BY SOLOMON DIBABA
Can someone tell terrorist TPLF that Ethiopia is not Yugoslavia, Syria, Yemen or Afghanistan? Yes, terrorist TPLF’s mission in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa is dictated by a consortium of global conspiracies hatched by the western powers and their media outlets that are marred with fabricating fairy tales and falsehood.
For a total of 47 years, terrorist TPLF’s objectives were based on working towards the disintegration of Ethiopia into Zemene Mesafint style of formation of principalities that would consume themselves into endless local wars over hegemony on the resources of their areas.
Terrorist TPLF’s devilish balkanization of Ethiopia is composed of two interrelated components. The first is the subjective side of preaching the theory of self-determination of nations and nationalities and peoples that this terrorist organization has been inculcating in the minds of the peoples of Tigray. The second is using the constitution in a distorted manner to create the terrorist version of ethnic federalism.
The question is what are the strategies that terrorist TPLF has been using to ensure the disintegration of this country? One can enumerate socio-political strategies, economic and financial strategy and social-psychological mechanisms.
Let us briefly look into each strategy and establish the necessary connection between each. The socio-political strategy is a superstructural strategy that was designed to ensure the socio-political dominance of terrorist TPLF in the political system of the country. This was made possible by ensuring that each policy direction that is commissioned for each sector is to prepared based on the long term interest of political hegemony. Each sector policy is first tested in Tigray and is implemented with necessary modifications in the rest of the regional states of the country. The old-style dogma of the so-called revolutionary democracy became the macro policy for terrorist TPLF’s dream to create numerous ethic based banana republics and create a constellation of city-states similar to ancient Greek.
The social strategy is based on tearing down the age-old cultural linkage between the people of Ethiopia by politicizing cultural values based on criticizing and corrupting the true nature of cultural heterogeneity among the peoples of Ethiopia based on a narrow nationalist model that is practised in Tigray.
The former leadership in Tigray also used ethnic disenfranchisement in the country by pausing as gurus of stability in the country in the event of conflicts they deliberately instigate among the peoples of Ethiopia.
The economic strategy implemented by terrorist TPLF took several forms. The first is creating endowment companies that were financed by looted properties and finance when EPRDF entered Addis Ababa and the regional towns. Terrorist TPLF established more than 30 companies that freely operate outside and independent of government trade and financial regulations. These companies frustrated efforts by local entrepreneurs and foreign investment groups pushing them out of completion.
Almost all the leadership of terrorist TPLF and few government officials were appointed as board chairpersons and shareholders. Terrorist TPLF generals and ministers managed to own apartments and malls through the easy access provided to them by officials of terrorist TPLF. Terrorist former officials siphoned out billions of USD through corruption and illicit financial transaction robbing the country of billions of Birr to weaken the economy to facilitate the destruction of the political order in the country.
According to Global Financial Integrity’s estimates, between 2005 and 2014, an average of US$1,259 million to US$3,153 million left Ethiopia as IFFs every year (GFI, 2014). From 1970 to 2012, the total capital flight from the country is estimated at USD 31 Billion. The average growth lost because of the capital flight is found to be about 2.2 percentage points per year, between 2001-2013. Additionally, had it not been for capital flight, poverty would have been reduced by about 2.5 percentage points in the last decade (Geda and Yimer, 2016).
This makes the country among 10 African countries most affected by IFF. According to Yimer, (2017), the main sources of IFF in Ethiopia are trade mis invoicing, informal remittance systems and illicit transfers by embassies and diplomatic officials. Ethiopia is also one of the countries that have a huge unaccounted-for flow of precious stones. For instance, most of the world’s tantalum comes from Brazil and Australia, but some also come from Ethiopia. A recently released map of IFFs also shows that the trans-Sahara drugs flow flows through Addis Ababa and that Cocaine also arrives via Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Interpol & Global Initiative against Illicit Flows, 2018).
It is no doubt that Terrorist TPLF officials were behind all this looting of public finance to ensure that the country will lose all financial and monetary backing and would finally drift into the quicksand of disintegration as a country. A recent media report indicates that right after terrorist TPLF lost political power in Ethiopia, it siphoned out some 30 billion USD to the USA which it is now using to pay for its lobbyists and media outlets that are working towards the balkanization of Ethiopia.
One of the targets of terrorist TPLF’s attempts towards the disintegration of the country is based on internal and external propaganda war a rumor mongering trying to make the people of Ethiopia believe that they could not have believed under normal circumstances. Spreading false news at the battlefront as a means of frustrating the rural communities and armed forces in their efforts to ascertain the unity and territorial integrity of the country is socio-psychological warfare geared towards the disintegration of political orders in regional states that border with Tigray.
Ethiopia is indeed not a country that one can make or break at will. This is a country of gallant fighters which can foil local and international conspiracies currently underway through the unholy alliance between terrorist TPLF and the western powers.
The Ethiopian Herald August 22/2021
