Oct 197 min read

“ENDING FOREVER WARS” OR US DIPLOMATIC HEGEMONY?

T he West’s Reaction to the Crisis in Tigray Shows a Deep Routed Trend in Wes- tern Attitudes Towards Dealing With Conflict in the Global South.

On the 28th February of this year, Amnesty International released a grave report detailing mass killings carried out in the ancient city of Axum in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. The report confirms suspicions many harboured as to both the nature and the extent of the ethnic violence which is ongoing in Ethiopia’s northern region along the border with neighbouring Eritrea. The death toll of the conflict and

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the massacre itself are as yet unknown, however, what the report illuminates is the interviews with the survivors of Axum, evidence of extrajudicial killings, rape, looting nature of the human rights abuses which are being carried out in the conflict. Through

and mass killings are detailed along with harrowing eye-witness accounts of the

systemic and brutal nature of the violence in East Africa, alongside video evidence of

gunfire directed at Tigrayan civilians. Tigrayans described events on the 28th

November when “forces deliberately and wantonly shot at civilians from about 4pm

onwards”.

The report puts an end to the ongoing rumours speculation as to the true character of

the conflict in Tigray as the total media and cellular blackout placed on the region by

the government made receiving witness accounts or detailed information about the

conflict impossible. Neither journalists nor aid workers are yet allowed into Tigray

making support for the Tigrayans either in terms of distributing information or

humanitarian aid unachievable. However, the details of the witness accounts

overwhelmingly suggest that the large part of the Axum atrocities were carried out by

the Eritrean military and as well as Ethiopian government forces, adding another

dimension to an already complicated civil war.

To trace the events which led to the massacre in Axum and the ongoing violence

against the Tigrayan people, one must to go back to April 2018 and the accession of

Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s serving President who has ruled the country since the outbreak

of the conflict. Abiy’s election marked the end of 27 years of rule by the Tigrayan

People’s Liberation Front which had ruled Ethiopia since its overthrowing of the

authoritarian People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia in 1991. Since 1991 the TPLF

had essentially ruled Ethiopia as a one-party state which saw ethnocentric

appointments favour Tigrayans in terms of political power. Although studies have

shown that ethnic Tigrayans (who comprise 7.4% of the population) outside of

government on the whole did not benefit from the system, the TPLF’s

ethnonationalism sparked resentment and opposition from Ethiopia’s two largest eth-

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nic groups, the Oromo and Amhara peoples (35% and 28% of Ethiopia’s population respectively). Abiy was quick to gain recognition on the international stage, bringing Ethiopia’s twenty-year war with Eritrea to an end after less than four months in office. After his becoming the first Ethiopian to win a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 coupled with his progressive domestic reform, including the release of thousands of previously held political prisoners, many were optimistic at Abiy’s capacity to take Ethiopia on a new course.

Recent developments in the Abiy administration have brought this into question, particularly in regard to Ethiopia’s new relationship with its former enemy Eritrea. s.

On the 4th November 2020, Abiy’s government signalled the initiation of civil war by declaring war on the state of Tigray, but essentially declaring a war against the armed wing of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. To further complicate matters, the Eritrean military appear to be playing an increasingly large and increasingly violent role in what is being described as the ethnic cleansing of the Tigray region.

Many accounts featured in Amnesty International’s reports described soldiers in Eritrean uniforms driving vehicles with Eritrean number plates.

The issue of Eritrea’s involvement signals a more systemic issue in the Horn of Africa in its increasingly influential role in destabilising the region. The country’s President,

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Isaias Afwerki, was described in an article by Foreign Policy as a king maker in Eastern Africa “constructing a three-cornered axis of autocracy in the Horn of Africa with him as its leader and Abiy and Farmajo [Somalia’s President] as junior partners”. Isaias’ Eritrea is certainly a threat to stability in the region. Its army comprises a staggering 17.5% of Eritrea’s population of 3.5 million and numerous reports outside of Axum have described Eritrean troops orchestrating the violence in Tigray. Isaias already harbours resentment for the TPLF due to his loss of the 1998 Eritrean-Ethiopian war which he lost to the party. Eritrean troops are also reported to be supporting Ethiopian troops in al-Fashqa, a disputed border region between Ethiopia and Sudan, while worries about Isaias’ authoritarian influence on neighbouring Somalia point to a significant threat to peace in East Africa.

