The former French colony is playing host to its third international athletics tournament, with this year's Jeux de la Francophonie. On Tuesday, Guinean sculptor Kaba Abdoulaye crafts items in Abidjan which he hopes to sell to visiting sport fans. Mr Buhari has received a visiting delegation of Nigerian politicians to Abuja House in the British capital, where he has been receiving medial treatment for a second time this year for an unspecified illness. Related Topics. It is not unlike the harassment he and his friends have faced for years, but once again Barre has had to tailor his schedule.
Now he trains in the afternoons, when there is less of a police presence outside. Still, he said, he is able to train more openly now than in previous years, and doing so is a risk he and others are willing to take. Teresa Krug. Fund shortages With runners exercising more control over their sport, there is hope that current and future Somalia-based athletes will opt to remain in the country or East Africa even after international events. And not everyone has enjoyed the same degree of this new, relative freedom. More from Sports. Swiss court acquits beIN media group chairman Nasser al-Khelaifi.
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Lewis Hamilton overtakes Schumacher with record 92nd F1 win. Biden, Trump campaigns enter final sprint: US elections live news. Due to lower transaction and transportation costs, ports also serve as nodes for production and manufacturing. Conversely, landlocked developing countries are at a major disadvantage Paudel, ; Faye, et al. The lack of direct sea access inhibits integration with the global economy and entails a transport cost disadvantage compared to states with sea access.
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Also, the fact that trade from a landlocked country must pass through a sovereign transit country in order to access international shipping markets creates a serious political vulnerability on the former. If a landlocked country and its transit neighbour are in conflict, either military or diplomatic, the transit neighbour can block borders, implement regulatory changes that impede trade, or simply increase tariffs.
Even when there is no direct conflict, landlocked countries are extremely vulnerable to the political vagaries of their transit neighbours.
To be sure, Ethiopia has suffered from its dependency on its neighbours for an outlet to the sea Wuhib, With the loss of Eritrean territory and the Red Sea ports of Massawa and Assab, Ethiopia effectively became landlocked. Though Ethiopia briefly continued to use the port of Assab — where three-quarters of Ethiopian trade passed through duty-free until — it was forced to shift its trading route to the port of Djibouti, which at that point had a poorly functioning railroad and limited port facilities Faye et al.
Opened in , Doraleh container terminal and port became the sole facility in the region capable of handling 15,tonne-plus container vessels Styan, ; 6. Infrastructure development across national borders is more difficult to arrange than similar investments within a country. The DCA — a joint one-stop border post development project — has proved only moderately successful, at least from an economic perspective, given slow implementation and development as well as recurrent disputes with Djibouti over transit and taxation Cannon, Yet, the result of these largely positive developments is that Ethiopia is now even more reliant on the port of Djibouti — importing and exporting a full 95 percent of its goods at the port Gessesse, Dependence on Djibouti has rankled Addis Ababa, which has been exploring alternative options to lessen reliance on its neighbour to the northeast since at least Giorgis, Ethiopia is understandably concerned by the strategic national security implications of being overly reliant on a single access point for trade and vital supplies.
As such, Ethiopia has focused on securing access to ports in neighboring countries, particularly the port of Berbera.
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Yet for a variety of legal, logistical and political reasons, Ethiopia has been unable until recently to fully exploit the port of Berbera. To begin with, the port is located in the Republic of Somaliland, which declared its independence from the Republic of Somalia in , but remains unrecognized internationally. Furthermore, as a state with firsthand experience in losing significant territory to a breakaway state and experiencing inter-communal violence and separatist insurgencies Yihun, , Ethiopia is understandably reticent to formally recognize Somaliland Jeffrey, Until , Ethiopia, with the assistance of the UN and further helped by a cavalcade of allegations of human rights abuses perpetrated by the government of President Isaias Afwerki in Asmara, had been fairly successful in corralling and isolating Eritrea.
The second pillar held dear by the mandarins of Addis Ababa rests on maintaining the status quo in post-civil war Somalia Cornwell, Simply put, a weak and fractured Somalia means that Ethiopia can concentrate its attention and forces on quelling persistent internal security difficulties and continuing to isolate and pressure Eritrea. The cross-purposes of the international community coupled with and reinforcing political instability in Somalia Cannon, a , particularly in the capital Mogadishu, have resulted in the inability of the Somali Federal Government SFG to do anything substantive about the de-facto independent Republic of Somaliland as well as the almost entirely autonomous northeastern region of Puntland.
