BY JEFF PEARCE
Part One
In 2015, while the war with ISIS was still going on, I had the opportunity to visit a Peshmerga base where I leaned on sandbags, and my fixer pointed out a village two kilometers away, held by one of the most despicable terrorist organizations on Earth.
To the world at the time, the evil of ISIS seemed a horrible yet seemingly permanent fixture of world politics. I met refugees from Mosul in a camp not far away from Erbil, people who lost practically everything. But in about three years, coalition forces would plow into Mosul and liberate the town.
And in all that time, as the world collectively held its breath and barely had an idea of how people fared “behind the lines” in Iraq and Syria, and as these psychopaths beheaded captured soldiers and even a respected, downright beloved archaeologist in Palmyra, I did not hear anyone once float the asinine idea of… “Well, ISIS doesn’t have power over there, and they don’t have communications, and they’re running out of food.”
The notion would have been ludicrous. Insane. It. Was. A. War.
In 1945, the Nazis sent little boys, their sobbing faces sometimes captured in film footage, to run out with rifles to defend what remained of the Third Reich. Can anyone believe that American soldiers wanted to shoot children? Mow them down with machine guns? But what choice did the soldiers have?
Does anyone think that when bombing raids were made on Berlin or Munich that the Allies wanted civilian casualties out of this? (And yes, I’m well aware of the atrocity of Dresden; after that, we can chat about what the Nazis did while invading Poland).
And yet the Allies dealt with an enemy of pure evil, one that did not think twice about bombing the East End of London into such rubble that to this day, Brits will wryly refer to a newish section of town as “Oh, yes, this was German relandscaping…”
What you did not hear was the enemy bleating, “You big meanies, our power’s cut off!” No shit, asshole, you invaded the Poland, Holland, France, etc…
Now the world has gone insane. In what twisted reality does a terrorist organization have the right to demand “restore power and comms” while it vows to destroy the very government providing those services? And even as its leaders threaten to invade more territory?
Because lest we forget, the ceasefire offer was barely a day old when Getachew Reda bragged to one of the TPLF’s favorite propagandists, Cara Anna of Associated Press, “We’ll stop at nothing to liberate every square inch” of Tigray. To Getachew, the unilateral ceasefire was a “sick joke,” and “if there is still a menace next door,” he and his thugs would go on a spree against Eritrea or regions with Amhara populations.
None of this has made any impression on Robert Godec, acting assistant secretary of state for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, who told the Foreign Affairs Committee in Congress the next day, “If the [Ethiopian] government’s announcement of cessation of hostilities does not result in improvements, and the situation continues to worsen, Ethiopia and Eritrea should anticipate further actions.”
But… No such ultimatum issued to the TPLF. No recognition of responsibility on the TPLF’s part at all. And yet at that same hearing, Godec acknowledged that the TPLF started the conflict.
“We need gov’t of Ethiopia to lift comms blackout, Amhara forces to open 3 major roads and UN and other donors to continue to scale up aid,” tweeted the Lead for the USAID Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance last night. How about, “No?”
Hey, USAID, you wanted this mess, it’s yours. How dare you ask for road access and the blackout lifted — and for what the Ethiopian government rightly considers a terrorist group that attacked its armed forces? Go use Mekelle airport for aid drops.
Some will say that we won’t know what’s being smuggled in with aid transported by air, but quite frankly at this point, the security of Ethiopia’s territory outweighs the logistics, manpower, and regular abuse Ethiopian authorities will endure if they need to continue checking aid convoys.
To hell with them, Roads are closed. Get your own damn aid from your American buddies. Need comms? Start building cell towers.
Especially when, according to sources, the TPLF, in fact, murdered several workers who tried to restore power service and communications after the terrorists repeatedly vandalized the infrastructure.
The U.S. and EU, the care providers for the entitled, spoiled and psychopathic child known as the TPLF, are telling the world the equivalent of, “Yeah, I know my kid just vandalized your store and puked on your cashier’s shoes, but you owe him a new Xbox.”
State Department representatives get awfully quiet when one asks why the TPLF, which was designated a terrorist group under Homeland Security’s Global Terrorism Database, can seemingly do no wrong in the eyes of the Biden administration.
