هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
In late June, the digital media platform “Pulse of Africa” launched personally by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali in October 2025 published a brief news item in strikingly vague language: “An Ethiopian institution specializing in foreign affairs and a UAE diplomatic academy signed a cooperation agreement aimed at strengthening partnership in diplomatic training, exchange of expertise, and research … The agreement was signed in Addis Ababa on the sidelines of an African-UAE regional forum.”
The report was accurate in substance, but what stood out was that the Ethiopian institution left unnamed was the Institute of Foreign Affairs — the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry’s official research and training arm — while the equally unnamed UAE diplomatic academy was the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, a federal Emirati institution named after the diplomatic adviser to the UAE president, who also serves as vice chairman of its board of trustees. Even the regional forum stripped of its name was the Hili Regional Dialogue, organized by the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research in cooperation with the same academy in Addis Ababa on June 25 and 26, in its first African edition following the Rio de Janeiro 2025 edition.
In its coverage, “Pulse of Africa” framed the event as follows: “An Ethiopian institution specializing in foreign affairs and a UAE diplomatic academy signed a cooperation agreement … The agreement was signed in Addis Ababa on the sidelines of an African-UAE regional forum.” In other words, the wording deliberately omitted four essential facts: the name of the institute, its affiliation with the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry, the name of the academy, and its connection to Anwar Gargash, the diplomatic adviser to the UAE president. Even the name “Hili Dialogue” itself was reduced to a mere “regional forum.” It was a systematic blackout that stripped away every traceable identifier while preserving the substance of the news.
By contrast, the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy published the news on its digital platforms in full and detailed form: “The Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy signed a memorandum of understanding with Ethiopia’s Institute of Foreign Affairs on the sidelines of the UAE-Africa Hili Regional Dialogue, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on June 25-26, 2026.”
According to the report, “The memorandum of understanding was signed by His Excellency Dr. Mohammed Ibrahim Al Dhaheri, deputy director-general of the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, and His Excellency Jafar Bedru, executive director of Ethiopia’s Institute of Foreign Affairs, in the presence of His Excellency Mohammed Salem Al Rashdi, the UAE ambassador to the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.
The memorandum, according to the text, aims to strengthen cooperation between the two sides in research and studies on foreign policy issues, organizing strategic dialogues, diplomatic capacity-building programs, and the exchange of experts and researchers, in a way that supports the partnership between the UAE and Ethiopia at both the academic and diplomatic levels.
The irony is that Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed personally launched the digital media platform Pulse of Africa in Addis Ababa in October 2025, presenting it as a tool to confront “negative images of Africa” and enable the continent to “shape its own narratives” free from external tutelage.
That means this platform is not an independent media outlet, but rather a quasi-official narrative project operating under the prime minister’s personal patronage and targeting, through its Arabic edition — which is receiving particular emphasis — Arab and Arabic-speaking African audiences. It is part of an Ethiopian media project within a soft power strategy aimed at entrenching Addis Ababa as the continent’s intellectual and media hub, drawing on its status as host of the African Union headquarters.
Yet this platform, which Abiy Ahmed said was created to counter negative media narratives about Africa free from external tutelage, found itself less than a year after its launch suppressing a narrative in favor of an external patron. This double blackout deliberately concealing the institute’s affiliation with the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry and hiding the academy’s ties to the circles closest to Mohammed bin Zayed is not a passing editorial detail.
It is a concentrated laboratory sample that encapsulates a much larger story: the story of a state whose foreign policy has become so beholden that it is now embarrassed even to name its partner, as this report will detail.
Financial and military rescue
To understand how Addis Ababa reached this point, one must go back to the summer of 2018, when Abiy Ahmed had just arrived in the prime minister’s office and the Ethiopian economy was choking under a severe foreign currency crisis that threatened the new order before it could find its footing. At that precise moment, Abu Dhabi stepped in with a $3 billion deposit into Ethiopia’s central bank, along with a parallel package of investments.
