The threat of disorder emanating from Ethiopia may not only engulf the region but threaten the security of the Red Sea.
The longer the 12-month conflict in Ethiopia drags on, the greater the damage to the fragile stability of the Horn of Africa. It has already sown the seeds of regional destabilization that will accelerate if a political settlement is not sought urgently.
It is a sign of this concern that President Uhuru Kenyatta of neighbouring Kenya is actively engaged in trying to promote a resolution to the conflict and to lay the groundwork for a longer-term political settlement in Ethiopia.
At issue now is whether a country of 110 million people can be prevented from unravelling
From the moment the fighting began, Ethiopia’s neighbours sensed unprecedented danger. If not rapidly contained, which it was not, the conflict would trigger a chain reaction of claims for self-determination and drain the economy. The consequences would not be confined within the borders of Ethiopia. At issue now is whether a country of 110 million people can be prevented from unravelling.
The effects of failure will be felt in neighbouring states, in the fragile relations among the countries of the region and in the strategic environment surrounding the Horn of Africa.
Conflict and economic collapse beget displacement and the hardest hit by a migratory wave will be Kenya and probably Somalia. If this wave grows, migrants – and the numbers could be very high – will try to reach South Africa and Europe. All of Ethiopia’s neighbours have their own economic challenges and this additional influx will test their financial capacities.
Ethiopia’s centrifugal political forces were contained over the past 30 years by significant budget subsidies to the regions nearest to the frontier. This is no longer the case. The cost of war has diminished the subsidies to these already impoverished border populations, who will seek more opportunity across the frontier. Once the provider of stability in the region, Ethiopia has become an exporter of insecurity. Ethiopia is now over-armed and under-financed. Weapons are making their way across frontiers and one should be alarmed that the jihadist group al-Shabaab, for example, can buy guns more cheaply from the Ethiopian market than it does from Yemen.
Ethiopia’s deteriorating internal security is being exploited by al-Shabaab and other likeminded groups to infiltrate and recruit in Ethiopia. If this persists and succeeds, an entirely new front is opened making Kenya’s security even more fragile.
The dispute over centralization of political authority in Ethiopia, which spilled over into the war with Tigray, was accompanied by a deliberate and parallel strategy to realign influence in the Horn of Africa.
It is now emerging that the agreement between Isaias Afewerki, the president of Eritrea, and Abiy – for which the latter won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 – supplemented by the inclusion of Somalia into a trilateral agreement, was to to create a bloc of countries with highly centralized and authoritarian political systems to control the eastern coastline of Africa, from Eritrea to Somalia. In the process, efforts to consolidate cooperative security and development in the region, under the umbrella of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, were jettisoned, leaving it with new divisions and no institution to manage differences.
Multilateral options, in short, were deliberately abandoned. The Horn of Africa thus hovers over how the fate of this political axis will be managed in an institutional vacuum. Djibouti is caught between the contending politics of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. In Sudan the move to overthrow the experiment in political reform in favour of the military is colliding with sustained popular resistance. South Sudan is prey to its own post-independence demons. Kenya is fighting to inoculate its open economy and competitive political system from the infection of a region where the centre – usually Ethiopia – no longer holds.
If this grim outlook is not reversed, the threat of disorder emanating from Ethiopia will not only engulf the region but threaten the security of the Red Sea.
Abiy’s war on Tigray has turned into the potential dissolution of Ethiopia. Nothing is permanent, not least in a region which has recognized two secessions and lives with another in Somaliland.
The current successor of the Ethiopian empire may collapse. Eritrea’s lethally eccentric regime cannot last forever. But Ethiopia’s vast population, whether living in a united country or as separate entities, will inevitably seek access to the sea.
For many years, Ethiopian hegemony in the region allowed for the containment of crises. Ethiopian troops served in peacekeeping operations and in AMISOM, the African Union Mission in Somalia. Ethiopia and Kenya had an understanding that dated back half a century. Ethiopia’s relations with Sudan were balanced by a Faustian bargain between Omar al-Bashir’s Islamists and the regime controlled by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in Addis Ababa. Eritrea’s bizarre isolation could gradually have ended with the rapprochement with Abiy.
