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Ethiopia’s government appears to be wielding hunger as a weapon – Famine crimes

January 21, 2021/0 Comments/in English, External, Politics/by Solomon

The Economist | A rebel region is being starved into submission

Ethiopia has suffered famines in the past. Many foreigners know this; in 1985 about one-third of the world’s population watched a pop concert to raise money for starving Ethiopians. What is less well understood is that poor harvests lead to famine only when malign rulers allow it. It was not the weather that killed perhaps 1m people in 1983-85. It was the policies of a Marxist dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, who forced peasants at gunpoint onto collective farms. Mengistu also tried to crush an insurgency in the northern region of Tigray by burning crops, destroying grain stores and slaughtering livestock. When the head of his own government’s humanitarian agency begged him for cash to feed the starving, he dismissed him with a memorably callous phrase: “Don’t let these petty human problems…consume you.”

Things were supposed to be different under Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian prime minister who was hailed as a reformer when he took charge in 2018, and who won the Nobel peace prize the following year. Yet once again it looks as if hunger is being used as a weapon in Africa’s second-most-populous nation. And once again the scene of the horror is Tigray. Since fighting broke out in November between federal forces and those of Tigray’s rebellious former ruling party, perhaps 2m out of 6m Tigrayans are thought to have fled their homes. Many could now starve because the government has let so little food into the region (see article).

Aid agencies guess that between 2m and 4.5m people need urgent assistance. They cannot be more precise because the phone networks are down and the government has barred reporters from entering Tigray. The few who make it in return with horrifying accounts of ethnic killings, mass rapes—and starvation.

Plenty of food is available. Charities and un agencies have been trying to get supplies through for months. But Ethiopia’s Orwellian Ministry of Peace has sent them on a paperchase for permits. “For more than two months there has been essentially no access to Tigray,” says Mark Lowcock, the un’s humanitarian chief. “There are 450 tonnes of supplies we’ve been trying to get in that are stuck.” On those occasions when the federal government grants permission for an aid lorry to pass, it is typically stopped en route by regional governments, which insist that they, too, need to give permission, or halted by troops inside Tigray. Meanwhile there are credible reports of government forces or their allies killing livestock and burning crops. If true, both the perpetrators and those who gave the orders are guilty of war crimes.

Abiy insists that his troops are respecting humanitarian law. The conflict is not a civil war, but a mere police action, he claims. His government claims that restrictions on aid workers are for their own safety. Few believe him. Moreover, many observers fear that the fighting has grown too complex for the government to control. Troops from neighbouring Eritrea have joined the fray, as have militias from a rival ethnic group, the Amharas.

Outsiders should press all parties to let civilians eat. Josep Borrell, the eu’s foreign-policy chief, has suspended €88m ($107m) of budget support until aid agencies are given access to Tigray. This is a good first step. Others, such as America and Britain, should add financial pressure. Ethiopia is desperately short of foreign currency, and depends on loans and grants from the imf and World Bank. Until its government allows food into Tigray, donors should not give it another dollar.

Western concern mounts over Ethiopian crisis

January 21, 2021/0 Comments/in English, External, Politics/by Solomon

©FT | UK, US and EU push for humanitarian relief to get to the war-ravaged Tigray region

Ethiopia’s reputation is “being tarnished” by the military conflict, UK foreign secretary Dominic Raab has said, ahead of his visit to the east African country on Friday to urge Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to allow unrestricted humanitarian access to the Tigray region.

Mr Raab has joined a chorus of senior western diplomats, including US secretary of state nominee Antony Blinken and the EU minister for foreign affairs Josep Borrell, who have all expressed concern about the humanitarian situation in the war-ravaged northern region.

“Until this conflagration, [Ethiopia] has had a, if you like, a reputation as a beacon, and of course it’s being tarnished. There’s no doubt, there’s no escaping it. I want to talk to Prime Minister Abiy. But above all, what we want to focus on right now is getting humanitarian relief,” Mr Raab told the Financial Times during the first leg of a tour that will take him to Sudan and Ethiopia, where aid agencies have expressed concerns about limited access to impoverished Tigray.

