💭“አዲሱን የዓለም ሥርዓት ለማስጠበቅ ልዩ ቀውስ ያስፈልጋል።…አዲሱን የዓለም ሥርዓት ለመጠበቅ የመንግስት ያልሆኑ ተዋናዮችን እና ስልጣን የተሰጣቸውን ግለሰቦችን ማስወገድ ግድ ነው”። “Extraordinary Crisis Needed to Preserve New World Order….The elimination of non-state actors and empowered individuals “must be done” in order to preserve the new world order.
💭 The Washington Post has analyzed photos of shrapnel and satellite imagery and cross-referenced video to confirm that Ethiopia used a Turkish drone in January in an attack that killed at least 59 civilians sheltering in a school in Tigray, the Stockholm Center for Freedom reported, citing an analysis by the paper published on Monday.
On January 7, a school was struck by a drone-delivered bomb, killing at least 59 people and gravely injuring dozens more, according to aid workers whose organizations worked at the camp for internally displaced people in Dedebit, located in the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray.
According to The Washington Post, more than 300 civilians have been killed by drone and air strikes since September, including more than 100 since the start of this year.
Weapon remnants recovered from the site of the strike by aid workers showed internal components and screw configurations that matched images of Turkish-made MAM-L munitions released by the weapons manufacturer. The MAM-L pairs exclusively with the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2 drone.
Military experts from the Dutch nongovernmental organization PAX and Amnesty International also identified the weapon used as a MAM-L bomb that is fitted to a TB2 drone, Politico earlier reported.
The attacks have drawn criticism from US President Joe Biden and a warning from the United Nations that they may constitute a grave violation of international law, Politico said.
Drones are rapidly turning into the decisive weapon of the conflict and have helped Ethiopian government forces turn the tide against rebels from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which governed the country for nearly three decades before 2018.
Turkey has exported Bayraktar armed drones manufactured by defense contractor Baykar Makina Sanayi ve Ticaret Anonim Şirketi (Baykar), which is run by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law Selçuk Bayraktar. Ukraine, Poland, Qatar, Libya, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia and Azerbaijan have all taken delivery of the armed drones.
According to Turkey’s 2021 export figures announced by the Turkish Exporters Assembly in early December, Turkey’s arms sales reached a record level, with the biggest increase to African countries.
In the first 11 months of 2021, Turkey exported $2.793 billion worth of defense products, an increase of 39.7 percent compared to the same period of the previous year. The Turkish defense industry, which set an export record of $2.7 billion in 2019, is preparing to set a new record by closing this year with exports of more than $3 billion. For the first time the defense sector had a 1.8 percent share of Turkey’s total exports in November 2021.
“All sides to the year-long conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region have committed violations that may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 9, 2022
💭 Another callous drone attack by evil Abiy Ahmed in an IDP [internally displaced persons] camp in Dedebit, Tigray has claimed the lives of 56 Christians so far. The drones are supplied and operated by Turkish, Iranian, UAE and China Mercenaries – and with the permission of the USA, Russia and Europe.
At least 56 people have been killed in an air strike at a camp for internally displaced people in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray, according to Reuters.
There were at least 30 others injured, two aid workers told the news agency, citing local authorities and eyewitness accounts.
The workers sent Reuters pictures of people wounded in hospital, including many children,
The government has been accused of targeting civilians in the 14-month conflict with rebellious Tigrayan forces – which it has previously denied.
Military spokesman Colonel Getnet Adane and government spokesman Legesse Tulu did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The aid workers, who asked not to be named because they did not have permission to speak to the press, said the number of casualties was confirmed by local authorities.
The camp that was hit by the strike is in the town of Daedaebeet in the northwest of the region, near the border with Eritrea, they said.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 15, 2021
The UAE is running a huge airlift arming an Ethiopian regime committing mass atrocities in Tigray. That inhumane adventurism is a strategic problem for Israel, too
The Abraham Accords gave Israel new leverage across the Arab world. Israel has new allies, notably the United Arab Emirates. It’s now vital to examine what these allies might be doing — especially when they contradict the founding values of the State of Israel.
Genocide scholars are sounding the alarm over Ethiopia, where the UAE is arming the government. Emirati-supplied weapons are encouraging Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to go all out for a military solution, which risks mass ethnically-targeted violence.
Israel should stop its new ally before a blunder becomes a crime.
