For context, Somalia’s initial alignment with Egypt—an archrival of Ethiopia—came as a response to Ethiopia’s Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Somaliland, a de-facto independent region that Somalia considers part of its sovereign territory. Egypt, ever wary of Ethiopia’s growing influence sought to draw Eritrea into a broader coalition aimed at containing Ethiopia’s maritime and Nile River ambitions.

While initially appearing to strengthen Somalia’s position vis-à-vis Ethiopia, the axis with Egypt and Eritrea risked alienating Turkey, in addition to Ethiopia. Turkey, economically the most important partner to Somalia, has poured the most financial and developmental resources into the Horn of Africa nation. Ethiopia for its part is the most crucial in helping Somalia combat the threat of Al Shabab. Losing both strategic partners to placate Cairo and Asmara would be a massive miscalculation, and one that the government of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (HSM) would be wise to avoid.

Moreover, the European Union and the United States, which play a significant role in funding the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), may oppose the idea of a peacekeeping force composed of both Ethiopia and Egypt—two nations with starkly conflicting geopolitical interests, particularly in light of their longstanding dispute over Nile water resource sharing. The inclusion of both may worsen Somalia’s internal conflicts, especially if each side takes onto backing a certain faction.

Indeed, the Ankara Declaration is a direct response to these competing pressures. By opting for a pragmatic partnership with Turkey and Ethiopia, Somalia ensures that it maintains critical diplomatic and security relationships. In return it recognized Ethiopia’s legitimate quest for reliable and unmediated access the sea. Considering the sea-access question by Addis Ababa, President Erdogan of Turkey stated, “the world is big enough for all of us”. 

This is not to say that Cairo and Asmara are irrelevant to Somalia’s calculations; however, their role in Somalia’s future is limited, and their strategic importance pales in comparison to that of Ethiopia and Turkey.

The Ankara Declaration has not been well-received by Cairo and Asmara. Both are reportedly looking for ways to undermine the agreement, likely out of frustration with Somalia’s shift away from their sphere of influence. Yet, despite their best efforts, Somalia’s government seems unlikely to renege on a deal that was facilitated by its most important international partner, Turkey. Western powers, too, have expressed overwhelming support for the agreement, underscoring its significance on the global stage.

More importantly, Somalia cannot afford to alienate Ethiopia, with which it shares a vast and porous border. For years, Ethiopian troops have been instrumental in combatting Al Shabab, a threat that continues to destabilize Somalia and the wider region. Without Ethiopia’s cooperation, Somalia’s security would be severely compromised, and peace and stability would remain elusive. While Egypt has sought to influence the Horn of Africa, its policies are often distant and disconnected from the practical realities on the ground in Somalia. If it were to send troops to Somalia, it will likely be at odds with Ethiopia’s mission, which would serve to deteriorate the security situation in Somalia. This of course would be a huge loss for Turkey, which needs peaceful coexistence to secure its many investments made in Somalia, which includes a significant share of Somalia’s maritime resources to include fisheries, as well as long range rocket test sites on the expansive Indian Ocean

The government of HSM likely understands that leveraging Egypt and Eritrea as a short-term tactic to put pressure on Ethiopia is just that—a temporary maneuver. Such a strategy might yield some tactical victories, but it cannot be sustained in the long run without endangering Somalia’s broader national interests. The Ankara Declaration, by contrast, offers a durable framework for collaboration with both Ethiopia and Turkey, two key players in Somalia’s future.

Therefore, The Ankara Declaration represents a wise recalibration of Somalia’s foreign policy. While it may have been tempting for Somalia to align itself with Egypt and Eritrea to counter Ethiopia, such a strategy would have come at the cost of essential partnerships with Turkey and Ethiopia. By embracing a more pragmatic approach, Somalia secures its position, as one that values strategic relationships over transient rivalries. For Mogadishu, the path forward is clear: collaboration, not confrontation, is the key to securing peace and stability.

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This is an excerpt from the latest extended version of “Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong” a book by veteran Horn of Africa correspondent Rasmus Sonderris

A quick Google search finds that “Meaza Mohammed is an Ethiopian journalist and human rights activist”. Countless newspaper articles depict her as an advocate for raped women. International organizations dedicated to press freedom portray her as persecuted for speaking truth to power. The website of the US State Department, no less, pays homage to her in this manner:

This honorable mention is because the State Department bestowed upon her the International Women of Courage Award on March 8, 2023, at a ceremony with First Lady Jill Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Following up on this event, a Voice of America video opens with the words: “Meaza Mohamed was arrested three times within the span of one year, all for doing her job.”

Meaza Mohammed is not only the founder, but also the chief editor and voiceover woman of Roha TV, one of the more successful of a plethora of ethnic-based Youtube channels produced by Ethiopians in the West. These can be watched freely in Ethiopia too (although until July 2023, a VPN was required). Most of the worldwide sympathy with Meaza Mohammed predates the Fano insurgency in the Amhara Region, which broke out in April 2023, but she was known in Ethiopia as an ethnonationalist firebrand before that. Certainly, Roha TV today is wholly dedicated to propagandizing for Fano, which is, as of 2024, just like the TPLF was until late 2022, an irregular army with the ambition of toppling the elected federal government. However, in this case, the first obstacle on its warpath is the local Amhara regional government, which also has a democratic mandate dating from 2021. We shall return to how Fano both resembles and differs from the two other major ethnonationalist militias in Ethiopia, the TPLF and OLA.

Roha TV serves up a fare of ethnicity-obsessed hate-, fear- and war-mongering. One claim is that the capital Addis Ababa, whose population is majority Amhara, is now in the hands of Oromo extremists who hate all things Amhara.

Roha TV is not all doom, however, as a triumphalist tone is important for recruitment. Just like the TPLF’s propagandists, Fano’s Meaza Mohammed plays a tune about human rights in English, but beats the drums of war in her own language. For instance, at the Amhara Grand Convention, held by the Confederation of Amharas in North America in Atlanta, USA, on March 9-10, 2024, she delivered a fiery speech in Amharic.^[4] Dressed in a T-shirt with three raised fists in the Ethiopian colors, she denounced the realists within the movement who seek a negotiated settlement: “We’re not talking about politics, in which we engage in compromise,”^[5] she thundered, and ended on this note: “We’re saying that if we don’t achieve victory, the outcome will be our destruction as a people. If this does not bother you, those of us who do care will struggle and we will win, and you better get out of our way!”^[6]

The last part is a thinly veiled threat to fellow Amharas who disagree with her. Many of them have been killed. Apart from attacks on federal soldiers and officers, basically anyone in constitutional authority in the Amhara Region, such as mayors, policemen, journalists for government media, and elected members of the regional parliament live with the risk of assassination. In some cases, bounties have been placed on their heads on social media.

In May 2024, I travelled to Bahir Dar, the beautiful capital of Amhara Region by the shores of Lake Tana. Despite a curfew in force after 8pm, life goes on. Amhara Region is suffering an insurgency, but not, as Tigray during the war with the TPLF, an all-encompassing insurgency regime. Banks and businesses continue to function. The mobile-phone network is up, but not for data. Those who can afford a coffee at a major hotel can get a wifi password for internet access. In general, the mood is depressed. People complain of disinvestment, economic sabotage, absence of tourists and rich people fleeing the city: “If they don’t pay Fano, Fano kills them, and if they do pay, the government arrests them,” the locals explained to me. In the parts of the countryside where Fano is in control, either schools have been closed or parents are afraid of sending their children.

There are no two ways about it. Meaza Mohammed campaigns and raises funds for Ethiopians killing Ethiopians, and particularly for Amharas killing Amharas. Of course, she and her backers genuinely believe that this is for a noble cause. To convince themselves and others that Fano’s killings are just, rather than extremist, they play up how the State Department as well as do-gooders around the world celebrate Meaza Mohammed as a champion of human rights. The international community’s failure to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate violence is depressingly déjà vu from the war with the TPLF.

“Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong” is now available on Amazon Kindle, paperback, or hardcover

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Even in the event of peace, Ethiopia is not going to achieve a democratic political culture overnight. It may even get worse before it gets better. However, it is wrong and reckless to conclude that violence is now a last resort. During the darkest years of the TPLF/EPRDF, when armed resistance was in every way legitimate, I personally disagreed with that path, not out of pacifism, but from a strategic perspective. Because violence begets violence. Conversely, making the most of a small democratic space can expand democracy. There are plenty of political parties in Ethiopia that have taken this path. Some examples are the National Movement of Amhara (NaMA), Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice, EZEMA, the Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC), the Enat Party, and the Tigray Democratic Party (TDP). Some of them complain of all manners of harassment. In the name of national unity, others have joined the government and been awarded with places in the cabinet, but they too will be running against the ruling Prosperity Party in the next election in 2026.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has often promised a peaceful transition of power, if he loses at the polls. It is admittedly hard to find Ethiopians who envisage that, if push comes to shove, he and the powerful people around him will just admit defeat and gracefully swap places with the opposition. But this needs to be tested rather than dismissed out of hand in a call to arms by actors whose democratic credentials are actually more dubious than the government’s.

Many have accused me of “shilling for the regime”, even of being a paid mouthpiece and what not. Of course, I would never take money from a party to a conflict that I am covering as an independent. Apart from giving interviews to Ethiopian state media, I have never even met anyone from the Ethiopian government, which has committed and will undoubtedly continue to commit acts that I disagree with, even condemn. Most international classifications use the term “hybrid regime” about the current system, that is, a mix of authoritarianism and democracy. This is probably fair.

But it is the legitimate government. It may sometimes commit illegitimate acts, but none of the armed alternatives today has a shred of legitimacy, let alone any prospect of making things better. Even if the government sometimes categorizes fair criticism as “incitement” and misuses the judiciary as in the bad old days, constructive opposition is the only way to go. Ethiopians demand solutions to everyday problems like long lines for public transport, bribe-demanding traffic police, power cuts, red tape, pollution, unaffordable healthcare, homelessness, low-quality schools, etc. Fundamentally, ethnic rivalry is not the root cause of war, but ethnic rivalry is an effective mobilizer for war. Unresolved bread-and-butter problems can make people vote for the opposition, but do not usually make them pick up a gun. If the most urgent issue of security gets under control, peaceful political competition should be able to focus on the second- most urgent issues, like growing the economy and fighting corruption. Conversely, if security continues to be the overriding concern, democracy, human rights and even good governance will look increasingly like unaffordable luxuries.

When I first got involved in opining on war in Ethiopia around November 2021, I set myself the goal of getting through it without regret. Notwithstanding some quick- tempered tweets,390 the only thing I would change, if I could go back, would be the headline of my speech for the Danish Society of Engineers in March 2022, in which I characterized Ethiopia as “a fellow democracy”. This was overselling a point in the heat of the propaganda battles. Building an Ethiopian democracy, let alone a democratic culture, remains a daunting project with no guarantee of completion. As we have seen, it backslides under pressure and polarization. Tensions lurk and can erupt into the next big war, in which the security state takes over and rolls back the reforms.

