By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO

Mail & Guardian Africa.

Where are the new roads being built in Africa taking the people, and what do the residents in the mushrooming apartments in the cities dream of?

IF you drop in on Ethiopia once every one or two years, the outward progress you see in places like the capital Addis Ababa, is very impressive.

It is a country in a hurry. It is pouring cement, stone, and laying down tar like it is going out of fashion. Ethiopia has been notching up the fastest growth of any African – and world –economy, turning nearly 11% a year.

If you ever visited Ethiopia in the awful days of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s military junta in the 1980s, the difference is like Earth and Mars.

Some old habits die hard, though. Ethiopia is not a bright-eyed democracy by any measure. The ruling EPRDF dominates power, and still rules with hammer and tongs, though with a velvet touch. And while its economy is galloping, the benefits have not been fairly shared and inequality is deepening.

Its state-led capitalism and political model were recently tested when high-handed plans to expand the capital into neighbouring Oromo lands provoked protests. According to human rights organisations, over 200 Oromo protestors were killed in the ensuing confrontation.

The government has now backed down and abandoned the expansion, for now, and Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn has struck a rare moderate tone on the Oromo demonstrations.

Also, despite the progress, and an aggressive push to bring more electricity and green power to the grid, outages are still frequent in Addis Ababa. Internet services are in the Stone Age, compared, for example, to what is offer in tech savvy Nairobi.

Hungry, but…

A drought, the worst in nearly 60 years, has also further exposed the country’s fragilities, and nearly 11 million people are in need of food aid.

Yet, it is the fact of the hungry Ethiopians, that reveal the real changes the country has made. Thirty years ago, a drought that was probably only half as severe set off a famine in which, according to some estimates, up to million people died.

It served up horror images of people dying daily like flies, and led to the birth of the celebrity charity concert, with the Bob Geldof-inspired Live Aid concert.

In some of those places where thousands perished, today there are lush irrigated farms.

READ: Ethiopia’s remarkable turnaround: 30 years after famine, village now hosts visitors to show off food security

If there is a miracle then, it is that today millions are hungry and suffering, but there have hardly been any deaths reported.

An African mirror

However, I was tantalised by something elsewhere – how the state of affairs in Ethiopia might mirror what is happening in the rest of Africa.

Like for other countries on the continent, the more interesting question is where the new roads are taking the people, and what the dreams of the residents in the mushrooming apartments in cities like Addis Ababa, Kigali, Nairobi, Accra, and Dakar, are.

It’s not easy to read, for the clues are sometimes hidden in strange places.

I was talking to a thoughtful African economist in Addis Ababa about the drought, when I joked that what Ethiopia needed to do was to buy some rain.

However, he didn’t take it lightly. He looked at me seriously and said, “actually, rain is not a problem. What African countries like Ethiopia that have been hard hit by drought need to do, is to invest in the technology to make rain. It’s possible, you know”.

It is. The Chinese make a lot of rain, and recently even Zimbabwe put some money into seeding clouds to water its parched lands.

READ: In search of rain: Zimbabwe starts modifying weather as drought deepens

I chose to read his comments metaphorically.

What I heard was that even what countries like Ethiopia are doing isn’t what will make Africa a big winner.

For that, we needed to move beyond exploiting the gifts of nature – the minerals, oil, weather, wildlife tourism – or those that were made by our ancestors, like the pyramids, the old Coptic cathedrals, the stone monuments of the Great Zimbabwe, and cave paintings, and do our own new things through innovation.

Zola Tatto in Addis Ababa has been busy allowing people like this Ethiopian woman make a statement. It’s a growing business in Africa and points to interesting explorations by young people on the continent. (Zola Tatto/FB).

Thus if you are to have tourism, then do it like the South Africans, and build Sun City. You can hang a bungee-jumping rope at Victoria Falls, yes, but let it be the start of something ambitious, not the end.

There are not too many matured developments of this, beyond a few like Sole Rebels, the very successful Ethiopian shoe company founded by Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu.

It makes and sells revolutionary eco friendly and vegan handcrafted shoes. It was the world’s first fair trade green footwear firm certified by the World Fair Trade Organisation (WFTO) and is now one of Ethiopia’s most thriving businesses.

It sells its products in over 55 countries, and its biggest markets are in Austria, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and the US.

More Sole Rebels

But will Africa have more Sole Rebels? Yes.

In Addis Ababa, when you park in a mall lot or along a street, something very familiar in other African cities happens. A hawk-eyed vendor nearby will slide up to your car window, and offer to sell you a cheap phone charger, fake Rolex, and other wares.

If you don’t buy, he will present pirate DVDs of the latest Hollywood movies. If you still don’t bring out your wallet, he will probably imagine that you are downcast. He will dig deep in his merchandise and bring out pornography DVDs – speaking highly of local offerings.

It can be offensive, and clearly it’s not the way the vendor will get to heaven.

However, in other ways it is also an act that shows a willingness to go to a forbidden and uncomfortable place, which is where truly ground-breaking ideas reside. People like those vendors are not the type who will pray for rain. They are more likely to try and make it.

Tattoos and forbidden things

Indeed, this time, I noticed in Addis a large number of young men and women spotting strange hairstyles and tattoos (some in unusual places). At one tourist art shop a cashier wearing a low cut blouse had an unmissable wild flower tattoo that obviously started much further down snaking all the way to her neck.

“Good” girls don’t do those kind of tattoos.

And that is what makes it a good indicator. It is a statement of hyper individuality, and a bold break away from what African tradition would approve, and therefore quite promising.

It’s refreshing to see these new explorations of the self and uncharted frontiers around Africa. Inside them, are modern day versions of the 15th century explorer Vasco da Gama.

As long as there is an army of restless and Africans out there, there will be more exciting things, like Ackeem Ngwenya’s shape-shifting wheel, or the Moyo Waterfront Restaurant in South Africa.

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Jerusalem (AFP) – Hundreds of Ethiopian Israelis marched in Jerusalem on Sunday after the government cancelled plans to allow their relatives to emigrate from the African nation, calling the move discrimination.

The Israeli government had in November voted to allow the immigration of some 9,100 Ethiopians known as Falash Mura, descendants of Ethiopian Jews who converted to Christianity, many under duress, in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But on March 7, an official from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office informed members of parliament the decision would not be implemented because of budgetary constraints.

Police and organisers estimated the crowd at up to 2,000 people for Sunday’s march, which ended outside Netanyahu’s office.

“Stop the suffering, stop the discrimination, stop the racism,” demonstrators chanted, holding signs bearing similar slogans as well as pictures of relatives left behind in Ethiopia.

“Our children, our parents are in Ethiopia,” they chanted, marching alongside elderly residents wearing more traditional garb, some leaning on canes.

Israelis from the Ethiopian community hold up photographs of their relatives in Jerusalem on March 2 …

Antaihe Cheol, a 30-year-old resident of northern Israel, said his father and brother have been waiting to immigrate for 20 years.

“This is simply discrimination,” he told AFP.

His friend Ashebo noted that the government actively encourages immigration of Jews from France, the United States and Russia.

“When it comes to Jews from Ethiopia — everyone refuses,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.”

Netanyahu’s office said it was working on bringing to Israel “elderly, solitary and dependent Falash Mura to ease their condition”.

Israelis from the Ethiopian community hold up photographs of their relatives in front of Israel’ …

But “the latest amendment to the budget law does not enable the government to take upon itself significant budgetary commitments to upcoming years, without regulating fiscal sources”, a statement read.

The issue will be discussed in the coming months as part of the budget discussions, the premier’s office said.

Netanyahu’s office considers reuniting Falash Mura families an issue “of humane and social importance”.

Leading the demonstration was MP Avraham Neguise, himself an immigrant from Ethiopia and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party.

Along with MP David Amsalem, Neguise has boycotted all parliamentary votes since being told the government was walking back its November decision, and reiterated on Sunday he would continue doing so until the decree was reversed.

Netanyahu’s coalition holds only a one-seat majority in parliament.

Revital Swid, a lawmaker from the opposition Zionist Union, also accused the government of racial discrimination.

“Would the government tell even one Jew from Russia, or Europe, or America who had family in Israel, we don’t have the money to bring you here?” she asked ahead of the march.

Previous demonstrations by the Ethiopian community against alleged discrimination have led to violence, but Sunday’s march was calm.

Israel’s Ethiopian community includes some 135,000 people.

Israel brought the bulk of Ethiopia’s Jewish community to the country between 1984 and 1991 under the Law of Return guaranteeing citizenship to all Jews, but the law does not apply to the Falash Mura.

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By Prof. Alemayhu G. Mariam

President Barack Obama is in Cuba!  On a mission. Liberate Cubans from “communist” mental slavery!

Hooray! Cuba libre! Free Cuba!

Back in 1898, another American president-to-be, Teddy “The Rough Rider” Roosevelt and crew caught a boat from Tampa, FL and set off on a mission to liberate the Cubans.

From the Spanish.

That “splendid little war”, the Spanish-American War, lasted a little over two months. The Spanish Empire collapsed and the U.S. snagged a number of Spain’s island possessions.

Ah! America’s manifest destiny of carrying on with the burdens of empire.

But Cuba was not liberated at the end of that “little war”. It became “independent”.

In 1928, President Calvin Coolidge went to Cuba to speak before the Pan American Conference and announced: “Today Cuba is her own sovereign. Her people are independent, free, prosperous, peaceful, and enjoying the advantages of self-government.”

The U.S. granted Cuba its “independence”.  In exchange for independence, Cuba had to agree to U.S. intervention in Cuban affairs as it sees fit and keep a perpetual lease on its naval base at Guantánamo Bay (where nearly 800 prisoners have been detained since January 2001 without due process of law and the detention camp Obama promised to shut down).

That was the deal until Fidel Castro and crew began armed struggle in the early 1950s to liberate Cuba from organized crime and organized American companies which dominated the Cuban economy.

In January 1959, Castro and his crew became victorious. Fidel declared, “I am not a dictator, and I do not think I will become one. I will not maintain power with a machine gun.”

For 56 years, the Castro Brothers, Fidel, Raul and Ramon (recently deceased), have run Cuba with an iron fist and index fingers on the triggers of machine guns.

The U.S. imposed an economic embargo on Cuba for over one-half century.

Now Obama is in Cuba to bring Cuba in from the cold. (I did not say the Cold War.)

In 2016, Barack Obama is in Cuba not to liberate Cuban territory but to liberate Cubans from the tyranny of human rights suppression and deprivation.

A couple of weeks ago Obama announced  that he will travel to Cuba in the third week of March to “press Castro on human rights.”

The U.S. “pressed” the Castro Brothers for over fifty years every which way and the Castro Brothers have proved to be tough nuts to crack (pun not intended).

Obama said, “We still have differences with the Cuban government that I will raise directly. America will always stand for human rights around the world.”

Well! Well! Does America “always stand for human rights around the world”?

In July 2015, Obama  traveled to Ethiopia and said, “I don’t bite my tongue too much when it comes to these issues. We are opposed to any group that is promoting the violent overthrow of a government, including the government of Ethiopia, that has been democratically elected.” (Emphasis added.)

The “government” of Ethiopia Obama called “democratic” is none other than the Thugtatorship of the Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front (T-TPLF), currently classified as a terrorist group by the Global Terrorism Database.

The T-TPLF won the May 2015 “election” by winning 100 percent of the seats in “parliament” (one hundred percent).

“Ethiopia is the second-worst jailer of journalists in Africa,” according  to Freedom House.

“Ethiopian authorities continue to severely restrict the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, using repressive laws to constrain civil society and independent media, and target individuals with politically motivated prosecutions,”according to Human Rights Watch.

Nevermind the facts, to Obama the T-TPLF is “democratic”.

In July 2009, Obama went to Accra, Ghana and said, “Now, make no mistake: History is on the side of these brave Africans, not with those who use coups or change constitutions to stay in power. Africa does not need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.”

In August 2014, Obama invited the who’s who of African thugtators to the White House to wine and dine them and take pictures (selfies?).

Guess who came to dinner at the White House?

Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya who was on trial at the International Criminal Court on various counts of crimes against humanity.

Paul Biya of Cameroon who has decades-long record of gross human rights violations.

Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso who committed human rights atrocities before he “resigned” in October 2014 after a popular uprising.

Paul Kagame of Rwanda who has been “stoking a rebellion in eastern Congo” resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of people.

Yoweri Museveni of Uganda known for his long record of human rights violations and stealing elections, including the last one a few weeks ago.

Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of  Equatorial Guinea who has rigged a 95 percent victory in every election for decades.

José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola who has been running his  government like a family business (more like a crime syndicate).

Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo who inherited the presidency from his father at age 30 and runs an empire of corruption.

Hailemariam Desalegn, the ceremonial prime minster of Ethiopia, generally regarded as a jovial buffoon.

And so on…

Under Obama’s watch, Africa’s “strongmen” have been stronger than ever before.

African strongmen have become so strong and unashamedly bold that they proudly announce winning election by 100 percent (in Ethiopia) and becoming presidents-for-life in Rwanda, Uganda or ruling-party-for-life in Ethiopia.

I coined the word “diplocrisy” in 2013 to describe Barack Obama’s human rights diplomacy by hypocrisy.

At the time, I was reacting to Secretary of State John Kerry’s statements during the release of the U.S. State Department’s annual Human Rights Report for 2013.

Kerry  remarked,  “Anywhere that human rights are under threat, the United States will proudly stand up, unabashedly, and continue to promote greater freedom, greater openness, and greater opportunity for all people.”

Obama is saying the same exact thing in 2016. He will “press Castro on human rights” and “America will always stand for human rights around the world.”

I can’t quite figure out Obama’s human rights policy.

But I have figured out, rather late in the game, that Obama is a  hypocrite. But not exactly the type of hypocrite he is.

There is the “true hypocrite who ceases to perceive his deception and proceeds to lie with sincerity.”

Then there is the hypocrite who is “worse than a liar”, because he is “a liar that’s also a hypocrite.”

I understand the legacy thing for U.S. presidents, especially in foreign policy.

Richard Nixon “opened” China.

Gerald Ford “ended” the war in Vietnam.

Ronald Reagan “won” the Cold War.

George Bush used weapons of mass deception to plunge America into a war of mass destruction in Iraq.

Barack Obama did the Iran nuclear deal and is working on a climate accord and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement among twelve Pacific Rim countries). I am not hip with trade deals that ship out American jobs. I am with Bernie on that.

I am with Bernie when he says, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a disastrous trade agreement designed to protect the interests of the largest multi-national corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment and the foundations of American democracy.”

I give Obama credit for “ending the wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, those it seems those countries are in a state of perpetual war drawing on American lives and treasury.

I give Obama credit for the Affordable Health Care Act and getting the economy on its “feet” after the 2008 debacle.

Bringing in Cuba from the cold is a nice feather in his presidential cap.

I had some reservations about the U.S.-Cuba rapprochement, but not anymore.

But I give Obama no credit for improving human rights globally and particularly in Africa.

Obama says he is going over to Cuba to talk about human rights. Is human rights the reason for the 56 year iron-clad embargo on Cuba?

If the Castro Brothers haven’t learned much about human rights in 56 years, is it possible to teach old dogs new tricks now?

It is perfectly sensible for the U.S. to normalize relations with Cuba after 5 decades. It makes diplomatic and humanitarian sense to reestablish relations, restore flight services and relax travel limits and allow Cubans greater access to U.S. financial institutions.

The way I see it, whatever Brother Obama does for the African Brothers (handout billions of dollars), he should also do for the Castro Brothers (at least in millions).

It is the height of hypocrisy for the U.S. to isolate and punish Cuba for its poor human rights records when the U.S. provides billions of dollars in aid to prop up African thugs in power who commit massacres and genocide every year.

I admit I have difficulty making distinctions in the human rights records of the Tweedle Dees and Tweedle Dums of the world.

But are the human rights “sins” of the Castro Brothers any worse than the “sins” of the African Brothers? I am just sayin’.

Hands down, the T-TPLF regime in Ethiopia has a far, far  worse human rights record than the Cuban regime. Yet the U.S. pumps billions of dollars every year to prop up the T-TPLF.

What is good for the goose should be good for the gander.

But such is Obama’s double standard of human rights diplocrisy.

The Castro Brothers have been around the block with the U.S. a few times over the last one-half century.

They know what’s up. They know who talks the talk and who talks the walk.

They know Obama only talks the talk when it comes to human rights.

Also, if there is anything the Castro Brothers hate, it is criticism of their human rights record.

But Obama says he wants to restructure U.S.-Cuba relations on a foundation of human rights and relaxation of state controls on the Cuban economy. He seems to believe that with more commerce, communication, tourism, social and cultural exchanges Cuba can be transformed into a more liberal democratic society. That remains to be seen.

As Obama visits Cuba, I wonder if he will call for the release of political prisoners. He says he will meet with the families of political prisoners and dissidents.

What will he say to them?

Don’t you ever feel sad/ Lean on me, when the times are bad

When the day comes and you’re down/In a river of trouble and about to drown

Just hold on, I’m comin’/  Hold on, I’m comin’.

That’s Sam and Dave.

Talking about political prisoners, the Castro Brothers may just casually mention something about the human rights of the prisoners in Guantanamo.

Fidel Castro once remarked, “I am a Marxist-Leninist, and I will be a Marxist-Leninist until the last days of my life.”

Fidel Castro is a Marxist-Leninist, an autocrat, a dictator and so on.

But Fidel Castro is no hypocrite. Fidel Castro does not speak with forked tongue. Fidel Castro says what he means and means what he says.

I disagree with Castro on press and individual freedoms, property rights, due process and so on. But I give him credit for his literacy campaign and vast improvements in health and education.

But I respect Castro because he is no hypocrite.

What kind of speech will Barack Obama give in Havana?

I think he will say something along the following lines:

Good afternoon, everybody. It is a great honor for me to be in Havana….  I am deeply grateful for the welcome that I’ve received…

We must start from the simple premise that Cuba’s future is up to Cubans.

I say this knowing full well the tragic past that has sometimes haunted this part of the Caribbean.

This is the simple truth of a time when the boundaries between people are overwhelmed by our connections. Your prosperity can expand America’s prosperity. Your health and security can contribute to the world’s health and security. And the strength of your democracy, once you get to enjoy it, can help advance human rights for people everywhere.

I do not see American and the people of Cuba as a world apart.

After all, Cuba is only 90 miles away!

I see Cuba as a fundamental part of our interconnected hemisphere — (applause) — as partners with America on behalf of the future we want for all of our children. That partnership must be grounded in mutual responsibility and mutual respect. And that is what I want to speak with you about today.

Now, to realize that promise, we must first recognize the fundamental truth that Cuba needs to catch up with the rest of the world in its economic development.  Development depends on good governance. That is the ingredient which has been missing in Cuba  for far too long. That’s the change that can unlock Cuba’s potential. And that is a responsibility that can only be met by Cubans.

This mutual responsibility must be the foundation of our partnership. And today, I’ll focus on four areas that are critical to the future of Cuba and the Caribbean: democracy, opportunity, health, and the peaceful resolution of conflict.

First, we must support strong and sustainable democratic governments.

As I said in Cairo, Ankara and Accra, each nation gives life to democracy in its own way, and in line with its own traditions. But history offers a clear verdict: Governments that respect the will of their own people, that govern by consent and not coercion, are more prosperous, they are more stable, and more successful than governments that do not.

