BY ADDISALEM MULAT
Lawrence Freeman is a Political-Economic Analyst for Africa, who has been involved in economic development policies for Africa for over 30 years. Since recently, he has been a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy towards Ethiopia in connection with the current situation in the country. Freeman is now in Addis Ababa. He sat down with The Ethiopian Herald to have his reflection on the foreign intervention and the West’s foreign policy towards Ethiopia.
How do you get the reality in Ethiopia as compared to the Western media and Western governments’ narrative?
I have been to Ethiopia many times. This is not my first time in Ethiopia. I understand the situation and the politics of Ethiopia very well. I have studied it over the last 10-12 years; I have also been looking at Africa as an analyst for over 30 years. The Western media and governments, Europe and the United States are carrying out what I would call psychological warfare by creating false stories, they are not just misinforming people, and they are disinforming people—intentionally. Since I arrived in Addis, I have seen that the bars and hotels are open. The plane that I flew with was nearly full. The airport is functioning well. Children and people are out on the streets. The media know these, as well, as you and I are sitting here because it’s true. It is a reality.
The US Embassy here knows this. Therefore, when the state department puts out a warning not to travel, I had to disobey the warning. They know it is not true, because they can see for themselves as we can see sitting here in this hotel. Therefore, it is a conscious campaign. It is political warfare, to weaken, demoralize and weaken the morale of the Ethiopian government to fight to restore the sovereignty of its nation, which is now under attack by the TPLF.
Why do you think these entities have resorted to waging such concerted war against Ethiopia?
The basic problem you have in the western world is that you have a diseased way of thinking, which is called geopolitics. We have the political-economic elite of the world; I call them an oligarchy. They believe they should control everything. And they believe that it’s a limited world, and therefore the main purpose in life is to be number one. And that’s why you see the attacks on China in particular. This geopolitics is geared towards control. They see Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed as not under their control. And therefore, they would rather create chaos and war in the Horn of Africa for they did not control it for themselves. It is a form of insanity.
It’s very hard for people to think this way. But I’ve studied this for 50 years. And the problem is that we have people in the Biden administration. We’re trying to pull President Biden into this destabilization of potential regime change in Ethiopia. I don’t know if he’ll go along with it. Because I don’t know if he wants to have his government be responsible for stabilizing a longtime ally, like the way President Obama destabilized Libya.
Now, Prime Minister Abiy is trying to lead his country against an ethnic movement as one cannot allow an ethnic separatists group to militarily attempt to overthrow the government. The Prime Minister was elected in two elections this year in June and September. I calculated over 43 million votes. That’s never been recognized by President Biden; by the State Department or the US Congress, or anyone in Europe for that matter. Because they don’t want to recognize, they don’t want to admit that there was a democratic election where the people came out, 43 million out of 110 million, to support the prime minister. The Biden administration doesn’t want to have that kind of political leadership in the country. So they have refused to recognize an election.
The African Union was here. And they said that it was a fair election. But my government has never said anything positive, yet they treat the TPLF which is trying to overthrow that government as an equal party to an elected government. If that continues, then all of Africa is in trouble, because as you know, Africa is filled with ethnic groups. I mean, there are hundreds of them. If the US gives equal status to the TPLF with an elected government, then it is giving green light to separatist across the continent, like the Biafra war 1967, which almost tore apart Nigeria to wage war against their country.
Why does the US shy away from recognizing the election, the elected government?
There were six total Americans here during the election. So they could not have viewed the election by going round to all polling stations. The only group with about 65 members was the African Union. The problem is there are people inside the Biden administration, not necessarily President Biden himself. You have people in the Biden administration, who have long-time contacts with the TPLF. And they want to maintain that kind of control over Ethiopia. You have people like Secretary Blinken, Gail Smith, Samantha Power, Lynda Thomas Greenfield who have ignored the fact that there are 7 million IDPs in Afar and Amhara states.
But the TPLF is not going to relieve that suffering. It’s up to the government; the elected government has to resolve this war, by making the TPLF conceding that they can’t overthrow the government. And then we have to get on with the task of rebuilding the country because the economic growth that the Ethiopians were living in for the last 10 years has been weakened.
The solution is to increase economic wealth for everybody. As one Ethiopia, we can’t have ethnic groups forming their own states dictating policy. There is only one form of citizenship, it’s called being a citizen of Ethiopia, not a citizen of a group, and you can maintain the groups. But once you have an elected government, you have to respect the government. If you do not like the government, you have to then change the government in the next election. But you can’t then declare war and demand to be part of a new transitional government, which also could include the removal of the elected government of Prime Minister Abiy.
So if this support by these factions in US and Europe, if this is not overturned, if this is legitimized, if the TPLF is legitimized, then what would stop every other ethnic group from launching a confrontation?
There are 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria. And they already had a civil war that killed a million people, because you both rebelled in 1967 against the government, to this, you’re playing with a powder cake here is confrontation across the whole continent. I can say this as an American; the idiocy of my government is failing to recognize the danger of what they’re doing. This is a serious problem! And we have to wake them up. And we have to appeal to the President, Joe Biden that he doesn’t want to have a war as his legacy. He doesn’t want to have disrupting and destabilizing Ethiopia as his legacy. And we have to make sure that we succeed in that.
Democrats boast to expand democracy in the world. So, doesn’t the attempt to overthrow an elected government contradict their own principles?