And yet, there is hope. The vast majority of Ethiopians both preach and practice multiethnic cooperation. Although ethnically-exclusive rebel outfits brandishing genocide hashtags still have too much manpower and firepower, their popularity seems to be in decline.

Meanwhile, outside of Ethiopia, despite the endurance of a narrative about a “Tigray genocide”, the Pretoria Peace Agreement has become unanimously endorsed. The TPLF has not been properly disarmed or stopped being a threat, but nearly everyone agrees that it should. The TPLF is unlikely to get much international support for another round of aggression under the cover of resisting a genocide. A retired Western diplomat told me that one lesson had been learned after all: “We should have listened less to the media and more to the African Union.” Indeed, and the African Union issticking firmly to the Pretoria Agreement.

However, there has been no reckoning over the tragic cost of achieving the Pretoria Agreement. Those who got Ethiopia dead wrong are not wondering aloud why the TPLF sent young Tigrayans to kill and die for peace terms that could have been easily obtained without firing a shot. Having learned so little, the world is perfectly capable of getting Ethiopia and other countries dead wrong yet again.

With this in mind, the final word goes to Dr. Steven Were Omamo, the results-oriented humanitarian sabotaged by self-serving, glory-seeking cowboy humanitarians during the war ‘At the Centre of the World in Ethiopia’:

“I also lament how the politics of major powers was allowed to infiltrate and corrupt a fragile but promising science-based process, destroying hard-earned credibility, along with the trust that went with that. Nobody has admitted that ‘the people are dying of hunger in Tigray’ narrative was total fabrication. There were no consequences. There are never any consequences as the ‘international community’ recycles itself from crisis to crisis. Incompetent and unethical people who lie, distort, and mess up can just walk away and do the same thing somewhere else. To me, that is annoying. For the world, it should be unacceptable.”

“Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong” is now available on Amazon Kindle, paperback, or hardcover

The post Get real for Ethiopia appeared first on Abren.

During the event, Governor Mamo addressed concerns from the Ethiopian diaspora regarding the floating exchange rate of the Birr and the significant regulatory changes underway. He noted real progress towards convergence between the parallel exchange rate and the newly established market-based bank exchange rate over the past two months, a natural result of the free exchange rate system.

Concerns about rampant inflation and a drastic depreciation of the Birr have diminished, with the governor asserting, “such a scenario was highly unlikely due to a monetary policy that’s periodically reviewed and adjusted according to market conditions.” He emphasized that measures have been taken to mitigate inflationary pressures and currency depreciation.

The shift to a free-floating currency has bolstered the export sector and increased remittances, with Dashen Bank reporting a staggering 300% year-over-year rise in dollar remittances in its third-quarter report. Despite the increased availability of foreign exchange in the banking sector however, bankers contend that importers have shied away, relying on their customary and informal means to access hard currency. “This could be a case of old habits die hard, but I believe it is more likely to be a problem of being misinformed about recent changes—we as banker certainly need to do more to clear up the confusion, said Abe Sano, CEO of state owned, Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, the country’s largest. 

Historically, many people in Ethiopia depended on traditional savings and loans schemes, mostly based on small knit circles of friends and family. Modern banking, although more than 120-year-old in the country, only started to make inroads just in the last few decades. For this reason, many remained unbanked up until very recently. This traditional way of thinking about money and credit is baked into the culture. This means relationships, be they familial or communal are still strong in business. These are not as easy to reform of to modernize. For this reason, a parallel market for foreign currency exchange will likely remain. But the price gap will converge as institutional trust grows. Combined with other incentives provided by licensed financial entities, the legal route for exchanging foreign currency should become more attractive. NBE Governor Mamo reiterated, “our ultimate goal is to instill trust in our banking institutions by building the right incentive mechanism for a healthy financial architecture, one that centers economic development and growth”. 

In a bid to enhance transparency and competitiveness, the NBE recently implemented a 2% cap on bank fees for foreign exchange transactions. However, questions linger about potential collusion among major banks in setting similar pricing for dollars and euros, as the price gap between buying and selling rates remains substantial. To further diversify the market, the NBE has licensed five new Independent Foreign Exchange Bureaus, including Dugda Fidelity Investment PLC and Global Independent Foreign Exchange Bureau.

While the Ethiopian banking sector shows signs of recovery, with restructured debt and improved capital adequacy, loan portfolios remain constrained, primarily serving a limited clientele. Governor Mamo pointed to the success of microfinance as a model for broader lending, suggesting that larger banks need to adopt similar strategies to reach a wider public. New fintech players, such as Ethio-Telecom’s TeleBirr, are poised to outpace traditional banks in attracting borrowers.

Ethiopia is also considering the entry of foreign retail banks into its previously closed market, a move that could disrupt the landscape for domestic banks that have historically faced little competition due to stringent regulations. “The layers of strict regulation meant there was little incentive to innovate for banks,” Governor Mamo noted. Dashen Bank’s CEO Asfaw Alemu said “Stringent regulation meant there was little you can do to fail as a bank in Ethiopia—you were always parented by the state”. Indeed, bank failure is very rare in Ethiopia, not because the banks are good, but rather because of moral hazard. The recent reforms aim to reduce bureaucratic obstacles and enhance the overall banking environment, though many local banks may struggle to compete against foreign entrants without adequate capitalization.

Legislation is on the horizon to encourage bank mergers, aiming to centralize capital and strengthen the sector in anticipation of increased competition. Pooling resources will be a matter of survival even for the biggest of the current institutions. As Ethiopia navigates these transformative changes, the future of its banks is poised for historic evolution, one that is long overdue. 

The post Ethiopia’s Banking Sector Set for Transformation Amid New Reforms appeared first on Abren.

For months, the TPLF’s old guard and the interim regional government, led by Getachew Reda, have engaged in a blame game over the region’s botched recovery, marked by military defeats, what many claim to be “loss of territory”, and a breakdown in law and order. These tensions have roots in the discord that emerged in 2019 when the newly formed Prosperity Party, led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed embarked on a series of reforms that threatened the TPLF’s grip on power. Hostilities then ultimately led to a devastating war that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands is what has come to be referred to as the “Tigray War”.

The Pretoria Peace Agreement was welcome news, as it ended the war. It also served as somewhat of a face-saving surrender for the TPLF, averting its total collapse, potentially leaving an unpredictable and perhaps even more dangerous power vacuum. Since then, however, internal frictions within the region’s long time ruling party have multiplied, with divisions deepening, especially after the Ethiopian Electoral Board refused to reinstate the TPLF, demanding its re-registration as a new political party.

Faced with diminishing prospects for regaining power, the TPLF’s old guard now appears to be relinquishing control of regional capital Mekelle to Getachew Reda’s interim administration, which is gaining support from key districts across central, eastern, and southern parts of the Tigray region, chiefly among the young.

Meanwhile, Debretsion Gebremichael, head of TPLF’s other more senior faction, seems to be consolidating power in Shire, the region’s second-largest city. Shire’s proximity to lucrative gold mines, currently under the control of TPLF warlords and generals aligned with Debretsion adds another layer of complexity to the situation.

Interim leader Getachew Reda accused his adversaries of engaging in the illicit gold trade. In a recent meeting with his supporters Getachew said, “Those who accuse me of falsehoods are involved in facilitating the export of gold from Tigray to the Gulf States via Eritrea” -— which has also relied on its own gold exports to finance itself despite years of Western sanctions. 

Before the war, licensed miners in Tigray sold gold to the National Bank of Ethiopia. Since the conflict began however, much of the region’s gold has been smuggled out. Other more urgent political priorities overshadowed the issue, but there is now growing concern the illicit trade may fuel yet another round of conflict. Any attempt by the interim administration, backed by the federal government to intervene could spark further violence due to the political nature of the mining interests.

As public dissatisfaction grows, pressure is building on the region’s government to utilize its resources to provide adequate services and to punish criminals. Many schools in the region remain shuttered. The vice chair of the Tigray Regional Board of Education reported that out of 2,492 schools ranging from kindergarten to high school, 1,835 are fully operational. However, approximately 500 schools are currently being used as arms depots and garrison to house the region’s large number of idled fighters. This despite nearly two years of relative peace. 

It is in this context the town of Shire emerged as a stronghold for the TPLF’s hardliners, as cadres continue trade blame for the region’s challenges and race to gather support for what appears to be another round of struggle, which so far has been limited to public rallies and heated public meetings organized by each side.

Considering the TPLF’s intolerant political culture and history of armed conflict, recent developments could trigger another wave of violence, especially since the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of TPLF fighters has not been fully realized. The situation in Ethiopia’s Tigray region remains unstable, raising significant concerns about the possibility of renewed conflict, a scenario feared by many in the international community, particularly the peace deal signatories like the African Union and the United States.

The post Ethiopia: TPLF Hardliners Pushed Out of Regional Capital as Tensions Escalate in Tigray appeared first on Abren.

According to Egyptian authorities, the partnership among Cairo, Mogadishu, and Asmara is officially aimed at combating terrorism and securing Red Sea shipping, which has been disrupted by Houthi (Ansarullah) attacks from Yemen. These attacks target ships in “solidarity with Palestinians” amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza, significantly impacting maritime traffic through the Bab El-Mandeb strait.

Beneath the surface, however, the emerging relationship may also involve potential Egyptian mediation to address the longstanding conflict between Eritrea and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Cairo will likely seek to provide support to dissenting factions of the TPLF via Eritrea to pressure the Ethiopian government, which has effectively completed the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD)—a project Egypt views as a threat to its vital share of the Nile River’s water.

During the two-year war in the Tigray region, Egypt supplied logistics and weapons to the TPLF via secret flights, one of which was shot down in 2022. Ethiopia has consistently accused Egypt of undermining its stability by supporting anti-government factions for decades. Recently, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed stated that “thousands of rebel groups were given assignments to impede the construction of the GERD.” Whether Asmara will allow itself to be used as a conduit for Cairo remains to be seen.

The potential rapprochement between Eritrea’s long-time ruler, Isaias Afwerki, and the TPLF leadership, once deemed implausible, is contributing to divisions in Tigray and threatening the relative peace in the region as various factions vie for power.

Historically, Egypt has played a crucial role in Eritrea’s political landscape. As early as 1960, Egypt supported the Eritrean independence movement, which eventually led to the rise of the current Eritrean regime. This historical involvement has established a complex relationship, with Eritrea often functioning as a client state of Egypt, seeking to intervene in Ethiopian affairs. The recent visit by Egyptian intelligence chief Gen Kamal Abbas and Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty to Asmara underscores the rekindling of long-standing ties between the two nations.

Egypt’s collaboration with Eritrea is part of a broader strategy to counter Ethiopia’s growing influence in the Horn of Africa. By strengthening ties with Eritrea, Egypt aims to exert pressure on Addis Ababa and influence regional geopolitics. This move aligns with a series of engagements Egypt has pursued with other regional actors, including Djibouti, Sudan, and Somalia.

