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Toward a Peaceful Order in the Horn of Africa

Feb 6, 2021

ABIY AHMED

https://www.project-syndicate.org/comme ... ed-2021-02

The Ethiopian government's victory over the Tigray People's Liberation Front came at a high cost, and the humanitarian situation in northern Tigray remains grave. But only an Ethiopia at peace, with a government bound by humane norms of conduct, can play a constructive role across the region and beyond.

ADDIS ABABA – Operations undertaken by the Ethiopian federal government have freed the Tigrayan people from decades of misrule by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). This has ignited new hopes, but also anxieties, about Ethiopia’s future and its role in the Horn of Africa and beyond.

The hopes stem from the removal – for good – of the corrupt and dictatorial TPLF. Ethiopians can now imagine a future based not on ethnic chauvinism, but on unity, equality, freedom, and democracy. Moreover, the source of ethnic division that had poisoned inter-state relations across the Horn of Africa has now been overcome.

But I cannot deny that the removal of the TPLF has fueled unease in the international community. Concerns about ethnic profiling in Tigray and obstacles to humanitarian relief abound. My government is determined to address and dispel these concerns.

So, to borrow from Thomas Jefferson,

a decent respect to the opinions of mankind

compels me to explain why my government acted to restore peace in Tigray, how we are alleviating suffering there, and why our efforts – supported, I hope, by the international community – will benefit all my country’s people, including those in Tigray and throughout the Greater Horn.

No government can tolerate its soldiers and innocent civilians being ambushed and killed in their dozens, as happened at the hands of the TPLF last autumn. My primary duty as prime minister and commander in chief of the national armed forces, after all, is to protect Ethiopia and its people from internal and external enemies.

Our operations in Tigray were designed to restore peace and order quickly. In this, we succeeded, but the suffering and deaths that occurred despite our best efforts have caused much distress for me personally as well as for all peace-loving people here and abroad.

Ending the suffering in Tigray and around the country is now my highest priority. This is why I am calling for the United Nations and international relief agencies to work with my government so that we can, together, deliver effective relief to all in Tigray who need it.

Meanwhile, we are working, day and night, to deliver necessary supplies to our citizens in Tigray and to those in want in neighboring provinces, as well as to ensure that human rights are respected and normal lives restored. To succeed, many challenges must be overcome. For example, reconnecting communication lines deliberately destroyed by the TPLF is testing our capacity to deliver humanitarian aid. In this work of reconstruction, the international community can be of enormous help.

My government is also prepared to assist community leaders in Tigray who are dedicated to peace. Indeed, we are already reaching out to them.

The international community understood what the TPLF was. Many had condemned its ethnic-based violence. Sadly, some were ready to turn a blind eye to TPLF torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings. Without the TPLF, it was said, Ethiopia risked fragmenting along ethnic lines, like Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Ethiopia’s collapse, the argument went, would usher in chaos across the Horn of Africa.

Common sense tells us that a regime based on ethnic division cannot last; but, as the saying goes, common sense is not always common. Fortunately, human societies can tolerate racial, ethnic, and religious violence for only so long.

In the roughly five years leading to my election in April 2018 as leader of the then-ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, which until then had included the TPLF, popular challenges to the regime multiplied. The TPLF responded with its usual brutality. The 2018 vote moved the country in a new and inclusive direction. The political party I now lead is the first in Ethiopia that is not based on race, religion, or ethnicity.

The TPLF’s regional policy was a crude extension of its domestic divide-and-rule strategy. TPLF Ethiopia, for example, adopted a policy of exclusion and ostracism toward Eritrea, against which it waged proxy wars from the sovereign territory of unstable neighboring countries – entrenching their fragility.

An Ethiopia free of the TPLF will champion peace and inclusive development. Internally, our “New Ethiopia” will be based on equality among all of our constituent groups, including the suffering people of Tigray. Externally, we will act in a way that recognizes that our national interests are inseparably linked to those of our neighbors.

The peace deal signed with Eritrea in 2018 is a living example of what Ethiopia is able and willing to do. That agreement resolved a violent two-decade-old stalemate, and allowed Eritrea to reintegrate within the Horn and the global community. Most important, its citizens, and those in my country residing along the border, can now live without the shadow of war hanging over them.

My government has also sought to reset Ethiopia’s relations with our other neighbors. Following the political crisis in Sudan in 2019, Ethiopia was instrumental in bringing that country back from the brink of civil war, helping create a transitional government of civilians and military representatives. Likewise, Ethiopia’s stabilizing role in Somalia is second to none, and our efforts to bring stability to South Sudan are unbroken.

