Pseudo-state Somaliland: Embodiment of Treason, Obscurantism and Tyranny

By: Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
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[ Posted On: 2008-04-20 ]

In five consecutive articles, I refuted Mr. Ahmed Ali Sabeyse's criticism of my earlier article 'Kosovo and Somaliland: The Impossible Equation', in which I had analyzed the impossibility to establish a possible parallel between the rightfully recognized Kosova and the duly unrecognized Somaliland. The last of the five articles was entitled '4000 Years of Illustrious History of Somalia and a Somali Renegade' (http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/58344) and there one can find links to all the previous parts of the series, as well as to the first article, and Mr. Sabeyse's criticism.

My lengthy answer was re-published in a great number of leading Somali portals, and this is a propitious opportunity for me to thank them all, to say in public how honored I feel to be quoted by them, and to express in public my admiration for the excellent job they have all been doing to promote the Cause of Somalia's pacification and re-unification.

If I were a Somali, I would feel proud for my nation that, even when divided, features so many authors, political analysts, commentators, journalists, reporters and photographers, who all – fighting from their watchtower (allusion to Bob Dylan's famous song) – offer the world an all-encompassing information about Somalia, communicate the most accurate tidings, and publish inventive considerations of and innovative approaches to possible solutions to the Horn of Africa ordeal.

However, my lengthy answer apparently disturbed the unremorseful Mr. Sabeyse, who obdurately intends to carry on, by means of personal attacks, evocation of irrelevant or unsubstantiated matters, and systematic evasion, as he proves to be absolutely unable to answer point-per-point. A few days ago, he published a third part in his series which, under the title 'Kosovo and Somaliland: The Impossible Equation III', is an attempt to attack without replying, to assume without proving, and to accuse without substantiating.

As Mr. Sabeyse's main concern evolves around one of the pictures I published in one of my articles, before commenting on his texts and correcting his inconsistencies, I will deal with the picture 'issue'. Here, I republish only the part of Mr. Sabeyse's article that concerns the picture 'issue'. I do not make any proofreading changes in Mr. Sabeyse's poorly edited text.

Kosovo and Somaliland: The Impossible Equation III – Excerpt on Picture Selection
(amongst others: http://www.waridaad.blogspot.com/)

By Ahmed Ali Sabeyse

………………………………………………

On March 25, 2008, the administration of www.Somalilandpatriots.com posted a news item from Gabiley along with the picture below. 6 It was a festive occasion and the people were celebrating following announcement of the elevation of the district of Gabiley to a region. What is troubling about this story is that a Greek professor, named Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis, has grabbed the picture, and pasted it at the top of anti-Somaliland article in a completely distorted context. Professor Megalommatis wants the world community to believe that the people of Somaliland are demanding unity with southern Somalia. He is trying to portray the government of Somaliland as the demon that is stifling public dissent. The fiend here is the hired man plying altered information throughout the internet.

Please click this link: http://somalilandpatriots.com/news-5227.html to see for yourself and compare it with the picture in this link http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/57815. The two pictures are exactly identical! Is it coincidence? Professor Megalommatis just borrowed picture and pasted it at the top of one of his articles titled "The Nile, Egypt, Abyssinia, Somalia, and Somaliland." published on the American Chronicle on April 7, 2008.

The caption under the picture reads: " Picture: the Somalis of Somaliland want unity with Somalia, as they know very well that the traditional enemies of Somalia, the Abyssinians, plan to destroy Somalia, and there are no traitors among the Somali people."

This is a disgraceful and an unprofessional act on the part of the professor to go to that low level in composing his response. The picture is taken in Gabiley and the people are celebrating; they are demonstrating for or aginst Somali unity period. What is so deviant and didturbing about the professor's intention is the gross misrepresentation of the symbolic meaning of the picture. Mr. Professor, this is not a credible way to persuade public opinion on the issue of Somaliland recognition. Let me ask the professor a few questions. Who provided you the picture in the first place? Is it the vanguards of the government of Embagathi Swine Stock Exchange fame? How much did you pay for it? This sure has the smell of a mercenary inclination and/or a hired lobbyist all over it!

The great champion of the down trodden masses of planet earth is resorting to diabolical tactics to mislead the readership of the American Chronicle. I hope the editorial board of the American Chronicle should take note of this. May I draw to the attention of the professor that neither the people in the picture nor any other individual in Somaliland will ever demand unity with Somalia- not now, not in a zillion years to come.