Well, you have to realize something that their view of democracy is imposing the rule of democracy. By the way, the United States is not a direct democracy. It is a democratic republic. We elect the supposed to elect the wisest, most intelligent people to elect our president is actually called the Electoral College. We’re not a pure democracy, as the last elections have shown, but when Secretary Blinken and others say we want democracy, what they really mean is they want to impose their will on other countries.
For me, democracy is not just elections; real genuine democracy is having a citizenry that’s educated, better standard of living, and the leisure to discuss policies for the country. Democracy really means the citizens having a discussion about the future of the country.
What does that mean? No, that means you have to have electricity, you have to have food, you have to have adequate housing, so your children can study and read, and you can meet and various town hall meetings and forums, they will look, this is where we, I think Ethiopia should go, this is what I think the best policy is. But you have a debate about the future of your country as common Ethiopian citizens, not as ethnic groups. That to me is democracy. But for real democracy, you have to have development. They claim that the fundamental human rights democracy. But for me, electricity is a human right. Food is a human right.
Those are the ways that you improve the standard of living of people. And that is what I believe Ethiopia has been trying to do for so many years. And we have to get back to that course. And, we have to move beyond regional ethnicity and move towards a conception of Ethiopian citizenship where everybody is united for the future of their country as a common interest of all. That’s what we need.
Do the average Americans know that the Biden administration is supporting a group that hated Ethiopia?
I’ve been involved in politics for 50 years, a half-century. The problem is the average American citizen does not think independently and does not think about the world in the terms that we should be thinking about. The United States, culture and vision have shrunk over the last five decades. Now our elected officials come from our population, and our elected officials in the United States are not well informed. They know very little about Africa. And they know even less about Ethiopia.
The senators and House representatives are very easily manipulated because they don’t have independent knowledge the way I do of Ethiopia and Africa. So for example, you can have the media, like CNN actually convince the US Senate and the House of Representatives to issue resolutions against Ethiopia, and it’s organized by CNN. So the media has become a foreign policy that everyone else accepts it. When Secretary State Blinken was quoting ethnic genocide, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, which are the code words for humanitarian intervention, he was getting them from news media reports, not from on-the-ground intelligence. And you have people in the world who are using the question of “humanitarian crisis to trigger an intervention”, it is called responsibility to protect R2P was put together by George Soros Open Society, and Tony Blair, the former prime minister of London in the late 1990s.
There has now been discussion floated in the media about the possibility of human US military intervention in Ethiopia. It’s just been floated. When they would say the Ethiopian people are suffering, they are saying that we have to intervene. That would be the pretext. And that’s what people are doing in this deliberate misinformation disinformation campaign. And the American citizen and the American Congress really don’t know. And they’re just pulled along by groupthink that comes from the media. The media is not objective. They’re not interested in the truth. They are part of the oligarch’s arm in convincing people to move ahead with this policy.
A sizeable fraction of the Biden administration is committed to the ideology of geopolitics. They are not interested in the welfare of Ethiopia. If they were, they would have committed themselves to development over the last 30 years. It is hard, I understand for Africans to understand this. But there is not a commitment by my country to develop Africa, to raise the standard of living. The Chinese are doing that. But the United States is not, and has not for the last several decades, probably since the death of John F. Kennedy in the 1960s. We have not committed ourselves to the development of Africa. So when you make your arguments, you have to realize you are arguing against an ideology.
And therefore, they’re not going to listen. So what you have to do instead is identify the danger of what they are doing to back them off, you can’t simply have a logical argument, you have to hit them with. Are you willing to destabilize East Africa of 300 million populations? Are you willing to do that? Do you want to have that blood on your hands? Mr. Biden, President Biden, you want that to be your legacy? You have to use that kind of intervention. The simple logic is, it is not going to work because you are dealing with people who are not thinking. They have already gone along with the narrative. And they don’t have any independent thinking power. To walk, you have to speak louder.
As part of the geopolitical thinking, they are not concerned about development. If they were concerned about development, they would have issued positive compliment to the Ethiopian government for constructing the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, because the dam is going to produce 6200 MW, the biggest development in East Africa. The fact that they do not compliment and praise the government for that action is they are not interested in development.
The potential in the Horn of Africa is enormous. I spent many years in Sudan studying this situation Sudan, before it was broken up, had the largest uncultivated area of agriculture in the whole continent. If it had been properly developed, Sudan could have fed the whole continent. It was never developed. The US had no intention of developing. The US has no intention of developing Ethiopia. So you have to look for other allies to China is a reliable ally for economic development, other nations or allies, and African countries can group together.
I’m not suggesting that Ethiopia should distance itself from the United States. I’m suggesting that there is life beyond the United States and that by the positive relationship we mean, Ethiopia should not be held hostage to the geopolitical thinking of the West. If the West doesn’t want to help, we’ll find other ways to move forward. What you have to do is you have to hit them hard, where you’re exposing the danger to everybody what you’re doing. So, we should have African countries, Latin America, African Americans, United States should all be sounding the alarm. No regime change in Ethiopia. Do not intervene and allow the countries of Africa to solve their problems. Do not legitimize a group that practices, publicly stating to overthrow a legitimate government.
Editor’s Note: The views entertained in this article do not necessarily reflect the stance of The Ethiopian Herald
The Ethiopian Herald November 30/2021
