At the heart of the conflict is the , a hydroelectric project on the . Ethiopia’s dam construction has angered Egypt, which sees it as a threat to its water supply. The Nile is crucial for Egypt, providing nearly all its water resources. While Ethiopia argues that the dam is solely for electricity generation and won’t significantly impact water flow, Egypt still needs to be convinced. This dispute has deep historical roots, reflecting long-standing power dynamics between the two nations.

The region’s history is marked by conflicts and shifting alliances. In the 1970s, Cold War dynamics played out in the Horn of Africa, with the United States and Soviet Union supporting opposing sides. The between Ethiopia and Somalia in 1977–1978 was a significant event, resulting in a Somali defeat that still resonates today. These historical conflicts have shaped current relationships and tensions between countries in the region.

Countries of the Horn of Africa. Via Zeremariam Fre (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Ethiopia’s Prime Minister has ambitious plans for his country, including rebuilding the capital and reestablishing Ethiopia’s access to the sea. This vision includes developing a port in a move that has angered Somalia. Ethiopia’s potential recognition of Somaliland has further complicated regional dynamics. Meanwhile, Eritrea’s relationship with Ethiopia has cooled.

Involving outside powers adds complexity to the situation. Egypt has begun providing military support to Somalia, potentially countering Ethiopia. The United Arab Emirates plays a significant financial backer in the region, though its exact strategy remains unclear. Other external powers, such as Turkey, India, China and the United States, also have interests in the area, further complicating the geopolitical landscape.

Precarious stability and the global implications of African tensions

The ongoing civil war in Sudan and the instability in South Sudan contribute to the region’s overall volatility. These conflicts have drawn in various international actors, each with their own agendas. The situation in Sudan, in particular, has the potential to impact the broader regional dynamics, especially given its strategic location and historical ties to both Egypt and Ethiopia.

Despite having a significant military presence in Djibouti, the United States is currently preoccupied with other global issues. This relative disengagement from the Horn of Africa’s tensions could allow other actors to fill the power vacuum. A solid mediating force is necessary to avoid escalating regional conflicts.

The situation in the Horn of Africa resembles the complex alliances and tensions that preceded World War I. The interconnected nature of the conflicts, the involvement of multiple regional and global powers and the potential for rapid escalation are concerning parallels. The region’s strategic importance, particularly in maritime trade and geopolitical influence, makes these tensions globally significant.

Looking forward, the stability of the Horn of Africa remains precarious. The combination of historical grievances, current political ambitions and resource disputes creates a volatile mix. The role of external powers, particularly China and the United Arab Emirates, will be crucial in shaping future developments. As global attention remains focused on other crises, the risk of overlooking the simmering tensions in this critical region could have far-reaching consequences for regional and global stability.

[Peter Choi edited this podcast and wrote the first draft of this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/podcast are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Making Sense of Rising Tensions in the Horn of Africa appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Yet the African Union brokered agreement is odd. It fails to mention one of the key participants in the conflict: the government of Eritrea. This is extraordinary since the Eritreans have tens of thousands of troops battling the Tigrayans. The agreement just one oblique reference to Eritrea’s role. Article 3/3 states that: “This Permanent Cessation of all forms of hostilities shall include…subversion or the use of proxies to destabilise the other party or collusion with any external force hostile to either party.”

The word “Eritrea” is never mentioned, yet the reality is that this war was primarily the brainchild of Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s unelected president and the region’s strongman. It is at his behest that conscripts have been rounded up and sent to fight in neighboring Ethiopia.

The Highway from Hell and House to House Conscription

All along the B30 highway – deep inside Tigray – Eritreans troops are under siege, fighting for their lives. The road links the western city of Shire, the sacred site of Axum and the historic town of Adwa, scene of the famous Ethiopian victory over the Italians in 1896. Today it has become the Highway from Hell, with beleaguered Eritrean and Ethiopian forces under constant from Tigrayan ambushes.

Some will wonder why Eritreans are inside Ethiopia at all. On March 21, 2001, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Eritrean troops would be withdrawn. Yet 20 months later the Eritreans are still fighting on Ethiopian soil.

Eritreans in the diaspora tell of friends and families terrified into giving up their children to go and fight, and of Afwerki’s notorious security forces going door-to-door to search out the few remaining young men and women who can be taken away for “National Service”. Many will never return.

There are first-hand accounts of men as old as 70 being forced into conscription. Families that resist are put out onto the streets – with anyone coming to their aid facing the same humiliating penalty. Eritrean hospitals are reportedly overflowing with wounded soldiers who have been ferried back from the front. Some can hardly cope with the dead and dying.

Ethiopian divisions transferred to Eritrean

It now seems clear that while the fighting is inside Ethiopia, it is Eritrea that is pulling the strings. The Daily Telegraph that Ethiopian troops had been transferred to Eritrea as the current offensives were erupting on August 26.

One source at Ethiopian Airlines told The Daily Telegraph that the country’s flagship carrier has been chartering dozens of flights to ferry soldiers and weapons up north to the frontline. Flight data showed a significant uptick in unscheduled domestic chartered flights last month, which flew in the direction of Lalibela, a key logistics hub for the Ethiopian army near the frontline. On just one day, September 1, at least eight Boeing 737s with a capacity of 180 soldiers and four Canadian made De Havilland Dash 8-400 with a capacity of 90 appeared to set off for Lalibela.

This is very much in line with what Alex de Waal on October 7: “About 30 [Ethiopian National Defense Force] ENDF divisions relocated from Amhara and Western Tigray into Eritrea last month, placing themselves under Eritrean overall command.” This is exactly as Afwerki would wish it to be. His is the hand that will guide the region’s reconstruction, if the Tigrayans can be eliminated. 

Just prior to the war commencing in November 2020, Afwerki brought his closest political and military advisers together for an intense discussion on how to . The president told them that the country had to accept that it has a small and not very viable economy and a lengthy Red Sea coast, which Eritrea cannot patrol on its own. He is reported to have suggested that some sort of “union” with Ethiopia might be possible, at least in terms of economic co-operation and maritime security.

War has been Afwerki’s ever since Eritrean independence in 1993. He has fought all his neighbors – from Sudan to Djibouti – and sent Eritrean troops as far as the Congo. As Asia Abdulkadir, a Kenyan analyst put it to : “War is the way for Afwerki to stay involved in Ethiopia’s politics” and peace is simply not an option as long as the TPLF are still around, she said. 

