Somalilandsun: Ethiopia is seeking greater access to the Red Sea, but indoing so, it is repeating past behaviours that have destabilised the region,writes Yohannes Woldemariam.
In its renewed campaign for access to the Red Sea, Ethiopia is threatening to further destabilise the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia already has port access for trade via Berbera in Somaliland as well as in Djibouti. If it wants more of the same, its neighbours would line up to compete to provide access in a mutually beneficial give-and-take arrangement. What is spooking Ethiopia’s neighbours however is its quest for a naval base, and the expansionist mindset and hostile force that is accompanying that drive.
The news of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Ethiopia and Somaliland has precipitated a regional political crisis because it includes a recognition of Somaliland independence. The MoU deal is separate from the Berbera port deal and gives Ethiopia access to the Red Sea at Lugaya close to the border with Djibouti. Somaliland has been de facto running its own affairs since 1991 and lobbying for independence from Somalia. This should be treated sympathetically especially because Somaliland has been comparatively democratic compared to the rest of the Horn of Africa. But does Ethiopia need to go as far as sanctioning a partition? It is for the people of Somalia and Somaliland to decide.
Ethiopian intervention is particularly threatening to its neighbours when one considers the region’s history since the Second World War. Ethiopia has made a habit of chipping away territories from neighbouring countries. Its leadership senses Somaliland is vulnerable. Somaliland may be about to jump up the political agenda after the election of US President-elect Donald Trump.
The country has long been on the radar of the Heritage Foundation’s Vision 2025 to counter Chinese influence in the Horn of Africa. The Trump administration might be supportive of Somaliland independence in return for a strategic foothold in the region to counter increased Chinese influence in the Horn of Africa.
Aklilu Habtewold, who later became the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, crisscrossed the world in the 1940s lobbying countries for the incorporation of Eritrea into Ethiopia. In 1942, Ethiopia’s Foreign Minister Yilma Deressa wrote a letter to then-US President Roosevelt stating his case about why Ethiopia deserved Eritrean ports, soon after Eritrea was occupied by the British. He argued: “[t]he people in what is now called Eritrea are ethnically and culturally akin to the Ethiopian people, and in time past, that territory was a province of Ethiopia called Hamassen. In 1940, during the attack on Eritrea from the Sudanese border, our British allies, by pamphlets dropped from airplanes, promised the people of Hamassen union with Ethiopia as a reward for deserting from their Italian conquerors.”
After WWII, Ethiopia incorporated Eritrea into its federation. It unsuccessfully tried to do the same with Somaliland, although it did succeed in incorporating the Ogaden region currently in south-eastern Ethiopia following the British withdrawal in 1948.
Ethiopia sent troops to the Korean war so as to position itself favourably with the United States, and bribed the US with a military base in Asmara, which was vital as a listening station during the Cold War.
Ethiopia then fought a 30-year (1961-1991) genocidal war against Eritreans when they tried to extricate themselves from the Federation. Ethiopian elites have again regressed to the mantra: “We are the same people” as a rationale for their territorial ambitions. This ignores the principle of self-determination, and the 1963 decision by African leaders that redrawing the borders of the continent was unwise and a recipe for chronic instability.
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