The war in Ethiopia broke out last year, pitting the Ethiopian government and its allies—Eritrea and Ethiopia’s Amhara regional state—against the Tigray region. All sides share responsibility for the war. Once it began, the Ethiopian government chose to fight with unspeakable brutality against Tigrayan civilians.
I receive daily calls from Tigrayans. My instinctive greeting, by now, is to offer condolences. Every single caller has lost a family member, often in one of the 260 documented massacres. I don’t ask about the daughters, sisters and mothers who have been raped. I hear about deaths from disease, of people who cannot get medicine because the hospitals were ransacked. I hear about children and their mothers perishing from hunger, because food was looted and plow oxen slaughtered.
This suffering is unseen. Journalists are forbidden from travelling to Tigray. The few aid workers let in work under a rigidly enforced code of silence.
Faced with imminent annihilation, Tigrayans rallied and fought back. Last June, they defeated the Ethiopian army and reoccupied their region. The government imposed a starvation siege: only about ten percent of the needed emergency aid has been allowed to get through.
Today the Tigrayan people are facing an even greater threat. Abiy Ahmed has rallied his supporters around a campaign of blatant ethnic hostility. They portray the Tigrayans as a “cancer,” “weeds,” “daylight hyenas” and “rats.” One of Abiy’s leading supporters was videotaped saying that they should be destroyed with the “utmost cruelty.”
Local militia and vigilantes are mobilized to the front line. They also instructed to patrol their own neighborhoods, far from the front line, to identify “enemies”—in practice, any Tigrayan. At least 40,000 Tigrayan civilians are believed to be held in internment camps and police stations in and around the Ethiopian capital.
Anyone who speaks of peace is hounded. A singer, Tariku Gankisi, was asked to perform at a rally, and he deviated from the script, telling the crowd, “This is no time for singing, there is nothing to sing about.” He called for peace. His microphone was shut off and the official media rounded on him, trying to force him to grovel and apologize.
Prominent elders of the peacemaking community, academics and businesspeople have also been targeted for online vilificationand real life intimidation for standing for peace or reaching out for dialogue with the opposition.
Among Tigrayans, I hear the sentiment that Ethiopia no longer wants them, and in turn they no longer want to be part of Ethiopia.
International efforts to negotiate a political solution are getting no traction. Efforts by the African Union, Kenya and the United States have been rebuffed. The Tigrayans say that they cannot trust Abiy. For his part, Abiy promises he will crush Tigray.
Abiy is emboldened by the weapons he has obtained on a global arms-buying spree. His supplies include the usual suspects—China, Russia, Ukraine and eastern European countries that manufacture small arms—and also Turkey and Iran. His most significant supplier has been the UAE, which is running a massive airlift of lethal equipment, including drones.
The UAE is a newcomer to the Horn of Africa. It sees opportunities for investment in agriculture and ports, and wants to make Ethiopia part of its security perimeter in the western Indian Ocean. Abu Dhabi was the sponsor of the peace agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea in 2018, which won Abiy Ahmed the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Nobel committee didn’t give Eritrean president Isaias Afewerki a share in the award, because he is a totalitarian despot who runs his country like a personal fiefdom. Isaias didn’t mind. He got what he wanted, which was a security pact against Tigray — whose leaders had run Ethiopia for the previous quarter century and had fought a war against him.
It seems that when Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed hosted Isaias and Abiy, he promised them ongoing financial and military support. He is certainly fulfilling that promise to Abiy, even though in doing so he is defying the U.S. policy of trying to de-escalate the Ethiopian war in favor of a negotiated peace.
The UAE belatedly reconsidered its support for proxies and its air campaigns in the wars in Libya and Yemen, but not before irreparable damage had been done to those countries. It should not have to re-learn this lesson at the expense of Ethiopia. With 110 million people, characterized by significant ethnic and religious diversity, the collapse of the country would be a calamity of surpassing size.
Israel should be worried. It has ties to Ethiopia dating back to the time of Emperor Haile Selassie. It has a deep connection to the country’s historic Jewish community, the Beta Israel. It has a security interest in a country strategically positioned at the southern end of the Red Sea arena, neighboring Muslim-majority countries.
Over the years Israel has cut deals to secure its strategic interests, and to get Ethiopia to allow its Jews to emigrate. Thirty years ago, during the last months of the communist military regime, Israel reportedly supplied munitions to the Ethiopian air force in return for expediting Operation Solomon which airlifted out 39,000 Beta Israel. Recently, as the Red Sea arena has become a theater of strategic rivalries and turmoil, Israel has kept a close eye on possible threats in the region, including militant groups.
