East Africa had a gruelling 2021 as the countries of the region reeled beneath a range of complex crises with interwoven local, regional and even international dimensions that combined to jeopardise some of the states concerned.
In addition to the extraordinary circumstances they still have to endure due to the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic and political repercussions, the East African countries are facing problems of a severity that threatens their stability and security. The outgoing year offers plenty of evidence to support this grim prognosis.
On 4 November, the Ethiopian War entered its second year after seeing radical transformations. It began as a limited operation dedicated to “upholding the law” but quickly escalated into a full-scale war engaging warplanes and air strikes. The theatre of operations was supposed to have been limited to the northernmost Tigray region of Ethiopia, but by autumn it had expanded southwards and eastwards into the Amhara and Afar regions.
Although the conflict was originally between the Ethiopian federal government in Addis Ababa and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), other factions took advantage of the fragile security situation in the country to reignite fronts in the Oromia and Benishangul-Gumuz regions. In the absence of a central authority to restrain them, other ethnic and political fault lines reopened, for example in the long and complex border conflict between the Afar and Somali peoples.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed initially billed the central government’s campaign against the TPLF as a limited operation that would last no more than a few weeks. His premature declaration of victory after fewer than four weeks ran up against the reality of the volatility of the situation, fuelling a spiral into a protracted war with no end in sight. Nor did Ahmed foresee how the tables would turn after seven months. Not only did the TPLF succeed in recapturing the Tigray capital Mekelle, but it also shifted to the offensive on several fronts.
However, perhaps the most consequential of the many transformations in the Ethiopian war was structural. This occurred with the creation of the United Front of Ethiopian and Confederalist Forces (UFEFCF), a coalition of nine groups that was officially launched on 5 November. The development put paid to the prime minister’s long-held claim that Addis Ababa’s campaign targeted an illegal terrorist group ensconced in the north.
Other East African countries continued to be rocked by destabilising events and circumstances in 2021. In Sudan, the transitional phase increased in complexity with the entrance of a third partner into the civilian-military power-sharing arrangements in accordance with the Juba Agreement between the Sudanese authorities and five main Sudanese rebel forces. The latter was instrumental in splitting the civilian Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) and in propelling the army into sidelining the civilian forces.
The transitional process was further jeopardised by a resurgence of tensions in eastern Sudan and by the fact that the Juba arrangements did not include two of the most powerful rebel factions, one led by Abdelwahid Mohamed Nour in Darfur and the other led by Abdulaziz Held in the Blue Nile state. These complications formed the backdrop of the crisis that came to a head on 25 October when the armed forces arrested Sudanese Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok and several ministers, after which military leader Abdel-Fattah Al-Burhan announced a state of emergency, dissolved the country’s Sovereignty Council and cabinet, dismissed the governors of the states and froze the activities of the Empowerment Removal Committee that had been formed to combat corruption.
Al-Burhan also announced that he would form a new government of technocrats that would run the country until general elections set for July 2023. His actions precipitated an international outcry, and following several weeks of intense foreign pressure he backed down. On 21 November, Al-Burhan and Hamdok signed a framework agreement to relaunch the civilian-military partnership in Sudan, reinstating Hamdok as prime minister and charging him with forming a “non-partisan” government.
Regarding the stability of the federal government in Ethiopia, although national elections were held in the summer of this year after several postponements, they offered little hope of reconciliation. The Tigray region held separate elections in 2020, which was one of the issues that sparked the conflict to begin with. Addis Ababa was unable to hold the second round of the elections in September as planned due to security breakdowns in other regions. Ahmed’s political future now hangs in the balance due to uncertainties surrounding the war and its repercussions.
Somalia has also been suffering from a governmental crisis that has persisted since the end of the constitutional term of the president and the federal parliament at the outset of the year. The country has been unable to hold new elections despite the fact that the international community has approved its indirect electoral system along the lines of previous models used in 2004, 2009, 2012 and 2017.
Progress with the electoral arrangements is still painfully slow, despite pressure by Somalia’s international partners to step up the process. The sense of urgency has been heightened by complicating factors with major security implications. Not the least of these are the approaching end of the mandate of the African Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and the drought in the south of the country.
The Al-Shabaab Al-Mujahideen group continues to pose a grave security threat in Somalia as well as to neighbouring countries, despite drone strikes by US forces. During the past year, this Somali terrorist organisation carried out a series of attacks that enabled it to seize control of road networks in northeastern Kenya. It also staged terrorist attacks against the Ugandan capital, Kampala, in October and November.
Terrorist organisations in East Africa have also expanded their scope of operations further down the Indian Ocean coast, especially since the emergence of the Islamic State-Central Africa Province (IS-CAP), which includes fighter groups from Mozambique. This organisation posed such a threat to the government in Maputo that it was forced to seek help from Russian, Rwandan and SADC (Southern African Development Community) forces.
Aside from such terrorist hotspots, other East African countries are vulnerable to the spread of terrorism in the future, as evidenced by the discovery in Khartoum of an IS-affiliated cell that Sudanese security forces managed to eliminate.
Meanwhile, after years in which internal strife has dominated conflicts in Africa, conventional warfare between national armies over disputed territory has once again begun to rear its head. The confrontation between Sudan and Ethiopia over the Fashqa region in eastern Sudan is a salient example. Several skirmishes between armed groups from Amhara in Ethiopia and Sudanese farmers escalated into deadly clashes between the Ethiopian and Sudanese armies. Heavy weapons were used and the hostilities claimed casualties on both sides.
The dispute over Fashqa has been fuelled by tensions between Khartoum and Addis Ababa over other issues, especially Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project and the fallout from the conflict in Tigray, which has generated waves of displaced civilians in the direction of Sudan.
To the east, Kenya and Somalia began to face off following an International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling in October in favour of the latter in their dispute over the demarcation of their maritime border in an area rich in natural gas. So far, the level of violence has been limited, in large measure due to the presence of Kenyan forces in the African Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). However, border skirmishes in which the Kenyan army inflicted civilian casualties on Somalia do not augur well for the future.
What makes the above-mentioned trends more ominous is the fact that the demand for conflict-prevention and resolution mechanisms in the region has not been adequately met. The proposed conventional and unconventional dispute-containment and settlement mechanisms have little chance of working effectively in this complex environment, considerably reducing the chances of success of any foreign attempt to intervene.
The writer is head of African studies at the Egyptian Centre for Strategic Studies.
*A version of this article appears in print in the 23 December, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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