Addis Ababa launched a military campaign on November 4 against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the movement that governed Ethiopia for almost three decades until Mr Abiy took office in 2018, seeking to push through liberal economic reforms. Saying the offensive was a response to TPLF attacks on federal forces in the Tigrayan capital Mekelle, Mr Abiy — who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 — launched “a law enforcement” operation that included air strikes and ground troops.

While the government has declared the war over, the conflict in Tigray has exposed ethnic faultlines, with ethnic-motivated attacks still being reported in parts of Ethiopia, and tens of thousands of refugees heading across the border into Sudan. Western donors say the delivery of humanitarian aid has been hindered by ongoing bouts of violence.

In a US Senate hearing this week Mr Blinken said that “we have seen a number of deeply, deeply concerning atrocities directed at both people in Tigray, directed at Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia, I think we need to see much greater access to the region, accountability . . . we need to see restoration of communications, we need to see access for humanitarian assistance in the region”.

“The situation on the ground goes well beyond a purely internal ‘law and order’ operation,” Mr Borrell said last week, freezing €88m in budget support for Ethiopia, until aid agencies were granted better access to the region.

“We receive consistent reports of ethnic-targeted violence, killings, massive looting, rapes, forceful returns of refugees and possible war crimes,” he said. “More than two million people have been internally displaced. And while people are in dire need of aid, access to the affected region remains limited, which makes it very difficult to deliver humanitarian assistance.”

There have been recent reports of “additional military incursions”, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, said last week. These were “consistent with open source satellite imagery showing new fires burning and other fresh signs of destruction” at two camps hosting nearly 100,000 Eritrean refugees in Tigray, who have fled Eritrea over the years, he said.

Some Eritrean refugees were being forced to return to the repressive state, he added, amid growing reports of involvement of Eritrean forces, a longstanding enemy of the TPLF, in the Tigray conflict. “Clear evidence exists,” said a senior US diplomat, “of Eritrean direct involvement.”

Ethiopia’s government said this week that it had been working with humanitarian agencies to deliver aid to 1.8m people.

Ethnic conflict could unravel Ethiopia’s valuable garment industry

January 21, 2021/0 Comments/in Economy, English, External, Politics/by Solomon

Source: The Conversation | Dorothee Baumann-Pauly

Ethiopia has long been considered one of Africa’s economic wunderkinds. Until recently, it had relative political stability in comparison to other countries on the continent. And, with an average GDP growth rate of 10% in the past decade and a government that instituted policies friendly to foreign investors, the country was able to attract South and East Asian clothing manufacturers. These sell to international brands, such as Decathlon and H&M.

But, for the past two months, violent conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region fuelled by ethnic power politics has threatened the country’s stability. According to the International Crisis Group, the violence has likely killed thousands of people, including many civilians, displaced more than a million people internally, and led some 50,000 to flee to Sudan.

The scale of the conflict could scare off foreign investment in the country’s garment industry. This sector is hugely important to Ethiopia, which aimed to propel its agricultural economy toward a more prosperous future built on providing clothing to consumers in the West.

While the Ethiopian textile and garment industry is still small – its export share is not more than 10% of total exports, and its products only represent 0.6% of total GDP – the sector was expected to grow by around 40% a year in the next few years.

In March 2019, I assessed Ethiopia’s garment industry alongside two colleagues from the New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. We wanted to see whether Ethiopia – as the new frontier of garment manufacturing – had learnt from mistakes in other sourcing countries. We analysed the industry’s prospects and the working conditions with a close look at the flagship Hawassa Industrial Park. This is a vast and still only partly filled facility, which currently employs 25,000 workers about 225km south of the capital of Addis Ababa.

What we found was sobering.

Manufacturers told us about the many challenges of doing business in Ethiopia. These included bureaucratic and logistical hurdles and the problems that come with an unskilled workforce that had no prior experience of working in an industrial setting.

