Re: Africa
Posted: Fri Jun 25, 2021 1:48 pm
Ethiopians Go to the Polls Even After the US Tells Them Not to
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 23 Jun 2021
Ethiopians Go to the Polls Even After the US Tells Them Not to
Many Ethiopians expressed enthusiasm for what they consider the country’s first real, competitive election, writes Ann Garrison.
“Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia are now alarming US political and military elites by forming an alliance and threatening to chart an independent path in the Horn of Africa.”
On Monday, June 21st, Ethiopians went to the polls to select a parliament, which will elect a prime minister, even though US officials told them not to, warning of chaos and violence. Maybe they think it’s arrogant of the United States to presume to be the global arbiter of peace, justice, and democracy.
The African Union sent an election observer mission headed by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who told press midday on Monday that it was going well, far better than previous Ethiopian elections.
Lawyer, judge, and politician Birtukan Mideksa, chairperson of the National Election Board, no doubt agrees. In 2005, she helped found the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) Party, ran for parliament a second time, claimed the election was rigged, and was then among thousands imprisoned by the US puppet government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in the ensuing crackdown. She was sentenced to life in prison, pardoned in 2007, after signing a controversial document regretting past mistakes, but sent back to prison for life in 2008. International human rights advocacy, including that of Amnesty International, led to her release and exile in the United States, where she attended the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and spent time employed by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA cutout that claims to promote democracy around the world while in fact promoting US global hegemony.
“Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo told press midday on Monday that it was going far better than previous Ethiopian elections.”
It’s not clear whether her brief tenure with NED should be a red flag or simply something to keep in mind as her political career advances. The United States foreign policy establishment often likes to invest in any promising African leaders even if they are opposed to a government the US is supporting at the time, as was the case with Mideksa. And the leaders they invest in don’t always toe the line over time. Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, aka Farmaajo, is a case in point. Abiy, Farmaajo, and Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki are now alarming US political and military elites by forming an alliance and threatening to chart an independent path in the Horn of Africa.
In any case, Mideksa seems to be enjoying rock star status in Ethiopia today. The BBC ran a lengthy profile of her including many of the aforementioned details.
Sitting Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party is widely expected to win a majority large enough to make him prime minister and increase both his legitimacy and the party’s. Abiy has served as Ethiopia’s caretaker prime minister since April 2018, when a popular uprising finally forced the Tigray People’s Liberation Front from power after 27 years. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating peace with Eritrea, a former Ethiopian colony
“Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party is widely expected to win a majority large enough to make him prime minister and increase both his legitimacy and the party’s.”
Under the rule of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, commonly known as the TPLF , Ethiopia was a key US ally and military proxy in the Horn of Africa and on the African continent, putting boots on the ground under US command in both Somalia and South Sudan. The US and NATO have been hostile to Prime Minister Abiy, seemingly because of his alliance with Eritrea, the only African nation that refuses to cooperate with AFRICOM , the US Africa Command, or submit to the debt peonage that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have imposed on other African nations.
Last year Prime Minister Abiy postponed elections because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the US’s former ally, the TPLF, held elections in Tigray Regional State nevertheless and then attacked a federal army base in the state capital, Mekelle, ambushing and killing Ethiopian National Defense Forces who had been sleeping. Prime Minister Abiy responded, as any head of state would, by sending in the national army to put down the insurrection, and fighting is ongoing. Eritrea was drawn in after the TPLF fired rockets across its border at the Eritrean military.
Elections were not held on Monday in Tigray because of the civil conflict. They were reportedly not held in Somali State because of logistical problems or in Harrar City because of an unresolved lawsuit over who can vote. It was also reported that some did not vote in Benishangul-Gumuz region because ethnic violence prevented voter registration. However, these regions are all expected to elect parliamentary representatives by September, and many Ethiopians expressed enthusiasm for what they consider the country’s first real, competitive election. Fitsum Alemu, a member of the Ethiopian diaspora living in Virginia, told me that he didn’t expect the election to solve all of Ethiopia’s problems, but that voting was so important to members of his family that they stood in line for several hours in the rain to vote in Addis Ababa.
“Eritrea is the only African nation that refuses to cooperate with AFRICOM .”
Benyam Kitaw, a member of the diaspora living in Los Angeles, said, "All the people I spoke with in Ethiopia stated that they are excited about voting and the prospect of true democracy starting to take hold there for the first time. Democracy may be bumpy and have flaws, but progress towards the common Ethiopian finally having their vote counted means that Ethiopia is closer to self-determination, and this is a very good thing.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and USAID Chief and former UN Ambassador Samantha Power said that the Tigray conflict, and more, made an honest and peaceful election impossible and demanded that Abiy postpone the election.
