89'-91: Northeast Africa's “collective near-death experience”

The north-east Africa region generally has a threshold of turbulence far higher than most other parts of the continent, and indeed the wider world. I recall one analyst noting that to point out that the “the Horn of Africa is in crisis” would be an evergreen statement. He was right. I struggle to think of a time when it has not been true and, aside from brief moments when tensions eased, there have always been — at best — potentially explosive issues simmering.

Yet even by that standard, the area stretching from Chad to Somalia confronted system-level challenges and episodes of extreme violence that would trigger transformative change between 1989 and 1991 – in some instances for the better, in others much, much worse. This coincided with the end of the Cold War, which removed the raison d’être for Washington and Moscow’s largesse in cultivating and supporting local allies in a region both considered strategically vital and sought to keep the other out of. From Chad to Somalia, governments abruptly lost their value to former patrons, pulling the rug from beneath regional elites and exposing the fragility of their regimes. Alex de Waal, the British expert on the region, described the region as going through a “collective near-death experience” in his book The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa.

Going from the heart of the Sahel to the Horn of Africa, Hissène Habré was replaced by Idriss Déby Itno, his former boss, in 1990; next door, Omar al-Bashir seized power from Sudanese prime minister Sadiq al-Mahdi; Meles Zenawi ousted Mengistu Hailemariam in 1991; Eritrea then seceded; and Siad Barre was removed by rebels in Mogadishu, leaving a vacuum for more than a decade in Somalia (check here). Another secessionist movement emerged in what is now Somaliland, which is still seeking recognition for its unilateral declaration of independence.

Though the leaders who came to power in the early 1990s are now all gone, except for Isaias Afwerki, who led Eritrea to independence, the entire region still lives with the consequences of those seismic events and what led to them. History swept through this corner of the world and, in one great gust, blew away the sclerotic regimes that were clinging on for dear life, spending their final breaths still mutually undermining each other.

I have always seen these events as interlinked, shaped by the interaction between domestic and regional politics and by global structural changes that hastened these regimes’ collapse. Yet little writing considers them in these terms. Alex de Waal is an exception. His book, though not centred on how these regimes contributed to each other’s downfall, explores instead how political loyalties in the region are rented and how regimes face challenges when new players outbid the former dominant powers for loyalty, or when the price of an actor’s loyalty changes. He ties the collapse of these regimes to dwindling aid budgets and the changing priorities of the Cold War Superpowers. I don’t intend to challenge that here, although I would add that I believe the political decisions of leaders in Mogadishu and Addis Ababa played just as big a role in my own schema.

In his book, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa, de Waal encourages us not think about the countries in East Africa as neatly bounded nation-states but more like trees. Some trees have strong, deep roots and are resilient in the face of extreme challenges; others develop healthy crowns, with lush foliage and sturdy branches, while some are sparse or thin. In certain cases, the branches of some trees extend over their neighbours, taking extra space and sometimes even blocking the sun, whereas the withered crowns of others leave them weakened.

You might say Sudan was a tree with a small truck but long branches reaching toward both Ethiopia and Chad, while Ethiopia had deep roots and a strong trunk, its branches intertwining with Somalia’s, a tree with a thinner trunk, weaker branches, and shallower roots. Ethiopia’s branches also reached into Sudan where the foliage of both tangled, if we take the metaphor to its limit. In other words, de Waal shows how elites relied on demographics, geography, and the loyalties of actors they could command to sustain and extend their power or to weaken their neighbors. The legal boundaries of their states were not the primary concern when formulating government policy.

Many African states struggled to develop national identities inclusive enough to unite all people within their borders, frequently resulting in excluded populations and often conflict.

This metaphor helps us better understand the often-toxic obsession these states had with what would otherwise be considered the “internal affairs” of their neighbours. The boundaries separating Sudan from Chad, and Somalia from Ethiopia, did not coincide with the realms over which these states believed they held interests. The borders also did not coincide with natural frontiers, creating geographic challenges to projecting state power throughout a territory, what Ethiopian opposition leader Jawar Mohammed recently called the “broadcasting ability of the state.” For example, Somali and Eritrean rebels in Ethiopia could relatively easily cross the desert into Somalia to seek refuge or supplies, then return to carry out armed attacks, and to continue their other activities. The same was true for Tigrayan and Eritrean rebels in Sudan fighting Ethiopia, as the al-Fashaqa plains made it easy to use Sudan as a rear base, beyond the reach of Ethiopia’s security forces.

