Kenya Backs Ogaden Peace Effort
David Arnold
September 26, 2013
WASHINGTON — One of the longest-running conflicts in Africa in the
Somali-inhabited region of Ethiopia could be moving toward a resolution.
Peace talks broken off last year between the Ethiopian government and the
rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) may re-open in October,
according to Kenyan negotiators.
Last year’s talks, hosted in Nairobi by Kenyan government officials, were
overshadowed by the death of Ethiopia’s longtime Prime Minister, Meles
Zenawi. They ended early without addressing substantive issues of a
half-century of conflict.
“There was a sort of uncertainty at the top of Ethiopian leadership and
about what they really wanted from these talks,” said Cedric Barnes,
International Crisis Group’s Horn of Africa regional coordinator in Nairobi.
The driving force behind both negotiation efforts is a team of Kenyan
officials who are ethnic Somalis led by a former State Minister for Defense
and member of parliament representing Garissa County, Mohamed Yusuf Haji.
Kenya’s special envoy to the Horn of Africa, Ambassador Ali Bunow Korane,
confirmed recently that the Ethiopian government and leadership of the ONLF
have agreed to meet.
Despite recent reports of fighting near Jijiga, the administrative capital
of the Ogaden, Kenya continues pushing for talks. “We’re discussing possible
negotiations in October,” Korane said. The ONLF’s chief negotiator,
<
http://onlf.org/> Abdirahman Mahdi, confirmed the Kenyan initiative.
“There’s quite a bit of shuttle diplomacy going on,” said Barnes, author of
a new ICG
<
http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/africa/horn-of-africa/ethiopia-eritre
a/207-ethiopia-prospects-for-peace-in-ogaden.aspx> report on the Ogaden
conflict.
The Ogaden talks could bring an end to a decades-long conflict that has left
a large region of Ethiopia, desperately in need of development, devastated
and marginalized. But Barnes’ report warns that success “requires
unprecedented concessions from both sides.”
After the World War II withdrawal of Italian forces, Ethiopia took
possession of the Ogaden, a vast semi-arid land of shrubs and bare hills
that became the southeastern quarter of Ethiopia. The majority of the 4.5
million population are ethnic Somalis whose Ogaadeni clan ties extend to
major parts of Somalia and Kenya.
Although dates are not yet firm, Special Envoy Korane spoke optimistically
of the impact they could have in the region. “I think settlement in the
Ogaden could have an impact on some of the other problems of Somalis in the
region.”
A constitutional stumbling block
Last year’s talks ended when the ONLF refused to accept the Ethiopia
constitution as a pre-condition to talks because of Article 39, which
addresses the right to secede.
“The constitution says they have the right to self-determination up to and
including independence,” said
<
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/keller/> Edmond Keller, an
Ethiopia scholar at the University of California at Los Angeles. “But it’s
sort of the old communist dictum: You have the right, but not to exercise
it.”
The two sides must confront the same issue in new talks, but “what we’ve
heard is that both parties are looking for a work-around,” said Barnes.
“It’s not a question of ONLF accepting it, or the government insisting.”
“While I doubt that the Ethiopian government is prepared to accept
independence or self-determination for the Ogaden region, I assume that
greater regional autonomy is on the negotiating table,’ former U.S.
ambassador to Ethiopia <
http://davidshinn.blogspot.com/> David Shinn told
the editor of Ogadentoday Press recently.
Mahdi argues that the single goal of the ONLF, which he helped to found in
the 1970s, is to permit the Ethiopians of the Ogaden to determine their own
political future. “The issue has been identity and legacy of 50 years of
oppression.”
“After the breakdown, there was a lot of campaigning to show the Somali
people that they are part of Ethiopia,” said Mahdi. “Many outsiders have
been deluded by a lot of Ethiopian propaganda.”
But war fatigue could overcome mutual distrust. “Two decades of deadly
conflict … have exhausted the local Ethiopian-Somali population sufficiently
to push the ONLF back to the table,” said the ICG report.
In addition to several divisions of Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF)
now stationed in the Ogaden, the government recruited thousands of local
Somalis to form a Special Police Force stepping up military pressure on the
ONLF. Both sides have been charged with abusing the civilian population by a
2010 Human Rights Watch
<
http://www.hrw.org/features/ogaden-war-crimes-ethiopia-0> report.
“Abuses have been committed by all sides,” said Barnes. “Both sides have to
reconcile that dire things have been done.”
Pressure from the Somali diaspora
The research director of the <
http://www.ihasa.org/> Institute for Horn of
Africa Studies in Minneapolis and a native of the Ogaden, Faisal Roble,
accused the Ethiopian government of abuses but said the ONLF is hurt by weak
leadership. “Frankly, the ONLF lacks leadership, the capacity to engage in
international diplomacy …”
Roble said that attitudes are changing on both sides of the Ethiopian
conflict. Somalis in the Horn are seeing Ethiopia in a new light, said
Roble.
“There is a new prime minister in Ethiopia, and they are asserting
themselves as a regional broker in peace building,” said Keller. “The
central government has been reaching out to ethnic groups in the Somali
region to find reasons for agreement.”
Somalis outside the Ogaden are now changing their views of Ethiopia, Roble
said.
“The Ethiopian leadership is not the traditional enemy they have known for
years” and diaspora Somalis are putting pressure on the ONLF to reach a
settlement, he said. Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Haile Mariam Desalegne,
unveiled in the administrative capital of Jijiga a statue of Sayyîd Muhammad
`Abd Allâh al-Hasan, the founder of the Pan-Somali movement. Similar
monuments in Mogadishu and other towns in the region have been destroyed in
clan warfare, said Roble.
Roble said Ethiopia is “opening its heart, at least, to the history of
Somalis.”
Received on Thu Sep 26 2013 - 10:28:47 EDT