Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN)
Critical analysis, news and commentaries
A WPMEN Editorial — July 24, 2026
History has an uncomfortable habit of exposing truths that modern politics prefers to ignore. One such truth lies buried in an obscure Italian diplomatic note from 1938 — only a few lines long, yet revealing how the world’s great powers once viewed what is today Puntland.
In his diary entry of 30 August 1938, Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano recorded a striking conversation with Benito Mussolini. According to Ciano’s account, the Duce spoke of a plan to turn Migiurtinia into a concession for international Jewish settlement, citing the region’s considerable natural resources as grounds for exploitation.
This was not an offhand remark. It came at the highest levels of Fascist Italy, at a moment when Europe was marching toward the Second World War — while Mussolini was weighing Hitler’s designs on Czechoslovakia, he was also contemplating the future of Migiurtinia (Majeerteenia) in northeastern Somalia.
The significance is hard to overstate. The region was not viewed as a barren colonial outpost; it was regarded as territory with genuine economic value — an assessment made by the colonial administration itself, an authority whose only real interest was extracting profit from conquered land.
A Region Undervalued by Its Own
Today, many Somalis casually dismiss Puntland as merely another federal member state. Yet eighty-eight years ago, one of Europe’s most expansionist regimes considered the region significant enough to feature in high-level geopolitical planning. That contrast should prompt some hard questions: What did Italian colonial planners understand about Puntland’s economic potential that successive Somali governments have failed to investigate or develop? Why did foreign powers recognize strategic value in the region while contemporary Somali politics remained — and remains — mired in clan rivalry and constitutional dispute?
History repeatedly shows that outsiders often see a country’s value before its own leaders do. Puntland sits on one of the world’s most strategically important maritime crossroads, commanding the approaches to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Its coastline runs more than 1,600 kilometres, and it holds rich fisheries, untapped mineral prospects, hydrocarbon potential, and direct access to one of the busiest trade corridors on Earth. None of this is a recent discovery — colonial planners understood it nearly a century ago.
Strategic Value and the Roots of Federalism
The 1938 note also sheds light on something else that is often overlooked: Puntland’s role as the principal champion of a federal Somalia was not a political accident. It was grounded in the region’s own history and geography. For centuries, the Majeerteen Sultanate maintained functioning political institutions, maritime commerce, and diplomatic relations with foreign powers. Italy’s own assessment of the region’s strategic and economic worth — Mussolini’s remark included — was simply another acknowledgment of what was never an ordinary colonial possession.
When the Somali state collapsed in 1991, Puntland’s founders did not call for a return to an all-powerful centralized government. They understood, from hard experience, that concentrating authority in Mogadishu had repeatedly produced instability, exclusion, and eventual collapse. Instead, they envisioned a Somalia built on the devolution of power, constitutional power-sharing, and regional self-government within a united state — a vision rooted in historical reality, not emotion or opportunism. A region that had long exercised meaningful political autonomy, and understood its own strategic worth, naturally concluded that Somalia’s future depended on sharing power rather than monopolizing it.
Puntland’s founding in 1998, and its sustained advocacy for federalism since, therefore amounted to more than a regional political project — it became the intellectual and constitutional blueprint for rebuilding Somalia after civil war. Whatever one thinks of federalism today, it is hard to deny that this vision emerged from lived historical experience rather than political convenience.
A Missed Strategic Opportunity
There is a real irony here: Fascist Italy recognized Puntland’s importance almost ninety years ago, however cynically, in service of imperial ambition — yet many Somali politicians today still underestimate the very region that supplied the constitutional framework on which modern Somalia now rests. Rather than building institutions capable of unlocking this potential, successive governments have spent their energy on political intrigue, centralization battles, and zero-sum struggles for power.
The note is also a reminder that Somalia has never existed in geopolitical isolation. External powers have always viewed Somali territory through a strategic lens — sometimes military bases, sometimes maritime routes, sometimes natural resources, and, as this note suggests, occasionally even demographic engineering.
To be clear, the lesson here is not that Mussolini’s proposal deserved consideration — it did not. It emerged from a fascist colonial worldview that treated occupied territories as assets to be disposed of without the consent of the people living there, a mentality that belongs in history’s museum of failed empires. The real lesson is different: if colonial powers saw Puntland as strategically indispensable in 1938, why have so many Somali leaders since failed to grasp its importance? Why has nearly a century passed without a coherent national strategy for developing one of the Horn of Africa’s most strategically located regions?
Conclusion
A nation that forgets how others once valued its territory risks undervaluing it itself. History is not simply about remembering the past — it is about understanding why powerful states make the decisions they do. The Fascists saw value in Majeerteenia because they were thinking strategically, even though their objectives were morally bankrupt. Modern Somali leaders can learn that strategic lesson without inheriting the colonial mindset behind it.
Puntland is not strategically important because Mussolini said so. His words matter only because they inadvertently confirm what serious geopolitical planners already understood: northeastern Somalia occupied an important place on the world’s strategic map long before today’s political disputes existed. Its later role as the champion of a devolved, federal Somalia was no historical accident — it was the logical political expression of a region whose history, geography, and institutional traditions had long set it apart within the Somali peninsula.
That reality has not changed. What has changed is the quality of leadership entrusted with managing it. The evidence is there. The question is whether Somalia is prepared to learn from it — or will keep letting others recognize Puntland’s value before its own leaders do.