How Afwerki responds to Wednesday’s peace agreement is hard to predict, but he is unlikely to end the plotting that has been his modus operandi for the past five decades.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Of these, the conflict in Ethiopia is probably the most burning issue. The forces from Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region are toward the capital, Addis Ababa, and panic is beginning to spread. The US has warned its citizens to leave now, saying that it will not the evacuation from Afghanistan. Britain has the warning while putting troops currently serving in Kenya on to assist.

Ethiopia’s Heavy Hand in Tigray Sends a Message

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The Somali situation has remained unsolved since the collapse of the last central government with the fall of Siad Barre in 1991. Sudan’s struggle to overthrow the military who have power is critical but unlikely to spill over into neighboring states.

From the of the war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region in November 2020, there were warnings that the conflict could lead to the collapse of the country, with catastrophic consequences for the region. The day after the war began, Johnnie Carson and Chester Crocker, both former US assistant secretaries of state for African affairs, put their names to a signed by some of America’s best-informed Africanists, warning that the conflict might lead to the “fragmentation of Ethiopia,” which would be “the largest state collapse in modern history.”

They suggested the consequences could be catastrophic, and their concerns are worth quoting in full:

“Ethiopia is five times the size of pre-war Syria by population, and its breakdown would lead to mass interethnic and interreligious conflict; a dangerous vulnerability to exploitation by extremists; an acceleration of illicit trafficking, including of arms; and a humanitarian and security crisis at the crossroads of Africa and the Middle East on a scale that would overshadow any existing conflict in the region, including Yemen. As Ethiopia is currently the leading Troop Contributing Country to the United Nations and the African Union peacekeeping missions in Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia, its collapse would also significantly impact the efforts by both to mitigate and resolve others conflicts in the Horn of Africa.”

Their warning was prescient. What began a year ago as the invasion of the northern region of Ethiopia has spread across large areas of the country. of the fighting show areas across Ethiopia held by Tigrayan forces or fighters of their allies, the Oromo Liberation Army.

How Did the Tigray War Begin?

This is by no means simply a war between the Ethiopian government and Tigray. The conflict began with an attack on Tigray by Ethiopian federal forces, militia from the Amhara region, supported by invading troops from Ethiopia’s northern neighbor, Eritrea, as well as forces from Somalia. The Tigrayans had ruled Ethiopia for 27 years until being ousted by the current prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, in 2018. The animosity between them was predictable.

The Tigrayans, smarting from their loss of power, attempted to defy the new Ethiopian prime minister. They resisted attempts to remove heavy weaponry from the Northern Command (headquartered in Tigray’s regional capital, Mekelle, which they controlled). These weapons guarded northern Ethiopia (and Tigray, in particular) against any Eritrean attack. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) mobilized their citizens to block roads and prevent their removal.

However, the position of the Eritreans and Somalis requires some explanation. Tensions between Tigray and Eritrea can be traced to the liberation movements of the 1970s. Back then, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) had an uneasy alliance, working together to fight the Ethiopian government. This culminated in 1991 with the simultaneous fall of Addis Ababa and Asmara. The EPLF support to the TPLF in the assault on Addis Ababa and then gave close protection to the TPLF leader, Meles Zenawi. But this alliance hid ideological and tactical disputes.

The TPLF came to power, ruling Ethiopia via the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. By 1998, this relationship had ruptured and Eritrea and Ethiopia a bitter war that ended in 2000, leaving some 100,000 people dead. A peace agreement was signed in Algiers, but, much to the fury of Eritrea, Ethiopia to accept the border drawn by the boundary commission established by the treaty.

In response, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki collaborated with the Somali Islamists of al-Shabab and Ethiopian guerrilla movements in a failed attempt to oust the Tigrayan rulers of Ethiopia. However, in 2018, internal factors finally saw the TPLF lose their grip on power in Addis Ababa, to be by Abiy Ahmed.

Enter the Eritreans

Ethiopia’s Abiy and Eritrea’s Isaias believed they shared a common enemy in the Tigrayan military and political leadership. A series of initiatives led to an end to in 2018 between Eritrea and Ethiopia, a conflict that had simmered since the 1998-2000 border war. In a series of nine joint meetings by the Eritrean and Ethiopian leaders, they a joint strategy to rid themselves of the Tigrayans. It is instructive that their final visits were held at the military bases of Eritrea and Ethiopia.

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Abiy canceled scheduled elections, arguing they could not be held because of the coronavirus pandemic. But his mandate had and the Tigrayans said he had no right to act in this way. They with their own elections, despite being instructed by the federal authorities not to. The last straw came when Abiy sent General Jamal Muhammad to take of the Northern Command at the end of October 2020, only to have the TPLF put him on a plane back to Addis Ababa.

The federal government and the Tigray regional authority were clearly on a collision course. Exactly what happened on November 4 last year is , but broke out at the Northern Command base in Mekelle, which the TPLF took control of. Tigray was under attack from the north, east and south, with reports of drones, possibly supplied by the United Arab Emirates, fired from the Eritrean port of Assab in of the Ethiopian government’s war effort.

This is not the “law-enforcement operation”  by Abiy. On November 6, 2020, he  in a tweet that operations “by federal defence forces underway in Northern Ethiopia have clear, limited & achievable objectives.” Six months later, this was hardly a plausible assessment. It had evolved into a full-scale war, which the Ethiopian government and its allies appeared to be winning. After an artillery bombardment of Mekelle, Abiy could rightly claim that his forces were in “” of Mekelle. He said that the army’s entry into the city marked the “” of the conflict with the TPLF.

From Defense to Offense

In reality, the Tigrayans had pulled their forces out of the cities and had headed to the countryside and the mountains to conduct a guerrilla war — just as they had done before 1991. Mekelle had fallen, but the Tigrayan administration had ordered its forces to withdraw before the attack.

The UN, in a secret report, the war would become an extended conflict, characterized by irregular warfare. This is indeed what has transpired. By April 4, 2021, Abiy that the fighting was far from over. Capturing the cities had not ended the war. Then, in June this year, the Tigrayans burst forth from the countryside, their capital, Mekelle, by the end of the month. Instead of leaving matters there, they continued pushing south, taking cities until Addis Ababa itself felt under threat, even though the Tigrayans are still many miles away.

The United States and European Union have been working with the African Union in an attempt to end the fighting. The US has imposed sanctions on Eritrea for its role in the war and threatened to extend these to Ethiopia and Tigray. Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has acted as a mediator, Mekelle as well as Addis Ababa. He has had limited success.

