Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, then chairman of the regional bloc IGAD, sent envoys to Nairobi and Mogadishu in July 2019 to try to settle the maritime border dispute between Kenya and Somalia without further damaging relations in the Horn of Africa, officials in both capitals told Kenya’s Daily Nation. They said he had proposed a meeting between President Uhuru Kenyatta and President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo for 13 July, though it still depended on the two leaders’ diaries.
The dispute dates from 2014, when Somalia took Kenya to the International Court of Justice, asking it to redraw the sea boundary as a diagonal line running south-east from the land border instead of the line due east that Kenya follows. The triangle at stake covers about 100,000 square kilometers of the Indian Ocean and is believed to hold oil and gas. In 2009 officials from both countries had signed a memorandum of understanding on the boundary, but the Somali parliament rejected it. The court later ruled that the memorandum was a valid agreement but agreed to hear the case because other means had not been exhausted. Hearings were scheduled for 9 to 13 September 2019.
Ethiopia, which has interests in Somali ports and defence ties with Kenya, wanted the dispute resolved amicably so it would not hold up cooperation in other areas. Senior Somali officials said Abiy Ahmed had been working behind the scenes, with the United States and Britain also pressing for a truce. IGAD and its partners feared the row could undermine cooperation against terrorism and piracy. An earlier attempt by the prime minister in 2019 had failed when Mogadishu insisted on going to court.
Reports in Mogadishu that Farmaajo was willing to delay, though not withdraw, the case drew a sharp denial. “We unequivocally deny a change of the position of the Federal Government of Somalia on the ongoing case at ICJ,” said Abdinur Mohamed Ahmed, the presidency’s communications director, adding that the attorney general would investigate the source of what he called fake news. Kenya, which preferred an out-of-court settlement, was also cautious. “We will need to verify,” said Macharia Kamau, principal secretary at Kenya’s foreign ministry.
To pause the case, the two governments would have had to write jointly to the court seeking leave to negotiate. Horn of Africa analyst Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdisamad said a delay could buy time, while withdrawing would look like a sell-out to Farmaajo’s critics ahead of elections due the following year. “A solution cannot be found in these tense moments,” he said. Kenyan Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Monica Juma had told an audience at the Royal United Services Institute in London two weeks earlier that Somalia was being pushed by Western commercial interests.
Sources: Horn Diplomat (Daily Nation), Hiiraan Online