Ethiopia has eyed the development of and access to the port of Berbera against this backdrop. However, Ethiopia found itself unable to fully exploit opportunities to expand its influence and power not only because of the potential legal and political headaches of doing deals with Somaliland, but also because of a paucity of critical resources and human capital. For example, as far back as Ethiopia and Somaliland signed a bilateral agency agreement on the Utilization of Port of Berbera and Transit Service African Intelligence, However, it lacked the technical expertise and resources necessary to transform the moribund brown water port into a commercially viable export and import shipping hub Davison, Ethiopia attempted to overcome these difficulties by signing trilateral agreements with China and Somaliland in covering gas, oil and logistics.
The agreements also included the large-scale development of the port of Berbera by the Chinese company PetroTrans. At the same time, ESL placed an order for nine new vessels in China and voiced its hope to become one of the main shareholders in the port, perhaps in conjunction with an international terminal operator Port Strategy, However, the agreements never materialized, partly because PetroTrans was unable to procure insurance for the port and proposed LNG facilities Anderson, Berbera port remained undeveloped, in part, because Ethiopia was unable to locate investors or companies with the incentive to take the substantial political and legal risks associated with business in Somaliland Ahmed, ; Houssein, ; Yusuf, However, the outbreak of war across the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and Gulf of Aden from Somalia, in Yemen, started a sequence of actions and reactions creating both challenges to and opportunities for Addis Ababa that would potentially reconfigure the regional order.
There are deep and historic connections between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa in terms of trade and the movement of people. The Saudi and Yemeni authorities fretted in particular that Iran would use Eritrean territory, especially the Hanish archipelago in the Red Sea, as a conduit for shipping arms to Shia Houthi rebels in northern Yemen Al Arabiya, After the breakdown in the regional order following the Arab Spring uprisings, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates UAE , and to some degree Qatar, adopted more assertive and interventionist foreign policies Young, Moreover, the perception that the United States under President Barrack Obama was more reticent to counter Iranian activity in the region led the Gulf States to believe that self-reliance was the order of the day.
In early , after years of intermittent rebellion in the north of the country, the Houthis and their allies seized the Yemeni capital of Sanaa. As a consequence, the UAE and to some extent Saudi Arabia moved closer to Eritrea, which ended its formal cooperation agreement with Iran Solomon, Starting with very little, Assab has been substantially developed by the UAE. It now includes a modern airbase 10 , a military training depot, and, significantly, a deep-water port under construction Katzman, ; Ethiopia has concrete reasons for concern over an emboldened Eritrea.
Recent UN monitoring mission reports on Eritrea conclude that the country supports armed groups in Ethiopia and offers sanctuary to anti-government rebels in its own country UN Monitoring Group, ; 3. Ethiopia had been attempting to curry the interest of Abu Dhabi and Dubai in Berbera Port for some time and this round of urgent discussions was by no means the first time Addis Ababa had engaged the UAE regarding Berbera. The Joint Commission Meeting was reportedly the result of an agreement to increase bilateral relations following a visit by the UAE Foreign Minister to Ethiopia that occurred as far back as While the Yemen conflict provided Eritrea with opportunities to leverage its strategic geographical position in order to win outside supporters and break out of isolation it also provided opportunity spaces hitherto unavailable to Addis Ababa, which duly took advantage of them.
These discussions were themselves predated by a February deal between Ethiopia and the government of Somaliland to develop the port Davison, The first was the aforementioned spat between Djibouti and DP World. In economic terms, the port be potentially lucrative given Ethiopian assurances of imports and exports and the relatively small amount of financing required to upgrade the port. In political terms, the strategic importance of Berbera increased for the UAE given its proximity to Aden and areas east and lessened to some degree the importance of Assab to the UAE. It is unlikely that DP World would have signed the deal over Berbera if it did not see at least some long-term commercial benefit.
But the deal also includes political and military dimensions. The base, only 90 kilometres from the shores of Yemen, is intended to help the UAE forces tighten its blockade against Yemen. The base decision was reached after a parliamentary vote in Hargeisa in February in which MPs voted in favour, two voted against, two abstained and nine other opponents were escorted out of the chamber by soldiers BBC, a.
