International crises never flare up at random. However unexpected they seem, closer examination shows them to have been as well signalled as the ticking black bomb in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. The UN Monitoring Group’s recent report on Somalia and Eritrea is just such an event. Its fuse has been merrily fizzing for nine long years.
The UN report, published as a new famine in southern Somalia reminds us of the region’s fragility, makes for a devastating read. The Red Sea state of Eritrea, whose principled rebel movement won the admiration of western leftwingers in the 1970s and 1980s, is shown in 417 carefully-documented pages to have matured into the most cynical of rogue states.
The individual examples are bad enough. Confirmation that Eritrean president Isaias Afewerki’s regime last January dispatched a commando unit with orders to explode bombs in neighbouring Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa to coincide with an African Union summit is particularly shocking. Were the attacks to have succeeded the death toll would have been horrendous.