GEOPOLITICS IN THE Horn of Africa has already had an explosive start to the new year. On January 1, Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia's prime minister, and Muse Bihi Abdi, his counterpart in neighboring Somaliland, delivered a surprise announcement. At a joint press conference in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, they announced that landlocked Ethiopia wants to lease a naval port and a 20-kilometer stretch of Red Sea coast in the breakaway province of Somalia. In return, Somaliland will receive shares in Ethiopia, Africa's largest airline, and, more importantly, possibly official diplomatic recognition from the Ethiopian government. This would make Ethiopia the first country to officially recognize the former British colony, which declared independence from the rest of Somalia more than three decades ago.
The Memorandum of Understanding signed by the two leaders has plunged an already unstable part of the world into even greater uncertainty. Authorities in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, have reacted angrily to news that Ethiopia is poised to break with the African Union's long-standing policy against redrawing the continental map. “Abiy is messing things up in Somalia,” complains an adviser to Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the Somali president. Just three days earlier, Mr. Mohamud and Mr. Abdi had signed an agreement brokered by the president of neighboring Djibouti to resume talks over Somaliland's disputed constitutional status. That deal is now in ruins. After an emergency Cabinet meeting on January 2, Somalia declared the new agreement “null and void” and recalled its ambassador from Addis Ababa. Mr. Mohamud urged Abiy to reconsider, saying the deal would only serve to boost support for al-Shabab, the al-Qaida-linked jihadist group that controls swathes of the countryside, and partly in response after Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in 2006.
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Abiy, however, described the deal as a diplomatic triumph that fulfills Ethiopia's decades-long quest for direct access to the sea. In recent months, the prime minister has alarmed observers with belligerent demands that Ethiopia's roughly 120 million people break out of what he called a “geographical prison.” Although Ethiopia once had two ports and a navy, it lost them when Eritrea, a region in the north, seceded and formed its own country in 1993. It has been denied access to Eritrea since a bloody border war between 1998 and 2000. Ethiopia relies on the port of Djibouti for almost all of its coastal foreign trade. In 2018, the company entered into a deal with Somaliland and DP World, an Emirati port operator, in which it acquired a 19% stake in the recently expanded port of Berbera, about 160 km from Somaliland's capital Hargeisa. The leaders in Mogadishu were angry; Four years later, the deal fell through.
Abiy has long expressed his ambitions to make Ethiopia a power on the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, one of the world's busiest and most geopolitically contested shipping routes. A peace deal with Eritrea, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 2019, was hailed at the time as a chance for Ethiopia to regain tax-free access to its neighbor's ports. The prime minister also pointed to a murky agreement with Somalia's former president Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed for Ethiopia to use four unnamed ports along Somalia's coast, including that of Somaliland. Neither materialized, in part because Abiy launched a disastrous war in 2020 focused on Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, and also because the Somali central government's authority barely extends beyond Mogadishu. More recently, foreign diplomats and analysts have fretted that Ethiopia's prime minister, alternately messianic and unpredictable, is planning a war with Eritrea to secure a piece of its coastline. However, Abiy can now claim that he achieved his goals through diplomacy rather than force. “According to the promise we have repeatedly made to our people, [we have realised] the desire to have access to the Red Sea,” he explained in a glossy promotional video released on January 1. “We have no desire to force anyone.”
For Somaliland's leaders, the deal represents a breakthrough in their three-decade quest for international recognition. “Somalia has been using delaying tactics since talks began in 2012,” said Mohamed Farah of the Academy for Peace and Development, a think tank in Hargeisa. “We can't wait forever.” They hope that the rest of Africa will follow Ethiopia's example: the African Union has its headquarters in Addis Ababa. Abiy also maintains close ties with the powerful Gulf states, especially the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In fact, some foreign diplomats suspect that the UAE, which is also close to the Somali government, may have played a role in brokering the deal. The announcement came as Abiy also hosted Sudan's most notorious warlord, Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo (better known as Hemedti), whose paramilitary force, rich in Emirati cash and weapons, was on the verge of defeating the Sudanese army stands. From this perspective, an Ethiopian military base in Somaliland is the latest step in a plan to secure an Emirati sphere of influence throughout the Gulf region and the Horn of Africa.
Further turbulence is likely. While Eritrea's rulers may breathe easier now that Abiy appears to have achieved his goals without the use of weapons, the prospect of an Ethiopian navy on their doorstep, however distant, will hardly be welcome. Djibouti is also dissatisfied and is likely to lose competition for Ethiopia's trade flows. The deal is also likely to displease Egypt and Saudi Arabia, both of which are increasingly at odds with the UAE in its quest for regional dominance. To calm nerves, Somalia is appealing to the African Union and the UN Security Council to intervene. But as one Western diplomat notes, “This is an age in which no one will get in your way if you are reckless and reckless.” It is a lesson Abiy has long taken to heart. ■