Ethiopia: Horn of Dilemma

As you might expect from a place that exports some of the world's finest coffee, Addis Ababa is a city of cafés. It's also a town of spooks. Whether huddled over tiny glasses of Arabica in luxury hotel foyers or the anonymous place with battered tables and a concrete floor on the north end of Meskel Square, quiet men in dusty suits swap intelligence. There you'll overhear mobile-phone conversations that begin like this: "Ambassador! Of course I'll give the document back ... " Or you might meet close-cropped, burly Americans carrying khaki rucksacks labeled "U.S." who mumble about going "someplace in country." As Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi observes, "The Horn of Africa is a very volatile area. There are many, many intelligence organizations here." On Sept. 11, the spies just might get a night off when Ethiopia, which runs by a modified version of the Julian calendar, will celebrate the new millennium's arrival more than seven years after the rest of the world. But given the speed of recent events, the spies will no doubt be back to their furtive work the very next day.

Most people's idea of Ethiopia is dated circa 1984, when a famine killed around a million of its people. But things have changed. Although its GDP is still a meager $13.3 billion in a country of nearly 77 million, it has been growing by more than 9% a year since 2003. Chinese engineers have found oil in its eastern deserts. Exports of coffee and roses are rising by more than 20% each year.

Today the Horn of Africa also arouses keen strategic interest among world powers. Not far from the Red Sea and thus close to Arabia, Ethiopia is a possible conduit for turmoil from the northeast. As Christianity and Islam flowed south to Ethiopia centuries ago, Meles tells TIME, so today "with all sorts of terrorist activities [in the Middle East], we are susceptible to that influence too." Ethiopia's eastern neighbor Somalia is already home to the oldest jihadi bases in Africa and has been a sanctuary, the U.S. believes, for three senior al-Qaeda planners who blew up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing more than 200 people. "There's more than one U.S. general who refers to the Horn as the third front in the war on terror," says a Western diplomat based in the region.

There is also Ethiopia's mutual enmity with its immediate northern neighbor Eritrea. After a 30-year struggle for independence, Eritrea seceded from Ethiopia in 1993, and the pair fought a border war in 1998-2000 in which tens of thousands died. Wounds from that fight are still fresh, and the border dispute remains unresolved. On occasion, Somalia has served both countries as a battleground for proxy wars. With such a confluence of conflict, the nightmare scenario has long been a regional war that engulfs the Horn, perhaps impeding Suez Canal shipping traffic. According to a Western official in Addis, Ethiopia is "the center of gravity" in this game of African Risk.

Lately, however, the intrigues and conflicts have intensified. First, in December 2006, Ethiopia invaded Somalia and overthrew the fundamentalist Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which had ruled Somalia for six months. Although the ICU brought the first semblance of law and order to the capital Mogadishu in 15 years, its Islamist ideology caused alarm in Ethiopia. With its troops occupying the country, as they still do, Ethiopia organized its own rendition operation with the cooperation of Kenya and the new government in Somalia it had installed, transferring hundreds of suspected jihadis and their families to jails in Addis and interrogating them for months. A July report by the Nairobi-based U.N. Monitoring Group on Somalia stated that Eritrea was supplying a gathering Somali insurgency with surface-to-air missiles and suicide vests to fight the Ethiopians. Ethiopia alleges Eritrea is doing the same for the Oromo National Liberation Front (ONLF), an Ethiopian separatist rebel group in the country's eastern Ogaden region, which killed 74 civilians at an oil exploration site there in May.

These increasing tensions are igniting fears that the regional-war fears could become reality. As Ethiopia's rulers see it, their country's army and finances are being stretched ever thinner by two Eritrean-backed insurgencies, so collapsing both by hitting their common backer may make sense. In June, Meles told the Ethiopian parliament he was strengthening the army with a view to countering the threat from Eritrea.

Some of this does not sit well with Washington. The U.S. considers Ethiopia its "biggest partner" in Africa, according to the Addis-based official. That relationship allowed U.S. Special Forces to piggyback on Ethiopia's operations in Somalia to launch two air strikes in January against one or more of the three fugitive al-Qaeda leaders believed to be on the Kenya-Somalia border. But, as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer has said, Washington opposed the invasion of Somalia. "We urged the Ethiopian military not to go into Somalia," said Frazer last month. "They did so because of their own national-security interests." This version of events, contrary to a common perception that the invasion was backed or even initiated by the U.S., is supported by accounts of a November 2006 meeting in Addis between Meles and the then head of U.S. Central Command, General John Abizaid. Sources from both sides relate that Abizaid told Meles he was "not allowed" to invade Somalia, adding Somalia would become "Ethiopia's Iraq." (An official in Washington disputes the precise language, but confirms the essence of the discussion.)