Who owns ilemi triangle

In the 20th century, the dispute involved not only Kenya, Sudan, and the UK, but also Uganda, whose nomadic peoples utilized the Ilemi Triangle, and Ethiopia, an independent empire with its own territorial aspirations, and Egypt, who had partial control of Sudan. Today, the dispute involves Kenya, South Sudan, and Ethiopia, but regional conflict, the importance of maintaining territory, and the possibility of natural resources present in remote Ilemi, have continued to make the dispute difficult to resolve.

Kenya—South Sudan Kenya and South Sudan share a straight-line border that extends for over km from the tripoint with Uganda in the south to the tripoint with Ethiopia in the north or east. Subscribe to our newsletter and receive a free map! Over the maritime territory in the Indian Ocean, preliminary negotiations in failed, necessitating judicial recourse at the International Court of Justice in , on the part of Somalia. The court process cannot guarantee neither a negotiable settlement nor a re-negotiable settlement post facto.

Kenya is now under a legal trap, with its territorial integrity hanging in the balance of the scales international arbitration, a needless position. Various attempts to set up joint security commissions, such as between the Kenya and Uganda police in , have not helped resolve the dispute. While Kenya has administered the Triangle since , the Triangle is virtually an ungoverned space. The Triangle is a legendary cattle rustling hub, with communities in the region living by the law of the jungle.

Kenyans have been inhabiting the Island since Kenya has the advantage to strategically deploy diplomatic and defense instruments to change the course of these disputes, and retain its territorial heritage at little political cost.

Edmond J. Photo: Migingo Island in Lake Victoria. By Edmond J. Pamba December 3, Current Territorial Disputes Somalia is claiming a , square kilometers of maritime territory in the Indian Ocean from Kenya, as the maritime boundary between the two states remain un-delimited.

Diplomatic and Defence Flaws Political settlements are determined by diplomatic strategies. It is the largest country in Africa, almost a million square miles, the size of the United States east of the Mississippi with long, poorly delimited borders. Throughout its modern history in the nineteenth and twenty centuries no central government in Khartoum — Turk, British, or Sudanese — has effectively controlled, let alone administered, its extensive frontiers let alone its very remote corners — Ma'tan al-Sarra, Halayib, and Ilemi.

Each of them is as remote from one another as from the center, but the contentious disputes over their sovereignty share common characteristics.

Each corner territory is a triangle. Each triangle is absolutely worthless except to its nomadic inhabitants. Each triangular dispute was but a symbol of larger issues that had little to do with their sand, scrub, or arid pastures. The Sara Triangle in the northwest corner of the Sudan was demanded by Mussolini as Italy's inheritance from Turkey and a strategic link in his imperial vision for Italian Northeast Africa.

The British, about to abandon Ethiopia, were not prepared to quibble over degraded sand, and on 20 July Mussolini acquired more of the Sahara for Libya. The Halayib Triangle was a Sudanese administrative boundary of the wastelands overlooking the Red Sea above the Egyptian-Sudanese international boundary at the 22nd parallel.

The sovereignty of the triangle flared up in and , but in Egypt forcibly contested the Sudan's administration of the triangle and promptly "annexed" it. The Sudanese press called for war, but the Khartoum government was content to supinely declare that Egypt had illegally annexed the disputed border territory and did nothing.

Hasan al-Turabi summed up the real issue of the Halayib Triangle as merely "a small piece of land which would add nothing to either Egypt or Sudan. It is only being used as a pretext to create tension in the relations because Egypt wants to display its superiority over Sudan. Ilemi was a triangular piece of arid hilly terrain named after the Anuak Chief Ilemi Akwon and bordering on Ethiopia and Kenya.

Its elastic size varied between 4, and 5, square miles depending on the year and the surveyor. The imperial officials from the surrounding states had no interest in the "light soil" of Ilemi except to promote their territorial ambitions by drawing arbitrary lines on maps.

