Galkayo, SOMALIA – President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud reached south Galkayo by road on Monday, three days after Galmudug President Ahmed Abdi Karie Qoor Qoor stood beside him in Dhusamareb and praised Puntland for keeping the peace in the very city he was heading to, calling the arrangement there the key to understanding between the two administrations. Puntland tightened security across its half of Galkayo, halted movement between the two sides and kept its forces on alert, having warned that the trip could produce disorder. President Said Abdullahi Deni is in the northern half of the same city holding meetings of his own. The one federal arrangement in Somalia that has worked for three decades is now being tested by two presidents standing on opposite sides of a closed street.
What Qoor Qoor Said in Dhusamareb
Speaking on Friday night at the ceremony marking the anniversary of Galmudug’s founding, with the federal president in the audience, the Galmudug leader singled out Puntland’s leadership and its people for the way the two administrations have handled their shared city. He said that where issues arose with neighbouring administrations, and with Puntland in particular, the two sides worked them out and reached common ground, and he named Galkayo as the example, a place he described as unlike anywhere else in Somalia and the key to peace and mutual understanding between the two administrations, an outcome he said had succeeded.
He returned to the point a second time and framed it as a plea. However much the two sides may differ on everything else, he said, he commends the leaders and people of Galmudug and Puntland for the way they work together, and for the way the special case of the city has been respected and managed, and he hoped it would continue from there. He also called for stabilisation operations and the campaign against al-Shabaab in the central regions to carry on.
Furthermore, those remarks landed in the middle of an argument. Officials in Garowe had accused the Dhusamareb administration of allowing troops and weapons to be offloaded at its airports, which they said the federal government was using to destabilise Puntland, and the two administrations had exchanged pointed accusations over Mudug for a week. Qoor Qoor’s tribute to his neighbour, delivered in front of the federal president, was a public request to keep the security arrangement outside the political quarrel, and it was the warmest thing any Galmudug official had said about Garowe in months.
Consequently, the timing of the visit reads as an answer to that request. The Galmudug president asked on Friday that politics stay clear of Galkayo, and on Monday the politics arrived by road with him accompanying it.
The Crossing That Closed on Monday
Somalia’s third city has been divided since 1993 between a northern half administered from Garowe and a southern half that answers to Dhusamareb, and the working arrangement between the two is the single most durable piece of practical federalism in the country. Traders, families and patients cross daily. On Monday that movement stopped, and Puntland forces held the positions they took after Villa Somalia first floated the trip.
Puntland’s case for the alert is the one its officials have made consistently. The state says a federal presidency whose constitutional mandate expired in May has spent the year moving forces and weapons into Mudug under the cover of counterinsurgency, and that a presidential appearance in the southern half of a divided city, staged with an organised rally, is an act of political theatre in a place where the balance is held by restraint on both sides. Having put its defence forces on full alert last Thursday, Garowe treated the visit as a security event and secured its own half accordingly.
Moreover, both presidents are now in Galkayo at the same time. President Deni is meeting the community and political figures in the north while the federal president addresses a rally in the south, and the two men have not met. Two heads of administration conducting parallel public programmes in one divided city, with the crossing shut between them, is the most concrete picture yet of where the federal quarrel has arrived.
The president himself arrived overland through Galmudug districts, having been received in Bandiiradley by crowds the day before, with the Galmudug leader travelling alongside him. Villa Somalia describes the tour as a peace and development visit, examining living conditions, security and local services across the districts of Galmudug, and the president thanked the Bandiiradley administration and residents for their reception while stressing the importance of social cohesion and local security.
Why Galkayo Works When Little Else Does
The arrangement Qoor Qoor praised was built locally after the 1993 fighting, sustained by elders, businesspeople and commanders on both sides who concluded that a permanent war over the city would ruin it for everyone, and it has survived every collapse in relations between Garowe and Mogadishu since. Neither administration has ever conceded the other’s claim to the whole city, and both have kept the peace anyway. No ministry in Mogadishu designed it, and no constitutional article describes it.
That is precisely why the arrangement is fragile in the way it is. Its stability rests on both sides declining to force the question of who governs the whole city, which means any event that requires one side to assert authority in the other’s half puts the entire structure under load. A presidential rally in the southern half, staged while Puntland is in open confrontation with the presidency that organised it, is exactly such an event.
Additionally, the federal government has spent the year giving Puntland reasons to read every deployment as directed at it. Forces recruited and paid by Mogadishu in Nugaal and Bari changed sides through July and August, camps at Galkayo, Bosaso and Carmo passed into Puntland’s hands, and the federal register in the northeast has been steadily emptied. A presidency that has lost that contest on the ground arriving in the divided city with a crowd assembled for it is read in Garowe as the continuation of the same campaign.
The pattern is familiar from the president’s own account of his record, when he told a Galmudug audience last week that he had established the federal states from Galkayo to Kismayo, a map whose northern boundary is the city he has now entered. Puntland heard that speech as a claim of ownership over administrations it regards as older than his presidency, and it has governed its reading of everything he has done since.
The Election Underneath the Tour
Underneath the peace-and-development framing sits the Galmudug electoral calendar. Federal leaders are engaged in political organising around the state’s next vote and the campaign of the JSP, the party that swept the Galmudug elections in early August and cleared the path for Villa Somalia’s preferred candidate. The government also has a troop mobilisation running in the central regions that it says is aimed at al-Shabaab, and it graduated three thousand soldiers at a camp in neighbouring Galgadud the day before the president set out for the city.
Those two purposes are difficult to separate on the ground, which is the objection Puntland has raised since the trip was first reported and the one Galmudug’s own information ministry raised last year when it warned that a federally managed election would not be imposed on the state. Qoor Qoor now occupies an awkward middle. He hosted the tour, travelled with the president and praised Puntland in the same week, and his administration told Puntland that Galmudug is not an island outside the country when the alert was issued.
Therefore the test of his Dhusamareb speech comes within days. If the crossing reopens, if the rally passes without incident and if the two administrations resume the traffic that makes the city function, his claim that Galkayo can be quarantined from the federal quarrel survives. If the closure hardens into a standoff, the one working example of Somali federalism will have been damaged by the presidency that describes itself as the system’s author. Elders on both sides of the city have kept it intact through worse than this, and they are the party with the least to gain from either capital winning the argument.
Neither man in Galkayo on Monday has an interest in the city breaking. Both have an interest in being seen to hold it, and the distance between those two positions is measured in a few hundred metres of closed road that ordinary residents of both halves need reopened by morning.
