In 2018, the leaders of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia signed a regional cooperation agreement that raised great hope in the Horn, but now, six years, later, it lies in tatters.
The Horn of Africa and its key waterways are the geostrategic interface between Europe, Africa, and Asia. They have been the site of more destructive foreign intervention and global power competition than any other region on the continent. It seemed as though consequent strife and instability might be coming to an end in 2018, when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, and then Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, aka Farmaajo, signed the Joint Declaration on Comprehensive Cooperation Between Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea, promising that the three countries would work together to promote regional peace and security. They pledged to pursue regional integration with political, social, cultural, economic, and security ties, and established a Joint High-Level Committee to coordinate their efforts.
Now, six years later, that agreement is barely remembered. Ethiopia is wracked by ethnic strife, while Somalia, Eritrea, and Egypt have lined up on one side of hostilities with Ethiopia and the secessionist Somali state of Somaliland. One media outlet after another publish the same sensational headline month after month. Will there be a regional war in the Horn of Africa?
I spoke to Eritrean American scholar, journalist, and podcaster Elias Amare about what went wrong and what the US had to do with it.
ANN GARRISON: Elias, I think we can start by assuming that US goals in the Horn are the same as they are all over the world: hegemony and control of strategic resources and geopolitical positioning. Correct?
ELIAS AMARE: 100%.
AG: And I think we can therefore assume that the US was not happy with the cooperative agreement between Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, which promised unity, prosperity, and independence from foreign powers including the US. Correct?
EA: 100%.
AG: So what then happened to dash the hopes of 2018 and what did the US have to do with it?
EA: Hopes had risen in the Horn not only because of the regional agreement but because prior to that, Abiy and Isaias had negotiated peace, ending a decades-long border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Those hopes were dashed when the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), an ethnic regional militia, attacked the Ethiopian national army, the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF), then fired rockets into Eritrea. The TPLF attacked on November 3, 2020, the same day that Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump. Such cataclysmic events often happen in Africa when the world is distracted by elections or inaugurations in the US, and in this case, the election brought the national security state actors who had long been allied with the TPLF back to power. They included humanitarian interventionists Susan Rice and Samantha Power, both of whom had been UN Ambassadors under Obama and key players during the NATO destruction of Libya.
Within a matter of hours after the TPLF attacked the ENDF, the hashtag #TigrayGenocide appeared on Twitter. Shortly thereafter Samantha Power, who had become the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, began warning of genocide in Tigray and Ethiopians began to fear another Libya-like military intervention to overthrow their sitting government. That intervention never materialized although the US did send a menacing troop deployment to enhance that already stationed at the US military base, Camp Lemmonier, in neighboring Djibouti.
In 2021, the US imposed sanctions on both Ethiopia and Eritrea, even excluding Eritrea from use of the SWIFT system for conducting international financial transactions, and those sanctions remain in place to this day.
In 2022, when the ENDF was close to defeating the TPLF, the US intervened to save it. PM Abiy’s agreement not to fully defeat the TPLF is not a matter of record, but it’s widely believed that Ethiopia was cash strapped by the war and greatly in need of an IMF loan.
US Special Envoy to the Horn Mike Hammer then flew to Tigray in a US Air Force jet to pick up the TPLF’s leader and fly to Pretoria, South Africa, to negotiate peace with the Ethiopian government. The result was the Pretoria Agreement, which allowed the TPLF to live on politically. It stipulated that the TPLF should disarm, but that stipulation was never enforced.
The TPLF had waged their civil war against the Amhara people of the Amhara Region, who felt betrayed by the agreement that allowed the TPLF to live on politically. The agreement also failed to settle long-running territorial disputes between the Amhara and the Tigrayans.
The Amhara distrusted the federal government for negotiating the agreement and not including them in the negotiations. This distrust grew into armed conflict when Prime Minister Abiy set out to disarm the regional militias, beginning with the Amhara Special Forces and Fano, the irregular Amhara militia that had fought with them against the TPLF. This triggered a civil war between the Fano militia and the national army that continues to this day.
By supporting the TPLF in the Tigray War and the Pretoria Agreement, the US thus succeeded in destabilizing Ethiopia, one of the three partners in the promising regional agreement.
