💭 “Abiy Ahmed has shown himself to be a weak and overly ambitious leader at best, and a duplicitous war criminal at worst.”
👉 From The Washington Post
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s forces have not lost the war that he launched one year ago against the rebellious ruling party of the country’s northern Tigray region, though the conflict appears to be spiraling out of control as militias and separatist groups mobilize and join forces against the government.
But even if fighters loyal to Abiy manage to pull off a military victory against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), Abiy has forever lost the image of savior and peacemaker. The young leader who was once compared to Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama is now mentioned in the same breath as war criminals such as deposed Sudanese strongman Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
Within days of launching a military operation to remove the TPLF from power in Tigray last November, Abiy was already losing the PR war. The prime minister’s strategy of imposing a communications and media blackout in Tigray raised red flags for the international community, and as information inevitably trickled out of Tigray, the worst suspicions were confirmed. Reports of massacres and mass rapes were confirmed by Amnesty International days after the conflict started and continued to be documented in the months since fighting started.
These atrocities were committed by both Ethiopian troops and soldiers from neighboring Eritrea, and Abiy further undermined confidence in his leadership by initially denying the presence of Eritrean forces before acknowledging that foreign troops were fighting on his behalf in Tigray.
And Abiy’s November 2020 declaration of victory, issued mere weeks after the conflict started, became laughable as the resurgence of the TPLF retook Tigray this summer and went on the offensive in other regions of the country. Now, speculation spreads that the Tigrayans might take the fight to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Abiy’s attempts to rally the country, calling on citizens to take up arms and “bury the terrorist TPLF,” come off as both desperate and dangerous. (Facebook even removed the prime minister’s post as an incitement to violence.)
It took Abiy less than two years in office to win a Nobel Peace Prize; it has taken even less time to go from Nobel laureate to embattled leader and international pariah. That Abiy would so badly mismanage both the military and public relations struggle against the TPLF is surprising for a man who built his career wielding both guns and information. Abiy started as a military man, having fought as a teenager in the rebellion that overthrew the Communist Derg military regime in 1991. From there, Abiy worked his way up the ranks of the post-Derg Ethiopian military. Along the way, he reportedly played a role in founding the country’s Information Network Security Agency, tasked with spying against dissidents and journalists.
Once Abiy moved from the armed forces to politics, he was equally tactical in managing information about his own life. Coming to power amid paralyzing protests from the country’s two largest ethnic groups, the Oromo and the Amhara, Abiy played up his own ethnic heritage, the first prime minister from the historically marginalized Oromo, married to an Amhara woman. He visited the Ethiopian diaspora, meeting adoring crowds who saw him as the country’s savior. Abiy spread a message of peace and unity with a pithy slogan: “Medemer,” an Amharic word for “unity” or “coming together.”
And he managed to pull this off while not-so-subtly scapegoating the TPLF, which played a leading role in the fight against the Derg and subsequently dominated Ethiopia. Abiy blamed the country’s problems on the TPLF and on Tigrayans more generally, purging members of the small ethnic minority that had held most of the country’s top political and military posts. Even as he proclaimed unity for international audiences, Abiy made references in local rallies and Ethiopian media against “daytime hyenas,” which many people interpreted as an anti-Tigrayan slur.
Abiy likely could have maintained this duplicity had he not overplayed his hand by attempting to crush the TPLF. But overplay he did, and the TPLF successfully countered on the battlefield and in the media. Tigrayan forces regrouped in the northern mountains before launching a successful counteroffensive this summer, drawing upon the TPLF’s history as a rebel group, as well as the weapons and military training that Tigray had amassed during decades in power.
And TPLF leaders successfully appealed to the international media, painting themselves as oppressed freedom fighters in strategic interviews to outlets such as the BBC and the New York Times. Only recently have international media started to highlight atrocities committed by Tigrayan forces — not surprising given the TPLF’s long history as an authoritarian ruling party in Ethiopia before Abiy’s rise — but these reports still condemn Abiy’s forces and Eritrean allies as the worst offenders in the conflict.
But even if sympathies for the TPLF wane, this is unlikely to translate into support for Abiy. The Ethiopian leader has shown himself to be a weak and overly ambitious leader at best, and a duplicitous war criminal at worst. Abiy’s meteoric rise in Ethiopia and the effusive praise of the global community — to which I contributed at the time — created a hubris that has proved disastrous for Abiy and for Ethiopia as a whole.
