2024 Ethiopia-Somaliland Memorandum of Understanding

On January 1, 2024, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Somaliland President Muse Bihi Abdi signed a memorandum of understanding intended to give landlocked Ethiopia access to the Red Sea. Under its reported terms, Somaliland would lease about 19 kilometers of its Gulf of Aden coastline to Ethiopia for fifty years, and in exchange Ethiopia would move toward formally recognizing Somaliland as an independent state, which would make Ethiopia the first United Nations member to do so. The agreement drew sharp condemnation from Somalia, which considers Somaliland part of its own territory under its constitution, as well as from Eritrea and Egypt, and Somalia recalled its ambassador from Addis Ababa in protest. A later accord between Ethiopia and Somalia, the Ankara Declaration signed on December 12, 2024 under Turkish mediation, addressed the port dispute but made no mention of the memorandum itself, leaving its status disputed between the two sides. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/