A recent military cooperation agreement between Egypt and Somalia further highlights this strategy. Under this deal, Egypt has airlifted arms, military hardware, and a limited number of military advisors to Somalia, which has heightened tensions with Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government has expressed strong objections, warning that these actions could destabilize the Horn of Africa, vowing to respond firmly. Arms supplies and other forms of assistance to the dysfunctional government of Somalia have consistently leaked to the Al Qaeda-linked Al Shabab terrorist group.

The historical context adds depth to the current dynamic. Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia in 1993, following a prolonged civil war, has been marked by ongoing tension despite periods of peace. The 1998-2000 border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia left a legacy of mistrust that continues to influence their interactions today.

The initial brief period of positive relations following Eritrea’s independence in 1993 ultimately gave way to a shooting border war from 1998 to 2000. The 2018 rapprochement, which earned Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed a Nobel Peace Prize, was never formalized and lacked any legal basis. The honeymoon ended with the Pretoria Peace Agreement, which concluded what is now commonly referred to as the “Tigray War,” during which Eritrea backed the federal government of Ethiopia against an armed insurrection in the Tigray region.

Somalia’s ongoing dispute with Ethiopia over Somaliland further complicates the situation. Somalia has condemned Ethiopia’s recent agreement with Somaliland, which involves leasing its coastal territory for a Naval bases in exchange for potential recognition of Somaliland’s independence from Somalia, which views this agreement as a breach of its sovereignty and has threatened military action if Ethiopia and Somaliland proceed with their plans. On September 12, Ahmed Moalim Fiqi, the foreign minister of Somalia told Universal TV that ‘Somalia could choose to engage with armed rebels in Ethiopia if it wishes, noting that this option remains available.’

The heated rhetoric elicited a response from Nebiyu Tedla, Ethiopia’s deputy permanent representative to the African Union and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, who took issue with remarks from Somalia’s foreign minister. On X, he described it as “comical” to see al-Shabab affiliates masquerading as government officials, ineffective beyond the Banaadir region, engaging in empty nationalism fueled by narrow clan interests”.

Amid the ongoing cycle of horse trading and temporary alliances, the Horn of Africa continues to serve as battlefield for external powers. There is no clearer premonition of the potential disaster of proxy violence than the ongoing war in Sudan, which has displaced millions, alongside the persistent threat from militant groups like Al Shabab in Somalia. Egypt’s increasingly aggressive posture aims to contain Ethiopia and prevent it from establishing a naval presence near the strategic Bab El-Mandeb.

For its part, through the construction of the GERD, Addis Ababa has demonstrated resilience in achieving national objectives despite difficult circumstances. It remains troubling, however, that existing regional and international mechanisms for cooperation and dispute resolution have so far failed to address the growing rivalry between Egypt and Ethiopia.

The post Egypt’s Power Play: Using Horn of Africa States to Contain Ethiopia appeared first on Abren.

In the opening lines of “The Abiy Project: God, Power and War in the New Ethiopia”, author Tom Gardner recounts his struggle to obtain close-up testimonies about the Ethiopian prime minister since 2018, Abiy Ahmed, whose eccentric personality is presented as “an enigma” and as key to understanding, in particular, the so-called Tigray War, which raged in the northern half of the country from November 2020 to November 2022. Some such precious first-hand sources had initially agreed to meet, but cancelled on second thoughts. “Even those living far away in safe countries in the West were often too afraid to speak with me”, we learn. Since the book casts Abiy Ahmed in the mould of the megalomaniac African despot, it fits the bill that fear would be at play. Why else would anyone not wish to help out the East Africa correspondent of the respectable highbrow weekly, The Economist?

Well, Tom Gardner ought to know. “I was a war reporter, then I became the enemy”, ran the headline of his article in late June 2022. It chronicles how Ethiopians railed against him online, culminating with his deportation in May 2022. However, it is beneath him to engage with the view that he did something wrong. He picks out the crudest insults and assumes that it was government-directed, since Ethiopia had learned “disturbing lessons from China and other authoritarian states” in order to “become a modern, digital autocracy”. His new book sticks to this script, in which he incarnates the well-intentioned free-speech pro from the civilized world amidst the murderous passions of an African tribal war.

This might have resonated with me too, as a decades-long subscriber to The Economist and to its pro-Western worldview. It is certainly a framing that will raise no eyebrows from Tom Gardner’s editors or mainstream audience, some of whom will give “The Abiy Project” rave reviews. However, since I happen to be familiar with Ethiopian affairs, having lived in the country, immersed myself into its society and reported on it since 2004, what I take away from the work of Tom Gardner is a moral-superiority complex that manifests itself as embarrassingly lazy journalism and, most of all, as vile slander of the second-most populous African nation. But before we get into that, a little context is necessary.

The Trump and the Biden framing of the war

Although the full background to any civil war is complex, in this case, as the first shots are being fired in Ethiopia, simultaneously with vote-counting in the US presidential election on the night between 3 and 4 November 2020, it is straightforward to identify the two main warring parties. One is the internationally recognized government with a short but remarkably liberalizing record, yes, even with a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to its leader, Abiy Ahmed. Its multiethnic armed forces have suffered a surprise attack by the other side, an ethnically-exclusive militia commanded by some of the most powerful people in the country, that is, until two-and-a-half years earlier, when they were kicked out of office thanks to decades of popular protests and painful sacrifices. At this stage, in late 2020, the dictatorial old guard has held on to some of its grip on the military and, as we shall soon learn, has considerable resources abroad, as well as friends in high places like Brussels, Washington DC, and the UN system.

The outgoing Trump administration makes the obvious distinction between legitimate and illegitimate use of force, supporting the constitutional government against the rulers-turned-rebels. Tom Gardner complains (in Chapter 15) that this greenlights Abiy Ahmed’s war effort. He is more in tune with the incoming Biden Administration, whose Africa policy-makers view it more as a case of a third-world strongman with a short fuse who whips the masses into a frenzy. Tom Gardner feels vindicated in this interpretation of the conflict, when he himself ends up as a victim of incitement to hate.

However, when he speculates breezily (in Chapter 17), apropos no particular incident or witness account, that Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers got together to gang-rape women of the Tigrayan ethnicity for the purposes of “male bonding”, he is the one who incites hate. We shall come back to what else Tom Gardner has to say about sexual assault in the Tigray War, the evidence presented for it, and even how Ethiopians feel about it, because, as we also see in the Israel-Hamas conflict, this issue packs an explosive punch in the propaganda battles.

Full disclosure and a sales pitch: I have just written my own book, “Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong”, whose pantheon of villains features Tom Gardner, winner of the pot-calling-kettle-black award for complaining that ordinary Ethiopians on social media, and not himself in big media, poured fuel on the fire. In those 71,000 words, I tackle every hair-raising accusation, from weaponized rape and starvation to hate speech and genocide. Nothing must be swept under the rug. But, we must never forget, the fine line between championing human rights and inciting hate is the truth, which is the proverbial first casualty of war.

Diverging from the single story about Africa

Now, there is no doubt that the war often became dirty. But so did the propaganda war. In a nutshell, young people from the northern region of Tigray were not minded to fight for the corrupt, cruel and discredited leaders of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) to return to power. But the constant messaging from the world press, amplified by a handful of TPLF-friendly individuals in academia, diplomacy, politics and humanitarian work, and of course pushed relentlessly by the TPLF itself, was that this was essentially an ethnic extermination war. Therefore, the usual legitimacy criteria did not apply. The only choice of Tigrayans was to kill or get killed. As we shall see, Tom Gardner did his part in this fear-, hate- and war-mongering campaign. It was so successful that, when the federal army and its allies finally prevailed in October 2022, having pushed the TPLF rebels all the way from near-victory in the capital to the brink of defeat in their stronghold in Tigray, the world had been primed for the killing of all six million or so Tigrayans in Tigray. As a natural authority on this subject, the US Holocaust Museum put the world on acute genocide alert. The most sought-after Ethiopia pundit, the professor and BBC man, Alex de Waal, who was never coy about his closeness to the TPLF hierarchy, wrote: “The Tigrayans have every motive to fight to the death”.

And then, thank God, they preferred to live! As Ethiopians and friends of Ethiopia had insisted throughout, asserting state monopoly on violence was the path, not to genocide, but to peace. This is what made the TPLF agree to disarm and demobilize, as enshrined in the agreement signed in Pretoria, South Africa, on 2 November, 2022. Implementation has not been smooth, and the TPLF is currently riven with internal divisions on issues of compliance, but for the international community, the Pretoria Agreement is the only game in town. After two years of preaching that “there is no military solution” and mulling punitive measures against Ethiopia, diplomats of liberal democracies have gone through some soul-searching, judging from their keenness to resume aid, trade and good relations with this strategically important partner. The massively traded hashtag #TigrayGenocide has lost its value. Hopefully, outsiders will now be warier of buying into a couple of other Ethiopian genocide hashtags, which are being pushed online, also to dress up the violent pursuit of power as noble human-rights causes, and also with quite a few Western takers, from left to right.

Alas, in “The Abiy Project”, Tom Gardner does not reflect on how peace came about in the very manner that he never considered viable or desirable. He steers strictly clear of the goldmine of lessons to be learned, namely the substance behind the anger that got him expelled from Ethiopia. The Tom Gardner project is to claim the high ground by conforming strictly to the genre of the single story about Africa, which the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has warned against. And in his miscasting of heroes and villains, he stoops low, very low. He even plays the victim by throwing the race card.

White demons and a bloodbath situation

“White demons” should “leave the country”, billboards greeted Tom Gardner in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa in September 2021, or so he writes in Chapter 18, with a footnote berating the government for not censoring this “for several months”.

I was there too for the natives to picture horns atop my cold blue eyes, but I was not pressured to leave, only to listen some frustrated people out. I noticed on television that Tom Gardner’s questions were still answered politely at official press conferences in October 2021, by which time The Economist was demanding an arms embargo and other sanctions against Ethiopia with the caption: “No favours for killers”. Yes, “killers” referred to the government, not to the TPLF, whose  irregular army was, at that time, marching towards the centre of power, sowing death and destruction in the regions of Amhara and Afar, while its triumphalist spokesman, known for a brutal crackdown seven years earlier, when he was the national Minister of Communication, tweeted out threats full of military bravado. So, yes, the city was slightly on edge. Yet Tom Gardner continued to be tolerated into November, when he also engaged with me in a private email correspondence. Oh yeah, it was almost like we could have been buddies, despite our strong disagreement. He rejected my suggestion that liberal democrats like us should support the elected government. He argued that outsiders should rather put pressure on the beleaguered Abiy Ahmed to enter into “negotiations to work out a new configuration of power”.

