Having ministers who are greeted with state honors, giving oil drilling rights to companies, signing defense agreements... Powers such as these, which are exclusively recognized to independent states, are assumed in the Horn of Africa by Somaliland, a republic that is not officially recognized by any other country in the world. In principle, other countries consider it as part of war-torn Somalia, a country that has had no effective control on Somaliland since 1990.

Somaliland has no official recognition from anyone but acts as a de facto sovereign country. The government of Somaliland has proved it this October in two different fields: international relations and oil exploitation.

Privileged links with Ethiopia

During all these years, Somaliland has privileged relations with Ethiopia, a major regional power and main U.S. ally in the Horn of Africa. Those are strong links the field of security (both countries have signed mutual security treaties and have agreed to graduate Somaliland military personnel in Ethiopian military academies), but there is more. The Somaliland Sunreports that Somaliland and Ethiopia had reached a bilateral agreement to increase their trade relations. Needless to mention that the Somali government in Mogadishu has had no say.

For Ethiopians -who have very tense relations with their Eritrean neighbors-, having a seaport is critical to their business relations. Ethiopia has no coast, but Addis Ababa solves this in two ways: first, through the small republic of Djibouti, and second, through the port of Berbera in Somaliland. In return, Somaliland asks for cheap prices to import power from Ethiopia, which happens to be one of the main electricity producers in the whole region.

Getting subsoil resources: petroleum exploration in Somaliland soil

One of the main obsessions of Somaliland authorities is to boost the economy and make it less dependent on remittances from the diaspora . A major asset for this is the exploitation of natural resources. Reuters explains that Energy minister Hussein Abdi Dualeh yesterday announced that extraction of iron ore and coal will start in a year time.

The most important announcement by the minister, however, is that Somaliland has reached oil drilling agreements with three companies who are expected to  start perforating in the next few months: Ophir Energy from the UK, Jacka Resources from Australia and Genel Energy from Turkey. It is striking that two of these companies are already specialized in disputed or self-styled territories, as is explained in this post on the Financial Times: Genel is working in semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, while Ophir manages projects in Western Sahara that have been signed with the Sahrawi government.