Bishop Giorgio Bertin of Djibouti, who is also the Apostolic Administrator of Mogadishu, has said that last month’s Ethiopia-Eritrean peace agreement may help cut a key arms supply route into Somalia, where an Islamist militant group is fighting to install a government.
Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, and Isaias Afwerki, the Eritrean President, signed the agreement on 9 July in Asmara, the Eritrean capital, ending one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts.
Afwerki has used the pretext of the war to run an authoritarian regime under whose watch Christians have been arrested and murdered on suspicion of spying for the West. Afwerki has been accused also of arming and funding al-Shabaab, the Somalia-based al-Qaeda affiliate in East Africa.
“Up to now, it seems that Eritrea was supporting those who were against the presence of Ethiopia in Somalia,” Bishop Bertin told The Tablet. Ethiopia is a major contributor to the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia.
Military conscription and poverty have driven many young Eritreans to follow dangerous migration routes through the Sahara and across the Mediterranean to seek asylum in Europe.
At the peak of the migration wave in 2015, Eritrea was producing more migrants than any other country, apart from Syria and Afghanistan. “The new relations… should open the political situation in Eritrea, probably with more freedom and less military service. Thus, there will be no need to leave their country,” said Bertin.
Luxembourg’s Archbishop, Jean-Claude Hollerich, president of the European Union bishops’ conference COMECE, has called for a Marshall Plan for Africa to help countries curtail migration.
“The people who suffer the most are those who don’t get to Europe because they don’t have the money,” Hollerich said.
“We have to work for a Marshall Plan for Africa … the West should implement an Africa policy that matches its rhetoric.”
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