Democracy is about more than just holding elections. It’s also about what happens between elections.  Repression can take many forms, and too many nations, even those that have elections, are plagued by problems that condemn their people to poverty.

No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. (No applause.) That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. And now is the time for that style of governance to end. (No applause.)

In the 21st century, capable, reliable, and transparent institutions are the key to success — strong parliaments; honest police forces; independent judges — (no applause); an independent press; a vibrant private sector; a civil society. (no applause.) Those are the things that give life to democracy, because that is what matters in people’s everyday lives.

America will not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation. The essential truth of democracy is that each nation determines its own destiny. But what America will do is support good governance, promote the rule of law and accountability.

With better governance, I have no doubt that Cuba holds the promise of a broader base of prosperity. Witness the extraordinary success of Cubans in my country, America. They’re doing very well.

America can also do more to promote trade and investment.   That will be a commitment of my administration. And where there is good governance, we can broaden prosperity through public-private investment partnerships, capacity-building and financial services.

This is also in our own interests — for if people are lifted out of poverty and wealth is created in Cuba, guess what? New markets will open up for our own goods. So it’s good for both.

In Moscow, I spoke of the need for an international system where the universal rights of human beings are respected, and violations of those rights are opposed. And that must include a commitment to support those who resolve conflicts peacefully, to sanction and stop those who don’t, and to help those who have suffered.

In places like Cuba, young people make up over half of the population.

And here is what young Cubans must know: The world will be what you make of it. You have the power to hold your leaders accountable, and to build institutions that serve the people. You can serve in your communities, and harness your energy and education to create new wealth and build new connections to the world. You can conquer disease, and end conflicts, and make change from the bottom up. You can do that. Yes you can — (applause) — because in this moment, history is on the move.

But these things can only be done if all of you take responsibility for your future. And it won’t be easy. It will take time and effort. There will be suffering and setbacks. But I can promise you this: America will be with you every step of the way — as a partner, as a friend. (Applause.)

Cuba, freedom is your inheritance. (Yeah! Cuba Libre!) Now, it is your responsibility to build upon freedom’s foundation. And if you do, we will look back years from now to places like Havana and say this was the time when the promise was realized; this was the moment when prosperity was forged, when pain was overcome, and a new era of progress began.  (Applause.)

Finally, make no mistake: History is on the side of brave Cubans, not with those who cling to power for 56 years. (No applause.)

Cuba doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions. (No applause).

Thank you very much.

Sounds vaguely like the speech Obama made in Accra, Ghana back in July 2009.

De ja vu!

I am not sure what the Cubans will see over Havana’s sky on March 20. “It’s a bird! It’s a  Trojan horse (in the form of Pegasus) with wings. No, no, it’s Air Force One!”

People of Cuba: Hail, Barack Obama, Diplocrite-in-Chief !

The post Cuba! Hail, Barack Obama, Diplocrite-in-Chief ! (Al Mariam) appeared first on Satenaw.

The statements presented a very rosy picture of Ethiopia and hid the income inequalities, adjunct poverty and dismal standard of living that persist. Today, the regime and its partners are forced to admit and present the true state of the Ethiopian economy and its effects on the majority of the population, of which 15 million are now in need of food aid.

Ethiopia touted as the “powerhouse in the Horn” is once again begging the international community to feed its people.

To prove that things had changed in Ethiopia, even Bob Geldof, the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, who sprung to global prominence with his role in Band Aid to raise money for the Ethiopian famine in 1980s, was now leading the call for investments in Ethiopia. The Wall Street Journal in its article, “Rock Star Bob Geldof Spearheads U.S. Private-Equity Push Into Ethiopia”, reported the following on 30 March 2015:

“… A generation ago, this African nation was a magnet for Western charity. Today, some of America’s richest deal makers are delivering something new: investment…

8Miles, the private equity firm Geldof chairs, owns Blue Nile, a company which acquired the 70-year old winery based in Addis Abeba and vineyard near the town of Ziway from the Ethiopian Privatization & Public Enterprises Supervising Agency (PPESA).

There were also others (probably hired by Ethiopia’s million dollar lobbyists) who weighed in and promoted investment in Ethiopia. In his 8 July 2015 article, “Ethiopia: From Famine to Feast”, Andrew S Nevin, PhD, said to be “one of Canada’s global thinkers”, touted Ethiopia’s “renaissance” with this:

“…A nation once characterised by land-locked isolation and poverty, Ethiopia has emerged as Africa’s ‘newest Lion economy’ and continues to accelerate in the global economy. With a population of 70.7 million people, Ethiopia has enjoyed a period of rapid economic growth by about 10% a year since 2004…Ethiopia was once a synonym for poverty and famine. Even though it is still one of the poorest nations in Africa – with an estimated third of the population earning less than $1 a day – the country has one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, and development of the agriculture industry is a major feature of Ethiopia’s economic growth… Ethiopia still remains an attractive business destination for investment, and a risk that is worth taking…”

But just a few months later, the headlines would read differently.

Rene Lefort in an 18 December 2015 wrote the following facts about the Ethiopian famine:

“…The United Nations has warned that more than 8.2 million people in Ethiopia will be in need of food aid by the beginning of 2016 because of a severe drought. The number of people in need climbed from 2.9 million (March 6) to 4.5 million (August 18) and suddenly to 8.2 million (September 21)…”

But the regime went on an extensive propaganda campaign to deny that there was “famine”. Addis based diplomats and journalists remained mum as the regime’s cadres hid the impending humanitarian disaster unfolding right in front of their eyes. When the BBC reported about the famine, the minority regime was not happy and it sent out its deputies to ridicule its reports.

The Deputy Prime Minister, Demeke Mekonen, commenting on a BBC report about the famine in Ethiopia said:

“…It is obvious that the foreign media works with different bodies of special interest. There is no such thing as famine in Ethiopia these days…”

In addition, the minority regime put out a Press Release on 10 November 2015 decrying news reports about famine in Ethiopia.

“…Up to now, the country has mobilised 2 billion Birr [£62 million] and has positioned food from the national reserve in places that are affected, or could be affected, by the drought. The government is working hard to ensure that no one dies from lack of food in this El Nino year and, contrary to some western news reports, there will not be famine of any sort, let alone anything remotely like the magnitude of that of 1984.

… The sensational news broadcast by BBC TV, regarding children dying on a daily basis, does not reflect the current broad reality on the ground and the full preparation that has gone into overcoming the problem. The report also failed to give perspective to the drought situation currently unfolding in Ethiopia and around the world, and how it is triggered by the El Nino phenomenon…”

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon visited Ethiopia in January 2016 to see first-hand “the consequences of thedrought in one of the worst affected areas”. At a round table discussion in the Ethiopian capital, Ban Ki Moon said:

“…a crisis of this scale was too much for any Government…The international community must stand with people of Ethiopia, immediate support for Ethiopia will save lives and avoid preventable suffering. Immediate support will also safeguard the impressive development gains that Ethiopia has made over the past years and decades…”

Gayle Smith, longtime friend of the TPLF regime and now Administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) echoed Ban Ki Moon when she made this announcement on 31 January 2016.

“…The Government of Ethiopia estimates that 10.2 million people are currently in need of emergency food assistance. This is in addition to 7.9 million chronically food insecure people who are covered by the Government of Ethiopia-led Productive Safety Net Program, supported by USAID and the donor community. Though the drought in parts of Ethiopia is the worst on record, famine-level mortality like that seen during the mid-1980s is very unlikely given improved safety nets, lack of conflict, and improved information and early warning systems…Ethiopia will need additional support from the international community in order to weather this crisis and to sustain its significant development gains…”

Everyone was sticking to the narrative …

A few months later, despite UN and NGO appeals for food aid, the minority regime and its cadres continued to deny the existence of famine in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Embassy in Washington reported the following in its 8 February 2016 newsletter:

“…Special Envoy and Ambassador Extra-Ordinary and Plenipotentiary to the US, Mexico and Jamaica, Girma Birru gave interviews on current situations in Ethiopia to Tsenat and Selam radio stations in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. respectively. Ambassador Girma said that though the current drought in Ethiopia impacts a vast area and relatively a huge population the government is trying its level best that it does not cause much harm to the people affected…”

Ambassador Girma also said that there was no famine in Ethiopia. Insulting the intelligence of the Ethiopian people, showing utter contempt for their suffering, the Ambassador:

“… challenged those who claim that the drought has turned into famine, by referring to a UN accepted measurement which states for a famine to exist. First, 20% of the house hold in the drought affected area should have nothing to eat or drink. Second, 30% of the entire population in the drought afflicted area, must be suffering from acute malnutrition. And the third is that in every 10,000 people in the drought affected area, two persons must be perishing daily for famine to exist. After having put the internationally accepted criterion, Ambassador Girma, took million people as a base in the drought affected area and proved that there is no famine in Ethiopia…”

The food crisis in the country was downplayed and the reckless regime chose instead to deal in semantics- renaming “famine and starvation” as “food insecurity”.

NGOs were warned not to use the words “famine, starvation or death” in their food appeals. The NGOs were not to state that “children are dying on a daily basis,” or refer to “widespread famine” or say that “the policies of the government in Ethiopia are partially to blame.” They were also not allowed to “compare the current crisis to the famine of the eighties.” They were not to place the blame on the government or its development policies that have uprooted Ethiopians from their lands. Instead, the latest drought in Ethiopia was to be described as “food insecurity caused by a drought related to El Nino.”

The regime was desperate to maintain the narrative of Ethiopia’s great economic renaissance, and the “double digit” annual growth. It was more interested in saving face, than facing the fact that millions of its own people continue to be “fed by donated sacks of grain”.

It did not take long for the bottom to drop.

The United Nations is now calling it the worst drought in 30 years and is saying that 400,000 children were suffering from severe acute malnutrition and more than 15 million people were in need food aid. UN and the Ethiopian government are currently appealing for $1.4 billion in emergency food aid

Carolyn Miles, Chief Executive of Save the Children, US said:

“…We only have two emergencies in the world that we have categorised as category one. Syria is one and Ethiopia is the second. And so we’ve said we need to raise $100m for this response…”

On 1 March 2016, AllAfrica’s Reed Kramer’s interview with Haile Mariam Desalegn was posted. In the interview, the Ethiopian Prime Minister said:

“…The famine, which is the result of the El Niño effect, is unprecedented in our country. The government is doing everything possible to feed our people and prevent starvation. We want to do this without slowing down progress we have made in health and education. To do that we need to work with our international partners. The response to date has not been sufficient…In the event that the lackluster response continues, the government will take every step necessary to avert humanitarian disaster, including diverting funds from other priorities, if that is what it takes…”

Not getting the donor response it desired, the regime is now resorting to threats.

The Ethiopian Prime Minister, who had chastised those who first reported about the famine was now warning the international community for its “lackluster” response to the regime’s, albeit belated, calls for help:

“…If something goes wrong, it is the international community who has not come in. The aid provided to us so far is very little and it often came very late. I urge organisations like UNICEF to come in if they think this is a worst case scenario. Just talking is not a solution…”

A responsible regime would know that the buck stops at Menelik Palace…

Finally, researchers have long argued that poverty was the ultimate cause of famine-and that climate acts simply as a catalyst. Blaming the famine in Ethiopia on El Nino likens it to a natural disaster-it is misleading and irresponsible.

The minority regime and its handlers, including the western media, should stop lying to the Ethiopian people and do the right thing. The regime must first feed its own people instead of feeding its over inflamed ego with tired old propaganda.

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VOA’s Mary Alica Salinas

American President Barack Obama and Cuba’s President Raul Castro disagreed over questions on human rights and Guantanamo Bay in a rare and, at times, tension-filled press conference in Havana.

The two presidents met at the Revolutionary Palace before facing the media. They talked about ways to move toward normal ties between their countries. The discussion included issues on which they disagree, including individual freedoms.

To a question about human rights in Cuba during the press conference, President Obama said, “I’ve met with people who have been subject toarbitrary detention and that’s something that I generally have to speak on because I hear from them directly and I know what it means for them.”

When an American reporter asked President Raul Castro about political prisoners in Cuba, he replied, “What political prisoners?”

Castro added, “Give me a name, or names, or after this meeting is over you can give me a list of political prisoners, and if we have those political prisoners, they will be released before tonight ends.”

President Castro told reporters that he welcomed U.S. action to ease trade and travel restrictions. But he also said the 55-year trade embargo against Cuba must end. And the leader called on the U.S. to return Cuban territory used for the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

U.S. President Barack Obama, left, speaks next to Cuba’s President Raul Castro, during a joint statement in Havana, Cuba, March 21, 2016.

President Obama said the trade embargo did not serve the interests of either country. “The embargo’s going to end,” he said, although he admitted he could not be “entirely sure” when it would happen.

Only the U.S. Congress can end the trade embargo on Cuba. There is Republican opposition in Congress on Obama’s policy shift from isolation toengagement with Cuba.

Three reporters were permitted to ask questions although Castro said he would answer only one. All asked him about political prisoners in Cuba.

Castro also disputed the general idea of human rights problems in Cuba. He argued that no country in the world honors all 61 internationally recognized human rights. He said Cuba honors many, including the right to education, the right to health care, and the right to equal pay for equal work for everyone.

A reporter also asked Castro if he supported Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump as U.S. presidential candidates.

“Well, I cannot vote in the United States,” he answered. The crowd laughed.

Historic trip

US President Barack Obama (C) attends a wreath-laying ceremony at Jose Marti monument in the Revolution Palace of Havana next to the Vice-President of the Cuban Council Salvador Valdes Mesa (C-R) on March 21, 2016.

Obama will attend a state dinner later Monday at the Revolutionary Palace.

He also is to attend meetings of both Cuban Americans and Cuban entrepreneurs. They are to discuss changes both governments can make to support more business ties between the countries.

Cuba and the U.S. officially renewed diplomatic ties in July. The U.S. has loosened travel and commercial restrictions since that time.

But Obama administration officials say the highlight of the trip will be the speech he will give to the Cuban people on Tuesday. He is expected to speak about the history between Cuba and the U.S., current plans to normalize relations and his vision for future relations.

I’m Caty Weaver.

VOA’s Mary Alica Salinas reported this story from Havana. Caty Weaver adapted the story for Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.

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ESAT Radio Tue 22 Mar 2016

The post ESAT Radio Tue 22 Mar 2016 appeared first on Satenaw.

Brussels attacks: Zaventem and Maelbeek bombs kill many

• 22 March 2016
• From the sectionEurope

Image copyrightAFP

More than 30 people are believed to have been killed and dozens injured in attacks at Brussels international airport and a city metro station.

Twin blasts hit Zaventem airport at about 07:00 GMT, with 11 people reported killed.

Another explosion struck Maelbeek metro station near EU headquarters an hour later, leaving about 20 people dead.

Brussels police have issued a wanted notice for a man seen pushing a luggage trolley through the airport.

He was pictured in CCTV footage with two other suspects who are believed to have died in the blasts.

The Islamic State (IS) group said it was behind the attacks in a statement issued on the IS-linked Amaq agency.

Belgium has raised its terrorism alert to its highest level. Three days of national mourning have been declared.

Prime Minister Charles Michel called the latest attacks “blind, violent and cowardly”, adding: “This is a day of tragedy, a black day… I would like to call on everyone to show calmness and solidarity”.

‘The worst thing I’ve seen’

Two blasts tore through the departures area of Zaventem airport shortly after 08:00 local time (07:00 GMT).

A suicide bomber was “probably” involved, the Belgian prosecutor said.

Eleven people were killed and 81 wounded in the blasts, Belgian Health Minister Maggie de Block said.

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More about the attacks

Live: The latest updates

What we know so far

Why was Brussels attacked?

Crisis information

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Some witnesses reported hearing shots fired and shouts in Arabic before the two explosions.

Others said that people fled the first blast, only to get caught in the second.

A third bomb failed to detonate and was destroyed by the security services.

A local firefighter, Pierre Meys, described seeing “war injuries”.

“I think this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my career,” he said

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“People were running over others that had fallen, I couldn’t breathe. I can’t believe I’m alive,” 15-year-old Antoine told me as he walked with his school friends in a line of hundreds being escorted on foot and by bus to a sports hall, now a makeshift reception centre.

Three hearses passed, heading towards the ruins of the airport departure hall. People sobbed at the sight of them.

Several tourists were asking police what they should do now, where it was safe to go – and when the airport might reopen.

The police were confused too, but offered what little information they had, telling people to head to a reception centre. An officer repeatedly shouted: “Quickly, keep moving, evacuate, this is serious.”

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Carnage on the Metro

The metro blast occurred shortly after 08:00 GMT during the rush hour at Maelbeek station.

It struck the middle carriage of a three-carriage train while it was moving away from the platform.

Alexandre Brans told AP: “The metro was leaving Maelbeek station when there was a really loud explosion. It was panic everywhere. There were a lot of people in the metro.”

Brussels Mayor Yvan Mayeur said “about 20” people had died and more than 100 had been injured, 17 of them severely.

Eyewitnesses recall explosions

In pictures: Brussels explosions

Full coverage

The station is close to EU institutions. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, has told employees to stay indoors or at home. All meetings at EU institutions have been cancelled.

Ryan McGhee, a catering worker at a college in Brussels, told the BBC: “The entire city is in lockdown. People are calm at the moment but the atmosphere is tense.”

Security raised

Local and international travel has been suspended or disrupted and security tightened across Europe.

All flights have been cancelled. The airport is due to reopen on Wednesday.

Eurostar has cancelled all trains to and from Brussels. The Thalys France-Benelux train operator says the entire network is closed.

In the UK, security has been stepped up at Gatwick and Heathrow airports. The UK Foreign Office has advised British nationals to avoid crowded areas in Belgium.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron chaired a meeting of the Cobra response committee on Tuesday.

In France the cabinet has held an emergency meeting. There is also extra security at Dutch airports.

Image copyrightHorst Pilger

Image copyrightRalph Usbeck via AP

‘Outrageous’ attacks

There has been strong international condemnation:

• US President Barack Obama called the blasts “outrageous attacks against innocent people”.
• The 28 EU leaders said the bombings were an “attack on our open democratic society” in a joint statement.
• “The terrorists have struck Belgium but it is Europe that was targeted,” said French President Francois Hollande.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin called the attacks “barbaric”.

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Belgium’s Interior Minister Jan Jambon had said on Monday that the country was on the highest level of alert for possible revenge attacks after the capture on Friday of Salah Abdeslam, the main surviving suspect from the Paris attacks in November.

Mr Jambon told Belgian radio: “We know that stopping one cell can… push others into action. We are aware of it in this case.”

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Gaps in intelligence: By Chris Morris, Europe correspondent

European security experts had been braced for another attack for months. But it is always a huge shock when it actually happens.

If this was “revenge” for the arrest of Salah Abdeslam on Friday, it will be a source of considerable concern that a functioning terrorist network was able to respond so quickly and with such devastating effect.

It is possible that a cell linked to Abdeslam brought forward the timing of a future attack because they thought he might blow their cover.

Either way, it shows how advanced the planning was in terms of logistics, explosives, weapons and people willing to carry out such attacks on civilian targets.

The priority now will be to ensure that anyone else who poses an imminent threat to the public is apprehended as soon as possible. But it is clear that there are still huge gaps in intelligence, and Brussels is seen as a soft target.

In the words of French President Francois Hollande, the response from Europe will need to be “calm, lucid and determined” – and it will have to last for a long time.