For the vast majority of Ethiopians, negotiating from that position of weakness was out of the question. And by then, the TPLF and some Westerners, admittedly not Tom Gardner, wanted all-out regime change. The journalistic cliché that month, still November 2021, became “a matter of weeks, if not days”. Western embassies evacuated their staff, and Jeffrey Feltman, the US Special Envoy, candidly called the capital falling to the dreaded enemy “a bloodbath situation”. Back then, the tone of Alex de Waal, the aforementioned superstar pundit, was not yet sombre and bitter. He waxed lyrical with a Rudyard Kipling poem, assuring again and again that the TPLF had already defeated Abiy Ahmed, rubbing it into the face of the vanquished: “Face your day of reckoning.”

Volunteers from all ethnic groups responded to Abiy Ahmed’s call for mobilization. Nobody cared that Facebook censored him for “incitement”. Or that the Western powers condemned both the attack on and the defence of Addis Ababa. A leader in The Economist ran the sensible headline: “Act now to avert a bloodbath in Ethiopia”. But it trained all its verbal firepower on those who were acting then to avert a bloodbath in Ethiopia, and who are, to this day, owed an apology.

Because, if Addis Ababa saw Tom Gardner as a white demon, the reason is that he demonized Addis Ababa relentlessly. In The Economist, it was claimed that “all ethnic Tigrayans” were locked up, going into graphic detail: “Tigrayans were grabbed and shoved in warehouses and old factories. Even doctors and nurses were dragged out of hospitals if they were Tigrayan.” Tom Gardner’s new book tones it down a notch, but insists that “residents [of Addis Ababa] turned on their Tigrayan neighbours”, citing a figure of 15,000 detainees within a few weeks. No motive other than their Tigrayan ethnicity is suggested.

Again, I was there. As per local taste, Tigrayan folk music continued to be played in malls, cafés, even in gyms. Tigrayans, as always, could be found in all walks of life. Still today, they number in the ballpark of half a million in Addis Ababa alone, from the poorest beggars to the wealthiest businesspeople, plus a lot of taxi drivers with whom I would strike up conversation. During those anxious days, I found that their politics varied on the spectrum between supporting and opposing the TPLF’s war effort. But, yes, all of them felt eyed up as potential infiltrators in the city where they had, until recently, felt perfectly at home. Some had experienced bigoted outbursts. There was fear of extremist mobs. Their plight was delicate, undeserved and sad. And, yes, some innocents were apprehended. The Ethiopian justice system is flawed.

However, a Tigrayan identity could not have been the sole reason for arrest, or the internment camps would have been on a much larger scale. With reports of TPLF sleeper cells operating inside nearby towns that had already fallen, these measures were not tribal madness, but, at worst, erring on the side of caution for Ethiopian lives. There are approximately two million Tigrayans in Ethiopia outside of Tigray. A Reuters investigation stated that 18,000 of them were imprisoned, of whom some 9,000 were still so in June 2022. Many were military men reasonably suspected of strong loyalty to the TPLF. All were freed after the war.

Here is a curious side note: In September 2020, less than two months before the fighting began, Abiy Ahmed wrote by invitation in The Economist. Clearly with the TPLF threat foremost on his mind, he denounced those out to derail the transition to democracy by sowing hatred and division. He added: “For those accustomed to undue past privileges, equality feels like oppression.” This was a reference to when the TPLF was in power on the national stage from 1991 to 2018, giving a leg-up to TPLF members, and hence to Tigrayans, in the economy, in the state apparatus, and most blatantly so in the military. Was the prime minister dog-whistling hate against Tigrayans in The Economist? Well, this is how it was read at the time in the TPLF camp. But those 27 years of ethnic favouritism had left a legacy that Ethiopians had to grapple with. Some did it with resentment towards all Tigrayans. A handful of extremists even acted out murderous blood vengeance. However, and keep in mind that this is when an army of Tigrayans was rapidly approaching and raising the spectre of pandemonium, the vast majority of Ethiopian citizens and political leaders did not take it out on their Tigrayan neighbours, friends and colleagues. This was by far the bigger picture, though it did not make it into The Economist.

Respectability journalism

Tom Gardner’s idea of evidence is to invoke what passes for moral authority or to refer to some untrue truism from the war, for instance, that there were “residential bombardments” in Tigray, even though not a single photo was ever presented of these neighbourhoods supposedly reduced to rubble.

Frustratingly, he gets away with his lazy journalism, because the good guys in his storyline, including himself, are respectable in the eyes of his non-specialist mainstream audience. Thus, in Chapter 17, he sticks up for the various do-gooder international organizations, NGOs and foreign embassies by mocking Ethiopian denunciations of TPLF infiltration in their ranks as a paranoid craze, and concludes: “Not even the internationally-respected Tigrayan head of the World Health Organization [WHO], the former TPLF member and Ethiopian foreign minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was spared.”

Indeed, Dr Tedros is internationally respected. In his home country, he was perhaps more feared than respected, when he was a powerful man during the most oppressive years of the TPLF-led regime. But that was in the past. Today he has rebranded himself as a donor darling. Forgotten is also how he started his tenure at the WHO by appointing Robert Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador, and how he picked a fight with Taiwan to ingratiate himself with Beijing. Since the Tigray War began, he has been the epitome of the internationally-respected African with tweets like: “Tolerance. Kindness. Compassion. Peace. Love. Say #NoToHate speech.” Apropos hate speech, he spent the war accusing Ethiopia of things like  “carpet bombing”, “torching an entire town in Tigray” and, most insistently, “genocide”. Meanwhile, he sent out coded messages to egg on the bloodshed.

Cultural meme as a weapon of propaganda

Tom Gardner writes that, in June 2021, “in a closed meeting of the UN Security Council, Mark Lowcock, then the UN humanitarian chief, said that parts of Tigray were now suffering famine – a sharp rebuke to the prime minister (…)”. Indeed, throughout the war, Mark Lowcock would do little else than sharply rebuking Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, on every subject under the sun, including economic policy, and on all sorts of platforms, including a lengthy opinion piece, in which he defended the TPLF’s legacy as rulers of Ethiopia and announced a list of Abiy Ahmed’s war aims: “The first is to starve the population [of Tigray] either into subjugation or out of existence.” This was an appalling abuse of moral authority for hate and incitement, but Tom Gardner must think he is on safe ground here, because, I mean, who can trump the moral authority of a UN humanitarian chief?

Well, let me try Dr Steven Were Omamo, the WFP Country Director for Ethiopia until the end of 2021, having arrived from his native Kenya in 2018 with an accomplished career in agricultural development and food security. He was the top UN relief-aid man in the logistical thick of it all, negotiating humanitarian access with both sides. And this is his reaction to what Mark Lowcock said in the UN Security Council: “To those of us on the ground in Ethiopia, it was an astonishing declaration. Not only was it not his role to declare a famine, we knew that he had no evidence to back such a declaration. There was no expert who could credibly support his claim. On the contrary, experts had just announced that there was no famine in Tigray. But the voice of the ERC [Mark Lowcock] could not be ignored. Every major news outlet carried the story.” The quote is from Dr Omamo’s book “At the Centre of the World in Ethiopia”. It paints a picture of committed UN fieldworkers in dire tension with senior UN political appointees, like Mark Lowcock, who prioritized hogging the limelight to take sides in the war over forging good cooperation to distribute relief supplies. This friction within the UN was confirmed by other incidents, such as the firing, in October 2021, of Dr Omamo’s compatriot, the UN Migration Agency’s Ethiopia chief, Maureen Achieng, after audio was leaked of her complaining that UN high-ups from outside of Ethiopia were aggressively pursuing a pro-TPLF agenda.

Dr Omamo does describe many obstacles to getting relief-aid trucks safely in and out of Tigray and other regions, but the Ethiopian government, notwithstanding its security concerns, acted as a trusted partner to the WFP. The Economist owes Ethiopia and the world a thorough review of this detailed testimony. It drew some attention from a magazine specialized in development issues, but it has been ignored by big media. This could be because it makes for uncomfortable self-questioning in newsrooms, which ran with the huge cultural meme on Ethiopia and man-made famine, evoking the legendary 1985 Live Aid concert, with every good person singing along to “We are the world”.

From early on in the war, Tom Gardner’s Ethiopia coverage in The Economist jumped on that cultural-meme bandwagon too, which is what later motivated the aforementioned caption: “No favours for killers”. In his book, Tom Gardner does make a clear retreat, as he admits that: “In mid-July [2022], an official from the World Food Programme told the BBC that famine had been successfully averted.” So, by then there had been widespread food insecurity but no famine. “But”, Tom Gardner continues, making the case that there was still a “slow strangulation” of Tigray. Part of the obfuscation here is to equate the misery in Tigray with the guilt of the government, though it was the TPLF, not the government, which had imposed an immiserating total-war regime on Tigray. Yes, there was a military blockade but not a humanitarian siege in place. Tom Gardner writes that, since the government “alleged” that fuel was being diverted to the TPLF’s war effort, fuel supplies were “tightly throttled” to the detriment of food distribution within Tigray. Well, what Tom Gardner knows, but chooses to omit, is that the TPLF took 12 WFP fuel tankers at gunpoint to power its last-ditch offensive in late August, 2022.

Also strangely absent from Tom Gardner’s account is how the TPLF war machine systematically confiscated the WFP’s trucks. The first 400-or-so trucks had gone missing by September 2021. By mid-2022, the Ethiopian Disaster Risk Management Commission (EDRMC) said that, out of 3,297 trucks entering Tigray, 1,128 had not been returned. This was UN capital stock being used not to save but to take lives. Again and again, Tom Gardner’s humanitarian concern is predicated on a moral judgement, or rather an immoral judgement, that the Ethiopian government must not care about its people getting killed in war.

Trust me, I am a liberal Westerner

Is it a mitigating circumstance that some of Tom Gardner’s peers were worse? For instance, The Telegraph’s correspondent based in Nairobi, Will Brown, threw everything plus the kitchen sink at Ethiopia during the war, with no follow-up to his mishits, such as his claim of chemical attacks. At the end of that fateful November 2021, this multi-award-winning young Englishman, said to have already “reported from over 30 countries“, wrote that “ethnic Tigrayans [in Ethiopia outside Tigray] are allegedly being rounded up into concentration camps and murdered”. This also went without follow-up.

The same month, an op-ed in The Guardian, penned by a trio of the great and the good, and sponsored by the Gates Foundation, raised the alarm about “a possible mass killing of interned civilians in Addis and elsewhere”, associating the Tigrayans with the Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide.

In February 2021, Associated Press awarded the “best of the week” to journalist Cara Anna for her “determined source work” behind a horror story about 800 Tigrayan church-goers in the holy city of Axum, who were cornered, dragged out into the central square, mowed down and eaten by hyenas. This version of events is still being commemorated by radical Tigrayan ethnonationalists, who will no doubt pass it down as the historical truth to their children and grandchildren. I went undercover online to get Cara Anna to loosen up about it. She fell for my two fake personalities, and it is both shocking and amusing how she squirms and squirms so as to neither own nor disown what she clearly knows was a fabrication. Cara Anna went on to report many more insanely inflammatory atrocity stories from the war, usually based on anonymous witnesses. Libelling Ethiopia is a free-for-all.

