"Ethiopia occupied Somali territory", says Somali minister
Hussein Abdulkadir Kassim delivers presser in Nairobi shortly after Somalia invaded Ethiopia
Somalia’s minerals and water minister, Hussein Abdulkadir Kassim, delivered this press conference recorded by the Associated Press in September 1977 in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Somalia had invaded Ethiopia in July that year in a move that neither the US nor USSR supported, which was rare given the Cold War dynamics, but made sense given it was red-on-red violence.
Somalia quickly found itself isolated but was determined to push on despite that. Hussein Abdulkadir Kassim was one of Somalia’s most eloquent spokespeople and in this short soundbite clarified Mogadishu’s reasoning in a conflict that was widely viewed as a war of aggression. In the initial stages of the conflict Somalia maintained that it hadn’t actually invaded Ethiopia and that a Somali guerrilla group, with the support of Somali volunteers had instead liberated “occupied Somalia territories” in Ethiopia.
A year before, he appeared to ensure Henry Kissinger during a meeting that his government would not take advantage of the political crisis in Ethiopia and launch an attack on its much larger neighbour. As Wretch 32 put it in his Fire in the Booth in 2015, they say a promise is a comfort to a fool.
Here is a transcript of his speech:
The fact remains, that the Western Somali Liberation Movement, is like all other liberation movements through the world, a legitimate liberation movement struggling for the liberation of its own country that has been colonially acquired and occupied by Ethiopia as you know at the fall of the 19th century.
And as late as 1954, a process of expansion, through which the imperial government of Ethiopia, imperially and colonially occupied the Somali territory.