Djibouti

A small Horn of Africa republic at the Bab-el-Mandeb gateway, from ancient trade and early Islam through French Somaliland to a coveted hub of world shipping and foreign military bases.

Djibouti occupies a slip of arid coast where the Red Sea narrows into the Gulf of Aden at the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, one of the world's busiest maritime chokepoints. The region has been bound to long-distance trade since antiquity, when its shores formed part of the commercial world of the Horn linked to ancient Egypt's Land of Punt, and Islam reached the nearby Red Sea coast within the first century of the faith; the port of Zeila, just to the south, became an early Muslim centre. The land is home to two principal peoples, the Afar and the Somali Issa, whose territories were drawn into the orbit of the medieval Muslim sultanates of Ifat and Adal. French interest began in 1862 with the purchase of the anchorage of Obock; treaties with local Afar and Somali rulers in the 1880s extended French control, and in 1888 Léonce Lagarde founded the port-city of Djibouti, which became the capital of the colony of French Somaliland (Côte française des Somalis) in 1896. The Franco-Ethiopian Railway, built between 1897 and 1917, tied the port to Addis Ababa and gave landlocked Ethiopia its principal outlet to the sea. After referendums in 1958 and 1967—the latter renaming the territory the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas—a 1977 vote led to independence on 27 June 1977 under President Hassan Gouled Aptidon. A civil war between the government and the Afar-based FRUD rebellion ran from 1991 to 1994, with a final accord in 2001. Since 1999 the country has been led by Ismail Omar Guelleh. Modern Djibouti thrives on its location, hosting foreign military bases—French, the US base Camp Lemonnier, Chinese, Japanese and others—and serving as a vital trans-shipment port and gateway for Ethiopian trade.