I find this to be the jaw-dropping scandal here, that is, how big media became the real hyenas in an African war, howling as a pack, lacking the instinct for individuality to hold one another accountable. Tom Gardner has little interest in taking on his colleagues, except briefly criticizing CNN for its “wildly erroneous claim” (really: its disgusting psychological warfare, also never apologized for), on 5 November 2021, that “Tigrayan troops” stood “just outside Addis Ababa”. At least in book-promoting interviews, Tom Gardner has admitted that some media-driven atrocity stories turned out to be inaccurate.

Alas, this has not sharpened his critical faculties. For instance, when he says the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) “downplayed the scale” of one massacre by Eritrean soldiers, he assumes, without probing into the details, that Amnesty International got the scale right (though he thinks Amnesty did “an unusually rushed report” on another massacre that found the killers to be TPLF-affiliated). The EHRC is the only entity that has worked on the crime scenes, including jointly with UN staff, but Tom Gardner lambasts it as partisan. A footnote mentions that its chief Daniel Bekele once expressed some personal views. And, bonus info, he was indeed a prisoner for his personal views under the TPLF-led regime. Mapping out the political bias of war-crimes investigators is fair game, of course, but Tom Gardner consistently gives short shrift to Ethiopian complaints of political bias. His line of reasoning only works on the tacit assumption that Amnesty, as a Western-based organization, is more credible than the EHRC as an Ethiopian one. This may be so, or it may not. The good journalist finds out by comparing the different investigations, critically assessing their methodology and evidence, their sources and their sources’ possible motives, how their findings either match or fail to match the known facts. However, on all the controversial issues related to the Tigray War, too numerous to mention here, Tom Gardner’s footnotes and links defer (if one knows who is behind the pages and institutions that he refers to) to the individuals exposed in my book as activists, propagandists, some even as blatant liars out to stir the pot.

Presenting this case takes a whole book, but the short answer is: No, it is not a mitigating circumstance that Tom Gardner was less extreme than other war reporters. Because his relative moderation springs not from digging deeper in search of the truth, but rather from trying to make the smear job more believable.

What standards of proof for African rape?

Rape is even more taxing on the human heart than murder. We feel both empathy with the horrified victim and revulsion that a mind could be so sick as to obtain sexual gratification, or whatever it is, from the misdeed. Most gut-wrenching of all is a close-up of a woman in the grip of one or more such scumbags. Tom Gardner provides one too in his Chapter 17. Yes, a Tigrayan woman is the target.

This kind of personal story hits all the buttons of disgust and anger. It is easy to imply that the good-hearted person sits in these emotions, whereas the cold-hearted person demands evidence. Indeed, Tom Gardner writes that Ethiopians demanding evidence were “engaging in a cruel campaign to cast doubt on Tigrayan accusers”. Unsurprisingly, nobody in big media was up for being called apologists for atrocity rape by insisting on evidence, not even in the rare case when the victim was identified, like Mona Lisa Abraha, an 18-year-old Tigrayan, who, in her harrowing story in the New York Times, lost an arm when she fought off a sadistic Ethiopian soldier, though one month earlier, Al Jazeera had published that it happened when a whole gang of Eritrean soldiers had attempted to rape her.

To be clear, there is no denying that sexual violence was committed in the war, and yes, on both sides. The way forward is to support Ethiopian civil society and legal practitioners in investigating cases and bringing more perpetrators to trial than the handful of its own soldiers that Ethiopian courts have thus far convicted. This should be obvious, but apparently it needs to be said: the Ethiopian public wants its armed forces to be disciplined and decent. Almost nobody in Ethiopia wants any citizen of any ethnicity to be raped. Nearly everybody wants the men on their own side to be punished if they are found guilty, that is, not in trial by media or by organizations full of righteous zeal, but through justice based on evidence that holds up in court.

Nothing appeals to a man’s honour like protecting his mother and sisters from degenerate monsters. In some cases, it also appeals, alas, to a man’s dishonour, as when some TPLF fighters invoked “revenge” as a motive for raping women in Amhara and Afar regions. Again, make no mistake, nearly all Tigrayans, including diehard TPLF supporters, do not want their troops to commit rape.

But for the same reason that rape churns good people’s stomachs and provokes a natural urge to kill the rapist, rape accusations are the most powerful demonizing and recruitment tool of all. This created a strong motive for the sophisticated TPLF propaganda team to fabricate. Indeed, a Tigrayan journalist deserting from Radio Dimtse Woyane (‘Voice of the TPLF’) testified on Ethiopian television (incidentally to a famous interviewer who is also Tigrayan) about Tigrayan sex workers being paid to pose as university students and tell rape stories to foreign NGOs. The journalist’s task is to tell the truth from the lies by examining the evidence. Because, again, in a war scenario in which truth is the first casualty, the truth, and sticking to evidence as the standard of truth, is the only way to navigate that fine line between championing human rights and inciting hate. So, in his book, how does Tom Gardner perform this delicate duty?

Well, in his aforementioned theory that rape was used for “male bonding” between Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers, he throws a grenade. At least as far as I know, this was never even alleged before, which must be why there is no source indicated, other than a piece from the general literature on conflict rape. Hand on heart: would the burden of proof have been so light to make a frivolous suggestion about, say, Scandinavian soldiers strengthening their togetherness at the expense of Afghan women? Of course not, and the theme that rape served as a morale-booster for the common soldier speaks volumes about how Tom Gardner sees people in this part of the world.

Indeed, Tom Gardner’s demonization goes the whole hog by portraying Ethiopians in general as fine with rape. He writes that many of them heard Tigrayan complaints as “special pleading”, because rape is par for the course in Ethiopian wars. To illustrate the backward savage mentality, he quotes an anonymous Ethiopian businessman who is supposed to have told him about Tigrayan rape victims: “It’s karma; they got what they deserve”. Tom Gardner should be careful talking to blabbering psychopaths. And when he uses an anonymous quote without any way to tell if he just made it up, may be it should not be something hateful and incendiary.

Tom Gardner moves on to the topic of baby-killing rapists who think they “purify bloodlines”. To show where this information comes from, a footnote takes the reader to a celebrated Al Jazeera article “No Tigrayan womb should ever give birth”. This was written by an Addis Ababa resident of Tigrayan origin, Lucy Kassa, who got her big break in international journalism, freelancing for the world’s most prestigious media, by telling tales of spine-chilling inhumanity. For instance, one featured in The New Humanitarian recounts a group of Ethiopian soldiers viciously executing a toddler for some political comment that they overheard the little boy say to his mother. Referred to endlessly as “courageous Lucy” and winning a grand human-rights award, it was as if her being Ethiopian gave her license to go one up on her colleagues in portraying Ethiopians as depraved, fiendish, diabolical. In her depictions, civilians would not only be rounded up and murdered, but also mutilated and dismembered. Women and girls would not only be raped, but gang-raped with a hot metal rod being inserted into their uterus. Lucy Kassa never went to the frontline. Her stories were based on anonymous witness accounts. One simply had to take her word for it, as indeed, all of big media did, The Economist too. The only evidence for her rape stories that she would come up with, on the exceptional occasion when someone in big media mentioned it ever so timidly, was “medical records”. Not that she ever showed any, but also medical records could easily be made up by an insurgency regime that is engaged in a fierce propaganda war.

Not rape, mass rape

To dispel the just-a-few-bad-apples defence, rape statistics became another battleground in the propaganda war almost from day one.

Tom Gardner writes that “plausibly” the real figure is 100,000. The footnote to back this up refers to Tigray’s regional authorities and that this is “a figure later supported by a comprehensive study conducted by the Columbia University biostatistician Kiros Berhane.”

Here, Tom Gardner invokes the moral authority of Columbia University, but refrains from throwing the additional respectability card that the survey-based study was published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), oh yes, very respectable (except if you are an anti-vaxxer or something). But what ought to be more respectable, if truth-seeking is the goal, is to actually read the study, subject it to critical scrutiny, and yes, look at the politics of the team behind it. I did that, finding it inconceivable that it could have reached any other conclusion, and that the BMJ might as well have published a survey conducted in North Korea by North Koreans to document North Koreans’ love for their leader. But don’t take my word for it. Start with my article, but then also read the study report in the BMJ, especially the small print, google the team listed in the study report, learn about the political climate in Tigray in which these interviews took place.

Tom Gardner’s book does touch upon a more nuanced view of the rape issue, but only obliquely, not apropos rape, but to make the point that the UN was largely biased in favour, and not against, Ethiopia: “In reality, the top leadership of several of the largest UN agencies in Addis Ababa were broadly supportive of Abiy’s government. The leaked audio of an internal meeting in March 2021 on the subject of sexual violence in Tigray, to take one example, demonstrated just how instinctively sympathetic many UN officials were to the arguments of their Ethiopian counterparts. Yet such was the force of official propaganda—and its narrative of Ethiopia alone against the world—that inconvenient facts like these were easily obscured.”

This is a new level of condescending. Does Tom Gardner take Ethiopians for such simpletons that they see the UN as a single sentient being? It also showcases Tom Gardner’s steely determination not to listen to Ethiopians. Of course, they always distinguished between the different individuals who compose the UN, and paid attention to how power is distributed throughout this vast organization. Yes, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Mark Lowcock became national villains, but Steven Were Omamo and Maureen Achieng became national heroes. The leaked audio from March 2021 was of seven UN professionals serving in Ethiopia, who privately discussed the difficulty of sorting rape facts from rape fabrications, feeling under pressure to feed the media sensationalism and thus fuel the war with more hate. One of the seven was Letty Chiwara, representative of UN Women to Ethiopia and to the AU, who pronounced the taboo words: “You take it with a pinch of salt”. While some vilified her for that, Ethiopians thanked her for her integrity.

Between pacifism and warlordism

So now it should be clear why Tom Gardner made Ethiopians angry and disinclined to cooperate with his book project. Given that he trots out so many TPLF talking points, all the way down to using the term “Western Tigray” about a territory that is disputed with Amhara Region, he often gets accused of being pro-TPLF. He shrugs this off, and in good conscience, because, actually, he is not. Nor does he side with Fano militia in its ongoing insurgency in Amhara Region, or with the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), still waging armed struggle in Oromia Region. Indeed, to my pleasant surprise, there were some good parts early on in his book describing the chauvinism of these ethnonationalist militias. But again, he suggests that it is up to Abiy Ahmed to solve these conflicts too. He clearly does not mean by spending more on arms and prevailing militarily, so it must be by making concessions. A negotiated settlement could be preferable to war, but for now, both the OLA and Fano aim to take the capital. Meanwhile, both are bleeding men and popular support, as they descend into banditry and infighting. As in the Tigray War, but not in the Ukraine War, the Western mantra here is that there is no military solution. More accurate is that any solution will have to have a major military component.

