Ethiopia at the receiving end of Biden’s ‘woke’ foreign policy:

Pacifist virtue-signaling at the expense of American values and interests. This sums up the Biden administration’s backstabbing of a hard-won democracy in Ethiopia, executed by a veritable pantheon of villains to conservatives, from Obama era officials to CNN, Facebook and many more. If Ethiopia has become a foe to Democrats, should she be a friend to Republicans? Here is the case for a big and urgent yes.

Ethiopian democracy might have been securer, if the American-Ethiopian Public Affairs Committee, AEPAC, had been as influential as its near-namesake AIPAC. So far, it has extracted a promise from governor-elect Glenn Youngkin to boost trade ties with Ethiopia, after 120 volunteers, drawn from a total of 100,000 Ethiopian-Americans in Virginia, canvassed for the Republican, celebrating his narrow victory. The other candidate, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, was doomed when he declined to criticize the White House’s Ethiopia policy.

“School choice was raised on the campaign trail, but now when there’s finally democracy where we came from, the wish for friendly relations between our two countries, (USA and Ethiopia) decides our vote,” explains chairman Mesfin Tegenu. “Historically, this has been overwhelmingly for the Democrats, but we’re crossing party lines in droves.”

They are appalled by the Biden administration reviling and sanctioning Ethiopia, even with a dangerous enemy marching on its capital. But would Republicans do better?

“Well, Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, who knows Ethiopia well, has championed our cause. And (Trump’s Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo, called it ‘terrorism’ when we were first attacked. Under Biden, we’re just being ordered to make concessions to the terrorists.”

The AEPAC chairman is referring to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, TPLF, made up chiefly of ethnic Tigrayans. It was founded in 1975 to make a Marxist-Leninist revolution, but its leaders are no longer plucky rebels from the bush. Rather, they are the stuffy old guard who filled the upper echelons of ministries, public as well as private corporations, and especially the military during an authoritarian regime lasting from 1991 to 2018. Many of its members have also been appointed to jobs in international organizations, most prominently the TPLF stalwart Tedros Adhanom, Director General of the Word Health Organization, WHO.

Popular protests pushed the TPLF from power on the national stage in March 2018, when the new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed began to liberalize both the economy and the politics. The TPLF retreated to its stronghold, the northern region of Tigray, protecting former cruel and corrupt officials from federal court orders, and enforcing its own interpretation of the constitution. Despite the tension, negotiations continued until November 3, 2020. That night a highly coordinated sneak offensive was launched on five federal army bases in Tigray. The TPLF has since justified it as a “pre-emptive strike” needed to take hold of armouries. Reports of thousands of soldiers being gunned down by their own comrades-in-arms, some of them in their sleep, shocked the Ethiopian public, as did, five days later, the massacre of at least 1200 non-Tigrayans in the small town of Mai Kadra. This tipped the country into war, engulfing three of its eleven regions, killing thousands and displacing millions.

Pacifist USA

At a recent press briefing in Ethiopia, Biden’s Special Envoy, career diplomat Jeffrey Feltman, accepted that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is democratically elected and has a constitutional mandate. He also acknowledged that the TPLF “would be met with unrelenting hostility if it entered Addis (Ababa, the capital) today”. In his own chilling words, this would be “a bloodbath situation”. And yet, he insisted repeatedly that the US “is not taking sides”. This might sound like disavowing US support for democracy in its faceoff with those who would commit a bloodbath against it, but the point was to rebut the widespread perception, the “false rumors”, that the US has indeed sided with one warring party. With the TPLF!

Frustrated and misunderstood though Feltman feels, this is what Ethiopians take away from the months he has been bombarding their government with pacifist rhetoric, urging it not to defend itself and to ground its air force, even when the rebels were advancing, while demanding an unfettered supply line into enemy territory on pain of more punitive US sanctions on an already sputtering war economy. Feltman would do well to take this advice from fellow American David Steinman: Repair US credibility by apologizing to the Ethiopian people for complicity with the TPLF. Then, after regaining trust, the US will have a friendly Ethiopian ear, including for airing human rights concerns.

Feltman wants to save Ethiopia’s unity, he says. The threat of a Yugoslavia-style breakup has long loomed large, as ethnic cleansing by violent fringe groups, and not just in Tigray, has, from the outset, been the main challenge to Abiy Ahmed’s vision of coexistence without authoritarianism. However, preventing the dreaded ‘Ethioslavia’ calls for strengthening, not undermining the central government.

Instead, Feltman and the rich world’s aid-industrial complex echo the tired mantra: “There’s no military solution, only a negotiated one”. But what if the opposite is true? How can the international community know this better than the Ethiopians who did try to negotiate for years? The tried and tested recipe for peace and stability is rule of law and state monopoly on violence. Mindless pacifist mantras are to be expected of large international organizations, but when trotted out by Biden’s envoy, it sounds more like reckless abdication of superpower responsibilities. As conservatives well know, blanket pacifism on one’s own behalf is suicide, while pacifism on behalf of others is suggesting that they commit suicide. Unsurprisingly, China, Russia, Turkey and even Iran have jumped on the opportunity, and who can blame the Ethiopians for taking the help on offer?

The role of Obama era officials  – TO READ COMPLETE POST