5 Dollars Year of the Rabbit

Somaliland declared independence from Somalia in 1991 but has never received formal international recognition from any sovereign state. Its coinage, issued throughout the 1990s, was produced largely for the collector market rather than domestic circulation — the regional economy ran primarily on Somali shillings and later on its own paper currency. This piece, timed to the 1999 lunar calendar, was part of a broader wave of Chinese zodiac issues commissioned from private mints and sold through numismatic distributors with no meaningful connection to the issuing territory.