All these assumptions have now been shattered. Ethiopia must struggle to avoid dissolution. Eritrea’s authoritarian vision of order in the region will be replaced by that of the political victors in Addis and their vision of Ethiopia’s relations with its neighbours and the wider world.
Thus, a new transition beckons for Ethiopia. But this time, it must encompass the whole region which will have been so damaged by the events of the past few years.
The international community will have to consider how this transition is not hijacked again and under what conditions it can be sustained financially to give populations the belief that peace does not degenerate again into war and regional insecurity.
💭 The Tekeze dam was hit by airstrikes, knocking off power to the entire Tigray region.
The evil monster Abiy Ahmed will continue stealing, killing and destroying – even the Grand Renaissance Dam – unless stopped abruptly. That’s what he promised Egypt’s Al-Sisi when he repeated these reassuring words in Arabic after him: “I swear to Allah, we will never harm you, Wallahi! Wallahi! Wallahi!”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on August 11, 2021
Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister is raising the stakes in the battle for Tigray. Abiy Ahmed is urging ‘all capable citizens’ to join the army and stop the region’s rebels ‘once and for all’. His government launched an offensive against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) last November. So how far will Abiy go to win the battle?
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on August 11, 2021
💭 Dead bodies float in Ethiopian river
👉 Courtesy: WION
👏 Thank you, dear Palki Sharma! I followed all your reports on Tigray for nine months — you will be richly rewarded for your passionate reports about Tigrayan women — you’re more Ethiopian than many Ethiopian women. Namaste!
“A cease fire doesn’t mean cutting a region off power or destroying critical infrastructure.
A credible cease fire means doing everything possible so that aid reaches the millions of children, women and men who urgently need it. Saving lives should be a priority for all. #Tigray.” Josep Borrell
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 1, 2021
The ruination of a once-thriving area of Ethiopia is the result of war and its associated crimes. The world needs to wake up
It is hard to believe it’s happening again, even harder to believe that so few people seem to know or care. A massive famine is unfolding in Tigray in northern Ethiopia. Five million people are in need of food aid, and perhaps 900,000 are already starving.
In other words, it’s looking horribly reminiscent of the start of the 1984 famine, in which a million people died, most of them in Tigray. Like the last cataclysm, this has nothing to do with “natural causes”. It’s caused by war and its associated crimes. This time, however, the man in charge is a Nobel peace laureate: the Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed. A great weight of evidence suggests that his troops, and those of his Eritrean allies, are using hunger as a weapon of war.
In February, Abiy’s government dissolved the boards of the most effective aid groups: the Relief Society of Tigray and the Tigray Development Association. Since then, their warehouses have been destroyed by soldiers, their offices looted and their vehicles stolen. The Ethiopian and Eritrean armies have blocked supply lines, turned back convoys of food and medicine, burned grain stores, felled orchards, slaughtered oxen and ordered farmers not to till their fields.
This week the Ethiopian government declared a ceasefire, ostensibly to “enable farmers to till their land”, but more plausibly to regroup after an astounding reversal: Tigrayan rebels have recaptured the regional capital. In any case, it’s too late. Tillage should have happened over the past three months. People who are starving today can’t wait for possible harvests in November.
Like his homicidal predecessor, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Abiy flatly denies the famine. Last week he claimed: “There is no hunger in Tigray.” If justice is ever done, we might one day witness the remarkable spectacle of a Nobel laureate on trial for crimes against humanity.
All this would be bad enough. But what sharpens the crime is that Tigray was, until the war began last November, a world-renowned success story.
The traditional explanation of famine, which appears to resist all evidence, is that hunger is caused by a surfeit of people. A rising population overtaxes the land, which can no longer provide sufficient food for those who depend on it. But a fascinating study shows that in Tigray the opposite has happened.
