US-UN-fuelled wild ambitions may drive Ethiopia to regional war

M.A. Shaikh

Muharram 04, 1419 1998-05-01

World

by M.A. Shaikh (World, Crescent International Vol. 27, No. 5, Muharram, 1419)

Ethiopian government policy is being driven by the wild ambition of becoming not only a dominant power in eastern and northeastern Africa but also the ‘bread basket’ of the Gulf countries, as Addis Ababa’s extensive advertising for investment in the western and Arab media puts it. This unrealistic bid by one of the world’s poorest countries to replace Egypt as the regional superpower, and Sudan as the area’s leading agricultural country is being encouraged by the United Nations and western donors, particularly the US.

The Christian Tigrayan-dominated minority government of prime minister Meles Zenawi is the largest recipient of American aid in Sub-Saharan Africa. And Zenawi - a former Tigray warlord who toppled the Amhara-based regime of the colonel Mengistu Haile Miriam in 1991 with US military assistance - is hailed as a leading light of a new breed of African rulers dedicated to the establishment of democratic government and free-market economies in the continent.

Zenawi shares this dubious honor with Uganda’s president Yuweri Museveni and Eritrea’s Isaias Aferworki - both minority warlords, who took power by force. All three are strongly committed to the overthrow of the government of Sudan’s president Omar Hasan al-Bashir by force and the establishment of an independent Christian State in the south of the country. They also support the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) economic policy for the continent and pay lip-service to the principles of human rights and democracy, despite operating autocratic and tightly-controlled regimes.

Ethiopia is being showered with hundreds of millions of US dollars annually. Donors have pledged more than $2.5 billion since 1996. In 1998 alone it will receive $700 million from the World Bank - the largest amount to any African State. It will also receive during the same year about $83 million - the largest any sub-Saharan country will get.

Western investment is also pouring into the country to take advantage of the government’s privatization policy which has led to the cheap sale of hundreds of State companies for a fraction of their market value, claiming that economic sense demands the dismantling of the socialist structures of the former marxist government of Mengistu.

Zenawi’s government has privatized 190 State-run enterprises. And private investment has tripled since 1994, with 120 American investors now doing business in Ethiopia. Is this what Clinton’s Africa doctrine of ‘trade instead of aid’ supposed to mean in practice?

But economic aid is not all that Ethiopia is receiving. Like Uganda and Eritrea, Sudan’s other hostile neighbours, it is also getting US weapons and military training for its forces. It is receiving US funds in return for supporting the Sudanese opposition forces - particularly those of the southern Christian warlord, John Garang.

The UN secretary-general has now also joined the US to bestow his blessings on the African continent’s ‘new breed’ of leaders. In his recently published African report - prepared at the security council’s request - Kofi Annan urges African leaders to stop blaming colonial powers for the continent’s woes and to address its problems squarely and without waiting for outside assistance. This has been interpreted by jubilant Washington as an endorsement for the familiar rhetoric of Zenawi, Museveni and Aferworki - Uncle Sam’s new African proxies.

Both the UN and the US have also been silent on the Ethiopian government’s appalling record of human rights violations. The regime has arrested thousands of critics and opponents - detaining, for instance, more journalists in the past three years than any other African government. And it is not as if there is lack of evidence or comment on this.

Two years ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that 10,000 Ethiopians were in prison for political or national security reasons. Western governments’ support for Addis Ababa and their silence over its appalling human rights record have outraged Ethiopian opposition politicians and journalists. An Ethiopian journalist, in a recent interview with the International Herald Tribune, said: ‘How could the west give the aid? How could the west call Ethiopia a democracy? How could the west call Meles Zenawi a new breed of leader? He has created an image, but there is no reality.’

It is not surprising for Zenawi to interpret all this as carte blanche for taking on the governments of the region in a bid to turn his country as a dominant power and a ‘bread basket’ for the oil-rich Arab States of the Gulf. For instance, he has told Egypt to stop interfering in Somalia’s affairs, asserting that only Addis Ababa has the mandate to arrange peace talks for Somalia’s squabbling warlords. The recent peace agreement brokered by Cairo between Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi has no value, he said, proceeding to block it.

But Addis Ababa’s designs on the Nile waters, encouraged by both the US and Israel is the more explosive of Zenawi’s ill-convinced schemes as it risks war with Egypt and Sudan. The Ethiopian government is planning to build seven dams, with Israeli technical assistance, to divert water from the Nile for hydraulic and agricultural projects.

Zenawi, who dismissively says that the Nile does not belong only to Sudan and Egypt, makes no secret of the plan to build the dams. In an interview with the Arab daily, Al-Hayat, on April 7, he says that ‘we are planning at present (emphasis added) to build four dams’ - hinting strongly that this is only an initial step.

Extensive advertisements in the same Arabic daily and in the western media in March speak eloquently of the ‘extremely rich agricultural potential of Ethiopia’ - with emphasis on the lowlands, said to constitute 60 per cent of the country’s land-mass. (The Tigray minority tribe, which rules Ethiopia, is incidentally concentrated in the northern mountainous area, and the ‘lowlands’ are a predominantly Muslim territory).

Both Zenawi and the advertisements wax lyrical about how Ethiopia could be the new bread basket of the Gulf. It was not long ago when the Arab League used to refer to Sudan as the Arab world’s planned bread basket, with Arab petro-dollars promised to finance the dream. Could it be possible that Gulf petro-dollars will, at Washington’s behest, finance Zenawi’s dream?

But Addis Ababa’s sick ambitions might engulf the whole region in religious wars beyond its control and that of its US masters.

Muslimedia: May 1-15, 1998