Djibouti (Commentary) — In December 2022, a political marriage ceremony ceremony passed off in Djibouti. The Presidents of Somalia, Djibouti and the Somaliland Administration attended the ceremony. Muse Bihi, then President of Somaliland Administration, gave the hand of the Djibouti President’s daughter in marriage to Sadaq John, a senior Somali police officer.
The tripartite political alliance unravelled in January 2024 when Bihi signed a maritime Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, to lease a coastal district in northern Somalia to Ethiopia.
The MoU soured relations between Ethiopia and Somalia. It gave Djibouti sleepless nights over Ethiopian plans to construct a naval base and service provider port close to Bulhar (Bullaxaar) or Lughaya to cut back reliance on Djibouti’s ports for importing items.
The maritime MoU modified the geopolitical panorama of the Horn of Africa. A key driver of Bihi’s resolution to signal the MoU with Ethiopia was the 2023 battle in Laascaanood. In August 2023, Somaliland forces have been defeated at Goja’adde base on the outskirts of Laascaanood after seven months of battles. Bihi seen the maritime MoU with Ethiopia as a possibility so as to add a geopolitical dimension to the secession declare and exhibit the Federal Authorities of Somalia’s lack of ability to face as much as Ethiopia, whose forces stay in Somalia as a part of peacekeeping operations till the tip of this 12 months.
The Federal Authorities of Somalia, which signed a defence pact with Ethiopia in 2023, needed to safe comparable agreements with a number of nations, together with Egypt, Turkey and Eritrea, to counter the violation of its sovereignty by landlocked Ethiopia, which seeks entry to the ocean.
Earlier this month, Sadaq John was appointed Deputy Director of Nationwide Intelligence and Safety Company, two years after the political marriage in Djibouti. For President Ismail Omar Guelleh, the political marriage was a possibility to deepen his affect in Somali politics, 22 years after the Arta Reconciliation Convention sponsored by Djibouti. It was at this convention that the discriminatory 4.5 power-sharing method was launched, empowering Mogadishu political elites on the expense of the remainder of the nation. The infamous motto xaq ma raadinayno; xal baan raadinaynaa (“We’re not in search of rights; we’re in search of an answer”) was coined in Djibouti in the course of the convention, relegating greater than 40 p.c of the Somali inhabitants to a decrease citizenship standing often known as “Others.”
The septuagenarian President of Djibouti sees his affect in Somalia waning, together with the unjust political system he helped set up in 2000 at Arta.
© Puntland Publish, 2024
