Introduction
How can one explain the apparent stability that has prevailed in the Horn since 1991? The overthrow of the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia and the de facto independence of Eritrea paved the way for a period of stable government that had been absent for the many years. Stability is not peace, but one is struck by the fact that for more than two decades the key countries in the Horn have remained essentially under the same administrations or forms of government. The fall of the Siad Barre regime in 1991 left Somalia without a centralised, effective government. Despite the best efforts of the international community and a number of costly conferences and mediations Somalis still are without a central government worthy of the name. Ethiopia has remained under the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and Eritrea under the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) (even if the parties now have different names) while Somalis still live in a patchwork of administrations. For more than 20 years now this has been the prevailing reality across the most important countries in the Horn.
If one compares this situation to the previous two decades one sees a very different picture, with major rebel groups overthrowing the Emperor and then the Dergue, while Eritrea broke away from Ethiopian rule. So why are these upheavals no longer taking place?
It is not because the governments are more just or any less repressive, as one can observe by reading the many reports of Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. Why did movements come into being after 1960 which finally dismembered the Ethiopian empire, yet no similar forces have arisen in the last two decades to challenge the governments in both Eritrea and Ethiopia? Equally one can ask why no unitary state structure has been found for Somalia. After more than 20 years without an effective central administration one has to conclude that this acephalous state of affairs may suit the Somali people. Somalia has remained without a stable administration, yet its people have survived – even if they have paid a terrible price for the absence of most state structures.
The current state of affairs cannot be considered permanent. Human rights abuses abound, famine continues to plague the peoples of all three countries and there are constant tensions between them. All have attempted to undermine each other. Ethiopia and Eritrea are in a state of near-conflict along their common border. Ethiopian troops are inside Somalia, attacking al-Shabab, while Eritrea is accused of putting resources behind rebel movements operating in Ethiopia and Somalia.
The apparent stability is held in place, at least in part, by foreign actors. Without American aid, the Ethiopian government would be routinely incapable of feeding millions of its own people. Without international backing the Somali government would have been swept from Mogadishu. Even Eritrea could not have survived without support from Libya, China, Iran and some Gulf states. For outside powers (from the United States to al-Qaeda) the Horn has been an arena of intensifying contest since the War on Terror erupted with the attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Yet international assistance alone is not a sufficient explanation for the current state of affairs.
Even the most cursory trawl through the literature on the Horn provides a rich vein of material detailing the instability of the region. The article by the former US Ambassador in Ethiopia, David Shinn, entitled: ‘Challenges to peace and stability in the Horn of Africa’ was just one example of this line of argument.
In the post-World War II era, the Horn of Africa has consistently been the most conflicted corner of the world. That is a bold assertion, but hear me out and then tell me if there is another region of the world that has consistently been more conflicted. (Shinn 2010)
Somalia: no ‘failed state’
For the international community there is little dispute that Somalia is the epitome of the failed state. It ranks first in the listing produced by the authoritative Foreign Policy magazine for 2011, as it has done for several years.1 The magazine defines the failed state in this way:2
A state that is failing has several attributes. One of the most common is the loss of physical control of its territory or a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Other attributes of state failure include the erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions, an inability to provide reasonable public services, and the inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community. The 12 indicators cover a wide range of elements of the risk of state failure, such as extensive corruption and criminal behavior, inability to collect taxes or otherwise draw on citizen support, large-scale involuntary dislocation of the population, sharp economic decline, group-based inequality, institutionalized persecution or discrimination, severe demographic pressures, brain drain, and environmental decay. States can fail at varying rates through explosion, implosion, erosion, or invasion over different time periods.
This perspective is supported by the findings of the UN Sanctions Committee Monitoring Group. In its latest report its experts found that:
More than half of Somali territory is controlled by responsible, comparatively stable authorities that have demonstrated, to varying degrees, their capacity to provide relative peace and security to their populations. Without exception, the administrations of Somaliland, Puntland, Gaalmudug, and ‘Himan iyo Heeb’ evolved independently of centralized State-building initiatives, from painstaking, organic local political processes. Much of Galguduud region is controlled by anti-Al-Shabaab clan militias loosely unified under the umbrella of Ahlu Sunna wal Jama'a (ASWJ), but lacks a functional authority. (UN Monitoring Group 2011)
A great deal of violence is generated by projects to capture the state or by counter-projects to resist the establishment of a state, either by groups who fear that they would be left outside its exploitative system (e.g., rival clans) or by groups who oppose any state since they are not interested in being neither outside nor inside an exploitative state (e.g. the business community). (Haldén 2008, 51)
There was something special about the highland rebels in both Ethiopia and Eritrea
When considering Ethiopia and Eritrea it is possible that the two dominant movements, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front and the Tigray People's Liberation Front were, in the true sense of the term, peculiar. Did they possess unique characteristics that other movements have been unable to replicate? Or was there something about the era in which they were formed which was unique? If this was true, it might explain why other rebel groups in both countries have been incapable of building sufficient support or momentum to threaten either regime.
