Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
| A good backgrounder on the Tigrayans. |
by Anatoly Shirokoborodov
[Alternatio] Since November 2020, a civil war has been going on in Ethiopia, in which the Prime Minister of the country, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Abiy Ahmed Ali, began a full-scale military campaign against the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Tigray (or, as we now like to write, "Tigraya"),
which controls the eponymous region. The reason for the conflict was the fact that the federal center refused to recognize local elections and allocate money to the Tigray budget. In response to this, the regional authorities stopped paying taxes to the state treasury and recalled their deputies from parliament.
Continued from Page 4
This conflict is usually presented as interethnic, since the Tigians, who make up six percent of Ethiopia's population, traditionally had a high status among the country's ethnic groups, and the country's new president is from the largest Oromo ethnic group (30 percent of the population).
Say, the political clan of the Tigers is fighting the political clan of Oromo. However, such a simplified interpretation of the conflict does not allow making political conclusions either regarding the internal situation in Ethiopia, or regarding the international significance of this war. And this latter plays a key role today, since the international situation is tense to the limit, the world is in the phase of a global confrontation between the United States and China, practically all local processes are willy-nilly intertwined with it.
ABOUT THE GOVERNMENT OF ETHIOPIA
In the spring of 2018, a change of power took place in the country, instead of the long-term dictatorship of the NFOT, Abiy Ahmed Ali became president. He is a pro-Western politician who immediately launched a complex of neoliberal reforms. He weakened state control over the economy, allowed foreign capital into the country, and launched large-scale privatization, including in the energy sector. The main goal of his policy, Abiy Ahmed Ali, called the development of entrepreneurship.
In the political field, Abiy Ahmed Ali has made the protection of human rights a priority. He released political prisoners, launched a large-scale purge among the former officials and the army, especially at the regional level. In the media environment, he played the ethnic card, formed the image of a representative of the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, who was allegedly not allowed to lead the state before.
Neoliberal reforms sharply exacerbated all the contradictions in Ethiopian society, led to huge inflation and the plight of the population. Interethnic conflicts erupted, protests and strikes began against the shock liberalization of the economy. More than two million people fled from their regions from drought, devastation and chaos, ending up in temporary residence camps. Moreover, Oromo protested against their own president.
The reaction of discontent within the ruling strata was almost instantaneous. In June 2019, a group of high-ranking "Chekists" of one of the states organized a putsch, but the army successfully suppressed it.
In the West, Abiy Ahmed Ali was set as an example to other African countries, was awarded the Nobel Prize and praised in every possible way for his reform activities. The BBC called him a young reformer and democrat.
However, the Ethiopian government was seduced by Chinese money and the One Belt, One Road project, and the rhetoric of the West changed from supportive to critical. Moreover, in the conflict between the government and the NFOT, Western countries directly support the opposition forces.
ABOUT NFOT
The Tigray National Liberation Front was originally a left-wing rebel movement that, since the 1970s, has fought a guerrilla war, first against the monarchist regime and then against the military DERG regime. According to its ideological orientation, the NFOT was a Hoxhaist organization, that is, they stood on ultra-Stalinist positions, criticizing the socialist pro-Soviet government of Derg from the left. In 1989, NPT chief Meles Zenawi said in an interview with The Independent:
"The Soviet Union and other countries of the Eastern Bloc have never been truly socialist. As far as we know, Albania came closest to socialism."
However, when the NPLT overthrew the government in May 1991 and became, in effect, the ruling party in Ethiopia, the ideology underwent a number of changes. It was decided to abandon the pure socialist model in favor of a mixed economy, and then the Marxist dogmas were completely forgotten. The NPLT adopted a conventional democratic constitution with all the typical liberal trappings, including federalization. In addition, a referendum was held, as a result of which Eritrea seceded from Ethiopia. In the future, these countries fought more than once, and Abiy Ahmed Ali received a Nobel Prize just for the peace treaty with Eritrea.
The economic model implemented by the NFOT was based on state control of energy, transport, telecommunications, roads, banks and powerful party corporations. The land was also in state ownership. Economic growth rates were quite high, but Ethiopia is a very poor and economically backward country. Even today, 80 percent of the population is employed in agriculture, and the average age of residents is 19 years.
The NPLT political regime was the dictatorship of Meles Zenawi, who maneuvered between different ethnic groups and classes.
THE NATURE AND DRIVING FORCES OF THE WAR
It is difficult to objectively assess the alignment of forces, the course of hostilities and the real state of affairs in a civil war, since both sides of the conflict continuously lie, exaggerate successes, underestimate failures, clashes are often chaotic, the front line is conditional.
Both sides commit war crimes, and so on. The only thing that is reliably clear is the swing-like nature of the conflict. In the initial period of the war, the initiative was with the government forces, they captured the capital of Tigray, and the troops of the NFOT were forced to leave for the mountains; then the NFOT launched a powerful counterattack, almost capturing Addis Ababa, and now the government army is returning the initiative.
The government of Ethiopia is supported by Eritrea and China, the NPLT receives support from Egypt, Sudan (they are against the project of the Ethiopian hydroelectric power station "Khidasa") and the West (it is against the "One Belt - One Road" project). The countries that support the NPLT want not its victory, but the maximum destabilization of Ethiopia as a whole, the incitement of a civil war.
This has a downside: in the event of a victory, the NFOT is unlikely to reckon with the opinion of the countries supporting it. It is quite obvious that the Tigers will continue to build hydroelectric power plants, and it is highly likely that they will continue to cooperate with China.
Civil conflict is based not so much on interethnic contradictions as on the social results of the government's neoliberal policies. His reform activities are so pernicious that they sparked an outbreak of separatism. By the way, not only rebels of Tigray, but other regions of the country are opposing the government.
LESSONS AND PARALLELS
The most important Ethiopian lesson for many other countries is that ultra-liberal reforms (just in the style of Poroshenko, Zelensky and ... Navalny) are associated with the prospect of a civil war and the likely collapse of the country. The implementation of the economic program of the liberal opposition leads to the deepest socio-economic crisis, poverty, explosive growth of crime and separatism.
Not everyone remembers how in the era of the liberal 1990s, even in the Urals, there was talk about independence. It is very difficult to preserve and keep from spreading a large multinational country in the conditions of the aggressive imposition of market relations and Western-style democracy.
Another Ethiopian lesson reveals the duplicity of the West, which supports NPLT only to weaken China's position. In the same way, the West supports the Ukrainian government only for the sake of destabilizing the borders of Russia and reducing the influence of China (just remember the story of Motor Sich).
In general, sowing chaos and fanning separatism are typical methods of Anglo-Saxon imperialism, designed to restrain the development of weak countries. The more time has passed since the 2014 Maidan, the clearer the original intention is not only to incite Ukraine against Russia, but to split the country into several parts, to disorient the Ukrainian people with nationalism and an imaginary Russian threat. Moreover, the Western countries are absolutely obscene and shamelessly using their "allies".
And if NPLT in Ethiopia seems to be aware of this, then the puppet Ukrainian government looks even more pitiful than the Syrian Kurds and the Afghan government, whom the Americans simply threw at a certain moment, like real bandits who promised a roof. The recent statements of the NATO Secretary General and Biden on Ukraine that no one is going to defend the Armed Forces of Ukraine clearly illustrate this.
The fading hegemony of the United States and the decay of the EU are associated not only with a series of shame on the “great powers”, but also with their expected meanness in relation to any satellites.
|