In 2022 the US also played a key role in engineering the electoral defeat of then Somali Prime Minister Mohammed Abdullahi Mohammed, aka Farmaajo, a beloved leader who had the widespread support of the Somali people and one of the signatories of the regional agreement. His successor, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, weakened the alliance with Ethiopia by initiating an alliance with Egypt, which had long been at odds with Ethiopia over its share of Nile waters, which they perceive to be threatened by the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.
Then, in late 2023, as the war between the Amhara Fano militia and the Ethiopian government raged on, PM Abiy suddenly made a speech asserting that Ethiopia, a landlocked nation, had a historic right to Red Sea access and that it would seek that access militarily if it couldn’t be negotiated. This ended the trust between Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, causing Eritrea and Somalia to take a defensive posture against Ethiopia. That defensive posture became more so after Ethiopia negotiated a Memorandum of Understanding with the breakaway Somali state of Somaliland in January 2024.
Somaliland’s independence from Somalia is not recognized by any state but Taiwan, whose own independence is recognized by only 11 of the world’s 193 UN member states. In their Memorandum of Understanding, Somaliland offered Ethiopia a large tract of seacoast to build a port and a naval base in exchange for Ethiopia’s recognition of Somaliland as an independent nation. Somalia, which has resisted Somaliland secession for 30 years, expressed outrage, formed a defensive alliance with Egypt, and invited Egyptian troops and armaments onto Somali soil. Turkey has attempted to negotiate between Ethiopia and Somalia, but it is widely perceived to be an ally of Somalia. Turkey, Egypt, and Eritrea are now helping Somalia rebuild its army, which has not recovered from state collapse in 1991.
AG: So this is where the Horn is now with nothing left of the 2018 agreement to cooperate regionally, most of all on regional peace. Tragic, no?
EA: Yes, especially after such high hopes.
AG: What role has the US seemed to play in this since the Pretoria Agreement? Have they taken either side in the hostilities between Somalia/Eritrea/Egypt and Ethiopia/Somaliland?
EA: I think we can assume that the US is always at work behind the scenes in the Horn, but it hasn’t taken an official side in the current hostilities. It has repeated that it respects Somali sovereignty and has not recognized the independence of Somaliland, although there are elements within the US foreign policy establishment, including some Congresspeople, who advocate for increased US engagement with Somaliland but stop short of calling for its recognition as an independent nation. The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act proposes increased military collaboration with Somaliland, as though it were an independent nation, but again, stops short of calling for its recognition as such. For some reason, the conservative Heritage Foundation has long called for the independence of Somaliland.
AG: What about the US posture toward the conflict between the Ethiopian government and the Amhara militia?
EA: Members of the Amhara diaspora have sought to enlist the US government on their side in their conflict with the government, as the Tigrayan diaspora did, but without success. Although the US makes statements about the need for peace, its only clear commitment is to its longstanding ally the TPLF, even though it can no longer hope of seeing it return to power in Addis, where it ruled from 1991 to 2018.
AG: What about the role of the United Arab Emirates, a US ally?
EA: The UAE doesn’t do anything in the Horn without consent of the US and it’s playing a destructive role. It has promised billions of dollars to Abiy Ahmed to build a huge palace and tourist attraction in Addis Ababa. This project is so extravagant and in such contrast to the poverty of so many Ethiopians that it has damaged Abiy’s credibility with his own people.
The UAE has also provided Ethiopia with weapons to fight the Fano militia, but to be fair, it did the same when Ethiopia was fighting the TPLF.
In Somalia, the UAE is engaged in all kinds of machinations, most of all to control the country’s ports, but without taking a stand between Somaliland and Somalia.
AG: So, whatever role the US may be playing now behind the scenes, its goal of undermining regional cooperation and independence in the Horn has been fully achieved.
EA: 100%.
AG: Thanks for speaking to Black Agenda Report.
EA: You’re most welcome.
Elias Amare is an Eritrean American journalist and geopolitical analyst. He is also founding member of the Asmara-based "Peacebuilding Center for the Horn of Africa". A veteran EPLF political organizer and activist during the Eritrean struggle for independence, Elias is also a Pan-Africanist deeply interested in the New Horn of Africa vision. He is based in Oakland, California (USA), and Asmara, Eritrea.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected]. You can help support her work on Patreon.
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