If we look further, however, we can get a clue. The fix has been in for years. Abebe Gallaw noted an interesting mindset on the part of the keepers of the GTD. If a government does it, well, that’s not terrorism, that’s “state terrorism,” so not included — geddit? And by 2013, the U.S. Attorney General’s office, along with Secretary of State John Kerry and Homeland Security, got the bright idea of exempting the TPLF from the normal rules that would apply to a terrorist organization regarding one of its members immigrating into the United States.
Remember when folks wanted to sue the asses of those in the diaspora raising cash for the TPLF? First, the money was supposed to be for innocents, but in a shamelessly brazen move, the fundraisers announced to their faithful that oh, no, they changed their minds and were diverting the money to their PR and lobbying efforts. No doubt a good portion of it found its way into the bank accounts of Von Batten-Montague-York, their lobby firm that should have a villain cameo in the next James Bond flick.
And the cry went up, Sue them! They’re raising money for terrorism! Only those of us who made that argument never had a chance. Note the exemptions of “activities” by the TPLF granted by Kerry and Company:
On its face, yes, this is a policy related to immigration eligibility criteria. But it’s quite obvious that if you keep the terrorist designation on the books while doing an end-run around the whole point of designating terrorist groups, something else is going on.
A year later, Susan Rice stood in the White House press briefing room as Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor and laughed after claiming Ethiopia’s election that year was a “100 percent” democratic election. No one in Ethiopia laughed. And Rice is not welcome there any time soon.
And so now we’re fully immersed in a weird, wild, Tim Burton world in which Von Batten-Montague-York can claim the Addis government’s declaration of TPLF as a terrorist group was done for “political and strategic purposes.”
Gee, I guess only the United States is allowed to say who the bad guys are. Fun fact: long before the U.S. decided it would barge into Iraq on a pointless search for fictional WMDs; it wanted to assassinate a general named Abdul Karim Qassim in 1958. Guess who the U.S. hired as part of a six-man hit squad? Saddam Hussein. It’s a great story: Saddam was completely incompetent, wound up getting shot by another member of his own team while another idiot got a hand grenade stuck in his coat, and then Saddam fled to Cairo, where the CIA babysat him for a while. I still can’t believe this stuff wasn’t a bigger deal back in 2003.
But then again, maybe I should…Because here are the Western spin doctors at it again. “Ethiopian officials threaten to send troops back into Tigray,” shouts the Guardian, for a piece written by Jason Burke.
Why is it that we have to scroll down several paragraphs to find the boasts of Getachew Reda reported by the AP? Okay, standard inverted pyramid structure, journalism 101, lead with your most up-to-date info — but it’s incredibly misleading, even downright deceitful, to present the Ethiopian government as threatening to break the ceasefire when the comments were made Wednesday and after Getachew Reda issued his sinister promises to go invade other territory.
No matter how despicable, it seems there are those who are determined to let the TPLF have its way. Nic Cheeseman, columnist for South Africa’s The Mail and Guardian, wins “Pompous Douche of the Week” Award by accusing analyst Bronwyn Bruton of being “disingenuous” and pushing what looks like “bias”…only to advance on the same day the stupidest rationale I’ve come across yet to justify media bias.
Who the hell decides who the “underdog?” is as we’ve seen, lately, it seems to be the top dogs. Under Cheeseman’s rules of warped reality, we should all be celebrating those terrorist acts in Europe by the Red Brigades. Hooray! After all, Italy was a “dominant power” with “advantages,” wasn’t it? Sorry, Aldo Moro, you were shot and dumped in the trunk of a Renault by “underdog” heroes. Hooray, Boko Haram! You’re free to go commit the vilest attacks because Nic Cheeseman noticed that Nigeria is a “dominant power.”
And this guy is a Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham. He used to run the African Studies Centre at Oxford. That is truly frightening.
It has been, to put it mildly, a confusing and depressing week for Ethiopians and those in the diaspora who want to make sense of the ceasefire and who hope something good can come out of this debacle after months of their native land getting beaten up and treated like an international pariah.
Editor’s Note: The views entertained in this article do not necessarily reflect the stance of The Ethiopian Herald
The Ethiopian Herald July 3/2021