Workers reported that they could barely survive with their base monthly wage as low as US$26. The government’s eagerness to attract foreign investment led it to promote the lowest base wage in any garment-producing country.

In addition to this already-strained business context, the report we published points to what we saw as the greatest challenge of all: ethnic tensions.

In Hawassa, ethnic tension erupted in July 2019 and caused disruptions to the industrial park. The new conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region could be the tipping point for foreign investors in the garment industry. Manufacturers had told us that further political instability in the country could jeopardise all future business.

The collapse of this sector would be disastrous. Tens of thousands of people would lose their jobs and the investments made in this enterprise wasted. In addition, foreign investors and the Ethiopian government need to understand that its collapse could have a symbolic knock-on effect in the region – Ethiopia’s garment sector is often seen as a pioneering experiment proving that structural transformation in Africa is possible.

Unmet promises

Garment manufacturers were already struggling to do business. We found that workers, unhappy with their working conditions and pay, were increasingly willing to protest by stopping work or even quitting. Attrition was high, and production was low.

There are also problems with raw materials, almost all of which need to be imported into Ethiopia from India or China. The government advertised the availability of more than 3 million hectares for cash crops, including cotton cultivation in 2010. In fact, only about 60,000 hectares were being used by 2019 to grow cotton, and that figure is falling as local farmers switch to sugar, sesame, and other more lucrative cash crops.

Ethnic tensions disrupted factory operations further. When Abiy Ahmed took over as Prime Minister in 2018, his reforms – which aimed to create a more ethnically inclusive government – unsettled the ruling coalition and opened a political space for ethnic tensions to resurface. For instance, in Hawassa, a group of the Sidama people – who are the majority ethnic group in the Hawassa state – pushed for independence in 2019.

The political uncertainty due to ethnic tensions translates into economic uncertainty for investors.

In Hawassa, security concerns emerged for local workers and foreign staff. Night shifts had to be cancelled so that workers could get home safely before nightfall. Political demonstrations at the park’s fence and within the park disrupted production. Sidama people also mobilised within factories and demanded more jobs for their people resulting in short strikes and occasional park-wide closings.

Such disruptions are a wild card beyond the control of investors, which may set back further investments.

By a thread

When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in early 2020, the sector was hanging by a thread. In June 2020, the International Labour Organisation published a report, which described reduced orders and a situation for workers even more perilous than before.

By the end of 2020, many of the over 60,000 garment workers in Ethiopia had lost their jobs or were too afraid to return to work, fearing they would catch the coronavirus.

The current ethnic conflict could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. For instance, the industrial park in Mekelle built for 20,000 workers – and with an occupancy in 2020 of around 3,500 workers – is currently closed. The current internet and phone blackout in the Tigray region now also makes any communication between buyers and the factories impossible.

A worsening human rights situation creates reputational and operational risks for investors and buyers. It increases uncertainty over the ability to complete orders and ship them on time. It also increases security risks for staff and workers. This may all cause long-lasting damage to investor confidence and the opportunity for sustainable economic development.

What must change

To assure investors, buyers, and international stakeholders, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed needs to end the blackout in the Tigray region, better protect journalists and civilians, and allow for independent human rights monitors to assess conditions.

At this critical moment, clothing companies and manufacturers invested in Ethiopia need to double down on their commitments to business in Ethiopia. This means they need to stay in the country and speak up to support human rights.

Once ethnic tensions are defused, more work will still need to be done by both the government and foreign manufacturers to strengthen the sector. This includes developing a domestic supply chain and establishing a minimum wage that ensures decent living conditions for workers.

But first, the future of the industry must be secured.

Ethiopians Flex Military Muscle During Orthodox Epiphany Holiday

January 20, 2021/0 Comments/in English, External, Politics/by Solomon

Outside a centuries-old stone church in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar, a drama troupe performed skits hailing the military defeat of the former leaders of the country’s Tigray region.

As rifle-toting actors danced around chanting actresses, an audience cheered when the troupe denounced the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) as a band of “traitors”.