Their wandering subjects, however, regarded its wells and dry- season pastures essential to their survival and worth dying for. In the heart of Ilemi live the nomadic Turkana who move back and forth between the Sudan and Kenya. Surrounding them west to east are the Didinga and Topasa from the Sudan who graze their cattle, sheep, and goats for eight months on the western pastures of Ilemi, the Nyangatom from the Sudan and Ethiopia who oscillate across its northeastern border, and the Dassanetch who come out of the east from Ethiopia.

During their patterns of transhumance these pastoral people interacted with one another to trade and graze that often involved elaborate intercommunity agreements.

When these arrangements broke down in competition for scarce resources, grass and water, the traditional response was the razzia that was not simply for the acquisition of animal wealth but culturally a rite of passage for young warriors, a strategy for dealing with natural disasters, or a means of improving the quality of livestock.

These raids were initiated and regulated by the council of elders, but with the introduction of large numbers of firearms from Ethiopia at the end of the nineteenth century their authority was deeply eroded by the younger men who obtained the guns. After the defeat of the Mahdist State in 1 and the declaration of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium in there was no rush to define the boundaries of the vast Sudan except with Ethiopia in order to secure the Nile waters and contain the imperial ambitions of the emperor Menelik II to expand his empire deep into southern Ethiopia.

He claimed all the territory to the southern tip of Lake Turkana, which he called the Samburu Sea, and proposed that Ethiopia's boundary with British East Africa, should be drawn from there to the Indian Ocean. Having withstood the demands by three European powers for territory in the Nile basin, Great Britain was not about to surrender the northern region of British East Africa to Menelik.

Captain Philip Maud of the Royal Engineers delimited the "Maud Line" in , consummated in a vague treaty in , that became in fact the Kenya- Ethiopian border, latter known as the Line, but did not stop Ethiopian imperialism. With Menelik's tacit approval, Ethiopian slavers and gunrunners operating from Maji roamed with impunity into Kenya and the southern Sudan and in return for ivory and livestock armed the Nyangatom and Dassanetch in Ethiopia who crossed the undelimited border into Ilemi.

The large numbers of arms produced by the First World War transformed the traditional razzia of the Ilemi nomads into violent confrontations during which hundreds of people were killed and thousands head of livestock were taken in a single raid. The Kelly-Tufnell expedition of worked assiduously in the verdant hill country east of the Nile as far as Mt.

Mogilla where they abandoned their survey and, as so many Europeans have done in the past, drew a straight line. Mogilla eastward for a miles to a point north of Mt. This arbitrary delimitation left the traditional territory of the Turkana to be administered by Uganda while reserving for the Sudan access to Sanderson Gulf and Lake Rudolf.

Known as the Line, it remains the recognized international border to this day. Not having traversed the territory east of Mt. Mogila, the commission recommended that when close administration was established in the region, the boundary should be reconsidered to reflect the actual grazing grounds of the nomadic Turkana. In April representatives of the Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya convened at Kitgum in Uganda to discuss their outstanding border problems that perhaps would require a rectification of the frontier.

At Kitgum the Ilemi Triangle became a territorial reality drawn on a map. The representatives of Uganda and Kenya sought to persuade those from the Sudan to redraw the boundary to include the northern limits of the Turkana grazing grounds across the Line ceding the territory either to Uganda or Kenya that would enable them to provide protection for the Turkana.

Everyone agreed that this was the logical solution, for the Sudan had no interest in administering this remote region. The Sudan, however, had no authority to surrender unilaterally Sudanese territory without the consent of its co-domini, Egypt, that would only introduce yet another cantankerous issue in the hostile relations between Britain and Egypt over the Sudan. In Egyptian nationalists had assassinated the British governor-general of the Sudan and provoked a mutiny of the Egyptian army in Khartoum that led to the forced repatriation of Egyptians from the Sudan.

On 1 February , the Rudolf Province of Uganda was transferred to the Kenya Colony and with it the unresolved Turkana and boundary problems of Ilemi that had plagued the Ugandan officials. Kenya requested the Sudan to extend its military administration into the region north of the Line to protect the now disarmed Turkana during their dry season migration.