This Might Be a Bigger Story in the Region than Gaza

It's a quiet story, but it is an important one, and one that breaks over 60 years of precedent.

In exchange for port access, Ethiopia has become the first UN member state to recognize Somaliland. (The Republic of China [Taiwan] recognizes them, but they are not a UN member state.)

It has done so in exchange for port access that it lost following the independence of Eritrea in 1993.

This is a very big deal, because this is a significant break with a 70 year consensus in Africa that the colonial boundaries are to be maintained.  (Eritrea was not a part of Ethiopia until after WWII, and annexed as a sort of a gift from the US and UK)

Obviously, there was the creation of South Sudan in 2011, but this is different for two reasons:

• The separation of Sudan and South Sudan was largely an artifact of intervention of forces from outside Africa, which was largely the result of the genocidal excesses of the Khartoum regime.
• This is the second time that we have seen the secession of a region of a country from its colonial borders, and as such, it not constitutes a precedent.

Given the ethnic tensions throughout Africa as a result of the artificial and arbitrary borders inflicted by the colonial powers. it seems to me that we may start seeing a lot more in the way of aggressive secessionist movements in Africa, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Many centuries ago, chroniclers conjured what was in antiquity called Ethiopia as a realm at the heart of global trade. The treasures of Rome and India all flowed through its ports along the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. Merchants and pilgrims made their way to the Middle East and Mediterranean world via its caravan routes and docks. A 6th-century Byzantine historian described a kingdom with a vast fleet of wooden boats. The ancient Greeks even named the southern part of the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles away from the Ethiopian highlands, the Ethiopian Sea.

But modern-day Ethiopia is famously landlocked. Apart from a few decades in the 20th century when Ethiopia had annexed neighboring Eritrea, Africa’s second-most populous nation has never had a coastline. It maintains a meager, mostly riverine navy and pays tiny Djibouti some $1.5 billion a year for the privilege of accessing its ports and coastal infrastructure.

That’s why Abiy Ahmed, the ambitious Ethiopian prime minister, has long harbored visions of reaching the sea. He has groused against his country’s “geographic prison” and summoned the legacy of seafaring medieval empires as one the contemporary Ethiopian state must redeem. Ethiopia’s profound economic woes and constant internecine conflicts have not dented Abiy’s desires for maritime access — indeed, they may fuel them.

And last week, in what was a geopolitical bombshell in the Horn of Africa, Abiy appeared to achieve his goal. Alongside Muse Bihi Abdi, president of the self-declared breakaway Republic of Somaliland, Abiy announced that the two parties had reached a memorandum of understanding that would see Somaliland lease to Ethiopia some 12 miles of its coastline by the port of Berbera. In return, the autonomous entity that exists within the internationally recognized territory of Somalia may win something altogether more valuable: diplomatic recognition from Addis Ababa.


………

But, apart from solidarity ties with the self-ruling island of Taiwan, Somaliland has not been recognized by any U.N. member state — and certainly any major regional power in Africa. The autonomous region’s officials expect this deal, should it come to fruition, may trigger a meaningful shift.

“Their hope is that where Ethiopia goes, the rest of Africa will follow: the African Union is based in Addis Ababa,” explained the Economist. “Abiy also enjoys strong relations with the United Arab Emirates. Some foreign diplomats suspect the UAE, which is also close to Somalia’s government, may have played a part in brokering the deal.”

………

Somalia, though, is outraged. The country’s ambassador in Addis Ababa was recalled. Protests and rallies against the developments have been held in Mogadishu. On Saturday, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the country’s president, signed a bill that symbolically nullified the agreement between Ethiopia and Somaliland, since the latter exists within Somalia’s internationally-recognized borders. “This law is an illustration of our commitment to safeguard our unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity as per international law,” he said.

Somalia is not really a functioning state, which is why Somaliland has been able to maintain its de facto independence for decades, but this still marks a huge sea change in African national boundaries, and I would expect to see some significant secessionist moves by provinces and regions in other African nations in the next few years.

