PREVIEW
The face-to-face meeting in the Somali capital follows mediation in Turkey in December
When Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was greeted on the tarmac at Mogadishu airport by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud on 27 February, hopes were raised of a normalisation of relations after the two leaders fell out a year ago over the status of Somaliland. The streets of Mogadishu were festooned with banners depicting Abiy against the background of the Ethiopian flag.
After spending most of 2024 in dispute over Abiy’s Memorandum of Understanding with Somaliland, offering it diplomatic recognition in exchange for a port in the Gulf of Aden, Abiy and Hassan Sheikh agreed to resolve the dispute at a summit mediated by Turkey in December (Dispatches 17/12/24, Abiy and Hassan Sheikh step back from the brink).
The talks in Mogadishu were the first round of ‘technical discussions’ aiming at agreeing on commercial arrangements to give Ethiopia ‘reliable, secure and sustainable access to and from the sea.’
In another sign of warmer relations between Addis Ababa and Mogadishu, Ethiopia is to provide 2,500 troops in the new African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) tasked with combatting Islamic insurgents in Somalia. Prior to the December rapprochement, Hassan Sheikh’s government had insisted that Ethiopian armed forces would not be welcome (Dispatches 12/11/24, Defence Minister insists Ethiopia not be part of new AU mission).
The main loser here is likely to be Burundi, whose troops are set to leave Somalia following a disagreement on the size of its deployment. The missions, mainly financed by western governments, have been a major source of foreign exchange for Burundi (Dispatches 7/1/25, Row over troop numbers jeopardises AU mission).
The deployment includes soldiers, police and civilian support staff, according to Somali and AU officials. Under an agreement struck by diplomats last week, the remainder of the 11,900 strong AUSSOM force will be comprised of 4,500 soldiers from Uganda, 1,520 from Djibouti, 1,410 from Kenya and 1,091 from Egypt, according to African Union officials.
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