This challenge extends beyond the specific region of Africa I am focusing on. Many African states struggled to develop national identities inclusive enough to unite all people within their borders, frequently resulting in excluded populations and often conflict. Some communities, such as Somalis and Eritreans, resisted incorporation into Ethiopia from the outset and fought doggedly to make that point. Elke Grawert, a German scholar of Africa, documents civil wars in 29 of 52 African countries between the wave of independence in the 1960s and 1990. “In 19 cases, extremely repressive rule deepened social cleavages and undermined the formation of national identities,” Grawert observes. This was a big problem in northeast Africa which provided hostile neighbours with opportunities to exploit.

The Sudan-Chad border, for instance, bisected communities such as the Zaghawa—a powerful group in Chad, but a marginal and sometimes persecuted non-Arab group in Sudan—creating ready-made sanctuaries for insurgents on both sides. Chadian President Idriss Déby himself launched his successful 1990 rebellion from Darfur, western Sudan, where his ethnic group reside, ousting Hissène Habré.

In the 1980s, Habré headed an extremely violent and unstable regime that enjoyed French and US backing, as it was viewed as a check on the regional ambitions of Muammar Gaddafi. Sudan, which had just undergone a military coup by figures from within the country’s Islamic movement, wanted him gone too as he was hostile to their politics. AFP reported that Habré said Libya, which he had been fighting to fend off for close to a decade, was “preparing to launch again, with the tacit complicity of the puppet regime in Sudan, its forces of aggression against Chad from Darfur.” The new government in Sudan was definitely not a Libyan “puppet regime” as Habré put it (much later in 2011 it would back rebels who overthrew Gadaffi too) but it was hostile to the Chadian leader.

Even though Déby was quite an unusual friend for Gaddafi (as Habré’s former defence minister, he would have fought Libyan troops), the shared interest in removing Habré was enough to overlook that detail. Déby, equipped with Libyan weapons and armoured vehicles, fought his way into Chad’s capital, N’Djamena from Darfur. Habré fled to Cameroon, and much later a landmark case was brought against him that would see him convicted for war crimes, torture and rape among other grave crimes.

Déby was initially grateful to Khartoum’s new leaders for their support and long overlooked the persecution of members of his restive Zaghawa ethnic group in Darfur, who had rebelled against their marginalisation in Sudan in the early 2000s. Déby met with prominent Sudanese Zaghawa figures led by Khalil Ibrahim in 2002—who would go on to become a major figure in Darfur’s rebel politics before later being killed—and an associate of his later said: “There were a number of meetings… but the president was opposed to the [Darfur] rebellion.”

Over time, however, this position became unsustainable, and he later backed Darfur’s Zaghawa-led Justice and Equality Movement under domestic pressure to act against the Sudan-backed Janjaweed militias, illustrating how shared ethnicities across colonial borders fueled cyclical proxy warfare.

In Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, Déby consolidated his rule through the Zaghawa dominated Patriotic Salvation Movement (MPS) and army and became the country’s longest-serving statesman. His regime took on dynastic qualities after he was killed during an offensive against anti-government rebels in 2021 while leading the army on the battlefield. His son, Mahamat Déby (Kaka), then took over and remains in charge, though he has expanded the regime’s base beyond his own ethnic group.

Returning to the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sudan, swept up in a fresh revolutionary fervour, supported the overthrow of Hissène Habré in Chad, as well as Mengistu Hailemariam in Ethiopia and backing Eritrean rebels and other ethnic armed groups—though its role was far more significant in Chad than in Ethiopia. It also backed Islamic groups in Eritrea after its independence in 1993 and in Somalia, though with much less success. With Eritrea, this sparked another proxy conflict, with Khartoum and Asmara each backing rival rebel groups. Scholars of the region, such as Jeffrey Lefebvre, were able to examine the conflict between Islamist Khartoum and several left-leaning progressive regimes that came to power across the region—from Uganda to Eritrea—in the 1990s as an ideological one.

Sudan wanted to export the revolution to all its neighbours, even including Egypt. Hassan Turabi, Sudan’s éminence grise at the time, even recalls long candid conversations with Egypt’s late former president, Hosni Mubarak, about Islamic revival in which he said: “I cannot remember a single issue after that on which we had differed.” Sudan was later linked to an attempt to assassinate Mubarak, though, as I think, the conversations were not progressing as quickly as they had hoped.