However, in 2015, when Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn and the TPLF claimed to have won an impossible 100% of the vote, Barack Obama called it democratic. Susan Rice, who was then Obama’s National Security Advisor, addressed reporters prior to their trip to Kenya and Ethiopia and said that the TPLF’s 100% victory suggested some procedural problems, but she didn’t doubt the rightness of the outcome. When a reporter asked whether she considered that an honest election, she responded “100%,” and then laughed, helping to make herself one of the most despised US officials in Ethiopia and on the African continent.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/ethio ... s-them-not
**********************************
Don’t Allow Another U.S.-NATO Libya in the Horn of Africa
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 24, 2021
Ready for Revolution
Protests in Ethiopia against US sanctions
A joint statement from the US Out of Africa Network and Horn of Africa PALS.
Paternalistic U.S. government political posturing toward Africa has a history of turning into fatal consequences for the masses of African peoples. A decade ago, several of the same individuals who now hold positions in the Biden administration were accomplices in the U.S.-led NATO decimation of Libya, which was rationalized under the guise of protecting “pro-democracy” activists from massacre by the so-called dictator Colonel Muammar Gadaffi. Hiding behind a modern-day version of the “White Man’s Burden,” otherwise known as “Responsibility to Protect” or R2P, the United States and its NATO allies killed and maimed thousands of Libyans, with U.S. leaders like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking special satisfaction in the sadistic video recording of Gaddafi’s murder.
Given the catastrophic effects of the U.S.-NATO intervention in Libya, the Black Alliance for Peace’s U.S. Out of Africa Network and BAP member organization Horn of Africa Pan-Africans for Liberation & Solidarity (HOA PALS), condemn, under no uncertain terms, any and all forms of intervention and meddling in the conflict in Ethiopia. As it did against Libya, U.S. imperialism is weaponizing disinformation and misinformation to exploit and distort the complexity, historical context and political realities in the Horn of Africa to create the pretext for more direct intervention.
“Should those responsible for undermining a resolution of the crisis in Tigray fail to reverse course, they should anticipate further actions from the United States and the international community. We call on other governments to join us in taking these actions.”
—U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, May 23, 2021 press statement
The attack on the federal base by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) that started the conflict is now being used as a de-facto instrument of U.S. policy in Ethiopia to justify “humanitarian intervention.” In this way, the primary contradiction in the Tigray region reflects broader dynamics in the Horn of Africa as a whole and can be boiled down to the common denominators of global capitalist hegemony and Western imperialism by way of its proxy actor, the TPLF. Western powers only curtail the right of self-determination for the Horn of Africa and Global South states.
We condemn all military violence, extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, displacement, theft, discrimination, harassment and intimidation perpetrated on innocent Tigrayans, as well as any and all unnecessary violence perpetrated on other Ethiopians and Eritreans in the ongoing conflict as a result of their ethnic, religious, or national identity, refugee status or political affiliation. We unequivocally support and uplift mutual cooperation, solidarity, and peace among all parties and people in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the broader Horn of Africa region.
We support African-led, localized conflict resolution that is not tied to advancing imperialism, neo-colonialism or any other nefarious Western agendas. We believe in the inherent agency and ability of Africans on the continent to reach a resolution to the conflict peacefully and independently of Western aggression, destabilization, and extractive and exploitative economic interests.
The United States and its EU-NATO allies know no compassion or genuine concern for the Black lives in Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa or anywhere else Black people are in the world. Their true concerns are always selfish, racist and reflective of their objective geopolitical interests. In Ethiopia and Eritrea, their interests are:
To control or have undue influence over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a chokepoint critical to securing global energy;
to challenge the robust presence of China; and
to impose AFRICOM in the only country left in Africa that has evaded its control, Eritrea.
Africa is not underdeveloped and fraught with militarized instability because there is not enough involvement by Western Europe and its evil settler-colonial spawn, the USA. Anyone who believes that must also believe Africans are inferior savages. The fact is Africa is underdeveloped and destabilized precisely because of centuries of European colonialism and decades of U.S. and Western European neocolonialism. Any disposition held by Africans that lends legitimacy to intervention, sanctions, or the fake moral or altruistic dominion of Pan-European, white supremacist capitalist interests in Africa are based either on severe ignorance or treacherous opportunism.
U.S. foreign policy in Africa always involves enveloping any part of the continent that poses a threat to its geostrategic interests into its sphere of forever wars. In 2011, Black anti-imperialist forces were unable to effectively counter the plan by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination to destroy the revolutionary Pan-Africanist nation of Libya. This was partially because the action had the political cover of the first Black president, which confused and disarmed left opposition and made them objective collaborators with U.S. reaction.
BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network and Horn of Africa Pan-Africans for Liberation & Solidarity refuse to allow this fatal mistake to be made again.
Hands off Ethiopia and Eritrea!
#ShutDownAFRICOM!
