Geography Archives: Ethiopia

Attempts by U.S. and other Western countries to sow discord between Ethiopia and Eritrea “will not be successful because the majority of the Ethiopian people are grateful for the Eritrean army’s help in defeating the TPLF,” former Ethiopian diplomat Mohamed Hassan told Peoples Dispatch.

The Ethiopian and Eritrean armies now seem close to winning a two-year war with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF,) a U.S.-backed clique that ruled Ethiopia brutally for 27 years, from 1991 to 2018.

After a fragile ceasefire lasting just five months, the TPLF (Tigray People’s Liberation Front) have once again initiated violent conflict with federal forces in Northern Ethiopia.

The U.S. is falsely accusing Ethiopia and Eritrea of hindering food aid and committing genocides in the ongoing war in Tigray. The charges are false and the US has no right to make such a claim on its own. Ann Garrison continues reporting from the region. 

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has overwhelmingly approved a new measure designed to impose sanctions on Ethiopia. Known as the Ethiopia Peace and Stabilization Act of 2022, the bill authorizes the U.S. government to suspend financial and security assistance to Ethiopia and to sanction individuals the United States decrees to be responsible for the ongoing conflict in the country.

A considerable military buildup is now underway. Last week, the U.S. military announced it was sending over 1,000 National Guard members to nearby Djibouti.

The U.S. and its Western European allies have been trying to pass some kind of resolution censuring Ethiopia that will lead towards military intervention, but so far, they have not succeeded. Why? Because China and Russia have been blocking it. They say that this is Ethiopia’s internal affair, and we shouldn’t engage in any undue interference. Everyone is saying the same thing they have been saying all along.

Historian Jeff Pearce, @jeffpropulsion, responding to the atrocity reports of Alula Solomon, @Alula_Solomon, CEO, Tigrai Media House

The Saudi-UAE war on Yemen has been going on for five years. Despite recent peace talks leading to an improvement in aid distribution, the violence has escalated in certain key districts of Yemen over the past two weeks. Since January, 35,000 Yemenis have been displaced from their homes, an indicator of the dangerous situation in the country.

I met Matan Kaminer in Tel Aviv in January 2012, and we agreed to do an extended interview about the state of the left in Israeli society after the controversial J14 social justice protests. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?  How did you get involved in political activity? I was […]

Recent developments in the West African Republic of Mali are raising serious concerns about the possibility of yet another U.S. intervention.  On March 22, one month before a scheduled presidential election, a military coup toppled the government of President Amadou Toumani Touré.  Quickly taking sides, the regional 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) […]

  Is current U.S. foreign policy in Africa following a blueprint drawn up almost eight years ago by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, one of the most conservative think tanks in the world?  Although it seems odd that a Democratic administration would have anything in common with the extremists at Heritage, the convergence in policy and […]

It started in mid-July, when Dafni Leef, a Tel Aviv filmmaker, was met with a hike in her rent that she couldn’t afford to pay.  Instead of moving to a new apartment, she moved to a tent on Rothschild Boulevard, the city’s sleekest thoroughfare, and set up a Facebook event calling for her compatriots to […]

The failure of the Indian state more than six decades after Independence to provide universal access to quality schooling and to ensure equal access to higher education among all socio-economic groups and across gender and region must surely rank among the more dismal and significant failures of the development project in the country.  It is […]

Somalia in particular and the Horn of Africa in general are at such a volatile stage that any misstep — domestic or foreign — could only further exacerbate their perilous condition.  One such potential misstep is the recently proposed US foreign policy toward Somalia known as the Dual-Track approach. First, a brief background: In 2006 […]

Walls have a longstanding relation both with freedom from fear and subjugation to another’s will.  After 1945, walls acquired an unprecedented determination to divide.  They spread like a bushfire from Berlin to Palestine, from the tablelands of Kashmir to the villages of Cyprus, from the Korean peninsula to the streets of Belfast.  When the Cold […]

Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in his blog on 2 October 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  See, also, Merle David Kellerhals, Jr., “United States to Strengthen Engagement with Puntland, Somaliland” (America.gov, 27 September 2010); Sophia Tesfamariam, “Ethiopia: It Is in the Minority Regime’s Interest to Perpetuate […]

In recent years, climate change seems to have elbowed out other environmental issues to become the No. 1 global problem.  But the alarming problems of water — increasing scarcity, lack of access to drinking water and sanitation, pollution, flooding — are equally important and an even more immediate threat. On 28 July, the UN General […]

I.  Apartheid of a Special Type In the previous section I made a distinction between historical apartheid (unique to South Africa) and apartheid in its generic form — a structured system of political exclusion and social marginalization on the basis of origins (including but not restricted to race).  I concluded that Israel is different from […]

War Crime Whistleblower in Obama’s Sights, War Criminals Not Private First Class Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old U.S. Army intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq, is being prosecuted by the Obama administration for disclosing a classified video showing American troops murdering civilians in Baghdad from an Apache Attack Helicopter in 2007.  Eleven adults were killed in the […]