The Islamic movement gradually consolidated its control over the Sudanese state in the years that followed. Like many revolutions, it eventually sidestepped overly zealous believers in its ideals, such as Hassan Turabi, who were seen as too ideologically uncompromising in the face of serious fiscal and political challenges for the new regime. The discovery of oil in the late 1990s and early 2000s extended the regime’s viability, enabling an infrastructure boom in Khartoum and surrounding regions and the paying of rents to subdue possible challengers.

The ideological composition of the regime also provided it with an additional layer of legitimacy and connection to the public. Applying the analytical framework of British-Pakistani scholar Salman Sayyid—originally developed for Iran’s revolution—the National Congress Party (NCP), the formal party of the Islamic movement, helped bridge the gap between the beliefs of a significant segment of the Sudanese public and those of its leaders, ensuring a dedicated, ideologically driven base. Noah Salomon’s For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State is an excellent study of how the movement reshaped the country in its image. The NCP regime endured until 2019, when a popular uprising substantially rolled back its power. This was followed by a division of authority between the army—where many Islamists remained entrenched—and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which the regime had originally created to fight in Darfur.

Ethiopia and Sudan, despite sharing only a short border, maintained more complex relations but during downturns would back armed groups in one another’s territories for leverage. John Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), for example, received training and safe haven in Mengistu’s Ethiopia. Garang was not initially a separatist; he sought a secular, decentralised, unified Sudan. However, following his death in 2005, his movement was later taken over by a secessionist faction under Salva Kiir, the current president, which culminated in the successful 2011 referendum. Addis Ababa was not the only actor responsible for this outcome, and indeed Meles Zenawi, Mengistu’s succesor, began scaling back support for Sudanese rebels in the early 2000s; nevertheless, it played a crucial role.

Somalia overtly claimed Ethiopia’s Somali-majority Ogaden region, invading it outright in 1977–78 and backing armed groups there throughout the latter part of the 20th century. Mogadishu coordinated the efforts of Oromo, Somali, Afar and Tigrayan fighters who were challenging Addis Ababa’s authority. Isaias Afwerki and Meles Zenawi, who would emerge as Eritrea’s and Ethiopia’s post-conflict rulers in the 1990s, for example, both spent time in Mogadishu, travelled on Somali passports, and were provided with radio stations to broadcast their messages in their languages. Barre, Somalia’s military leader, was able to style himself as a revolutionary, backing downtrodden groups across Africa and especially in his own region, which usually translated into arming rebels in Ethiopia.

In an interview I have not been able to date exactly, but which definitely took place in the 1970s, Barre said: “I told you that we always support those who are fighting for their freedom. We are against anybody or any state who oppresses people and refuses their freedom. Whatever it costs, we always support that principle.”

Somalia eventually helped topple Ethiopia’s Derg regime by arming those rebels and facilitated Eritrea’s separation from Ethiopia, which in turn supported an alphabet soup of rebel groups in Somalia that brought down Siad Barre. Although Somalia backed the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), and other groups fighting Ethiopia’s government, it would be wrong to think of them as proxies for Mogadishu. The armed groups simply shared grievances and, like Somalia’s government at the time, viewed Ethiopia as a colonial state subjugating the country’s many ethnic groups and nations.

The official magazine of the Somalia Revolutionary Socialist party, for example wrote a 1977 editorial in which it said: “The controversy in the Horn of Africa is not a border dispute between the SDR [Somali Democratic Republic] and Ethiopia, it is the outcome of the liberation struggles of the Western Somali People, Eritrea and other nationalities waging wars against a century old Ethiopian colonialism.”

I interviewed a member of an Eritrean rebel front who told me the relationship they had with Mogadishu was “crucial”, in that Barre never wavered in his support, in contrast to other Arab League countries, which did. “Somalia was the only country that never changed its position on the Eritrean revolution,” Mohammed Kheir Omer, a former member of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), a leading Eritrean organisation at the time told me. “Sudan fluctuated a lot. Egypt and Saudi Arabia provided minimal support. Other Arab countries helped but Somalia remained a key ally through our struggle.”

Amongst the groups Ethiopia backed in Somalia was the Somali National Movement (SNM), which—in a moment of instant karma for Somalia—declared its own secession to form Somaliland, mirroring Eritrea’s break from Ethiopia. Addis Ababa had earlier backed the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF), formed in 1978 with roots in what is now Puntland, the first armed movement to challenge Barre’s regime. Somali rebels tended to be more reserved about the nature of their relationship with Addis Ababa due to a widely ingrained view of Ethiopia as a national rival, if not an outright enemy.

