A Bab al-Mandab Saga: From Assab to Perim; All Has a Base, None Has a Plan. Part II

The geopolitical aspects of Bab-al-Mandab extends way beyond any narrow view, both historically and contemporarily. So, before the next “maritime security initiative” arrives, ask the 4 main questions the brochure never answers

Part I ended in 1993 with Ethiopia landlocked and a grievance planted in its politics. This part runs from that moment to the last few weeks. The short version: every outside power has discovered that the Red Sea can be rented but not owned, and the people who live around it are paying the deposit.

The landlocked giant, and three prime ministers

Assab was Ethiopia’s main trade outlet before a war with Eritrea between 1998 and 2000, but since then, Addis Ababa has relied on Djibouti for the bulk of its international trade. The war started in Badme in May 1998 and ended with the Algiers Agreement of December 2000, but a CSIS assessment gives credit Lasting chill on regional security from Meles Zenawi’s refusal to accept border ruling. Meles, meanwhile, sold himself as the West’s indispensable partner against extremism and lent Ethiopian airstrips to American drones.

He died in August 2012. Hailemariam Desalegn, a southerner from a small ethnic group, inherited a coalition of powerful rivals and resigned in February 2018 amid the Oromia and Amhara protests, the first resignation in modern Ethiopian history.

On 2 April 2018 Abiy Ahmed, a former radio operator in the Badme war, took over. Within months he accepted the border ruling, and Ethiopia and Eritrea signed a peace declaration.

The Nobel Peace Prize followed, so did the troubles.

The cross-cost storm and the base bazaar

After the Saudi-Emirati intervention in Yemen in March 2015 (Operation Decisive Storm), there have been Sudanese deployments. These consisted of a force commanded by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan but made up largely by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which trace their ancestry to the Janjaweed.

The Janjaweed, formed during the Chad-Libyan wars of the 1980s, when Sudan supported the Arab nomads revolt against the two countries, due to droughts, famine, in addition to related local disputes over grazing land and water between competing non-Arab farmers and Arab nomadic herders. To later on, become notorious in Darfur following the year 2003.

In 2013 Bashir remodelled one group of the militia led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, “Hemedti”, which dragged them into the center of Sudanese politics, which eventually exploded their existence and influence, from the Chad, Libya and Central Africa borders and the supply lines that originate from there, to a later on further eastward movement, now expanded to the other shore of the Red Sea.

There is no clearer hint that everything connects across both shores of the gate of grief.

Meanwhile, the other coast became a rental market. Djibouti hosts American, French, Japanese, Italian and, since 2017, Chinese forces. Camp Lemonnier has held the US Africa Command’s Horn task force since 2002 and is America’s only permanent base on the continent, with well over 4,000 personnel by most counts. China’s base sits beside the Doraleh terminal, and by published estimates its personnel are a fraction of the American ones, which has not stopped much Western commentary from........

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