One year on, the war Abiy launched threatens his own political survival and that of Ethiopia as a country.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on November 8, 2021
In both cases, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, the speed of the collapse of government forces was (and is) remarkable. The reasons for this are complex, with differences between the two situations, along with some similarities.
👉 Two events stand out for me this year.
The first was on 18 June when I visited Mekelle, the capital of the Ethiopian province of Tigray. Ethiopian Airlines had resumed a scheduled flight service after the rebels of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) had retreated into the hills in the face of an invasion by the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF) at midnight on 3/4 November 2020.
The war came after months of simmering tensions between the government of Prime Minister Ahmed Abiy and the TPLF, which refused to join his new Prosperity Party, a successor to the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which had ruled Ethiopia since the collapse of the Marxist Derg regime in 1991.
I took a (very) battered taxi around Mekelle, which had to be bump-started, the driver always positioning it carefully on a slope whenever we stopped. “No parts”, he said of the ancient Toyota, though no money was a more likely reason, given its state. The driver filled up from small bottles of petrol bought on the side of the road, two litres at a time, literally a hand-to-carburettor existence.
My meetings with the UN humanitarian office and the university done and dusted, and having successfully stayed out of the way of the ultra-aggressive ENDF patrols, I made my way back to the airport for the return to Addis. There I stopped at a small kiosk selling Tigrayan trinkets. Business had been “very slow”, said the assistant, “since the war”. Having bought something which I explained was for my daughters, he thrust two small wooden crucifixes into my hand. “These are for your children,” he insisted, “since you have been kind to me. Thank you.”
Prime Minister Abiy had declared the war against Tigray to be over on 28 November with the fall of Mekelle to his ENDF, working in conjunction with Amhara “special forces” militia and, though denied at the time, Eritrean troops.
Just 10 days after I was in Mekelle, the rebel Tigray Defence Force (TDF) retook the city and advanced across the Tigrayan borders into the Amhara and Afar regions. Since then, TDF military gains have increased in tempo from steady to rapid.
In spite of Abiy’s latest attempt to launch an offensive against the TDF this October, today the rebels are less than 350km from Addis Ababa, threatening to cut the capital’s trade lifeline with the port of Djibouti to its northeast. This led Abiy to declare the State of Emergency this week, calling on residents to take up arms to defend the city against the rebels’ advance which was, he said, “pushing the country to its demise”.
In early July, I was in the province of Bamiyan, Afghanistan. I went there to meet the governor and to film near the Buddha statues which were infamously blown up by the Taliban in 2001 after declaring that they were unacceptable “idols”. I was working in the Arg, the Presidency, as part of an attempt to determine a fast-track method for regional peace — an effort best summarised as “too little, too late”.
In Afghanistan, just the following month, the 400,000-strong armed forces and police collapsed in the face of a Taliban advance. Between 9 July, when we left Kabul, the Taliban’s control of districts was at 90 out of 398; by 16 August, all bar seven districts were under Taliban authority. By 31 August, it was all over; the US and its allies had left, and the Taliban was in charge.
In both cases, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, the speed of the collapse of government forces was (and is) remarkable. The reasons for this are complex, with differences between the two situations, along with some similarities.
In Afghanistan, despite the numbers of government forces, at least on paper, much of the fighting was done by a small number of special forces, around 10% of the total. A combination of their exhaustion, malign regional actors (if for different reasons) in both Iran and Pakistan, an inability to manage Afghan materiel resupply by air, and the suddenness of the US pullout (the nadir of which was the departure from Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night on 2 July without informing their Afghan allies), reinforced a self-fulfilling prophecy of collapse, as one district after another folded.
In the end, the Taliban won the psychological war as much as the military contest.
In Ethiopia, Abiy’s attempts to bolster his forces by employing Eritreans along with Amharic militia and, latterly, fresh recruits from among the youth and retired soldiers, have served to demonstrate his weakness while scarcely adding to his military capability. Addis Ababa’s military reliance on the national arch-enemy in Eritrea at critical moments has hardly elevated Abiy’s popularity. In Afghanistan, of course, the regime was dependent on external support in the US; when that went away, it collapsed, spectacularly.
The presence of the US also turned the struggle into a regional religious jihad. But the post-Taliban project after 2001 suffered from the strength of the pull of tribal and religious identities over Afghan nationalism.
Ethiopia has faced the same challenges, where internal peace has been rare and the history between different ethnic groups — the Oromo, Amhara, Somalis and Tigrayans among them — less a source of unity than division. One group’s national hero is another’s imperialist conqueror and land grabber.