#USOutofAfrica!
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/06/ ... of-africa/
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 23 Jun 2021
Ethiopians Go to the Polls Even After the US Tells Them Not to
Many Ethiopians expressed enthusiasm for what they consider the country’s first real, competitive election, writes Ann Garrison.
“Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia are now alarming US political and military elites by forming an alliance and threatening to chart an independent path in the Horn of Africa.”
On Monday, June 21st, Ethiopians went to the polls to select a parliament, which will elect a prime minister, even though US officials told them not to, warning of chaos and violence. Maybe they think it’s arrogant of the United States to presume to be the global arbiter of peace, justice, and democracy.
The African Union sent an election observer mission headed by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who told press midday on Monday that it was going well, far better than previous Ethiopian elections.
Lawyer, judge, and politician Birtukan Mideksa, chairperson of the National Election Board, no doubt agrees. In 2005, she helped found the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) Party, ran for parliament a second time, claimed the election was rigged, and was then among thousands imprisoned by the US puppet government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in the ensuing crackdown. She was sentenced to life in prison, pardoned in 2007, after signing a controversial document regretting past mistakes, but sent back to prison for life in 2008. International human rights advocacy, including that of Amnesty International, led to her release and exile in the United States, where she attended the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and spent time employed by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA cutout that claims to promote democracy around the world while in fact promoting US global hegemony.
“Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo told press midday on Monday that it was going far better than previous Ethiopian elections.”
It’s not clear whether her brief tenure with NED should be a red flag or simply something to keep in mind as her political career advances. The United States foreign policy establishment often likes to invest in any promising African leaders even if they are opposed to a government the US is supporting at the time, as was the case with Mideksa. And the leaders they invest in don’t always toe the line over time. Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, aka Farmaajo, is a case in point. Abiy, Farmaajo, and Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki are now alarming US political and military elites by forming an alliance and threatening to chart an independent path in the Horn of Africa.
In any case, Mideksa seems to be enjoying rock star status in Ethiopia today. The BBC ran a lengthy profile of her including many of the aforementioned details.
Sitting Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party is widely expected to win a majority large enough to make him prime minister and increase both his legitimacy and the party’s. Abiy has served as Ethiopia’s caretaker prime minister since April 2018, when a popular uprising finally forced the Tigray People’s Liberation Front from power after 27 years. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating peace with Eritrea, a former Ethiopian colony
“Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party is widely expected to win a majority large enough to make him prime minister and increase both his legitimacy and the party’s.”
Under the rule of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, commonly known as the TPLF , Ethiopia was a key US ally and military proxy in the Horn of Africa and on the African continent, putting boots on the ground under US command in both Somalia and South Sudan. The US and NATO have been hostile to Prime Minister Abiy, seemingly because of his alliance with Eritrea, the only African nation that refuses to cooperate with AFRICOM , the US Africa Command, or submit to the debt peonage that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have imposed on other African nations.
Last year Prime Minister Abiy postponed elections because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the US’s former ally, the TPLF, held elections in Tigray Regional State nevertheless and then attacked a federal army base in the state capital, Mekelle, ambushing and killing Ethiopian National Defense Forces who had been sleeping. Prime Minister Abiy responded, as any head of state would, by sending in the national army to put down the insurrection, and fighting is ongoing. Eritrea was drawn in after the TPLF fired rockets across its border at the Eritrean military.
Elections were not held on Monday in Tigray because of the civil conflict. They were reportedly not held in Somali State because of logistical problems or in Harrar City because of an unresolved lawsuit over who can vote. It was also reported that some did not vote in Benishangul-Gumuz region because ethnic violence prevented voter registration. However, these regions are all expected to elect parliamentary representatives by September, and many Ethiopians expressed enthusiasm for what they consider the country’s first real, competitive election. Fitsum Alemu, a member of the Ethiopian diaspora living in Virginia, told me that he didn’t expect the election to solve all of Ethiopia’s problems, but that voting was so important to members of his family that they stood in line for several hours in the rain to vote in Addis Ababa.
“Eritrea is the only African nation that refuses to cooperate with AFRICOM .”
Benyam Kitaw, a member of the diaspora living in Los Angeles, said, "All the people I spoke with in Ethiopia stated that they are excited about voting and the prospect of true democracy starting to take hold there for the first time. Democracy may be bumpy and have flaws, but progress towards the common Ethiopian finally having their vote counted means that Ethiopia is closer to self-determination, and this is a very good thing.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and USAID Chief and former UN Ambassador Samantha Power said that the Tigray conflict, and more, made an honest and peaceful election impossible and demanded that Abiy postpone the election.