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• The latest official death toll stands at 31. Up to 230 people are reported to have been injured.
• Two blasts took place at Zaventem airport, to the north-east of the city centre, at around 8am local time; at least 11 people died here and up to 100 were injured.
• A third bomb went off at Maelbeek metro station on the rue de la Loi, close to the European Union headquarters, around an hour later. Twenty people died in this attack and 130 were injured.
• Adelma Tapia Ruiz was the first victim of the attacks to be named. The 37-year-old Peruvian woman was killed at the airport, where she was reported to be catching a flight with her Belgian husband, Christophe Delcambe, and their twin four-year-old daughters Maureen and Alondra, who survived.
• A wounded Jet Airways crew member pictured in the immediate aftermath of the explosion in her torn and bloodied yellow uniform has been named as Nidhi Chaphekar.

• Two of the suspected attackers were captured on CCTV dressed in black and wearing black gloves on their left hands thought to have concealed detonators. Federal prosecutor Frederic van Leeuw saidthe two men “very likely committed a suicide attack”.
• Belgian police launched a series of raids in a massive manhunt for a third man, who is thought to have escaped following the attackswithout detonating his own suitcase bomb.
• The identities of the men are not known and police issued photographs asking the public to help name them.

Summary: what we know so far

Claire Phipps

• The latest official death toll stands at 31. Up to 230 people are reported to have been injured.
• Two blasts took place at Zaventem airport, to the north-east of the city centre, at around 8am local time; at least 11 people died here and up to 100 were injured.
• A third bomb went off at Maelbeek metro station on the rue de la Loi, close to the European Union headquarters, around an hour later. Twenty people died in this attack and 130 were injured.
• Adelma Tapia Ruiz was the first victim of the attacks to be named. The 37-year-old Peruvian woman was killed at the airport, where she was reported to be catching a flight with her Belgian husband, Christophe Delcambe, and their twin four-year-old daughters Maureen and Alondra, who survived.
• A wounded Jet Airways crew member pictured in the immediate aftermath of the explosion in her torn and bloodied yellow uniform has been named as Nidhi Chaphekar.

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FP

Brutal repression was the secret to the country’s rapid rise. It could also bring it crashing down again.

AMA, Ethiopia — For those who would speak frankly about politics in this landlocked East African country, the first challenge is to find a safe space.

But on a recent evening in Adama, a city in the heart of a region reeling from the largest protest movement Ethiopia has faced in decades, most people seemed at ease. University students poured out of the city’s main campus, spilling into claustrophobic bars and pool halls. Others crowded around a cluster of aging taxis, jostling for a quick ride home.

Though it is one of the largest cities in Oromia — where members of Ethiopia’s Oromo ethnic group have taken to the streets in recent months in unprecedented numbers to protest their political and economic marginalization — Adama has remained mostly quiet.

Hidden beneath the casual veneer of daily life, however, lurks a deep-seated suspicion of the government, which has built a massive surveillance apparatus and cracked down violently on its opponents

Hidden beneath the casual veneer of daily life, however, lurks a deep-seated suspicion of the government, which has built a massive surveillance apparatus and cracked down violently on its opponents.

Citizens feel they have to watch what they say, and where they say it. At the hangouts where crowds have gathered, a political statement might be overheard. Out on the sidewalks, government spies could be on patrol. Inside the university campus, security officials are on the lookout for suspicious behavior.

In a way, the recent unrest is rooted in Ethiopia’s rapid economic rise. The federal government claims to have notched double-digit GDP growth rates over the past decade, but its rigid, top-down approach to developing industry, and attracting foreign investment, has resulted in mass displacement and disrupted millions of lives. This, in turn, has heightened ethnic tensions that today threaten Ethiopia’s reputation for stability.

All across Oromia, government security forces have been struggling to control the spate of violent protests that erupted in November, partly in response to the government’s so-called master plan to coordinate development in Addis Ababa with nearby towns in Oromia, a sprawling central region that surrounds the capital on all sides. Like much of the country, the vast majority of Oromia is rural, home to small-scale farmers who feel left behind by the dazzling growth of Addis.

When this latest round of protests began last year, demonstrators seized on the master plan as symbolic of broader encroachments on Oromo autonomy. They also accused the government of taking land from Oromo farmers for little or no compensation, suppressing the Oromo language in schools, and unfairly redistributing the region’s natural resources.

In Adama, a 23-year-old engineering student, whose full name has been withheld for his safety, was initially reluctant to speak with this reporter for fear of reprisal. He relaxed only after he and some close friends sat down in a deserted cafe near campus, where a quiet woman brewing coffee over hot coals was the only person listening in.

“There are so many problems facing the Oromo people,” he said. “But those who speak about it are getting arrested. Educated people, farmers, teachers, doctors — the government accuses them all of being part of the protests.”

His caution was warranted. Less than two weeks later, a confrontation erupted at the university, reportedly in response to a small demonstration by students — though the details, as always, are hazy. One witness who asked not be named said he heard gunshots as security forces descended on the campus. Amid the confusion, at least two fires were sparked — one in the school’s backup generator.

“On campus, students already feared the armed forces,” said the witness, who is a student at the university. “Now, no one feels like they have any right to speak at all.”

Government security forces have been accused of exacerbating the crisis in Oromia by violently suppressing the protests. In a recent report, Human Rights Watch said it had “documented security forces firing into crowds of protesters with little or no warning, the arrests of students as young as 8, and the torture of protesters in detention.” The rights group said military and police forces have killed “several hundred peaceful protesters” since November.

Members of the Ethiopian diaspora have been equally vocal, taking to social media to call attention to alleged atrocities. Jawar Mohammed, who is based in Minnesota, is perhaps the most prominent online activist, manning a number of social media feeds featuring bloody photos of dead demonstrators and grainy videos of police brutality that have become hubs for Oromo diaspora members around the world. His Facebook page has amassed nearly a half million followers.

“We have freelancers embedded in pretty much every district across the country,” said Mohammed, who was born in Ethiopia but works abroad as the executive director of the Oromia Media Network, a news broadcaster whose satellite feed here has been repeatedly jammed by the Ethiopian government. “They infiltrate the system from top to bottom,” he said in a Skype interview.

How much of an impact social media activism has had on the actual protest movement is a matter of debate. In a country with limited Internet penetration, and where the sole government-owned telecommunications provider has the power to shut down signals and block opposition websites, online activists like Mohammed are necessarily limited in what they can do. According to the engineering student in Adama, people on the ground are driving the protests, and social media matters “only a little bit.”

Where online activists have succeeded is in channeling video and photographic evidence of abuses to the outside word

Where online activists have succeeded is in channeling video and photographic evidence of abuses to the outside word. But even this evidence is difficult to verify; several journalists, including this correspondent, have been detained by officials for attempting to report in some of the worst-affected areas.

There are also questions about the direction social media activists have steered the debate surrounding the protests. Comments by Mohammed’s passionate social media followers sometimes advocate violence against members of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a political party from the northern region of Tigray that dominates the government’s security and intelligence agencies. And because he and other online activists are far from the front lines, some argue that their social media posts are ultimately a distraction. The student who witnessed the altercation at the university in Adama, for instance, said he agrees with Mohammed’s political analysis, but is concerned that the Facebook page has become a magnet for a dizzying array of viewpoints — about religion, regional politics, and ethnic strife — that make the movement more controversial than it needs to be.

Still, Mohammed has a clear strategy in mind. When it comes to human life, he advocates nonviolence. But he encourages demonstrators to block trade routes, destroy the property of companies that are seen as operating against Oromo interests, and avoid bringing crops to market in order to raise food prices.

Might such tactics be unethical during the worst drought Ethiopia has witnessed in decades, which has left 10.2 million people in need of emergency food aid? “Morally, yes,” Mohammed said. “Strategically, no.”

Officials have no time for these “activists on the other side of the Atlantic,” said government spokesman Getachew Reda. He claimed that agitators, some of whom have backing from Eritrea, Ethiopia’s archrival, have infiltrated the ranks of the protesters and are responsible for the current violence. The government security forces, by contrast, have generally handled the situation professionally, he said.

“We may have some bad apples,” Reda said. “Otherwise, the security apparatus that we have in this country is very much oriented towards serving the interests of the public.”

Amid this war of words, normal citizens are caught in the middle. In the quiet café in Adama, the engineering student spelled out a set of remarkably prosaic demands: He would like to see more Oromo professors at the university, for instance, and a fairer allocation of resources for the region. But, he said, he stays quiet for fear of Ethiopia’s pervasive security and intelligence apparatus.

“People don’t feel free,” he said. “We are all psychologically impacted.”

After two months of violent demonstrations, the government announced that it was scrapping the master plan. It wasn’t enough. Some protesters said they didn’t believe it had really been canceled. Others were motivated by grievances that run much deeper than any development scheme, citing marginalization stretching all the way back to the late 1800s, when the Ethiopian emperor Menelik II swept in from the north to expand Ethiopia’s borders and establish the capital city in Oromo lands.

On paper, today’s federal system is meant to ensure some measure of autonomy for all of the country’s ethnic groups, including the Oromos. The ruling coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), is made up of four regional parties, including the TPLF and the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO). But the government lost some credibility in May, when the EPRDF and allied parties won every parliamentary seat in a national election. Though the OPDO holds more parliamentary seats than any other party, protesters say the party either cannot or will not challenge the dominance of the TPLF — and Oromos remain marginalized as a result.

Officials say they are trying to promote meaningful dialogue. “It is the government’s responsibility to make sure that people’s legitimate grievances are addressed properly,” Reda said. To that end, OPDO officials have convened meetings with concerned citizens across Oromia, and hundreds of low-level officials have been dismissed for corruption.

But the government has continued to lean on its powerful security apparatus, which has both enabled Ethiopia’s impressive, state-led economic development and imperiled it by bringing ethnic tensions to the fore. The ongoing protests in Oromia point to cracks in the facade, where citizens feel left out as the government pursues its uncompromising vision of modernization.

By continuing to crack down on demonstrators instead of listening to their demands, Ethiopia risks compromising the reputation for political stability that fueled its unprecedented decade of growth and foreign investment. In that way, the government may soon erode the very foundation of its own economic ambitions.

Image credit: ZACHARIAS ABUBEKER/AFP/Getty Images

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Soruma Ashale an 11 year old 5th grader at Abdisa Aga school in Najjo ( West Walaga). He was wounded by Agazi force that raided the school today March 23, 2016
Kun Soorumaa Ashaalee mucaa waggaa 11 mana barnoota Abdiisaa Aagaa kan Najjotti argamu keessatti barataa kutaa 5ffaati. Guyyaa har’aa Agaaziin dallaa mana barnootaa seenuun daree cabsitee isas akkanatti miidhan.

16 mins ·

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Ethiopia’s leaders continue to improvise a workable response to the popular uprising in Oromia state. An estimated 400 people have been killed and tens of thousands arrested in the ongoing upsurge in Oromo protests that broke out last November.

Initially, Ethiopian authorities pointed fingers at the usual scapegoats, “anti-peace elements” and armed opposition groups operating from Eritrea, Ethiopia’s archrival. As the size of the protesters swelled, officials started to admit — albeit timidly and tangentially — that the protesters’ grievances are legitimate. As the death toll rose inflaming the populace, the authorities stated that the disproportionate use of force was a mistake, an admission made to a visiting U.S. state department delegation in January.

Next, federal authorities and their surrogates tried to lay all the blame at the feet of the governing Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO). The latter, meeting in an emergency session, reversed course by canceling the implementation of the controversial Addis Ababa Master Plan that triggered the protests and promised to address the people’s grievances. After months of muddling, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, addressing the country’s rubber stamp, one-party parliament, on March 16 offered to pay compensation for victims’ families and made a vague apology for failing to heed the people’s grievances. Little has been said about the sheer lack of accountability and impunity got security forces.

On March 22, the Voice of America reported that the OPDO is purging more than 300 local government officials. And that some may soon face criminal charges. The mass purge follows the demotion in early March of two senior OPDO officials: Executive Committee member of both OPDO and EPRDF as well as Head of the Organization’s Office, Dhaba Dabale, and Zelalem Jemaneh, an Executive Committee member of both OPDO and EPRDF and Head of Natural Resource Bureau of Oromia Regional State.

The sacking of OPDO officials is not unexpected. The ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) faces unprecedented opposition from Oromos in all walks of life, including the nationalist regional leaders, police, and the local militia.

Yet Desalegn and his party want to reduce the question of good governance to whether the local government officials that citizens come in contact with to meet their public service need is corrupt or not. The fact of the matter is the entire system is riddled with corruption. And a majority of the protesters are not aggrieved by their interactions with local officials. Neither are they grieving about the quality of public service provided by local officials, poor as that is. In fact, one doesn’t need to come in direct contact with a government official to feel the influence of the state. The suffocating effects of the all-embracing one-to-five structure known asShane or Got and Gare is felt by the public as they go about their daily lives.

The master plan, which triggered the current Oromo protests, is not the handiwork of local government officials. The orders to shoot and kill protesters were not issued by local government officials. The order to detain thousands of protesters and herd them in concentration camp like detention centers is not issued by local government officials.

As speaker of the house Abbadula Gamada implied recently, local government officials have no say in the daily propaganda manufactured by state-owned media, full of highly convoluted narratives that are foreign to the lived experiences of average Oromos. Local officials were not the ones that ordered the detention of prominent opposition leaders and journalists critical of the regime.

Regional authorities have no say in tilting the balance of power between the federal government versus the states. Local officials had no say in crafting a land policy that dispossessed and displaced thousands of poor farmers from their ancestral lands.

The decision to make Ethiopia a one-party state is not made by OPDO officials. The decision to keep 99 percent of the top brass of the security forces in the hands of the Tigrayan ethnic group, which makes up a mere 6 percent of the population of Ethiopia, a country made up of many ethnic groups.

The regime is faulting those purged for failing to contain the protests, meaning for not being as heavy handed as the security forces. This flies in the face of the government’s rhetoric that the protests were legitimate. Seeing that the regime is ready to say any and all kinds of things, one is excused to conclude that the motivation to confuse people rather than create clarity.

This week Desalegn also hosted the traditional Abba Gadaa leaders — the first such encounter between traditional Oromo leaders and state leaders in modern Ethiopian history — in what appears to be a last-ditch attempt to calm tensions in the populous state. While pledging to help calm the situation, the elders pressed the PM to make amends with the Oromo, pay compensation to victims and remove federal security forces from Oromia to reduce the current insecurity and standoff.

As with hitherto mixed messaging from EPRDF officials, the ensuring purge of OPDO leaders is unlikely to quell the uprising. The reason is simple: the Oromo grievance includes but is not limited to questions over the lack of good governance, rampant unemployment, and corruption. The longstanding issue of the political, economic and cultural marginalization of the Oromo is at the core of the Oromo andEthiopian state conflict.

Neither the purges nor the rhetorical gymnastics and charm offensives by the PM can tackle the core issue of marginalization. In fact, these measures do not even scratch the surface of the problem, let alone address it meaningfully. For example, despite making up close to half of the county’s population, the Oromo account for a mere 11 percent of the federal bureaucracy.

While Oromo members form a numerical majority in the rubber stamp parliament, the Tigreans or their minions hold the key posts. During the past 25 years, Tigrean occupied the positions of Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Army Chief of Staff. When a non-Tigrean is placed at the head of a pyramid, power shifted to a Tigrean minder who ran the show behind the scene as a puppet master. For example, when Meles Zenawi first came to power, his title was President and the presidency had all the powers. When he decided to instead become Prime Minister, the presidency was rendered mere ceremonial position. The same is true with other ministries. Currently, Hailemariam, non-Tigrean, hold the premiership but, in reality, power is wielded by senior hardline Tigrean advisors.

The government claims that power is devolved to the states. The reality is such that the regional states, especially Oromia, do not have the powers of a province, let alone a sovereign state in a federation.

Economically, the Oromo sit on the most fertile lands. But land is owned by the federal state, which is ready to displace farmers in the name of investment and development. Farmers are compensated $0.80 per square mile whereas the market rate is $17,777.

Culturally, the Oromo language, the most widely spoken language in the county, is relegated to the countryside, which is fast dwindling in the face of rapid urbanization. A farmer whose farmland is gobbled up by the sprawling capital, Addis Ababa, could not even plead his case at the courts in the city in his native language, Afaan Oromo, let alone receive public service there. Reduced to being security guards, beggary, and menial labor, local Oromos will also have to forfeit their cultural identity and pride in self. Such is the fate of the Oromo in general and those born in the small towns and countryside adjoining Ethiopia’s capital.

Ending Oromos longstanding marginalization in Ethiopia is not an easy task. For starters, Ethiopian authorities must heed the protesters’ demands and release all political prisoners detained as part of the ongoing crackdown as well as previous ones. It should also set up an independent, transparent, and credible commission of inquiry into the killings of hundreds of unarmed protesters.

In the intermediate period, EPRDF needs to address the issue of its legitimacy to rule. Six months after winning 100 percent of the seats in parliament, the Oromo public had dealt the party a total rejection. Holding new elections under a level playing field at least in Oromia is another measure that could reduce tensions. The EPRDF regime must also elevate the Oromo language as a working language of the federal government at par with Amharic.

As a long-term measure, the ruling party needs to open up the political system so that the Oromo, as well as other people in Ethiopia, could govern themselves through a representative and accountable government.

Source -OPride.com

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ESAT Special News – More than 300 Amharas arrested in Dansha

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ESAT Breaking News – Dr. Merera Gudina has been blocked from traveling to the United States to participate the upcoming Vision Ethiopia’s conference

ESAT Breaking News Mar 24, 2016

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Seife Nebelbal Radio, March 25, 2016 (Amharic)

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The second-in-command of so-called Islamic State (IS) has been killed in a US operation in Syria, US media report.

Defence officials told NBC News that Abdul Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, an Iraqi who was also known as Hajji Iman, was killed during a raid this month.

The second-in-command of so-called Islamic State (IS) has been killed in a US operation in Syria, US media report.

Abdul Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, an Iraqi also known as Hajji Iman, died during a raid by US special forces on Thursday, officials told NBC News.

US Defence Secretary Ash Carter was expected to confirm the jihadist’s death and provide details of the raid in a statement at 14:30 GMT.

The US authorities had offered a reward of $7m (£5m) for Qaduli.

Defence officials told NBC correspondent Richard Engel that US special operations forces landed in helicopters in Syria early on Thursday morning.

They lay in wait as Qaduli drove past them in a car, and were able to stop it.

There was an attempt to capture Qaduli alive, but the situation escalated and the militant and three other people in the vehicle were killed, the officials said.

Qaduli, an ethnic Turkmen, was born in 1957 or 1959 in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, which has been controlled by IS since 2014.

He joined al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) – a precursor of IS – in 2004 under the leadership of the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, serving as his deputy and the local leader in Mosul, according to the US.

After his release from an Iraqi prison in early 2012, he joined IS forces in Syria.

Last year, some sources identified Qaduli as “Abu Alaa al-Afari”, who was said to have taken temporary charge of IS after its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was allegedly injured in an air strike.

Mr Carter will also confirm on Friday the death of the “minister of war” of IS earlier this month, according to the Daily Beast.

Tarkhan Batirashvili, a Georgian known as Omar Shishani, was the target of a US air strike in north-eastern Syria on 4 March, US officials say.