And it was not money alone. In those same months, the UAE sponsored the Ethiopia-Eritrea peace agreement that earned Abiy Ahmed the Nobel Peace Prize and gave Abu Dhabi the image of a “peacemaker” in the Horn of Africa before the agreement later collapsed and the two sides brought together by the UAE drifted to the brink of war.
Then came the existential test when the Tigray war broke out in late 2020 and TPLF forces advanced toward the capital in the fall of 2021. Investigative reports and flight-tracking platforms documented a UAE air bridge carrying drones and military equipment to the Ethiopian army at a moment when the fall of Addis Ababa seemed only weeks away.
Those drones shifted the balance of the war and cemented in Abiy Ahmed’s mind an inescapable equation: that the survival of his regime was a debt he owed to Abu Dhabi.
On top of those two layers — financial and military — a third economic and logistical layer was built: investments by the UAE’s Masdar in solar energy, agricultural and real estate projects, and logistical corridors linking Ethiopia’s landlocked economy to ports managed by Emirati companies on the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden coasts, so that Addis Ababa’s maritime ambitions, whatever form they take, pass through infrastructure controlled by Abu Dhabi.
Then came the June 2026 memorandum to complete the pyramid with its fourth and most cunning layer: shaping diplomatic consciousness itself. The memorandum signed between the Gargash Academy and the Institute of Foreign Affairs includes training diplomats, joint research, policy dialogue, joint publications, and the exchange of experts.
In other words, after buying the regime’s financial survival to secure its military survival and tying its economy to its own network, Abu Dhabi has now moved to help train the next generation of Ethiopian diplomats and shape the papers on which the Foreign Ministry feeds.
It is worth noting that the UAE has tried this model before with prestigious universities such as Johns Hopkins. But the crucial difference here is that the relationship with the American university is one based on institutional parity and an exchange of material value for exclusive knowledge, whereas the Emirati academy’s memorandum with Ethiopia’s Institute of Foreign Affairs is not seen as a partnership between two academic equals, but rather as a soft power instrument attached to the massive financial, military, and investment support Abu Dhabi provides to the Ethiopian government. The institute’s executive director, Jafar Bedru, did not hide the ambition behind the arrangement, noting that the memorandum is not a mere formality but the beginning of a long-term partnership.
The UAE dictates decisions: Testimony from the inside
What had been whispered in the corridors of Addis Ababa came into the open early this year. In an investigation published by Middle East Eye on Jan. 21, 2026, the outlet cited a former Ethiopian government adviser who had worked with it for more than a decade as saying that Abiy Ahmed sees his country’s future in full alignment with the Emirati axis, to the exclusion of other options. Officials inside and outside the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry, he said, have come to believe that the UAE is dictating Ethiopia’s decisions on at least three pivotal files: dealing with the Sudanese government, relations with the Rapid Support Forces, and the stance toward Eritrea and the port of Assab over the past two years. The adviser went even further, revealing that Abiy Ahmed “almost invaded Assab last year at Abu Dhabi’s urging.”
This testimony warrants close attention. Invading the Eritrean port of Assab — the maritime outlet Ethiopia lost when Eritrea gained independence in 1993 — would have meant a full-scale regional war in the Horn of Africa. For a decision of such magnitude, involving war and peace, to have come close to execution “at the urging” of a Gulf capital means that what is described as a partnership has gone beyond the logic of alliance into the logic of dependency. Abu Dhabi is no longer merely influencing Ethiopian calculations; it is proposing wars for Addis Ababa.
The picture is completed by the testimony of Jalel Harchaoui, a specialist in North Africa and political economy, to the same outlet. After Riyadh ousted the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council from Aden in late 2025, and Abu Dhabi was forced to withdraw from its base in Bosaso, Somalia, after Mogadishu canceled all its agreements with it, Harchaoui believes Saudi Arabia is now moving aggressively to shift the course of the Sudan war in favor of the army, and that several regional actors will adapt to Riyadh’s initiatives with one exception: Ethiopia.