Certainly the period in which these movements came into being was extraordinary – even in the complex history of both countries. The movements were shaped by the revolution that overthrew the Ethiopian empire, whose roots stretched back into the mists of time. This is not the place to revisit these events in detail, which were traced by the late Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux (Halliday and Molyneux 1981, 51 ff.). They portrayed a student movement, radicalised by the international protests of 1960s, which brought these debates from Europe and North America and attempted to apply them to Ethiopian realities. By the early 1970s their ideas had been taken up by sections of the military and played a key role in the formation of the Dergue and the rise of Haile Mengistu Mariam in September 1974. There then followed the bloodbath of the Red Terror, in which thousands were killed, but the seeds of revolution had been planted and with them concepts of Marxism-Leninism, which continues to shape the policies of Ethiopia and Eritrea to this day.
Without tracing the development of the TPLF and EPLF in detail, it is worth noting that Isaias Afeworki attended the Haile Selassie University in Addis Ababa in late 1965 and early 1966, prior to the most radical period of student politics. Other key early members of the EPLF were at university in Addis during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These included Mesfin Hagos, Hailemariam Woldetensae and Haile Menkarios.3 The TPLF's subsequently leader, Meles Zenawi, joined the Medical Faculty of Addis Ababa University after completing his schooling in 1972 and remained at the university for two years, during the height of the radical period.
Marxist concepts and Leninist practices became embedded in both movements giving them both intellectual steel and a ruthless belief in the legitimacy of the use of force to reach their goals. The radical impulse, which swept across the student world of the 1960s and 1970s, has long passed. In its place have come other intellectual movements, but few – apart from radical Islam – have so successfully attempted to reshape the world.
It must, of course, be recognised that it was not just Tigrayans or Eritreans who were caught up in these events; other Ethiopian nationalities were swept along as well. However, there are suggestions that the nature of Ethiopian society was such that they were not involved to the same extent. John Young wrote: ‘While Oromos and others more recently incorporated into the Ethiopian empire suffered the greatest oppression under the imperial regime, it was the Tigrinya speakers of Eritrea and Tigray who were the most ethnically conscious: Tigrayans, who inhabited the heartland of the historic Ethiopian state were resentful of their subordination to an Amhara-dominated state, and Tigrayan students increasingly embraced the view that the best approach would be to engage in a national liberation struggle’ (Young 1998, 37).
Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux pointed to the ‘geographical extension and fragmentation of Oromo areas’ to explain the obstacles to successful mobilisation against the Ethiopian state (Halliday and Molyneux 1981, 198). Certainly the Oromo, Ethiopia's most numerous people, are diffuse and complex. They are spread from the far west through the centre of the country and down to the Kenyan border. Attempts by the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) to confront the Ethiopian state have met with only limited success. While the Ethiopian government has failed to eradicate the movement, it has managed to contain the OLF's operations. The same can be said of other opposition movements in Ethiopia, like the Somali-based Ogaden National Liberation Front, which came to international attention after its troops killed Chinese oil workers in 2007 (New York Times 2007), and then in December 2011, when two Swedish journalists travelling with the rebels were jailed for entering Ethiopia illegally (Reuters 2011).
None of these movements appear to currently pose any real threat to the Ethiopian government. Indeed, the Ethiopian government appears well entrenched, having survived the potentially destabilising death of its charismatic but dictatorial Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi. Much the same can be said of the groups attempting to overthrow Eritrea's President Isaias Afeworki. Both governments appear capable of meeting the threats posed by rebel movements and opposition parties. A mixture of covert surveillance, ruthless repression and fragmentation has rendered these movements incapable of mounting a real challenge to either government. While it is impossible to predict coups or assassinations, since they involve such small, covert groups, there are few indications that either government is about to be removed.
What about the Sudans?
