Thursday October 24, 2024
By Mohamed Sheikh Nor and Simon Marks
About 13,000 troops from Ethiopia and four other nations are set to leave Somalia at the end of this year, before a reconstituted mission is scheduled to take over next year.Photographer: Ed Ram/Getty Images
(Bloomberg) -- Somalia’s government asked the African Union and United Nations to exclude Ethiopian soldiers from a revamped peacekeeping force fighting al-Qaeda-linked insurgents.
The request will strain already fraught relations between the two countries. Ties deteriorated in January, when Ethiopia offered to recognize Somaliland — a breakaway region in the north — as a sovereign state in return for access to a port and a military base in a region that Somalia regards as part of its territory.
About 13,000 troops from Ethiopia and four other nations are set to leave Somalia at the end of this year, before a reconstituted mission is scheduled to take over next year.
“Ethiopia’s recent unilateral actions, including an illegal agreement with Somalia’s northern region, violate our sovereignty and erode the trust essential for peacekeeping,” Somalia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
Diplomats in the region have expressed concern that the standoff over troop participation in the new peacekeeping force may erupt into conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia.
Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Somalia has been battling Islamist militants for almost two decades. It needs outside military support because its economy has yet to recover from years of civil war and the impact of the ongoing insurgency.
The upcoming mission will require a “more strategic selection” of troop partners to ensure the so-called African Union Stabilization Mission in Somalia “aligns with Somalia’s development and security goals,” the statement said.
Amid the tensions between Somalia and Ethiopia, Egypt has strengthened its ties with Somalia. Cairo sent several shipments of military aid to Mogadishu, the capital, earlier this year.
The Egyptian aid has in turn angered Ethiopia, which is in a long-running dispute with the North African nation over a giant hydropower dam that Addis Ababa has built on the main tributary of the Nile river — the waterway that’s the source of almost all of Egypt’s fresh water.
--With assistance from Fasika Tadesse.