The performance was part of festivities marking the Orthodox Christian holiday of Epiphany, known as Timkat in Ethiopia, which commemorates Jesus’s baptism in the River Jordan.

In a typical year, Timkat in Gondar is a sunny, lighthearted affair, capped by a ceremony at 17th-century stone baths — built during the time of Emperor Fasilides — in which thousands of worshippers and tourists dive into holy water.

The event is a main driver of tourism in Gondar, the former seat of Ethiopia’s royal empire, and in 2019 it earned a spot on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

This year, however, is hardly typical for Ethiopia: The country is grappling with the conflict in Tigray as well as persistent ethnic violence in other regions and, most recently, simmering tensions along the border with Sudan.

The crises have inspired some officials and ordinary Ethiopians to turn the event into a celebration of military might, using public statements and performances to project strength and issue warnings to would-be enemies.

Even the official slogan of this year’s celebration — “Ethiopia’s Rebirth at Gondar’s Timkat” — is a reference to the Tigray conflict, which officials term a “law-enforcement operation”.

“It is talking about Ethiopia’s renaissance, especially because of what the government is achieving with the law-enforcement operation,” Gondar’s mayor, Molla Melkamu, said of the slogan.

“It means that for Ethiopians, this is a new beginning.”

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, announced the military operations in Tigray in early November, saying they were in response to TPLF-orchestrated attacks on federal army camps.

By the end of the month, federal forces had entered the Tigray capital Mekele and Abiy was declaring victory, though TPLF leaders remain on the run and fighting has continued.

In Gondar, located in the Amhara region south of Tigray, the conflict has spotlighted long-running animosity towards the TPLF, which dominated Ethiopian politics for nearly three decades before Abiy took office in 2018.

After the fighting broke out, Gondar resident Tesfahun Mande grabbed a rifle and rushed to the front, determined to help reclaim land that many Amharas, members of Ethiopia’s second-largest ethnic group, accuse the TPLF of seizing when they came to power in the early 1990s.

“When we went there, we were very joyful,” Tesfahun told AFP, describing his time in battle.

“Even the dead died smiling.”

Tesfahun held onto his rifle during Timkat this week, strolling through the streets of Gondar yelling chants in praise of Amhara fighters who took on the TPLF.

A nighttime poetry reading organised in Gondar in the lead-up to Timkat struck a triumphant note, with one man drawing applause for the following lines:

“Oh, the time has come/ The people who are being pushed are now standing/ The people who were doing the pushing are now down.”

The Tigray offensive was not the only conflict invoked by worshippers during this year’s Timkat.

At a five-kilometre fun-run earlier this week, several participants carried signs imploring officials to “pay attention to Metekel”, an area of western Ethiopia where hundreds — including many Amharas — have died in recent grisly attacks on civilians.

Abiy’s government has failed to stem the violence or explain who is behind it.

But Amhara politicians see it as an attempt to drive ethnic Amharas out of Metekel and are calling for federal military intervention.

Tegenu Guadie, a 26-year-old student from Metekel, spotlighted that appeal during Gondar’s main Timkat procession Monday, which saw priests escort cloaked tabots — replicas of the Ark of the Covenant — amid a riot of song, dance and prayer.

“The Metekel issue is very worrying. People are chased out of their homes and are being killed,” Tegenu said, arguing that the situation called for “military” force.

As crowds gathered Tuesday morning at Fasiledes’ Bath, priests tried to keep the focus squarely on religion, singing hymns, burning incense and reading Bible verses describing Jesus’s baptism.

Emerging in his underwear from his short swim in the holy water, 24-year-old Gondar resident Getenet Mekuant said that was as it should be, stressing he was there “for religion, not politics”.

Yet politics and conflict were never far from officials’ minds.

“As we celebrate this year’s Timkat, we think about those who gave their lives in the law enforcement operation,” Amhara regional president Agegnehu Teshager said in remarks delivered from the water’s edge.

“We also think,” he added, “about those who were killed or chased from their homes because of their ethnic identity.”