However, in 2015, when Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn and the TPLF claimed to have won an impossible 100% of the vote, Barack Obama called it democratic. Susan Rice, who was then Obama’s National Security Advisor, addressed reporters prior to their trip to Kenya and Ethiopia and said that the TPLF’s 100% victory suggested some procedural problems, but she didn’t doubt the rightness of the outcome. When a reporter asked whether she considered that an honest election, she responded “100%,” and then laughed, helping to make herself one of the most despised US officials in Ethiopia and on the African continent.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/ethio ... s-them-not
**********************************
Don’t Allow Another U.S.-NATO Libya in the Horn of Africa
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 24, 2021
Ready for Revolution
Protests in Ethiopia against US sanctions
A joint statement from the US Out of Africa Network and Horn of Africa PALS.
Paternalistic U.S. government political posturing toward Africa has a history of turning into fatal consequences for the masses of African peoples. A decade ago, several of the same individuals who now hold positions in the Biden administration were accomplices in the U.S.-led NATO decimation of Libya, which was rationalized under the guise of protecting “pro-democracy” activists from massacre by the so-called dictator Colonel Muammar Gadaffi. Hiding behind a modern-day version of the “White Man’s Burden,” otherwise known as “Responsibility to Protect” or R2P, the United States and its NATO allies killed and maimed thousands of Libyans, with U.S. leaders like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking special satisfaction in the sadistic video recording of Gaddafi’s murder.
Given the catastrophic effects of the U.S.-NATO intervention in Libya, the Black Alliance for Peace’s U.S. Out of Africa Network and BAP member organization Horn of Africa Pan-Africans for Liberation & Solidarity (HOA PALS), condemn, under no uncertain terms, any and all forms of intervention and meddling in the conflict in Ethiopia. As it did against Libya, U.S. imperialism is weaponizing disinformation and misinformation to exploit and distort the complexity, historical context and political realities in the Horn of Africa to create the pretext for more direct intervention.
“Should those responsible for undermining a resolution of the crisis in Tigray fail to reverse course, they should anticipate further actions from the United States and the international community. We call on other governments to join us in taking these actions.”
—U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, May 23, 2021 press statement
The attack on the federal base by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) that started the conflict is now being used as a de-facto instrument of U.S. policy in Ethiopia to justify “humanitarian intervention.” In this way, the primary contradiction in the Tigray region reflects broader dynamics in the Horn of Africa as a whole and can be boiled down to the common denominators of global capitalist hegemony and Western imperialism by way of its proxy actor, the TPLF. Western powers only curtail the right of self-determination for the Horn of Africa and Global South states.
We condemn all military violence, extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, displacement, theft, discrimination, harassment and intimidation perpetrated on innocent Tigrayans, as well as any and all unnecessary violence perpetrated on other Ethiopians and Eritreans in the ongoing conflict as a result of their ethnic, religious, or national identity, refugee status or political affiliation. We unequivocally support and uplift mutual cooperation, solidarity, and peace among all parties and people in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the broader Horn of Africa region.
We support African-led, localized conflict resolution that is not tied to advancing imperialism, neo-colonialism or any other nefarious Western agendas. We believe in the inherent agency and ability of Africans on the continent to reach a resolution to the conflict peacefully and independently of Western aggression, destabilization, and extractive and exploitative economic interests.
The United States and its EU-NATO allies know no compassion or genuine concern for the Black lives in Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa or anywhere else Black people are in the world. Their true concerns are always selfish, racist and reflective of their objective geopolitical interests. In Ethiopia and Eritrea, their interests are:
To control or have undue influence over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a chokepoint critical to securing global energy;
to challenge the robust presence of China; and
to impose AFRICOM in the only country left in Africa that has evaded its control, Eritrea.
Africa is not underdeveloped and fraught with militarized instability because there is not enough involvement by Western Europe and its evil settler-colonial spawn, the USA. Anyone who believes that must also believe Africans are inferior savages. The fact is Africa is underdeveloped and destabilized precisely because of centuries of European colonialism and decades of U.S. and Western European neocolonialism. Any disposition held by Africans that lends legitimacy to intervention, sanctions, or the fake moral or altruistic dominion of Pan-European, white supremacist capitalist interests in Africa are based either on severe ignorance or treacherous opportunism.
U.S. foreign policy in Africa always involves enveloping any part of the continent that poses a threat to its geostrategic interests into its sphere of forever wars. In 2011, Black anti-imperialist forces were unable to effectively counter the plan by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination to destroy the revolutionary Pan-Africanist nation of Libya. This was partially because the action had the political cover of the first Black president, which confused and disarmed left opposition and made them objective collaborators with U.S. reaction.
BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network and Horn of Africa Pan-Africans for Liberation & Solidarity refuse to allow this fatal mistake to be made again.
Hands off Ethiopia and Eritrea!
#ShutDownAFRICOM!
#USOutofAfrica!
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/06/ ... of-africa/