It is very unethical and morally reprehensible to misrepresent pictorial information in such a bold faced manner. Without the prior written approval of the owner or duly acknowledging the source, you can not reproduce any material. As long as the words "All Rights Reserved" appears anywhere in the domain of www.Somalilandpatriots.com, the information contained in that portal is proprietary or copy right material. Retrieval, reproduction, and transmission of that stored information is prohibited without the consent of the portal owners. Of course a picture is worth a thousand words, but this one has one and only one connotation: Celebration on the conferring of a region to the inhabitants of Gabiley- it is not a demonstration against any perceived traditional or real enemies of the Somali people.

…………………………………………………………………………

Refutation of Mr. Sabeyse's Assumptions and Accusations

Quite interestingly, Mr. Sabeyse compiled six (6) paragraphs out of nothing. His text's 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th paragraphs are dedicated to the comical Picture 'Issue' that he deliberately invented. I have no reason to avoid answering, but I must highlight first an important, otherwise unnoticed, 'detail'. Mr. Sabeyse's integral text totals 1537 words. That's not much, when you have to reply to five consecutive and much longer articles.

But!

Out of the total of 1537 words, Mr. Sabeyse dedicates 565 words (slightly more than one third of the text!!!!!!!) for the picture 'issue', apparently because the rest (just 972 words) did not appear to him as a possibly proper and sufficient answer to my series of articles (that total more than 13200 words)! By this I do not imply that Mr. Sabeyse should write an even longer reply; not at all. Contents mater, not the length of a text. But certainly, an answer of less than 1000 words looked – even to Mr. Sabeyse – very short and inappropriate, and this is the reason he tried to impress his readers by misguiding and leading them to a completely irrelevant issue that he created on purpose.

However! Mr. Sabeyse accuses me for having picked up a picture without naming the source; he then names a source that he considers as the original publication of the picture. And subsequently he makes an issue about the relationship between the picture and my caption. The entire affair is so nonsensical that it even raises questions as to whether the backward Mr. Sabeyse has ever understood the real meaning of the web, and the quintessence of the Internet. He seems to still live in the 80s when property rights issues were completely differently contextualized for every article and picture in newspapers, magazines, reviews and encyclopedias. Internet means above all unprecedented diffusion of knowledge, plus an unmatched flow of textual and pictorial info. By this, I do not mean that property rights ceased to exist; on the contrary, they are present, but they take a different, more sophisticated assessment of needs, rules and approaches.

To give an example, I selected a picture of the mosque of Zahedan (capital of the Iranian province of Baluchistan) from an official Iranian website; I used the picture in an article about the Iranian part of Baluchistan in which I demanded the liberation, re-unification and independence of Baluchistan. Of course, not a single Iranian, representative of the website or governmental apologist, protested. The reason is simple; there is nothing wrong with it. If you have a reason not to allow the re-publication of your website's pictures, all you have to do is to disable the possibility.

Property rights for a picture published in 10 websites

If the administration of the otherwise unknown and absolutely marginal website truly intended to keep full right of ownership of the picture, they could simply develop their website in a superior and more sophisticated way, and disable the possibility of downloading pictures from their web pages. I add here for your information that www.Somalilandpatriots.com ranks no 493,836 website in the world, being rather the hobby of few Hargeysa rulers' relatives who live abroad (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/somalilandpatriots.com), as 63.2% and 34.1% of its visitors are from England and Yemen respectively.

Being also a photographer, I launched an online gallery (pictures and captions: http://www.clubafrika.com/photos/cpg133/thumbnails.php?album=22) dedicated to the city of Alexandria, Egypt. The website, www.clubafrika.com, is one of the websites are affiliated to www.afroarticles.com.

To understand what content property truly is, one can try to make a right click on a picture to save the target, and download the picture. If you do so on a picture in the aforementioned link, you will fail to proceed because saving / downloading the picture is disallowed by the attentive and serious web developers of the website who truly care about their website's property.

As soon as you make a right click on a picture, you will read on an interface the following: "All rights reserved. Content property of Club Afrika, our affiliates & registered users. To use these photos on your website or offline, you must first seek permission from us. Unlawful use s strictly prohibited. Linking to these photos from your website without permission constitutes bandwidth theft. Your action has triggered an alert”. This is professionalism. The rest is amateurism that does not entitle you to possibly protest.