Ethiopia is composed of almost a hundred different ethnic groups but the Ethiopian state accorded a place of prominence to the Amhara language, Amhara culture, Orthodox Christianity — the faith professed by the majority of Amharic people — and Amhara history

Ismail Warsame, a former senior Puntland official serving Abdillahi Yusuf, the SSDF’s first leader, even said Mengistu and Yusuf were “suspicious of the other’s political motive.” Writing for the Somali website Wardheer News, Warsame wrote: “Yusuf wanted to depose Siyad Barre. Mengistu wanted to destroy Somalia.”

In the end, Mengistu had his way, and his successors—Meles Zenawi, Hailemariam Desalegn, and even later Abiy Ahmed—pursued a policy aimed at keeping Somalia balkanised by propping up regional actors, often at the expense of allowing central authority to consolidate. Speaking to Newsweek in 2008, Zenawi probably expressed a widely held view of Somalia in Addis Ababa when he said: “An oversupply of national sentiment is not the problem in Somalia. The problem is a lack of it. The problem is an oversupply of sub-sub-clannish attitude”.

The new regime Zenawi built laid the groundwork for addressing the “Question of Nationalities,” as the prominent Ethiopian student activist Walleligne Mekonnen put it in 1969. Ethiopia is composed of almost a hundred different ethnic groups but the Ethiopian state accorded a place of prominence to the Amhara language, Amhara culture, Orthodox Christianity — the faith professed by the majority of Amharic people — and Amhara history. Everything else was to be erased or rendered invisible. “In short to be an Ethiopian, you will have to wear an Amhara mask (to use Fanon’s expression),” Mekonnen wrote in that landmark essay. “Start asserting your national identity and you are automatically a tribalist, that is if you are not blessed to be born an Amhara.”

For the Somali state, the proxy conflict with Ethiopia proved disastrous, which is why I think of it as a tree with a thin trunk and shallow roots, struggling for sunlight against a much larger and more powerful neighbour

Ethnic federalism, the system of government developed by Zenawi, changed that and allowed the country’s major ethnic groups to establish states within the Ethiopian federation where they could nurture their own cultures. For Somalis, this meant the widespread use of the Somali language, the development of Somali culture, and the opportunity for Somali political figures to integrate into Ethiopia’s body politic by gaining a stake in maintaining a functioning system. In 2018, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), the successor to the Mogadishu-backed Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF), laid down its arms and decided to engage in civil political struggle after Abiy Ahmed created more space for Somali political participation at both national and regional levels. The ONLF still maintains complex relations with Addis Ababa, which have recently deteriorated, but today Ethiopia has a deputy prime minister who is Somali and a finance minister which was previously unthinkable. This has meant that even if Mogadishu had the capacity to stir nationalist feeling in Ethiopia against the government, the potency of the sentiments it once tapped into has greatly diminished.

A referendum was held in Eritrea, where effectively everyone voted for their own state. Although it has since become an extremely repressive dictatorship that has fought all its neighbours (even Yemen), it holds a seat at the UN and a place in the international community. Its growth has stagnated since then, which is a completely different question.

For the Somali state, the proxy conflict with Ethiopia proved disastrous, which is why I think of it as a tree with a thin trunk and shallow roots, struggling for sunlight against a much larger and more powerful neighbour. Somalia went toe-to-toe with a country several times larger than it for four decades.

The 1990s saw the Somali state completely implode, plunging the country into a ruinous civil war. I guess for Somalia it wasn’t a “near-death experience” but was a death experience. It remains the only state in the region that has not, even to this day, been able to meaningfully reconstitute itself, with the exception of a few regional examples that appear stronger than they actually are. Until the mid-1990s, Somaliland struggled to manage and resolve power-sharing questions among clans in the north, while Puntland only emerged after a period of fighting in 1998. Step by step, more sub-state entities have emerged. While these have addressed the need for local governance, the jury is still out on whether they have helped or hindered the rebuilding of a Somali state. These sub-state entities are also riddled with internal contradictions between their claims and the realities of how effectively they can govern the populations for whom they are responsible. Somaliland, Puntland, Jubaland, and Hirshabelle State all have their own movements that have either already sought, or aspire to, separate and create their own smaller polities.