Ethiopia’s current foreign policy is premised on a belief that closer regional integration benefits all. Our efforts to make operational the African Continental Free Trade Area is a key part of this.

More concretely, just a few weeks ago, we inaugurated a highway that links the Addis Ababa-Nairobi-Mombasa Corridor, a project that removes physical barriers to cross-border trade between Kenya and Ethiopia. Likewise, the road from Addis Ababa to the Eritrean port of Assab is being rehabilitated as a transport artery for international trade.

Moreover, in partnership with the private sector, new expressways are being planned to connect Ethiopia with the ports of Djibouti and Assab (to replace the older road now being rehabilitated), which will then be linked with Juba, South Sudan’s capital, providing that impoverished, landlocked country with a viable outlet for trade. Joint projects in ports and logistics, industrial parks, and potash mining are also being developed. And it is my profound hope that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, when completed, will gain the support of all of our neighbors and offer unprecedented opportunities for everyone in East Africa.

Only an Ethiopia at peace, with a government bound by humane norms of conduct, can play a constructive role across the Horn of Africa and beyond. We are determined to work with our neighbors and the international community to deliver on this promise.

ABIY AHMED
Writing for PS since 2020

Great article and timely

Could the new Horn of Africa with out the terrorist tplf be a threat to the merchants of war, hunger and other NGO’s who thrived under the status quo?
Unfortunately, Kenya sees a threat of Assab-Addis- Juba corridor
Sudan was ok for 30 yrs under tplf for Amhara farmers to farm the fashaga but now it wants war? Why? Who’s behind it? Patience is the answer

God bless Dr Abiy but he’s been tested by the world for been pro Ethiopia...

The Biden folks have to throw away on their old practices when it comes to the Horn of Africa and accept the new reality of peace and prosperity, if not Abiy needs to tell them siding with a terrorist tplf is not acceptable for Ethiopia

Zmeselo wrote: ↑

06 Feb 2021, 13:35

Common sense tells us that a regime based on ethnic division cannot last; but, as the saying goes, common sense is not always common. Fortunately, human societies can tolerate racial, ethnic, and religious violence for only so long.

Abiy: Yes, well said. No need for "ethnic" states anymore!

Mr. Blinken: Yes, to “Unhindered” But No to “Unsupervised” Access


US Secretary of State , Mr. Antony Blinken (Photo : from his Twitter page)

The Queen of Sheba

https://borkena.com/2021/02/05/mr-blink ... ed-access/

February 5, 2021

After a phone conversation with Prime Minister Dr. Abiy Ahmed on 4 February 2021, Mr. Antony Blinken, the new US Secretary of State, on his twitter account wrote:

Dr. Abiy in his response the next day twitted back:

One cannot disagree with Mr. Blinken on the need for the safe and unhindered humanitarian access to save human lives in Tigray. To be sure, this support should most certainly focus on those in dire needs not only in Tigray but also to all those equally affected by ethnic and tribal conflicts contrived by the TPLF cabal—millions of them in different regions.

The Ethiopian government is already working with numerous major humanitarian organizations operating in Tigray. The big names include ICRC, UNHCR, MCF, Save the Children, CRS, and MSF. Be this as it may, more than 60 percent of the humanitarian aid that is going to Tigray still originates from the government’s coffer.

However, the social media is awash with fabricated stories generated by TPLF cabal fanatics and their enablers, as if nothing is happening—and that the Ethiopian government has been an impediment. Enraged, embarrassed, and humiliated by the thunderous defeat on the battlefield, they are now waging another aggressive warfare on the airwaves and social media—hence the distorted story on the humanitarian situation.

Dirty History: Countless Deceit

The TPLF cabal has a long, well-chronicled history of trickery and deceit. Some forty years ago, they invited their competing comrades in the field for a truce; after pretending to have reached a truce, they slaughtered them in the dead of the night—in their sleep. Some three months ago, they perpetrated the same trickery on the Ethiopian National Defence Force of the Northern Command massacring it—while asleep.

The TPLF cabal and its henchmen also have a dirty history of swindling a relief intended for drought and famine victims. Martin Plaut—a former BBC reporter who now turned a surrogate spokesperson for the cabal—wrote https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8535 ... id%20money in March 2010,

Millions of dollars in Western aid for victims of the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 was siphoned off by [Tigrayan] rebels to buy weapons, a BBC investigation finds.