OK, This is Not What I Expected

The Supreme Court just ruled that about ½ of Oklahoma remains an Indian reservation, and so sovereign land, at least to the degree that reservations are sovereign in the United States:

The first thing we learned this morning with the announcement of the decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma was that Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t manage to be in the majority in every single 5-4 decision this term. Today, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for a majority of five (joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan), with Roberts writing for the four dissenters and Justice Clarence Thomas appending a brief solo dissent to assert that the court lacked jurisdiction to hear this case at all.

The court held today that land in northeastern Oklahoma reserved for the Creek Nation since the 19th century remains a reservation for the purpose of a federal statute that gives the federal government exclusive jurisdiction to commit certain major crimes committed by “[a]ny Indian” in “the Indian country.” The court’s holding means that state courts in Oklahoma had no jurisdiction to convict petitioner Jimcy McGirt, who is an enrolled member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, of three serious sexual offenses that took place on the reservation.

The decision is a stunning reaffirmance of the nation’s obligations to Native Americans. It confirms the existence of the largest tract of reservation land in the country, about 19 million acres encompassing the entire eastern half of Oklahoma. The court took almost two full terms to decide this question. It first heard oral argument in a predecessor case, Sharp v Murphy (in which Gorsuch was recused), in the fall of 2018, before restoring Murphy to the calendar this term and then, instead of hearing re-argument, granting and hearing oral argument in May on the same question in McGirt (in which Gorsuch could participate). (In a one-sentence, unsigned opinion, the court today also disposed of Murphy, ruling in favor of inmate Patrick Murphy “for the reasons stated in” McGirt.) In substance, the court “hold[s] the government to its word,” reaffirming the continuing existence of the reservations that the federal government promised to the Five Civilized Tribes in the 1830s to persuade them to give up their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama and walk along the Trail of Tears to the lands at issue.

As Indian law cases go, the dispute in this one is easy to understand: whether the land once granted to the Creek Nation as a reservation retains that status. The majority of five says that it does, because Congress has not adopted any single statute that explicitly terminates that status; the dissenters say that it does not, reasoning that the total body of congressional intrusions in the area, culminating in the development of eastern Oklahoma as a predominantly non-Native American area, adequately illustrates Congress’ intent to disestablish the reservation.

Gee, what happened to strict constructionism there?  

Gorsuch begins by documenting the clarity of the historical record establishing the creation of the Creek reservation: a series of treaties and statutes that, among other things “solemnly guarantied” the land to the tribe, “forever set apart as a home for said Creek Nation,” “no portion [of which] shall ever be embraced or included within … any Territory or State.”

………

For Gorsuch, though, the allotment process sheds no light on the outcome of the case: “For years, States have sought to suggest that allotments automatically ended reservations, and for years courts have rejected the argument.” Rather, “this Court has explained repeatedly that Congress does not disestablish a reservation simply by allowing the transfer of individual plots.” Gorsuch acknowledges that the proponents of allotment hoped that, after the land was parceled out, the reservations eventually would be abolished, but he concludes that “to equate allotment with disestablishment would confuse the first step of a march with arrival at its destination.”

Finding allotment insufficient to show disestablishment, Gorsuch turns next to the many “other ways Congress intruded on the Creek’s promised right to self-governance.” He discusses those at some length, but, as with allotment, his overarching view is that the various “laws represented serious blows to the Creek … [b]ut, just as plainly, … left the Tribe with significant sovereign functions over the lands in question.”

………

There is a notable symmetry in the articulation of a strong voice in support of Native Americans by the only justice with roots in the western part of the nation. Observers of the court know that it frequently has given short shrift to the promises and obligations that Congress has undertaken for Native Americans, and that a decision so firmly vitalizing the nation’s obligations to Native Americans does not come along every year. It will be interesting to watch in the years to come to see whether Gorsuch continues to stake out an interest in the topic.

I do not know what this means from a functional perspective, except that members of the various tribes encompassed by the reservation will not have to be prosecuted in a federal court.

However, there might be significant changes in the regulatory and tax regimes as a result of this, as well as potential renegotiation of energy leases in the area.