Sudan (North and South) is an integral part of the Horn of Africa. Anyone who has travelled across its vast territory can be left in no doubt about the interconnections between its peoples. In the past the Sudanese played critical roles in the lives of their neighbours, allowing both the Eritreans and Tigrayan rebels to operate from their soil, while Ethiopia played host to the South Sudanese rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM). Today, by contrast, Sudan and South Sudan are less involved with the rest of the Horn. Since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Kenya in 2005 and the independence of the South in 2011 the two countries have focused on their relations with each other, rather than on playing a role in the region. Relations between Addis Ababa and Khartoum appear to be on a more even keel. Ethiopia is keen to export electricity to Sudan and recently completed a power transmission line that links its grid with neighbouring Sudan (Sudan Tribune [online], 19 February 2012). Funded by the World Bank, the $41 million dollar power project will enable Ethiopia to export electricity to Sudan. This could be substantially increased once Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam on the Nile is completed.
Sudan's relations with Eritrea have also improved. Although Asmara used to host Darfur groups like the Justice and Equality Movement, this is a thing of the past. With Eritrea having lost its ally in Colonel Gaddafi, President Isaias has had to mend fences with President Omar al Bashir. In October 2011 the Eritrean leader paid a three-day visit to Sudan in an attempt to cement ties (Sudan Tribune [online], 21 October 2011). South Sudan is focusing on the enormously difficult task of building a new state and finding a modus operandi with its northern neighbour. As a result, Khartoum and Juba are keener to woo their neighbours than undermine them.
Is the real problem Eritrea?
It is not difficult to construct a narrative that suggests that Eritrea is the major source of instability in the Horn. This case is eloquently made by the Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea established under the United Nations Sanctions Committee. Since 2002 the Monitoring Group have spelled out in extraordinary detail the complex web of links that tie Eritrea to the major rebel movements operating in the Horn, and to al-Shabaab in particular:
In the course of the current mandate, the Monitoring Group obtained firm evidence of Eritrean support for armed opposition groups throughout the region, including Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia and the Sudan. Support for these groups also involves Eritrean diplomatic, intelligence and PFDJ-affiliated networks in Kenya, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere. (UN Monitoring Group 2011, paras. 258–259)
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Ogaden National Liberation Front
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Oromo Liberation Front
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Afar Liberation Front
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Afar Revolutionary People's Democratic Front (also known as Ugugumo)
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Sidamo Liberation Front
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Tigrayan People's Democratic Movement
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Unidentified fighters from the Amhara and Gambella regions of Ethiopia
The report implicates Libya, Iran and a number of Gulf states in assisting Eritrea in financing these operations, while arms are imported and equipment serviced by Russia, Ukraine and Romania in violation of a UN arms embargo against Eritrea that has been in place since 2009. UN Security Council resolution 1907 should have resulted in sanctions being imposed against the violators. However, as the Monitoring Report notes, this has not taken place.4
Perhaps most tellingly of all, the UN Monitoring Group found that these operations are controlled by President Isaias Afeworki's office (UN Monitoring Group 2011, para. 261). ‘Eritrean support for armed opposition groups is directed by a small but efficient team of officers from the National Security Office, the Eritrean military and the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) leadership under the direct supervision of the President's Office’.
This evidence of Eritrean involvement in, and support for, rebel movements operating across the Horn is compelling. What it does not indicate is how effective these measures have been. The movements President Isaias has backed are generally weak and ineffective. This is not to suggest that they could not be destructive. There is evidence that Eritrea attempted to bomb targets around Addis Ababa during the African Union summit in January 2011 by training and supporting members of the OLF (ibid., paras. 286 ff.). The attacks were halted through the vigilance of the Ethiopian police and intelligence services. But elsewhere there is little evidence that the groups working out of Asmara pose a real threat to the governments of the region. The exception is al-Shabaab, which still controls large swathes of central and southern Somalia. Yet even here the Islamist group is on the retreat, with Kenya, Ethiopia and the African Union force removing them from many of their strongholds. At least as important has been the gradual development of movements inside Somalia itself that oppose al-Shabaab. Of these, Ahlu Sunna wal Jama'a – supported by Ethiopia – is the most powerful (ibid., para. 15).
If Eritrean supported movements are generally ineffective or on the back foot, what can be said of movements backed by the Ethiopians? Here the evidence is less compelling, but this is at least in part because there is no counterpart to the UN Monitoring Group probing Addis Ababa's activities with a fine-tooth comb. There is certainly support for Eritrean opposition groups from Ethiopia, which regularly allows these movements to meet and plot against the government in Asmara. There have also been attacks across the border by Ethiopian forces, even though these have been relatively small scale (BBC News 2012).
