Djibouti-Foreign Military Bases-Gateway House
Geopolitics is a lucrative business for Djibouti. The US pays US$63 million annually in rent for its base, the French US$36 million, China US$20 million and Italy US$2.6 million. The amount Japan pays is not publicly disclosed.
There are an estimated 4,000 soldiers and Filipino workers at the American base, 180 troops at the Japanese camp and 1,450 at France’s two bases — one near the airport and a naval facility on the coast where the Germans and Spaniards are also stationed. Around 80 Italians are situated in a base near the US camp.
China’s Doraleh base is close to a new seaport and the end station of a new Chinese-built 759-kilometer railroad extending from Djibouti’s coast to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. The standard gauge railroad was opened for commercial traffic on January 1 this year, replacing a a meter-gauge railway built during the French colonial era that is no longer used.
Passengers can use a station close to the airport while freight trains carrying containers go all the way to and from Doraleh. Nearby is the largest free trade zone in Africa, known as the Djibouti International Free Trade Zone (DIFTZ), where hundreds of trucks can be seen waiting to pick up goods destined for Ethiopia and other countries beyond Djibouti.
The Chinese-financed, UD$3.5 billion DIFTZ opened earlier this year, covering an area of 4,800 hectares. According to an official announcement, it will focus on logistics, export processing, financial support services, manufacturing and duty-free merchandise trade.
This small and largely peaceful republic on the Horn of Africa is fast becoming China’s economic gateway to Africa. But it is the naval base that has sent jitters through the Western military community in Djibouti.
Djibouti-China-Naval base-2017-Facebook
Chinese PLA Navy officers on guard at Beijing’s Djibouti naval base. Photo: Facebook
The official China Daily, which covered the opening of the base in August last year, stated at the time it could “support some 10,000 people” with the caveat that “official figures for the number of personnel to be stationed there have not been released.” The paper said the official reason for the establishment of the base was “to support the Chinese military’s escort and peacekeeping missions in Africa and West Asia.”
The Western powers that have bases there usually refer to the same reason for their presence in Djibouti, as well as to fight pirates famously active off the coast of Somalia.
But The China Daily was probably more frank than Western spokespersons as it also quoted Liu Hongwu, a professor at Zhejiang University, as saying that Djibouti “is situated at the juncture of Europe, Asia and Africa; in a sense, it is at the crossroads of the world.”
That’s more likely why China is there, to protect its economic and strategic interests in the region — and hence also better position itself for any potential conflicts between China and the West, primarily the US.
Djibouti is not America’s only base in the region. It also has an important facility in Qatar, as well as the highly secretive, multi-purpose base at Diego Garcia, a leased atoll in the British Indian Ocean Territory that is the only possession the United Kingdom keeps in the region after it withdraw from east of Suez in the 1960s.
In that sense, China’s new base in Djibouti is the first serious challenge to US military supremacy in the Indian Ocean region. And China is making incipient moves in that direction.
US-Djibouti-Marines-Camp Lemonnier-Wikipedia
US Marines train at their Camp Lemonnier Base in Djibouti. Photo: Wikipedia
In July 2017, just before the official opening of the base, the Chinese warships CNS Jinggangshan and CNS Donghaidao brought in personnel and materiel to the base. The CNS Jinggangshan carried marines, engineers and military vehicles to the base while the CNS Donghaidao transported some unspecified heavy equipment.
Then, in September last year, troops stationed at the base carried out their first live-fire drills. The exercise, which involved dozens of soldiers, took place at Djibouti’s national gendarmerie training range and was meant to test their combat readiness when faced with extreme heat, humidity and salinity — all omnipresent in Djibouti as well as other parts of Africa.
To keep up the pretense that nothing untoward is underway, the combined European Union counter-piracy task force in Djibouti and China’s PLA Navy carried out a joint exercise in October.
But there is no hiding the fact that Western powers are peeved by China’s newly established presence. In March this year, Marine General Thomas Waldhauser, the top US general for Africa, told a US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee hearing that “the consequences would be significant” if China took over the port at Doraleh.
That is now happening as the Djibouti government took over the port from Dubai’s DP World in February without any official explanation and appears now to be negotiating an agreement with the state-run China Merchants Group to take its place.
DP World appealed against the decision and in August won a legal battle against Djibouti at the London Court of International Arbitration. But that is no guarantee that Chinese interests will not soon win control of the port.
Djibouti-Port-Wikipedia
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