Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
09-01-2024
ADDIS ABABA: Many centuries ago, chroniclers conjured what was in antiquity called Ethiopia as a realm at the heart of global trade. The treasures of Rome and India all flowed through its ports along the Gulf of Aden and the 
Red Sea. Merchants and pilgrims made their way to the Middle East and Mediterranean world via its caravan routes and docks. A 6th-century Byzantine historian described a kingdom with a vast fleet of wooden boats. The ancient Greeks even named the southern part of the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles away from the Ethiopian highlands, the Ethiopian Sea but modern-day Ethiopia is famously landlocked. Apart from a few decades in the 20th century when Ethiopia had annexed neighboring Eritrea, Africa’s second-most populous nation has never had a coastline. It maintains a meager, mostly riverine navy and pays tiny Djibouti some $1.5 billion a year for the privilege of accessing its ports and coastal infrastructure.
That’s why Abiy Ahmed, the ambitious Ethiopian prime minister, has long harbored visions of reaching the sea. He has groused against his country’s “geographic prison” and summoned the legacy of seafaring medieval empires as one the contemporary Ethiopian state must redeem. Ethiopia’s profound economic woes and constant internecine conflicts have not dented Abiy’s desires for maritime access indeed, they may fuel them and last week, in what was a geopolitical bombshell in the Horn of Africa, Abiy appeared to achieve his goal. Alongside Muse Bihi Abdi, president 
of the self-declared breakaway Republic of Somaliland, Abiy announced that the two parties had reached a memorandum of understanding that would see Somaliland lease to Ethiopia some 12 miles of its coastline by the port of Berbera. In return, the autonomous entity that exists within the internationally recognized territory of Somalia may win something altogether more valuable; diplomatic recognition from Addis Ababa.
Somaliland declared its independence from Somalia three decades ago, amid the wave of turmoil that turned the country into a perennial failed state. It comprises the northwestern wing of Somalia, and represents the territory once governed under a British protectorate that was separate from the Italian colony that mostly made up the rest of what is now independent Somalia. The breakaway republic prints its own currency, maintains its own political institutions and has earned a reputation for being one of the more stable corners of the Horn of Africa certainly more so than the areas controlled by the beleaguered government in Mogadishu. (Int’l News Desk)