All of the factors which have combined to create the civil war in Tigray make the Western media and political response to the crisis at best unhelpful and at worst deeply problematic. The headlines of the majority of media outlets are overwhelmingly US-

centric, calling for the Biden administration to act via bilateral diplomatic or economic pressure on Ethiopia. This media approach can be seen more broadly across western publications on Africa and the Middle East, with the focus heavily on “Biden’s Policy” and “What Will Biden’s Approach to the Middle East Be?”. Articles in western publications have largely concerned what Biden’s policy will be regarding Ethiopia and suggest an approach either spearheaded by the USA when there are far more appropriate vehicles for instigating long-term peace and stability to Eastern Africa. The same can be seen in the American diplomatic response to the crisis. Joe Biden’s first action in response to the conflict following Amnesty International’s report was to host a one-on-one video call with President Abiy urging him to remove Eritrean troops from the Tigray and to allow humanitarian aid into the region. While the sentiments are correct, the approach is not.

This bilateral strategy was supported in a problematic article by Foreign Affairs, urging that the Biden administration should aim to increase its diplomatic presence in Africa with regional Ambassadors whose “authority could transcend national borders” and “eliminate cumbersome bureaucratic hurdles”, ending with the worrying statement that “like it or not, a twenty-first century scramble for Africa is underway. The United States might prefer to avoid becoming embroiled in African proxy wars during this new era of great-power competition, but it must be prepared for such conflicts nonetheless.”

This final statement alludes to President Trump’s insistence on disengaging America from what he termed “Forever Wars”, a policy which the Biden administration has thus far appeared keen to pursue. However, bilateral one-time diplomatic intervention is not the correct way to achieve this. Biden is expected to send Senator Chris Coons to Ethiopia on Thursday to negotiate directly with Abiy Ahmed, at a stage in the Biden administration when the President is yet to fully staff his State Department and has not appointed a team or taskforce in Africa. This points to the inadequacy of the western-saviourism being executed in Ethiopia and many parts of the global South.

In order to foster long-term stability in regions such as East Africa, the West must aim to conduct its diplomatic efforts through regional diplomatic frameworks in order to avoid short-term Western peace arrangements. In the case of Ethiopia, this namely includes the African Union (AU) and the East African Community (EAC). The African Union comprises all 55 states in Africa and acts as a body to foster peace, security and co-operation on the continent, yet is continually overlooked when it comes to the West’s response to crises in the region. The AU’s ‘Silencing the Guns’ campaign is aimed at exactly this sort of conflict in its aim to end conflict and genocide on the African continent. Although the AU is a relatively young organisation (at 19 years old), it will only strengthen through international support for it and its use in instances where international peacekeeping is required. The US government’s approach has thus far been too black and white, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken expressed the onus to be purely on the Ethiopian government to resolve the crisis while Biden and Coons negotiate directly. The compromise, and best long-term solution, would be to give diplomatic support to the African Union so it can effectively put pressure on Ethiopia and Eritrea through its own frameworks. This solution would also leave in place an institution which would be capable of resolving future crises and in relation to East Africa would be more capable of handling the growing concerns over Eritrea’s destabilisation of the region. The East African Community (comprising Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda) would also be a useful vehicle due to its economic influence as well as its aim to foster increased political integration between East African countries. Although these institutions are young and untested, if they continue to be surpassed by the United States, long term solutions to many of the complex geopolitical and ethnic problems in Africa will not be solved and frameworks will not be in place to manage conflicts such as that in the Tigray in the future.

The African Union has thus far made moves towards trying to weigh into the Tigrayan conflict with the AU pledging at the 2020 summit of the IGAD [Intergovernmental Authority on Development] to aim to end the conflict in Tigray. Naturally the Union faces many of the obstacles which international diplomatic organisations face such as

countries within it opposed to intervention, as well as Ethiopia’s ongoing refusal to accept outside assistance or intervention. However, Ethiopia thus far will neither accept help from the United Nations or the USA, and an African Union effort to end the conflict combined with the weight of US diplomatic support would appear to be the best way forward in terms of both making diplomatic advances with Ethiopia and instituting a framework which could lead to future peace in East Africa.

Ultimately, in terms of the western media’s coverage of such events, a less western- centric approach to reporting on global Southern affairs would help to foster an international attitude which looks less to America and the West to intervene and instead allows internal regional diplomacy to take care of conflicts and crises. However, the mantle now falls to the Biden administration to de-Americanise their diplomatic response to events in the global South, in particular in the Middle East and Africa, by working through regional diplomatic frameworks such as the African Union and the Arab Union, as well as more local organisations such as the East African Community. If Joe Biden is to be believed in his will to end America’s “forever wars” then supporting regional diplomatic organisations must be a foreign policy consideration above bilateral negotiating. In carrying out diplomacy the way the USA has in Ethiopia, it continues to act as a powerbroker and does not look set to withdraw from its commanding role in global Southern politics.

FIN.