In fact, Mr. Sabeyse is wrong; I did not copy the picture from the website he tries to market, but from another! So ignorant Mr. Sabeyse is, and so unaware of the web realities, that he failed to notice that the same picture has been published in a multitude of Somali websites, without any reference to the source.

Actually, I do not know, and I do not care to know, where the picture was initially published. For your information, I can reveal that, searching in Google Images, I found it in http://www.somalilandnet.com/sawirada/so_womecr.jpg. I believe that neither the original source nor the aforementioned website bothered about property rights. Texts and images are elements of information and knowledge, and their diffusion is beneficial to all.

For your information, the same picture was also published in many other websites, and here are links to some of them:
http://www.dhahar.com/article.php?articleid=4515; http://www.qaranimo.com/2008/april/news_april_08_08_9.htm; http://www.ayyaantuu.com/Oromiyaa/NewsBlog/tabid/36/EntryID/1946/Default.aspx; http://www.jeberti.com/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1207621070&archive=&start_from=&ucat=&. The list is not exhaustive.

By the way, Mr. Sabeyse should visit the following link and recognize the value of the picture selected by the website's administration; I am sure this document will make him reconsider: http://www.qaranka.com/ENGnews/70.html.

The overall situation is not strange at all; it simply reflects a generalized phenomenon of web info diffusion, and there is nothing wrong with it.

Riyale stands in Af Somali (language) for Distortion

The ineffectual Mr. Sabeyse tried then to put the blame on me for distorting the context! This is pathetic and ludicrous! I have no reason to disagree with Mr. Sabeyse and I can add that the picture commemorated "a festive occasion” and that "the people were celebrating following announcement of the elevation of the district of Gabiley to a region”.

I would have distorted the context, if I had written in the caption "Somalis celebrating the collapse of the Riyale regime in parts of Somaliland neighboring with Ogaden”. This would have certainly been sheer distortion. Because the picture had not been taken on an occasion like that!

It is strange how Mr. Sabeyse, who goes up to re-publishing the picture's caption, fails to realize that I did not distort the truth in anything. The caption reads as following: "Picture: the Somalis of Somaliland want unity with Somalia, as they know very well that the traditional enemies of Somalia, the Abyssinians, plan to destroy Somalia, and there are no traitors among the Somali people”.

A Mirror for Mr. Sabeyse

As anyone can understand, I did not describe the reason of the festivities, neither did I mention the location or the date. I spoke about what the Somalis of Somaliland "want” and "know”. This is what disturbed Mr. Sabeyse, the Hargeysa dictator propagandist; because he knows that he has nothing to say in this regard to convince any readers that I am wrong. It is a fact; and I repeat it, "the Somalis of Somaliland want unity with Somalia, as they know very well that the traditional enemies of Somalia, the Abyssinians, plan to destroy Somalia, and there are no traitors among the Somali people”.

Certainly Mr. Sabeyse has reason to be frustrated when reading this caption. In and by itself, the text shows very well how alienated and separated from his compatriots he must be feeling, now that he works for the Hargeysa dictator, the execrable puppet of the Abyssinians. The caption's sentence "there are no traitors among the Somali people” must have created a psychological shock for Mr. Sabeyse; he must have seen himself in a mirror, and in a moment of Truth he must have deeply hated himself for his inexcusable deeds. And all this turned out as a point to use in counter-attacking!

Being attached to a dictator, as Mr. Sabeyse is now, does not allow anybody to view things clearly; the passion to support the impossible regime at Hargeysa has for Mr. Sabeyse a simple, critical indeed, name: salary. Because of his salary, and his un-Somali and anti-Somali fanaticism, Mr. Sabeyse fails to realize that the outright majority of the populated entrapped within the illegal territory 'Somaliland' hates and despises the shameless gangster Riyale and his few thugs who, using their relatives and fiends, try to portray themselves as some sort of credible, democratic establishment in search of a hypothetical peace.

Festivities under dictatorial regimes: Riyale and Franco

The outright majority of Somaliland's Somalis want peace in the rest of Somalia, national unity and reconstruction, liberation of Ogaden, and elimination of the Neo-Nazi Tigray and Amhara Abyssinian thugs from Somalia's territory. Whereas I have full proof of the aforementioned, Mr. Sabeyse has nothing to say, except his meaningless monologue about the festivities at Gabiley. Mr. Sabeyse has no idea about the vast subject 'festivities under dictatorial regimes'.