And with the Abraham Accords, Israel is becoming a partner to bin Zayed’s adventurism. In Washington DC and European capitals, Israeli and Emirati diplomats work hand in glove. The allies are building a new security architecture for the region — which is also giving the Emiratis a free pass when they go rogue.
Emirati arms may save Abiy Ahmed’s government, but, as we have seen from Libya and Yemen, saving a government may come at the cost of losing a functioning state. That could destabilize the Horn of Africa for an entire generation.
Worse still, knowingly or not, the UAE is abetting an Ethiopian regime committing mass atrocities that are escalating by the day. The warning sirens of genocide are blaring, loudly.
Israel took a moral stand against genocide in Rwanda and Darfur. It must act now when Tigrayans face that hideous prospect. It should tell its new-found ally in Abu Dhabi to stop, now, in the name of humanity.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on November 3, 2021
The Biden administration is ending Ethiopia’s special trade status under U.S. law — the latest penalty imposed on the Ethiopian government amid its ongoing war with the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, the regional force that once controlled the federal government.
The decision, announced Tuesday by the White House, comes amid an expansion in the conflict, which has its anniversary Wednesday. The U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa warned it could spill out into a wider civil war, threatening even more suffering for the Ethiopian people and more instability in the region.
To halt that expansion and push both sides to negotiate, the administration has prepared targeted U.S. sanctions against figures on all sides, according to two sources familiar with the plans.
The State Department has also prepared a declaration that the Ethiopian government’s atrocities against Tigrayans constitute a genocide, both sources said, although it’s unclear whether Secretary of State Antony Blinken will sign it and when.
While those first sanctions could come soon, it’s the suspension of Ethiopia’s trade status under the African Growth and Opportunity Act on Tuesday that marked a new step. In a message to Congress, President Joe Biden said Ethiopia’s “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” made it ineligible for AGOA under the law.
The suspension is required under U.S. law, but it is also seen as another warning shot across Abiy’s bow — with a potentially strong economic impact on the country, which exports between $100 million and $200 million to the U.S. each year, according to various estimates.
But it won’t take effect until Jan. 1, 2022, so Ethiopia can still reverse the decision before its implementation, according to Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa.
“It’s not too late to retrace our steps toward the path not taken, but the change in direction must occur in days, not weeks,” he said Tuesday.
Events on the ground, however, show the war is heading in the opposite direction. Abiy’s government declared a national state of emergency Tuesday amid concern that the Tigrayan Defense Forces may move on the capital Addis Ababa after seizing towns just 160 miles to the northeast, according to the Associated Press.
Ethiopia’s Ministry of Trade and Regional Integration criticized the Biden administration’s decision, saying that it was “extremely disappointed” and that the move will “reverse significant economic gains in our country and unfairly impact and harm women and children.”
“We urge the United States to support our ongoing efforts to restore peace and the rule of law — not punish our people for confronting an insurgent force that is attempting to bring down our democratically elected government,” it added in a statement.
But Feltman made clear the U.S. sees Abiy’s government as part of the problem here, in particular because its “unconscionable” blockade on the Tigray region since June has led to shortages of food, medicine, fuel,\ and cash. Some 900,000 people are facing famine-like conditions in the region, according to U.S. estimates.
The United Nations has estimated that 2,000 trucks of aid are needed per month to deal with the humanitarian crisis, but just 1,100 trucks have entered in total since the beginning of July — 13% of what’s required — per Feltman.
“Without question, the most serious obstacles are intentional government delays and denials,” he added during remarks at the U.S. Institute of Peace. “This unfortunately suggests an intentional effort by the authorities to deprive Ethiopians who are suffering of life-saving assistance. … No government should be adopting policies or allowing practices that result in mass starvation of its citizens.”
Feltman was also quick, however, to condemn the TPLF, especially for its “unacceptable” offensives into neighboring Afar and Amhara regions that have worsened the humanitarian situation. He urged them not to march on Addis, too.
Something is going wrong in Africa. Nigeria and Ethiopia, the two most populous countries on the continent, are both stumbling towards disintegration. There are now 54 sovereign African countries, which really ought to be enough, but in a few years there could be 60.
Ethiopia is closer to the brink, so close that it could actually go over this month. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s attempt to force the northern state of Tigray into obedience began well in late 2019, when federal government troops occupied it against only minor resistance, but the Tigrayans were just biding their time.
