Somalia: A State in Search of Exceptional Leadership

Mohamed Issa Trunji was born in Beledweyn, Somalia, in 1943. After the Secondary School in 1962, he joined the Ministry of Education as Teacher for elementary school pupils. In 1964 he joined the staff of the National Assembly of Somalia (Parliament) as interpreter, a position he held until October 1969. In 1972, after graduating from Somalia National University, Faculty of Law, he joined the Ministry of Justice as judge, a position he held until 1980. From 1981, after completing a Diploma Course at the University College London (UCL) in Maritime Law, he became member of the Somalia delegation to the annual sessions of the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea held in Geneva, New York and Kingston, Jamaica, which ended with the adoption in 1982 of the Third UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. In 1983 he was placed on secondment to the office of the National Commission for Refugees (NRC) as Chairman of the Eligibility Committee, a position he held up to 1991. From 1992 to 2005, he served the United Nations Agency for the Refugees, the UNHCR, as Senior Protection Officer in Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Ethiopia and Zambia. After retirement in 2005, he enrolled on a Master’s Degree in International Human Rights Law at the University of Essex, UK, graduating in 2006. For his dissertation, he wrote a paper entitled ‘Prosecution of past Human Rights Violations”, a subject closely related to the events of the last three decades in Somalia. He is the author of ‘Somalia The Untold History: 1941-1969’ (Looh Press, 2015); ‘President Aden Abdulla: His Life & Legacy’ (Looh Press, 2023).