Mereja Forum

[Za-Ilmaknun]

https://www.economist.com/the-economist ... -of-africa

ACROSS THE Horn of Africa evidence is mounting that relations with Gulf countries are growing stronger. Last month representatives from Djibouti, Sudan and Somalia gathered in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, to discuss the creation of a new Red Sea security alliance. Three months earlier the prime ministers of Ethiopia and Eritrea signed a peace deal that Saudi Arabia helped to broker. In the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, a property developer from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is working on the largest and most expensive project of its kind in the city’s history. The UAE has had a military base in Eritrea since 2015 and is building another in Somaliland, a breakaway state in northern Somalia. Saudi Arabia plans to build one in Djibouti. And Qatar and Turkey are refurbishing a port in Sudan. Why?

Between 2000 and 2017 Gulf states invested $13bn in the Horn of Africa, mainly in Sudan and Ethiopia, according to a study by the Clingendael Institute, a think-tank in the Netherlands. For resource-poor Horn countries the economic benefits of Gulf investments are obvious.

One of the first moves of Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, upon taking office in April was to secure $3bn in aid and investments from the UAE, including a $1bn deposit in the country’s central bank. Sudan’s central bank received a deposit of $1.4bn from the UAE in March.

For Saudi Arabia, renewed interest in the Horn has been primarily driven by competition with Iran. In 2014 it forced both Sudan and Eritrea to cut ties with Iran and eject Iranian diplomats. For the UAE—a logistics and transhipment powerhouse—the growing threat of Somali piracy in the 2000s, followed by the outbreak of war in Yemen in 2015, prompted a new focus on maritime security. Its string of ports and bases along the southern rim of the Arabian peninsula and up the Red Sea is part of a strategy to project influence throughout the region (it uses its base in Eritrea to launch attacks in Yemen