The military occupation of Tigray didn’t last. The Tigray Defence Force (TDF) came down from the hills last June and cleared federal troops out of the state practically overnight. Then it pushed south into the neighbouring state of Amhara along Highway One, which links Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, with the only port accessible to the landlocked country, Djibouti.
In July the TDF stopped at Weldia, still in Amhara state and about 250 miles from Addis Ababa, to await the great Ethiopian counter attack – which didn’t start until about Oct. 10. It takes time to organise tens of thousands of half-trained volunteers, which was about all Abiy had left after the June-July debacle.
The battle raged for two weeks, with the attacks of Amhara militia and volunteers from elsewhere failing against the trained, experienced Tigrayan troops. About a week ago the Ethiopian troops broke and started fleeing south, although you probably didn’t hear about that because Abiy began bombing the Tigrayan capital, Mekelle, to distract your attention.
The TDF has already captured Dessie and is advancing on Kombolcha, which is halfway from Mekelle to Addis Ababa. Will the Tigrayans actually go for Addis itself? It’s not impossible. They’re arrogant enough, and they may be strong enough.
Nigeria is not that close to the edge, but the signs are bad. The huge gap in income, education and simple literacy between the very poor Muslim north and the mostly Christian south is a major irritant. The desperate lack of jobs for the young is destabilising even the south, as last year’s failed youth rebellion clearly demonstrated.
In the north east, the jihadist Boko Haram has become the local authority in some places, collecting taxes and digging wells. In the north west, banditry is out of control, with dozens or even hundreds of schoolchildren being kidnapped for ransom almost every week. The region is awash with arms, and one gang recently shot down a military jet.
In the ‘middle belt’ of states, farmers and herders are often at war, and in the southeast Igbo secessionists are raising the call for an independent Biafra again. Along the coast piracy is flourishing, and the oil multinational Shell is offloading its onshore Nigerian oil assets in the face of insecurity, theft and sabotage.
“This is an exposure that doesn’t fit with our risk appetite anymore,” said Shell CEO Ben van Beurden, and most major investors, whether foreign or Nigerian, feel the same way. Nigeria, like Ethiopia, is full of clever, ambitious young people with the education and skills to transform the country if only it was politically stable, but that is asking for the moon.
It would be a catastrophe if these two countries, containing a quarter of Africa’s total population, were to be Balkanised, but that may be coming. If the Serbs and the Croats can’t live together happily, why should we expect the Igbo and the Hausa, or the Tigrayans and the Amharas, to do so?
The old Organisation of African Unity rule said the former colonial borders must never be changed, no matter how arbitrary they were, because otherwise there would be a generation of war and chaos. That’s why for a long time there were fifty African states and no more, but recently the rule has begun to fray. Somaliland, Eritrea, South Sudan…who’s next?
Will the dam burst if Ethiopia breaks up into three or four different countries? Nobody knows, but it would be preferable if we don’t have to find out. Better the borders you know than the borders you don’t.
💭 My Note: Yeah! That’s why we are „Addis Ethiopia/ አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ” = New Ethiopia
💭 One year after Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sent in troops who committed unspeakable atrocities in an attempt to crush the rebellious Tigray region, the army that he sought to vanquish is heading down the highway towards Addis Ababa. The fate of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s regime now hangs in a precarious balance
Over the weekend, fighters from the Tigrayan Defence Force seized control of parts of Dessie, a city 400km from Addis Ababa, and captured Kembolcha, with its major airport.
Abiy gambled everything on a massive offensive that he launched on 9 October, throwing tens of thousands of poorly trained and poorly equipped rookies into the fight and bragging that it would take 10 days to recapture Mekelle, the Tigray capital.
That offensive has collapsed.
Over the weekend, fighters from the Tigrayan Defence Force (TDF) seized control of parts of Dessie, a city 400km from Addis Ababa, and captured Kembolcha, with its major airport. The French analyst René Lefort wrote that in 1991 when the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) overthrew Mengistu Haile Mariam’s military junta (the Derg), it took them only a few days to travel from Dessie to Addis.
Some of the TDF military leaders were among those who liberated Addis that day, among them General Tsadkan Gebretensae, the TDF commander and military strategist who is credited with outplaying and outfoxing Abiy’s forces. No one knows the geography of the country or the road into Addis better than he does.
Having failed with the ground attack, the Ethiopian air force has repeatedly bombed Mekelle over the past fortnight, killing many civilians. The Amhara ethno-nationalists have resorted to ever more extreme language, with calls for the extermination of the Tigrayans that were reminiscent of Rwanda in 1994.