The burden of resolving this conflict now rests on the shoulders of Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta. Whether he can succeed where others have failed remains to be seen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Who Can Resolve Ethiopia’s Catastrophic Conflict? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Earlier this year, Italy hosted the first ever Italy-Africa Ministerial Conference in Rome. Held at the cavernous travertine-laden��Farnesina headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the meeting was attended by high-level delegations from over 40 African countries.

In his closing remarks, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi underscored his intention of broadening political and economic ties with the African continent, by for a “future in which Africa is seen not as the greatest threat—as some demagogues would have it—but as the greatest opportunity.”

The conference, which is intended to be a biennial affair, and Renzi’s visits to sub-Saharan Africa (the first ever by a sitting Italian premier) reflect the Italian government’s commitment to reinvigorating the relationship.

Mutual Benefits

Italy has been late to realize the mutual benefits that��can accrue from a more robust partnership with Africa. Even though it is the world’s eighth largest economy, and Africa’s sixth or seventh most significant trading partner, Italy’s postwar political engagement with the continent has been , and commercial exchanges are below their potential.

Other countries have realized much sooner that regular high-level political dialogue featuring targeted discussions about trade and development could spur investment. China and India, for example, both hold triennial summits with African leaders, whereas the United States holds the biennial US-Africa Business Summit. The French arrange an annual Africa-France Summit, Japan regularly organizes the Tokyo International Conference on African Development, and Turkey has periodically spearheaded summits with continental leaders.

What accounts for Italy’s laggardness to date?

Italy’s insularity and relative economic underdevelopment explains Italian officialdom’s comparatively low level of engagement with Africa post-World War II. Political instability wrought by constant changes in government—63 since 1945—also stunted long-term strategic thinking at la Farnesina.

Moreover, at varying times and to varying degrees, Italy’s former colonial possessions—and their relationship with Rome—were beset with problems, some of their own making, others attributable to Italy. As a result, for most of the postwar period, Italy, unlike Britain or France, could not use its former colonies as a launch pad for strengthening political and business ties elsewhere on the continent.

Understanding the factors impeding closer ties between Italy and the sub-Saharan African countries with which it had historical ties requires understanding the nature of Italy’s postwar exchanges with Eritrea (an Italian colony from 1890 to 1941); Somalia (Italian Somaliland comprising most of modern-day Somalia was a colony from 1889-1941, it continued to be ruled by the Italians under a United Nations trusteeship until 1960 when, at independence, it was conjoined to British Somaliland); and Ethiopia (occupied, but never fully pacified, from 1936 to 1941).

ERITREA

The Italian community in Eritrea was mostly nestled in the picturesque capital, Asmara. Initially a settlement of a mere 150 inhabitants, Asmara was officially founded as a town when the governor of the then Ethiopian Mereb Mellash province, Ras Alula, opted to make it his new capital. When it fell under Italian rule, Asmara blossomed. In a bid to turn it into Africa’s “Little Rome,” the Italians expended significant resources to modernize the city’s infrastructure and to beautify it with Art Deco architecture for which it is renowned to this day.

The colony’s most prominent Italian businessmen made Asmara and its environs their home. These included figures like Barattolo, who got his start in the textile sector, opening a single factory employing a mere 200 workers and eventually growing his business to around 10,000 workers.

Emma Melotti was certainly the region’s most prominent female��entrepreneur. After her husband’s passing, she took over his namesake brewery, and under her sapient stewardship, Melotti came to dominate the Ethiopian market through a network which enveloped even remote villages. Melotti was also available throughout the region, being sold in Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Yemen and Kenya.

Ethiopian-Eritrean Federation

The first snag in relations between Eritrea and the Italian community—principal propulsor of relations—emerged soon after Eritrea was re-conjoined to Ethiopia under a federal arrangement in 1952, as mandated by United Nations (UN) Resolution 390 (V). Previously Ethiopian, then colonized by the Italians, and after World War II a British protectorate, Eritrea was federated to Ethiopia upon the condition that Eritrean institutions bequeathed by the British—such as the legislature and courts—would continue to function unimpeded.

This resolution of the Eritrean issue via federation—though temporary it later turned out to be—occurred in spite of competing formulas floated by other states at the UN. Among those opposed to the federal arrangement, for instance, was Italy. Though Italy’s post-World War II government may have been post-fascist, it was not postcolonial.

Rome favored a solution where Eritrea remained an Italian colony; and barring that, advocated that Italy continue to administer Eritrea under UN trusteeship. Ultimately resigned to the fact that neither of these proposals would garner sufficient support, Italy called for Eritrean independence. Indeed, during this time, Ethiopia and Italy financially supported rival (and armed) groups—pro-union on the one hand, pro-independence on the other.

Ethiopian diplomats secured a diplomatic coup by obtaining sufficient international support for the Ethiopian-Eritrean Federation, but the same imperial government also helped sow the seeds of the two countries’ eventual separation.

In a pique of royal obstinacy and heavy-handedness, and only 10 years after consummation of the Ethiopian-Eritrean Federation, Emperor Haile Selassie, unwisely going against the counsel of some of his advisers, forcibly dissolved the federal arrangement. His decision subsumed Eritrea into the unitary Ethiopian state and gave further impetus to Eritrean agitation for secession.

The Derg

The beginnings of armed resistance, and the consequent instability in Eritrea, began to hinder Italian (and, indeed, all) commercial activity. The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF)—a precursor to today’s governing Eritrean People’s Liberation Front—for instance, regularly engaged in extortion by levying “taxes” on agricultural land concessions run by Italians.

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The coming to power in 1974 of Ethiopia’s military government, the Derg, in 1974, made the business environment particularly inhospitable for Italians; most private enterprises were nationalized and expropriated. The Derg’s decision to close all foreign consulates in Eritrea, including the Italian consulates in Asmara and the port town of Massawa, further hastened the Italian exodus.

In one particular act of ruffianism, Derg functionaries went so far as to break into the then vacated Italian consulate in Asmara and temporarily occupied its premises. The final nail in the coffin of a continued Italian presence in Eritrea was the then province’s envelopment by civil war throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

ETHIOPIA

In Ethiopia, much like Eritrea, the “vanguard” of Italo-Ethiopian ties were Italian residents. The Italian community thrived due to its industriousness and ingenuity. Its prosperity, however, was also enabled by Haile Selassie’s injunction prohibiting retribution against Italians who had not committed war crimes.