Kapuściński and the Autocrats

January 19, 2021/0 Comments/in Books, English, External, Politics/by Solomon

Source: Book and Film Globe | Neal Pollack

The late Polish journalist, like no other writer, understood societies in crisis

Everyone’s busy checking Orwell out of the library and pretending to read 1984 right now, because apparently we live in an “Orwellian” reality. But if you really want to understand, or at least try to understand, what’s going on in America, I recommend reading Ryszard Kapuściński instead. Kapuściński was a Polish journalist who had more courage on an average Tuesday than you or I have had in our entire lives. He spent decades reporting from the most dangerous war zones on Earth. He would find what’s going on in the States tragic and comic in equal measure. Kapuściński saw what really happens when societies descend into revolt.

[…] Kapuściński had many specialities as a writer, but his best literary trick was explaining autocrats, how they work, and how societies function under them. In particular, his masterpieces, Shah of Shahs, about the end of the Iranian monarchy and the rise of the caliphate, and The Emperor, about the terrifying reign of Ethopia’s monarch Halie Selassie, can help shed some understanding on what’s going on today.

[…]

The Emperor

Ethiopia doesn’t exist in the American consciousness at all, except for guilt-making commercial pleas for aid during period famines, and as the source of culinary delicacies like injera bread and zilzil tibs for urban sophisticates. In the middle of the 20th century, though, it was a larger player on the world stage, first because Mussolini’s Italy invaded it, in a precursor to World War II. Then it’s “Emperor”, Halie Selassie, became a favored pet among the Western elite, even receiving Time’s “Man of the Year” award for resisting Mussolini even though he was hiding in the English town of Bath at the time.

In reality, as Kapuściński writes in his brilliant book The Emperor, Selassie was merely a savvy bureaucrat who wheedled his way to the throne, whispering society to bend to his whims and stealing countless billions to deposit into Swiss bank accounts. Whereas Shah of Shahs is a more on-the-ground “you are there” style of book, The Emperor comes in after Selassie death in 1975, when it’s relatively safe to talk about him and his misdeeds. Kapuściński, who covered Ethiopia during Selassie’s reign as well, seeks out the surviving members of Selassie’s court, as well as some of his former servants, to provide an account of life in the insanely privileged court of a country suffering from inconceivable poverty and starvation.

The pattern is somewhat similar to Iran’s: an elaborate system of favors and rewards, hoodwinking naive Westerners into donating capital and cash, and absolute incompetence at every level of society. Monstrous violence follows. Eventually, and pathetically, Selassie falls in a military coup. The palace empties. The Emperor has no clothes.

Aftermath

Kapuściński is equally harsh on these societies after the autocrats fall. What replaces the strongman is often just as murderous as before, if not more so. The mullah-ruled Iran is a mess of repression, spying, superstition, renunciations, and meaningless, bloody street demonstrations. In post-Selassie Ethiopia, he writes of the bizarre phenomenon of “fetasha“, which authorizes every citizen to search every other citizen at all times, without explanation:

“To get things under control, to disarm the opposition, the authorities order a complete fetasha [Amharic for search], covering everyone. We are searched incessantly. On the street, in the car, in front of the house, in the house, in the street, in front of the post office, in front of an office building, going into the editor’s office, the movie theatre, the church, in front of the bank, in front of the restaurant, in the market place, in the park. Anyone can search us because we don’t know who has the right and who hasn’t, and asking only makes thing worse. It’s better to give in. Somebody’s always searching us. Guys in rags with sticks, who don’t say anything, but only stop us and hold out their arms, which is the signal for us to do the same: get ready to be searched. They take everything out of our briefcases and pockets, look at it, act surprised, screw up their faces, nod their heads, whisper advice to each other. They frisk us: back, stomach, legs, shoes. And then what? Nothing, we can go on, until the next spreading of arms, until the next fetasha. The next one might be only a few steps on, and the whole thing starts all over again. The searchers never give you an acquittal, a general clearance, absolution. Every few minutes, every few steps, we have to clear ourselves again.”

