Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud visited Ethiopia on Jan. 11, being warmly welcomed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and signalling a marked improvement in relations between the two countries, after about a year of tensions generated by the agreements between the Ethiopian and Somaliland governments to develop a naval base in the port of Berbera.
During the visit to Addis Ababa, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Abiy Ahmed confirmed their common willingness to restart peaceful bilateral cooperation, as previously defined by the mediation sponsored by Turkey last Dec. 11, which facilitated the resolution of the crisis and the rapprochement between the two countries.
The Somali president’s visit followed that previously conducted on Jan. 2 in Mogadishu by Ethiopia’s Defense Minister, Aisha Mohammed Mussa, where the two countries agreed on the need to cooperate in the new African Union mission in Somalia, AUSSOM. The Somali and Ethiopian Defense ministers agreed that the vast majority of the more than 10,000 Ethiopian military personnel on Somali soil, engaged in countering al Shabaab especially in the border area between the two countries, will be included in the new mission.
Following the tensions that emerged over the past year between Somalia and Ethiopia, the government in Mogadishu had threatened to expel Addis Ababa’s troops from the country, setting the stage for a risky evolution of the crisis, which would expose Ethiopia’s southern borders to the threat of instability.
The Somali government had therefore opened to the possibility of replacing Ethiopian troops with Egyptian soldiers, which had meanwhile arrived in the country partly as part of the African Union’s multinational contingent and in part under bilateral agreements with the Somali government.
The Egyptian presence, moreover, had been invoked by the government in Mogadishu as a result of the crisis with Ethiopia, knowing that openness to military units from Cairo would further exacerbate relations with the Ethiopian government in light of the unresolved dispute between the two countries over the development of the GERD dam on the Blue Nile, in Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gomuz province.
Although the threat of expulsion of the Ethiopian contingent had raised the concern of the government in Addis Ababa, which fears the possibility of an expansion of the al-Shabaab militia’s capacity for action within its territory, even for the Somali government the replacement of the 10,000 Ethiopian military personnel would represent a problem, with the risk of not been fully replaced by Egyptian forces and, consequently, increasing the threat of a renewed capacity of al Shabaab.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s visit to Addis Ababa thus enshrined the full restoration of diplomatic relations between the two countries, while at the same time reviving the prospects for bilateral military and economic cooperation, which include the construction of joint infrastructure designed to foster increased trade and energy cooperation.
At the same time, however, on Jan. 11, the foreign ministers of Egypt, Eritrea and Somalia – Badr Abdelatty, Osman Saleh and Ahmed Moalim Fiqi, respectively – met in Cairo for a trilateral dedicated to regional security cooperation, which follows the trilateral summit of the heads of state of the three countries held on last Oct. 10 in Asmara, and which was attended by Isaias Afwerki, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Hassan Sheikh Mohamud.
Both Egypt and Eritrea’s relations with Ethiopia have been gradually deteriorated over time, the former as a result of the GERD dam issue and the latter due to the consequences of the conflict in the Ethiopian regional state of Tigray. The trilateral summits held in Asmara and Cairo thus represented for Egypt and Eritrea an opportunity to isolate Ethiopia in the regional context, while for Somalia, on the other hand, this risks to become a new source of embarrassment with Addis Ababa in the aftermath of the resumption of diplomatic relations and the revival of economic and military cooperation.
A confirmation of how the trilateral ministerial meeting had been intended by the Egyptians and the Eritreans in an anti-Ethiopian capacity was provided by the final communiqué of the meeting, where the Egyptian Foreign Minister Abdelatty emphasized that the three countries had agreed to support a common position that excludes the possibility of a military and naval presence in the Red Sea by non-littoral states. A clear closure, then, to any ambitions of Ethiopia.
