Mogadishu (Guest Column PP) — The extent to which Abiy Ahmed, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, is out of touch with global politics was demonstrated in the interview he gave to the i magazine in 2022 when the civil war in Tigray was raging. In the interview he boasted of strong ties between the USA and Ethiopia.
“In the Iraq War, I fought with them. I was the one who would send intelligence from this part of the world to the N.S.A., on Sudan and Yemen and Somalia. The N.S.A. knows me. I would fight and die for America” he told the New Yorker. Abiy claimed that Ethiopia could fight American wars. In 2023, Borkena, an influential news and commentary website, criticised Abiy Ahmed for being a “mercenary warlord”.
Warlords are known to be undiagnosed psychopaths who trigger man-made famines and think only of letting their foot soldiers plunder unarmed civilians. That is what happened in Somalia early 1990s before the US-led humanitarian intervention of 1992. The famine in Tigray, the constant bombardment of Amhara civilians by the Ethiopian Defence Forces using Turkish-supplied armed drones all point to the emergence of entrenched warlordism in Ethiopia under Abiy Ahmed.
Warlords are notorious for defying international norms but at the same time they appeal to the International Opinion for legitimacy. The elevation of Oromumaa, an offshoot of Abiy’s Medemer concoction, to a national philosophy to be imposed on other Ethiopian ethnicities, indicates that Ethiopia has been forced to retreat from Zemenawint (modernity) to a destructive cycle of Zemene Mesafint (the era of princes), with one leader calling the shots in the nocturnal conviction that his mother dreamt of his kinghood.
That is a far cry from the description provided in The Ethiopian Revolution: War in the Horn of Africa, by Professor Gebru Tareke, about EPLF and TPLF: “Distinguishable from the predatory warlordism of Somalia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone were the Eritrean and Tigrayan movements that were more like the purposeful, popular, and disciplined struggles of China and Vietnam, whose organizational, mobilizational, and combat techniques the Ethiopian rebels so assiduously and efficiently replicated.” When, between 2020 and 2023, Abiy Ahmed mobilised other Ethiopian ethnicities against Tigrayans, he had taken a leaf from the book of warlordism.
Given the political situation in Ethiopia whose leaders aim to divert attention from domestic woes to create a geopolitical tension, one wonders how long the International Community can tolerate a leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for accepting the ruling on Badme “to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea” but now aims to annex Somali littoral district under the pretext that he signed a maritime Memorandum of Understanding with the President of a secessionist administration in Northern Somalia.
Adan M. S. Hussein teaches history at a university in Mogadishu.
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