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The Horn and GCC Political Spat
Amen Teferi
The Gulf state, Qatar, had been acting as mediator in a border dispute between Djibouti and Eritrea. However, Qatar is believed to have pulled out after both countries sided with Saudi Arabia in a diplomatic row. AS Qatari peacekeepers withdrew on June 12 and 13, on the same day, there were Eritrean military movements on the mountain. Djibouti late last week accused Eritrea of deploying troops to a disputed border region after Qatar withdrew its troops. They are now in full control of Dumeira Mountain and Dumeira Island and this is a breach of the UN Security Council resolution.
The United Nations (UN) has urged Horn of Africa neighbors – Eritrea and Djibouti, to peacefully resolve a border dispute that is threatening the security of the region. The AFP news agency reported that the UN security council after discussing a report on the border tension tasked, ‘‘parties to resolve the border dispute peacefully in a manner consistent with international law.’‘ The UN is soon joined by the regional political bloc, the Inter-governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), whose General-Secretary also stressed that both countries needed to exercise restraint in de-escalating tensions. Ethiopia, a regional security giant, agreed with adding that it was monitoring the situation and called for the UN intervention in the impasse.
Moreover, the African Union (AU) dispatched a fact-finding mission to the area last weekend but its report has yet to be made public. The AU Chair, Moussa Faki Mahamat in a statement called for calm to avoid any clashes.
This situation will have dangerous thrust on the already fragile and delicate nature of the Horn. The Horn always assumes an eluding disposition. So varied is the Horn of Africa that people pluck what they wish from that variety to generalize. It is that diversity of geography, history, population, politics, and culture that has made the region so prone to conflict within its societies and between its countries. And it is those differences that have allowed outsiders to play proxy politics with the region.
The Horn is also a region that has been at an historical crossroads. Traders have travelled through the region, north to south and west to east. Empires have grown and subsided. Islam and Christianity embedded themselves in the region from the earliest days of each faith. The river Nile rises in the region and flows through to Egypt, linking all the countries in a mortal association for survival. Along its eastern coast, it gives on to the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean, its people engaged in trade for millennia, linking themselves to the Gulf and beyond.
But there is one overriding truth about the Horn of Africa. It straddles a geographical space of such strategic importance that those who treat it with indifference will one day pay a price for their neglect, whilst those who try to manipulate it will get their fingers burnt. As I write, the core of this region, comprising the countries of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, and Somalia—with Kenya and Uganda very closely associated—has attracted once again in its history the attention of greater powers.
Terrorism has intensified the presence of the international community. The confrontation within the Muslim world has led to a realignment of loyalties in the region. The conflict in Yemen has raised concerns about the security of trade through the Red Sea. The jugular vein of trade between East and West is less protected than ever. The pervasive spread of a more purist interpretation of Islam in the region has shaken assumptions about cohabitation among communities throughout the Horn. The global migration crisis has galvanized a European Union concerned both by terrorism and migration into a far greater diplomatic, economic, and security activism in this critical part of Africa.
In geopolitical terms, the Horn is the fragile neighborhood of Europe’s much fractured southern neighborhood. It is also the backyard of countries in the Muslim world. Confronted by their own conflicts, the latter have decided to secure their own interests in the Horn of Africa and are actively doing so. Whether the Western interest in counter terrorism, good governance, and economic growth can find common ground with the security concerns of the Gulf so as to sustain a momentum towards stability and coherence—rather than fracture in the Horn—is one of the great challenges that we collectively face and must meet.
The people of the Horn of Africa and their governments will have to steer a delicate path to spare themselves and the region from the vagaries of strategic clientelism; those from outside will do well to understand the region—its history and politics—lest they think that this part of Africa is an easy proxy.
Three Challenges
Three major challenges confront the region. The first is how states manage to win over the population to a national project—therein lies the vital distinction between persuasion and coercion. The former requires deliberation that will one day, perhaps, become a form of democracy. If they don’t, marginalization in urban and rural areas will prevail. Discontent creates new loyalties that are easily exploited from within or by external actors.
The second challenge concerns the task of regional integration. This is a region of loosely controlled frontiers often populated by marginalized communities that straddle boundaries and become proxies in the politics between countries of the region. There is, therefore, a link between internal politics and regional integration.
Finally, the Horn of Africa has been an easy playground for players outside the region and outside Africa. The mix of poor governance, mutual destabilization, and external intervention are the combustible ingredients of a region always hovering on the edges of insecurity. It is this mix that the region is challenged to overturn into a virtuous cycle of participatory government; regional integration that focuses on building a regional economic market, and thus a region that can negotiate on its behalf with the outside world rather than retail its interest to the first buyer.
To overcome these challenges is not easy. The Horn of Africa is freighted with divisive historical baggage. How do we make sense, then, of this region? It shares no common colonial past. Italy, France, and Britain each left a now increasingly distant imprint. Three of the region’s countries—Sudan, Somalia, and South Sudan—have succumbed to most vicious and still unresolved civil wars. The countries have simply fragmented—whatever the protestations to the contrary of their rump central authorities. The Horn is also the only part of Africa where, in the cases of Eritrea and South Sudan, secession has been recognized. No other part of the world has more peacekeepers (or enforcers)—whether they are hatted by the United Nations or the African Union. Few parts of the world have generated, and yet host, more refugees.
At its center lies Ethiopia, never colonized, the successor to an empire comprising a wide diversity of populations, now bound together by a form of ethnic federalism which will hold so long as economic growth and redistribution outstrip the expectations of its youth. Populations from each of its neighbors inhabit the periphery of Ethiopia.
To its east lies Somalia, the only nation after independence to espouse an irredentist ideology. Shattered by civil conflict but united in identity, the test for Somalia, its neighbors, and the international community will be to help weave a newly constituted state out of the tattered garment that has been Somalia.
To the west lies Sudan, divided between its central authorities and rebellious peripheries, a power that espoused sharia, was willing to shed its southern territory, sustain a conflict in the Blue Nile, Kordofan, and Darfur, and still survive for almost 30 years. Finally, to the north lies Eritrea, isolated by its conflicts with Ethiopia and Djibouti, subject to international sanctions, controlling almost one thousand kilometers of the Red Sea coastline, and accused by many of gross human rights violations.
These countries form the core of the Horn of Africa, and each faces challenges to create a lasting sense of national identity; the failure to do so reverberate through the region. Where and when this project collapses, there is conflict within and the provocation of conflict among neighbors. Five wars have dominated this region in the last 40 years, and they have all sucked in other neighbors. In the Horn of Africa, the failure of one state to manage itself is like a bullet that ricochets through the region.
