Mogadishu ( PP Commentary) — Somali secessionists wonder why Ethiopia does not promote secession in Somalia. Two years ago, the former foreign minister of the Somaliland administration, Essa Keyd, claimed that his administration acts as a buffer zone for Ethiopia against Al-Shabaab. The idea of buffer zones in Somalia originated in an essay co-written in 2018 by Seyoum Mesfin, the former foreign minister of Ethiopia. The TPLF saw the disintegration of Somalia as an opportunity to co-opt rival Somali groups into its sphere of influence on the one hand and to prolong its reign in Ethiopia on the other. The essay argued that Kenya and Ethiopia could establish buffer zones in Somalia because the Federal Government of Somalia lacked the institutional capacity to prevent its territories from becoming a terrorist haven.
TPLF rule was imposed on Ethiopia after the end of the Cold War. Its one-time Marxist leaders were shrewd for a period of time before they forgot that, in Ethiopia, the preoccupation of any regime is to maintain ethnic supremacy over other Ethiopian ethnicities. That is the rationale of the ethnocratic state in Ethiopia.
In 1991, the Oromo Liberation Front had to be disarmed to give the TPLF the opportunity to shape post-Mengistu Ethiopia. During the TPLF’s reign in Ethiopia (1991-2018) under the EPRDF, many graduate students wrote dissertations on the Somalia-Ethiopia rivalry. Emperor Haile Selassie understood that fomenting dissent or secession in Somalia could raise the political consciousness of non-Amhara ethnicities in Ethiopia, particularly the majority Cushitic ethnicity.
Ethiopia’s dislike for secession in Somalia has historic roots. According to Ethiopian leaders, the primary cause of territorial disputes between Somalia and Ethiopia was the foreign policy of Somalia, expressed by the Somali hero Abdullahi Issa Mohamud at the 1959 Greater Somalia Conference in Mogadishu and formalised in 1960 when the Republic of Somalia came into existence. The “missing territories” argument was partly based on the territories Ethiopia annexed in 1954 after Britain violated the Protectorate Agreement with Somali “tribes” whose elders did not read the fine print in the agreements. The Protectorate Agreements denied Somalis the ability to seek recourse to common law should Britain violate the agreements.
The position of Somalia from 1960 until now has not changed. Last year, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud invoked that policy when he said, “Somalia has given up territories annexed illegally by Ethiopia and cannot accept Ethiopia violating the territorial integrity of Somalia.” No Somali secessionist rejects the fundamental principle that Ethiopia annexed Somali-inhabited territories with the help of the British Empire. Ethiopia understands that Hargeisa is the bastion of Greater Somalia ideology. The young generation of Somali secessionists cannot comprehend the deep suspicion Ethiopia has about secession. Ethiopia feels it is a victim of secession, which made it a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa.
© Puntland Post, 2025
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