Issue No. 243

The battle for South West—and Somalia's political future—continues apace. With the brittle alliance between South West State President Abdiaziz Laftagareen and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud having broken down spectacularly, the federal government is pouring in arms and forces to oust the Digil-Mirifle leader. Staring down the barrel of the formal opposition holding three Federal Member States and, with it, greater territory, population, and clan, Villa Somalia is looking to exploit intra-Digil-Mirifle grievances—and convince Addis—to keep its monopolistic electoral agenda alive. But this morning, Laftagareen announced a 9-member electoral committee to hastily steer his re-election, bringing the formal bifurcation of the Somali state ever closer.

The history of the contemporary Horn of Africa is littered with abandoned and abrogated peace agreements-- as well as a handful of successes. A petri dish (or Pandora's box) of issues related to sovereignty, inter- and intra-state conflict, and the nature of the state itself, the region has also been a laboratory for numerous forms of peacemaking and dealmaking. Yet in such a fractured regional order, 'peace' and 'conflict' should not be considered binaries, but rather as part of a sliding scale, where civilians may be targeted during the active fighting in South Sudan or suffer as part of a 'negative peace' in Tigray. Today, with predatory peace in South Sudan, Sudan, and perhaps now Tigray, having given way to renewed violence on a broad scale, what is the nature and future of peacemaking in the Horn of Africa?

The worm, it seems, has finally turned. After years serving as a prop for President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's monocratic aspirations, Abdiaziz Laftagareen, the leader of South West State, has clapped back against Villa Somalia, accusing the federal government of – among other things - dividing the country, monopolising public resources, colluding with Al-Shabaab, and leading Somalia back into state failure.

Six general elections in Ethiopia have been held since the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) implemented its ethnic-federal system in 1995. Each has delivered victory to the incumbent government of the day — including, most recently, the deeply discredited 2021 polls held in the shadow of the Tigray war. Once again, with Ethiopia's 7th elections — scheduled for 1 June 2026 — fast approaching, few anticipate anything other than a coronation in a country mired in raging insurgencies, state contraction, and the threat of broader inter-state conflict.

Last April, General Sheegow Ahmed Ali-- once the highest-ranking military officer hailing from the Somali Bantu-- died in ignominy in a Mogadishu hospital. A senior commander who had previously spearheaded operations in south-central Somalia, Sheegow had been summarily sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2023 for operating a militia in the capital. His death-- mourned widely and protested in Mogadishu and Beledweyne-- returned the spotlight to the pernicious issues of discrimination in the Somali National Army (SNA).

The Horn of Africa's political fate has always been wired to external commercial interests, with its expansive eastern edge on the Red Sea serving as an aorta of trade for millennia. A Greek merchant's manual from the 1st century AD describes the port of Obone in modern-day Puntland as a hub of ivory, tortoiseshell, enslaved people and cinnamon destined for Egypt. Today, as so often quoted, between 12-15% of the world's seaborne trade passes along the arterial waterway, with the Suez Canal bridging Europe and Asia. But well before the globalised world or the vying Gulf and Middle Powers over the Red Sea's littoral administrations, the logic of 'gunboat diplomacy' underpinned the passage over these seas.

Once on the US-designated terrorist sanctions list, it is unsurprisingly rather difficult to come off it. And with the US designating the 'Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood' as terrorists, elements of Khartoum's military government may now have the dubious honour of being on it twice. First time out in 1993, Khartoum was deemed a US State Sponsor of Terror in the wake of a raft of jihadist plots linked to the Islamist authorities in Sudan. Nearly three decades later, and only after Sudan's partial ascension to the Abraham Accords, the title and punishing sanctions were lifted for the civilian-military transitional government. Today, though the warring Sudan is no longer home to an Osama bin Laden or Carlos the Jackal, a US labelling of 'terrorist' has returned to Khartoum.

At the collapse of the Somali state in the early 1990s, the bloated, corrupt, and clan-riven national army was nevertheless in possession of vast quantities of light weapons. Much of it sourced during Somalia's ill-fated alliance with the USSR and later Western and Arab patrons, government armouries were soon plundered by warring militias across Mogadishu, Kismaayo, Baidoa, and every garrison town as the country descended into chaos, providing the ammunition for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Almost exactly 130 years ago, a vast Ethiopian army led by Emperor Menelik II outmanoeuvred and overran the invading Italian army at Adwa in Tigray, bringing the first Italo-Ethiopian war to a decisive close. By midday on 1 March 1896, thousands of Italian soldiers and Eritrean 'askaris' had been killed, sparing Ethiopia from the carving up of the African continent by European colonisers.