This aversion to legitimizing legitimate use of force is illustrated in Chapter 18. Tom Gardner revisits December 2021, when the TPLF offensive is beaten back through the unity of Ethiopians of different ethnicities and faiths. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a protestant Christian, thanks his Creator for being with him. Tom Gardner seizes on this to harp on his pop-psychological theme that Abiy Ahmed believes himself to be some kind of Messias. In the final sentence of the chapter, Tom Gardner then laments Abiy Ahmed’s success in repelling TPLF’s attack on Addis Ababa: “Now, it seemed, he might never need to compromise.”

This reflects a philosophy which, as I learned to my indignation during the Tigray War, is prevalent among liberal Westerners out to ‘help’ the developing world: That patriotism and peace through strength is a luxury for rich countries with superior morality, whereas poor ones with inferior morality, like Ethiopia, must make do with pacifist sermons and deals between its strongest warlords.

To be fair, the liberal Western moral-superiority complex made more of a fool of itself than it decided the war in Ethiopia. But it did exacerbate the rancour and the suffering. In the attempt to look good doing bad, some infuriatingly smug careerists resorted and continue to resort to shocking dishonesty. Tom Gardner’s book about Ethiopia says more about Tom Gardner than it does about Ethiopia.

Go here to read my book instead. And, given how the mass media will ignore this perspective, please, encourage others to read this article and to subscribe to my Substack (no payment needed).

The post Another book about African savagery: SELF-PROJECTION appeared first on Abren.

Ethiopians can observe that Egypt’s efforts in eastern Libya, Sudan, and especially Gaza have been ineffective despite an over-the-top posturing. Formal meetings further highlight that Egypt’s so-called “intervention” in Somalia was little more than grandstanding, because after all, no other nation is better suited to understand and navigate Somalia’s complex clan politics than Ethiopia, which has entrenched itself in the country for over twenty years. Already several powerful clans in regions, including Baykol, Hiraan, and Jubaland have denounced Mogadishu’s Hawiye clan for making a military pact with Egypt, thus increasing the chances for Somalia becoming a proxy battle ground.

Authorities in Mogadishu, grappling with territorial mismanagement, the Al-Shabaab insurgency, and regional pressures, might find some benefit in Egypt’s renewed engagement. However, people are aware that Egypt’s recent efforts in eastern Libya and Sudan indicate its primary aim is to apply pressure on Ethiopia vis-à-vis GERD, rather than genuinely expanding its influence to include Somalia. Furthermore, a hot war between Egypt and Ethiopia in Somalia is not in the cards, otherwise Egypt would need significantly more than just the ten thousand troops it plans to deploy, not to mention the logistical nightmare that presents.

Rather than deterring the MoU, the presence of Egyptian troops in the Horn of Africa seems to be accelerating Ethiopia’s increasingly revisionist stance vis-à-vis access to and from the sea. Djibouti’s recent willingness to provide Ethiopia with an expanded alternative trade outlet to the sea has had no bearing on Addis Ababa’s decision to take advantage of the opportunity for escalation. It just graduated thousands of Somaliland soldiers, appointed an ambassador to Hargeisa, while deploying more forces on the border with Somalia, and warning Mogadishu against seeking support from external powers. But it has also said through its foreign minister that the door for negotiations is always open. 

Somalia, despite its ongoing internal strife and geographical significance, remains distant from Egypt’s core interests compared to Ethiopia’s pressing regional ambitions. Ethiopia’s strategic move to secure access to the Gulf of Aden through Somaliland has notably increased its regional clout. This development, alongside its successful dam project, amplifies Ethiopia’s negotiating strength, especially in relation to Egypt’s attempts to exert regional influence.

Despite its own internal conflicts, Ethiopia’s enhanced diplomatic and military positioning allows it to challenge Egypt’s regional maneuvers more effectively now than at any time in recent history. While Egypt’s actions in Somalia might seem impressive on the surface, they are overshadowed by Ethiopia’s growing assertiveness and strategic advantages, including its control over the Nile’s flow and its military presence in Somalia. As such, Ethiopia is adeptly using the situation to strengthen its position by counterbalance Egypt’s efforts. Nevertheless, Egypt will continue to leverage Ethiopia’s internal rifts as well as hostile neighbors to exert more pressure on Addis Ababa.

The post Egypt’s Arrival in Somalia is About Posturing Rather Than Strategy appeared first on Abren.

Before I explain this, a caveat is in place. Fano is a movement rather than an organization. Notwithstanding repeated and ongoing attempts to unify the various Fano factions, there is still no Fano central command, let alone an official Fano platform. Incidentally, this is why it is harder to negotiate with Fano than with the TPLF, as the most extremist Fano groups, who tend to become empowered under a state of war, will disavow concessions made by compromise-minded ones. It also makes it harder to pin down the Fano philosophy, so this is but a rough generalization based on reading and listening to pro-Fano individuals.

Their claim that Amharas have been persecuted ever since the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 is an exaggeration. But there is a kernel of truth in that the scapegoating of Amharas has been the staple of various ethnonationalist discourses for decades in Ethiopia. This has even seeped into the world press. For instance, a recent BBC article describes the Amharas as “historic rulers of Ethiopia”. The characterization of Amharas as oppressors is inaccurate and incendiary. However, as already mentioned, it is fair to say that Amharas generally identify with and are identified with Ethiopia. Fano used to be the term for the patriotic guerrilla soldiers who resisted the fascist Italian occupation from 1935 to 1941 (which is why the militia’s adversaries today will often call it something else). Stressing how the Ethiopian and the Amhara identity are interwoven, Fano uses the basic version of the Ethiopian flag, just green, yellow and red, that is, without the blue disk with the golden pentagram, which was put there by the EPRDF in 1996. While secession is the lodestar of the OLA and a fallback option for the TPLF, only coming to power on the national stage makes any sense for Fano. If anything, people in the Fano camp wish to abolish the Amhara Region, which is a brainchild of the hated ethnic federalism.

Another Fano talking point is that the federal government, elected though it is, has lost its legitimacy through acts of oppression, such as arrests of opposition leaders, journalists etc. The government likes to refute this by comparing to the darkest years of the TPLF/EPRDF. But it is hard to deny that the liberalization and democratization agenda has backslid to give way to the security state. We saw how the soft touch of Abiymania in 2018-2020 enabled violent ethnonationalism to bubble up across the country. The response to all this bloodshed has been a hardening of minds and policies. The Ethiopian judiciary has no history of being independent. Still today, it is safe to assume that both the jailing and the freeing of politicians, and probably of journalists too, takes place on orders from the executive. Thus, without examining the details, I will not vouch for the fairness of detentions and trials of politicians and journalists. Some of them may well be innocent by normal democratic legal standards. However, whenever I have cast a glance at their cases, there is direct or indirect advocacy for violence. Learning from the TPLF’s propagandists, Fano supporters will portray the motive of the government and judiciary as ethnic-based persecution. In reality, not necessarily the justification, but the root cause, is the fact that people are getting killed, which is making everyone involved, bar the diaspora activists, live in fear. It is simply unrealistic to have the same rules apply in peace and in war.

Another justification held up by the Fano camp is all manners of cruelty against Amharas en masse. Exhibit A for this accusation is, as mentioned in Part 3, the massacres in Wollega in western Oromia, which have cost the lives of thousands of unarmed Amharas, with whole families being slaughtered. A particularly nasty episode took place in August 2022, just as the war with the TPLF entered its final phase. These and similar crimes against Amharas in Oromia, including mass kidnappings of Amhara university students, have caused public outrage. The federal government has been rightly criticized for not providing security, and the prime minister for failing to strike the right empathetic note. But the perpetrators have been Oromo extremists, not least the TPLF’s old ally, the OLA, which remains, as of mid-2024, at war with the federal government.

And quite a dirty war at that, it seems. According to a Reuters investigation from February 2024, when Abiy Ahmed rose to power in 2018, senior government officials in Oromia set up a secretive Korree Nageenyaa (Security Committee in the Oromo language), aimed at crushing the OLA with extrajudicial killings. Fano supporters have used this to paint a picture of a government that operates with callous disregard for due process. This is a fair point, but it shatters a core tenet of Fano’s case for war, namely that the leading Oromos in the governing Prosperity Party are on the same side as the OLA. If this does not hold true, it is in fact the Fano insurgents who are helping the OLA by keeping the federal army overstretched on two fronts.

Were it not for the federal army, the OLA and Fano would probably conquer their own regions, and then clash in a cataclysmic showdown. Thus far, there have only been occasional skirmishes between the two, but their hatred of one another helps fuel both regional wars. You never know in Ethiopian politics, but formal collaboration between the OLA and Fano is an absurd suggestion. And yet, they are both fighting the federal government. They are enemies in theory, but they are allies in practice.

As for the accusations of civilians being killed by federal troops in Amhara Region, trust in the reports of international human-rights organizations ought to be rock bottom after their partisanship during the war with the TPLF. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the war in Amhara, like the one in Oromia, can be dirty. Extrajudicial revenge killings of mere suspects and other counterinsurgency measures outside the law must be condemned.

Again, this is no different from the war with the TPLF. There are the closeups of individual war crimes on both sides that call for justice. And there is the zoom-out of a political scenario that calls for respecting state monopoly on violence. The minimum requirements for taking up arms is that the established government is illegitimate, that the rebellion has broad popular support, that a sound context analysis is in place, and that a better alternative is within realistic reach. The Fano insurgency meets none of these conditions. In particular, those who paint Fano as fighting under the banner of democracy and human rights should notice how assiduously Fano politicians are courting the dictator of Eritrea, Isaias Afeworki, seeking his sponsorship, albeit apparently with limited success.

Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong is now available on Amazon Kindle, paperback, or hardcover

The post Why I am no fan of Fano appeared first on Abren.

The gradual withdrawal of ATMIS troops, which has been underway for nearly a year, has raised fears that an uncoordinated exit could lead to a dangerous power vacuum. This, in turn, could allow Al-Shabaab to establish an ISIS-like caliphate in Somalia, exacerbating instability in an already volatile Horn of Africa region. Moreover, Al-Shabaab’s affiliations with Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and increasingly the Houthis of Yemen present a broader threat to regional security, especially impacting maritime routes in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

In response, the African Union (AU) has proposed a new peacekeeping initiative, the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), scheduled to replace ATMIS in January 2025. This new mission was proposed after extensive consultations involving the AU, UN, EU, and other stakeholders, including Turkey and the UAE. The AU dispatched a team of experts to Somalia to assess the security situation and help formulate AUSSOM’s mandate, which will focus on protecting strategic population centers, UN facilities, and key government installations.