It used photographs dating back to 1868, taken from the same vantage points, to assess the condition of the land. Since then, the population of Ethiopia has risen from 6.6 million to 115 million. A catastrophe? Far from it. The researchers found more trees, more vegetation, less erosion, less degradation. The region, they discovered, is “greener than at any time in the last 145 years”.
Why? Because the main driver of land degradation and hunger is not population. It’s policy. In 1868, the best land was owned by feudal lords. Other people were driven on to steep slopes. Pressed to the margins, without secure tenure, they were forced into destructive forms of land use: mostly uncontrolled grazing. But in the 1970s, land was redistributed to the people. Beginning in the 1980s, the rebels in Tigray, who later formed the national government, launched a programme to protect the soil, catch rainwater and reforest the land. Livestock were fenced out of large areas, steep slopes were terraced, stone walls and soil bunds were built to stop erosion, and trees planted and ponds dug to prevent water from flashing off the land.
The scale of these works is astonishing. Every fit person over the age of 18 spends 20 days a year on collective projects to rehabilitate the land. Entire landscapes, torn apart by gullies and sheet erosion, have been remodelled. The stone and soil moved by hand must amount to millions of tonnes. This might explain an extraordinary finding: the greenest places in Tigray are those with the highest population density. Because of the vast effort required, these works would have been impossible with fewer hands.
There have been similar results in other places: the Karoo Midlands in South Africa, Machakos in Kenya, the Loess plateau in China and the Adarsha catchment in India. In all these cases, population growth has been accompanied by environmental repair.
But Tigray is the outstanding example. The restoration works have caused a huge reduction in soil erosion and water loss, a resurgence of wildlife and improvements in crop production that have easily outstripped population growth. Incomes have risen. Children spend more time at school. In 2015-2016, when a major drought struck, the system helped to avert famine. The reason for its success is local control and enthusiasm for the programme: people feel it belongs to them. As welfare and security have improved, and women have greater rights and opportunities, population growth has fallen.
Of course, there are plenty of places where higher numbers of people, combined with total institutional failure, harm both the natural world and human welfare. But the important point is that population growth, degradation and famine are not intrinsically connected. What counts is the quality of government.
So there are no excuses. No part of the catastrophe in Tigray is natural or inevitable. Abiy, with his allies in Eritrea, is turning a thriving, prosperous region into the scene of another historic disaster. And he won’t stop until the world wakes up.
🔥 Amhara & Oromos bombing Tigray, Using Rape, Hunger & forced resettlement (Mengistu did it back then, Ahmed will do the same now) as a Weapon against People in Tigray for the past 130 years:-
The great famine is estimated to have caused 3.5 million deaths. During Emperor Menilk’s Reign, Tigray was split into two rgions, one of which he sold to the Italians who later named it Eritrea. Only two months after the death of Emperor Yohaness lV , Menelik signed the Wuchale treaty of 2 May 1889 conceding Eritrea to the Italians. It was not only Eritrea that Menelik gave away, he also had a hand in letting Djibouti be part of the French protectorate when he agreed the border demarcation with the French in 1887. Some huge parts of Tigray were put under Gonder. The Southern part, places like present day Alamata, Kobo etc were put under Wello Amhara adminstration.
👉 2. Haile Selassie (1892 – 1975)
Between 2 and 5 million’ people died between 1958 and 1977 as a cumulative result. Haile Selassie, who was emperor at the time, refused to send any significant basic emergency food aid to the province of Tigray,
👉 3. Mengistu Hailemariam (1937 – )
1979 – 1985 + 1987
Due to organized government policies that deliberately multiplied the effects of the famine, around 1.2 million people died from this famine. Mengistu & his Children still alive & ‘well’ while Tigrayans are again starving.
👉 4. Abiy Ahmed Ali (1976 – )
2018 – Until today: probably up to 500.000 already dead. 😠😠😠 😢😢😢 Unlike the past famine there is no natural or man-made drought, rather, Abiy simply uses war and hunger as a weapon. Abiy Ahmed sent his kids to America for safety, while bombing & starving Tigrayan kids!
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 