Puntland’s Strategic Value Was Recognized By Fascist Italy In 1938, Somalia Still Hasn’t Caught Up – OpEd
Locations of Somalia, Puntland and Somaliland. Credit: VOA
Key Takeaways:
- 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 protectorate agreements — a distinction Rome maintained because it found it more useful to negotiate with the sultanate than to simply absorb it.
The geography that drew that attention has not changed. Puntland sits where the Gulf of Aden meets the Indian Ocean, along the approaches to the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, through which a substantial share of global container traffic passes. Its coastline extends well over 1,000 kilometers — by some estimates closer to 1,600 — and holds fisheries that remain largely undeveloped, mineral prospects that have periodically drawn foreign survey interest, and offshore hydrocarbon potential that has attracted exploration activity since the 2000s.
Recognition has outpaced Mogadishu’s engagement
That pattern of outside recognition has continued into the present, largely without a matching strategy from Somalia’s federal government. In recent years, Puntland has signed a security cooperation agreement with the United States in Bosaso, hosted Turkish and Emirati commercial and security interests, and become a reference point in wider Red Sea and Horn of Africa competition involving Turkey, the Gulf states and Israel. Each of these engagements has proceeded largely on Puntland’s own initiative, a continuation of a decades-old dynamic in which external actors have assessed the territory’s value more consistently than Mogadishu has.
That dynamic has a domestic root. When the Somali state collapsed in 1991, the founders of what became Puntland did not call for restoring a strong central government in Mogadishu. They had watched centralized rule concentrate power, entrench exclusion and ultimately fail. Drawing on a regional history of self-government that predated the Somali republic itself, they built the case for devolution and power-sharing that led to Puntland’s founding in 1998 — years before federalism was written into Somalia’s provisional and, later, permanent constitutions. Whatever one’s position on federalism today, that argument grew out of lived political and institutional experience, not opportunism.
An unfinished lesson
The irony is that a fascist regime, acting from motives no one should defend, still managed to identify strategic and economic value in Majeerteenia in 1938. Eighty-eight years later, Somalia’s federal governments have too often treated Puntland as a subordinate administrative unit rather than the region that supplied the country’s federal blueprint and continues to anchor its northeastern coastline and maritime security.
The 1938 note is a reminder that Somali territory has never sat outside the calculations of outside powers — sometimes over military access, sometimes over shipping lanes, sometimes over minerals, and, in this one case, over a scheme for ethnic removal dressed up as a resource assessment. The mindset behind that scheme belongs in history’s record of failed empires. The underlying observation behind it — that this coastline commanded attention because it was worth something — does not disappear because the people making it were fascists.
A government that consistently lets outsiders assess the value of its own territory before it does so itself is not exercising sovereignty so much as deferring it. Nearly nine decades after Rome quietly conceded Puntland’s worth for its own self-interested purposes, the open question is whether Mogadishu is prepared to do the same — deliberately, and for reasons Somalia can defend.
A warning issued once already
That question has taken on new urgency because of Mogadishu’s collision course with Ankara over the shape of Somali federalism itself — and it is not the first time this warning has been raised.
In September 2019, Warsame joined six other Puntland intellectuals and politicians — Ahmed Abdulahi Yusuf “Ahmed-Dawlad,” Faarax Ali Shire, Eng. Mohamud Ahmed Hassan “Dhegaweyne,” Omar Mohamud Farah “Dhollowaa,” Abdi Farah Said “Juhaa” and Issa Mohamud Farah “Dhollowaa” — in publishing a policy paper on WardheerNews titled “Call for Confederation, Warning of Any Term Extension and Freeze the Constitutional Review Process Until After the 2020/21 Election.” Writing against a Somali Federal Government the group regarded as pursuing “dangerous and unconstitutional steps” to dismantle the federal system, the seven authors concluded that confederation — a looser arrangement devolving more power to member states than classical federalism allows — had become “a more viable governance option for public debate,” given what they described as Mogadishu’s resistance to, and violations of, the federal constitution. They were explicit that this was not a call to abandon Somali unity, and equally explicit in rejecting any return to the centralized unitary system of the 1960 constitution, which they held responsible for state collapse in the first place.
Six years later, the argument that 2019 paper made has become mainstream in Puntland policy circles, taken up independently — and largely without attribution — by a new generation of WardheerNews contributors debating confederation since 2025. The dispute that prompted the original warning, a Somali president extending his own mandate against Puntland’s objections, has recurred in a more advanced form.
The pattern repeats, with Ankara now in the mix
Turkey’s expanding military and economic footprint — Camp TURKSOM, the Turkish-trained Gorgor special forces, a naval task group in Somali waters, and F-16s deployed to Mogadishu since early 2026 — has increasingly been read in Garowe not as neutral support for the Somali state but as backing for one side of a constitutional fight. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud signed constitutional amendments in March 2026 that extended his own mandate and pushed elections to 2027; Puntland and Jubaland rejected the changes as a constitutional coup. When Ankara subsequently tried to broker talks between Mogadishu and the opposition in July 2026, Puntland and Jubaland refused to take part, arguing that a mediator whose military presence underwrites the government it is meant to be mediating with cannot be neutral.
That refusal is a symptom of a larger shift. Over the course of 2026, Puntland has rescinded its recognition of the federal government, barred federal military forces and vehicles from its territory, and aligned with Jubaland and other federal member states in the Somali Future Council coalition against Mogadishu’s centralization drive. South West State’s formal break with the federal government in March 2026 made Puntland and Jubaland’s earlier ruptures look less like isolated disputes and more like the leading edge of a pattern the 2019 policy paper anticipated.
None of this guarantees a particular outcome, and Puntland’s leadership has been explicit for nearly three decades that its project was federalist rather than separatist — a state-building model for Somalia, not an exit from it. That was the position of the 2019 paper, and it remains Puntland’s official position today. But models built on a country’s willingness to negotiate in good faith do not survive indefinitely when that negotiation stops happening. If Mogadishu continues to treat constitutional revision, foreign security guarantees and control of federal member states’ ports and resources as tools to be used against, rather than with, the states that make up the federation, Puntland and its allies in the Somali Future Council will face growing pressure to consider governance arrangements that no longer depend on Mogadishu’s cooperation. A confederal arrangement — the option Warsame and six co-authors proposed for public debate in 2019 and that has since gained wider currency — remains the more likely next step. Outright separation, on the Somaliland model, would be more drastic and less probable, but after two Somali presidents in succession have extended their own mandates over Puntland’s objections, it is no longer a possibility that can be dismissed out of hand.
Whether Somalia’s federal government grasps this is, in the end, a version of the same question the 1938 note raises. Mussolini recognized Migiurtinia’s value from Rome, for reasons that served only Italy. Mogadishu has yet to demonstrate it can recognize Puntland’s value from within a shared Somali state, for reasons that would serve both.
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