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 December 1, 2021
😈UAE Drone Jihad Against ❖ Christian Tigrayans of Ethiopia
Traitor Abiy Ahmed Ali Sold Christian Ethiopia out to its Historical Arab & Turkish Enemies. His Fascist Oromo regime betrayed Ethiopia by committing treason.
💭 The deployment of Emirati unmanned combat aerial vehicles UCAVs on the side of the Ethiopian government has been speculated on ever since the beginning of conflict with the rebellious Tigray Region in November 2020. Nonetheless, the oft-repeated claim that several Chinese-made Wing Loong UCAVs operated out of Assab air base in Eritrea to undertake combat missions over Tigray has never been supported by evidence that points towards such a deployment. However, new information received by the authors’ from an aircraft mechanic working at Harar Media air base appears to finally disclose the presence of Emirati Wing Loong Is UCAVs over Ethiopia.
Rather than operating out of neighbouring Eritrea, the United Arab Emirates appears to have deployed at least six Wing Loong I UCAVs to Harar Media air base located near the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. The deployment of Emirati armed drones to Ethiopia comes amidst an increasingly detoriating security situation throughout the country, with government forces all but capable of stemming the threat from Tigray forces. After the Ethiopian Army’s disastrous offensive against Tigray forces in early October, these commenced a counteroffensive that at one point even threatened the security of the capital.
Reports that the Ethiopian government could soon succumb to the threat posed by Tigray forces is sure to have alerted authorities in Abu Dhabi, and might have been the very reason for an immediate deployment of Wing Loong Is from the United Arab Emirates Air Force’s UAEAF stocks to Ethiopia. The source reported on the recent arrival of at least six Wing Loong Is along with Emirati personnel to Harar Meda air base, although it’s not yet clear whether the Emiratis will also operate the UCAVs over Ethiopia. Considering Ethiopian personnel would first need to undergo extensive training on the operations of Wing Loong Is, the initial use of Emirati operators does not seem implausible.
The source works for Dejen Aviation Engineering Industry DAVI at Harar Meda air base and had previously correctly informed the authors’ on the arrival of three Wing Loong Is purchased by Ethiopia from China, which’s story we broke in early October 2021. The UAEalready delivered a large VTOL type of UCAV armed with two heavy mortar rounds to the Ethiopian military in the summer of 2021, but the deployment of six of its own Wing Loong Is is nonetheless a huge increase in its support.
The United Arab Emirates is an active user of both Wing Loong I and Wing Loong II UCAVs, deploying them in combat over Yemen and Libya, where it lost at least twelve examples to crashes, Houthi surface-to-air missiles SAMs and Turkish air defence systems. In January 2020, an Emirati Wing Loong I carried out a lethal drone strike that killed 26 unarmed cadets at a military academy in Tripoli, Libya. Also in 2020 Amnesty International urged the United States to stop drone sales to UAEover the use of armed drones by the UAEto ”target civilian homes and health facilities, including field hospitals and ambulances”.
The Wing Loong I is China’s most commercially successful UCAV design, so far confirmed to have been exported to seven export clients worldwide, including Ethiopia. The type features one hardpoint under under each wing for the total carriage of two air-to-ground missiles AGMs or guided bombs. What the Wing Loong I lacks in the number of hardpoints, it makes up for in the wide variety of armament it can carry. In early November, it became known that Ethiopia had purchased TL-2 AGMs for its Wing Loong Is, up to four of which can be carried on double pylons by each Wing Loong I. The UAEis known to mainly use AR-1 AGMs with its Wing Loong UCAVs.
The deployment of Emirati UCAVs to Ethiopia is a substantial increase in quality and kalibre of the United Arab Emirates’ support to the embattled regime of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, and could signal that the UAEis willing to guarantee the survival of the current government even at exorbitant political and financial costs. Since August 2021, more than 100 cargo flights from the United Arab Emirates to Ethiopia have been identified, most carrying various types of armament onboard, at some point evidently including these drones. Tigray forces might be forced to take note if the UAE’s deployment is to resemble anything of the determination and extensive involvement of its past interventions in Yemen and Libya.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on November 30, 2021
💭 Jeremy Hunt: “There is a genocide happening in Tigray. What work is (@VickyFord) doing to send a message to 😈 AbiyAhmedAli that there can be no int’l aid channeled through the Ethiopian gov’t until the genocide stops.”
👉 The once great Haile mourning the loss of PM Melese Zenawi in the year 2012
💭 Olympic gold medal winner Haile Gebreselassie tells Sky’s John Sparks that he has “no choice” but to join the frontline of the conflict which is spreading through large parts of Ethiopia.
As he prepares to fight the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, Gebreselassie – a national hero in his homeland – says he feel betrayed by foreign governments who have told their citizens to leave the country.
