By ALY VERJEE
A different world, indeed—especially for Djiboutians outside the walls of Camp Lemonnier, headquarters of the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa, part of the U.S. Africa Command (Africom) and home to Special Forces operations planning and, recently, U.S. drone flights. Despite the country’s close military relations with the United States—benefiting Djibouti to the tune of $38 million in base lease fees annually, roughly the same amount as the country’s entire defense spending—Djibouti languishes at the bottom of the world league tables for corruption, human rights and political freedom. When the Arab Spring revolutions threatened to spread to the country in February 2011, President Ismail Omar Guelleh squelched dissent and easily won reelection a few months later in a vote boycotted by the main opposition parties.
In the global order, Djibouti wouldn’t matter, except for its strategic location. It is a land neighbor of troubled Somalia, and only a few miles of water separate it from unstable Yemen. Djibouti is the only friendly port in the northern Horn of Africa for navies conducting anti-piracy operations. It is also nestled at the mouth of the Red Sea, one of the world’s most important sea routes for Saudi oil exports. The country of 860,000 is extremely poor—more than 40 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty—and has few natural resources to export and little industry to speak of. Still, Djibouti’s geostrategic value long ensured that France, from which Djibouti became independent in 1977, always retained a military base there.
The United States is a more recent arrival, first using Camp Lemonnier in 2002. Since 2011, the U.S. government has spent more than $200 million in Djibouti to construct the Horn of Africa Joint Operations Center, upgrade airports and build an armory and a fitness center for troops. Africom plans further expansion, exceeding $1 billion in cost, over the next two decades. Approximately 4,000 U.S. personnel, both military and civilian, are now based at Lemonnier, watching over Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Yemen and several Indian Ocean island states. It was from Djibouti that U.S. troops deployed to reinforce American interests in South Sudan during recent fighting in the fledgling country. Various covert missions in Somalia and Yemen are also believed to be launched from the Djibouti base. U.S. military air traffic at Lemonnier has increased so much that the Defense Department recently allocated $7 million to train local air traffic controllers, far more than the entire amount the U.S. spends on development assistance to the country: a mere $4.5 million set for 2014.
Even with all those Americans flying around, Djibouti remains one of the world’s classic electoral autocracies—a state that routinely organizes well-conducted elections that are effectively meaningless, with severe limitations on media freedoms and civil liberties. Real power is centralized in the Guelleh family’s hands, and opponents, if they become too vocal, run the risk of imprisonment, exile or worse.
But Guelleh, in power since 1999 and the nephew of Djibouti’s founding president, has proved himself a useful and clever American ally. As long as the United States pays rent for the base, it is free to do whatever it wishes at Camp Lemonnier. Guelleh, for his part, has not generally resorted to overt and systematic brutality to repress his population. Indeed, despite the quickly crushed 2011 uprising, U.S. policy on Djibouti is largely unchanged: ostensibly committed to reform, but in reality quite happy with the state of affairs; in 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even went out of her way to make that state of affairs
public, praising Djibouti for playing “a stabilizing role in the Horn of Africa.” The message couldn’t have been clearer: Whatever the concerns and desires of Djiboutian citizens, this is a most useful outpost on the African coast.
Source: politico.com
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