Who does not remember festivities in Salazar's Portugal, in Franco's Spain, in Papadopoulos' Greece? In tyrannies, like the National Somali Shame of Somaliland, people celebrate because they have to obey the orders of the rulers' police and army. Certainly, a joyful moment is a joyful moment, but it does not change in anything the deep feelings of a people against the tyranny. In the case of the criminal High Traitor Riyale and his most loathed subordinates, the resolute rejection comes as result of their servility toward the Neo-Nazi Abyssinian dictator Zenawi and his vicious plan to destroy and annex Somalia.

There may have been differences of ideological - political and socioeconomic contents between people from Hargeysa and Mogadishu, and many Somalis from Somaliland may have expressed all sorts of complaints against the late President Siad Barre, but nothing equals Riyale's most loathed servility toward, and dependence on, Abyssinia – the irrevocably perverse and evil enemy of Somalia that happens to be Africa's most appalling and inhuman tyranny. In separate articles, I will have the chance to publish articles written by Somalis from Somaliland who are very categorical in their rejection of the National Shame Riyale.

Riyale knows better than Mr. Sabeyse how slim his chances are…

To conclude about the troublesome (for Mr. Sabeyse only) caption, I would say that this Somali patriotic feeling, which is overwhelming against the pseudo-president Riyale, I wished to reveal and highlight in my caption; nothing more and nothing less than that. And I am very correct in my statement that has been so triumphantly corroborated by the illegitimate postponement of the presidential elections by Riyale, who knows better than Mr. Sabeyse how slim his chances are to get more than 25% in unbiased elections. Therefore there is nothing diabolical in my statement, and there is no misinterpretation in the picture.

The Somalis of Somaliland and all the people allover the world do not stop thinking when joining others in a festivity. What people can understand from my selection of pictorial documentation is that I preferred to show the moment of a social activity of a population in distress because of the shame caused by the loathed tyrant and self-styled president Riyale.

Mr. Sabeyse has to understand that it's not me who portrays the secessionist puppet government of Hargeysa as evil; it's the Somalis who undeniably believe it is.

Some of Mr. Sabeyse's questions further demonstrate his poor idea of the web; he does not know 'something' called Google Images. Why should one pay for a picture? Only an ignorant member of the Hargeysa Stock Dog Exchange can ask a question like that!

If you had in the past a doubt about the dictatorial mentality of the Hargeysa Stock Dog brokers, you can now be sure that their concept of 'democracy' is based on the assumption that all the others are mere copies of themselves; read:
"neither the people in the picture nor any other individual in Somaliland will ever demand unity with Somalia- not now, not in a zillion years to come”! This is Democracy a la Sabeyse, and Freedom of Speech a la Riyale…

Either you agree with Riyale's shoe shine boys or they send you to the already packed out jails of Hargeysa ….'for a zillion years'!

No rights 'reserved' in illegal countries

Mr. Sabeyse is certainly too young and too ignorant to know that "All Rights Reserved” is an expression valid only in rightfully existing countries; no rights are 'reserved' in illegal countries.

The only right for the pro-Hargeysa websites that are illegally financed to act against Somali Law and against Somali History is the right to close them down – as soon as possible and by any possible means.

Concluding, I will agree with Mr. Sabeyse (who seems to have taken advice, as regards points to develop in his text, from the pseudo-Ethiopian pseudo-ambassador of Abyssinia at Hargeysa) that there is a need to rephrase the caption in order to reflect the scene in a better stressed way.

The picture represents Somalis of the illegal territory 'Somaliland' at a moment they were forced to celebrate; all of them will jubilee in a far more phantasmagoric way on the day Riyale and his thugs will be arrested and properly condemned for having ashamed the entire Somali Nation.

On that day, which is not too far, the unrepresentative Abyssinian pseudo-diplomats and gangsters at Hargeysa will be taken to the International Court of Justice for the Amharas'and Tigrays' Crimes against the Mankind.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis - is Orientalist, Assyriologist, Egyptologist, Iranologist, Islamologist, Historian and Political Scientist. Dr. Megalommatis, 51, is the author of 12 books, dozens of scholarly articles, hundreds of encyclopedia entries, and thousands of articles. He speaks, reads and writes more than 15, modern and ancient, languages.

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