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Swedish television channel (TV4) exposed H&M’s cotton sourcing from Al Amoudi Ethiopia Is H&M turning a blind eye to land grabs in Ethiopia? TV4 does an investigation into H&M’s cotton sourcing from Ethiopia and discovers the disturbing truth. The corrupt businessman Sheik exposed in this investigation. watch the following video for the full documentation.

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By Jim Muir

BBC News

Image copyrightAlamy

Abu Anis only realised something unusual was happening when he heard the sound of explosions coming from the old city on the western bank of the Tigris as it runs through Mosul.

“I phoned some friends over there, and they said armed groups had taken over, some of them foreign, some Iraqis,” the computer technician said. “The gunmen told them, ‘We’ve come to get rid of the Iraqi army, and to help you.'”

The following day, the attackers crossed the river and took the other half of the city. The Iraqi army and police, who vastly outnumbered their assailants, broke and fled, officers first, many of the soldiers stripping off their uniforms as they joined a flood of panicked civilians.

It was 10 June 2014, and Iraq’s second biggest city, with a population of around two million, had just fallen to the militants of the group then calling itself Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham/the Levant (Isis or Isil).

Four days earlier, black banners streaming, a few hundred of the Sunni militants had crossed the desert border in a cavalcade from their bases in eastern Syria and met little resistance as they moved towards their biggest prize.

Rich dividends were immediate. The Iraqi army, rebuilt, trained and equipped by the Americans since the US-led invasion of 2003, abandoned large quantities of armoured vehicles and advanced weaponry, eagerly seized by the militants. They also reportedly grabbed something like $500m from the Central Bank’s Mosul branch.

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How rich is IS?

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Despite territorial losses, IS survives, thanks in no small part to its status as “the best-funded terrorist organisation” in history. While most people decry the validity inferred from the name of IS as a “state”, the group’s financing is certainly more reminiscent of a state than that of organisations such as al-Qaeda that relied heavily on donations to fund their operations.

Islamic State: The struggle to stay rich

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“At the beginning, they behaved well,” said Abu Anis. “They took down all the barricades the army had put up between quarters. People liked that. On their checkpoints they were friendly and helpful – ‘Anything you need, we’re here for you.'”

The Mosul honeymoon was to last a few weeks. But just down the road, terrible things were already happening.

As the Iraqi army collapsed throughout the north, the militants moved swiftly down the Tigris river valley. Towns and villages fell like skittles. Within a day they had captured the town of Baiji and its huge oil refinery, and moved on swiftly to seize Saddam Hussein’s old hometown, Tikrit, a Sunni hotbed.

Just outside Tikrit is a big military base, taken over by the Americans in 2003 and renamed Camp Speicher after the first US casualty in the 1991 “Desert Storm” Gulf war against Iraq, a pilot called Scott Speicher, shot down over al-Anbar province in the west.

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Camp Speicher, by now full of Iraqi military recruits, was surrounded by the Isis militants and surrendered. The thousands of captives were sorted, the Shia were weeded out, bound, and trucked away to be systematically shot dead in prepared trenches. Around 1,700 are believed to have been massacred in cold blood. The mass graves are still being exhumed.

Far from trying to cover up the atrocity, Isis revelled in it, posting on the internet videos and pictures showing the Shia prisoners being taken away and shot by the black-clad militants.

In terms of exultant cruelty and brutality, worse was not long in coming.

After a pause of just two months, Isis – now rebranded as “Islamic State” (IS) – erupted again, taking over large areas of northern Iraq controlled by the Kurds.

That included the town of Sinjar, mainly populated by the Yazidis, an ancient religious minority regarded by IS as heretics.

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Hundreds of Yazidi men who failed to escape were simply killed. Women and children were separated and taken away as war booty, to be sold and bartered as chattels, and used as sex slaves. Thousands are still missing, enduring that fate.

Deliberately shocking, bloodthirsty exhibitionism reached a climax towards the end of the same month, August 2014.

IS issued a video showing its notorious, London-accented and now late executioner Mohammed Emwazi (sardonically nicknamed “Jihadi John” by former captives) gruesomely beheading American journalist James Foley.

In the following weeks, more American and British journalists and aid workers – Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning, and Peter Kassig (who had converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdul Rahman) – appeared being slaughtered in similar, slickly produced videos, replete with propaganda statements and dire warnings.

In the space of a few months, IS had blasted its way from obscurity on to the centre of the world stage. Almost overnight, it became a household word.

Seven-and-a-half thousand miles (12,000km) away, then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott summed up the breathtaking novelty of the horror. It was, he said “medieval barbarism, perpetrated and spread with the most modern of technology”.

IS had arrived, and the world was taking notice. But the men in black did not appear out of the blue. They had been a long time coming.

The theology of murder

The ideological or religious roots of IS and like-minded groups go deep into history, almost to the beginning of Islam itself in the 7th Century AD.

Like Christianity six centuries before it, and Judaism some eight centuries before that, Islam was born into the harsh, tribal world of the Middle East.

“The original texts, the Old Testament and the Koran, reflected primitive tribal Jewish and Arab societies, and the codes they set forth were severe,” writes the historian and author William Polk.

“They aimed, in the Old Testament, at preserving and enhancing tribal cohesion and power and, in the Koran, at destroying the vestiges of pagan belief and practice. Neither early Judaism nor Islam allowed deviation. Both were authoritarian theocracies.”

As history moved on, Islam spread over a vast region, encountering and adjusting to numerous other societies, faiths and cultures. Inevitably in practice it mutated in different ways, often becoming more pragmatic and indulgent, often given second place to the demands of power and politics and temporal rulers.

For hardline Muslim traditionalists this amounted to deviationism, and from early on, there was a clash of ideas in which those arguing for a strict return to the “purity” of the early days of Islam often paid a price.

The eminent scholar Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), who founded one of the main schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, was jailed and once flogged unconscious in a dispute with the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. Nearly five centuries later, another supreme theologian of the same strict orthodox school, Ibn Taymiyya, died in prison in Damascus.

These two men are seen as the spiritual forefathers of later thinkers and movements which became known as “salafist”, advocating a return to the ways of the first Muslim ancestors, the salaf al-salih (righteous ancestors).

They inspired a later figure whose thinking and writings were to have a huge and continuing impact on the region and on the salafist movement, one form of which, Wahhabism, took his name.

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was born in 1703 in a small village in the Nejd region in the middle of the Arabian peninsula.

A devout Islamic scholar, he espoused and developed the most puritanical and strict version of what he saw as the original faith, and sought to spread it by entering pacts with the holders of political and military power.

In an early foray in that direction, his first action was to destroy the tomb of Zayd ibn al-Khattab, one of the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad, on the grounds that by the austere doctrine of salafist theology, the veneration of tombs constitutes shirk, the revering of something or someone other than Allah.

But it was in 1744 that Abd al-Wahhab made his crucial alliance with the local ruler, Muhammad ibn Saud. It was a pact whereby Wahhabism provided the spiritual or ideological dimension for Saudi political and military expansion, to the benefit of both.

Passing through several mutations, that dual alliance took over most of the peninsula and has endured to this day, with the House of Saud ruling in sometimes uneasy concert with an ultra-conservative Wahhabi religious establishment.

The entrenchment of Wahhabi salafism in Saudi Arabia – and the billions of petrodollars to which it gained access – provided one of the wellsprings for jihadist militancy in the region in modern times. Jihad means struggle on the path of Allah, which can mean many kinds of personal struggle, but more often is taken to mean waging holy war.

But the man most widely credited, or blamed, for bringing salafism into the 20th Century was the Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb. He provided a direct bridge from the thought and heritage of Abd al-Wahhab and his predecessors to a new generation of jihadist militants, leading up to al-Qaeda and all that was to follow.

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Born in a small village in Upper Egypt in 1906, Sayyid Qutb found himself at odds with the way Islam was being taught and managed around him. Far from converting him to the ways of the West, a two-year study period in the US in the late 1940s left him disgusted at what he judged unbridled godless materialism and debauchery, and his fundamentalist Islamic outlook was honed harder.

Back in Egypt, he developed the view that the West was imposing its control directly or indirectly over the region in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse after World War One, with the collaboration of local rulers who might claim to be Muslims, but who had in fact deviated so far from the right path that they should no longer be considered such.

For Qutb, offensive jihad against both the West and its local agents was the only way for the Muslim world to redeem itself. In essence, this was a kind of takfir – branding another Muslim an apostate or kafir (infidel), making it justified and even obligatory and meritorious to kill him.

Although he was a theorist and intellectual rather than an active jihadist, Qutb was judged dangerously subversive by the Egyptian authorities. He was hanged in 1966 on charges of involvement in a Muslim Brotherhood plot to assassinate the nationalist President, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Qutb was before his time, but his ideas lived on in the 24 books he wrote, which have been read by tens of millions, and in the personal contact he had with the circles of people like Ayman al-Zawahiri, another Egyptian who is the current al-Qaeda leader.

Another intimate of the al-Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden said: “Qutb was the one who most affected our generation.” He has also been described as “the source of all jihadist thought”, and “the philosopher of the Islamic revolution”.

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More than 35 years after he was hanged, the official commission of inquiry into al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 concluded: “Bin Laden shares Qutb’s stark view, permitting him and his followers to rationalise even unprovoked mass murder as righteous defence of an embattled faith.”

And his influence lingers on today. Summing up the roots of IS and its predecessors, the Iraqi expert on Islamist movements Hisham al-Hashemi said: “They are founded on two things: a takfiri faith based on the writings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and as methodology, the way of Sayyid Qutb.”

The theology of militant jihadism was in place. But to flourish, it needed two things – a battlefield, and strategists to shape the battle.

Afghanistan was to provide the opportunity for both.

Rise of al-Qaeda

The Soviet invasion in 1979, and the 10 years of occupation that followed, provided a magnet for would-be jihadists from around the Arab world. Some 35,000 of them flocked to Afghanistan during that period, to join the jihad and help the mainly Islamist Afghan mujahedeen guerrillas turn the country into Russia’s Vietnam.

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There is little evidence that the “Afghan Arabs”, as they became known, played a pivotal combat role in driving the Soviets out. But they made a major contribution in setting up support networks in Pakistan, channelling funds from Saudi Arabia and other donors, and funding schools and militant training camps. It was a fantastic opportunity for networking and forging enduring relationships as well as tasting jihad first hand.

Ironically, they found themselves on the same team as the Americans. The CIA’s Operation Cyclone channelled hundreds of millions of dollars through Pakistan to militant Afghan mujahedeen leaders such as Golbuddin Hekmatyar, who associated closely with the Arab jihadists.

It was in Afghanistan that virtually all the major figures in the new jihadist world cut their teeth. They helped shape events there in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a period that saw the emergence of al-Qaeda as a vehicle for a wider global jihad, and Afghanistan provided a base for it.

By the time the Taliban took over in 1996, they were virtually in partnership with Osama Bin Laden and his men, and it was from there that al-Qaeda launched its fateful 9/11 attack in 2001.

The formative Afghan experience provided both the combat-hardened salafist jihadist leaders and the strategists who were to play an instrumental role in the emergence of the IS of today.

Most significant was the Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who more than anybody else ended up being the direct parent of IS in almost every way.

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A high-school dropout whose prison career began with a sentence for drug and sexual offences, Zarqawi found religion after being sent to classes at a mosque in the Jordanian capital, Amman. He arrived in Pakistan to join jihad in Afghanistan just in time to see the Soviets withdraw in 1989, but stayed on to work with jihadists.

After a stint back in Jordan where he received a 15-year jail sentence on terrorist charges but was later released in a general amnesty, Zarqawi finally met Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1999. By all accounts the two al-Qaeda leaders did not take to him. They found him brash and headstrong, and they did not like the many tattoos from his previous life that he had not been able to erase.

But he was charismatic and dynamic, and although he did not join al-Qaeda, they eventually put him in charge of a training camp in Herat, western Afghanistan. It was here that he worked with an ideologue whose radical writings became the scriptures governing subsequent salafist blood-letting: Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir.

“The brutality of beheading is intended, even delightful to God and His Prophet,” wrote Muhajir in his book The Theology of Jihad, more generally referred to as the Theology of Bloodshed. His writings provided religious cover for the most brutal excesses, and also for the killing of Shia as infidels, and their Sunni collaborators as apostates.

The other book that has been seen as the virtual manual – even the Mein Kampf – for IS and its forebears is The Management of Savagery, by Abu Bakr Naji, which appeared on the internet in 2004.

Image copyrightCreative commons

“We need to massacre and to do just as has been done to Banu Qurayza, so we must adopt a ruthless policy in which hostages are brutally and graphically murdered unless our demands are met,” Naji wrote. He was referring to a Jewish tribe in seventh-century Arabia which reportedly met the same fate at the hands of early Muslims as the Yazidis of Sinjar did nearly 14 centuries later: the men were slaughtered, the women and children enslaved.

Naji’s sanctioning of exemplary brutality was part of a much wider strategy to prepare the way for an Islamic caliphate. Based partly on the lessons of Afghanistan, his book is a detailed blueprint for provoking the west into interventions which would further rally the Muslims to jihad, leading to the ultimate collapse of the enemy.

The scenario is not so fanciful if you consider that the Soviet Union went to pieces barely two years after its withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Naji is reported to have been killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan’s Waziristan province in 2008.

Iraq fiasco

The fallout from the 9/11 attacks changed things radically for the jihadists in late 2001. The US and allies bombed and invaded Afghanistan, ousting the Taliban, and launching a wider “War on Terror” against al-Qaeda.

Bin Laden went underground, and Zarqawi and others fled. The dispersing militants, fired up, badly needed another battlefield on which to provoke and confront their Western enemies.

Luck was on their side. The Americans and their allies were not long in providing it.

Their invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was, it turned out, entirely unjustified on its own chosen grounds – Saddam Hussein’s alleged production of weapons of mass destruction, and his supposed support for international terrorists, neither of which was true.

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By breaking up every state and security structure and sending thousands of disgruntled Sunni soldiers and officials home, they created precisely the state of “savagery”, or violent chaos, that Abu Bakr Naji envisaged for the jihadists to thrive in.

Iraq was on the way to becoming what US officials are now calling the “parent tumour” of the IS presence in the region.

Under Saddam’s tightly-controlled Baath Party regime, the Sunnis enjoyed pride of place over the majority Shia, who have strong ties with their co-religionists across the border in Iran.

The US-led intervention disempowered the Sunnis, creating massive resentment and providing fertile ground for the outside salafist jihadists to take root in.

They were not long in spotting their constituency. Abu Musab Zarqawi moved in, and within a matter of months was organising deadly, brutal and provocative attacks aimed both at Western targets and at the majority Shia community.

Doctrinal differences between the two sects go back to disputes over the succession to the Prophet Muhammad in the early decades of Islam, but conflict between them is generally based on community, history and sectarian politics rather than religion as such.

Setting himself up with a new group called Tawhid wa al-Jihad (Tawhid means declaring the uniqueness of Allah), Zarqawi immediately forged a pragmatic operational alliance with underground cells of the remnants of Saddam’s regime, providing the two main intertwined strands of the Sunni-based insurgency: militant Jihadism, and Iraqi Sunni nationalism.

His group claimed responsibility for several deadly attacks in August 2003 that set the pattern for much of what was to come: a suicide truck bomb explosion at the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed the envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 20 of his staff, and a suicide car bomb blast in Najaf which killed the influential Shia ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim and 80 of his followers. The bombers were salafist jihadists, but logistics were reportedly provided by underground Baathists.

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The following year, Zarqawi himself was believed by the CIA to be the masked killer shown in a video beheading an American hostage, Nicholas Berg, in revenge for the Abu Ghraib prison abuses of Iraqi detainees by members of the US military.

As the battle with the Americans and the new Shia-dominated Iraqi government intensified, Zarqawi finally took the oath of loyalty to Bin Laden, and his group became the official al-Qaeda branch in Iraq.

But they were never really on the same page. Zarqawi’s provocative attacks on Shia mosques and markets, triggering sectarian carnage, and his penchant for publicising graphic brutality, were all in line with the radical teachings he had imbibed. But they drew rebukes from the al-Qaeda leadership, concerned at the impact on Muslim opinion.

Zarqawi paid little heed. His strain of harsh radicalism passed to his successors after he was killed by a US air strike in June 2006 on his hideout north of Baghdad. He was easily identified by the tattoos he had never managed to get rid of.

The direct predecessor of IS emerged just a few months later, with the announcement of the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) as an umbrella bringing the al-Qaeda branch together with other insurgent factions.

But tough times lay ahead. In January 2007, the Americans began “surging” their own troops in Iraq from 132,000 to a peak of 168,000, adopting a much more hands-on approach in mentoring the rebuilt Iraqi army. At the same time, they enticed Sunni tribes in western al-Anbar province to stop supporting the jihadists and join the US-led Coalition-Iraqi government drive to quell the insurgency, which many did, on promises that they would be given jobs and control over their own security.

By the time both the new ISI and al-Qaeda leaders were killed in a US-Iraqi army raid on their hideout in April 2010, the insurgency was at its lowest ebb, pushed back into remote corners of Sunni Iraq.

They were both replaced by one man, about whom very little was publicly known at the time, and not much more since: Ibrahim Awad al-Badri, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Six eventful years later, he would be proclaimed Caliph Ibrahim, Commander of the Faithful and leader of the newly declared “Islamic State”.

Territorial takeover

Baghdadi’s career is so shrouded in mist that there are very few elements of it that can be regarded as fact. By all accounts he was born near Samarra, north of Baghdad, so the epithet “Baghdadi” seems to have been adopted to give him a more national image, while “Abu Bakr” evokes the first successor to (and father-in-law of) Prophet Muhammad.

Like the original Abu Bakr, Baghdadi is also reputed to come from the Prophet’s Quraysh clan. That, and his youth – born in 1971 – may have been factors in his selection as leader.

All accounts of his early life agree that he was a quiet, scholarly and devout student of Islam, taking a doctorate at the Islamic University of Baghdad. Some even say he was shy, and a bit of a loner, living for 10 years in a room beside a small Sunni mosque in western Baghdad.

The word “charismatic” has never been attached to him.

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Who is the leader of IS?

As a youth, Baghdadi had a passion for Koranic recitation and was meticulous in his observance of religious law. His family nicknamed him The Believer because he would chastise his relatives for failing to live up to his stringent standards.

Who is Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?

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But by the time of the US-led invasion in 2003, he appears to have become involved with a militant Sunni group, heading its sharia (Islamic law) committee. American troops detained him, and he was reportedly held in the detention centre at Camp Bucca in the south for most of 2004.

Camp Bucca (named after a fireman who died in the 9/11 attacks) housed up to 20,000 inmates and became a university from which many IS and other militant leaders graduated. It gave them an unrivalled opportunity to imbibe and spread radical ideologies and sabotage skills and develop important contacts and networks, all in complete safety, under the noses and protection of their enemies.

Baghdadi would also certainly have met in Camp Bucca many of the ex-Baathist military commanders with whom he was to form such a deadly partnership.

The low-profile, self-effacing Baghdadi rang no alarm bells with the Americans. They released him, having decided he was low-risk.

Image copyrightGetty Images

But he went on to work his way steadily up through the insurgent hierarchy, virtually unknown to the Iraqi public.

By the time Baghdadi took over in 2010, the curtains seemed to be coming down for the jihadists in the Iraqi field of “savagery”.