This is not to suggest that Ethiopia is not attempting to destabilise Eritrea. Addis Ababa has repeatedly refused to implement the Boundary Commission report on the disputed border between the two countries, following their war of 1998–2000. The Commission issued its finding on the border on 13 April 2002.5 For the next four years it attempted to place concrete pillars along the newly designated border. Although Eritrea accepted the ruling as final and binding (as both countries were required to do by the Algiers Peace Treaty that ended the border war) Ethiopia has consistently said it will not do so (UN Security Council 2008).
Ethiopia has insisted that further discussions on the border should take place with Eritrea before implementation of the ruling. Eritrea is equally determined that the demarcation is final and binding in international law and that demands for further discussions are an Ethiopian ploy to reopen the issue. In an attempt to put pressure on the United Nations to ensure the implementation of the Boundary Commission's ruling, Eritrea put in place a series of increasingly severe restrictions on the UN monitoring force along the border (UNMEE). The troops finally had their mandate terminated in July 2008 (ibid., paras. 10–14). While Eritrea has played its cards ineptly, Ethiopia must carry most of the blame for the border impasse. Eritrea complains continually that it has abided by its legal requirements and that Addis Ababa would not take this stand without Washington's support – a complaint that has considerable justification.
From the evidence cited above it is clear that Eritrea is a force for instability in the Horn. At the same time Ethiopia is also ready to meddle in its neighbour's affairs and blocks progress on the border with Eritrea. It is the key issue dividing the two countries, resulting in continual tension between them. It is a conflict that is played out across the Horn through proxies and if Asmara must take the blame for this, then so too must Addis Ababa.
Real change takes place outside of the political sphere
While this paper has looked at the political changes that have caused instability in the Horn it may be that this overlooks the real area of change: the economic situation in countries in the region. Here the story is clear. Ethiopia has enjoyed rapid economic growth in excess of 10% a year since 2004.
| 2004–2008 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 forecast | 2012 forecast | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ethiopia | 11.8 | 11.7 | 12.6 | 11.5 | 11.8 | 11.2 | 10.0 | 8.0 | 7.5 | 5.5 |
| Eritrea | –1.1 | 1.5 | 2.6 | –1.0 | 1.4 | –9.8 | 3.9 | 2.2 | 8.2 | 6.3 |
| Somalia | n/a | 2.8 | 2.4 | 2.6 | 2.6 | 2.6 | 2.6 | 2.6 | n/a | n/a |
| Sources: Ethiopia and Eritrea: IMF, Regional Economic Outlook, Sub-Saharan Africa, October 2011, Table SA2, Real Non-Oil GDP Growth. Somalia: CIA World Fact book, Somalia, estimates, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/so.html. |
This summary of growth is also reflected in GDP per capita growth. Ethiopia is among the top four African states in the period 2009–2012 (UNECA 2012, Figure 1.9). Poverty is also on the decline. The proportion of people below the poverty line at national level measured by the poverty head count index declined from 44.2% in 1999/00 to 38.7% in 2004–2005 (African Development Bank Group 2010). Development was initially led by agriculture, with a rapid increase in flower production. However, growth is increasingly moving towards the service sector. This has been driven by the rapid expansion in banking, public administration and retail business activities.
By contrast, Eritrea has gone into decline. There are few reliable statistical indications of what is really happening in Eritrea. The UN's Economic Commission for Africa fails to provide any data for the country. The International Crisis Group has outlined the crippling impact of having the nation on a permanent war-footing as a result of the ongoing confrontation with Ethiopia (International Crisis Group 2010). Without payments from the Eritrean diaspora it would be hard to see how the country or its people could survive. The one bright spot in the economy has been the mining of gold, which has taken off in recent years.
The picture that emerges from this cursory look at the economic situation is one of a rapid divergence. Ethiopia is enjoying successful growth while Eritrea is at best registering little or no growth at all. Addis Ababa can sit back and enjoy the benefits of prosperity while Asmara slides into decline. If this is accurate then there is little reason for Ethiopia to provoke a confrontation, while Eritrea may be too poor to afford one. This may be another reason for the current apparent stability in the Horn.