ATMIS troops are slated to withdraw entirely by December 2024. The AU Peace and Security Council (AUPSC) is currently reviewing the successes and failures of previous missions to inform AUSSOM’s planning. Egypt and Djibouti have already pledged to contribute troops, and additional support from other AU member states is expected. However, Ethiopia’s participation remains uncertain due to recent diplomatic tensions with Somalia, which has requested Addis Ababa to withdraw its MoU with Somaliland, a region that has governed itself independently since 1991, and now seeks recognition for its vaunted independence, something Ethiopia is keen to do. 

It’s not exactly clear how AUSSOM would be effective without Ethiopia’s participation, which not only shares the longest border with Somalia, but also has contributed a bulk of the fighting capability in previous AU-led peace keeping missions. It also deploys an additional 15,000 troops bilaterally to secure some of the most difficult sectors of Somalia and has done so since 2007. 

Following its recent fallout with Addis Ababa, Mogadishu has threatened to expel Ethiopian troops and invite Egyptian forces to replace them. This or course could further complicate regional dynamics and impact Ethiopia’s strategic security interests. In reaction, Ethiopia may accelerate MoU with Somaliland. Having spent decades engraining itself in Somalia and with the ongoing threat of terrorism, Addis Ababa will be unlikely to withdraw its army completely either. These may include parts of Bakool, Gedo, and Baidoa where reportedly Ethiopian forces retain good will among the public.

The failures of AMISOM and ATMIS highlight deep-rooted issues that may undermine the new mission’s effectiveness. Central to this uncertainty is Somalia’s enduring governance crisis. For over three decades, Somalia has struggled to establish a stable and effective government, and expectations that a new mission will resolve these long-entrenched issues are overly optimistic. Somalia risks further balkanization and even occupation with the arrival of more and more foreign forces, all of whom have diverging interests, and are determined to take advantage of a weak state for their own benefit. 

Previous peacekeeping missions faced numerous challenges, including inadequate resources, political infighting, and corruption within institutions, but now there appears to be international exhaustion at Somalia’s endless internal clan wars. In addition, other more pressing regional and global conflicts are carting away more resources from the international community.

The financial sustainability of AUSSOM also poses a concern. Previous missions were heavily reliant on external funding, and recent global financial strains and other priority global security challenges have made obtaining such support more challenging. While a new UN resolution aims to alleviate this burden by redistributing funding responsibilities between the UN and the AU, the effectiveness of this approach remains uncertain.

The AU’s new mission, AUSSOM is yet another effort to address Somalia’s deteriorating security needs, but three decades of governance failures, and persistent instability in the country present formidable challenges. The potential for AUSSOM to succeed where AMISOM and ATMIS fell short is highly questionable.

The post Somalia: Yet Another AU Peace Mission Amid Chaos and Fallout With Ethiopia appeared first on Abren.

Journalism is the first draft of history. This applies to what is commonly referred to as the Tigray War, raging across northern Ethiopia from November 3, 2020 to November 2, 2022. Alas, in this case, big media became actors of history as well, when their early sketches, weirdly slanted and upside-down, contributed to also misshaping the international community’s response.

Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong aspires to be a first rewrite of this history. Although the truth in such matters is always nuanced, it should be straightforward to identify the two main warring parties at the outset. One is the internationally recognized government with a short but remarkably liberalizing record. Its multiethnic armed forces have suffered a massive surprise attack by the other side, an ethnically-exclusive militia commanded by the country’s old guard, kicked out of office just two and a half years ago, deeply unloved after oppressing the people for 27 years, but holding on to some of its grip on the military.

Such boring basics, however, had no place within the dominant framing of the conflict as tribal savagery on the darkcontinent. Playing on this ‘single story about Africa’ enabled a well-connected clique to pass off its violent quest to return to power as a persecuted minority facing a choice between killing and getting killed. Skillful propagandists laid it on thick. Activist university professors gave intellectual cover. Sensation-hungry correspondents lapped it up. News directors and editors made no retractions when proved wrong.

For example, important news outlets have yet to own up to spreading the fake news that, in the foremost church of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, 800 worshippers were cornered, dragged out, gunned down and eaten by hyenas. One section in this book looks at who invented this incendiary lie, and at the various investigations into what really took place in the holy city ofAxum. This is followed up in the annex “Going undercover to interview Cara Anna from Associated Press”, a jaw-dropping and not unamusing piece in the genre of swindling the swindler, which can be read as a dessert at the end or as an appetizer at the beginning.

False reports and sloppy analysis soon translated into open support for the rulers-turned-rebels, infecting Western governments. This was infuriating, but also heartbreaking, because most Ethiopians, and certainly myself as a long-time friend of Ethiopia, think of these prosperous democracies as the model of society to strive for. How could the liberal world order betray us so badly in our hour of need? Answering this became my obsession, and eventually turned into this book.

Though most of the readership will have a special interest in Ethiopian affairs, the target audience is much wider. This is why no particular foreknowledge is required. The context will be provided. This is for anyone concerned with international relations, diplomacy, development, media dynamics, the misuse of academia, career opportunism, the misrepresentation of Africa, and much more to do with contemporary society.

This had to be a whole book. For sure, a short article has greater reach. But persuading the neutrals, let alone the skeptics, that Ethiopia was gotten dead wrong was only possible by addressing every half-truth and falsehood repeated enough times to become truisms: ethnic animosity, hate speech, mass arrests, shutdown of public services as collective punishment, weaponized rape, humanitarian siege, deliberate starvation, even genocide. Complicating matters further, I was up against sources so authoritative that, as much as a year into the war, I would believe them myself on pure instinct. Gradually, however, I found myself scrutinizing their footnotes and methodological appendices, appalled at their anonymous witnesses and righteous verbiage substituting for forensics and standards of proof.

Throughout the war, these multiple renowned voices amplified the key justification for an irregular army, namely that, if the official army were to prevail, the Tigrayan people would be exterminated. Instead, Ethiopian military victory was what enabled peace. This ought to provoke some soul-searching. There seems to have been a bit of that in the realm of diplomacy. But in the media landscape, the narrative has barely changed. Meanwhile, international organizations, for all their do-gooder mission statements, still contribute to cementing enmities and hindering reconciliation among Ethiopians. This refusal to learn follows a pattern of fatal mispredictions being instantly forgotten and accurate predictions (or timely warnings) being afforded no recognition. It is high time to dig into who said what would happen, and then compare it to what did happen, so as to revise our model of reality accordingly.

This goes for my own mispredictions too, which were not about the actual war, but about global reactions to it. It sent me on a personal journey of questioning my worldview, as will be portrayed along the way. Spoiler alert: it has not pushed me into the arms of the regimes of China and Russia, but it has taught me some profound lessons about the nastiness and pervasiveness of the Western moral-superiority complex.

A preliminary version of Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong was uploaded to my Substack account on September 3, 2023. You may find it at rsonderriis.substack.com. It is about two thirds the length of this book, and will remain available for free. It was well received, including by some Western diplomats who wrote to me that it had changed their perspective. By then, however, something loomed larger than rewriting recent history: a new war.

The central topic here is the 2020-2022 insurgency of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). This covers the TPLF’s alliance with the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA). It also goes into the support for the federal government coming from Eritrea and from the volunteer Amhara militia known as Fano. However, while Ethiopian-Eritrean relations soured during 2023, Fano launched a full-scale insurgency in Amhara Region in April 2023, which rages till this day, deep into 2024.

My first online publication barely mentioned this. I was dismayed that blood was being shed between sides who had just pulled together to save Ethiopia from the onslaught of the TPLF. Whatever stand I took would draw the ire of a major share of my readers, adding to the disunity. Pressed on this issue in an interview, I cravenly responded that I was “not comfortable talking about it at this point”. Well, it is time to put aside my discomfort and speak out. And it is highly relevant as follow-up to the TPLF’s war, because Fano is borrowing leaf after leaf from the TPLF’s playbook. Therefore, the hostilities between the government and Fano shall be addressed throughout the various sections, and especially in the new ending titled “Part 5: Do not get the next war wrong too”.

Each ethnonationalist rebel group in Ethiopia is unique in its history and ideology, but all of them rile up their base and appeal to outsiders with an overblown sense of victimhood, including the obligatory social-media genocide hashtag. They make it all about ethnicity, so as to distract from the real issue of legitimacy to rule a diverse country. The TPLF has played this game better than anyone, thanks to its extensive government experience and network in places like Washington DC, Brussels and the UN system. But the Fano camp has also notched up some notorious wins, not on the battlefield, but in the fight for the sympathy of those international arbiters of right and wrong.

Smooth-talking to wannabe humanitarians from rich countries has long been big business in Africa. It should come as no surprise that this art form has been perfected in Ethiopia too. Thus, in English, they speak of human rights and freedom of expression. But in their own language they monger fear, hate and war, as they recruit and fundraise for the violent pursuit of power, with media-savvy diaspora activists leading the propaganda war and drawing in Westerners on their side. As the death toll mounts, extremists are empowered and moderates are cowed, if not killed. It is high time we see through this and stand in solidarity with the majority of peace-loving Ethiopians.

Getting it wrong on Ethiopian affairs ranges from prejudice and honest mistake to reckless incompetence and elaborate deception. The pantheon of villains featured here have yet to be held to account. May this book be a step towards that. At the very least, it will help set the historical record straight.

Rasmus Sonderriis, August 2024.

The post Preface to Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong appeared first on Abren.

The bottom line is simply this: the price at which you can legally exchange the local currency for foreign currency is no longer fixed by the government. This doesn’t mean all finance is deregulated, you still need licenses to be a bank or other financial service provider. But last week, the price of dollars was 57 ETB/USD and any other price was technically illegal. Today it can be anything. 47, 57, 67, 97, 100…  It is up to the banks and their customers to agree on a price, like buyers and sellers of anything else. The price itself is no longer a crime. Free at last! 

Last year, in my post entitled “The mother of all distortions“, I wished for exactly this:

The government could simply revoke the law that says Abebe, Berhane and the banks are not allowed to exchange their USD for ETB at whatever price they agree to. That’s what is meant by jargon like “float” or “unification”, “liberalization”, etc. Just let the two parties agree on a price. No other laws need to change. Any product that is illegal can remain illegal. Banking licenses don’t need to change. Just decriminalize voluntary price. That’s it. 

And, surprise! That is actually the current Ethiopian government’s position. Don’t take my word for it. It said so in 2019:  Ethiopia: Central Bank announces floating exchange rate regime. And again in 2020: Ethiopia Plans New Key Rate, Floating Currency to Boost Economy. Even now in 2023, exchange rate unification remains the goal. But the policy is “gradual”, and 4 years in, the peg remains and the gap is growing. So what are we waiting for? Why don’t they just waive this magic wand today?  
[…]
To be blunt, the political cost of doing the right thing is very high.

So let’s applaud the government for finally doing it. A very courageous move. 