But another one miraculously opened up for them across the border in neighbouring Syria at just the right moment. In the spring of 2011, the outbreak of civil war there offered a promising new arena of struggle and expansion. The majority Sunnis were in revolt against the oppressive regime of Bashar al-Assad, dominated by his Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shia Islam.

Baghdadi sent his men in. By December 2011, deadly car bombs were exploding in Damascus which turned out to be the work of the then shadowy al-Nusra Front. It announced itself as an al-Qaeda affiliate the following month. It was headed by a Syrian jihadist, Abu Mohammed al-Julani. He had been sent by Baghdadi, but had his own ideas.

Jostling with a huge array of competing rebel groups in Syria, al-Nusra won considerable support on the ground because of its fearless and effective fighting skills, and the flow of funds and foreign fighters that support from al-Qaeda stimulated. It was relatively moderate in its salafist approach, and cultivated local relationships.

Al-Nusra was slipping out of Baghdadi’s control, and he didn’t like it. In April 2013, he tried to rein it back, announcing that al-Nusra was under his command in a new Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (Syria or the Levant). Isis, or Isil, was born.

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What’s in a name?

Image copyrightAlamy

During the short and turbulent period over which it has imposed itself as a major news brand, so-called Islamic State has confused the world with a series of name changes reflecting its mutations and changing aspirations, leaving a situation where there is no universal agreement on how to refer to it.

• After emerging in Iraq as the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), its spread to Syria prompted the addition of “and al-Sham”, a word that can mean Damascus, Syria, or the wider Levant
• Many chose to use the easy acronym Isis, with the “S” standing either for Syria or al-Sham, though the US administration and others opted for Isil (the “l” standing for “Levant”). Both are still widely used though technically outdated
• In Arabic the same acronym can come out as Daash, sometimes spelled Daesh in English; it has passed into common usage among many Arabs, but is disliked by the organisation itself, which sees it as disrespectful of the “state”; although Daash has no meaning in Arabic, it also has an unpleasant sound to it, which may be why American and Western officialdom often use it
• After further expansion of territory and ambitions, the movement dropped geographical specificity and called itself simply “the Islamic State”; Much of the world was politically reluctant simply to call it that, for fear of implying legitimacy
• The BBC and others have generally opted for calling it the “self-styled” or “so-called” Islamic State on first reference, and IS thereafter

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But Julani rebelled, and renewed his oath of loyalty to al-Qaeda’s global leadership, now under Ayman al-Zawahiri following Bin Laden’s death in 2011. Zawahiri ordered Baghdadi to go back to being just the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) and leave al-Nusra as the al-Qaeda Syria franchise.

It was Baghdadi’s turn to ignore orders from head office.

Before 2013 was out, Isis and al-Nusra were at each other’s throats. Hundreds were killed in vicious internecine clashes which ended with Isis being driven out of most of north-west Syria by al-Nusra and allied Syrian rebel factions. But Isis took over Raqqa, a provincial capital in the north-east, and made it its capital. Many of the foreign jihadists who had joined al-Nusra also went over to Isis, seeing it as tougher and more radical. In early 2014, al-Qaeda formally disowned Isis.

Isis had shaken off the parental shackles. But it had lost a lot of ground, and was bottled up. One of its main slogans, Remaining and Expanding, risked becoming empty. So where next?

Fortune smiled once more. Back in Iraq, conditions had again become ripe for the jihadists. The Americans had gone, since the end of 2011. Sunni areas were again aflame and in revolt, enraged by the sectarian policies of the Shia Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki. Sunnis felt marginalised, oppressed and angry.

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When Isis decided to move, it was pushing at an open door. In fact, it had never really left Iraq, just gone into the woodwork. As it swept through Sunni towns, cities and villages with bewildering speed in June 2014, sleeper cells of salafist jihadists and ex-Saddamist militants and other sympathisers broke cover and joined the takeover.

With the capture of Mosul, Isis morphed swiftly into a new mode of being, like a rocket jettisoning its carrier. No longer just a shadowy terrorist group, it was suddenly a jihadist army not only threatening the Iraqi state, but challenging the entire world.

The change was signalled on 29 June by the proclamation of the “Islamic State”, replacing all previous incarnations, and the establishment of the “caliphate”. A few days later, the newly anointed Caliph Ibrahim, aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, made a surprise appearance in Mosul in the pulpit of the historic Grand Mosque of Nour al-Din al-Zangi, heavily laden with anti-Crusader associations. He called on the world’s Muslims to rally behind him.

By declaring a caliphate and adopting the generic “Islamic State” title, the organisation was clearly setting its sights far beyond Syria and Iraq. It was going global.

Announcing a caliphate has huge significance and resonance within Islam. While it remains the ideal, Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders had always shied away from it, for fear of failure. Now Baghdadi was trumping the parent organisation, setting IS up in direct competition with it for the leadership of global jihadism.

A caliphate (khilafa) is the rule or rein of a caliph (khalifa), a word which simply means a successor – primarily of the Prophet Muhammad. Under the first four caliphs who followed after he died in 632, the Islamic Caliphate burst out of Arabia and extended through modern-day Iran to the east, into Libya to the west, and to the Caucasus in the north.

The Umayyad caliphate which followed, based in Damascus, took over almost all of the lands that IS would like to control, including Spain. The Baghdad-based Abbasid caliphate took over in 750 and saw a flowering of science and culture, but found it hard to hold it all together, and Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols in 1258.

Emerging from that, the Ottoman Empire, based in Constantinople (Istanbul), stretched almost to Vienna at its peak, and was also a caliphate, though the distinction with empire was often blurred. The caliphate was finally abolished by Ataturk in 1924.

So when Baghdadi was declared Caliph of the Islamic State, it was an act of extraordinary ambition. He was claiming no less than the mantle of the Prophet, and of his followers who carried Islam into vast new realms of conquest and expansion.

For most Islamic scholars and authorities, not to mention Arab and Muslim leaders, such claims from the chief of one violent extremist faction had no legitimacy at all, and there was no great rush to embrace the new caliphate. But the millennial echoes it evoked did strike a chord with some Islamic romantics – and with some like-minded radical groups abroad.

Four months after the proclamation, a group of militants in Libya became the first to join up by pledging allegiance to Baghdadi, followed a month later by the Ansar Beit al-Maqdis jihadist faction in Egypt’s Sinai. IS’s tentacles spread deeper into Africa in March 2015 when Boko Haram in Nigeria took the oath of loyalty. Within a year, IS had branches or affiliates in 11 countries, though it held territory in only five, including Iraq and Syria.

It was in those two core countries that Baghdadi and his followers started implementing their state project on the ground, applying their own harsh vision of Islamic rule.

To the outside world, deprived of direct access to the areas controlled by IS, one of the most obvious and shocking aspects of this was their systematic destruction of ancient cultural and archaeological heritage sites and artefacts.

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Some of the region’s best-known and most-visited sites were devastated, including themagnificent temples of Bel and Baalshamin at Palmyra in Syria, and the Assyrian cities of Hatra and Nimrud in Iraq.

It wasn’t just famous archaeological sites that came under attack. Christian churches and ancient monasteries, Shia mosques and shrines, and anything depicting figures of any sort were destroyed, and embellishments removed even from Sunni mosques. Barely a month after taking over Mosul, IS demolition squads levelled the 13th Century shrine of the Imam Awn al-Din, which had survived the Mongol invasion.

All of this was absolutely in line with IS’s puritanical vision of Islam, under which any pictorial representation or shrine is revering something other than Allah, and any non-Muslim structures are monuments of idolatry. Even Saudi kings and princes to this day are buried without coffins in unmarked graves.

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By posting videos of many of these acts which the rest of the world saw as criminal cultural vandalism, IS also undoubtedly intended to shock. In that sense, it was the cultural equivalent of beheading aid workers.

And there was a more practical and profitable side to the onslaught on cultural heritage. In highly organised manner, IS’s Treasury Department issues printed permits to loot archaeological sites, and takes a percentage of the proceeds.

That is just the tip of the iceberg of a complex structure of governance and control put in place as IS gradually settled in to its conquests, penetrating into every aspect of people’s lives in exactly the same way as Saddam Hussein’s intelligence apparatus had done.

Captured documents published by Der Spiegel last year give some idea of the role of ex-Baathist regime men in setting up and running IS in a highly structured and organised way, with much emphasis on intelligence and security.

Residents of Sunni strongholds like Mosul and Falluja in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria, found that IS operatives already knew almost everything about everybody when they moved in and took over in 2014.

At checkpoints, ID cards were checked against databases on laptops, obtained from government ration or employee registers. Former members of the security forces had to go to specific mosques to “repent”, hand over their weapons and receive a discharge paper.

“At first, all they did was change the preachers in the mosques to people with their own views,” said a Mosul resident who fled a year later.

“But then they began to crack down. Women who had been able to go bare-headed now had to cover up, first with the headscarf and then with the full face-veil. Men have to grow beards and wear short-legged trousers. Cigarettes, hubble-bubble, music and cafes were banned, then satellite TV and mobile phones. Morals police [hisba] vehicles would cruise round, looking for offenders.”

A Falluja resident recounted the story of a taxi-driver who had picked up a middle-aged woman not wearing a headscarf. They were stopped at an IS checkpoint, the woman given a veil and allowed to go, while the driver was sent to an Islamic court, and sentenced to two months’ detention and to memorise a portion of the Koran. If you fail to memorise, the sentence is repeated.

“They have courts with judges, officials, records and files, and there are fixed penalties for each crime, it’s not random,” said the Falluja resident. “Adulterers are stoned to death. Thieves have their hands cut off. Gays are executed by being thrown off high buildings. Informers are shot dead, Shia militia prisoners are beheaded.”

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Severed heads on park fences: A diary of life under IS

An activist based in Raqqa from a group called Al-Sharqiya 24 has been keeping a diary of what life is like under Islamic State group rule.

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There are IS departments that carry the organisation’s grip into every corner of life, including finance, agriculture, education, transport, health, welfare and utilities.

School curricula were overhauled in line with IS precepts, with history rewritten, all images being removed from schoolbooks and English taken off the menu.

“One thing you can say is this,” said the Mosul resident. “There is absolutely no corruption, no wasta (knowing the right people and pulling strings). They are totally convinced they are on the right track.”

One recent story tells a lot about IS and its ways.

As Iraqi security forces were pressing forward in areas around Ramadi earlier this year, civilians were fleeing the battle – and IS fighters, losing the day, were trying to sneak out too.

Two women, running from the combat zone, approached a police checkpoint.

As they were being waved through to safety, one of the women suddenly turned to the police, pointed at the other, and said : “This is not a woman. He’s an IS emir [commander].”

The police investigated, and it was true. The other woman was a man, who had shaved, and put on makeup and women’s clothes. He turned out to be top of the list of wanted local IS commanders.

“When IS arrived, he killed my husband, who was a policeman, raped me, and then took me as his wife,” the woman told the police.

“I put up with him all this time, waiting to avenge my husband and my honour,” she said. “I tricked him into shaving and putting on makeup, then denounced him to the police.”

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What is life like for women under IS?

“Nour” is a woman from Raqqa, the so-called Islamic State’s (IS) capital inside Syria. She managed to escape the city and is now a refugee in Europe, where she met up with the BBC.

This story is based on her experiences and those of her two sisters, who are still inside the IS-held city.

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Taking on the world

Having taken over vast swathes of territory in Iraq with their lightning offensive in June 2014, the militants might have been expected to calm down and consolidate their gains.

But, like a shark that has to keep moving or else it will die, IS barely paused before initiating a new spiral of provocation and reprisals that was predictably to draw it into active conflict with almost all the major world powers.

Already, the June offensive had threatened the approaches to Baghdad, prompting the Americans to start bringing in hundreds of military advisers and trainers to see how to help the struggling Iraqi army.

Just two months later, the attack on Kurdish areas in the north triggered US air strikes in defence of the Kurdistan capital, Irbil, and then to help stave off the threat of genocide to the Yazidis. Fourteen other nations were to join the air campaign.

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Ten days later, IS beheaded James Foley and the others followed, in line with the doctrine of exemplary brutality as punishment, deterrent and provocation. The most shocking was to come some months later, with the burning alive of the downed Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh. Shock intended.

The US-led bombing campaign was extended to Syria in September 2014 after IS besieged the Kurdish-held town of Kobane on the Turkish border. Coalition air strikes turned the tide there. IS lost hundreds of fighters killed at Kobane and elsewhere. More revenge was called for. IS turned abroad.

From the declaration of the caliphate until early 2016, some 70 terrorist attacks were either carried out or inspired by IS in 20 countries around the globe, from California to Sydney,with an estimated 1,200 victims killed. The attacks carried the same message of punishment, deterrence and provocation as the hostage beheadings, while also demonstrating IS’s global reach.

At the same time, they carried through the militants’ doctrine of distracting the enemy by setting fires in different locations and making him squander resources on security. For IS, “the enemy” is everybody who does not embrace it. The world is divided into Dawlat al-Islam, the State of Islam, and Dawlat al-Kufr, the State of Unbelief.

The most consequential of these atrocities were the downing of a Russian airliner over Sinai on 31 October and the Paris attacks on 13 November, provoking both Russia and France to intensify air strikes on IS targets in Syria.

Had IS gone mad? It seemed determined to take on the whole world. It was goading and confronting the Americans, the Russians, and a long list of others. By its own count, it had a mere 40,000 fighters at its command (other estimates go as low as half that).

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Could it really challenge the global powers and hope to survive? Or can President Barack Obama fulfil his pledge to “degrade and ultimately destroy” IS?

Final showdown

If there seems to be something apocalyptic about IS’s “bring it on” defiance, that’s because there is.

When the organisation first brought out its online magazine – a major showcase and recruitment tool – just a month after the “caliphate” was declared, it was not by chance that it was named Dabiq.

A small town north of Aleppo in Syria, Dabiq is mentioned in a hadith (a reported saying of the Prophet Muhammad) in connection with Armageddon. In IS mythology, it is the scene where a cataclysmic showdown will take place between the Muslims and the infidels, leading to the end of days. Each issue of Dabiq begins with a quote from Abu Musab Zarqawi: “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify – by Allah’s permission – until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.”

The prospect of taking part in that final glorious climax, achieving martyrdom on the path of Allah and an assured place in paradise, is one of the thoughts inspiring those heeding the IS call to jihad.

That could help explain why the organisation seems to enjoy an endless supply of recruits willing to blow themselves to pieces in suicide attacks, which it calls “martyrdom-seeking operations” (suicide is forbidden in Islam). Hundreds have died in this way, and they happen virtually daily.

It’s one of the elements that makes IS a formidable fighting force that will be hard to destroy even in strictly military terms.

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The Baathist legacy at the core of IS

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IS is in many respects a project of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s outlawed Baath party, but now with a different ideology. Former agents or officers of Saddam Hussein’s regime dominate its leadership… They represent a battle-hardened and state-educated core that would likely endure (as they have done through US occupation and a decade of war) even if the organisation’s middle and lower cadres are decimated.

Is Islamic State invincible?

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The head of security and intelligence for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, Masrour Barzani, tells the story of a frustrated would-be suicide bomber who screamed at his captors: “I was just ten minutes away from being united with the Prophet Muhammad!”

“They think they’re winners regardless of whether they kill you or they get killed,” says Barzani. “If they kill you, they win a battle. If they get killed, they go to heaven. With people like this, it’s very difficult to deter them from coming at you. So really the only way to defeat them is to eliminate them.”

Probably for the first time in military history since the Japanese kamikaze squadrons of World War Two, suicide bombers are used by IS not only for occasional terrorist spectaculars, but as a standard and common battlefield tactic.

Virtually all IS attacks begin with one or several suicide bombers driving explosives-rigged cars or trucks at the target, softening it up for combat squads to go in. So much so that the “martyrdom-seekers” have been called the organisation’s “air force”, since they serve a similar purpose.

Formidable though that is, IS as a fighting force is much more than a bunch of wild-eyed fanatics eager to blow themselves up. For that, they have Saddam Hussein to thank.

“The core of IS are former Saddam-era army and intelligence officers, particularly from the Republican Guard,” said an international intelligence official. “They are very good at moving their people around, resupply and so on, they’re actually much more effective and efficient than the Iraqi army are. That’s the hand of former military staff officers who know their business.”

“They are very professional,” adds Masrour Barzani. “They use artillery, armoured vehicles, heavy machinery etc, and they are using it very well. They have officers who know conventional war and how to plan, how to attack, how to defend. They really are operating on the level of a very organised conventional force. Otherwise they’d be no more than a terrorist organisation.”

The partnership with the ex-Baathists, going back to Zarqawi’s early days in Iraq, is clearly a vital component in IS success.

But that does not mean its fighters are invincible on the battlefield. The Kurds in north-east Syria were fighting IS off with no outside help for a year before anybody noticed. And even now, IS makes what would conventionally be seen as costly mistakes.

In December 2015, they lost several hundred fighters in one abortive attack east of Mosul alone, and probably 2,500 altogether that month. In total some 15,000 are estimated to have been killed by Coalition air strikes since August 2014.

But they seem to have little difficulty making up the numbers. With a population of perhaps 10 million acquiescent Sunnis to draw on in Iraq and Syria, most recruiting is done locally. And if IS remains in place, there will soon be a new generation of young militants.

“I didn’t join out of conviction,” says Bakr Madloul, a 24-year-old bachelor who was arrested in December at his home in a Sunni quarter in southern Baghdad and accused of taking part in deadly IS car bomb attacks on mainly Shia areas, which he admits.

Bakr says he was working as a construction foreman in Kurdistan when IS took over Mosul. He was detained for questioning by Kurdish security, and met a militant in jail who persuaded him to go to Mosul, where he joined up with IS and manned a checkpoint until it was hit by a Coalition air strike.

He was then sent back to his Baghdad suburb to help organise car bombings. The explosives-packed vehicles were sent from outside Baghdad, and his job was to place them where he was told by his controller, usually in crowded streets or markets.

“Only one of the five car bombs I handled was driven by a suicide bomber,” he says. “I spoke to him. He was 22 years old, an Iraqi. He believed he would go to paradise when he died. It’s the easiest and quickest way to Heaven. They strongly believe this. They would blow themselves up to get to Heaven. There were older ones in their 30s and 40s.”

“I asked my controllers more than once, ‘Is it OK to kill women and children?’ They would answer, ‘They’re all the same.’ But to me, killing women and children, I didn’t feel at all comfortable about that. But once you’re in, you’re stuck. If you try to leave, they call you a murtadd, an apostate, and they’ll kill you or your family.”

Bakr knows he will almost certainly hang. I asked him if he would do the same things over if he had his life again. He laughed.

“Absolutely not. I would get out of Iraq, away from IS, away from the security forces. I took this path without realising the consequences. There is no way back. I see that now.”

But up in Kurdistan, another IS prisoner, Muhannad Ibrahim, has no such regrets.

A 32-year-old from a village near Mosul with a wife and three children, he was a construction worker for a Turkish company when IS took over the city. Two of his older brothers had died fighting the Americans there in 2004 and 2006. He joined IS without hesitation and was commanding a small detachment when he was captured in a battle with the Kurds.

“We were being oppressed by the Shia, they were always insulting and bothering us,” he says. “But that’s not the main motivation, religious conviction is more important. All my family is religious, praise be to Allah. I came to IS through my faith and religious principles.”

“If I had my time over again, I would take the same path, the same choices. Because I am convinced by this thing, I have to go to the end. Either I am killed, or Allah will decree some other fate for me.”

