EU plans to help stabilise troubled Horn of Africa

The EU will work closely with the seven nations of the Horn of Africa to defuse regional conflicts and prevent them spreading to other parts of Africa and the Middle East, the union’s development commissioner said in Brussels today.

Louis Michel said the situation in the region had been steadily deteriorating as a consequence of growing Islamic extremism resulting from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“There is a concentration of conflicts of infrequent intensity,” Michel said as he announced that the European Commission – the EU’s executive body – had adopted a new “strategy for peace, security and development in the Horn of Africa”.

Regional trouble-spots include Somalia, which has had no effective government for 15 years, Sudan’s Darfur region and the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia, where a UN peacekeeping force is monitoring a tenuous ceasefire.

Michel said European and African leaders are increasingly worried by the emerging “fault lines” in a region of great strategic importance which straddles the Red Sea routes between Africa and the Middle East.

All seven nations concerned – Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda, are members of IGAD, the East African trade and development grouping. But that has not prevented cross-border conflicts, illegal immigration and the trafficking of arms and drugs.

Michel said the new European strategy would be defined in close co-operation with the governments concerned.

It will draw on the EU’s recently announced €3bn fund for improving governance in developing nations.

The plan will be focused on three main pillars – encouraging regional integration through organisations such as the African Union and IGAD, addressing national political issues that could have regional ramifications, and dealing with cross-border threats to security and development in one of the world’s poorest regions.

“There can be no development without security,” Michel said.

“These are important political and security concerns for all of us, but the impetus for change must always come from within,” he said “It all depends on the political will of the countries concerned.”