by GREGORY R. COPLEY
The Horn of Africa is sliding toward a major war which seems likely to rapidly expand to embrace the major powers. The situation has strong parallels to the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, which began World War II and destroyed the League of Nations.
Most Ethiopians are mesmerized by the growing violence threatening to totally engulf their country. They watch mutely as they see a seemingly improbable threat evolve as their Government assures them that all will be well.
But all will not be well. And it is not merely the population which is frozen; it is the Prime Minister, Dr Abiy Ahmed Ali. He has heeded no strategically- or militarily-capable advice.
And, with strong coordination, the internal war has been married to the international threat. Sudanese forces have already begun to occupy Ethiopian border lands; they are ready to penetrate further, with Egyptian help.
He has succumbed to the advice of his ethnic Oromo political power base to refuse military assistance to the Amhara and Afar regions, thus allowing key areas of the country to face major devastating assaults on the local communities there by the marxist rebels of the Tigré Popular Liberation Front (TPLF) and Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) militias.
In other words, Abiy has now demonstrated that he is not the Prime Minister of all Ethiopians.
The question, then, is why the Ethiopian people are not preparing for a grave internal collapse, or for foreign incursions against their borders? Part of this is down to the reality that they have been deprived — as has the outside world — of a realistic, independent reporting on the crisis. Virtually all the news spectrum is dominated, on the issue of Ethiopia, by the TPLF’s extensive and well-funded global information warfare, which has even gone to the extent of threatening Australia’s Government-owned Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Amharic-language service.
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