A Dream Realized After 34 Years: A Historic Moment for Somaliland

From Isolation to International Engagement: Why President Cirro’s Reception in Israel Resonates Deeply with Somalilanders

There are moments in life that stop time itself.

Moments that make your heart swell until you can barely breathe.

Moments that remind you why hope is worth holding onto, even when the world tells you — over and over, in a thousand different ways — to let go.

Today was one of those moments.

After 34 years — thirty-four long, aching, bone-deep years of waiting, praying, and believing against every odd, every dismissal, every closed door — I watched something I had only dared to dream of in the quietest hours of the night:

The President of the Republic of Somaliland, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdillahi (Cirro), standing on foreign soil, receiving a welcome not as a supplicant, not as a beggar, not as someone who needs to explain himself — but as a leader. A welcome in Israel.

Not tears of sadness. Not even tears of joy, exactly.

Tears that had been gathering for three decades — three decades of carrying a weight so heavy that you forget you’re carrying it until someone finally lifts it off your shoulders.

Tears of a people who have whispered their story into a world that too often refused to listen. Who have knocked on doors that never opened. Who have stood in rooms where their name was not spoken, where their flag was not flown, where their very existence was treated as an inconvenience.

Tears of mothers who buried their sons for this dream — sons who died believing in something they would never live to see. Who held their children’s bodies and wondered if the world would ever know their names, ever acknowledge that they died for a country that the world pretended didn’t exist.

Tears of fathers who worked barren lands with hands cracked and bleeding, believing — against all evidence, against all reason — that one day, the world would see what they saw. That one day, someone would look at this land and see not a ‘breakaway region,’ not a ‘self-declared state,’ but a nation. A people. A heartbeat.

Tears of a generation that grew up hearing ‘you don’t exist’ — at airports, at embassies, at border crossings, in classrooms where teachers marked their maps with a single Somalia and no room for Somaliland — yet never stopped existing. Never stopped believing. Never stopped being.

The Weight of 34 Years

Do you remember what 1991 felt like?

I do. I remember it in my bones, even though I was just a child.

I remember the smell of burning. I remember the sound of my mother’s voice, raw and terrified, telling us to get under the bed. I remember the silence that came after the guns — a silence so heavy it felt like drowning.

I remember the earth. Still wet. Still warm. Still holding everything we had lost.

And yet — and this is the miracle, the thing that still makes me weep when I think about it — in the ashes of our own destruction, we chose something so radical that the world still doesn’t know how to process it:

Not because someone offered it to us. Not because the international community brokered it. Not because we had any reason to believe it would be rewarded.

We chose peace because it was who we are. Because we had seen the alternative, and we had buried it. Because there was a moment — a single, fragile moment — when we looked at each other across the rubble and decided: Not again. Never again.

While the world looked away, we built.

While they called us ‘the region that doesn’t matter,’ we mattered — to ourselves, to each other, to the future we refused to surrender.

We built democratic institutions when no one demanded them of us. When there was no one watching, no one grading our homework, no one who would have noticed if we had chosen the easier path of strongmen and silence.

We held elections that the world ignored — elections that were freer and fairer........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)