Addis Ababa, in his assessment, will remain attached to the UAE. For that very reason, the Emiratis shifted the center of gravity of their military operations to Ethiopian territory in preparation for a major attack which did in fact take place against Sudan’s Blue Nile region bordering Ethiopia in March 2026. In other words, at a moment when countries across the region, from the Haftar family in Libya to governments in the Horn of Africa, are recalculating between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, Ethiopia appears to be the only state that has lost the luxury of recalculation not necessarily because its national interest requires it, but because the accumulated structure of dependency since 2018 has left it with no room to maneuver.
The UAE president’s plane over an Ethiopian base
The material evidence of this shift is no less eloquent than the testimony. The same Middle East Eye investigation, using flight-tracking data, documented a series of flights by a giant Antonov 124 cargo plane bearing registration UR-ZYD and operated by the UAE company Maximus Air between Abu Dhabi and Harar Meda Air Base — the main base of the Ethiopian Air Force — on Jan. 3, 12, 15, and 17, 2026. Some of those flights departed from Al Dhafra Air Base. Days before the first of these flights, the same aircraft had landed three times at Israel’s Ovda Air Base after arriving from Bahrain’s Sheikh Isa Air Base.
This aircraft is no mystery. In 2021, a UN panel of experts identified it as part of a covert UAE air bridge smuggling weapons to Haftar’s forces in Libya in violation of the arms embargo. The UN report said its beneficial owner was Mohammed bin Zayed himself, then crown prince of Abu Dhabi and now president of the UAE, while the operating company belongs to a group whose sovereign fund board is chaired by National Security Adviser Tahnoon bin Zayed.
The same aircraft was previously tracked in an arms bridge to Ethiopia during the Tigray war in 2021, and on repeated flights to Chad linked to supplying the Rapid Support Forces. Today, its preferred destination is an Ethiopian air base. Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University, warned that repeated sorties by an aircraft with such capacity to an airport near areas of escalating RSF activity should be a matter of global concern, calling on Addis Ababa to close its airspace to the UAE and its proxies if it is proven that the flights are helping supply the militia.
It is also worth noting that the Sudanese army announced that it had shot down a hostile drone on May 23 after it violated Sudanese airspace coming from Ethiopian territory over the city of Damazin, the capital of Blue Nile region.
Thus the circle is complete: the state that was receiving Emirati weapons to save its capital in 2021 had, by 2026, become a transit point for Emirati arms headed to tear apart its neighbor Sudan and an alternative launch platform after Abu Dhabi’s other options, from Libya to Bosaso, had narrowed.
Blackout as editorial policy to avoid criticism
In light of all this, the obscured post by Pulse of Africa regains its full meaning. Deleting the names of the signatories was neither an oversight nor a general editorial style. It was a calculated communications decision serving two complementary needs. The first is distinctly Emirati: the platform’s Arabic edition speaks directly to the audience most angered by the UAE’s role Sudanese who hold Abu Dhabi responsible for the blood of their burned cities, Somalis enraged by the trajectory of the separatist Somaliland region, and Yemenis and Libyans with direct experience of Emirati intervention.
Mentioning the name “Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy” in an Arabic post would have turned it within minutes into a public tribunal over the Ethiopian-Emirati partnership. So the identifiers were cut away while the substance was passed through.
The second need is internal to Ethiopia. Openly acknowledging that the Foreign Ministry’s research arm is receiving “capacity building” from an academy belonging to a Gulf state undermines the nationalist discourse on which Abiy Ahmed builds his legitimacy and provokes the sensitivities of Ethiopia’s traditional elites in the military and foreign ministry, who regard the independence of national decision-making as central to Ethiopian identity itself.
The result is that media coordination between the two capitals has reached the level of managing the details of wording on quasi-official platforms, and Addis Ababa itself has come to treat its relationship with Abu Dhabi as a reputational burden to be managed through concealment rather than publicity. And if this is what was hidden in a public, protocol-level news item, logic suggests that much more is being hidden in undeclared understandings.