👉 Courtesy: SkyNews (Why is SkyNews the only Western News Outlet which is allowed by the fascist Oromo regime of Abiy Ahmed Ali to report on the genocidal war? What is the secret?
Country boy, Haile Selassie who has a Tigrayan name and who became rich, famous, successful & an officer (Major) when Tigrayans dominated the ruling alliance composed of four ethno-regional parties in Ethiopia is now behaving badly or in an ungrateful way towards Tigrayans who he depended on for two decades. Everyone seems to enjoy biting the hand that feeds them – Just like 😈 Andy Tsege:
“The 66-year-old is an opposition leader who first fled Ethiopia in the 1970s after the country’s old Marxist dictatorship murdered his brother. The UK granted him asylum in 1979„
💭 My Note: Isn’t it mind-bogglingly weird: The Tigrayans fought the Marxist Oromo despot, Mengistu Haile Mariam, and ousted his Dergue Junta which murdered traitor Andy Tsege’s brother. Now, Andy Tsege, who is 66 (6), is inciting genocide against Tigrayans who avenged the murderer of his brother. The world upside down!
❖❖❖[1 John 3:15]❖❖❖
„Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.„
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on November 28, 2021
“The 66-year-old is an opposition leader who first fled Ethiopia in the 1970s after the country’s old Marxist dictatorship murdered his brother. The UK granted him asylum in 1979„
💭 My Note:Isn’t it mind-bogglingly weird: The Tigrayans fought the Marxist Oromo despot, Mengistu Haile Mariam, and ousted his Dergue Junta which murdered traitor Andy Tsege’s brother. Now, Andy Tsege, who is 66 (6), is inciting genocide against Tigrayans who avenged the murderer of his brother. The world upside down!
[1 John 3:15]
„Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.„
Andy Tsege was freed after pleas from Philip Hammond and Jeremy Corbyn and has recently been urging soldiers to resort to ‘savage cruelties’
A British citizen who was released from death row in Ethiopia after a high-profile government lobbying effort has been accused of telling soldiers to carry out genocide in the East African nation’s bloody civil war.
Andargachaew Tsege, an Ethiopian-born UK citizen who was freed after pleas from Philip Hammond and Jeremy Corbyn, urged soldiers to resort to “the most savage of cruelties”, in a speech seen by The Telegraph.
“I tell you, you must not hesitate from resorting to the most barbaric of cruelties when you face them,” he said, referring to the ethnically Tigrayan opposition army that is advancing on the capital, Addis Ababa.
“You must be merciless, you must act beyond what our [ethnic] Amhara or Ethiopian cultural values permit,” Mr Tsege, a top government advisor dressed in army fatigues, yelled at a cheering crowd which included armed fighters.
Mr Tsege’s inflammatory rhetoric comes at a time when ethnic Tigrayans are allegedly being rounded up into concentration camps and murdered. It has been widely interpreted as a call to kill Tigrayan civilians.
“It is genocide incitation against Tigrayans. It adds to the list of similar public incitements by public figures of the regime in Addis [Ababa],” said Mehari Taddele Maru, a professor at the European University Institute in Florence.
“What is more baffling is the international community’s, including UK’s and US, silence to genocidal incitement and war by their nationals.”
Tens of thousands of people have died since the war between Ethiopian federal and allied troops, and fighters from the northern country’s Tigray region broke out late last year.
Now the prospect of the ancient nation of 115 million people breaking apart has alarmed observers who fear what would happen to the already fragile Horn of Africa.
In 2015, Mr Tsege, an Ethiopian-born UK citizen was at the heart of a diplomatic feud between Addis Ababa and London.
The 66-year-old is an opposition leader who first fled Ethiopia in the 1970s after the country’s old Marxist dictatorship murdered his brother.
The UK granted him asylum in 1979 and he went on to study the works of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant at the University of Greenwich.
Later he married in the UK, fathered three children and was granted full UK citizenship, voiding his Ethiopian citizenship as the country does not allow dual nationality.
The Tigrayans are just one of more than 80 ethnic groups in Ethiopia but despite its small size, the group has played a huge role in Ethiopia’s modern history and dominated the country’s politics for almost 30 years up to 2018.
Accused of organising a failed coup
In 2009, he was accused of organising a failed coup and sentenced to death in absentia. Then five years later he was arrested by airport guards in Yemen and extradited to Ethiopia where he was put in solitary confinement on death row.
Mr Tsege was dubbed “Andy Tsege” by parts of the British press. His plight was covered widely and his family appeared on Good Morning Britain and other major news shows, to advocate for his release.
Jeremy Corbyn, Mr Tsege’s local MP, tried to lead a delegation to Ethiopia to secure his release in early 2015.
Later, Philip Hammond, at the time foreign secretary, warned Ethiopia – one of the top recipients of UK aid – that the country’s relationship with the UK was being threatened by the treatment of Mr Tsege.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch also campaigned heavily for his release.