US relations with the Horn since the end of the Cold War
It is often forgotten that the Horn was once among the most divisive issues in international politics. Competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was played out in the region. The US's traditional relationship with Ethiopia was disrupted by the overthrow of the Emperor in 1974 and the Soviets gradually (and rather reluctantly) established a relationship with the new government. The Somalis, who had been a Soviet client, were dumped in 1977 when they invaded Ethiopia, with the US finding a new client in the region.6
It is worth recalling just how fierce the competition for influence in the region really was. The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Robert Gates, said in his memoires that for a three-month period Soviet aircraft were landing in Ethiopia every 20 minutes (Gates 2006, 122). Cuba poured in 11,600 troops and 6000 advisers (Westad 2007, 276). By early 1979 the Soviet experts in Ethiopia and other socialist countries reached more than 7000 and were directing and participating in military operations against rebellions in Eritrea and Tigray (Connell 2003). It was, says one authority on the period, ‘the largest foreign assistance programme the Soviets ever undertook after China in the 1950s’.7 Zbigniew Brzezinski, US National Security Adviser under President Jimmy Carter declared that détente between the superpowers ‘lies buried in the sands of the Ogaden’.8
The end of the Cold War halted this rivalry. It also reduced American interest in the Horn. In 1995 the US Department of Defence outlined its view of the continent, asserting that: ‘ultimately we see very little traditional strategic interest in Africa’ (Ploch 2011, 13). The attacks on American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 changed this perspective. The new threat from al-Qaeda put the Horn firmly on the map in the War on Terror. The result was the formation by US Central Command in 2002 of what was called ‘Combined Joint Task Force: Horn of Africa (CJTF–HOA)’, responsible for fighting terrorism and piracy (Ploch 2011, 20–21).
The Combined Joint Taskforce operates from Djibouti. It has been used by Washington to wage a quiet but effective war against al-Qaeda and its local Somali affiliate, al-Shabaab. It is not possible to give an accurate picture of the extent of this operation, but from time to time there are press reports of naval gunfire directed at Somali locations and drones being fired at targets.9 The Washington Post reports that the US runs some of its drone operations from a base inside Ethiopia (Washington Post 2011). ‘The Air Force has been secretly flying armed Reaper drones on counterterrorism missions from a remote civilian airport in southern Ethiopia as part of a rapidly expanding US-led proxy war against an al-Qaeda affiliate in East Africa, US military officials said. The Air Force has invested millions of dollars to upgrade an airfield in Arba Minch, Ethiopia, where it has built a small annex to house a fleet of drones that can be equipped with Hellfire missiles and satellite-guided bombs’. There are also reports that the CIA has a covert interrogation centre at Mogadishu's Aden Adde International Airport (The Nation 2011).10
The priority given to the War on Terrorism has influenced US relations with the Horn in general and Ethiopia in particular. As Human Rights Watch commented in 2008, the international community is prepared to downplay allegations of what it described as war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Somali region, because Washington was determined to maintain good relations with Addis Ababa. ‘Ethiopia is viewed by many western governments as a reliable and strategically important regional partner on counter-terrorism efforts’ (Human Rights Watch 2008, 118–119).
The historic, if sometimes difficult, relationship between Washington and Addis Ababa has skewed American relations with the Horn as a whole. Given the centrality of these links it is hardly surprising that Eritrea finds its interests marginalised, particularly when it behaves with such lack of regard for international norms. Other US allies in the region, such as Kenya, have to work hard for American backing.11
Is stability illusory?
This briefing began by asking whether the Horn of Africa was as crisis ridden as many commentators suggest. Having reviewed some elements of this question it is possible to conclude that the region is indeed relatively stable while at the same time being far from conflict free.
Having pointed to the stability of these countries it is also important to acknowledge that these regimes are not immune to the stresses and strains that afflict all administrations. They may be sufficiently capable and repressive to bottle these up, but in the end no regime has been able to resist its own population forever. Change frequently comes with little warning. Who predicted the fall of the Mubarak regime in Egypt or the end of the Soviet Union? Indeed, in Ethiopia the military committee or Dergue, which took power in June 1974, at first had no intention of ending Imperial rule, yet by 12 September of that year Haile Selassie was overthrown (Giorgis 1989, 12–16).
Perhaps rather than using the term ‘crisis’, which uses the medical analogy to suggest a point at which a patient may recover or die, it would be better to look to geography and the movement of tectonic plates. Tension builds up until it is unbearable and is then released in a devastating shock or in a series of smaller, less dramatic movements. Earthquakes are impossible to predict and their outcome and severity cannot be foreseen. This would appear to be a rather gloomy view, since it denies the social sciences their predictive powers, but perhaps it paints a more accurate picture of the state of our knowledge in the political affairs of closed and repressive regimes. At present there seems little obvious way forward, but then this region has a habit of taking all observers by surprise.