Among the most successful businessmen entrepreneurs were Mario Buschi, who was involved in public works and ran a company with boats for hire on Lake Tana, source of the Blue Nile; or Mezzedimi, the Italian architect responsible for designing a number of buildings that��came to dominate Addis Ababa’s postwar urban landscape, including the UN Economic Commission for Africa’s sprawling Africa Hall.

Such commercial activity occurred in spite of what were often lukewarm political ties between the two countries. Closer postwar relations between the two governments were inhibited for several reasons.

In the first instance, stalled negotiations over payment of reparations hindered the establishment of closer ties. Italy reneged on its obligation to pay Ethiopia $25 million for war damages and moral harm, as laid out in the 1947 Treaty of Peace. Indeed, at one point, the negotiating positions of both parties seemed irreconcilable. The Italian government maintained that it owed Ethiopia no money, because any moral or physical harm caused by Italy’s five-year occupation of the country was supposedly outweighed by public works the Italians had built. Ethiopia countered that Italy’s egregious war crimes warranted that it pay above and beyond the $25 million stipulated by the peace treaty.

Giuliano Cora, an Italian journalist who at the time commented on the absurdity of this diplomatic impasse, rhetorically asked: “Do we really have to compromise our situation and our future in this region for want of $25 million?” It appears that the Italian government was prepared to do so.

Ultimately, Italy secured the better bargain. Addis Ababa agreed to a lower figure of $16.3 million and the payments occurred under the guise of “technical and financial assistance” for the construction of a dam not far from the capital and a textile mill in the town of Bahir Dar. No mention was ever made of reparations.

Even with this hurdle cleared, another remained: restitution of the 1,700-year-old Axum obelisk, which the Italians had plundered during the occupation. To placate Addis Ababa, Italy offered to build a hospital or an interstate road, in exchange for the uncontested “right” to retain this concrete reminder of its colonial past. Here, too, Italy conveniently forgot that the 1947 treaty mandated the obelisk’s return.

The saga finally ended in 2005 when Italy bore the costs of surgically slicing the obelisk into three parts, so as to have it transported back to Axum in three trips aboard an Antonov plane. Ironically, it was Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right government (whose governing coalition included neo-fascists) that made amends.

Italy still retains other important wartime loot, most importantly a portion of Ethiopia’s prewar Ministry of the Pen archives that appears to be within the custody of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This issue has been forgotten by both sides. The government of Ethiopia ought to try��.

Haile Selassie’s imagination

The most curious stumbling block to closer postwar Italy-Ethiopia relations, however, was the delay by Rome in extending an official invitation to the emperor to visit Italy. The Ethiopian monarch fervently wanted to revisit the country he had last seen in 1924 as regent. His trip had been perennially postponed due to a disagreement over a number of issues, including negotiations over reparations and the Axum obelisk; as well as the impolitic decision by the Italians, at one point, of scheduling Haile Selassie’s visit for shortly after the planned visit of Somalia’s president, at a time when the two countries were at loggerheads over disputed land.

Perhaps no two countries captured Haile Selassie’s imagination as much as Italy and France. The monarch’s fondness for the French is easy to comprehend. Haile Selassie was Francophone, and after an early traditional Ethiopian church education, schooled by a Guadeloupian physician and a Francophone Ethiopian Capuchin monk. But what to make of his affection for Italy on both an emotive and psychological level?

After all, it was Italy that��had unseated him, and it was in Italy that his first daughter, Princess Romanework, and two of her sons had died after having been captured by the Italians.

According to Italian historian Angelo Del Boca, Haile Selassie reputedly confided to Giulio Pascucci-Righi, the Italian ambassador accredited to Addis, in 1970:

“I owe nearly everything to Great Britain. The British gave me a place to live when I chose to go into exile, and they brought me to my homeland. All the same, as it may seem, the Ethiopian people have no love for Great Britain. Only two countries are our friends and understand us. Those countries are France and Italy. I hope that my successors will keep the faith [with regard to] this two-fold constant.”

The likelihood that the emperor’s words reflected the Ethiopian people’s state of mind after a . His pro-Italian gestures soon after the war ended could, in theory, be attributable to a desire to play off the Italians against the British.

British forces had fought together with Ethiopian patriots to dislodge the Italians and had remained behind after Ethiopia’s liberation. It is possible that Haile Selassie wanted to guard against Britain’s accumulation of undue influence in Ethiopia, and the risk that having gained such influence, Britain would wield it to declare Ethiopia a protectorate. But the words spoken to Ambassador Pascucci-Righi were purportedly spoken in 1970, years after the threat of falling under Britain’s sway had passed.

Regardless of whether the words spoken privately to the ambassador were accurately recounted by him, clearly the emperor’s attachment was heartfelt. First, because he persisted in sending signals, at times subtle and on other occasions explicit, to the press and visiting Italian officials that he was eager to receive an invitation to visit Italy.

Enemy Country

A further example of the emperor’s sympathy for Italy occurred in the 1960s when, having dispatched a delegation to Italy, the imperial government secured a loan from a consortium of Italian banks (with the facilitation of the Italian government). The Ethiopian government submitted the loan to the senate for final approval. The Ethiopian senate, whose members included several veterans of the Italian-Ethiopian war, rejected the loan’s terms because they considered the interest rate unduly onerous.

The emperor initially responded to the senate’s recalcitrance by claiming ��è����-����������é and rebuking legislators for still treating Italy as an “enemy country.” Ultimately, in relenting, the emperor resorted to what Cambridge historian Christopher Clapham has termed a familiar imperial stratagem employed by Haile Selassie in the face of insurmountable political opposition to a deal: professing ignorance as to its details. The loan was never disbursed for want of the senate’s approval.

The incident bore an uncanny resemblance to an earlier loan negotiation between Italy and Ethiopia. In 1889, Ras Makonnen (the emperor’s father and duke of Harar), visited Italy to conclude a loan agreement on behalf of his cousin, Emperor Menelik II. Upon his return to Ethiopia, Ras Makonnen was castigated by courtiers for having agreed to a loan with interest rates that were deemed usurious, several courtiers went so far as to impugn his patriotism.

Indeed, of the 235 Italian concessions existing in Somalia at independence, comprising more than 45,300 hectares of land, most were devoted to bananas. During their colonial suzerainty over Somalia, and for several decades following independence, Italy gave preferential treatment to banana imports from Somalia by imposing higher tariffs on those imported from other countries.

