Issue No. 303

With northern Ethiopia and Eritrea teetering on the brink of a return to full-scale conflict, the grim morass that has become Tigrayan politics shows no sign of easing. Recent days have again been dominated by accusations and counter-accusations by the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in Mekelle and the deposed Tigray Interim Administration (TIA) leader Getachew Reda from Addis over violent clashes in Southern Tigray

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the Tigray war and the third since the signing of the Pretoria agreement. Five years since Ethiopian federal forces, Amhara militias, and an invading Eritrean army launched a joint offensive that would leave between 300,000 and 600,000 Tigrayans dead and over 120,000 women and girls raped.

The Afar have had more than their fair share of grievances. A marginalised minority in three countries today, the Cushitic, largely agro-pastoralist people were once organised into Islamic Sultanates that stretched along the Dankalia coastline, profiting from the wealthy littoral trade of salt and enslaved people on the Red Sea. But Italian, French, and Ethiopian partitioning shattered the image of the 'Great Afar' in the late 19th and 20th centuries, wreaking irreparable havoc on these constellations and interfering with Afar kinship structures—primarily split into the Asaimara (Red) and Adoimara (White) groupings.

The lightning is over-- for the time being. Last week, after 11 gruelling months, Puntland President Said Abdullahi Deni announced the victory of Operation Hilaac (lightning) against the Islamic State-Somalia (ISS) faction in the Cal Miskaad mountains. Declaring triumph at the opening of the 57th Puntland parliament session, he asserted that the group had been nearly entirely dismantled, barring a few pockets of cells "still hiding" in Cal Miskaad, and thanked international partners for their assistance —singling out the US, UK and UAE in particular.

Obscurity and discord appear to be the name of the game this week in Villa Somalia. Hostility between South West President Abdiaziz Laftagareen and a slice of the splinter national 'opposition', Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden and Mohammed Mursal, two former speakers of parliament, bubbled over publicly, with the former barring these latest Villa Somalia allies from travelling to Baidoa. In Hirshabelle, meanwhile, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud appears to be gearing up to oust his fellow Justice and Solidarity Party (JSP) member in Jowhar, Ali 'Guudlawe'. And preparations for the district-level Banaadir direct elections continue apace, with the date now scheduled for 30 November and nearly 1 million people dubiously registered. But make no mistake; the political churn is a tool for Villa Somalia to muddy its principal obligation to hold federal presidential elections in May 2026.

Many thousands of miles from the Horn of Africa, the small Caribbean nation of Haiti and its capital, Port-au-Prince, remain engulfed in brutal gang warfare. Since the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, the country has slipped ever further into chaos, with rival paramilitary gangs seizing control over most of the capital and inducing a widespread humanitarian crisis. No elections have been held since 2016, most government services have ground to a halt, and the transnational drug gangs-- led by notorious individuals such as Jimmy Chérizier 'Barbecue'-- continue to act with impunity, with the Haitian police badly outnumbered and outgunned. Over two years ago, and in light of a problematic history of foreign interventionism in the country, the US and others—following a request from ousted Haitian PM Ariel Henry—pushed for a nation from the Global South to take the lead in responding to the collapsing state.

Reports of another major Ethiopia-Somaliland deal turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Last Tuesday, fresh from a lengthy visit to Abu Dhabi, Somaliland President Abdirahman 'Irro' immediately departed for Addis to meet with Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed. As it was both his first visit to Hargeisa's most consequential ally and came so soon after travelling from their shared Emirati patron, speculation abounded in the Somaliland capital about what might be on the cards. That turned out to be somewhat of a damp squib, however, with no bombshell announcement this time like the much-quietened Memorandum of Understanding last year.

Over two decades after the contested 2004 Oromia-Somali Regional State (SRS) referendum, the restive boundary refuses to fully quiet. The longest internal boundary in Ethiopia, it stretches over 1,400 kilometres down to the Kenyan border and has been the site of intermittent violence for years, peaking between 2017 and 2019. And in mid-July, after a period of relative calm, clashes broke out once again, displacing over 250,000 people in just a couple of months. Coalescing around several intersecting issues, the violence has flared amid unilateral moves from the SRS administration to redraw over a dozen new districts as part of its 'internal' administrative map, regarded as a clear provocation to Oromo nationalists in an attempt to solidify control over disputed territories.

The 18th-century French philosopher Voltaire once famously quipped that the "agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire." The satirical critique was such that the empire had become little more than an amorphous collection of states and territories that was bound together by neither a common religion, nor a direct lineage to ancient Rome, nor even by a centralised authority. Historians may continue to debate the extent to which Voltaire exaggerated the fragility and nature of the empire, but there are likely to be fewer disputes about the status of Somalia's putative 'federal parliamentary republic'. The federation is in tatters, its parliamentary system bulldozed by an overweening presidency, and its public so thoroughly disenfranchised that the term 'republic' resembles less an aspiration than a cruel joke.