Intra-Gulf Competition in Africa’s Horn: Lessening the Impact
- Introduction
Over the last decade, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar and Turkey have dramatically increased their physical, economic and political presence in Africa. Policymakers in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha and Ankara each describe this new power projection as seizing a long-overlooked opportunity. Hosting just a handful of embassies at the start of the decade, the continent now has at least two Gulf state or Turkish missions in nearly every country. This growth has been particularly striking in the Horn of Africa, where the Gulf States are playing a significant role in shaping political transitions in Ethiopia and Sudan, and influencing conflicts in Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and South Sudan. What distinguishes these countries’ engagement with African actors are the significant resources they are willing to deploy, the speed with which they can react and the intensity with which they are willing to pursue their political interests. Today, while local and great power dynamics still set the context, this new competition increasingly drives the plot.
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Gulf countries and Turkey point out that they have a long history in the Horn. Before 2011, economic and cultural ties mostly dominated the relationships. Trade across the Red Sea is centuries’ old. Large diasporas from the Horn live and work in the Gulf and in Turkey, sending hundreds of millions of dollars back in remittances. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were among the first Gulf donors to the region, offering aid through development funds and religious charities. Riyadh built mosques and investment into arable land in the 1980s to shore up food security. Qatar carved out a niche in the 2000s on conflict mediation, including for the war in Darfur. The UAE’s Dubai Ports World (DP World), meanwhile, signed its first agreement in the region in 2006 to develop Djibouti’s Doraleh port. Turkey’s aid and civil society organizations have built hospitals and schools across the Horn, while Turkish companies that pioneered low-cost infrastructure contracting are executing some of the largest projects in the region after China.
What has changed over the last decade, and particularly since 2015, is the emergence of a more overtly political agenda in these countries’ calculations? The shift began in 2011 with the turmoil that followed the Arab uprisings. As regimes in Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus, and Sanaa faltered, the Gulf States and Turkey each invested heavily in preferred allies. Two contradictory axes emerged: on the one hand, Saudi Arabia and the UAE favored strong central governments that restored security over chaotic democratic transitions ideologically led by the Muslim Brotherhood or its affiliates. They also sought to push back against growing Iranian influence in the region, made possible initially by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and propelled by the upheavals since 2011. On the other hand, Qatar and Turkey cemented ties with Islamist forces during the uprisings and continued to back them financially and through the media. They occasionally pushed back against Iran, for example in the Syrian civil war, but did not priorities Tehran among their regional enemies.
In nearly every Middle Eastern battlefield, one or both sides of the Gulf rift lost ground, as did Turkey, while Iran appeared to be gaining a stronger foothold. To rebalance the equation in their favor, each of these states turned to the Red Sea basin to protect and redouble their investments. The Middle East’s volatility had left Abu Dhabi and Doha, in particular, feel they were surviving in the eye of the storm. To weather it, they had to secure the neighborhood. Riyadh, meanwhile, saw the chance to claim a position of Arab leadership – which it had only ever previously shared with Egypt, Iraq or Syria. Ankara, chastened by its inability to unseat Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, sought new ways to fortify its official narrative pitching Turkey as a humanitarian and economic model for the Sunni Muslim world. For their own domestic reasons, each of these states cast its gaze outward for new or stronger allies.
These trends were already visible when Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud ascended the throne and named his favored son as defense minister in 2015. Mohammed bin Salman’s first public act was to send a military coalition into Yemen to unseat Huthi rebels who, with loose backing from Tehran, had swept southward to Bab al-Mandeb, a key chokepoint for global trade at the mouth of the Red Sea. The UAE, Qatar, and Turkey all joined a Saudi-led coalition to push them back.
Thus the Red Sea corridor became directly implicated in the region’s turmoil. Riyadh and its strongest coalition partner, Abu Dhabi, sought new relationships in the Horn of Africa that could limit Iran’s reach. As a Saudi analyst put it: “We needed to ensure that both flanks of Bab al-Mandeb were secure. We wouldn’t want to end one war only to find that we have another conflict [to roll back Iran] on the other side”. In exchange for new aid, warmer ties and help lifting international sanctions, Saudi Arabia convinced both Sudan and Eritrea to expel Iran’s presence in 2015. Khartoum agreed to send ground forces to aid the coalition’s war effort in Yemen, while Eritrea leased a military base near the port of Assab to the UAE and, according to some unconfirmed reports, dispatched a few hundred soldiers. In 2017, the UAE won additional agreements to develop a military base in Berbera, Somaliland, and expanded its military footprint in Bosaso, in the Somalia region of Puntland, where it had been training a maritime police force to combat piracy.