When Haile Selassie’s trip to Italy finally occurred, the emperor was received with all the pomp and pageantry reserved for Italy’s most illustrious postwar guests. Perhaps the most evocative scene of the trip was described by the Italian daily, Il Giorno, which wrote of the emperor, with his diminutive figure, standing erect in an open state vehicle side-by-side with Italian President Giuseppe Saragat, accompanied by a phalanx of fully-mounted cuirassiers whose horses’ hooves click-clocked on the Roman cobblestones as the pair majestically made their way to the Quirinale Palace.

In the run-up to, and after, the emperor’s 1970 visit, official Ethiopian-Italian ties were on an upswing. Following the 1974 revolution, commerce suffered another prolonged denouement; this time caused by the military government’s nationalization of private enterprises and, later, the country’s descent into an all-consuming civil war.

SOMALIA

In post-independence Somalia, as was the case in Ethiopia, some leaders harbored an affinity for Italy, which encouraged continued engagement. Somalia’s one-time minister of planning and international cooperation, Ahmed Habib Ahmed, in words that were somewhat similar in spirit to those reportedly uttered by Haile Selassie, remarked: “[Though] I studied in France, ‘my world’ is Italian; the French are distant to me.”

Several decades post independence, Italian commercial involvement in Somalia centered upon agriculture. The Italians set up cotton, sugar and banana plantations and, after 1929, the year in which worldwide cotton prices collapsed, focused mostly on bananas. Bananas eventually became Somalia’s most significant export.

Indeed, of the 235 Italian concessions existing in Somalia at independence, comprising more than 45,300 hectares of land, most were devoted to bananas. During their colonial suzerainty over Somalia, and for several decades following independence, Italy gave preferential treatment to banana imports from Somalia by imposing higher tariffs on those imported from other countries.

Italy further bolstered its political position in Somalia by tilting in its favor in territorial disputes (this policy may not have been adhered to consistently given the frequent change in governments in Rome).

Almost immediately after independence, in the early 1960s, Somalia pressed territorial claims on Ethiopian-controlled territory inhabited primarily by ethnic Somalis. It did the same with regard to lands inhabited mostly by ethnic Somalis in neighboring Kenya and Djibouti, avowedly announcing pursuit of a Greater Somalia encompassing all ethnic Somalis.

Somalia lent pressure to its irredentist claims by supporting armed militias who made frequent forays into Ethiopia, where they were pursued back into Somali territory by forces led by General Aman Andom—an Eritrean who was an interesting historical figure in his own right; in charge of Ethiopian counteroffensives against Somalia, and later, briefly, head of state after Haile Selassie was toppled, before he too suffered the same unceremonious fate.

All-Out War

In the late 1970s, Somalia and Ethiopia actually fought an all-out war over the ethnically Somali Ethiopian Ogaden province. Italy maintained an outward veneer of neutrality, but leaned toward Mogadishu, surreptitiously allowing it to purchase military helicopters, trucks and light weaponry on the Italian market. The support emanated, in part, from the fact that since Somalia had been Italy’s longest-held colony, it was treated with some affection. Beyond that, it is reasonable to surmise that Italy’s support for Somalia may have emanated, at least in part, from lingering bitterness over the Ethiopian-Eritrean Federation—a solution to the Eritrean question which Italy had strenuously opposed.

Aside from official institutional ties, for many years Somalia also benefited from another sort of linkage with Italy: the sympathy and support of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Promotion of commercial interests and mobilization of investment in postwar Italy were not the sole province of the government, but of political parties too. The PCI, and its competitors, jockeyed for influence at home and abroad, by supporting foreign regimes they deemed to be their ideological brethren.

Following the 1969 Somali revolution, the PCI extended cultural and technical assistance and invested in the country through Italian labor unions and affiliated entities. It provided Mogadishu with expertise and machinery to help bolster the Somali construction and agricultural sectors. Italturist, the PCI’s travel and touring company, was also tasked with arranging facilitation tours for Italian tourists in Somalia.

The Italian community in Somalia thrived as a result of the good political ties between Italy and Somalia. As was the case in Ethiopia under Haile Selassie, the Italians benefited from the protection of Siad Barre, Somalia’s post-revolution strongman. Barre inveighed against any harm befalling the Italians and expressed his sympathy toward Italians on more than one occasion, such as when he declared: “I have said, and have repeated, that for us Somalis, Italians are not considered foreigners; and this is a privilege which we have not extended to any other community.”

At one point, Barre even assured the Italians that he was “no Gadaffi.” In saying so, he was communicating to the Italians that he would refrain from following in the footsteps of the Libyan leader who had nationalized the property of Italian settlers after Libya gained its independence from Italy.

But such sweet-talking aside, as Barre fell under the Soviets’ orbit and he increasingly moved his country to the left, ideology trumped his apparent affection for Italians and a spate of nationalizations followed. The local branches of the Banca di Roma and Banca di Napoli, multiple insurance firms and AGIP—the precursor to today’s oil conglomerate, ENI—were among the Italian firms affected.

Though some firms and small factories were spared, the damage was done. Italian companies and most of their expatriate personnel left the country, never to return. Once Somalia spiraled into civil war, even the small Italian community that had faithfully remained behind returned to Italy.

Italy’s engagement with countries in the Horn of Africa was peripatetic. In Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country, relations were frequently rocky. Disputes arose over Eritrea and the implementation of commitments undertaken by Italy at the end of World War II by signing the 1947 Treaty of Peace; more generally, it appears that for several decades Italy struggled to come to terms with the fact that the colonial era had ended.

Italy’s focus on other geopolitical priorities, Ethiopia and Somalia’s adoption of economic policies that were inimical to an Italian presence, and their enmeshment in civil wars also minimized Italy’s engagement with the Horn and, by extension, other African countries.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Eritrea’s national soccer team has defected after ten of its players refused to return home following a World Cup qualifier in Botswana.

The defection and effective demise of the squad underscored the failure of autocratic rule in Eritrea, which has already been highlighted by the large contingent of Eritreans among the hundreds of thousands of refugees washing ashore in Europe. It also threw a spotlight on differing degrees of repression in failed autocracies and the way people deal with it. The defecting Eritrean players clearly felt they could afford to seek asylum without repercussions for family members left behind, a luxury Syrian soccer players do not enjoy.

