Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 6, 2021
Biden’s Brewing Problem in Ethiopia
War broke out in the Tigray region of Ethiopia in November. Five months later, the scale of the carnage, destruction, and destabilisation is becoming evident.
The spark for the fighting was an attack on army bases by soldiers loyal to the region’s ruling Tigray People’s Liberation Front which was at odds with the federal government headed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. But wars don’t happen overnight: the European Union, International Crisis Group, and many others issued warnings. Most worryingly, Eritrea — with whom Prime Minister Abiy had made a much-heralded peace agreement in 2018 — had a scarcely-hidden war plan.
Abiy’s initial goal was cutting the TPLF down to size. But his coalition partners’ war aims appear to go much further. For Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki, the aim is nothing less than the extermination of any Tigrayan political or economic capability. For the militia from the neighboring Amhara region it is a land grab — described by the U.S. State Department as “ethnic cleansing.”
For the first month, the Trump administration endorsed the war, backing up Abiy’s depiction of it as a domestic “law enforcement operation” and praising Eritrea for ‘restraint’ — at a time when divisions of the Eritrean army had poured over the border and reports of their atrocities were already filtering out.
The Biden administration is building a sensible policy — but is hampered by the slow process of putting its senior team in place. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made reasonable demands. President Biden dispatched Senator Chris Coons to convey how seriously Washington is taking the crisis. A special envoy for the Horn of Africa — reported to be the senior diplomat Jeffrey Feldman — is due to be appointed, short-cutting the process of confirming an Assistant Secretary of State for Africa. The new USAID Director Samantha Power, a passionate advocate of action against mass atrocity, is awaiting confirmation.
The Ethiopian government is providing just enough of a plausible impression of compliance to postpone or dilute effective action
But Biden’s approach is not working. To be precise, the Ethiopian government is providing just enough of a plausible impression of compliance to postpone or dilute effective action.
Blinken’s first demand was that Eritrean forces should withdraw. This pushed Abiy — after months of dissembling — to admit that the Eritrean army was actually present and that he would request Pres. Isaias to pull them back. Abiy’s problem is that if Eritrea withdraws, he loses Tigray: the Tigrayan resistance would overwhelm his depleted army. Isaias is a veteran operator and he has prepared for this: his security agents and special forces are now so strategically placed inside Ethiopia that Abiy’s fragile government would be endangered if he withdrew.
Second, the U.S. insisted on a ceasefire and political negotiations. This is essential to stop the battlefield slaughter — thousands were killed in combat in March—and the ongoing scorched earth campaign that is reducing Tigray’s economy to the stone age. But Abiy rejected this. He and Isaias appear determined to try one more offensive to vanquish the Tigrayan Defense Forces. What they fail to see is that inflicting atrocities only stiffens the resolve of the Tigrayans to fight back. Speaking on April 3 Abiy belatedly conceded that a “difficult and tiresome” guerrilla war is in prospect — but he has made no mention of peace talks.
Third, Blinken demanded unfettered humanitarian access for international relief agencies to provide food and medicine for to the starving. He might have added, without a pause in the fighting, farmers cannot prepare their lands for cultivation. The agricultural cycle brooks no delay: ploughing needs to begin soon, before the rains come in June. If there’s no harvest this year, hunger will deepen.
The World Food Program and international agencies are reaching about 1.2 million of the 4.5 million people estimated to need emergency relief. But there are reports that as soon as food is distributed, soldiers sweep through and take it from civilians at gunpoint. The aid effort is, at the moment, too little and too late.
Last, there should be an independent investigation into reports of atrocities, which the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has begun, but in partnership with the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission. This has the drawback that it’s unrealistic to expect the staff of an Ethiopian government body—whatever their personal integrity—to withstand the personal pressure that the authorities will put on them. And many Tigrayans will automatically reject their findings as biased.
The United States has other policies in this complicated mix too. Last year, the Treasury took on the task of trying to mediate in the Nile Waters dispute between Ethiopia and Egypt. Abiy inherited a huge dam, under construction on the Blue Nile, from his predecessors. It’s a point of national pride, the centrepiece of Ethiopia’s development. Egypt sees any upstream state controlling the Nile waters as an existential threat.