Taming Mosul

Defeating IS militarily is less about its own strengths and vulnerabilities than it is about the deficiencies of the forces arrayed against it. IS is as strong as the weaknesses of the failed states whose collapse into “savagery” has left room for it to take root and grow.

Iraq and Syria have to be the primary focus, as the commander of Coalition forces, Lt Gen Sean MacFarland, spelled out in February 2016:

“The campaign has three objectives: one, to destroy the Isil parent tumour in Iraq and Syria by collapsing its power centres in Mosul and Raqqa; two, to combat the emerging metastasis of the Isil tumour worldwide; and three, to protect our nations from attack.”

It goes without saying that Coalition air strikes, deadly and effective as they are, have their limitations. Only in co-ordination with cohesive, motivated ground forces can the territory taken by IS be regained. And that’s the crippling problem, in both countries.

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The Kurds in the north of both Iraq and Syria have made considerable progress in pushing IS back from areas they regard as theirs, with the help of air strikes. But they are neither capable of going all the way, nor should they – in both countries, they would stir up acute communal sensitivities in the Sunni Arab areas where IS is rooted.

Pro-government forces in Iraq have largely dislodged IS from Diyala province and the Tikrit area north of the capital, but that was mainly the work of Iranian-backed Shia militias who leapt to the defence of Baghdad and the south as IS advanced southwards in June 2014 after the army collapsed.

Using them in mainly Sunni areas is fraught with risk.

Ramadi, the provincial capital of al-Anbar to the west, was recaptured at the end of 2015 in an offensive spearheaded by the government’s US-built Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), with the Shia militias kept out of this Sunni stronghold. But the CTS has limited numbers and has been badly battered. And Ramadi was left in ruins, its entire population fled.

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All of which does not augur well for the sound retrieval of remaining Sunni hotbeds where IS is dug in in Iraq, such as Falluja – barely 30 miles from Baghdad – and above all, Mosul, 10 times the size of Ramadi.

Surprisingly, given the presence of literally hundreds of competing rebel factions, it’s in Syria that the chances of making serious progress against IS may be greater, though still not great.

The IS imperative has spurred all the outside parties involved there, including the Americans and the Russians and their regional and local allies, for the first time to put serious weight behind a truce and a negotiated settlement between rebels and regime.

The idea and driving motive is that all parties would then be free to turn on IS, and, to be consistent, also al-Nusra Front, because it belongs to al-Qaeda. It may seem like a long shot, but the US seems to be pushing very hard indeed, making things happen that have proven intractable for nearly five years.

If all the parties – the rebel groups, the Kurds, regime troops and militias, and their outside allies including the Coalition and the Russians – can somehow be reconciled and turned against IS, its chances of surviving for long in Syria would not be great.

Its only real conurbation there is Raqqa. It is much less deeply embedded in the Sunni population in Syria than in Iraq. Disgruntled Syrian Sunnis have many other vehicles for pressing their grievances against the regime.

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So it keeps coming back again to Iraq, and specifically, to Mosul. Ten times the size of Raqqa. And that’s not the only reason for its significance.

“Mosul is the beating heart of IS,” says a senior western official in northern Iraq. “IS is essentially an Iraqi creation. The tragic reality is that at the moment, it is the main Sunni political entity in Iraq. From the West, it’s looked at as a kind of crazed cult. It’s not. Here in Iraq it represents an important constituency. It represents a massive dissatisfaction, the alienation of a whole sector of the population.”

“That’s not to say that the people in Mosul are enthusiastic about IS, but for them, it’s better than anything that comes from Baghdad.”

The word in both Baghdad and northern Iraq is that the Americans are pushing seriously hard for a Mosul campaign by the end of 2016, with President Obama’s departure in mind. That may not be possible, given the difficulties involved in assembling credible ground forces, as well as severe financial crises affecting both Baghdad and Kurdistan.

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But if it does go ahead, the fear is that wrongly-conceived short-term victory, if it is achieved, will turn into long-term disaster, given the total lack of national reconciliation between Sunnis and Shia in the wake of the sectarian carnage that followed Saddam’s overthrow in 2003.

Sunni grievances in Iraq are such that if IS did not exist, it would have to be invented. Without reconciliation and a sense of Sunni empowerment and partnership in a national project, IS in some shape or form will always be there, just as the Taliban are now resurgent in Afghanistan despite everything that was done to oust them.

But the Iraqi expert on radical movements, Hisham al-Hashemi, believes that IS could be badly damaged if the Coalition succeed in one of their top-priority tasks – to kill Abu Bakr Baghdadi.

Leaders have been killed before, and replaced with little obvious effect on the course of history. But Hashemi believes Baghdadi is different.

“IS’ future depends on Baghdadi,” he says. “If he is killed, it will split up. One part would stay on his track and announce a new caliphate. Another would split off and return to al-Qaeda. Others would turn into gangs following whoever is strongest.”

“The source of his strength is that he brought about an ideological transformation, blending jihadist ideas with Baathist intelligence security methods, enabling him to create this quasi-state organisation.”

Hashemi believes only Baghdadi can hold it together. There have been numerous false reports of him being hit, but he appears to be stubbornly and elusively still alive, not seen in public since that mosque appearance in early July 2014.

The Americans are unlikely to rest until they have killed Baghdadi, not least because of their belief that he personally repeatedly raped an American NGO worker, Kayla Mueller, and then had her killed in early 2015.

But even if they do get him, and even if IS does break up, the Sunni problem in Iraq will not go away.

Capitalising on chaos

IS is in any case spreading its bets and developing other territorial options. At present, Libya looks the most promising. It has just the kind of failed-state anarchy, the “savagery”, that leaves room for the jihadists to move in, forging alliances with local militants and disgruntled supporters of the overthrown regime. Just like Iraq.

IS signalled its arrival there in typical style, issuing a polished video in February 2015 showing a group of 21 bewildered Egyptian Christian workers in orange jumpsuits being beheaded on a Libyan beach, their blood mingling with the waters of the Mediterranean as a warning to the “crusader” European countries on the other side.

The man who voiced that warning was believed to be the IS leader in Libya, an Iraqi called Wissam al-Zubaydi, aka Abu Nabil. By coincidence, Zubaydi was killed in a US air strike on the same day IS struck terror in Paris, 13 November 2015.

The man sent by IS to replace him, Abu Omar al-Janabi, was another Iraqi and former Baathist with a tough reputation and a knack for generating revenue – clearly with one eye on Libya’s oil facilities, given the damage wrought by Coalition bombing on the organisation’s exploitation of fields in Iraq and Syria.

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The US and allies have been powerless to halt IS advances in Libya, taking over a big stretch of the coast around the central city of Sirte, which was to (overthrown) Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi what Tikrit was to Saddam Hussein. Another American air strike in February killed (among nearly 50 other people) Noureddine Chouchane, reputedly an IS figure responsible for the deadly attacks on Western tourists in his native Tunisia next door.

With little prospect of a national unity government to end Libya’s chaotic fragmentation and provide partners on the ground, such remote strikes – which sometimes act as powerful recruiters for the militants – are about all the frustrated Western powers can do as IS takes root and spreads.

There are other possibilities already beckoning – Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia… wherever there are dysfunctional states and angry Muslims, there are opportunities for IS, competing strongly with a diminished al-Qaeda as a dominant brand in the jihadist market. Adding the extra risk for the West, that that competition could be another spur for spectacular terrorist attacks which they know are being actively plotted.

Battle for minds

In the first 18 months after the declaration of the “Islamic State”, the number of foreign fighters making their way to join jihad in Syria and Iraq rose dramatically. The New York-based security consultancy Soufan Group estimated that 27,000 foreign jihadists had made the trip from 86 countries, more than half of them from the Middle East and North Africa.

Clearly, the caliphate had appeal, despite – perhaps in some cases because of – its graphically publicised brutality. A tribute to its extraordinary skill in using the internet and social media as a propaganda and grooming tool.

Ten months after vowing to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the organisation, President Obama ruefully acknowledged that IS “has been particularly effective at reaching out to and recruiting vulnerable people around the world including here in the United States, and they are targeting Muslim communities around the world”.

And he put his finger on the real challenge, monumentally greater than the comparatively simple task of defeating IS militarily:

“Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas, a more attractive and more compelling vision,” he said.

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The complex art of IS propaganda

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On a relatively normal day… there was a total of 50 distinct pieces of propaganda. The photo reports and videos included depictions of an IS offensive in northern Syria and eulogies for the dead in Salahuddin… Overwhelmingly, though, the propagandists were preoccupied with a carefully refined view of ‘normal’ life.

Fishing and ultraviolence

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The problem is that when disenchanted people in the region look around them – especially the young, the idealistic, or the hopeless unemployed who have no future – they see scant evidence of “better ideas” or attractive and compelling visions.

They see the ruins of an “Arab Spring” which raised hopes only to dash them cruelly.

The brutal, corrupt dictatorships which it shook have either fragmented into chaos and sectarian and tribal upheaval, like Syria itself, Libya, Yemen and (with Western intervention) Iraq, or the “deep states” of their former regimes came back, even more harshly in the case of Egypt, more gently in the case of Tunisia.

While many of the European jihadists may have heeded the call for other reasons, socio-economic factors play an important part in radicalising some of the Arab jihadists, and will continue to do so unless addressed.

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Why IS still attracts recruits from Europe

Image copyrightWest Midlands Police

The flow of recruits, both fighters and families, leaving their homes in Europe to live under so-called Islamic State rule in Raqqa in Syria has slowed dramatically.

“It reached its peak in 2013-14, when it was far easier for jihadists to cross the 822km-long (510-mile) Turkey-Syria border, when IS propaganda on social media went largely unchallenged, and when IS was on a roll militarily, seizing ever more territory across northern Syria and north-western Iraq.

“While all three of those factors have now changed to the detriment of IS, the underlying factors propelling young Britons and Europeans towards joining the group have not gone away. So what are they?

Islamic State: What is the attraction for young Europeans?

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One of the biggest contingents is from Tunisia, where a detailed survey in the poorest suburbs of the capital showed clearly that the radicalisation of young people there had far less to do with extreme Islamic ideology as such than it did with unemployment, marginalisation and disillusion after a revolution into which they threw themselves, but which gave them nothing, and left them hopeless.

A rare insight into the types of people who volunteer to join IS came with the emergence in European media in March of batches of what are believed to be “secret” IS files withpersonal details of recruits.

The data from 2013-14 purported to identify members from at least 40 countries. It included names, addresses, phone numbers and skill sets – a potential treasure trove for intelligence agencies trying to track and prosecute nationals who have signed up with the group.

IS is also filling a desert left by the collapse of all the political ideologies that have stirred Arab idealists over the decades. Many used to travel to the Soviet Union for training and tertiary education, but communism is now seen as a busted flush. Arab socialism and Arab nationalism that caused such excitement in the 1950s and 1960s mutated into brutal, corrupt “republics” where sons were groomed to inherit power from their fathers.

In this vacuum, IS took up the cause of punishing the West and other outsiders for their actions in the region over the past century:

• the carve-up by the colonial powers 100 years ago, drawing a border between Iraq and Syria which IS has now erased
• the creation of Israel under the British mandate for Palestine, and its subsequent unswerving political and financial support by the US
• Western (and indeed Russian) backing for corrupt and tyrannical Arab regimes
• the Western invasion and destruction of Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts, with the death of uncounted thousands of Iraqis
• the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisoner abuse scandals….

The roots of IS also lie in a crisis within Islam.

“Isil is not Islamic,” said President Obama, echoing statements by many western leaders that “IS has nothing to do with Islam”.

It has.

“It is based on Islamic texts that are reinterpreted according to how they see it,” says Ahmad Moussalli, professor of politics at the American University of Beirut. “I don’t say they are not coming out of Islamic tradition, that would be denying facts. But their interpretation is unusual, literal sometimes, very much like the Wahhabis.”

Hisham al-Hashemi, the Iraqi expert on radical groups, agrees.

“Violent extremism in IS and the salafist jihadist groups is justified, indeed blessed, in Islamic law texts relied on by IS and the extremist groups. It’s a crisis of religious discourse, not of a barbaric group. Breaking up the religious discourse and setting it on the right course is more important by far than suppressing the extremist groups militarily.”

Because ancient texts can be interpreted by extremists to cover their worst outrages does not implicate the entire religion, any more than Christianity is defined by the Inquisition, where burning at the stake was a stock penalty.

Extremist ideas remain in the dark, forgotten corners of history unless their time comes. And IS time came, with Afghanistan, Iraq, and everything that followed.

“Salafism is spreading in the world, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Arab countries,” says Prof Moussalli.

He blames the Saudis for stifling the emergence of a moderate, democratic version of Islam, the “alternative Islamic discourse” to salafism that President Obama would like to see.

“A moderate Islamic narrative today is a Muslim Brotherhood narrative, which has been destroyed by the Gulf states supporting the military coup in Egypt,” says Prof Moussalli, referring to the Egyptian military’s ousting of the elected President Mohammed Morsi, a senior Muslim Brotherhood figure, in July 2013.

“We lost that opportunity with Egypt. Egypt could have paved the way for real change in the area. But Saudi Arabia stood against it, in a very malicious way, and destroyed the possibility of changing the Arab regimes into more democratic regimes that accept the transfer of power peacefully. They don’t want it.”

Saudi Arabia’s ultra-conservative Wahhabi religious establishment and its constant propagation have raised ambiguity over its relations with radical groups abroad. Enemies and critics have accused it of producing the virulent strain of Wahhabism that inspires the extremists, and even of supporting IS and other ultra-salafist groups.

But Jamal Khashoggi, a leading Saudi journalist and writer who spent time in Afghanistan and knew Bin Laden, says that simply is not true

“We are at war with IS, which sees us as corrupt Wahhabis.” he says.

“IS is a form of Wahhabism that has been suppressed here since the 1930s. It resurfaced with the siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 and spread here and there. But Saudi Arabia didn’t back it at all, it saw it as a threat. So it’s true that salafism can turn radical, just as the US right-wing produces some crazy lunatics.”

Hundreds of people died in a two-week siege when extremist salafists took over the Grand Mosque, the holiest place in Islam, in protest at what they saw as the Kingdom’s deviation from the true path.

More recently, Saudi Arabia’s security forces and its Shia minority have in fact been the target of attacks by IS, and the kingdom has executed captured militants. It has an active deradicalisation programme.

But Mr Khashoggi agrees that the Saudis made a huge mistake when they backed the overthrow of the elected Muslim Brotherhood president in Egypt and the subsequent crackdown on the movement, which has pushed political Islam into the arms of the radicals.

“There were no pictures of Isis, Bin Laden or al-Qaeda in Tahrir Square,” he says. “It was an opportunity for democracy in the Middle East, but we made a historical blunder for which we are all paying now.”

But the Kingdom’s extreme conservatism, its distaste for democracy, and its custodianship of the shrines in Mecca and Medina to which millions of Muslims make pilgrimage every year, have made it one of the main targets for calls for an unlikely reformation within Islam as part of the battle to defeat IS and other extremist groups.

“We must accept the fact that Islam has a crisis,” says a senior Sunni politician in Iraq.

“IS is not a freak. Look at the roots, the people, the aims. If you don’t deal with the roots, the situation will be much more dangerous. The world has to get rid of IS, but needs a new deal: reformation, in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, al-Azhar [the ancient seat of Sunni Islamic learning and authority in Cairo].”

“You can’t kill all the Muslims, you need an Islamic reformation. But Saudi and Qatari money is blotting out the voices so we can’t get anywhere. It’s the curse of the Arab world, too much oil, too much money.”

Regional rivalry

IS is at the heart of yet another of the region’s burning themes – the strategic geopolitical contest, the game of nations, that is taking place as Syria and Iraq disintegrate.

When the US-led coalition destroyed the Iraqi state in 2003, it was breaking down the wall that was containing Iran, the region’s Shia superpower, seen as a threat by the Saudis and most of their Sunni Gulf partners since its Islamic revolution in 1979.

Iran had for years been backing anti-Saddam Iraqi Shia factions in exile. Through those groups, the empowerment of the majority Shia community in Iraq after 2003 gave Iran unrivalled influence over Iraqi politics.

The arrival of the IS threat led to even more Iranian penetration, arming, training and directing the Shia militia who rose in defence of Baghdad and the South.

“If it weren’t for Iran, the democratic experiment in Iraq would have fallen,” says Hadi al-Ameri, leader of the Iranian-backed Badr Organisation, one of the biggest Shia fighting groups.

“Obama was sleeping, and he didn’t wake up until IS was at the gates of Erbil. When they were at the gates of Baghdad, he did nothing. Were it not for Iran’s support, IS would have taken over the whole Gulf, not just Iraq.”

Image copyrightGetty Images

For Saudi Arabia and its allies, Iranian penetration in Iraq threatens to establish, indeed largely has, a Shia crescent, linking Iran, Iraq, Syria under its minority Alawite leadership, and Lebanon dominated by the Iranian-created Shia faction Hezbollah.

From the outset of the war in Syria, the Saudis and their Gulf partners, and Turkey, backed the Sunni rebels in the hope that the overthrow of Assad would establish Sunni majority rule.

So then a north-south Sunni axis running from Turkey through Syria to Jordan and Saudi Arabia would drive a stake through the heart of the Shia crescent and foil the Iranian project, as they saw it.

That is essentially what IS did in 2014 when it moved back into Iraq, took Mosul and virtually all the country’s Sunni areas, and established a Sunni entity which straddled the suddenly irrelevant border with Syria, blocking off Shia parts of Iraq from Syria.

If IS had just stayed put at that point and dug in, who would have shifted them? Had they not gone on to attack the Kurds, the Americans would not have intervened. Had they not shot down a Russian airliner and attacked Paris, the Russians and French would not have stepped up their involvement.

“Had they not become international terrorists and stayed local terrorists, they could have served the original agenda of dividing the Arab east so there would be no Shia crescent,” says Prof Moussalli.

We may never know why they did it. Perhaps their virulent strain of salafism just had to keep going: Remaining and Expanding.

Could they now just row back and settle in to their “state”, stop antagonising people, and eventually gain acceptance, just as Iran has after its own turbulent revolution and international isolation?

It seems unlikely, for the same driving reasons that they made that escalation in the first place. And even if IS wanted to, the Americans also seem set on their course, and they have proven implacable in their pursuit of revenge for terrorist outrages.

But what is the alternative? Given the problem of assembling capable ground forces, can the Americans be complicit in a takeover of Mosul by Iranian-backed Shia militias, and of Raqqa by Russian- and Iranian-backed Syrian regime forces or other non-Sunni groups like the Kurds? Is their hostility to IS so strong that they would watch the Iranians connect up their Shia crescent? And would the Saudis and Turks go along with that?

There are no easy answers to any of the challenges posed by IS in all the strands of crisis that it brings together.

That’s why it’s still there.

Credits:

Author: Jim Muir

Editor: Raffi Berg

Production: Ben Milne, Susannah Stevens

Graphics: Henry Clarke Price

Video: Mohamed Madi

All images are subject to copyright

The post Islamic State group: The full story appeared first on Satenaw.