While government efforts have endeavoured to promote the functioning of a central, federal state through state-led infrastructure and a growing economy, the absence of a national cause at least as coherent (or as existential) as that of the Tigrayans has indubitably shaped their political direction as much as their relative martial prowess. The cause of Ethiopian nationalism has not been helped by widespread inequalities along ethnic, urban-rural and religious lines, frictions heightened by social media. Economic contraction and rising unemployment haven’t helped, now over 29%, with inflation touching 27%.
While both countries have been brutalised by their experiences, the psychological war is also important. Abiy has lost this battle, just as President Ashraf Ghani did in Afghanistan. In the last major towns to fall, Kombolcha and Dessie, just 350km to the north of Addis Ababa, the ENDF gave up without a fight, getting into their (and other people’s) vehicles and fleeing south. This is partly because the TPLF has proven to be so much better at the media battle, but also because Abiy has not enjoyed a good relationship with the press, not least given the government’s tendency to turn the internet on and off to suit its ends, which has backfired badly. His increasingly belligerent rhetoric, which includes calling on citizens to“bury” the rebels, has undermined his credibility internationally, a perception worsened, ironically, by his award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.
For Ethiopia, as Afghanistan, the components of a negotiated peace include the realisation by the conflicting parties that they have more to gain by ending fighting than continuing with it, that the international community pushes them to the table, and method, timing and leadership.
Both countries have faced a restive region. Kabul’s problems related directly to Pakistan’s support of the Taliban and that was rooted in Islamabad’s relationship with India and with its own domestic tapestry inside Pakistan. Iran had its own interests, centring on the removal of the US at whatever cost.
Ethiopia is in the centre of a particularly difficult and increasingly complex region. Sudan has just suffered a military coup (again), where the military component of a joint government removed its civilian counterparts from power, a putsch supposedly supported, inter alia, by Egypt. Both allegedly support the TDF against Addis, not least given mutual fears about Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam on the Nile. Eritrea’s role is well known, in part because of historical enmities between the Tigrayans and President Isaias Afwerki in Asmara, while Ethiopian troops have reportedly used weapons supplied by China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, among others, to strike Tigrayan targets.
And there is the question of leadership failures and frailties.
Ghani failed to consolidate his military forces and give them reason to keep fighting. Abiy has relied on increasingly belligerent rhetoric to inspire dramatic acts of heroism and bravery against the advancing TPLF, one so far unmatched by military training, discipline and, it seems, motivation.
In between bouts of intellectual pomposity, Ghani tried to get a peace process going, but was let down by his US allies, who made peace with the Taliban in Doha in February 2020 while excluding Kabul. Abiy has been far less willing, talking up war rather than peace, not least since any acceptance of a negotiation process would involve tacit acceptance of the status of the opposition, weakening his legitimacy and credibility as the government in place.
The role of the international community in Ethiopia is different, though the country receives more than $5-billion in annual aid. It is not overwhelmingly dependent, as Afghanistan was, on one external actor (in the US), or vulnerable to one malign neighbour (Pakistan). But this does not entirely discount the role to be played by outsiders in urging both parties to the negotiating table through a measure of carrot and stick, including sanctions, and in placing their weight behind African mediation efforts. For instance, if Abiy does not play ball, mention of the rescinding of his Nobel Peace Prize might help to focus his mind.
Abiy so far has lacked strategic nous, reacting to events rather than having a grand plan for peace. Like Ghani, he is a reluctant peacemaker, making concessions only under duress. Both leaders’ handling of the military has been chaotic and amateurish. Abiy’s ethnic profiling of Tigrayans in business, in airport queues and in carrying out atrocities has not only undermined his cause, but ensured deep-seated enmities.
It is said that competent people choose to have smart, challenging folk around them. The Arg became a notorious echo chamber of ideas, Ghani surrounding himself with kinsmen and acolytes, some of whom were notorious for seeking rent through government connections. From all accounts, Abiy lacks the feedback loops that make leaders sensitive to events and receptive to good ideas. But he does not lack for messianic certainty.
Still, it’s difficult to negotiate a peace settlement from a position of weakness, no matter the level of confidence on the part of leadership. This is a lesson for Abiy as much as it was for President Ghani.
A military stalemate in Ethiopia would now require a stiffening of ENDF resolve and a consolidation of forces hitherto unseen. But it would be necessary if a peace process is to take root, since victorious armies generally don’t see the point in making peace when they are advancing — as the Taliban showed.
