A budding dispute over plans to develop a port in Somaliland risks destabilizing the Horn of Africa region, the semi-autonomous territory’s foreign minister said.
Saad Ali Shire’s comments raise the stakes in a standoff between Somaliland and Somalia, which this month declared the planned harbor illegal. The impasse could also jeopardize Ethiopia’s bid to reduce its reliance on neighboring Djibouti as its main trade route through the Red Sea and the United Arab Emirates’ plans to extend its military influence in the region.
DP World, Dubai’s state-owned port operator, won a 30-year concession in 2016 for the port at Berbera on Somaliland’s coast, which will cost as much as $442 million. Ethiopia’s government took a 19 percent stake in the project. Somalia, which doesn’t recognize Somaliland’s 1991 declaration of autonomy, dismissed the deal as “non-existent, null and void.”
“If Somalia decides to invade Somaliland” over the development of the port, “then we will have the right to defend our territory,” Shire said in a phone interview from Abu Dhabi on March 17, where he was part of a Somaliland delegation meeting Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, the U.A.E.’s deputy prime minister. “That confrontation of course will not be limited to us.”
Berbera, which will host a U.A.E. military airport and naval base, is located on the Gulf of Aden, 260 kilometers (162 miles) south of Yemen, where U.A.E. troops in a Saudi Arabia-led coalition are battling Houthi rebels.