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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2218 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 11, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Ethiopia & Somalia

A follow up to last week’s post about Somaliland trading Ethiopian access to their ports for Ethiopia recognizing them as a country (and giving them a stake in an Ethiopian airline, but the diplomatic coup is really what they wanted). The current Somali President Abdi has stayed in power in excess of term limits and recently got some terrible press for civilian deaths in a conflict between the government and a dissident group, so this treaty is a bit of a hail mary to keep himself in power/good graces. Is it working? Surprisingly hard to say.

There have been big (peaceful thus far) protests in Somaliland and the country seems divided about whether they support or oppose the deal, ironically because people are divided about whether it boosts sovereignty by getting foreign recognition, or compromises sovereignty by letting foreign troops use their land. The Defense Minister has actually now resigned in protest over stationing Ethiopian troops on Somali(land) soil. It sounds like there’s also some dispute over the territory belonging to his clan, or at least them perceiving that it belongs to them, so there could well be issues in the future even if he didn’t get his veto over the policy now.

Somalia proper is of course furious with Ethiopia, recalling their ambassador and demanding arbitration in both the United Nations and African Union. This is all complicated by the fact that, as covered previously here, Ethiopia has not exactly been building good region relations anywhere else lately either. Their new dam threatens the water supply of both Egypt and Sudan, and Egypt has already come out publicly supporting Somalia’s position in the conflict. It may not end there either.

Eritrea and Egypt will also be concerned with Ethiopia’s having a major naval presence in the strategic Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, observers say.

And in Djibouti, which charges Ethiopia about $1.5 billion a year to use its ports, observers say that the loss of such income could lead to instability for President Ismail Omar Guelleh, who has benefited from that cash inflow during his more than two decades in office.

Given that the Red Sea is already highly chaotic right now, this really isn’t an ideal time to make things even more complicated. Mercifully, it would probably take a long time for any of this to move forward anyway, and a treaty hasn’t actually even been finalized; all Ethiopia and Somaliland have now is a memorandum of understanding.

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