The ambitious United Arab Emirates

TUCKED away behind rows of tin shacks and unkempt acacia trees, a cluster of tumbledown villas, mosques and a synagogue conjures up the grandeur of a port that once marked the southern tip of the Ottoman Empire. “Berbera is the true key of the Red Sea, the centre of east African traffic, and the only safe place for shipping upon the western Erythraean shore,” wrote Richard Burton, a British traveller, in 1855. “Occupation [by the British]…has been advised for many reasons.”