Even Fascist Italy in 1938 recognized the strategic and economic value of Majeerteenia (today’s Puntland) for its coastline, resources, and location near key shipping lanes—an assessment outside powers have continued to make more consistently than Mogadishu.

Puntland’s federalist model, rooted in pre-colonial self-governance, has increasingly clashed with the federal government’s centralizing moves, leading to security alerts, revoked recognition, and growing talk of confederation.

Continued Mogadishu efforts to revise the constitution, rely on foreign (especially Turkish) security support, and sideline federal member states risk pushing Puntland and allies toward looser arrangements or deeper rupture rather than cooperative federalism.

A single line in a diplomat’s diary, written 88 years ago, is a useful place to start when weighing why outside powers have consistently paid closer attention to this stretch of Somali coastline than Mogadishu has.

On Aug. 3, 1938, Galeazzo Ciano, Fascist Italy’s foreign minister and Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law, recorded in his diary that the Duce had raised a proposal to turn Migiurtinia — the colonial-era name for Majeerteenia, the historic sultanate that today forms the core of Puntland — into what he called “a concession for international Jewry.” Mussolini’s reasoning, as Ciano recorded it, was that the territory held “important natural resources, which the Jews could exploit.” The entry has been corroborated by historians of Italian colonial and Jewish-refugee policy, including research published by New York’s Primo Levi Center.

The scheme deserves no admiration. It surfaced weeks before Italy’s September 1938 racial laws, as Mussolini looked for somewhere to send roughly 10,000 foreign Jews he was preparing to expel from Italian territory. Ciano’s diary also records a vicious aside from Mussolini about Migiurtinia’s shark-infested waters — evidence, historians say, of contempt rather than respect for the people he proposed sending there. The plan collapsed within months; Mussolini’s attention shifted to Jubaland, then dropped the idea entirely by early 1939 after press denials and objections from Jewish organizations unwilling to place themselves at the mercy of a fascist colonial administration.

None of that context should be minimized. But even a regime built on exploitation and, in this case, a plan for ethnic disposal, could not draft such a proposal without conceding that the ground itself was worth something. That is the narrower and more durable lesson: colonial planners were not in the habit of complimenting the territories they occupied. When Rome did so, even in passing and even while planning something indefensible, it is worth asking what it saw.

A pattern that predates fascism

What Italian planners were assessing in 1938 was not unclaimed territory. For centuries, the Majeerteen Sultanate maintained its own governing institutions, its own maritime trade, and formal diplomatic relations with foreign powers, including treaty arrangements with Britain and Italy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that recognized it as a functioning polity. Unlike southern Somali territories that came under direct Italian rule, the northern sultanates were administered for decades through........

© Eurasia Review