Somaliland Country Abbreviation

Question

I can't find a two letter country abbreviation for Somaliland, likely because it's not a country, but rather, as Wikipedia puts it: "an unrecognized self-declared de facto sovereign state that is internationally recognized as an autonomous region of Somalia". Nevertheless, it still takes up space on a map.

This may not seem like a programming question, but it is. I'm using the jvectormap jQuery plugin, which accounts for this region and has assigned it the abbreviation "_3" in lieu of a two letter abbreviation. The problem is that in order to make jvector map function correctly with my code, I need to enter Somaliland into our database but I don't want to use "_3" as its abbreviation, and I also don't want to just make something up.

First and foremost, is there an official two letter abbreviation for Somaliland?

As trivial and petty as this problem may sound, it's created a paradox in my mind and is causing my brain to melt. How can this be handled "correctly" if an official abbreviation does not exist?

Answer 1

The two-letter country code for Somalia is SO. ISO added it to ISO 3166 after it received the "UN notification of full name" in July 2013. See Somalia in ISO's Online Browsing Platform.

In the Country Codes Collection, SO has a green colour code for "Officially assigned code elements".

The ISO country codes collection does not have an entry for Somaliland. The Wikipedia article ISO 3166-2:SO (i.e. Somalia's country code) states - without citing a source -

The autonomous regions of Somaliland and Puntland (the former of which claims independence but is not recognized by any nation) each span several regions and have no separate codes.

Based on the ISO registry, this appears to be correct. jVectorMap gives Somaliland the code XS; in the ISO registry defines, two-letter codes starting with X are "User-assigned code elements". Using XS for Somaliland appears to be safe in the context of jVectorMap, but there is no guarantee that other libraries or programs will use the same two-letter code.

Somaliland is not listed by the Nations Online Project either.

After visiting Somaliland, the journalist Joshua Keating, writing in The Guardian of 20 July 2018:

(...), according to the US Department of State, the United Nations, the African Union and every other government on Earth, I was not in Somaliland, a poor but stable and mostly functional country on the Horn of Africa. I was in Somalia. (...)

As Somalilanders will often remind you, it was, in the past, an independent country, fully recognised by the international community, including the UN. But this halcyon period lasted less than a week. On 26 June 1960, the former Protectorate of Somaliland became fully independent from British rule, its independence recognised by 35 countries around the world, including the US. The next day, its new legislature passed a law approving a union with the south. On 1 July, Somalia became independent from Italy, and the two were joined together. It is a decision Somaliland has regretted almost ever since.

See also

• 25 years on, Somaliland struggles for recognition by Deutsche Welle, August 2016.
• Why Somaliland is not a recognised state by The Economist, November 2015.
• Somaliland's own recognition campaign.