WATCH THE MINI-DOCUMENTARY ABOUT SOMALILAND'S FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE

Somaliland was a sovereign state before it was ever part of Somalia. On 26 June 1960 it won its independence from Britain as the State of Somaliland and was recognized by more than thirty governments, including all five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Five days later it entered a voluntary union with the former Italian Somaliland to create the Somali Republic — a union that was never lawfully completed. The two territories signed separate and conflicting acts of union, and the Act of Union was never properly ratified by both legislatures. When the people of the State of Somaliland were asked to approve the new constitution in a 1961 referendum, they overwhelmingly rejected it,

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Within a generation, the state Somaliland had trusted turned its air force on its own cities.

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Between 1987 and 1989, the dictatorship of Siad Barre set out to destroy the Isaaq, the largest of the peoples of the State of Somaliland. Because Somalilanders had begun to argue that their country should reclaim the independence it once held, Barre treated an entire nation as a military target. Hargeisa and Burao were bombed into ruins by pilots taking off from Hargeisa's own airport. An estimated 200,000 people were killed, men, women and children alike, and hundreds of thousands more were driven across the border into Ethiopia. A 2001 United Nations investigation concluded that the crime of genocide had been committed against the Isaaq. Researchers have now identified over 200 mass graves across Somaliland, the largest concentration in the area known as the Valley of Death.

Nearly four decades later, not one perpetrator has been held to account. There has been no apology, no internationally supported truth and reconciliation commission, and no criminal trial. Somaliland, unrecognized and largely cut off from international funding, lacks the resources to exhume the graves, let alone prosecute the men responsible. Some of those men still hold office in Mogadishu or remain close to those who do.