To protect the “Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam” project, Ethiopia’s ministry of foreign affairs had constructed a coalition of African riparian states, which isolated Egypt and minimised the danger of direct confrontation.
Abiy upended this: 18 months ago he went into direct talks with Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who invited the United States to mediate — confident that the Trump administration would lean his way. Sudan, the other party to the talks, had no option but to line up with Cairo and Washington. By the time he had realised his error, Abiy was stuck, and the scenario foreseen by his diplomats was unfolding: Ethiopia was the one isolated as Egypt pressed home its advantage and the United States suspended some aid. Since then the talks have repeatedly broken down, with each side escalating its rhetoric.
The African peace and security order lies wrecked
To compound the error, in preparing for his assault on Tigray, Abiy antagonised Sudan. A few days before the war, he asked Sudanese leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan to seal the Sudanese border. He hadn’t anticipated that this would trample over a delicate live-and-let-live border agreement, whereby the Sudanese allowed Ethiopian farmers to cultivate land inside their territory. They were ethnic Amharas. In sealing the frontier, the Sudanese troops drove those villagers out — enraging the powerful Amhara regional government and igniting a needless border conflict.
To complicate the picture still further, Isaias’s planned axis of autocracy extends through Ethiopia to Somalia. A painstaking process of stabilising and reconstructing Somalia is imperiled by President Mohamed Farmajo’s failure to agree an electoral timetable with the opposition, and refusal to step down when his term of office expired in February. Farmajo’s special presidential forces have been trained in Eritrea and many Somalis believe that he plans to use them to impose a military solution on his rivals.
The African peace and security order lies wrecked. The African Union has failed to act. Ethiopian diplomacy and pressure (the organisation’s headquarters are in Addis Ababa) has kept Ethiopia’s war and Eritrea’s destabilisation of the wider region off the AU agenda. Abiy rebuffed African mediators and convinced enough of his fellow African leaders that it was a purely domestic affair to prevent an African consensus position against the war.
At the centre of the chaos is Abiy, at every turn he has blundered
In turn, Africa’s inaction gave a green light to Russia and China to threaten to veto any resolution at the UN Security Council. Last month, the U.S. tried and failed this route. This passes the baton to the U.S. and Europe acting alone — at the G7 last week and next week at the Spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF.
At the centre of this chaos is Abiy. At every turn he has blundered. He has overpromised, mistaken image for reality, made needless enemies and locked himself into dangerous alliances. Those who once embraced his rhetoric of reform and peacemaking are looking naïve at best. He’s not a consensus-builder, rather an agent of polarisation. Perhaps most significantly for the incoming U.S. diplomatic team, the Ethiopian leader has demonstrated an explosive combination of hubris and poor judgement that make him an unreliable interlocutor — sitting atop a fragile country of 110 million people in a volatile region.
There’s no obvious solution: it’s a problem from hell.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 6, 2021
Delegation members have met some of the refugees who have fled across the border to escape the conflict in neighbouring Tigray at Um Rakuba camp in Sudan’s Gadarif state.
MSF Says Staff Witness Ethiopian Troops Execute Civilians In Tigray
👉 ቢያንስ አራት ሰዎች ከህዝብ አውቶቡሶች ተጎትተው በመውጣት ሲገደሉ አይተናል
👉 Ethiopia: Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières MSF staff attacked after witnessing killings by soldiers in Tigray
👉 At least four men were dragged off public buses and executed
We are horrified by the continued violence in Tigray, Ethiopia. This includes the extrajudicial killings of at least four men who were dragged off public buses and executed by soldiers, while our staff members were present, on Tuesday, March 23.
The latest incident took place on the road from Mekelle to Adigrat, where three MSF staff members were traveling in a clearly marked MSF vehicle. Along the journey they encountered what appeared to be the aftermath of an ambush of an Ethiopian military convoy by another armed group, in which soldiers were injured and killed. Military vehicles were still on fire.
Ethiopian soldiers at the scene stopped the MSF car and two public transport mini-buses driving behind it. The soldiers then forced the passengers to leave the mini-buses. The men were separated from the women, who were allowed to walk away. Shortly afterward, the men were shot.