[…]

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‘Extreme urgent need’: Starvation haunts Ethiopia’s Tigray

January 18, 2021/0 Comments/in English, External, News, Politics/by Solomon

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — From “emaciated” refugees to crops burned on the brink of harvest, starvation threatens the survivors of more than two months of fighting in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.

The first humanitarian workers to arrive after pleading with the Ethiopian government for access describe weakened children dying from diarrhea after drinking from rivers. Shops were looted or depleted weeks ago. A local official told a Jan. 1 crisis meeting of government and aid workers that hungry people had asked for “a single biscuit.”

More than 4.5 million people, nearly the region’s entire population, need emergency food, participants say. At their next meeting on Jan. 8, a Tigray administrator warned that without aid, “hundreds of thousands might starve to death” and some already had, according to minutes obtained by The Associated Press.

“There is an extreme urgent need — I don’t know what more words in English to use — to rapidly scale up the humanitarian response because the population is dying every day as we speak,” Mari Carmen Vinoles, head of the emergency unit for Doctors Without Borders, told the AP.

But pockets of fighting, resistance from some officials and sheer destruction stand in the way of a massive food delivery effort. To send 15-kilogram (33-pound) rations to 4.5 million people would require more than 2,000 trucks, the meeting’s minutes said, while some local responders are reduced to getting around on foot.

The specter of hunger is sensitive in Ethiopia, which transformed into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies in the decades since images of starvation there in the 1980s led to a global outcry. Drought, conflict and government denial contributed to the famine, which swept through Tigray and killed an estimated 1 million people.

The largely agricultural Tigray region of about 5 million people already had a food security problem amid a locust outbreak when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Nov. 4 announced fighting between his forces and those of the defiant regional government. Tigray leaders dominated Ethiopia for almost three decades but were sidelined after Abiy introduced reforms that won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.

Thousands of people have been killed in the conflict. More than 50,000 have fled into Sudan, where one doctor has said newer arrivals show signs of starvation. Others shelter in rugged terrain. A woman who recently left Tigray described sleeping in caves with people who brought cattle, goats and the grain they had managed to harvest.

“It is a daily reality to hear people dying with the fighting consequences, lack of food,” a letter by the Catholic bishop of Adigrat said this month.

Hospitals and other health centers, crucial in treating malnutrition, have been destroyed. In markets, food is “not available or extremely limited,” the United Nations says.

Though Ethiopia’s prime minister declared victory in late November, its military and allied fighters remain active amid the presence of troops from neighboring Eritrea, a bitter enemy of the now-fugitive officials who once led the region.

Fear keeps many people from venturing out. Others flee. Tigray’s new officials say more than 2 million people have been displaced, a number the U.S. government’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance calls “staggering.” The U.N. says the number of people reached with aid is “extremely low.”

A senior Ethiopian government official, Redwan Hussein, did not respond to a request for comment on Tigray colleagues warning of starvation.

In the northern Shire area near Eritrea, which has seen some of the worst fighting, up to 10% of the children whose arms were measured met the diagnostic criteria for severe acute malnutrition, with scores of children affected, a U.N. source said. Sharing the concern of many humanitarian workers about jeopardizing access, the source spoke on condition of anonymity.

Near Shire town are camps housing nearly 100,000 refugees who have fled over the years from Eritrea. Some who have walked into town “are emaciated, begging for aid that is not available,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said Thursday.

Food has been a target. Analyzing satellite imagery of the Shire area, a U.K.-based research group found two warehouse-style structures in the U.N. World Food Program compound at one refugee camp had been “very specifically destroyed.” The DX Open Network could not tell by whom. It reported a new attack Saturday.

It’s challenging to verify events in Tigray as communications links remain poor and almost no journalists are allowed.

In the towns of Adigrat, Adwa and Axum, “the level of civilian casualties is extremely high in the places we have been able to access,” the Doctors Without Borders emergency official Vinoles said. She cited the fighting and lack of health care.