Defenders of the status quo

As expected, there has been a lot of discussion of this historic change. Much of it is excellent and constructive. The press has been vigorous, quick and has offered diverse views. Today I want to focus on a subset, the hard core defenders of the old status quo who are crying bloody murder. Intentionally or not, they are ensuring that the political cost we discussed above is paid in full!  Their arguments are predictable. In fact I haven’t yet heard any that are not already debunked (or rather “pre-bunked”) in my aforementioned article. It would be tragic if these fallacies caused a political failure of this reform. So here’s my modest contribution: by responding to some of them directly, maybe I can help the probability of success a tiny bit. But first, since I won’t be repeating the details, if you haven’t yet read my article, now would be a good time to go and read it. I’ll wait… 

Ok are you back? Once more unto the breach dear friends!

One of the loudest opponents of this freedom is Alemayehu Geda. A few hours after the initial statement, on Sunday evening, before the change actually took place on Monday, he was already out on the radio and social media attacking the reform. Here’s what he had to say (I will put his claims in italic, since as you can guess, I’m about to rebut them).

Proposition AG1: Ethiopia imports more than it exports. If the exchange rate is freed,  things that were imported at 50 ETB/USD will now be imported at 100 ETB/USD and so imports will be more expensive. This will cause inflation. Inflation will cause the currency to weaken further. And as the exchange rate goes up the prices will go up even more. And so we will have an unstoppable spiral of general price inflation and currency weakening. 

If you follow his argument carefully, you will realize it it mixes up cause and effect, and then loops back in a circular argument. It’s like saying: “Wet streets cause rain. This rain in turns causes the streets to get more wet. And the wetness of the streets causes more rain to fall. Because of these wet streets, soon there will be a hurricane!” Sounds scary. Indeed we’ve all noticed the close correlation between rain and street wetness! But in reality, it is more like astrology than meteorology. Econstrology.

To show why, let me ask some questions. Excuse me Professor, of course we all know the peg was keeping the rate artificially low, so when freed, it will naturally go up close to the “black” market rate. And you are saying inflation will go up if the government allows this. Then does that mean inflation would go down if they pegged the rate lower?  Maybe even  deflation? If the peg went to  50, 40, 30, … 0.01 Birr per Dollar, would the cost of living would get lower and lower? The central bank has a magic keyboard that lowers the cost of living?  What about the huge fraction of imports priced according to the black market exchange rate. If the new free market rate holds at or below the old black market rate, why would prices go up on those? 

One more question Prof! You then say if inflation goes up, the currency gets weaker.  How does that work? Let’s say we collectively spend 100 Birr every day. And we spend 50 Birr to buy domestic products, and 50 birr to buy US dollars to import stuff. If suddenly we have to spend say 65 on domestic stuff, now we only have 35 birr left to buy dollars with. Therefore there is less demand for dollars. How can that make the price of dollars go up? Conversely, if the dollar is more expensive we should have less money for the domestic stuff, so their price should go down. But you are saying both go up together… Very strange! Clearly if both were to go up together, there would have to be something else causing it (hint: money supply. But more on that later).

Clearly there’s a bug in your model. Here’s what was really happening. There was two foreign exchange markets. The official one which is pegged by law and the “black” market which I will simply call the market. The price of foreign currency on the market was double the official price.  For forex coming in, legally, you had to “surrender” your forex and get only 50% of the market value in Birr. Similarly for dollars going out, if you could get forex legally, you were basically getting a 50% discount on the market. And it is illegal to evade it. In other words, mathematically it is exactly like a tax and a subsidy. No magic wealth creation by fixing the price. Purely a mechanism of transfer. Taking money from exports and foreign investments, and giving it to consumption of imports. Meanwhile local producers who need forex for their capital investments were getting starved. So as a share of the whole economy: exports decrease, investment decreases, manufacturing decreases, and import consumption increases. More dollars go out and fewer dollars come in. This in turn increases the gap between the market and the official rate, so the implicit tax/subsidy effect gets bigger and the whole problem accelerates. This is the real spiral, and it is the reverse of your spiral.  Your model is right to point out the correlation, but it has cause and effect backwards.  Wet streets do not cause rain!

So, whither inflation? Shouting “everything will go up! panic!” is incorrect. All else being equal, the price of things that were implicitly subsidized by getting forex priority will go up, and the price of things that were implicitly taxed will go down. But of course not all else is equal, other variables will change. If the government wants to subsidize fertilizer imports, it will have to do so explicitly,  as government spending, with the choices and trade-offs that implies, not implicitly via distortion of the currency. This is the healthier way. Explicit and transparent. Implicit subsidies are prone to capture by special interests, and end up being regressive and corrupt.   

Another thing that can change is money supply. On that note, let’s go to the Prof’s second major point.

Proposition AG2:  Government budget includes a number of things paid for in foreign currency. So that portion of it will double.  Tax collection is already down in the last couple of years, because of war etc..Where will it get the money? And the white people want the government to cut spending and increase taxes. The economy can’t support that. This will lead to printing and inflation. Ethiopians are poor. Now they will be poorer.

Ok this is partially true. When government prints more money, when the amount of Birr increases faster than the real economic activity, then we get inflation. More money / same stuff,  means more money per unit of stuff, i.e. prices go up. It is possible government will just print more Birr and this would lead to inflation. The part that is not true is the implication that reforming the exchange rate will automatically cause the government to print more Birr. You have to ask: what actually creates the temptation to print more, and will the temptation be stronger now? In fact Ethiopia already had very high inflation, running at around 30% per year, before this reform! One of the reasons is that the currency distortion was killing real productivity, increasing implicit and explicit tax evasion. In those conditions, the government is tempted to print more as quick fix, like an addict taking more drugs to avoid dealing with a painful reality. So the old currency regime was contributing to inflation! Now this reform, by improving productivity, should reduce inflationary tendencies in the long term.

To be clear, the reform does not silence the siren song of the money printer. The transition will be disruptive. There will be winners and losers in the short term. The old winners of the letter of credit privilege game will now be on equal footing with everyone else. The old losers, those who were generating forex and were forced to convert below market rate, will now get more of the benefit of their efforts. Manufacturers will have an easier time with imported equipment and inputs. Banks and merkato traders will speculate on whether the new policy will hold, and this will add volatility in prices and supplies. It will take a bit of time for things to settle down. Until then, it will be tempting for the government to spend more to smooth some of the bumps, whether newly borrowed money or printing. 

For this reform to succeed, the government must resist the temptation. If it does succeed, it will lead to more efficiency and fairness, a more productive economy and therefore less poverty. As it turns out, the central bank (NBE) has actually been systematically reducing the Birr money supply for the last few months. Not to be too technical, but they “drained liquidity out of the system” by lowering the maximum amount of lending  as a fraction of banks’ balance sheets.  This is basically the opposite of printing money. So even though so the temptation will be there, there’s reason to be optimistic that this reform is well prepared and the discipline to see it through will be there.

Now his third and final point is the following.

Proposition AG3: The people are poor. Cost of living is high. 70% of the population earns less than 50 dollars [a month].  Inflation makes life harder for the poor. 

That doesn’t even need rebutting. It’s just stating the obvious. But it is not derived from the subject at hand. No reason is given why this reform will increase poverty or reduce it. This is a rhetorical tactic called “motte and bailey fallacy”. Continuing our previous analogy, it’s like saying: “Wet streets cause rain and rain causes hurricanes. Hurricanes are terrible!” Then if an opponent says  “No, wet streets don’t cause rain!” then he can respond with “Oh so you like hurricanes, you horrible person!” In this case, if you point out the incorrectness of his argument about the forex regime, this allows him to say “Oh so you want more poverty!”

One more thing. In Proposition AG2, there was a passing jab at  “ፈረንጆቹ”  (i.e. the white people)… He’s just using that as shorthand for the IMF, western governments etc. And the IMF is of course the most toxic brand in the third world.  If the IMF says the sky is blue, you can get a lot of political mileage by saying the sky is green. But that’s empty rhetoric. The reality is the IMF is more like a pharmacist and third world governments are addicted to prescription drugs. And this pharmacist (or drug dealer if you prefer) says: you really should stop the addiction, but I’ll give you a little dose to wean you off, if you promise to reform yourself. Most of the time, the reforms fail. This has been going on for decades and everyone hates the IMF as a result. But nobody ever cured an addiction with righteous indignation about the pharmacist. Ultimately the addicts need to repair themselves. IMF loans can be addictive and destructive in the long term. But if used correctly in the short term with exception discipline, they can also help wean the government off the addiction.  So please dear friends, don’t fall for the old  “Whitey made them do it!” attack. Just think from first principles about this reform. 

Finally, when asked if there’s anything positive, the Prof acknowledges that it may close the gap with the black market for remittances (true).  But then he simply asserts that exports can’t increase! He says exports have other problems like shortage of foreign currency (duh!). He also blames customs, bureaucracy,  corruption and lack of peace in the country for harming exports.  That’s all true. 

For example:

• Customs is hell. This week the customs commission suddenly decided to freeze imports of capital goods including those that are en route and those that have  already arrived and been cleared. This is a devastating cost to many businesses, including some that would be generating forex.
• Land transportation from Djibouti to Ethiopia, both trains and trucks,  is plagued by congestion and insecurity.
• The Houthi blockade of the Red Sea is extremely costly for trade to/from Ethiopia.
• Political problems and violence handicap many parts of the economy, including exports.

All that is true. Doing business in Ethiopia remains unfathomably difficult.  But none of that is a reason for opposing this particular reform. On the contrary, it *will* improve a lot of it. Much of the incomprehensible torture that you go through in customs or investment licenses, for example, is based on forex things like franco valuta, bank permits, etc. Having a freely exchange currency will definitely eliminate this important source of red tape and corruption.

To conclude, the professor despairs that he’s been a prophet but the government is not listening to him. But what he doesn’t say is that his approach was actually implemented for the last 50 years! And even though this reform has been the goal since 2019, such arguments have delayed it for 5 years.  So Prof, congrats on your team’s five decade policy victory streak. Now please have the humility and honesty to admit that your approach was tried and failed.  

Five decades is a long time. Over 95% of the population has never known a life where changing currency from one to another is no big deal, like in Europe, or America or indeed much of Africa. I’m confident Ethiopians will adjust to this little bit of extra freedom, and the benefits will accrue slowly but surely.

P.S. A personal note to Prof Alemayehu. If you ever read this, first thanks for reading and second, let me be clear, this is not  personal. In fact by picking on you, I’m recognizing you as one of the chief public  defender of the old system. You are widely respected. I just think you are wrong. Second, even though we don’t know each other, you’ve  made a couple of condescending public comments about my previous article, essentially calling me a simpleton. Since you blocked me, I never got to thank you. I took your insult as a compliment.  My goal is always to make things as simple as possible!

P.P.S. This post is too long so I’m stopping at the polemic. In a follow-up post, I will give some concrete predictions and maybe even offer some bets! A preview:

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