The Somaliland Supreme Court is reportedly interested in reviewing the deal. The anger of some in Somaliland pales in comparison to that in Mogadishu. Given the sensitivities of the SFG regarding any formal engagement with Hargeisa that would negatively affect its own claim of suzerainty over Somaliland, coupled with the official diplomatic narrative by Washington, Ankara and other capitals that emphasizes a unitary Somalia, Hargeisa has, until the Berbera Port deal, remained largely isolated with the exception of humanitarian missions TİKA, SFG ministers have publicly challenged the right of Somaliland to enter into official agreements with any country Press, TV, The reality is that with the growth in annual volumes of Ethiopian transit cargo — over nine million tons in — Ethiopia has long required alternative routes for its cargo from Djibouti Port Strategy, Additionally, when the deal was inked between DP World and Somaliland, Ethiopia ensured its substantive presence in the running and development of the port in the form of ESL.
ESL will reportedly control a 19 percent share in the deal — almost twice as much as it initially expected to receive Manek, ; Indian Ocean Newsletter, Somaliland Foreign Minister Saad Ali Shire further confirmed the percentage, noting that DP World sold 14 percent of its shares to Ethiopia with the government of Somaliland selling five percent of its shares to Ethiopia National Staff, b. Lastly, Ethiopia was able to engineer a formal, legally-binding agreement between the de-facto but unrecognized, independent state of Somaliland and the UAE.
In doing so, Ethiopia further ensured the continuing Balkanization of Somalia and potentially paved the way for eventual, international recognition of the Republic of Somaliland. Does the case of Berbera demonstrate that Ethiopia has established an accepted and uncontested hierarchy in the Horn of Africa? The short answer is no.
But Ethiopia is no longer a rising power unduly constrained by landlockedness. Berbera represents a friendly corridor across the territory of a pliant state for Ethiopian markets. As noted, most of these have focused on outside powers and security situations such as the conflict in Yemen that have the triggered the engagement of external states.
By focusing on Ethiopia and its aims in its near abroad, we attempt to avoid the all-too-common pitfall whereby African states are deemed as passive and lacking in agency as they are acted upon by powers or regional blocs outside the continent Cannon, b; However, a few caveats are in order. First, our article pays scant attention to the actions of the ruling cadre and businesspeople of the Republic of Somaliland in relation to developments with the port of Berbera. An analysis of these actions, often in concert with or encouraged by Addis Ababa, as well as dissatisfaction and anger over the deal within Somaliland are beyond the scope of this article and represent a potential follow-on research project.
Second, our article largely ignores Ethiopian internal politics, partially because these are outside the scope of this article and partially because of a paucity of verifiable data emanating from Ethiopia. Their strategic interests are informed by the political, economic and security dynamics in that theatre and their shifting relationships with the SFG. Regional powers should be able to decisively influence the policies of neighbours to achieve their own goals.
Landlocked, Addis Ababa has been unable to ascend to this role despite the material distribution of power in the region being heavily in its favour. Rankled by its dependence on Djibouti for importing and exporting its marketable goods and essential materials, Ethiopia carried out expeditionary diplomacy on behalf of Somaliland in relation to Berbera Port in order to further its own interests as far back as Yet when faced with the possibility that its enemy, Eritrea, would shake-off international isolation, Ethiopia showed adroitness, using connections at the governmental and sub-governmental level to steer the UAE towards Berbera and away from Assab.
While Ethiopia ultimately failed to convince the UAE to abandon the Eritrean port, it succeeded in its aim of getting DP World to refurbish and further develop Berbera Port so as to handle increased Ethiopian trade and the transit of goods. In the process, Ethiopia further bolstered its other regional security objective: ensuring a divided and weak Somalia.
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Brilliantly, it did so by avoiding any overt action which could later be misconstrued in Mogadishu, the UN or the AU Staff Report, In the process, a further fractured and divided Somalia and a largely isolated Eritrea mean Ethiopia is the undisputed local power broker in the region; the regional hegemon. As further deals for ports and mineral rights continue across the northern Somali coast, 22 Addis Ababa can potentially negotiate with Somaliland, the autonomous region of Puntland and the Somali Federal Government SFG all separately — unofficially or officially — depending on perceived need.
Ethiopia has also further cemented its hold over Somaliland. Towards Hargeisa, Ethiopia has combined pressure with material incentives to achieve its goals. While Ethiopia was instrumental in bringing in significant outside investment and recognition to Somaliland, it also increasingly meddles in internal affairs. For example, when a delegation from Somaliland was invited to visit Egypt, Ethiopia reportedly lodged a harsh diplomatic complaint against the visit to its main Nile River rival and Hargeisa cancelled the visit Somaliland Informer, African Intelligence.
Backpacking in Mogadishu; Not the Smartest Thing I’ve Ever Done
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