Leaders of three countries met last week to plot how to contain Ethiopia

Ethiopia Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. [File, Standard]

On October 10, 2024, the leaders of Egypt, Somalia, and Eritrea met in Asmara, Eritrea, to discuss perceptions of security threats from Ethiopia. While the perception of Ethiopia as being threat is not new, that feeling intensified when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed expressed his wish to make Ethiopia a sea power, through the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean.

Ethiopia is a landlocked country, courtesy of late 19th Century European competition for land grabbing in Africa, which curtailed Menelik II’s imperial ambitions.

The British surrounded Menelik in the west through Sudan and Egypt, in the south through British East Africa, and in the east through British Somaliland.

France took Djibouti and Italy claimed Eritrea in the north and Somalia. Although Menelik became a legend for resisting European colonial aggression by beating Italian invasion at Adowa in 1896, his dream of Ethiopia as a sea power was shelved until Abiy tried to revive it in the 21st Century.

Abiy confronts a different reality than that of Menelik. With independence, colonial states became countries called Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, and Djibouti. Ethiopia tried to hang on to Eritrea and fought a protracted war but Eritrea became independent in 1993. Ethiopia remained landlocked, seeking trading outlets to the sea through Djibouti and even entertained the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transport idea. The challenge was that Ethiopia wanted ownership of ports, not just trading access. In 2023, with eyes on Eritrea’s Asab in the Red Sea, Abiy said he was willing to use force to acquire a port.

He had inherited Ethiopia with many problems that included internal regional frictions, war with Eritrea, and longstanding dispute with Egypt over Ethiopia’s construction of the Great Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile. He started well as a peacemaker, earning a Nobel Peace Prize for his 2018 peace deal with Eritrea. But the image of a man of peace started disappearing when he sought to centralise power in Addis Ababa and a civil war broke out in the Tigray region in the north, neighbouring Eritrea.

The Tigray People Liberation Force (TPLF) initially outperformed Ethiopia but fortunes changed when Eritrea sided with Ethiopia to force an end to the war. Since Eritrea does not trust the TPLF, it was not amused by the terms of the settlement that left the TPLF intact and a potential threat to Eritrea. In addition, Eritrea and Ethiopia have running disputes over the Afar region. It did not help, therefore, for Abiy to start coveting Assab and even imply a possible war.

Unable to acquire Assab, Abiy seemingly turned attention to the autonomous Somaliland in Somalia in a 2024 Memorandum of Understanding, MOU, and offered the carrot of official recognition in exchange for 20 kilometres of coastline. Somaliland was the former British Somaliland which, in the spirit of Greater Somalia, had united with Italian Somaliland in 1960 to create the Republic of Somalia and still hoped to incorporate other Somali occupied regions.

When the ideology of Greater Somalia project collapsed with Siad Barre in 1991, Somalia fragmented into little autonomous entities of which Somaliland is the most viable. Somaliland, with many ingredients of statehood, has unsuccessfully campaigned for acceptance internationally. Ethiopia, it appeared was to open the gates of international recognition in exchange for a port. No other country has made such a move.

The MOU helped to isolate Ethiopia and united the Somali peoples whose seeming new strategy is penetrate, adapt, and control. US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar vowed to use her position in in the US Congress to defend Somali interests. Among those committed to help Somalia was Egypt which sent military supplies to Mogadishu.
In doing so, Egypt wanted to Isolate Ethiopia, mainly over the Renaissance Dam, and to establish its presence in the Indian Ocean. The Tripartite meeting in Asmara, therefore, was a security alliance to contain Ethiopia.