It has also been noted that Pulse of Africa’s coverage of the war in Sudan increasingly resembles that of its Emirati counterparts, as it fully avoids mentioning the crimes of the Rapid Support Forces militia documented by most international media outlets and rights organizations. In recent days, the Ethiopian platform also hosted Sudanese Sumoud coalition figure Khalid Omar Yousif known for his loyalty to Abu Dhabi, where he has been living for several months.
Yousif repeats the Emirati narrative that the war in Sudan is a civil war, in an attempt to deflect attention from the UAE’s role, and that it cannot be ended except through a political solution a political solution that naturally entails preserving the militia and incorporating the UAE-aligned political coalition into the deal.
The paradox of Adwa
The irony reaches its peak when it comes to the Battle of Adwa. Abiy Ahmed is the very man who never misses an occasion to invoke the Battle of Adwa and the crushing victory of the military commander Ras Alula Aba Nega over the Italian army in 1896 — the battle that made Ethiopia the only African state to break the European colonial project during the Scramble for Africa — and for which Abiy built a massive museum in the heart of Addis Ababa, turning it into a central pillar of his rhetoric about “Ethiopian pride” and the antiquity of Abyssinia, which was never colonized.
Yet the state that defeated a European army with spears and antiquated rifles in defense of the independence of its decision-making now finds itself, by the testimony of its own government advisers before its opponents, in the position of having its decisions on war and peace dictated from a foreign capital; of nearly waging a regional war over a port at external prompting; and of allowing aircraft linked to the president of a foreign state to pass over its air bases while its quasi-official media does not even dare name its partner.
In Abiy Ahmed’s discourse today, the Adwa narrative serves a compensatory function more than a mobilizing one. The greater the actual dependency on foreign powers, the louder the dose of historical pride in the rhetoric as if invoking Menelik II could heal what the present has failed to preserve. The result is a unique model of voluntary dependency: no occupying forces and no coercive treaties, but rather a web of interests and indebtedness — financial, military, and existential — woven patiently over eight years until breaking free became costlier than remaining within it.
In this sense, the Gargash Academy’s memorandum with the Institute of Foreign Affairs is nothing more than an institutional declaration of an existing reality. After Abu Dhabi secured the money, weapons, and logistics, the time came to secure the minds that will shape Ethiopian foreign policy for decades to come.
The objectives behind this go beyond Ethiopia itself: Addis Ababa is the seat of the African Union and a gateway for influence across the continent; an alternative support platform in the Sudan war after other options have contracted; and a cornerstone in the strategy of encircling the Red Sea, where Emirati interests intersect with Ethiopian maritime ambitions at the expense of Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia alike.
What remains most dangerous about this model is its replicability. The series of regional “Hili Dialogues” organized by the Emirates Policy Center, whose academy chair is related to the mother of the UAE president — will continue, and the same tools of penetration — “the deposit, the drones, and the diplomatic academy” — are on offer to every African capital in crisis.
Finally, in the coming months, the small details will tell us where this story is headed: What title will the first joint research paper produced under this institutional agreement carry? How many young Ethiopian diplomats will return from Abu Dhabi’s halls having rearranged their mental maps of the Red Sea and Sudan? Will the language of Pulse of Africa move more broadly toward Abu Dhabi’s tone in covering the Sudan war and the Somaliland file? Or will the platform continue its game of omitted names whenever the UAE appears in a news item?
If the blackout continues, that will be the clearest admission that what was signed in Addis Ababa in late June between the Emirati academy and the Ethiopian diplomatic institute was not a memorandum of understanding between two research institutions, but a contract of soft submission, under which the memorandum becomes an instrument of soft oversight and strategic guidance for the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry, ensuring Addis Ababa’s foreign policy remains subordinate to the Emirati axis over the long term.