Some 15 years ago, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy, largely known as Qinijit, handsomely beat the TPLF on the elections held in May 2005. The ruthless and treacherous head of the cabal, pleaded that he would

negotiate on anything under the sun

to resolve the standoff.

Soon, however, he reneged on his words, declared a state of emergency, threw the opposition leaders in prison, and rounded up and camped some 40,000 in treacherous camps around the country. At the kangaroo court the cabal established, it appallingly slapped death penalties on the leaders of the opposition.

Five years after the historic 2005 election, the TPLF engaged donors in “negotiations” https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2010/c ... s/ethiopia to allow them to send observers for the 2010 election. It however called their election report https://www.voanews.com/a/meles-clashes ... 56823.html

useless trash that deserves to be thrown in the garbage,

according to Prof. Alemayehu G. Mariam, https://almariam.com/2021/01/31/the-fir ... iation-or/ a long-time critique of the cabal.

According to a leaked report, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06AD ... 708_a.html citing the former US Ambassador Huddleston:

A series of explosions were reported in Addis Ababa on September 16, killing three individuals. The GoE [Government of Ethiopia] announced that the bombs went off while being assembled, and that the three dead were terrorists from the outlawed Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) with links to the Oromo National Congress (ONC). An embassy source, as well as clandestine reporting, suggests that the bombing may have in fact been the work of GoE security forces.

According to another report https://www.facebook.com/EritreanPresss ... 279317230/ on TPLF cabal, the Former Israeli Ambassador to Ethiopia and Deputy Director-General of Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Avi Granot was quoted as saying:

I was ambassador to Ethiopia when the war with Eritrea started in 1998. One of the things I learned in the Addis Ababa is that lying is a justified means to achieve greater opportunities.

And many, many more.

Hollow Noise: Real Concern

The humanitarian agencies have their own “untidy” history too. They have helped escape some high-ranking officials following the failed coup against Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, some thirty years ago. At the danger of appearing hypocritical, I have no complaints there.

There were also an attempted, but rejected, offer from such an organization to help escape a leading judge who presided over the investigation on the Addis Ababa massacre following the 2005 election. He managed https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/ ... ainsection to do so on his own—and exposed the cabal of its crimes.

It is conceivable that such practices may have been at work when the UN mission in Tigray recently broke two check points—but had to be forced to stop on the third one. The UNHCR, which was a subject of my piece “The UN: What is an Apology Worth After Inflicting a Massive Injury?” https://borkena.com/2020/12/15/un-apolo ... ve-injury/ apologized for its behaviour—but this did not deter it from continuing to manufacture and spread flimsy reports and news.

The Ethiopian government has a lot to worry about given these well- and lesser-known transgressions by such agencies which come in all forms and shapes—and motives.

The global noise around humanitarian crisis in Tigray has been engineered and coordinated by TPLF cabal remnants, operatives, and shenanigans—who are openly mourning the sudden—and unceremonious—demise of their benefactor. The recent desperate theatrics at the gate of the Department of State could stand as one memorable, probably climactic, stunt of the cabal families and their fans.

In Conclusion

Very few may disagree with Mr. Blinken on providing unhindered humanitarian access to prevent suffering and loss of life in Ethiopia—or anywhere else, for that matter. But, that access needs to be fully supervised by the government to prevent swindling and looting of aid, thwarting clandestine operations, and, yes, preventing the fugitives from escaping.

As I observed on Dispensing Culpability: UNHCR’s Glaring Double Standard, https://borkena.com/2020/12/23/dispensi ... -standard/

It is imperative that the Ethiopian government fully honors its part of the deal to provide unimpeded humanitarian access.

But, it should never permit unsupervised access, whatsoever. Yes, to unimpeded access, but no to unsupervised access. Because, the corrupt history of the TPLF cabal that manipulated aid organizations in the past—and helped it capitalize diplomatically, financially and logistically, as narrated by its former leaders—is such that access must be monitored—very closely.

In the meantime, Mr. Blinken should be reminded to release the funds due to Ethiopia unjustly—and recklessly—withheld by the former administration. Those resources would go a long way to alleviate the hardships of many Ethiopians—and directly contribute to peace and stability of Ethiopia and the region as a whole.