How was this setback possible, with Abiy holding such a huge advantage in numbers against a largely guerrilla force from a landlocked province, without an air force or international support? Why have the sophisticated weaponry and drones from Iran, Turkey and China proved no match for this low-tech army of footsoldiers?
“PM Abiy threw an ill-trained peasant army against a battle-hardened, formidable army with an iron will to fight and expected to win,” explained Rashid Abdi, the Kenyan expert on the Horn of Africa.
Ethiopia is a multi-ethnic country with a long history of inter-ethnic conflict, violence and resentment. The country has 80 ethnic groups, but the top five — Oromo, Amhara, Tigrayan, Afar and Somali — represent 85% of the population.
The political system that kept these tensions in check has been breaking down for decades and the forces of violent ethno-nationalism have grown.
The immediate trigger for the military conflict was Tigray’s decision to hold an unauthorised election in 2020 after Abiy postponed the country’s elections, citing Covid-19 as a pretext.
On 4 November 2020, Abiy sent a combination of ENDF troops, the Eritrean military and Amhara militias into Tigray, claiming he was responding to an attack by the Tigray military on a federal military camp.
Abiy sought to exploit the anti-Tigrayan resentment of the Amhara ethno-nationalists to crush the Tigrayans, who had been dominant in the country’s political system during the authoritarian rule of Meles Zenawi between 1991 and 2012. After Abiy’s succession to power in 2015, they remained a significant check on his power.
The ensuing conflict has been particularly violent, with upwards of several hundred thousand dead — but these are just estimates; no one seems to be counting and few independent reporters have been near the battlefields. Reports of atrocities have been random and episodic.
After the November invasion drove the TDF into the mountains, the Amhara fighters were accused of ethnic cleansing of Tigrayan villages and Amnesty International claimed that troops from Eritrea massacred hundreds of unarmed Tigrayan civilians in the town of Axum.
The turning point in the war came in June, when the TDF routed the ENDF and recaptured Mekelle. Since then, it has been a slow march to the south and the east, a war on several fronts, while Abiy tried to rebuild his army; he also signed military cooperation agreements with Russia and Turkey.
Abiy has attempted to starve the encircled Tigray into submission by blocking food aid convoys from reaching up to a million people, mostly women and children, who are near starvation. UN officials who complained of this use of hunger as a weapon — a war crime — were expelled from the country.
Abiy’s incitement of ethnic hatred in a combustible world further undermined the standing of this former hero of progressives worldwide, who won the Nobel Peace Prize a short two years ago.
His legacy, if he falls, will be a shattered country and ruined economy. With the destruction of the ENDF, and the Eritreans staying out of the recent fighting, the conflict could be entering a new phase between the Tigrayans and the Amhara that will go on even after Abiy has fallen. The more extreme Amhara faction has launched a “call to arms”.
The Tigrayans are mindful of the fact that they represent less than 5% of the country’s population and cannot rule Ethiopia alone, so they have been building alliances with other ethnic groups and political movements.
Their victories this weekend coincided with Abiy’s recent losses on other fronts to the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), now allied with the Tigrayans. There are reports that the Tigrayans have agreed to let the OLA be the ones to march into Addis, an important symbolic gesture — but the OLA do not have the same firepower as the TDF.
😈 The Oromo should be the big winners, but they are divided between those in opposition and those in Abiy’s Prosperity Party. Abiy himself is Oromo, but his support within that group is mixed.
Further ethnic conflict will cause broader turmoil in the Horn of Africa that was highlighted this past week with a military coup in Sudan.
The brutality and hatred that has been aroused by the war have cast doubt on the very survival of Ethiopia. But Ethiopia is a multi-ethnic country and dismembering it, similar to what happened to Yugoslavia in the 1990s, might precipitate a level of death and suffering that is unimaginable.
The only alternative is a national conference, an attempt to forge a viable compact, one that, unlike the EPRDF victory in 1991, opens itself to the many voices and groups in Ethiopia. Echoing South Africa’s Codesa process of the early 1990s, the call has gone out for a “new Ethiopia”.
The response of the international community, including the African Union, to the crisis in Ethiopia, has ranged from negligent to complicit. It has so far failed to construct any kind of useful framework for peace. We can only hope that in the months ahead, with a potential changing of the guard in Addis, that will change.
_______
______
_______
________
__________
_________
Addis Ethiopia Weblog 