The drums of war are beating loud in the Horn of Africa. The current dispute between Somalia and Ethiopia could engulf the whole region in cataclysmic violence. However, nowhere is this looming geopolitical tension followed closely with dread, uncertainty and anticipation than the Somali region in Ethiopia – a federal state inhabited by 6 million Somalis located in Eastern Ethiopia.

The rising tensions between Somalia and Ethiopia has placed the Somali region in a quandary. A war between the two countries will destabilize the Somali region – a geography with a long history of state violence and brutalities. Moreover, history could be repeating itself in the Somali region: both Ethiopia and Somalia fought over the territory during the 1977 Ogaden war that involved both the Soviet Union and Cuba.

The recent political developments in the Somali region are worrisome. Birhanu Jula, the chief general of the Ethiopian army and the man who oversaw and executed the genocidal Tigray war described the Ogaden National Liberation Front – a formerly armed Somali independence movement – which is now the foremost political party in the region as agents funded by Egypt and enemies of the Ethiopia state. Moreover, six people were killed recently in a mosque in what appears to be an attempt to ignite violence in the Somali region.

The Somali region is a product of the haphazard and improper European colonial border designs; its inhabitants experienced statist violence for decades. A war between Somalia and Ethiopia will turn the Somali region into a war arena.

Colonial Betrayal

The European colonial divide and rule strategy has devastated the Somali world for the last century. The Somali territory was so vast that only through the partitioning of it was viewed logical by the European powers. To diminish and crush anti-colonial resistance and mobilizations, the Somali territories were divided for efficient colonization into five: French Somaliland (what is today Djibouti), British Somaliland, Italian Somaliland, Ogadenia (Somali region in Ethiopia) and the Northern Frontier Districts (NFD) in Kenya.

Despite the British having protectorate treaties with the Somali clans and communities in the region, in 1897 their sovereignty was transferred to Ethiopia; and when the British defeated fascist Italia in the region, the territories were “given” to Ethiopia in 1956. The Ethiopian Empire was seen by Britain and France as a fellow Christian Empire surrounded by threatening Muslims; Moreover, Ethiopia assisted Britain in defeating Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, a freedom fighter and the founder of the Somali Dervish state in the 1920s.

It was only after the failure of the Bevin plan proposal to unite all the Somali territories into one independent nation-state that the fate of the Somali people in the region was sealed. Without their knowledge and participation, their land was given to Ethiopia. This led to numerous revolts and armed confrontation with the Ethiopia Empire between the 1940s and 1960s.

Routinized State Violence

The Somali people in Eastern Ethiopia have a precarious political relationship with the Ethiopian state: one based on mutual suspicion, contempt and violent out-bursts. In her book We do not have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya Keren Weitzberg document how the Somali inhabitants of North-Eastern Kenya face othering, contempt and the suspicion of being unpatriotic from the state; a similar political and social phenomenon exists in the Somali region in Ethiopia. Numerous attempts of self-determination or secession were violently crushed by the Ethiopian state and its security apparatus in the region. Moreover, the state settled non-Somali speaking ethnic groups in the region to curb and engineer the demography for political ends.

The region and its inhabitants have been politically emasculated through violence and suppression. Political mobilizations and aspirations based on Somali identity and nationalism were viewed as dangerous to the state sovereignty and consequently repressed. Armed Somali rebels such as the Western Somalia Liberation Front (WSLF) and the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) have emblematic of the Somali people resistance and aspirations of self-determination in Ethiopia.

More recently, when Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia in 1992, the whole region was engulfed with violent insurgency since the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) renegaded on the consensus reached between the rebels that toppled the Derg regime in Ethiopia in 1991. Alongside the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front (ARDUF) the ONLF re-ignited its armed resistance against the Ethiopian state. State violence then become part of the daily lives of the inhabitants of the region: abductions, extra-judicial killings, incarcerations, torture, rape and mass killings traumatized and maimed the communities. The investigations and narratives that have emerged from the Jail Ogaden (Ethiopia’s version of Abu Ghraib) embody the state violence and brutalities in the Somali region.

The Right to Self-Determination

When Abiy Ahmed become the first Oromo politician to lead Ethiopia, it was anticipated that the young and dynamic former soldier will transform Ethiopian politics for the better. However, the Abiy-mania that gripped the nation and the whole of Horn of Africa turned into a nightmarish debacle of successive wars. A genocidal war was waged against Tigray with approximately 600,000 dead. Right now, a war between the government and the Fano Amhara militia is ravaging the Amhara region with documented human rights abuses.

Hence, the recent utterances of Birhanu Jula that opposition groups in the Somali region are paid operatives of Egypt do not portend well for the region in a time Ethiopia has a geopolitical tension with Somalia – and to some extent Egypt and Eritrea. Peace and stability has eluded Ethiopia since Abiy Ahmed come to power; the country is fractured along ethnic lines. The center cannot hold.

The Somali region has one option: the right to self-determination and secession which is enshrined in the Ethiopian constitution, article 39. Substantial representative democracy and individual liberties and freedoms are elusive in Ethiopia; the state is in perpetual war with the periphery and opposition groups; political differences and contestations are resolved through military violence and repression. Ethiopia is on the brink of collapse. A recent Financial Times article suggested that Ethiopia risks becoming a new Yugoslavia.

Ethiopia is emblematic of the failure of the post-colonial nation-building process in Africa. The country is hemorrhaging from within. The political situation in Ethiopia is unsustainable. The Somali region and its people should chart their own path for the future. In his books Brutalism and Critique of Black Reason the Cameroonian Philosopher Achille Mbembe laments that violence and brutalities – which Africans resisted during the colonial era – have become normalized and intrinsic to contemporary African politics. Maybe a new wave of decolonization from internal colonialism and statist domination is apt in contemporary African politics. If becoming a nation fails due to ethnic fragmentations and political hegemonies coupled with perennial state violence, then dissolution becomes inevitable – and a necessity. We are not pessimistic: painful and violent ends and collapse carry within themselves seeds of new horizons and possibilities as history indicates.

*Mahat Maalim Ibrahim is a researcher and a PhD candidate in Economics at Istanbul Ibn Haldun University, @MahatMacalim

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