The West Distances Itself from the Ethiopian Prime Minister

[Deeq A.]

Addis Ababa ( PP Commentary ) —The Prime Minister of Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed presses on with a war against Tigray despite calls for de-escalation. Dominic Raab, the British Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, had a telephone call with Abiy Ahmed this week to drive home the message that a ceasefire is what the International Community wants to take effect in Ethiopia to pave the way for talks.  Pope Benedict XVI added his voice to the calls for de-escalation.

Western commentators have reflected on the premature decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the Ethiopian Prime Minister, who celebrated the first anniversary of the prize by declaring a war on a part of his country.

Pope Benedict XVI with Abiy Ahmed, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia.

Journalists in Ethiopia reported that Abiy Ahmed had mobilised ethnic militias to fight alongside the Ethiopian National Defence Forces to wage the war and overthrow TPLF following local elections that  gave the one-time liberation front a strong mandate to represent Tigrayans.

Demonisation of one ethnicity to sanction killing and looting is what Abiy Ahmed least expected from the war. The civil war in Ethiopia has all the  characteristics of hostilities that result in genocide.

The calls for de-escalation should have persuaded Abiy Ahmed to salvage his reformist reputation but now that it is too late to do so he insists on the war as “operations against TPLF”. The irony is that Abiy Ahmed has become a leader who declared a war against his compatriots to destroy power stations, arm one ethnic militias against another and force thousands of citizens to flee into Sudan.

One discernible lesson from the Nobel Peace Prize farce is that any leader from the third world promoted by the West as a peacemaker or pro-democracy can turn out to have the opposite of the questionable persona that the prize confers on him or her.

 “Mr Abiy has proposed arealistic and forward-looking programme. I call on Africa and the internationalcommunity to back him” argued Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia and a Nobel Peace Prize winner herself in an op-ed in the Financial Times last year.  The image Abiy Ahmed has formed in the minds of millions of peace-loving people is likened to the infamy of Charles Taylor, a former warlord who was found guilty of 11 counts of “aiding and abetting” war crimes and crimes against humanity.

© Puntland Post, 2020

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