Issue No. 278

Addis's national strategy of divide and conquer towards legitimate political opposition is pushing the Somali Regional State (SRS) to the brink of renewed conflict. Months of escalating tensions between the SRS administration led by Mustafa Mohammed Omar 'Agjar' and the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) have taken another dangerous turn in recent days. Yet another attempt to remove the ONLF Chairman Abdirahman Maaday underhandedly appears to have definitively pushed the former insurgents towards a return to armed mobilisation, imperilling nearly 7 years of fragile peace in the SRS.

Last week, during a meeting of the so-called 'Second Regular Central Committee' within the government-affiliated wing of the ONLF in Jigjiga, officials claimed to have removed Maaday and installed Abdikarim Sheikh Muse as interim chairman. This move was immediately challenged by ONLF's core leadership, which denounced the meeting as fraudulent and lacking a quorum. It appears that the SRS administration directly organised the meeting and dispatched both Prosperity Party members and former disgruntled ONLF officials to muddy the waters. Of particular concern was the reported presence of National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) officials, further compromising the federal body. It was the latest endeavour by Agjar, a close ally of the federal government, to engineer a schism within the ONLF to exploit and undermine the credibility of the former insurgent group. Having already created a rival faction by the same name and led by the party's former deputy leader, Ahmed Yassin, the SRS administration has sought to frame this as the 'real' party and incorporated some of its leaders into the regional government. Few have bought it.

As a result of these attempts to sabotage the former insurgent group, in contravention of the 2018 peace accord that enabled its transition to a political party, the ONLF believes it has no other recourse apart from a return to armed conflict. It has been reported that the internal debates within the ONLF are over, and the former insurgents are now preparing to return to the armed struggle. In March 2025, Maaday is reported to have travelled to Asmara and met directly with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki and other senior Eritrean officials, possibly to solicit military support. Though only 10% of the former insurgent fighters have been demobilised, the estimated strength of the ONLF today is less than 5,000– far below its height of 30,000 in 2008. In turn, it may struggle to wage a significant conventional insurgency in the SRS from the off, but the Liyu Police-- formed as a brutal force to suppress the ONLF-- have also been significantly eroded. Partially dismantled in April 2023 as the federal government sought to clip the wings of their special forces counterparts in Amhara, many former Liyu have been incorporated into the police or cast aside their weapons and returned to their villages.

There were multiple missed opportunities that could have prevented the situation from deteriorating so far. Under both the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front and Prosperity Party governments, the ONLF, a decades-old political movement that has advocated for ethnic Somalis in the Ogaden, has repeatedly criticised the marginalisation of the region, and the contraventions of its right to self-determination under Article 39 of Ethiopia's Federal Constitution. However, the pledges to open up the SRS's political space and the integration of ONLF fighters under the 2018 peace accord have gone unimplemented. Instead, much like his loathed predecessor, Abdi Iley, Agjar has been gradually handed carte blanche by Addis to suppress the limited organised regional opposition within the SRS. Though perhaps less violent than Iley, who wielded the Liyu Police as a repressive praetorian guard, Agjar, too, has worked to diminish the SRS's democracy. The only regional private TV station has been closed, demonstration permits are routinely denied, and vocal critics of the government are harassed and detained by security forces without just cause. Agjar's government has particularly worked to unsettle the largely popular ONLF, the best-organised and vocal opposition movement within the SRS.

Last year marked an extreme downturn in relations amidst the fallout of the Somaliland-Ethiopia Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and attempts by the SRS to muster Somali support for the agreement. The ONLF argued that the now-paused implementation of the MoU threatened to contravene the SRS's right to self-determination, as well as criticised the deployment of significant troops to the region amid the Ethiopia-Mogadishu feud. Then, in September 2024, Ethiopian National Defence Force Chief Berhanu Jula referred to the ONLF as an "enemy of the Ethiopian state," and associated the former insurgents with Egypt. Addis refused to withdraw the statement, and consequently, the ONLF retired from the tarnished National Dialogue Commission, which has been reduced to a handful of government-affiliated groups and serves only in an advisory capacity. 

The ONLF and others have further called attention to the egregious corruption of the SRS government, most recently criticising a meeting between a Chinese oil firm and the SRS. It asserted that the agreement was an attempt to "plunder Somali resources" and warned that it would face "repercussions" if the firm pursued oil and gas extraction without local backing. With the federal and regional government refusing to take the ONLF's complaints seriously and much of the 2018 accord remaining unimplemented, Maaday, in an interview with the BBC earlier this year, stated, "We are currently holding consultations. Our response could involve taking up arms, exerting political pressure, engaging in peaceful resistance, or resuming negotiations." It appears the ONLF has decided to pursue the first.

Ethiopia's immense political fractures are increasingly spilling over and refracting across the region. Kenya, for instance, has conducted joint border operations with the Ethiopian military against the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), citing Al-Shabaab links with the Oromo nationalist group. Though the Mogadishu-Addis relation has steadied somewhat after its collapse in 2024, Somalia's federal government repeatedly threatened a return to hosting anti-Addis rebel groups on its soil. Meanwhile, Eritrea, a former patron of the ONLF, has resumed its position as a ready and willing partner of Ethiopia's insurgent groups. If the ONLF is able to solicit military support from Asmara, which already sustains several Fano militias with weapons and training in the Amhara region, it could begin to ramp up a violent return in the near future.

Within Ethiopia, though, the attempts by Addis and its proxies like Agjar to coerce and constrain legitimate political opposition continue to destabilise the country. In Oromia, this has taken the form of splitting the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and the Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC) from the OLA, while in Tigray, it has successfully stoked the intra-Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) rift that paralysed the region's governance. More broadly, it has eroded Addis's position as a party that can be trusted to make peace, having undermined the 2018 Asmara accord with the ONLF, peace with the OLF and the 2022 Pretoria agreement. And this strategy extends to splitting the regional opposition from each other to prevent a cohesive and national resistance from emerging. A newer– but increasingly central– plank of this approach has been to foment fears about a northern 'Abyssinian' alliance of Eritrean, Tigrayan, and Amhara forces coalescing. 

But while the divide and conquer strategy may be able to prevent any single group from posing a direct threat to the federal government in the immediate, it will continue to constrict Addis's already diminished hold on the country in the longer term. Stoking inter-ethnic tensions, particularly between the government's Oromo base and others, is a recipe for further conflict and disintegration. Now, with conflict already raging in Oromia, Amhara and threatening to return to Tigray, the latest cost of such a stratagem appears likely to be the fragile peace in the peripheral and marginalised SRS.