http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/13814/south-sudan-conflict-destabilizes-ethiopia-s-regional-strategy
South Sudan Conflict Destabilizes Ethiopia's Regional Strategy
By Harry Verhoeven, May 29, 2014, Briefing
If the past century's dominant image of Ethiopia was that of an
impoverished, war-torn state, epitomized by the horrendous 1984-1985 famine
in Tigray and Wollo provinces, the early 21st-century picture of the
country is surely exemplified by the construction of the biggest
infrastructure project anywhere in Africa: Mere miles from Ethiopia's
border with Sudan, nearly 8,000 workers and engineers are laboring seven
days a week, 24 hours a day as part of a round-the-clock construction
schedule to erect the nearly 560-foot-tall Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
(GERD).
Africa's second-most populous nation is betting that the
multibillion-dollar GERD will dramatically modernize Ethiopia's domestic
political economy through mass electrification and have a positive
influence on regional relations through the export of surplus power to
North and East Africa and its hinterland. Late Prime Minister Meles
Zenawi's dream was for Ethiopia to emerge as a regional hegemon through
energy diplomacy. His successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, has judiciously
stuck to this mission and has given his dam builders all the resources and
political backing required to complete the biggest hydro-infrastructure
project on the Nile since the Aswan High Dam.
For Ethiopia to fund its domestic transformation through an integrated
regional energy market, however, a stable Horn of Africa and Nile Basin are
absolutely essential. For centuries, the region has been characterized by
proxy wars and the export of internal instability by countries like
Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia itself; reversing this historical pattern
requires not just high-modernist infrastructure and economic partnerships,
but also a new international politics. Meles understood this, and following
the 1998-2000 bloody conflict with his former comrades in arms in Eritrea,
he led the Ethiopian government's attempts to play a more positive role of
peacemaker in the region.
Addis Ababa normalized relations with Khartoum after decades of direct and
indirect conflict, and encouraged the implementation of the 2005
Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which was meant to tackle the root causes of
catastrophic violence in Sudan and ultimately allowed South Sudan to
peacefully secede on July 9, 2011. From late 2010 onward, Meles and his
diplomats worked closely with the African Union and the U.S. on the
"post-referendum arrangements," hosting a series of quasi-permanent
negotiations between the two governments in Khartoum and Juba to settle
outstanding issues like border disputes, sharing oil wealth and Sudan's
mountain of debt. Ethiopia's service as vital broker and trusted
interlocutor has received near-universal praise in the international
community and among Sudanese and South Sudanese politicians.
For a long time, then, Ethiopian diplomacy seemed to go from strength to
strength, improving Addis Ababa's position in the geopolitical long game
with the Nile Basin's historical hegemon, Egypt, which has consistently
warned that Ethiopian dam-building on the Blue Nile threatens catastrophic
consequences for downstream states. The post-2011 turbulence in Cairo, and
Ethiopia's close partnership with the U.S. in the context of the global war
on terror, seemed to pave the way for a redrawing of the regional balance
of forces, with Sudan, South Sudan, Yemen and Kenya queuing up to sign
energy deals with Ethiopia under Meles and, later, Hailemariam. Egypt found
itself impotent and consumed with domestic issues, and Eritrea, Ethiopia's
old arch foe, remained isolated and increasingly ineffective at
destabilizing Ethiopia from within or without.
However, the December 2013 outbreak of South Sudan's civil war between
President Salva Kiir and a camp of disgruntled politicians and generals of
the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), led by Kiir's former
deputy Riek Machar, has gravely disturbed Ethiopia's regional master plan.
The challenge for Ethiopia is twofold. On the one hand, the conflict
gravely tests Ethiopia's self-styled role as neutral mediator. Outrage has
grown among Ethiopia's own Nuer population following waves of ethnic
cleansing that have killed thousands of Dinka and Nuer civilians across the
border in South Sudan. The flood of refugees into Ethiopia's Gambella
state, many of them carrying stories of killings perpetrated by Kiir's
largely Dinka army, destabilizes Addis Ababa's vulnerable western frontier
and local power-sharing arrangements.
On the other hand, Ethiopia has been forced to respond to the conflict's
regional dimensions. Uganda's military intervention, ordered by Ugandan
President Yoweri Museveni after consultation with U.S. National Security
Adviser Susan Rice, saved Juba from being captured by Riek's rebels but
dramatically upped the regional ante. While Addis Ababa tried to reach a
peaceful settlement through its role as chair of the Intergovernmental
Authority on Development, an East African regional body, unilateral
intervention by member state Uganda greatly irked Kenya and Ethiopia. The
intervention also led Sudanese generals to warn that a Ugandan military
presence near the Sudan-South Sudan border would not be tolerated, given
Museveni's extensive support for rebels fighting the Khartoum regime.
The menace of renewed proxy war between Sudan and Uganda inside South Sudan
not only risks further exacerbating the humanitarian crisis, it also puts
tremendous pressure on the carefully assembled coalition of Nile Basin
countries who have endorsed Ethiopia's GERD and its vision of energy
diplomacy. Such tensions could easily be exploited by Egypt, which has been
reaching out to Kiir through military cooperation agreements and additional
development projects, and by Eritrea. Asmara has already been accused of
arming South Sudanese rebels, and a series of meetings between Sudanese
President Omar al-Bashir and Eritrean strongman Issaias Afewerki are
causing Ethiopian officials considerable anxiety. In other words, from
Ethiopia's perspective, the sooner the Ugandan intervention is scaled down
or embedded in a multilateral framework and regional force, the better. But
it remains to be seen who else is willing to wade into the chaos of civil
war and ethnic cleansing in South Sudan, despite the unanimous vote of the
U.N. Security Council to improve protection of civilians.
Ethiopian foreign policy has for years now been a remarkably successful
example of realpolitik, carefully aligning the government's internal
interests with those of regional players and global forces. Whether that
image endures, and a more prosperous and peaceful Horn of Africa emerges,
is highly contingent on whether Ethiopia manages to help pull the region
out of acute crisis mode and back onto the long-term trajectory of a new
hydropolitics around the Nile. As seen from Addis Ababa, the stakes could
hardly be higher.
Dr. Harry Verhoeven teaches African politics at the University of Oxford
and is a junior research fellow at Wolfson College. He is the convenor of
the Oxford University China-Africa Network and the author of the
forthcoming book, "Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan: The Political
Economy of Military-Islamist State-Building" (Cambridge University Press).
Photo: The Nile River and delta as seen from space (NASA photo by Jacques
Descloitres).
Received on Thu May 29 2014 - 09:12:40 EDT