Assegid Habtewold[1]

Following my presentation entitled “Bridging The Leadership Gap: For smooth transition and successful post conflict Ethiopia” on March 26, 2016 at Georgetown Marriott Hotel in Washington DC, some audience members chatted with me afterwards, and gave me some feedbacks. While many of them recognized the gap and glad that it was discussed at this conference, some of them challenged whether the elephant in the room is a leadership gap after all. Since the time allotted to each speech was 20 minutes max, it wasn’t possible to provide enough background information. Last year, PRO Leadership Global conducted its annual conference, which was held at Prince George’s Community College. The conference recognized the 3G (Geographic, Generational, & Gender) Leadership Gaps. No one disputes the existence of leadership gap in the Southern and Eastern Hemispheres than in the West. There’s a huge generational gap globally. Research shows that, in just the US alone, 33 million baby boomer leaders are going to retire by the year 2020. The same is true in our case. Who are leading both in Ethiopia and here in the Diaspora? The Ethiopian version baby boomer leaders J are in charge everywhere. Whether it’s within the ruling party or in the opposition camp; whether it’s in the NGOs or in the religious institutions, the dominant decision makers are members of the older generation. There’s nothing wrong with this as far as the contemporary leaders are conscious about the existence of the generational gap and proactively raising their successors. Unfortunately, that is not what has been happening. Likewise, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that we’re plagued by gender leadership gap. Regardless of their number, which is more 50% and their lion share contributions at family, community, and national levels, enough women aren’t at the front and leading.

Once you have the context, please note that this past Saturday, I specifically talked about bridging the leadership gap that hasn’t allowed us to topple dictatorship. If you’re interested, you may consider reading my recent article entitled “Leadership Gap: The main reason why we keep failing to topple dictatorship” that briefly pointed out how our past and contemporary struggles to remove dictatorship and usher our country to a bright future- where there’ll be peace, stability, freedom, democracy, and the rule of law- have been sabotaged because of leadership gap. Some of the audience members who talked to me looked unconvinced. I don’t blame them because the familiar culprits many point their fingers at for our inability to carryout a smooth transition from dictatorship to democracy are TPLF, Derge, America and the Western Countries, even God (many think that we’re cursed), and still others believe that the devil has been messing us up J and the only way out is fasting and prayer. Sorry to spoil their pity parties. We’re the authors of our own failing. It’s not the strength of TPLF. Or the lack of diplomatic supports we haven’t got from TPLF’s allies. These may have some negative contributions toward our quest to make a smooth transition. If we have had competent leaders, we wouldn’t have kept failing. Of course, I’m not talking about leadership gap in numbers. The gap the presentation attempted to show was a quality gap- the lack of leadership competency, not just at the top, at all levels.

Some people think that the problem we’ve had is the lack of committed, patriotic, and active followers. These are mainly leaders who’re trying to escape responsibility. Whose responsibility is to attract followers, organize, inspire, & develop them? This is a job primarily of the leadership though it’d be great if the followers become proactive and take initiatives. When people have confidence in their leadership, they’re willing to commit their time, talent, resources, and even their lives. Still others argue that they have the leadership in place. Their problem is the lack of organizational capacity. Again, whose responsibility is to design the right organizational design, recruit the right people to fill the structure, and engage the public at grass root level? The leadership.  There are also some who complain that their leadership is constrained by lack of resources; otherwise, they’d have succeeded in realizing their vision and meeting their goals. Whose responsibility is to be resourceful? The leadership. Of course, there’re also some who specifically point out that our trouble is none other than the constitution, the ethnic federalism, some other faulty policies, and therefore, they shy away from acknowledging the leadership gap as a serious issue. It’s true we need a relevant, timely, and comprehensive constitution that must gain the support of the majority of Ethiopians. We also need appropriate policies and programs, democratic institutions, well-trained human capital to implement these policies and run the institutions, respectively. With the right and competent leadership, these and many other specific, technical, and policy issues would have been resolved easily. However, without the former, having the latter is useless, to say the least.

Still others grumble about our culture. They say: It’s the culture that is stupid, not us the leaders. It’s true that status quo is the problem but whose responsibility is to reform the culture if it is a roadblock? Great leaders are those who challenge the status quo even if it means offending the public. China is now heading to be a superpower country. That journey began with a cultural revolution led by Mao Zedong. Though I don’t condone his method, which was violent in the majority of the cases, Cultural Revolution transformed the country, setting China up to enjoy her present state of success. Another example. Research shows that South Korea and Ghana were on the same footing in the 60’s; having almost the same GDP, receiving equal amount of aid, producing similar products and services, etc. Unlike Ghanaian, South Korean leaders employed Cultural Revolution by substituting some of their counter productive cultural values with some powerful values, which in turn enabled them to transform their country from one of the developing countries into one of the developed within a few decades. We have a hope to transform our country but that journey must begin with Cultural Revolution! We need to identify those cultural attributes that are golden, and those that are limiting. And, we need courageous and bold leaders to help us disown the latter, and substitute them with some important values that could empower us to become tolerant, inclusive, hard working, innovative, and so on.

Unfortunately, many of our leaders, like the general public, are blind loyal to our culture. Of course, as in the case of all other cultures, there are great cultural attributes and some cultural values we must eradicate if our desire is to make lasting and enduring change. That is why we need transformational leaders. Leaders who are bold enough to poke around our culture, and force us change for good. During the question and answer session, almost all of the participants who stood to comment and ask complained about some of our cultural shortcomings (of course, they didn’t mention the word culture). They criticized our failure to come together, questioned why we divide ourselves along ethnic, region, and religion lines? They wondered why we do this and that. Unlike the Chinese and South Koreans, who overcame insurmountable challenges in unison, we failed to do so because we’re unable to reform our culture courageously. Very few of our problems require advanced technologies, highly trained manpower, intensive resources, and so on. Ethiopia won’t be able to see unity, democracy, stability, prosperity, and freedom until we open our eyes and acknowledge that we are victims of our own culture. Unless we are brave enough to reconfigure our culture, we keep toiling in vain. Blaming one another, pointing our fingers somewhere, and barking at the wrong trees doesn’t cut it. Unfortunately, the task of reforming our culture too desperately needs courageous, selfless, visionary, far-sighted, and transformational leaders. This is the kind of leadership gap I was talking about, not a mere number gap.

I had the same challenge following my presentation on March 20 2016 at Resident Inn Marriott Hotel in DC. The theme of my presentation was “The Necessity of Women’s Role in Leadership Positions in Ethiopia”. Some contended that we don’t have a lack of women leaders. They reasoned that a few women leaders should be enough to lead us bridge the gender inequality. I stand with my position. Without having enough and, most importantly, competent women leaders at all levels, it’s impossible to bridge the gender inequality, and gender leadership gap.

When I say we have a leadership gap, I’m talking about in terms of their competence. Do they have both hard and soft skills? Are they articulate enough to clearly spell out the mission, motto, brand, goals, and objectives of their organizations? Are they visionary, and most importantly, do they know how to impart the vision to all stakeholders?  Do they have the right values and character? Can they strategize and also put in place contingencies (or at least willing to get help)? Do they have detailed long and short term plans to execute the strategies and meet their goals? Can they set up an organizational design that fits the mission of their respective organization? There’s no one design fits all. We need different types of designs for different kinds of organizations- NGOs, parties, businesses, government agencies, religious institutions, and so on. By the way, I’m not saying that we need to have perfect and readily available leaders. As far as they are humble and willing to learn, we should be okay. These kinds of leaders go ahead of their flock, continue to feed themselves and grow. In his classic Habitudes, Tim Elmore used the starving baker as a metaphor to show how leaders must feed themselves before feeding others. Leaders should first change their inside through the things they take in before they try to change others, and the world outside of them.

Last but not least, we- the public- should also take some responsibilities for creating the leadership gap. The 19^th C philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville said, “The people get the government they deserve.” Do we deserve the leaders we have had? If the answer is NO, then, let’s show it by playing a proactive role in selecting and developing leaders we deserve. Of course, that journey should begin with us. Each one of us should become leaders in the area of our passion. Leadership is the birthright of all. If we’ve great leaders everywhere, only the best of us take the top leadership at national, community, party, and organizational levels. Our country cannot become greater and better than its own people and leaders. We also need to learn from our past leaders (adopt and improve their strengths, avoid their mistakes), and the experiences of other leaders around the world. Let’s try our best to play our share in bridging the leadership gaps. In this regard and to play my little share, I’ll share with you a couple of articles in the coming weeks and months, and look forward to hear your feedbacks.

[1] Dr. Assegid Habtewold is a leadership expert at Success Pathways, LLC. Assegid can be reached at ahabtewold@yahoo.com

The post The Width And Depth of The Leadership Gaps Ethiopia Faces – By Assegid Habtewold appeared first on Satenaw.

That Ethiopia is at the cross-road is becoming clearer and clearer by the day. We are witnessing mass uprisings by citizens all over the country including the Oromos, the Kimants in Gonder, the Knosso people in the south, the transportation workers in Addis Ababa and Mekele etc., the government in power no longer is able to sustain its dictatorial grip. The decades of its undemocratic ruling has resulted in the continuous public resistance. If this pattern continues, EPRDF’s unavoidable downfall is not a question of if but when. In other words, Ethiopians are telling this government in clear terms that it has no legitimacy to be their leader. That, its unjust cling to power has subjected the country to an unpresented tension which could bring chaos to the country.

In its twenty-five years’ history, the group in power has already shut the door to democracy and continues to weaken all democratic forces making the formation of an effective oppositions next to impossible.

That Ethiopian democratic forces could not master the wisdom and tenacity to overcome the repressive measures from the government and form a unified opposition that can channel their collective intellectual and logistical forces to become alternative political force for Ethiopia. As the result, our nation is facing a very grave danger. This is why Ethiopia is at a cross-road and with no clear direction.

The volatile condition in Ethiopia exposes the country to many possibilities some of which can have dangerous consequences. Given the current situations, we can anticipate the possibility of the following scenarios.

1. That the peoples’ resistance will continue and even intensifies and the government resorts to nation-wide military rule while at the same time trying to buy time to prolong the misery of the Ethiopian people by pretending to address the democratic demands. In fact, the government is already imposing military rule region by region as we recently witnessed in Oromia and before that in Gambella, Ogaden and Afar regions.
2. That the EPRDF comes to its sense and participate in initiatives to work with the Ethiopian people, civil and opposition organizations to address the political, economic and social issues to pave the way for a democratic Ethiopia.
3. That the civil obedience that was started in many parts of the country intensifies and spreads all over the country in unorganized manner making the government weaker and weaker to the point that it cannot rule while at the same time, there are no strong civil and political organization to replace it leaving the nation in total disarray.
4. That the civil disobedience that has started continues and spreads all over the nation and through the process of self-organization, the people manage to create a coordinated movement that will determine the future of the country.
5. That the Ethiopian political organizations realize the grave danger the country is facing and urgently minimize their differences to work together to build strong organization which can lead the country to a better future.
6. That the forces mentioned in scenario #4 and #5 form alliance to intensify the democratic struggle and bring the government to negotiation table to create a better future for all Ethiopians.

Scenario by nature can only draw a rough picture of what could happen if certain conditions exist. It is up to the stake holders (supporters) of a given scenario to convert it to a reality they want to see exist. I hope I am not mistaken if I say that the majority of Ethiopians are interested in realizing scenario #6. To realize scenario #6, we citizens have to make a renewed effort to save our country and make democracy a reality. We cannot sit and watch our people and country going into the unknown.

Below, I put my thoughts as to what we citizens should do to make scenario #6 a reality.

Objectives and Values

As a starter, Ethiopians engaged in the popular uprising, in organized oppositions as well as all democracy longing population, need to agree on common objectives and set of values. First objectives. At minimum our objectives should include the following.

• Our first objective has to be to maintain the integrity of our country, Ethiopia, as we know it now. It is only when we keep Ethiopia together we keep a common place we call home. This is vital even for those individuals and groups who have the desire to form a separate nation (other than Ethiopia) latter as there is a way to do it peacefully when a democratic system is established.
• Our second and equally important objective is the establishment of democracy (the right to organize, freely speak and write, vote, respect individual rights, religious and democratic freedom etc.). When this happens, all people have the right to participate in their country’s affairs and collectively and peacefully decide on their common future.
• The third objective is to make national reconciliation and form a democratic and constitutional government.
• The forth objective is to establish system that eradicates our main enemies, poverty ignorance and diseases and fair distribution of the national wealth.

The other important thing we need to do is to stablish the set of ethical values we all should abide by. Values are important because they are codes by which we operate to achieve our objectives. They are like common languages by which we can understand each other and build expectation from each other.  The set of minimum values that the citizens and their organizations should carry include

• Integrity (honesty and truthfulness)
• Equality- respect for each other (tolerance to differing ideas, belief systems and approaches)
• Transparency (openness and no hidden agenda)
• Patriotism (love for people, country and the common good)

After formulating agreeable objectives, and values the next thing is to work on the formats of organizations we want to establish to achieve our goals.

Agile Networks 

After formulating agreeable objectives and ethical codes, the next logical task is to get organized.

Organization is a tool by which we can achieve our objectives.

That the repressive reality in Ethiopia did not allow the formation and development of large opposition political organizations is a fact. It is also true that the undemocratic traditions and lack of tolerance among the opposition did not help the emergence of large organizations. What we have is fragmented and weakened oppositions which in some cases have irreconcilable objectives. What we also have is spontaneous popular uprisings in many part of the country, which are the results of prolonged political repression and economic inequality imposed by the ruling group.  The big question is: how do we go about establishing a viable opposition force under this repressive government that can build a true democratic country?

I try to answer the above big question by asking: Are large organizations (classical organizations) necessity to achieve our objectives? In other words, do we need to organize ourselves under large organizations to be a strong challenger to this government or can we forge the existing smaller and fragmented organizations in to networked systems to enable them to work as one?    

No question that Ethiopia would have been in a better place now, had we have strong opposition organizations. But our history of many decades testify that we could not manage to form such formidable organization. Given the urgency that our country is facing, we need to explore a different model for cooperation while still trying to form the needed strong opposition organization (s). In this paper, I dwell on discussing an alternative form of cooperation as opposed to the classical organization. Before I get to that, I want to say few words about the traditional (classical) organizational format.

The classical organizations that most of us are familiar today have their beginning in the agrarian societies. The agrarian societies that came after the hunter-gatherer societies formed the basis for large settlements which in turn created the condition for the emergence of organizations such as states, armies, churches etc. Fast forward, the societies of the industrial revolution of the 18^th and 19^th centuries also adopted those organizational formats and continued with them. Governments and entrepreneurs of the industrial revolution borrowed their organizational model from the states and armies started in the agrarian communities. Just like the states, armies and churches of earlier societies, the organizations including states of the industrial revolutions had centralized, hierarchical and command and control nature.

In addition to being centralized, hierarchical, command and control, another characteristic of the classical organization model is the acceptance of the separation of the mind (intellect) from the body (manual). This separation of the thinking from the doing became the foundation to separate the functions such as leaders, government officials, management, technical, administrative and labor which in turn reinforced the hierarchic and centralized organizations.

It is this organizational model that the majority of societies in this and the previous centuries apply in states, army, church, industry, commerce, education, politics, philanthropic and other functions that require large number of people. Another important point that needs mentioning here is that, for large organizations to exist and develop, they need a fertile and conducive conditions be it political, financial and cultural which the landlords of the agrarian societies, the states of industrial nations or the corrupt governments of EPRDF types have no shortages of.  Otherwise it is impossible for such organizations to exist let alone to survive.

In repressive systems, the only big organizations that has the means to exist and grow are those which belong to the regimes. Opposition organizations, are suppressed and are not allowed to grow.

So in repressive regimes, like ours, we want to deemphasize pursuing the classical organization which promotes the formation of large, centralized, and rigid organizations. Instead, we should choose to pursue alternative form of organizations that do not require to be bulky, hierarchical and centralized. The alterative form is a decentralized, flat and networked cooperation. The cooperation of such organization is based on agreed up on common objectives and values. The common objectives should be implemented through agile and flexible networks. The emphasis should be on unity of purpose than on forming large organizational structure. The national goals can be achieved by the independent organizations which keep their own separate structure while they maintain unity of purpose. Forming and running large organization, if at all possible to form them, not only make them easy targets for the repressive state but also unaffordable (expensive for the small and fragmented opposition), bureaucratic and slow for the tasks ahead. Moreover, valuable time, money and resources can be wasted while pursuing them.

Working with networked structure does not mean that a unified large organizations are not necessary all together. Large organizations can be necessary when the right time comes. If anything, the networks, in addition to facilitating the peaceful democratic struggle, will become the foundations for the formation of larger organizations when the regime weakens, repression subsides and democracy emerges.

The Relevance of networked format  

I mentioned that the ineffectiveness of the opposition politics also comes from their own lack of cooperation with each other and by their inability to be agile and flexible to rally the Ethiopian people.

This is not to say that there are no oppositions who have not tried to work together. There have been organizations and still are who are trying to form alliance. In fact, significant portion of their efforts and energy went doing just that. But it did not deliver the results they sought. The question is: why did they fail? Repression aside, part of the answer may be attributed to the organizational model the oppositions are seeking to achieve. In the majority of the cases, the opposition organizations intended to forge the type of classical organizational model described above.

The classical model, as ubiquitous as it is, cannot be applied in every situation. Particularly, it cannot be effective in authoritarian societies where there is no democratic governance and rules of the law are not followed. As mentioned above, the classical organizational structure is rigid, cumbersome, mechanistic, centralized and slow. The classical structure goes against the success factors that today’s Ethiopian repressive reality and the conditions of opposition organizations need which are speed, creativity and flexibility.

 In repressive states like ours, the effort to form large organization that is big enough to challenge the ruling power will not be practical. As such, it is not the best form of organizational format.  There are few obvious reasons for this. For starter, the repressive regime does not allow it, that is, the atmosphere is not conducive. Two, it is logistically and financially not feasible. Three, it is very hierarchical and slow. Four it is not flexible. Five, the organizations are not psychologically prepared. 

So, what is the alternative? We know there are many genuine organizations who desire to bring democracy, rule of law and to eradicate poverty and disease in Ethiopia. Few of them want to do it alone. But most want to form some sort of alliance or even want to merge. This is good in that it is well intentioned.   But even if feasible, to be big is not always effective. In fact, as mentioned earlier, in today’s repressive Ethiopian reality, big organization is ineffective. What is feasible and even necessary is unity of purpose and values (I mentioned above the objectives and values as I see them) but not merger to create large organization. If all or the majority of the oppositions agree on the purpose of what they want to achieve and core values they all operate by, establish solid network, and allow a smooth flow of information and coordination of actions among them, they can achieve what they want without being big ones.

In the next few paragraphs, I will say some more why the networked organizational format can be an effective tool. I will also briefly discuss the concepts of adaptation and self-similarity as operational guides as the networked oppositions forge ahead to achieve democracy for their country.

Why the Network approach?

In today’s connected world, we witness the cyber networks such as facebook, twitter, google etc. pointing that network thinking is a very important tool of our time. Network is defined as a collection of nodes connected with links. For our discussion, the nodes are the individual opposition organizations and the links are the connections or links they create among themselves. The network concept helps us to sort out the commonalities of connections and exchanges that can exist in a society.  It is a good tool to understand and operate in organized manner without being “organized”. The network concept also helps to forge a resilient and efficient connections by bringing people together for a common cause such as to work for justice, democracy and others. It can also help identify the vulnerabilities of social connections and therefore to take preventive actions. Networks also are effective tools to exchange information quickly.

