BY MULUGETA GUDETA
A recent survey has recently come out with a not so unexpected revelation that CNN which has been boasting as a champion of truth for many decades has now lost 95 percent of its fans because of its fake news. There is nothing more humiliating than this for a media outlet that claimed of having “monopoly of truth” for so many years. As republicans and democrats are split over their media preferences between Fox News and CNN, democrats that are fans of the latter have now become “comrades-in lies” of the biggest media machinery in US history. This is also another reconfirmation that the administration’s policy missteps are therefore guided by CNN’s fakes news and its policy blunders in Africa.
Washington is up in diplomatic arms against countries in the Horn of Africa. It is unscrupulously intervening in these countries to change the course of recent events. It has imposed selected sanctions against Eritrea and Ethiopia. It is punishing tens of thousands of manufacturers, workers and their families by scrapping the AGOA deal brokered during the Clinton administration. AGOA was a favorable trade deal whose objective was to encourage imports to the US by doing away with tariffs or duties for African producers and exporters.
AGOA was used a flagship initiative for helping African countries to effectively deal with their growing balance of trade deficits. Democratic administrations were proud of this achievement because it was a very pragmatic approach to Africa’s trade problems. The new US administration has veered in this opposite direction by suspending Ethiopia from benefitting from the AGOA advantages. By doing so the new administration has turned AGOA into a political tool to punish Ethiopia and revealed the hypocrisy of the democrats.
Politics, including diplomacy in the Horn of Africa is has always been a very messy, volatile, fluid and unpredictable process. During the Cold War, Soviet domination of the Horn was evident. Moscow had the upper hand in the 1960s and 1970s in Somalia in the context of the Ethio-Somali border war and the irredentist claims of Moqaadisho under former president Ziad Bare. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the United States tried to fill the strategic vacuum left by the Moscow without much success. The new millennium too did not augur well for the Horn of Africa as the region continued to be contested by old and new powers for various reasons.
The rise of terrorism in the Horn is another anomaly that has pushed to adopt the West’s strategy to the new situation. This in turn, directly or indirectly led the Western countries to use military force as a guarantee for their continued presence in the region. China’s rise to number two global economic powers is perceived by the US as the greatest threat to Western domination. But this should not be reason to see Ethiopia’s cooperation with Beijing as a kind of strategic or military cooperation. Ethiopia is a developing country that needs to balance its relations both with the West and with countries like China to its own benefit.
A lot has changed in the strategic dynamics of the Horn in the past decades. What has not changed is the fate of hundreds of millions of Africans living in the area whose lives has little changed as direct colonialism evolved into a new form of colonialism that has contributed to the poverty, famines, conflicts and proxy war conducted under various pretexts while their endgame is the subjugation and exploitation of the people of the Horn of Africa.
Africa in general and the Horn of Africa in particular are fast becoming hotbeds of US and Western neocolonial political, economic and geopolitical struggle for regional hegemony. All the major global economic powers have built their bases in the tine republic of Djibouti whose strategic location has made it the envy of the West as well as the East. The Red Sea littoral is also becoming a pole of attraction for regional powers whose intention is to have a dominant control over this strategic trade sea route. In brief, from Eritrea in the north to Somalia in the south, from Sudan in the west to Djibouti in the east, and Ethiopia in the center, the entire Horn region is becoming a powerful pole of attraction in the fast-paced competition for economic, military and strategic advantages.
The Horn of Africa is also home to the combined population of the five countries estimated to reach hundreds of millions of people. The potential natural resources are vast. The markets are untapped and potentials for economic growth are immense. What is most attractive to the competition powers however are natural resources that go into feeding their ever hungry manufacturing sectors in the great economic powers of the US, Western Europe, China and Arab countries in the Middle East. More than during the Berlin conference that ushered in what is known as the 1885 scramble for Africa.
One hundred seventeen years after the infamous Berlin conference that resulted in the partition of Africa, Western powers are still on the lookout for Africa’s natural resources in addition to its strategic-military values. Capitalism went through the stages of imperialism and globalism but its appetite for African raw materials is coupled with the strategic relevance of the Horn in the new, albeit subtler and indirect control of the region. Neocolonialism, in the words of the pan-Africanist patriot Kwame Nkrumah, has grown into “the highest stage of imperialism”.