In 2018, he was pardoned by the newly appointed Prime Minister Abiy. He is believed to be an advisor to the Nobel laureate.
According to ABC News in America, at the start of November, the US government is considering designating the Ethiopian federal army atrocities in the northern Tigray region over the last year as a genocide.
The massacre left the town’s inhabitants reeling. One man visited a relative who lost her children in the house-to-house killings: “They killed her children and locked the compound door behind them, so no one could get in at first. She was left alone with the bodies of her two dead children for a day and a half. She was numb, unresponsive by the time we saw her.”
For about a week, the military forces pillaged. While several residents who spoke to Human Rights Watch saw Ethiopian forces participate, most said the soldiers just stood by and watched. “It was painful,” said one man. “I thought the Ethiopian military stood for Ethiopia and its people… but they did nothing as Eritrean forces looted and killed. They just kept silent.”
Human Rights Watch was unable to determine the number of civilian deaths resulting from the joint Ethiopian-Eritrean offensive on Axum and the ensuing massacre. However, based on interviews with elders, community members collecting identification cards of those killed, and those assisting the retrieval of the dead, Human Rights Watch estimates that over 200 civilians were most likely killed on November 28-29 alone. Human Rights Watch also received a list of 166 names of victims allegedly killed in Axum in November, 21 of which correspond to the names of those killed on November 28 and 29 given by witnesses interviewed.
International humanitarian law, or the laws of war, applicable to the armed conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigrayregion, prohibits deliberate attacks on civilians and attacks that are indiscriminate or cause disproportionate civilian harm. Indiscriminate attacks strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction, including those not directed at a specific military target. The laws of war also prohibit all violence against captured combatants and civilians, including murder and torture. Pillage and looting are also prohibited. Individuals who commit serious laws-of-war violations with criminal intent, including as a matter of command responsibility, are liable for war crimes.
Crimes against humanity include murder and other unlawful acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population.
The late November attacks were documented by media organizations, as well as by Amnesty International. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has also begun investigations. Human Rights Watch provided its findings to Ethiopian and Eritrean government officials on February 18 but received no response. On February 26, the Ethiopian government announced it would thoroughly investigate events in Axum and expressed “readiness to collaborate with international human rights experts.”
While the lack of access to conflict areas has hindered reporting on the conflict, Human Rights Watch and others have reported on other massacres, the indiscriminate shelling of towns, widespread pillaging, including destruction of crops, and the apparent extrajudicial executions by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces, as well as forces from the neighboring Amhara region.
Given the presence of multiple armed forces and groups and the poor track record of the warring parties in investigating grave abuses, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) should conduct an urgent, independent inquiry focused on establishing the facts, collecting forensic and other criminal evidence, and investigating war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in Axum and elsewhere is crucial, Human Rights Watch said.
“Condemnations are not enough to bring justice to the victims of grave abuses committed by both Ethiopian and Eritrean forces in Tigray,” Bader said. “Attention and action by UN member states is needed now to ensure those responsible for these grave abuses are held accountable. So far, reports of these chilling abuses have been met by shameful silence.”
💭 Attack on Axum, November 19-20 / 2020
Axum is in northern Tigray, home to an ancient civilization, and declared a World Heritage Site in 1980 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Following the outbreak of armed conflict in Tigray in early November, many residents fled the fighting in western Tigrayby crossing into Sudan or by going east, including to Axum, where they hoped to find a safe haven given the town’s historical and religious significance.
Axum residents were already feeling shortages because of the conflict. Ethiopia’s federal government cut off access to Tigrayat the war’s start and food was in short supply. “Electricity was shut,” one resident said. “We couldn’t grind the grains. People subsisted on crackers. After a week, there was nothing. This affected everyone.”
In mid-November, airstrikes hit an area near Axum’s airport.
On November 19, residents heard the distant sounds of artillery getting closer from the direction of Sheree, a town 40 kilometers west that Ethiopian federal forces had captured two days before. Several residents then saw Tigray special forces and militia withdraw from the town. “People were scared because of the terror in Sheree,” said a man who fled to Axum. “No one opened their shops or the market.”
At about 4 p.m., Ethiopian and Eritrean forces fired artillery into Axum that struck buildings, hit the town’s cobblestoned streets, and killed and injured civilians. Panicked residents sought cover from the shelling, some hiding in their homes, others fleeing to rural areas, following a pattern of attacks already documented by Human Rights Watch during the conflict.
Artillery hit the wall of a house in Kebele 02, killing four civilians inside. One young man said: “We were scared, this was our first experience with war. We didn’t know what they were targeting. A heavy weapon hit a home. The blast scattered the bodies of Kassa Enquay, Almaz Zeraya, Ammanuel Berhe, and a young woman who worked as a housekeeper.”
The shelling continued until evening. Residents then heard gunfire.
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