The M S F team was allowed to leave the scene but saw the bodies of those killed on the side of the road. A short distance farther away, the MSF vehicle was stopped again by soldiers. They pulled the MSF driver out of the vehicle, beat him with the back of a gun and threatened to kill him. Eventually the driver was allowed to get back into the vehicle and the team could return to Maekkaellae.
This horrific event further underscores the need for the protection of civilians during this ongoing conflict, and for armed groups to respect the delivery of humanitarian assistance, including medical aid. Our teams are still reeling from witnessing the senseless loss of lives from this latest attack.
👉 Ethiopia: Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières MSF staff attacked after witnessing killings by soldiers in Tigray
👉 At least four men were dragged off public buses and executed
We are horrified by the continued violence in Tigray, Ethiopia. This includes the extrajudicial killings of at least four men who were dragged off public buses and executed by soldiers, while our staff members were present, on Tuesday, March 23.
The latest incident took place on the road from Mekelle to Adigrat, where three MSF staff members were traveling in a clearly marked MSF vehicle. Along the journey they encountered what appeared to be the aftermath of an ambush of an Ethiopian military convoy by another armed group, in which soldiers were injured and killed. Military vehicles were still on fire.
Ethiopian soldiers at the scene stopped the MSF car and two public transport mini-buses driving behind it. The soldiers then forced the passengers to leave the mini-buses. The men were separated from the women, who were allowed to walk away. Shortly afterward, the men were shot.
The M S F team was allowed to leave the scene but saw the bodies of those killed on the side of the road. A short distance farther away, the MSF vehicle was stopped again by soldiers. They pulled the MSF driver out of the vehicle, beat him with the back of a gun and threatened to kill him. Eventually the driver was allowed to get back into the vehicle and the team could return to Mekelle.
This horrific event further underscores the need for the protection of civilians during this ongoing conflict, and for armed groups to respect the delivery of humanitarian assistance, including medical aid. Our teams are still reeling from witnessing the senseless loss of lives from this latest attack.
More details are emerging the day after a 21-year-old identified as the alleged suspect killed 10 people, including a police officer, during a mass shooting at a Boulder, Colorado, grocery store this week.
The suspect allegedly bought the firearm used in the attack six days earlier, and was known by former classmates to be short-tempered and paranoid, according to reports and an arrest affidavit released Tuesday.
The document did not disclose where Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, from the Denver suburb of Arvada, bought the Ruger AR-556 but stated he did so on March 16. Just six days later, he allegedly shot multiple people outside the King Soopers on Table Mesa before entering the store and continuing the killing spree inside.
“In December 1997, Silk Air Flight 185 crashed in Indonesia, killing 104 people on board. Indonesian authorities weren’t sure exactly what had happened, though US investigators suggested the captain may have switched off the flight recorders and caused the plane to dive — possibly after his co-pilot had left the cockpit. At the time of the crash, investigators noted, the pilot had been experiencing significant financial difficulties and had work-related problems.“
“The Investigation determined that the crash was caused deliberately by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies and declared “unfit to work” by his doctor.”
A report by SkyNews: In Cheli, Tigray, on Feb 23, 2021, evil Abiy Ahmed Ali’s and Eritrean soldiers – slaughtered everyone in the village – torched food supplies for humans and animals – destroyed homes…Each house has lost at least 2 to 4 of their family memebers…Those who could not flee were killed & berried in mass graves “Eyewitness accounts of Cheli massacre, #TigrayGenocide where evidences of the atrocities is overwhelming. 😢😢😢
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on March 16, 2021
Exclusive: Allegations and stories of atrocities and human rights abuses have surfaced in Tigray despite a government-imposed communications blackout.
After four months of warfare between Ethiopia’s national defence force and fighters from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), more than 500,000 Tigrayans have lost their homes and 60,000 have sought refugee status in neighbouring Sudan.
But other stories are emerging of executions and other atrocities.
Sky’s Africa correspondent John Sparks and his team are the first broadcast journalists to reach the region south of Tigray.
Ethiopia’s government has been asked for a response to this story.
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 