By Aden Ismail

Turkey vaunts as a mediator in the Somalia-Ethiopia tensions over the latter’s controversial bid for maritime access. But Ankara’s efforts seem dangerously naive and risk not only diplomatic breakage as seen already but also revive historical wounds ingrained in the collective Somali political consciousness.

As Russia’s Sergey Lavrov quipped, diplomacy is not the art of guessing – nor indeed, is it ever conducted on a clean slate. Historical memory and grievance heavily weigh in the Horn of Africa, where state and social identities are contested across generations under different pretexts. The Somali-Ethiopian question is not an ordinary dispute but an unhealed historical trauma from centuries of wars, colonial deprivation, and continental betrayals.

It stretches back to the Aksum era, a Byzantine client kingdom in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. In the 6th century CE, Aksum invaded Arabia on behalf of Constantinople in an imperial contest with the Persians. For Somalis dominating the lowlands in northeast Africa, this was a geostrategic awakening. The mass conversion to Islam that followed was more of a geopolitical act than spiritual: Islam promised an ironclad against anticipated Aksumite-Byzantine expansion into the Somali sphere.

Subsequent religious binaries fueled centuries of holy wars, the most iconic being the 16th-century campaign of Ahmad Ibrahim alias Gurey (the Left-Handed), who led Somalis in a brutal war of deterrence against Abyssinia – the successor of Aksum and predecessor of Ethiopia – though it prevailed with Portuguese reinforcements.

Later colonial powers compounded the configurations by legitimizing Abyssinian imperialism. They ceded vast Somali territories until emboldened Ethiopia attempted to annex the infant Somali Republic in 1960. The 1964 resolution by the Organisation of African Unity further locked colonial borders in place to render historical injustice permanent.

In this context, Turkey’s approach is wholly ahistorical. By promoting “dialogue” at Somalia’s expense, Ankara tacitly grants Ethiopia moral cover to subsume the entire Somali Peninsula into its imperial orbit. This appears to reprise the old Ottoman script that treated Somalis not as sovereign stakeholders in the region, but as expendable appendages to a broader Ottoman-Abyssinian calculus.

This is not the first in recent times that an external power is fatally misreading the Somali agency in the Horn. At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet “Pax Sovietica” policy proposed a union between Ethiopia, Somalia and South Yemen into a socialist bloc to manage intra-alliance disputes. But the plan collapsed in the heat of the 1977 Ogaden War, when Somalia undertook a historic mission to reclaim usurped territories from Ethiopia.

The war tilted the Cold War geopolitical balance and exposed to Moscow the perils of downplaying the vitality of Somali nationalist agency. Like the Soviets before, Turkey’s mistake is viewing the Somali-Ethiopian affair as a manageable bilateral dispute. Far from it, this is a civilizational fault line next to Turkey’s historical animus with the Greeks, or, the Arab-Israeli conundrum. Moral equivalence is not only backfiring but insulting.

At the heart of Ethiopia’s maritime ambition is a flawed premise that population size or developmental goals entitle a country to maritime outlet as if geography is negotiable. More than 40 countries are landlocked in the world including many best economic performers, and none claims extraterritorial sea corridors.

Ironically, Ethiopia’s most miraculous economic growth occurred after it became landlocked in 1993 following Eritrea’s secession. When Ethiopia had control of the Eritrean ports of Massawa and Assab, there has never been an economic golden age to speak of. This tells the current push for maritime access is less about necessity and more about reviving old imperial ambitions, this time wrapped in a developmental rhetoric.

Western powers have enabled this logic by crowning post-Cold War Ethiopia a regional “anchor state” as a carte blanche to unilaterally shape the Somali political and security landscape in line with its historical and strategic needs. This is the basis of its 2006 invasion of Mogadishu under counterterrorism pretext to build a puppet network in the capital to manage the Somali political centre and spark a centre-periphery political paralysis in Somalia.

When this and the entrenchment of Al Shabaab is juxtaposed with systematic imperialisms disguised in the global war on terror, they echo what international law scholar Francis Boyle described as “the business of ending states.” In this equation, Ethiopia appears content with having dismantled the Somali state, and negotiating fait accompli with Turkey over a Somali skeleton.

Yet the goings are being rejected across Somalia and the vast network of Somali diaspora. While Turkey has earned Somali goodwill through solid humanitarian and security injections, many Somalis see its regional policy as building on the legacies of Western imperialism. But Somali existential stakes are too high for passive acceptance and resistance is gathering momentum.

In sum, the Somali-Ethiopian question is not a technical dispute but an unfinished project that has been running through the ancient, medieval, colonial, post-colonial times and is now only under a hibernation. Even Britain, the architect of Somali tribulations as it did in Palestine, once likened Somali agency in Africa to Europe’s Gaul in a rare acknowledgement of imperial guilt.

Turkey, and any other aspiring global power, must confront a hard truth: normalizing or perpetuating the Somali-Ethiopian status quo is strategically shortsighted, morally apprehensive and self-defeating. In the next world order, true peace in the Horn of Africa comes not from symptom management but on the just recognition of Somali territorial and social integrity contingent upon collective emancipation from the trappings of global and regional imperial chauvinism.

Without that, the Horn will remain trapped in an abyss that benefits no one.

Aden Ismail
Email: aden.mohedi@gmail.com
—-
Adan is an independent columnist, security studies at the department of diplomacy and international studies, University of Nairobi.