Somaliland: Foreign Powers’ Double-edged Interest in Horn of Benefit to Whom?

It’s not just the UAE that is taking an interest in Berbera, but also Somalia’s neighbor and rival Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government has signed a tripartite agreement with the UAE and Somaliland, giving Addis Ababa a 30-year concession for the development and management of the port. “The port can be one of the gateways for Ethiopia,” Somaliland’s foreign minister, Saad Ali Shire, told FP, “which is one of the biggest countries in Africa.”

But since Somaliland is not a recognized state and cannot legally make contracts with foreign governments, it is unclear how this will all pan out. Somalia’s fragile government in Mogadishu, led by President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (widely known by his nickname, Farmajo) has declared this deal “null and void,” adding that it risks pushing war-torn Somalia into further instability.

In a statement in March, Somalia’s Ministry of Ports and Marine Transport said Berbera’s port deal was going against the grain of hopes for unity of Somalia and that it was a violation of the Somali Constitution.

But for Saed Abdullahi Hassan, the head of Berbera’s port authority, the Somali government has no right to get in the way: “They should not disturb the investment going into Somaliland.” Given that Farmajo’s government still only functionally controls small swathes of Somalia and is locked in a bitter war with al-Shabab, his government’s irritation over the Berbera port deal may remain just that.

The tensions surrounding outside investment in Berbera offer a window into how power struggles from Middle East are increasingly being projected onto the Horn of Africa.

Somaliland is just 162 miles across the water from Yemen’s port city of Aden. As war in Yemen has resulted in the increasing militarization of the Red Sea region, its ports have become important stepping stones for various Middle Eastern players. The United Arab Emirates has a port in Eritrea. Qatar has plans to upgrade a port in Sudan. The Turks are in Mogadishu. Ahmed Soliman, a Horn of Africa expert at Chatham House in London, told FP the region has become a “maritime laboratory” with every major power now either in possession of a military base or searching for one.

In 1869, the Red Sea was changed forever with opening of the Suez Canal. In 1956, the French, Israelis, and British went to war with Gen. Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt to keep their privileged access to the waterway, before pressure from the United States eventually forced their defeat.

Today the Red Sea has once more become an important space for the region’s powers to pursue their own ambitions

[pullquote]Today the Red Sea has once more become an important space for the region’s powers to pursue their own ambitions[/pullquote]

, and strengthening connections to Berbera and neighboring Djibouti have become top priorities for many regional players.

Somaliland itself was created during the 19th century, when the Horn of Africa was carved up by European powers. Contemporary Somalia is a composite state—formed in 1960 when two former colonial territories, British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland, were fused together. Meanwhile, Djibouti, which was once labeled French Somaliland, became independent in 1977.

The Somaliland of today exists within the same borders as its colonial predecessor, British Somaliland. However, this has led to ongoing territorial disputes with Puntland, a semi-autonomous part of Somalia, which claims that the contested regions of Sool and Sanaag should belong to it, rather than Somaliland, on the basis of kinship ties rather than colonial-era divides. Because British Somaliland gained independence five days before Italian Somaliland, advocates of Somaliland’s sovereignty say that this detail gives them the ability to revert back to their previous status as an independent nation. If Somaliland volunteered to join with its much larger neighbor to the south in 1960, the idea goes, its leaders can also decide to opt out.

In the post-colonial era, Somalia came under the rule of Gen. Siad Barre, who took over in a bloodless coup in 1969 after he forced out the country’s first democratically elected president. Barre quickly aligned himself with the Soviet Union. It was during this era of socialist rule in Somalia from 1969 to 1991 that Berbera gained its contemporary significance as a place where outsiders seek to project power in the Horn of Africa.

In 1964, the Soviet Union was the first major power to arrive in Somali-controlled Berbera. The Soviets constructed the largest airstrip in Africa at the time, just next to the port. In the 1970s, Soviet troops ran military operations out of Berbera. This was particularly unnerving to the United States, which saw Barre’s government as a proxy for expanding the Soviet Union’s power in Africa.

But Somali-Soviet ties were short lived. In 1977, when animosity between Ethiopia and Somalia culminated in the Ogaden War over another disputed border, the Soviets starting arming and supporting Somalia’s archrival Ethiopia, and the alliance between the two was over. In a remarkably abrupt pivot between enemies, Barre’s government realigned itself with the United States. U.S. President Ronald Reagan subsequently embraced the dictator.

Somaliland suffered terribly in the late 1980s under a U.S.-aligned Somali government. Its current capital, Hargeisa, became known as “Africa’s Dresden,” because it was so heavily bombed in 1988.

[pullquote]Somaliland suffered terribly in the late 1980s under a U.S.-aligned Somali government. Its current capital, Hargeisa, became known as “Africa’s Dresden,” because it was so heavily bombed in 1988.[/pullquote]

The Horn of Africa’s relevance waned as the Cold War ended, and in 1991 the country collapsed into a three-decade-long civil war, while Somaliland unilaterally declared its independence from the rest of Somalia.

The threat of international piracy off the Somali coast brought the Horn of Africa back into the international spotlight in the early 2000s. Since then, the United States has played a significant role, which seems set to expand. Shire, Somaliland’s foreign minister, said, “Since Trump came to office it seems there has been an escalation of the war against al-Shabab.”

Somalia’s current president, Farmajo, is a dual American-Somali national who lived a significant part of his life in Buffalo, New York. He rose up through the African diaspora of Buffalo, home to a significant number of Somali refugees who had escaped the war. He refined his leadership at the New York State Department of Transportation, where he worked as the commissioner for equal employment. Farmajo is also a registered Republican—a particularly complex position for a Somali dual national in the era of U.S. President Donald Trump.

When Stephen Schwartz, the first U.S. ambassador to Somalia in 25 years, met Farmajo in February 2017, he presented him with a gift: a blue-and-white baseball cap with the slogan “Make Somalia Great Again.”

Makau W. Mutua, a Kenyan-American professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law who knew Farmajo, told FP that though people were proud when he became the ninth president of Somalia, his political affiliation in the United States did not go unnoticed. “It was surprising that he’s a Republican,” he said.

Only weeks after he took office in early 2017, Trump signed a directive that declared parts of Somalia an “area of active hostilities.” Since then, rules of engagement by the U.S. military in Somalia have been relaxed, which has led to a rapid increase in drone strikes in the country. Hundreds of people have been killed, including militants and civilians, with displacement becoming an increasing problem.

But the violence in Somalia is just one example a trend in the wider Horn of Africa, which has become one of the most militarized areas of the world in the past decade. The UAE had originally planned to build a port in Djibouti. When the deal fell apart, it moved down the coast to Somaliland.

Berbera benefits from its proximity to Aden, Yemen’s main port and the de facto headquarters of the Gulf coalition in Yemen. UAE soldiers are stationed in Yemen, and many say the UAE’s long-term aim is to create a buffer zone in south Yemen, a breakaway region, from which the Houthi north can be contained by military and naval bases on either side of the Red Sea. With Berbera, the UAE will have effective control of both banks of the Red Sea.The Port of Djibouti, as seen from Ambouli, Djibouti on April 23, 2017. (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

Under former U.S. President Barack Obama, Camp Lemonnier underwent a $1.4 billion upgrade. The installation now houses around 4,500 American military personnel and includes a well-appointed gym and a Pizza Hut. The base has become a vital cog in the machinery of U.S. military operations in the region. From this camp, the United States has launched countless drone flights into Somalia and Yemen.