In seeking asylum in Botswana, the players joined a long list of athletes who have left Eritrea against the backdrop of assertions by the United Nations (UN) that government policies amount to slavery and crimes against humanity and that torture is widespread.

The players reinforced the political statement embedded in their defection by appointing the exiled Eritrean Movement for Democracy and Human Rights (EMDHR) as their spokesperson.

Eritrean soccer (like Syrian football) has been leaking players, who are among the privileged few allowed to travel abroad, for years. As a result, the Eritrean team has had to rebuild from scratch several times.

Rebuilding the team is facilitated by the fact that Eritreans are enlisted for indefinite periods of time into national service. Eritrea has denied assertions in a UN report that it subjects its citizens to indefinite national service or kills people trying to flee the country.

While Eritreans have often defected in groups, Syrians have either left their country individually without turning their escape into a media event to protect relatives left behind, or in the cases of those players with dual nationality who lived abroad before the civil war began in 2011 quietly refused to play for what they saw as the team of President Bashar al-Assad rather than that of a nation that only still exists on paper.

The Eritrean defections are a blow to the government’s prestige in a country that, according to a 2009 US embassy cable disclosed by WikiLeaks, is “mad about soccer.” The cable noted that “senior government and party officials are avid fans of the British Premier League and sometimes leave official functions early to catch key matches.”

Twelve members of the national soccer team disappeared in Kenya in 2009 during a regional tournament. Another 13 players sought asylum in Tanzania in 2011. A year later, the reconstituted 17-member national team defected en masse together with their doctor while in Uganda. Four other Eritrean athletes requested political asylum in Britain after the 2012 London Olympics.

EMDHR Spokesman Dick Bayford, a Botswanan human rights lawyer, told reporters that the most recent defecting players were still doing national service and risked being charged with desertion, which is punishable by death if they were forced to return to Eritrea.

Pro-government media denied Bayford’s statement and asserted that the Eritrean team dispatched to Botswana had 34 members, 24 of which had returned to Eritrea.

Writing in Tesfanews, Mike Seium charged that the EMDHR “seem[s] to think that because 10 players defected the country is in uproar and we have serious problems. However, they don’t know Eritrea …The nucleus of the team is still there along with many other players. To those that defected, the sad part of it is that you are using the Eritrean national team to send a political agenda that allows failed organizations like the EMDHR to gain propaganda points.”

Eritrea vs Syria

While Eritrea ranks among the world’s most repressive nations, Syria hosts one of the world’s most vicious regimes, which explains why Syrian players choose to defect quietly.

As a result, Syria has largely been able—despite multiple defections—to keep its national team intact. Surprisingly, the team is performing well on the pitch, and even with the mayhem and bloodshed, it is closer to reaching the 2018 World Cup finals than it has ever been.

The stories of individual players nevertheless reflect Syria’s crisis. Mosab Balhous, the Syrian team’s goalkeeper, was arrested in 2011 on charges of supporting opposition movements and sheltering rebel fighters; he vanished for a year before suddenly re-joining the squad in 2012. The national youth team’s folk-singing goalkeeper Abdel Basset al-Saroot became a leader of the uprising in Homs before initially joining the Islamic State (IS), which he left in 2014 to join al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.

Swedish-Assyrian international Louay Chanko opted out of the Syrian team because of what he called “corruption.” Striker Firas al-Khatib, who plays for Kuwait’s Al-Arabi SC, left the national team in 2012 because he did not want to represent the Assad government. The departure for Germany of youth team captain Mohammad Jaddoua prompted the Syrian Football Association (SFA) to ban players from traveling abroad except for on official business.

Other players have joined a team in Lebanon fielded by the US-backed Free Syrian Army that hopes to, one day, be Syria’s national team. It sports green jerseys, the color of the anti-Assad revolt, as opposed to the national squad’s red. The team’s coach, Walid al-Muhaidi, says he escaped Syria in 2013 together with some 100 athletes.

Syrian national team��captain told The Guardian��ahead of a qualifying match earlier this month against Japan that his squad represented “all aspects of Syria. Whether you are a Christian or a Muslim or any sector of Islam we’re all one family, we’re playing for one team, one country.” His professed optimism put a brave face on a bad situation. “At the end of the day, we’re playing for the country, hoping it will get back to the way it was. The best thing we can do is unite the people of Syria,” he said.

Hussein’s optimism is all the more remarkable given that unlike Eritrea, which toils under repression but is not threatened by disintegration of its nation state, restoring Syria to its pre-2011 colonial borders is at best a distant dream. Few believe that Syria can be restored as a nation state within its pre-conflict borders. Russian intervention is widely seen as an effort to ensure that Assad controls a swath of land stretching from Damascus to Latakia on the Mediterranean coast that could constitute a rump state built around his Alawite minority—one of several entities that could emerge from the ruins of Syria.

Using options they have that are far less available to their Syrian counterparts, Eritrean players have with their repeated mass defections been doing what FIFA and other international sports associations should have long done: penalize regimes that blatantly violate human rights and use soccer to distract international attention and polish their badly tarnished images.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The narrative of hostility, suspicion and aggression towards immigrants and asylum seekers is not new, nor is it unique. Reports of governmental and societal mistreatment of asylum seekers ebb in and out of the news continuously, to the extent that many stories of this nature disappear into the slipstream.��So it has been with Israel’s African asylum seekers, until the recent wave of strikes and protests that caused the global media to snap to attention.

By now, the practical dynamics of the situation have been well-recounted: the numbers of asylum seekers in Israel, their countries of origin, the facts of their arrival and the Israeli government’s increasingly draconian measures to first stem, and then reverse the influx of those seeking refuge.��Yet it is a less reported element of the experience of Africans in Israel that sets it apart from other apparently similar situations; namely, the violence that has been done to them by their host country in both word and deed.

The Journey to Israel

With the possible exception of the Roma, it is difficult to think of a parallel case in the Western world — and given that Israel chooses to identify itself as part of the West, that is the area with which the contrast must be made. However, this is an asymmetric comparison, as in spite of their almost uniformly-reprehensible treatment at the hands of governments across Europe, Roma communities have not fled dictatorial regimes and mass crimes against humanity, as have Israel’s African migrants.

