Sea of trouble spells danger for the Horn of Africa

The Horn of Africa retains the potential to be one of the continent's most explosive regions, having suffered some of Africa's longest and most bitter conflicts during the past century.

"The problem with this region as a whole," says Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society, "is that you cannot talk about Ethiopia without talking about Eritrea and Somalia. You can't talk about Sudan without mentioning Egypt."

Dowden is convinced too that a failure to understand the nature of the relationships between the various neighbours by other countries - not least the United States and Britain - has contributed to the difficulties in the area.

With Yemen, just across the Gulf of Aden, added to the mix, the area's multi-layered security, economic and political problems appear so interconnected at so many levels as to seem irresolvable at a local one alone.

This region has left its mark on the international consciousness over the past two decades for all the wrong reasons: war, famine and massive displacement of civilian populations.

The most potent images, inevitably, are of disasters that struck westerners rather than the local populations: the Battle of Mogadishu that saw dead US servicemen dragged through the city's streets; the 2000 attack on the USS Cole by al Qaeda in the Yemeni port of Aden that killed 17 American sailors, and the kidnapping of western ships and tourists by pirates off Somalia's coast.

Then there are the connections to the failed Christmas Day plane-bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is believed to have received training and instruction from al Qaeda in Yemen.

The profundity of the region's problems has seen it defined as one of the two anchors of the so-called "arc of crisis" - the locus of religious, economic and political fault lines which extends in a broad sweep through the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, terminating in India.

Yet the complexity of the relationships between the states that make up the area remains the least examined and least understood contributor to that arc.

Omar Sharmarke, the prime minister of Somalia's beleaguered Transitional Federal Government, has exposed what many see as the shortcomings of western policy towards the region - a tendency to ignore the potential fallout from and consequences of external intervention.

Responding to the US offer to help Yemen in its fight against al Qaeda - and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's move to convene a summit on the issue - Sharmarke issued a warning. He said the sudden upsurge of interest after Abdulmutallab was linked to Yemeni-based extremists would only displace Yemen's problem to Somalia and other parts of Africa.

"Gordon Brown has rushed to call an emergency summit on Yemen," said Sharmarke, "but it must be understood that the problem will simply displace to Somalia unless there is corresponding support here. We call on Mr Brown to ensure that the summit agreed for the end of this January considers Somalia and Yemen jointly, and that resources are deployed immediately to assist our efforts against this scourge.

"Al Qaeda and their affiliates such as al-Shabaab [the Somali Islamist militia] are simply making sure that whilst Yemen is the subject of increased western attention and Somalia receives only empty gestures, they seize the opportunity to secure new supply routes and movement corridors for a move deeper into Africa."

Western preoccupations have not only been driven by the alleged links between Abdulmutallab and the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

There are also reports that fighters from Afghanistan have relocated recently to Somalia and Yemen. Yemen is also home to thousands of former mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

The most dangerous situation for now is in Somalia, where relative stability is confined to the autonomous Puntland and Somaliland regions.

There, the feeble stop-start peace process of the past decade which created a Transitional National Government - torpedoed by Ethiopian interference - and then the present Transitional Federal Government, installed by force with the help of the same state, has hardly solved the country's problems; in fact it appears to have exacerbated them.

The involvement of the US in approving Ethiopia's disastrous intervention encouraged the rise of the brutal al-Shabaab militia, which has been backed by Ethiopia's enemy Eritrea, and armed with weapons smuggled from Yemen. It is precisely this competition between Ethiopia and Eritrea that has been one of the most dangerous conflict accelerators in the Horn in the past five years.

A final area of risk has been produced by the slow corrosion of the US-brokered comprehensive peace agreement which ended the second Sudanese war between the mainly Muslim north and Christian-Animist south. That agreement began unravelling at the end of 2007. Tensions have been exacerbated by plans in the south to hold a referendum next year on full independence - a vote Khartoum has warned could lead to all-out war.

In the past year alone, according to a report released last week by aid groups, 2,500 people have been killed in the south and more than 350,000 have fled amid renewed ethnic clashes. Violence flared again last week when 140 villagers were killed in a cattle raid.

In Yemen, a slow disintegration is taking place of a government faced with insurgencies in the north and south - the latter which the government has associated with al Qaeda.

Abdul Ghani al-Aryani, an independent political analyst based in the Yemeni capital, Sana'a, is increasingly fearful that the Yemeni state may struggle to survive. "Thousands of Somali refugees have been arriving on Yemen's coastline," he said. "It is open to them. No one knows how many are associated with al-Shabaab and al Qaeda, but there is evidence that some of them are. "

If there are, as al-Aryani suspects, links between al Qaeda groups and proxies in the two countries, he contends that the mutual destabilisation has been driven in recent years by the Yemeni government - not least from the involvement of powerful figures in the arms trade.

One thing most analysts do agree on, is the risk. Ginny Hill, who runs Chatham House's Yemen Forum, believes future instability in Yemen could expand a lawless zone.

"People are worried about the transit of Islamist radicals, but the real story is arms. If you can find a way of tackling the arms trade you could improve governance in Yemen and reduce the potential for further conflict in Somalia."

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