WTF IS GOING ON IN ETHIOPIA?

Abyssinia at the abyss?

by Daniel Barge

You've probably heard confused reports from the mainstream media about a conflict in Ethiopia. No doubt the reports didn't bother to tell you much about what was going on, but stressed "human right" issues, violence against women, and the possibility of a "humanitarian disaster." 

Obviously the West hasn't really got much of a dog in this fight yet, and our elites are keeping their options open and their powder dry. No narrative has been decided. So, what's really going on?

Well, Ethiopia, like almost every other African country is a rag-bag of different ethnicities that hate each other and either (a) want to break away or (b) just dominate the entire country. 

Also, it is usually the case that one ethnicity is much better at fighting than the other ethnic groups. In the case of Ethiopia, the Tigrayans, who make up only 6-7% are the chads, mainly because they were the furthest North Christians and had to bear the brunt of Islamic attacks on Christian Ethiopia for centuries. For this reason they have punched above their weight in Ethiopian politics and actually more-or-less ran the country from the 1991 to 2018, when the other groups finally united enough to push them out.

In recent years Ethiopia has seen a lot of economic development, with massive investment from the Muslim world and China. These investors all want to see a more politically unified and economically centralised Ethiopia, so they support the present government of Abiy Ahmed, an Oromo, who took over in 2018. But the drive to economically centralise the country without first achieving a political basis for this, has rubbed the Tigrayans the wrong way, especially as Ahmed has seen them as the main threat to his plans and taken measures to marginalise them. 

In 2018, under the guise of "military reforms," he pushed Tigrayans out of key roles in the army. Then in 2019 he changed the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a coalition of ethnic parties that had long ruled the country and which had been dominated by its Tigrayan faction, into a more centralised political group, the Prosperity Party, which ended up excluding the Tigrayan faction.

This led to a cycle of rebelliousness and repression which then sparked off the latest war, in which the Tirgrayans, as the most martial group in Ethiopia, not surprisingly, turned the tables on the national army.

Chad Tigrayans

As the government's power has weakened, other regional groups have also stirred, even the Oromos, who, despite Ahmed being one of them, have a few grievances as well. The Amharas meanwhile have seized some Tigrayan land under the guise of "supporting" the central government. 

In this complicated picture, the Tigrayans have kept their eye on the prize. After pushing back the national army, they have now advanced far beyond their own regional territory towards the capital city Addis Ababa, which is now a teeming metropolis of 5 million people.  

But Ahmed is not finished yet. He has plenty of support from foreign governments. The Eritreans, who have a long-running grudge against the Tigrayans, have crossed the border to attack Tigrayan forces, and recently the Tigrayans accused the Iranians, Turks, and the United Arab Emirates of supporting their opponents. On the other side the Ethiopians have accused the Sudanese of supporting the Tigrayans. The Sudanese, by the way, are not too happy about Ethiopian plans to dam the Blue Nile, and neither are the Egyptians. 

No doubt the Chinese, who actually have a small military base in neighbouring Djibouti, want to get much more involved, but are wary of doing so as the West would probably then get more actively involved to preempt them.  

If the Tigrayans can maintain their advance and take the capital, they can depose the Ahmed government, but are unlikely to be strong enough to impose their will on the rest of the country, so they would be likely to push for a peace settlement thatt gave them greater regional autonomy. If they are stopped, however, the war will probably smoulder on, with Tigrayans carving out an unrecognised autonomy in the North.