While I once wrote a lot of Somaliland updates, and still pay attention to what is going on in the de facto nation, there has been little to update the world on, from the point of view of the Western observer, because for a long time the world as a whole has been content to prop up a regime in Mogadishu that has almost no power or authority but which has the benefit of belonging to the club of nations, while Somaliland does not (yet). The question has always been, what would happen that would change the status quo of de facto nationhood given that Somaliland cannot trust itself to be ruled from Mogadishu given the horrors of 1991 and 1992 during the end of Barre’s regime when the region suffered immense death and destruction, and given that the rest of Somali has been unwilling to let them go peacefully despite not having any de facto authority over its territory. Like the conflicts in Western Sahara and Cyprus, as well as Moldova, Georgia, Taiwan, and other places, it remains a problem where the political will on the part of a nation is lacking to accept a breakaway but where the military will is lacking to force union upon an unwilling territory.

What changed is that it became in someone’s self-interest to support Somaliland’s independence, and it is not surprising in this context that Ethiopia would be the interested party. Today, as I write this, Ethiopia and Somaliland’s elected government came to a memorandum of agreement, to be hashed out in the new future with a settled agreement, over an obvious deal that would grant Ethiopia the use of the port of Berbera in Somaliland to allow Ethiopia greater and less expensive access to the sea and also the use of part of Somaliland’s coast near the port to build naval bases on, thus allowing it to become a landlocked country no longer, in exchange for Somaliland part-ownership of Ethiopian Airlines as well as Ethiopian recognition of Somaliland’s independence, and presumably the establishment of full diplomatic ties between the two nations.

As might be expected, there were some immediate consequences to this. Somalia recalled its ambassadors to Ethiopia, severing their own diplomatic relations, and called an emergency cabinet meeting of the Mogadishu city council (otherwise known as the Transitional National Government) in order to deal with the crisis, which comes as the TNG was seeking to engage in renewed negotiations with Somaliland. For Somalia, the promise of Ethiopian help to Somaliland in order to separate more Somali territory from it probably reminds it of the disaster of the 1970s Ogaden conflict when Somalia sought to unify all Somali peoples under its own rule but found itself defeated by the more powerful Ethiopian state. For Somaliland, it offers a threat to Somalia that unless Somalia provides some means of ensuring the peaceful recognition of Somaliland’s independence that Somaliland has acquired some powerful support in its own favor. 

Ethiopia is a nation that is no stranger to conflict in the Horn of Africa. Recently, the leader of Ethiopia promised that he would end Ethiopia’s landlocked status, and immediately the concerns of the journalists of the world went to the thought that Ethiopia would start another war to try to take back Eritrea, which won its independence in 1991, or that Ethiopia would attack little Djibouti, currently the only way that Ethiopia has access to the sea, an immensely costly one at that. Instead, it appears that Ethiopia was signaling its seriousness in obtaining port rights in another place–Somaliland–and in improving the transportation infrastructure between Ethiopia and Somaliland that will allow the two nations to increase their trade and for Ethiopia to be able to provide timely military assistance to its ally if necessary. Somalia is right to view this with concern, but they only have themselves to blame for not providing Somaliland with any meaningful option for obtaining its freedom in a peaceful way through a plebiscite of its own population, which has been regularly electing its own government with peaceful transfers of power, and struggling to rebuild and develop its own territory for more than thirty years now. Now another nation’s self-interest in improving its own position has allowed it to come to generous and reasonable terms with Somaliland to give both nations what they so desperately want, and Somalia can only sit and fume in its anger for having wasted so much time where it could have sought to cultivate good relations with Hargeisa.