The Queen of Sheba may be reached at [email protected] | @TheQueenofSheb5

Horn of Africa: Europe in the hands of lobbyists? The strange parable of Amb. Rondos


Alexander Rondos

By Elen Belder

https://www.worldmedias.net/horn-of-afr ... mb-rondos/

Who is Alexander Rondos? A little-known figure to international public opinion, this 67-year-old Greek ambassador is actually a very powerful person, having direct relations with practically all the European chancelleries. Until 31 August 2020 he was the European Union’s Special Representative in the Horn of Africa while now, in fact, it seems that he also works as a lobbyist in Brussels. And for whom will this diplomat, who since 1 January 2012, i.e. for eight years, has uninterruptedly represented European interests in one of the most strategic areas in the whole of Africa, work today? From the historic headquarters of the European Commission, the Charlemagne building, they say, requesting anonymity, that Rondos works for the Tigrines, the ethnic minority that has dominated and governed Ethiopia for 20 years and that now, after losing the elections, is plotting in the shadows to remove elected president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Abiy Ahmed from office. This is the same ethnic group that the last of the Tigrinya people in sight, Tedros Adhanom, the extremely powerful former Ethiopian foreign minister who was put in charge of the World Health Organisation by China, belongs to and secretly fights for.

Let’s be clear, being a lobbyist is not a sin, but it cannot be done when one holds an institutional position and uses his role to negatively influence the fate of entire populations for private interests. The issue to be addressed is transparency and possible conflicts of interest. In this specific case, Rondos does not seem unassailable. According to various diplomatic sources, the Greek ambassador has always had close relations with the Tigrins. Relations that led him first to convince the European Union to block funding to support Somalia and Ethiopia, then, thanks to his good relations with Koen Doens, the new director general of the Department of Cooperation and Development (Devco), to mount a strong ostracism to the application of the trilateral agreement between Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia signed in August 2018.


Ursula von der Leyen

Well-informed sources explain that the relationship between Rondos and the TPLF (Tigray People’s Liberation Front) the Tigrinya party that ruled Ethiopia for 20 years and of which WHO Director Tedros was a major exponent, has ancient roots and is based on sound economic reasons. Listening to these sources, it would appear that Rondos has strong interests in the oil sector, especially in Kenya and Somalia. In particular, it is explained to us that Rondos would be in fact partner of the former Prime Minister of Somalia, Hassan Khaire, who is now running in the upcoming elections for the presidency of Somalia but has a past in the oil sector, as he was a director of the British oil company “Soma Oil & Gas” until 2017.

From the long-standing relations with the Tigrinya people, who are no longer represented by any government but are not in disarray because of the fortunes they have accumulated over the years, and from the relations with Khaire and the oil companies that gravitate between Kenya and Somalia, a general conflictual picture emerges that casts many shadows on the positions that Rondos has helped the European Community to adopt in recent years in the Horn of Africa. Was it really right to oppose and obstruct the peace and development process signed by Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea? Or was this in the interests of those who were better able to do business in a poor and divided territory? Here, of course, no definitive conclusions can be drawn. But certainly the European Community would do better to reflect on the question and to verify who is doing what and in whose interest. Once the pandemic is over, the Horn of Africa will become even more the area of greatest interest on the entire continent. Leaving it in the hands of businessmen would be a crime.

(Associated Medias) – Tutti i diritti sono riservati

Flip flopper!



Saying the completely opposite thing, here:

Zmeselo, I am assuming you are an Eritrean. But you are doing a splendid Jon in promoting Ethiopian interest. Thanks.

Sam Ebalalehu wrote: ↑

06 Feb 2021, 21:23

Zmeselo, I am assuming you are an Eritrean. But you are doing a splendid Jon in promoting Ethiopian interest. Thanks.

A weyane cadre egging ppl on, to fake cry. At one point, he insults the females as sluts who didn't cry convincingly enough for his taste. Smh!

Has he forgotten that he's recording himself too, the f-n idiot?

Sam Ebalalehu wrote: ↑

06 Feb 2021, 21:23

Zmeselo, I am assuming you are an Eritrean. But you are doing a splendid Jon in promoting Ethiopian interest. Thanks.

Sam,

Don't you see he's filling in for those diaspora "convinced" and "confused" Ethiopians?

Even Paul Kagame, of a country who Abiy as a military personnel served as a peace keeper is out to backstab the leadership of Ethiopia by calling for the US to intervene on us?

Can you see now, why Bro. Zmeselo can't help himself by standing looking at the mess we're in? The fact is the issue is in Eritrean interest as well and they have passed through worst diplomatic impasse than this; we have tough act to follow.

Cheers!

As usual interesting stuff by brother zemeselo. Good read.