The way forward for peace in Ethiopia has to centre, first, on acceptance of a ceasefire by all sides in exchange for various confidence-building measures including the restoration of humanitarian access and services such as banking and electricity to Tigray. Getting to this point, however, demands mediators being allowed to freely travel to Tigray to shop these suggestions, which until now Abiy has been reluctant to do, out of fear of undermining his own position.
Thereafter there is a need for a settlement. Whether this allows Abiy to remain in office is one key question, one that is increasingly unlikely given the brutality of the occupation of Tigray. Any deal will also have to involve Oromia opposition groups, which have linked up with the TDF. This has to entail opening further lines of communication with plausible Oromo intermediaries, some of whom are in jail. Thus, releasing political prisoners would be another confidence-building measure.
Finally, all this would have to be thrashed out at some sort of national dialogue, implicit in which is an acceptance by the government that it is prepared to accept and facilitate a peaceful handover. Most likely this would have to be based on a Tigrayan acceptance of a subordinate role that would leave the TPLF in control of Tigray itself, but without major strength in the federal government.
Such a peace process will depend on a coordinated international effort in getting behind an indigenous process, involvement that is willing to hold Ethiopian feet to the fire.
Ghani missed several opportunities to make peace with the Taliban. The most notable was after the 2019 national election, when he was elected with less than 10% of nearly ten million registered voters. If he had used that moment to reset national politics, and to form an inclusive government, how different things might have been.
Abiy, like Ghani, fears that negotiation means equivalence of the cause of the national government with the rebels. So far, his favoured approach to nation-building has only worsened the political crisis, in so doing never failing to miss an opportunity.
Like Ghani, Abiy risks making himself dispensable to the interests of peace.
“Coded microchips implanted in every person in the country would tie all of us into a master computer that could track anyone down at any moment, and plans for such a system are already under way whether you like it or not!”
ይቀጥልና…
“The tiny transmitters can be injected painlessly from a tiny gun in humans without them even knowing it through a nationwide vaccination program.”
በመጨረሻም፡
“All the government would have to do is make up something like the swine flu vaccine.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on November 8, 2021
💭 As Taliban took over Afghanistan presidential palace after president Aschraf Ghani Ahmadsai has fled to Dubai – in Ethiopia, the Oromo Taliban CRIME MINISTER Abiy Ahmed will also soon be deposed by Tigrayan Zionists and forced to leave the Arat Kilo palace forever. This evil and monstrous war criminal will be brought to justice. His dream of creating an „Oromo Islamic Emirate„ will remain a dream.
The Taliban declared the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from the Presidential Palace in Kabul.
Convicted rapist who was deported from US in 2017 is arrested at Washington’s Dulles International Airport after catching Ethiopian Airlines evacuation flight out of Kabul
Ghader Heydari, 47, boarded evacuee flight but was flagged by border officials
How he got on flight unclear because it’s ‘unlikely’ he had Special Immigrant Visa
Man whose name matches pleaded guilty to rape in Ada County, Idaho, in 2010 A convicted rapist who was deported from the US in 2017 has been arrested at Washington’s Dulles International Airport after catching Ethiopian Airlines evacuation flight out of Kabul.
Ghader Heydari, 47, boarded a flight for evacuees but was flagged by border officials upon arrival into Washington.
He was being held at the Caroline Detention Facility in Bowling Green, Virginia, according to DailyWire, after his criminal and immigration history was pointed that.
He was released in December 2015, according to state records, and was deported from the country in 2017.
When Heydari arrived in the US on the evacuation flight, officials tried to persuade him to cancel his request to enter but he appears to have refused.
The U.S. evacuated 13,400 people from Kabul last Thursday, taking the evacuees to bases in Qatar, Bahrain or Germany before they return to the states.
They flew 5,100 people out of Kabul on US military planes. Another 8,300 were saved by coalition flights. The total – 13,400 – was drastically less than the 19,000 rescued the previous day.
Senator Ted Cruz responded to the situation on Twitter, “Biden’s evacuation from Afghanistan has been chaos. He’s bringing TENS OF THOUSANDS of people into America without thorough vetting. We have a moral obligation to get Afghans who fought with us out of harm’s way. But all unvetted evacuees should be housed in safe 3rd countries.”
“Coded microchips implanted in every person in the country would tie all of us into a master computer that could track anyone down at any moment, and plans for such a system are already under way whether you like it or not!”
ይቀጥልና…
“The tiny transmitters can be injected painlessly from a tiny gun in humans without them even knowing it through a nationwide vaccination program.”
በመጨረሻም፡
“All the government would have to do is make up something like the swine flu vaccine.”
_________
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