Eritreans, the largest group of asylum seekers in Israel, have escaped an autocratic government which routinely kidnaps, tortures and executes its citizens; in prison, detainees have , beatings with metal bars, and the use of shipping containers for housing prisoners. Sudanese migrants, the second-largest asylum seeker group in Israel, have left behind a government that is widely considered to have committed genocide through both its own soldiers and the Janjaweed, a government-sponsored militia. War crimes in the country include infanticide, gang rape, and mutilation.

Furthermore, while crossing the Sinai on the way to Israel, many asylum seekers — particularly Eritreans — are for ransom money by Rashaida Bedouin.

What also makes Israel a case apart is its population’s own recent history. As reductive as arguments based on exceptionalism can be — and indeed, morally-speaking, this is an unacceptable approach — racially-driven violence in Israeli society cannot be examined in isolation from the dominant events of the 20th century.

So what do we find when we start to probe the contours of the cruelty visited on asylum seekers in Israel? A bloated and seething public discourse, fed by politicians, the media, and other members of society alike. We encounter quotations from public officials, which in most Western democracies would lead to dismissal and potentially a police investigation for incitement to racial violence. We learn of the brutal attacks that stem from such provocation. And we discern, gradually, a consistent strain of amnesia working its way through Israeli society.

Sent to Gas Chambers?

The media in Israel is fond of using the term “red line” to denote commonly-perceived boundaries of decency and morality. For African asylum seekers in Israel, this “red line” was undoubtedly crossed on the night of May 23, 2012, when a rally in south Tel Aviv calling for the removal of African asylum seekers from Israel mutated into a riot.

Following Member of the Knesset (MK) Miri Regev’s address to the crowd, during which she Sudanese people “a cancer in our body,” the rally’s attendees proceeded to shops, smash car windows and physically assault passing Africans. A was stopped and searched, fires were with cries of “the people want the Africans to be burned” and — in addition to the many racist slogans that were voiced that night — one protestor chose to ensure her message would not be lost in the ether by up in a vest on which she had written, “Death to Sudanese.” Journalists covering the events were also ��and aid organizations were threatened. On the morning of the riot, the received threats, one of which called for Sudanese to be sent to gas .

These events, although marking a severe intensification of attacks on asylum seekers, were not unprecedented. A rally had also taken place the previous night, during which MKs engaged in hate speech against Africans, and attendees called for Israeli women expressing sympathy for asylum seekers to be .

The months preceding that had seen a political conference on migration, at which plainly racist views were by Israeli politicians, along with a night of firebomb and arson attacks against the African community in south Tel Aviv. Throughout this period, the public dialogue surrounding asylum seekers in Israel was characterized by , and prejudice that has not yet relented. Sporadic rallies have also , featuring the now-customary racist demagoguery, calls for the rape of leftist Israeli women, and — when Africans pass by — monkey noises from protestors.

Although the far-right Otzma LeYisrael (Strong Israel) party has led the line on anti-African agitation — one of their primary platforms was the expulsion of all asylum seekers — racism has emerged from center-right and even “” political parties, including those currently in power.

None of this is empty rhetoric. State persecution has culminated in recent legislation mandating the indefinite detention of asylum seekers in the new “Holot” desert prison camp. In practice, this policy has been implemented via violent , unannounced , and cynical by Israel’s Ministry of Interior (MOI).

Indeed, state persecution of African asylum seekers has matched aggression in the street, and Israel’s treatment of them —����— has been publicly . (These condemnations have been .)

In a final insult, the MOI — in an apparent historical blackout — recently summoned over 150 asylum seekers to trial by presenting the court with a .

Meanwhile, calls for the extermination of Africans in Israel continue on social media, with . Of the many miracles that Israel claims to have worked in its young life, the transformation of amnesia into a weapon against the dispossessed must surely rank among the most audacious.

Human Rights Violations

As with any appalling abuses that defy description and deny logic, we are left with a question which is both the most compelling and the hardest to answer — for in attempting to answer it, we risk lapsing into justification, a transgression that must be rigorously guarded against. Yet it must be asked: How does violence so gratuitous and indecent come about?

“Violence… is man recreating himself,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his introduction to Frantz Fanon’s classic postcolonial work, The Wretched of the Earth. While Sartre was referring specifically to the intensity of action needed in order to break from the stranglehold of colonialism into the throes of revolution, his words have a wider application.

In remaking himself, in forging a new identity, man is embracing the possibility that he can decouple himself from his past. So it is that the State of Israel — which was conceived in response to violence, born amidst violence, grew up submerged by and continues to live in the same — can be unmistakably perceived as a nation recreating itself. Israeli society is possessed of a dread memory, while being simultaneously militarized and terrified even if the terror is not visible, for braggadocio in the face of existential anxiety is part of the national character.

Consequently, Israel is uniquely prone to excesses of force, for it has a recent past that foments panic as well as the resources with which to swing at it wildly. In short, Israeli society is brutalized, and is therefore liable to brutalize in return. Furthermore, it belongs to a culture that prizes insularity, and thus insulates itself by design. As a nation-state, Israel remains in development, trying to define itself while in the grip of a volatile combination of��fear and isolationism, and in a perpetual state of being at war or on the brink thereof.

Small wonder, then, that unknown quantities — no matter how little threat they pose — are susceptible to such disproportionate aggression when they debut into Israeli society; in this case, African migrants.

In praxis, Israel’s government is inflicting indefensible human rights violations on a vulnerable group within its borders, as well as directly and indirectly encouraging the atrocious abuse of that group by significant numbers of Israelis. Moral abasement aside, these circumstances also provoke wider questions about Israel’s sociopolitical stability.

As Hannah Arendt posited in her book,��On Violence: “[P]ower and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.”

If we are to avoid cruelty’s eternal recurrence, we must recover our memory and abandon violence, blind or otherwise. It is the only permanent way out of this situation, for all concerned.

*[Note: All incidents discussed in this article have been documented by , an independent journalist and film-maker from Toronto, Canada, who now lives in Dimona, Israel. Further incidents and background information are also documented on his website.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Recent geopolitical developments across the Middle East and Africa have added momentum to Iran and Sudan’s strategic partnership, an alliance driven primarily by an interest in weakening the power of Israel, and by extension the US, throughout East Africa. Other objectives include Sudan’s fight against other forces that constitute existential threats to the Khartoum regime, and Iran’s interest in establishing an alternative weapons corridor to Gaza and Lebanon, particularly given that Syria will likely remain destabilized for the near-to-medium term.

