Issue No. 305

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.

In the latest, particularly bloody, bout of violence, clashes were once more concentrated in the East Borana zone of Oromia and the Dawa and Liban zones of the SRS, inclusive of the aortic trade route that runs through the border town of Moyale. Though precise numbers are difficult to verify in these peripheral, agro-pastoralist communities, reports of several dozen people being killed circulated in July, as well as broader mobilisations of community militias. Such a rapid militarisation of these disputes has played out time and again, contributing to the displacement of an estimated 288,000 people by OCHA since July, primarily in Wachile, Mubarak, and Qarsa Dula-- three contested border woredas. The nearby Borana-Gabra-Garrie triangle has been another repeated flashpoint, and part of the same unrest in July. As a result of the intermittent violence, the Nagelle Borana-Moyale corridor has been reported to have now been closed for several weeks, severing a trade artery from southern Ethiopia that connects to Kenya and driving up the prices of essential goods by between 40% and 60%. 

A century ago, these areas were all part of the imperial Haraghe province, with customary dispute mechanisms mediating the blend of Oromo, Somali, and other ethnic communities. The Jarso and Gerri sub-clan of the Darood have long mingled in the Deda Waled Valley, for instance, sharing much in common, not least Islam and various cultural and customary oral-based jurisprudence practices. However, in the intervening decades, successive interventions from imperial and federal authorities have left distinctly politicised imprints upon the group's relations and others, such as the transnational Borana and the Issa. And in July, similar clashes unfolded between Borana and Garre pastoralists in East Borana as well. Across these flashpoints, rising climate stress from drought is driving competition for finite water and grazing across these cohabiting and neighbouring communities. It has placed fraught inter-communal relations on a knife-edge, making them highly susceptible to the machinations of vested interests of SRS and Oromia politicians.

Though the 1990s ethnic federal model was intended to mitigate the domination of any particular group in Ethiopia, the ill-defined borders in lowland areas between Oromia and the SRS have instead only helped to sharpen rival ethnic identities. In the years since, officials from either side have repeatedly sought to monopolise control over the border administrations in the interest of resources and taxation, failing to offer any nuanced government that could consider the needs of the pastoral competition on either side. Further, the 'peripheral' nature of much of these semi-arid pastoralist communities has meant that the federal or regional state's presence remains highly limited, only expressed intermittently in military force. In turn, throughout the 1990s, episodic military deployments punctuated the decade, particularly around Moyale, Shinile and Babile until 2004. 

That year, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) conducted a substantial referendum, stretching across 420 contested kebeles in an attempt to permanently resolve the disputed areas. And yet, with around 80% of the challenged kebeles being awarded to Oromia, it rather amplified resentment and perceptions of marginalisation at the hands of Addis and the Oromo amongst Somali communities. While it may have steadied administrative disputes in some locales, it instead accentuated the territorial disputes elsewhere, particularly Chinaksen and Tuli Guled in the Deda Waled Valley. In particular, narratives of Oromo 'eastward expansionism' took root in the political discourse amongst the Somali elite, though clashes were mostly subdued in the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s.

Then, between 2017 and 2019, amid massive political churn at the country's centre, significant and recurrent clashes between Oromia's Liyu Hail and the SRS's Liyu Police erupted, leaving over a million people displaced, with violence concentrated in Moyale, Mieso and Gursum. Intended to police the border against Al-Shabaab and suppress the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) insurgency, Liyu paramilitaries were deployed in violence over the three contested Afar kebeles, as well as sporadically against Oromia from 2007 onwards. In 2017, however, with the beleaguered Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in Addis wrestling with the Oromo Qeerroo youth wave of protests, the Ethiopian military was only intermittently deployed as a buffer between the two regions. Violence spilt over and the sharpened identities amongst the Oromo and Somalis were pulled into forging recurrent tensions that have not substantially eased. However, the sudden elevation of PM Abiy Ahmed in 2018, and his subsequent purging of Abdi Iley and elements of the Liyu Police from the SRS, helped cool tensions somewhat and facilitated the return of some displaced persons. 

However, the contours of the years-long conflict were not suddenly eradicated by the transition from the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) to the far more centralised Prosperity Party. Indeed, both presidents, Mustafe Omer 'Agjar' from the SRS and Shimelis Abdisa from Oromia, hail from the same party, along with over 90% of the federal parliament. And yet both Agjar and Shimelis face substantial challenges to their positions, being wildly unpopular among their constituents and owing their presidencies wholly to Addis. Agjar continues to wrestle with the ascendant ONLF, while Shimelis-- alongside facing the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) insurgency in western Oromia-- has his own Oromo credentials questioned by the opposition Oromo Liberation Front and Oromo Federalist Congress parties. Such challenges to Agjar and Shimelis from their own populations are likely to become only more acute in the run-up to the national polls in 2026, and both appear likely to continue to play to their ethno-nationalist 'bases' by activating historic narratives of rival ethnic expansionism.

In turn, in the past two years, Oromia and the SRS administrations have sought to forge a 'facts on the ground' situation, carving out new enclaves and woredas to administer. Such a dynamic is part of a broader 'woreda-inflation' that has proliferated since Abiy took power, with administration after administration being created without clear political or economic structures in place. Prior to the latest bout of clashes, in 2023, Oromia announced the creation of the Mekanisa woreda within the Chinaksen district, a wholly Oromo-enclave surrounded by SRS territory. For Jigjiga and Gerri elders, this was considered another element of Oromo expansionism, slowly cleaving out chunks of the SRS through upgrading and forging new woredas and kebeles. And again, it triggered renewed clashes between the Jarso and Gerri, much like the 2017 violence before it. Then, in mid-2025, it was Agjar's turn when the SRS president announced a unilateral swathe of changes along the contested territories, deliberately triggering a reaction from Oromo nationalist groups such as the OLA that condemned the restructuring as "destabilisation." Blighted by corruption scandals and his star fading in Addis as well, Agjar has returned to a tried and tested stoking of tensions with the Oromo to distract from his badly weakened position.

Meanwhile, the federal government would seemingly prefer internal squabbles between its devolved administrations than any cohesive or coherent pressure being applied to the centre. The Orwellian 'Ministry of Peace' has again remained nearly entirely silent, preferring not to intervene in the boundary clashes-- as it has not on the litany of inter-communal conflicts now simmering across Ethiopia. The Prosperity Party's internal disciplinary committee was reported to have quietly urged both Agjar and Shimelis to "exercise restraint," but offered no public stance; extraordinary considering the scale of displacement and disruption to a vital trade corridor. And though some Ethiopian military forces and police were deployed in August, without a sustained government presence to ensure a ceasefire, sporadic retaliatory clashes are anticipated to continue, potentially dragging in more of the region's supposedly 'disbanded' special forces. Absent a credible demarcation process and with Addis's attention trained on redrawing external borders with Eritrea, the Oromo-Somali frontier looks set to remain one of Ethiopia's most combustible internal boundaries.