Monday September 17, 2018
A rebel group in Ethiopia said it will demand a
referendum on self-determination for the country’s troubled, gas-rich
Somali region during landmark peace talks with Prime Minister Abiy
Ahmed’s government.
The plan by the Ogaden National Liberation
Front, which has staged a low-level insurgency in Ethiopia’s east for
over three decades, comes as Abiy invites once-banned opponents to take
part in elections. The demands may aggravate a scramble for the region’s
energy resources, including natural gas reserves the government
estimates will eventually earn it $7 billion a year.
At stake are
an estimated 8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Ogaden Basin,
where exports are due to begin 2021 via a pipeline to neighboring
Djibouti. A unit of China Poly Group Corp. has also started testing oil
deposits.
“We want to achieve self-determination recognized by
international law under the current Ethiopian constitution,” Ahmed
Yassin Abdi, the ONLF’s foreign secretary, said by phone from the Kenyan
capital, Nairobi. “We want our people to have a right to decide.” He
said his group has no preconditions for the talks. The region’s new
president expressed support for greater autonomy.
Ethiopia,
Africa’s second-most populous country after Nigeria, is a federation
designed to give autonomy to its dozens of ethnic groups. The ONLF has
long maintained that the Somali regional state, which it calls the
Ogaden and borders war-torn Somalia, hasn’t been properly represented by
the federal government.
Ethiopia’s constitution enshrines the
rights of people with “a large measure” of common culture, customs,
language, identity and “psychological makeup” in an “identifiable,
predominantly contiguous territory” to seek self-determination and even
establish their own states.
Seeking Settlement
The ONLF, which
took up arms in 1984 and has been an intermittent threat to regional
authorities, declared a cease-fire at a July meeting of its leaders in
Eritrea, pending what Ahmed calls an unspecified “comprehensive
political settlement.”
Its largest attack was in April 2007 on a
site in the Somali region -- operated by China’s Zhongyuan Petroleum
Exploration Bureau -- where it killed nine Chinese workers and 65
Ethiopians. Ahmed said that was justified because the then-government
sought to produce gas “without consent of our people.”
While he
wouldn’t disclose the number of armed fighters the ONLF has, the figure
is thought to be significantly diminished from a decade ago.
Click here for a story on Ethiopia’s nascent oil and gas industry
A
special police force in the Somali region has been notorious for its
alleged counter-insurgency tactics, with accusations it jailed and
tortured people suspected of having ONLF sympathies. Since the regional
president, based in the local city of Jijiga, was ousted by federal
forces in August, authorities and the group haven’t clashed, according
both to Ahmed and the new state president, Mustafa Omer.
“There
are some areas where we agree,” Mustafa said in an interview in the
national capital, Addis Ababa. “Yes, we want more autonomy for our
region, genuine self-rule.”
While the cease-fire predates
Mustafa’s rule as a response to Ethiopia’s recent sweeping reforms, the
ONLF is supporting the new president because “he can make a difference
in clearing the system and creating a new political environment,” Ahmed
said. “We have agreed to work together to seek more rights for the
Somali people.”
Mustafa said regional authorities are letting the
ONLF mobilize grassroots support and he’ll help arrange its formal
talks with Abiy’s government in the coming weeks. The president welcomed
the possibility of the ONLF taking part in federal elections slated for
2020.
Ahmed said the ONLF will discuss the possibility of its
disarmament with the government, and, should the negotiations face
difficulty, Somalia President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed has offered
support in the talks. Once a deal is reached, the ONLF may compete in
elections, he said.
“We need to have a negotiation -- agreement
on a comprehensive political settlement, and peace in the Ogaden -- then
oil companies can come and explore,” Ahmed said.