The June 2017 crisis between Qatar and other Gulf states accelerated their turn toward the Horn. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt broke ties with Qatar and imposed an economic and travel blockade. The dispute exposed an unofficial split over the role of political Islam in the region, as well as over Riyadh’s dominance in shaping Gulf foreign policy. Both axes quickly embarked on a global tour to win allies to their side, nowhere more ruthlessly than Africa. Poorer countries on the continent at times found it hard to resist trading their loyalty for hard cash. To Gulf eyes, the Horn also superficially contains many of the same ingredients that were central to the Gulf rift: Islamist forces, a lingering Iranian influence, and significant economic potential, factors that make it ripe for intra-Gulf competition. For countries already inclined to see a great game for dominance underway, the Horn was a clear next stop.
In the last two years, several instances of competition have upped the ante between Gulf rivals. The UAE and Qatar each cite an ugly 2018 dispute (in which they paid their respective Somali allies to undermine the other’s interests) as evidence that the other’s presence is a problem that needs addressing. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Turkey are all seeking to influence political transitions in Ethiopia and Sudan. In the latter country, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi in the earlier stages demonstrated that they are willing to overlook significant violence committed by military allies in order to ensure a friendly government is in power. All sides have poured investment and aid into countries across Africa, and much cash into the pockets of local leaders and politicians, who have often exploited it to advance their own narrow agendas.
The Gulf’s internal crisis has also intensified economic competition. The Horn has some of the highest GDP growth rates in the world, and Gulf sovereign wealth funds, transport firms, and other investors see the potential to benefit richly from that growth if they get their foot in the door early on and cut out their rivals. For now, the region’s infrastructure is insufficient to meet the growing demand for basic goods and fuel. The UAE and Turkey, in particular, have experience building the deepwater ports and transportation infrastructure that could connect Africa’s growing consumer class to markets. The Horn has also emerged in recent years as a magnet for oil and gas exploration, with oil companies discovering significant fields in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Somalia, and making moves to tap the region’s suspected vast hydrocarbon potential. Countries that invest early in port, rail and pipeline infrastructure will enjoy an advantage when these resources come online. Moreover, the firms running Africa’s future ports will gain the ability to shape which other countries will benefit and by how much.
China’s significant role in the Horn adds to the economic attraction. Beijing has become the largest buyer of Middle Eastern oil and gas over the last decade; for this reason, both sides of the Gulf crisis have worked hard to improve ties.20 Turkey, Qatar and the UAE are pitching themselves as China’s best partners for its Belt and Road Initiative, whose projects stretch from the Indian Ocean and East Africa to the Horn and the Suez Canal.
With this potent mix of economic, security and political interests, Gulf states are likely to continue vying for power and influence in the Horn well into the future. Saudi Arabia seeks to quarantine the region from Iranian influence while boosting its credentials as the littoral states’ leader. The UAE aims to leverage its political and military presence to push back against an array of perceived foes: Islamist movements backed by Qatar and Turkey, as well as Iran. Qatar, for its part, sees vast potential for new friends and investments to bolster its independence, while outmaneuvering the Gulf adversaries blockading it. Ankara is weaving a story of Muslim leadership, built on its accumulated credibility in Somalia. Turkish businesses have had remarkable success on the continent.
Political and military actors in the Horn have seized on these rivalries to advance their own goals in ways both positive and negative. Eritrea’s long-ruling strongman Isaias Afwerki has parlayed ties with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to earn sanctions relief and partially rehabilitate his international image while offering no space for political reforms at home. Sudan’s military rulers sought political cover from their Gulf allies to cling to power. Ethiopia turned to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for much-needed funding, while keeping an open line to Qatar. Neighboring Kenya has, in turn, sought help from Doha as a potential mediator in its maritime border dispute with Mogadishu. In Somalia, dueling political candidates see the cash-rich Gulf actors as sometimes gullible conduits for campaign money. More positively, hinting at ways actors in the Horn can exploit the rivalry to draw wider benefits, Djibouti, Somaliland and Puntland have all at various times milked the competition for strategic ports between the Gulf and China to secure better deals.
While the Horn could leverage competing interests to its advantage, particularly by building greater economic connectivity across the Red Sea, these external actors – with vastly disproportionate resources – have an outsized influence for now on the partnerships they are seeking to establish. As an Ethiopian analyst observed: “The Gulf’s impact on the Horn depends on how that individual [Gulf] country behaves. The Gulf-Horn relationship is so asymmetrical that the Gulf is the one that decides what kind of relationship they can have”.
While the destructive impact of these new dynamics is increasingly clear, the motivations behind them and the potential to turn them in a positive direction remain largely underexplored for policymakers in the Horn and beyond. This report, based on high-level conversations in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha, and Ankara, as well as Nairobi, Addis Ababa and Washington, seeks to clarify these actors’ goals and ambitions and propose ways to mitigate the destabilizing impact of unbridled competition in the Horn.
This timeline tracks increasing Gulf and Turkish involvement in the Horn of Africa from 2006 until the present day. An extended timeline is available in Appendix B.
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