There are two categories of networks. They are known as small-world and scale-free networks. The two network models enable us to choose what fits our purpose the best. For example, if one is looking for a resilient organization, the model known as scale-free networks are resilient in that if a node or a set of nodes are deleted (in our case one or few organizations are attacked by repression) at random from a network, the property of the whole network will not be damaged severely. It still keeps functioning. On the other hand, if efficiency is what is desired the model known as small-world will work the best as it can avoid redundancy and reach far in short time. By combining the two models our democratic movement can survive the destructive attempt of repression. Functioning via network approach has a paramount significance for the effectiveness of our networked organizations when compared to the traditional form of organization.

Developing cooperative action based on unity of purpose and values and implementing them by way of strong network and smooth flow of information can take the place of large organizations. Each opposition can maintain its independence, identity and culture while at the same time playing its role as a carrier of the common purpose.  In undemocratic society, unity of purpose can have much stronger role than organizational merger. In political condition which our country is in, smaller organizations with strong link between them may be preferable as they can be agile, flexible, and fast.  In undemocratic and repressive regime, large organizations can be easy targets to the repressive regime as they are bureaucratic, cumbersome, slow and expensive.

Organizations that are cooperating through networks can try to work on their difference and merge to form large organizations if that is what the situation calls for. Merging of organizations will be valuable especially when a democratic system emerges. Potentially, the networked systems can pave the way for genuine merger.  Until that time comes, the opposition organizations should form strong networks and equip themselves with the concepts of adaption and self-similarity as they strive to bring democracy and economic development to their nation.

Adaptation as a tool for democracy

In order to survive the brutal suppression, they may encounter from the government, networked organizations and the popular democratic forces should follow the principles of adaption. Adaptation involves understanding the methods and the threats from the repressive government and changing their tactics to survive and continue the struggle. The networked organizations need to be truly learning systems that adapt and function in an environment that is dominated by the calculating, vicious, brutal and at times pretentious behaviors of the government.

At the individual organization level, the adaptive behavior of the opposition organizations should come from the members in organizations who have learned and developed the patterns of adaptation. This means that each member learns and adapts to fit and form a coherent pattern within the organization. Fitting of individual’s pattern with the collective pattern and the vice-versa so that a whole organizational pattern emerges is a crucial part of adaptation.

At networked level, the adaptation process involves one organization trying to fit with the other organizations that have different cultures and operational behaviors. We should assume that the environment can be hostile. For example, the environment can be hostile due to the repression therefore we need to adapt to survive. Also, misunderstanding and confrontations can emerge even among oppositions as confrontations can be unpredictable. The only effective way to address such occurrence is by quick learning and adapting.  Environments change continuously requiring change of shared rules and patterns among organizations. In this situation, again learning and adaptation becomes a question of life or death. All the networked organizations have to be quick learners to fit and survive. Flexibility but not rigidity should be the mode of operation for all in the network.

In short, for networked but independent organizations with common objectives the key points to grasp include:

• A democratic movement originates from the aggregate behavior of all individuals in the network. That is, everyone counts. Everyone has to adapt to everyone else.
• The aggregate behaviors of the individuals come from the objectives they are seeking to achieve.
• The interactions between individual members, networked organizations as well as the response from the repressive government can be challenge and become unpredictable, the best approach to achieve the goal is to learn, to adapt and to fit to the changing condition and continue to rally around the GOAL.

Self-Similarity of Actions

Another effective operational tool that the networked organizations and the popular uprising should apply is the self-similarity or (Technical name Fractal) concept. One good example of self-similarity is the sunflower. If you have observed a sunflower, its smallest petal has the same pattern as the whole flower. This phenomenon of having the same pattern at every dimension is known as self-similar. Self-similarity is the result of applying the same procedure to construct uniformity at every level. One striking properties of self-similarity is that similar patterns are found repeatedly at any scale (i.e. smaller or larger scales) throughout a system, so that even the smallest part has similar patterns to the whole.

What is the relevance of self-similarity to social systems, particularly to bring democracy?  We know that democratic changes require networks of tens of millions who participate in tandem. The desired change cannot come if each and every one does different things or moves in different directions.  The millions in the network and their organizations have to apply the same, actions, rules and procedures at all levels, so that the behavior of all functional groups from leadership committees to departments to teams down to individuals can be self-similar. It is only when this happens that a collective behavior of big significance can be achieved.

In other words, achieving democratic change require the emergence of similar pattern of behavior and actions at all levels of the networked organizations all the way at the national level.

We observe the self-similarity at work in the behaviors of the government in power when all of its organs from the national level to the smallest local Kebeles conduct repression, corruption, ethnic segregation etc. following the same procedures and recipes at every level. It is these repressive and backward behaviors that the network of the opposition and the popular uprisings have to counter with the popular and democratic opposing self-similar actions.

On the other hand, it is encouraging to see self-similarity in action in the current unrests that are taking place across Ethiopia. One real specific example of self-similarity in action is what we saw on the streets of both Ambo (Oromo students) and Kimant people (Gonder) where protesters blocked the roads with sticks and stones to prevent the intrusions of government armed forces.

If the networked opposition and the general population recognize the power of applying the concept of self-similarity to their democratic struggle, their political power grows exponentially in a short time. Here too, quick learning and adaptation are tremendous help.

In Summary

If the Ethiopian government truly stands for a better Ethiopia, it would adopt scenario #2, and urgently goes to work to effect it. But its history shows that it has no regards for Ethiopians and Ethiopia. There is no regard for a country without practicing democracy.  As the result of its unpatriotic behaviors, Ethiopia is on the cross-road and is facing a grave danger. The true daughters and sons of Ethiopia are left alone to save our country and we do not have time to waste. We need to hurry to craft a common objectives and values and start networking to form a strong alliance to save our nation and to bring democratic rules by forcing the government to come to the negotiation table. We do not need to form a large organization to do our job. A strong network that learns quick and adopts and functions in self-similar manner will get us there.  Nothing is more powerful than networked citizens who stand for just causes.

         LET US COME TOGETHER IN A HURRY TO SAVE OUR COUNTRY. W

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By Nahome Freda

During the time of the dreadful Derg, outward migration surged to levels unheard of in Ethiopia’s recent history due to push factors of government brutality and repression, famine, internecine fighting between the government and a plethora of liberation fronts. With the demise of the Derg and the end of the war, many internally and externally displaced refugees returned home. But those lucky enough to have been resettled in the West stay put to see if the victorious rebels would follow through promises of democracy, rule of law, and an accountable government. Initially, there was indeed a slight ray of hope with the limited opening up of the economy and a degree of personal freedom unseen in the country’s prior history. Unfortunately, these positive developments didn’t last long. After a few years of consolidating power, the TPLF reared its true repressive and vengeful colors and chipped away those budding gains.
The TPLF pursued single-mindedly a plan to remake the country in its contorted image. It introduced, without broad consultation and against established governance conventions, ethnic federalism in a country that is home for over eighty different ethnic groups. Overnight, Ethiopians became outsiders in their own country if they find themselves outside of their designated artificial ethnic boundaries erected by the TPLF. Millions were displaced and lost whatever resources they accumulated over a lifetime and many were murdered. Addis Ababa, with its multi-ethnic composition and relative safety, became so crowded with internally displaced people from all over the country that it has never recovered from that pressure. One can surmise that the Addis Ababa expansion, the trigger point for the current uprising in Oromia, started its early phase because of that pressure. Individuals and organizations that resisted the ill-advised ethnic policies of the TPLF were silenced through threats, illegal sanctions, exile, arrests, and even murder.
Intensified repression, especially after the failed 2005 elections, closed even the slightest avenues for dissent. Today, no one knows how many ordinary political prisoners languish in horrendous jails. With time, the TPLF increasingly became associated with torture, gross human right violations, and corruption. On the economic front, the TPLF controlled key economic sectors through shoddy deals and outright thefts and embarked on a claim of achieving economic success for the country. Last year, it lavishly celebrated its 40th anniversary with millions of dollars, basking at the “success” of its economic achievements. The party that never failed to self-congratulate itself with claims of 10% year-over-year economic growth for the last 10 years and partied hard just last year for “registering” economic miracle, is now panhandling once again before the international community in the name of 20 million citizens facing starvation.
With popular uprisings in many parts and a plethora of economic challenges facing the country, the government’s carefully cultivated image of leading the country to new economic heights is crumbling quickly in front of the world’s eyes. The compound effect of all these failed policies is the continued resurgence and multiplication of push factors that had subsided in the immediate aftermath of the Derg. Today, sadly but not a surprisingly, the dreams of the vast majority of Ethiopian parents and their children is to leave the country. As a result, Ethiopia continues to bleed its most precious resource at an alarming rate. Thanks to the TPLF’s failed policies, Ethiopia remains one of the foremost sources of refugees and asylum seekers in the world.
Certainly, such an environment doesn’t encourage a large number of the established Diaspora to return home with its knowhow, experience, and funds to help rebuild and develop the country anytime soon. With deeming prospects of returning home anytime soon, migrant Ethiopian’s have been planting their roots in all corners of the world for the last several decades. Those fortunate to resettle in the West have done particularly well, thanks to the enabling environment in their newly adopted countries and their industrious and hardworking nature. Most remain strongly connected, despite their spatial and temporal separation, to their homeland due to their deep familial, cultural, and sentimental ties. Ethiopians of all persuasions have done an admirable job of recreating pillars of their culture, faith, and communities in a relatively short period of time. They have acquired notoriety for hard work, discipline, and good citizenship. They are raising their children with strong values and work ethics. They have livened the communities they call home through their vibrant cultures and traditions. They have attained admirable personal and professional achievements in their chosen occupations. The number of worship places, restaurants, small businesses, associations, and community centers that they have recreated in a relatively short period of time is a success story other immigrant communities highly envy and would like to emulate. However, because these nodal points of community power and individual achievement have not been effectively harnessed, the Diaspora’s immense potential for positive influence both abroad and at home remains unrealized.

The plight of Ethiopia and their people remain at the forefront of the Diaspora’s thoughts, dreams, and aspirations. It is their fervent desire to help Ethiopia extract itself out of deep poverty through equitable and sustainable development. They want to see a self-sufficient, industrialized, and democratic Ethiopia that is at peace with itself, its neighbors, and the world. According to a 2010 World Bank report, the Diaspora sends an eye-popping $3.5 billion dollars in remittance payment to Ethiopia ever year. This is about 20% of the country’s annual budget, a sum as much as the aggregate humanitarian and development assistance Ethiopia receives per year. The Diaspora is also a key conduit for the transfer of knowledge, skills, and technology.
The Diaspora certainly is a formidable force for good and should be proud of its contributions. But at the same time, should find a way to ensure that its contributions have systemic and lasting impact on the development, democratization and national integrity of Ethiopia. Most of the Diaspora’s aspirations for Ethiopia are shared by democratic Ethiopian forces and are potential points of cooperation with Ethiopia’s Western partners. However, these lofty goals are unachievable as long as the holder of state power in Ethiopia is unrepresentative and remains anathema to compromise and reform. The current arrangement whereby the government gleefully feeds off remittance in-flow without concomitant accountability has certainly not helped and a new approach is urgently needed. Likewise, support to the opposition should be conditioned on measurable performance that benefits all Ethiopians. It’s also in the Diaspora’s long term interest, as recent immigrants and minorities, to organize and advance its interests effectively at the local and national level in their newly-adopted countries.
TPLF’s Nefarious Interventions in Diaspora Affairs

Many believe that the Diaspora’s crucial financial, diplomatic, intellectual, and moral support helped the opposition win the fateful 2007 elections, which the TPLF violently reversed. Badly wounded by that experience, the TPLF has since pursued an aggressive policy to curtail the Diaspora’s influence on domestic politics. It has established within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Security, Immigration and Refugee Affairs Authority well-funded divisions to clip the influence of the Diaspora and turn it into a powerless and unquestioning cash cow for the TPLF. The main mission of these departments is, if possible, to coral the Diaspora as a supporter of the government’s ill-advised political and economic agenda, and if that fails, to prevent it from coalescing around viable opposition forces. To this end, the TPLF works to keep the Diaspora fragmented and busy infighting with itself. It uses long-arm overt and covert interventions in immigrant Ethiopian communities throughout the world. It employs both incentives and threats to induce compliance from the Diaspora.

It purposely aggravates ethnic and sectarian fissures to prevent the Diaspora from bridging ethnic divisions, building strength, and exerting positive influence. It engages in extensive propaganda to distract, confuse, and discourage the Diaspora from speaking for the voiceless multitude back home. It presents the Diaspora as either a supporter of the government’s policies or as a “good for nothing” disgruntled bunch. Look around and you will notice plenty of TPLF-funded (directly or indirectly) radio stations that parrot the government’s propaganda and never question its blatant transgressions. Likewise, it has trained and deployed cyber warriors to poison social media discussions and disseminate venomous propaganda. It engages in jamming and blocking independent broadcasts to Ethiopia. The Diaspora should take lessons from the few Ethiopian organizations that have managed to remain independent and cleanse itself off outside influence. For instance, the Ethiopian Football Federation in North America, despite its own weaknesses, deserves our collective admiration for withstanding and outwitting repeated TPLF interventions and remaining independent. It is indeed a pride for all Ethiopians and an example for others to emulate. Others, such as, the Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia and the relatively new Ethiopian Heritage Society in North America have also done admirable job in bringing Ethiopians together. These and other beacons of hope should be encouraged and supported.

Religious Institutions in the Diaspora

The TPLF perceives religious institutions as a significant threat, given Ethiopians’ deep connection to their faith and the influence religious institutions exert on their flock. For this reason, religious institutions are not immune from TPLF’s subversive attacks. The TPLF also realizes that religious institutions played a significant role in the past (and do play today) in positively influencing politics in many countries around the world. For example, the exiled Ethiopian Orthodox Church regularly condemns TPLF’s excesses and incorporates prayers and teachings on peace, liberty and freedom for all Ethiopians in its services. Ethiopian Muslim religious leaders have courageously stood up against the TPLF, demanding religious freedom, and for that reason, they are now languishing in TPLF’s jails. In U.S. politics, the evangelical Christian right is very active and one of the largest voting blocks. Pope Francis, the beloved leader of the Catholic faith, is not shy about using his bully pulpit to advance the economic and political interests of the downtrodden around the world. So far, the independent Ethiopian Orthodox Church in exile is the only church that I know of that has publicly and forcefully condemned the TPLF’s killings and arrests of innocent Oromo protesters and other Ethiopians. It will be interesting to see for how long the Ethiopian Evangelical Church will remain silent in the face of unprecedented brutal crackdown on the Oromia region, which by far is home to the largest number of evangelicals in the country.

A cursory look at the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa are instructive on this point. Religious institutions in both cases, played a central role in raising public awareness and financial support and in galvanizing pressure and civil disobedience everywhere. The resultant pressure forced the U.S. to outlaw racial discrimination and for the apartheid regime to eventually collapse in South Africa. Perhaps the best example of Diaspora political clout and influence can be found in the highly-organized and disciplined Jewish community throughout the world. For example, the Jewish community in the U.S. worked (and still does) with like-minded civil rights and religious organizations to combat racism, reverse discriminatory policies, and fight injustice. It uses its significant clout to advance the cause of Israeli and the Jewish people throughout the world. One thing all these entities had in common was their success to ward off subversive interference from dark forces.

Sadly, most Ethiopian religious leaders have abdicated their religious and moral duty and stayed silent in the face of widespread government abuses and the country’s precarious situation. They remain dogmatic and purposely avoid practicing what they preach. The TPLF certainly doesn’t want the Ethiopian Diaspora to learn from these models and pause a challenge to its repressive rule. To this end, it infiltrates religious institutions and uses various underhand tactics to censor religious leaders into silence in the face of repression. It is well known that the TPLF handpicks the home based Orthodox and Muslim leaders (the reasons for the ongoing conflict with the later). Unfortunately, it has succeeded in doing the same in several Diaspora churches. Some churches that have stood as pillars of their communities for many years are now divided and at each other’s throats, in part, because of suspected TPLF-instigated divisions.

A Clearer Diaspora Vision Needed

The Diaspora has so far failed to develop and execute proportionate clout in a manner that best services its own long term interests, that of the homeland, and that of their newly-adopted countries vis-à-vis Ethiopia. This in my view is due mainly to the lack of trust, deep suspicion within the various sectors of the community, and inability to learn from other successfully organized immigrant communities in the West. But also due to the failure of some in the Diaspora to truly internalize the lessons of the prevailing progressive and ideologically-based democratic political systems in the West. It is morally wrong and hypocritical to embrace and thrive under multiparty democracy in the West, while at the same time encourage regressive, divisive, and corrosive ethnic politics at home. We have to recognize that at the end of the day, Ethnic politics is discriminatory to “others” and has no place in the 21st century.

The TPLF-led government recognizes the immense potential of an organized, principled, and disciplined Diaspora, and as stated earlier, throws every trick possible to keep it divided and ineffectual. If the Diaspora is to realize its lofty and worthy objectives of serving its own interests abroad and advance the cause of Ethiopia, it has to first cleanse itself off outside influence and assert its independence. It is time for the Diaspora to contemplate some tough questions: How can the Diaspora breakout of its own ethnic divisions and come together and advance its collective interests both abroad and at home? How can it capitalize on its affinity to Ethiopia and unique position in the West to serve as a natural bridge between the West and the homeland? Why has the Diaspora failed to develop sufficient clout, despite its huge financial and other forms of support to Ethiopia, to positively influence the agenda of the Ethiopian government, the opposition parties and the West? Is remittance inflow helping embolden a belligerent government in Ethiopia to continue on its destructive and uncompromising path? What are the best ways for the Diaspora to channel its talents, skills, and resources to help Ethiopia overcome debilitating humanitarian, economic, and political challenges? I don’t pretend to have answers to these and similar questions. They should be researched by academics, graduate students, and Diaspora organizations to form the basis for a clearer Diaspora vision and policy positions moving forward.

The Diaspora should recognize that building an independent, visionary and strong organization that advances its day-to-day and long term interests abroad and that of Ethiopia’s is in its own long term interest. But let there be no mistake, the first order of things is for the Diaspora to assert its independence using legal means available at its disposal. The Diaspora, therefor, has lots of work to do. They should gather evidence and raise awareness about the TPLF’s nefarious interventions among the Diaspora. They should pursue and support legal means to identify and systematically weed out TPLF interventions and other political organization from their communities, religious, and civic organizations. They should build their organization at the local level on democratic governance principles with the mission of advancing the interests of current and future generations. They should push for an umbrella organization that can exert influence at the state (provincial) and national level and create alliances with like-minded external organizations that stand for minority rights and the pursuit of shared goals and objectives. They should extend or deny support to causes on the basis of universal values and principles of freedom, liberty, justices, and opportunity on equal basis for all.

They should capitalize on their growing numbers, expertise, and unique position in the West to push for a mutually beneficial pro-democracy, pro-human rights, and pro-development agendas that account for the national security interests of their native Ethiopia and that of their newly-adopted countries. From the position of such collective strength, they should elevate their lobbying efforts from the streets of Western capitals into the corridors of power. We should never forget that a peaceful, equitable, self-reliant, and democratic Ethiopia is in the best interest of all Ethiopians and an enduring pride for Diaspora Ethiopians and their offsprings wherever they may find themselves in this world.

In Part III, I will focus on resurrecting and strengthening civil society and the independent press and discuss possible points for engaging the West.

Nahome Freda

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