However, some of Sudan’s traditional Sunni Arab allies staunchly oppose further development of the Iran/Sudan partnership. It remains to be seen how far Khartoum can further entrench its ties with Tehran while maintaining its alliance with Saudi Arabia and other states in the region.

Background of Bilateral Ties

When President Omar al-Bashir and Hassan al-Turabi rose to power in the 1989 coup that established an Islamist state in Sudan, one of the new regime’s first diplomatic initiatives was to forge an alliance with Iran, whose own Islamic revolution a decade earlier inspired Sudan’s Islamists (despite the Sunni-Shia division). Five months after the coup, Bashir paid a visit to Iran and the two states’ intelligence agencies signed cooperative agreements.

In 1991, then-Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani visited Sudan pledging $17 million in financial aid, delivery of $300 million of Chinese weapons, and 1 million tons of oil per year. Some 2,000 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) were reportedly sent to Sudan to train its Popular Defense Forces (PDF) during the second Sudanese Civil War. That same year, Khartoum hosted the infamous Popular Arab and Islamic Congress (PAIC), which brought together Osama bin Laden, Abu Nidal, Carlos the Jackal, and members of Jama’at al-Islamiyah, Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRGC.

Over the years, Iran and Sudan have maintained varying degrees of support for non-state actors, including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine. In 2008, the two states officially signed a military cooperation agreement, and in May of this year, the pace and scope of the construction of Iranian naval and logistical bases in Port Sudan was enhanced remarkably. In short, over the past two decades, the two countries have significantly deepened their political ties, and in the process, Sudan has become a magnet for a variety of militant extremist and jihadist individuals and groups.

Proxy War in Africa

Sudan has at the same time become an extension of Iran’s proxy war against Israel. Historically, Sudan and Israel’s relationship has been hostile. In 2012, Israel bombed Sudan for the fourth time since 2009, striking the Yarmouk factory near Khartoum. Israel’s motivation for targeting Sudan was likely to punish Sudan for allowing Iran to use Sudanese territory as a staging ground for arms shipments to Gaza and Lebanon via the Red Sea and Egyptian Sinai, in addition to Khartoum’s alleged support for Hamas and other militant Palestinian groups.

Israel knows that Sudan is a failed state with a military that is preoccupied with South Sudan and Darfur, among other concerns, and that Khartoum is not capable of responding directly to Israel. Simply put, Bashir’s bluff has been called as a consequence of his inaction to Israel’s air raids. Part of Israel’s message to Sudan’s government appears to be to refrain from forging deeper ties with Iran and Hamas; the more important message relates to Iran: If Tehran uses East Africa as a launching pad for its Palestinian/Lebanese proxies, Israel will apparently strike against Iran’s interests in the region.

Moreover, Israel has used its ally, South Sudan, in an effort to further weaken Khartoum’s regional clout. This partnership far precedes Iran and Israel’s standoff. During the first Sudanese Civil War (1955-1972), Israel armed and trained the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement (SSLM), which was consistent with the “alliance on the periphery” pillar of Ben-Gurion’s foreign policy. After South Sudanese independence in 2011, Juba’s diplomatic gestures toward Israel established the world’s newest state as a staunch Israeli ally. In March 2012, an Iranian drone was shot down by Juba-backed rebels and the Israelis have sent security experts to South Sudan to train their troops to operate T-72 battle tanks. If Khartoum and Juba wage war over the disputed oil-rich region of Abyei, Iran and Israel may be expected to use their leverage to back their respective sides, further establishing the Sudans as a battleground for one of the Middle East’s most dangerous power struggles.

Eritrea is another important piece to this puzzle, as Asmara courts a military partnership with Iran and Israel. From Eritrea’s perspective, a potential Ethiopian invasion constitutes the gravest national security threat. To counter this menace, Eritrea signed an agreement with Iran in 2008 that provides the Iranian military a presence in Assab (which for official purposes is to safeguard an oil field).

However, for a number of reasons (the most important being to gain greater support from Washington, which holds strong influence over Addis Ababa), Eritrea appears to have sought balance in its partnership with Iran by forming a relationship with Israel. Israeli naval teams have set up in the Dablak Archipelago and Massawa, and have also reportedly established a listening post in Amba Soira to monitor Iran’s presence in the country. Israel has a difficult task, as deeper ties with Asmara threaten to undermine its relationship with Addis Ababa. Nonetheless, Israel will likely continue to nurture its partnership with Eritrea as long as it serves to weaken Iran’s capacity to use East Africa to expand Tehran’s strategic depth.

Sudan’s Gamble

Given that nearly three-quarters of Sudanese exports reach the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Khartoum is economically dependent on states that would view the growth of Iran’s footprint in East Africa as a significant geostrategic setback. As Saudi Arabia and Iran wage a proxy war in Yemen, the build-up of Iran’s military presence in the Red Sea is troublesome from the Saudi perspective. Voices within Sudan’s opposition have criticized Bashir for permitting Tehran to establish a greater military footprint in their country, on the grounds that Sudanese-GCC ties will suffer and it undermines prospects for any potential rapprochement with the United States.

From Bashir’s perspective, it is reasonable to assume that the most imminent threats to his regime’s survival are reduced as a result of the growing partnership with Iran. With Darfur rebels having struck major blows against the Sudanese state earlier this year, and as the conflict with South Sudan is likely to linger for years to come, the influx of more advanced weapons and training from Iran should strengthen Khartoum’s position.

Bashir has every reason to continue to deepen Sudan’s ties to Iran. He knows that Iran is determined to expand its influence in Africa, and that Sudan has a unique role to play in furthering that objective. Thus, with Iran’s ongoing battle of words with Israel and the US over Tehran’s nuclear program, the continuation of the Syrian crisis – which threatens to break-up the Middle East’s “axis of resistance” — and the tension between Sudan and South Sudan, Iran and Sudan have apparently come to view each other as indispensable strategic partners for the long haul.

The recent news that Zimbabwe has signed a Memorandum of Understanding to sell Iran uranium will certainly raise the stakes in Iran’s presumed pursuit of nuclear weapons, and will only serve as an incentive for Sudan to enhance the role it is playing in broadening Iran’s pursuit of power and influence in the Middle East and beyond. There is no real incentive for them to change course, nor any meaningful way for other countries to reduce the significance of the impact that relationship has had, and will presumably continue to have, on Africa and the Middle East. As a result, Sudan should be expected to continue to play an indirect and influential role in the unfolding landscape of Africa and the Middle East.

*[This article was originally published by the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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