What brought about the old colonialism into Africa was competition among the great political powers of the time for domination and exploitation. What are feeding present day neocolonialism are the rivalries among the great economic powers for economic supremacy that has become the precondition for global political domination As the economic domination of the West in general and the US in particular is perceived as threatened by the rise of China and other potential aspirants, the competition for resources is becoming stiffer than ever.
The West dominated the world for much of the 20th century. The 21st century is believed to be the century of new economic powers like China and probably Russia and other aspirants. According to many pundits, American power and influence is waning and the vacuum that would soon be left is expected to be filled by the new powers.
It is axiomatic to say that economic dominance is the precondition for global military and political dominance. The US wants to remain the number one economic and military power beyond the 21st century. It is now waking up to the sad realization that its once apparently invulnerable power is being threatened with the newly rising powers of Asia and the Middle East. It is this sad realization that is bringing out America’s unprecedentedly aggressive behavior looking at recent developments around the world as something of a threat to its global superiority not dominance.
In Europe, Washington is bogged down in the Ukraine-Russia military deadlock. In Africa instead of fair competition, it is seeking undue advantage and using threats of destabilizing individual countries in its bid to replacing regimes that are a thorn on its side with those more accommodating to US interests. Meanwhile it is also punishing “dissident” countries that do not toe the Washington diktat. Ethiopia is the best contemporary example.
The other target of Washington’s aggressive foreign policy is Somalia where an internal political impasse is being exploited by Washington to order the politicians to conduct elections as soon as possible. Meddling in Somalia’s internal politics is not a new experiment for the US. In the 1990s, it intervened militarily and lost control of the country following the rise of tribal warlords with conflicting claims that ended in the rise of extremism and terrorism and the expulsion of US forces from the country.
Last week, the US president once again reiterated his plan for a cease fire and negotiations between the TPLF neo-fascist terrorists and the Ethiopian government that is deep in the struggle to get Tigray rid of the group’s suffocating or deadly hold on the region. There is in fact nothing new about Biden’s stance except that it was sent via telephone. As before, the president is concerned or worried about the fate of the ragtag remnants of the neo-fascist group than the tragic situations in Amhara and Afar where the TPLF has looted and burnt everything on its path of total mayhem.
Why did the US stay silent when women as old as 80 and as young as 3 were raped, killed and buried in mass graves by the barbaric hordes of the TPLF? Instead of brushing off those gruesome stories as “unconfirmed” the Washington hawks could have sent their own fact finding teams to the invaded regions and see for themselves what happened.
In fact the West’s conspiracy of silence has rather emboldened the TPLF murderers to “accuse” Ethiopian forces of bombing soft targets and killing a number of civilians. The US administration’s partisan position is once again laid bare when Washington expressed its concern with the bombings of targets inside Tigray. The TPLF is not only a barbaric horde of killers. It is also a group of incorrigible liars who are running from justice to hide their crimes. They are also past masters of deceptions and psychological manipulation.
The Ethiopian federal forces are legitimately pursuing the TPLF criminal group inside Tigray to bring the perpetrators of the above atrocities before a court of law. The air strikes are conducted with this single objective in mind. However, the TPLF is crying foul because the group is feeling the heat of Ethiopia’s air power and wants to protect itself from future operations. It is issuing fake casualty figures in its bid to earn the “compassion” of the Western powers in order to portray itself as the false victim while it is the true criminal.
If Ethiopia’s claim of the destruction of entire regions and the maiming of children and the raping of girls and mothers by TPLF is “unconfirmed”, why is the State Department so quick as to believe TPLF’s claims of “civilian casualties” as true as a passage from the Bible and issue thinly veiled “warnings” against Ethiopia? The answer is as simple as two plus two is four.
The US should not look at developments in Ethiopia from the narrow or myopic perspective it was condemned to by CNN and the other corporate media outlets as well as by strange bedfellows like Tedros Adhanom and the TPLF’s barbaric hordes. US foreign policy and diplomacy should be guided by realities on the ground. The US administration should not be misinformed by so-called big media that have been exposed as confirmed liars but by facts on the ground that should be followed, checked and confirmed by its embassy staff in Addis Ababa. Washington need not believe what the TPLF or the Ethiopian governments are saying for that matter. It has the technological capacity and experience of knowing the truth in its own way to rectify its diplomatic missteps.
The Ethiopian Herald January 20/2022
