Ilemi Triangle - History

History

To the southeast of the Ilemi, Ethiopian emperor Menelik laid claim to Lake Turkana and proposed a boundary with the British to run from the southern end of the lake eastward to the Indian Ocean, which was shifted northward when the British and Ethiopian governments signed a treaty in 1907, reaffirmed by a 1970 Ethiopia-Kenya treaty.

The Ethiopia-Sudan boundary, the "Maud Line", was surveyed by Captain Philip Maud of the Royal Engineers in 1902-3. It was adopted by Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement treaty of December 6, 1907 between Ethiopia and British East Africa. Though vague on the precise details of where the border was located, it clearly placed the entire Ilemi on the Sudan side of the Ethiopia-Sudan line. In 1914 the Uganda-Sudan Boundary Commission agreement provided Sudan access to Lake Turkana via the now-dry Sanderson Gulf at the southeast corner of the Ilemi. After the First World War the Ethiopians armed the Nyangatom and Dassanech peoples, whereby the traditional raids turned into battles where hundreds died.

Representatives of Sudan, Uganda and Kenya in April 1924 in Kitgum agreed that Sudan should hand over some territory north of the 1914 line to either Kenya or Uganda, who could give protection to the Turkana people. However, Britain was jointly administering Sudan with Egypt, and did not want to pressure Egypt to concede Sudanese territory since relations were poor after Sir Lee Stack, the British Governor-General of Sudan, was assassinated in Cairo in November 1924. Sudan in 1928 agreed to allow Kenyan military units across the 1914 line to protect the Turkana against the Dassanech and Nyangatom, although it cost £30,000 per year. In 1929 Kenya began subsidising Sudan to occupy the territory, which it did not wish to continue because of the perceived useless nature of it. In 1931 it was Sudan which agreed to subsidise Kenya to occupy the territory.

In 1931 the Red Line (the Glenday Line) was drawn to represent the northern boundary of Turkana grazing. "In a series of agreements from 1929 to 1934, the Governor-General of the Sudan and the Governor of Kenya agreed that this Red Line should be accepted as the boundary." This line was based on the grazing limits of the Turkana peoples as required in the 1914 agreement to replace the provisional straight line.

After Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1936, Italy briefly claimed the area of the Ilemi triangle. A joint Kenya-Sudan survey team in 1938 demarcated the "Red Line" or "Wakefield Line", very close to the delimitation a few years earlier of this Red Line, marking the northern limit of grazing of Turkana. This line, to replace the provisional straight line of 1914 as required by that treaty, was carefully mapped and demarked with stone monuments. While Egypt and Britain agreed on this, Italy did not. The Dassanetch and Inyangatom had suffered because of the Italian occupation, and wished to recoup their losses by making a raid against the Turkana. Several hundred Turkana people were killed in a raid in July 1939 by the Inyangatom and Dassanech peoples. Italy gave up their claim on the Ilemi subsequently, and allowed the British to respond with a raid on the Inyangatom and Dassanech supported by the Royal Air Force.

British troops of the King's African Rifles occupied Ilemi in 1941 after the British invasion of Ethiopia during World War II. The KAR passed through Ilemi on their way to southwestern Ethiopia. In 1944 Britain's Foreign Office surveyed a "blue line" which was further northwest than the "red line". Sudan, in 1950, established their own patrol line even further northwest into Sudan where they prohibited Kenyan and Ethiopian pastoralists from moving west of it, giving up policing and development to the area east of it. However, that Kenya-Sudan agreement specified that this patrol line in no way affected sovereignty; that it was not an international boundary, and money continued to be paid to Kenya to patrol this Sudanese territory. There was fighting between 1949 and 1953 as Sudan attempted to keep the Nyangatom behind this line. After Sudanese independence in 1956, Sudan has not administered Ilemi or much of the southern part of the country due to the Civil war there.

In 1967 President Kenyatta's administration had made overtures to the British in order to secure support for the cession of the Triangle to Kenya. The British were unresponsive and the results amounted to little. The matter was sidelined and successive Kenyan administrations have been seemingly willing to accept the territorial status quo and their de facto territorial control, even if the Kenyan influence did diminish after the relocation of the SPLM to Sudan in the 1980s-90s.

In 1964 Kenya and Ethiopia reaffirmed their boundary, confirming Kenyan sovereignty to Namuruputh, which is just south of the southeastern point of the triangle. In 1972 a Sudan-Ethiopia boundary alteration did not solve the Ilemi issue because it did not involve Kenya, but did confirm that Ethiopia had no claim to the Ilemi Triangle.

In the 1990s Ethiopia armed the Dassanech with Kalashnikov automatic rifles, perhaps in response to Kenyan government arming in 1978 of the Turkana. Beginning in the 1960s, many Kenyan maps have marked the Red Line as the official boundary of Kenya, rather than a dotted boundary which it had been previously. More recently, most Kenyan maps depict the 1950 patrol line, the furthest northwest, as the boundary. There was a question as to whether a secret agreement was broached between Kenya and South Sudan to allow Kenya to administer this territory, in return for support in the Sudanese Civil War. In recent decades, the countries involved have had other priorities, delaying a resolution to the issue.

With the independence of South Sudan in 2011, the Sudanese claim to the Ilemi Triangle transferred to the new national government in Juba.