As violence and unrest in the Tigray region of Ethiopia continues, we bring Goitom Gebreleul on the show. Gebreleul is a researcher in international and comparative politics of the Horn of Africa at Hatèta Policy Research. In his interview with Kim, he shares the evidence that this is a genocide and tells listeners what they can do to help. There's no news wrap this week, but you can still see what we're reading, listening to, and learning this week in the show notes on our website, ufahamuafrica.com.
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Previous Episodes We Mentioned
Find the books, links, and articles we mentioned in this episode on our website, ufahamuafrica.com.
As violence and unrest in the Tigray region of Ethiopia continues, we bring Goitom Gebreleul on the show. Gebreleul is a researcher in international and comparative politics of the Horn of Africa at Hatèta Policy Research. In his interview with Kim, he shares the evidence that this is a genocide and tells listeners what they can do to help. There's no news wrap this week, but you can still see what we're reading, listening to, and learning this week in the show notes on our website, ufahamuafrica.com.
Books, Links, & Articles
Previous Episodes We Mentioned
Find the books, links, and articles we mentioned in this episode on our website, ufahamuafrica.com.
Kim Yi Dionne 0:05
Welcome to Ufahamu Africa. I'm Kim Yi Dionne, your host. In this episode we wanted to draw attention to the ongoing conflict in Ethiopia, which some are calling a genocide against Tigrayan people. Earlier this week I spoke with Dr. Goitom Gebreleul, the managing director of Hatèta Policy Research, which conducts analysis and provides advisory services on political economy, security policy and regional affairs in the Horn of Africa and Red Sea regions. Goitom earned his PhD in political science from the University of Cambridge and previously taught at the University of London and the University of Mekelle. His publications and commentaries on security, political economy, foreign policy, Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post and The Washington Quarterly. I asked him this week to describe and contextualize the conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. And I want to let our listeners know that my conversation with Goitom includes discussion of sexual violence and may not be suitable for all audiences. Rachel and I are skipping our news wrap this week, but on ufahamuafrica.com will include links to things we read and found interesting this week, including the latest Afrobarometer Monkey Cage collaboration by Joe Asunka and Carolyn Logan connecting citizens access to government budgets, and their perceptions of corruption; an essay in The Economist saying Somaliland deserves international recognition and Human Rights Watch report on how Sudan's armed forces are using excessive lethal force against peaceful protesters gathering in Khartoum to commemorate victims of the 2019 crackdown. As we near the end of season five, we want to invite our listeners to share their good news with us so that we can share it in our season closer. For example, we just learned that our friend and colleague and guest in episode 102, Noah Nathan, earned tenure. Congratulations, Noah. So reach out to us via Twitter or send us an email at ufahamuafrica@gmail.com and tell us your good news so we can share it with our listeners. Now let's go to my conversation with Goitom.
Goitom Gebreluel 2:15
Hi, my name is Goitom Gebreluel. I'm a researcher on Ethiopian and Horn of Africa politics.
Kim Yi Dionne 2:21
Thank you for joining us this week to get our listeners a better understanding of what's happening in Tigray, the northernmost region of Ethiopia, which sits on the border with Eritrea. Now to give our listeners some context, what analysts are now calling a civil war began in Tigray in late 2020 when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sent federal troops into the region for a military operation against the Tigray People's Liberation Front, the TPLF, the northern region's ruling party. Now the TPLF was prominent in national politics for decades as a powerful party in the ruling coalition the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front the EPRDF. Though its position of prominence has declined since 2012. The year when former TPLF leader and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi died in office for the last few months across Ethiopia, ethnic Tigrayans have been harassed, arrested and suspended from their jobs. 1000s of people are reported to have been killed in the conflict, nearly 2 million people have been displaced and more than 5 million people will be in need of food assistance because of the conflict's impact on food supply and distribution. It is rare, but there are even a few articles in the international media referencing genocide and reporting on Tigray documenting stories of ethnically motivated violence, including sexual violence. So Gebreluel, what I would like to know is what beyond this summary, do you think our listeners should know about what's happening in Tigray right now, whatever or, you know, even what I have said, that you think needs correction or more explanation?
Goitom Gebreleul 3:56
Thank you. So I would just add a couple of more points. First of all, I would say at this point, I think the evidence for the fact that what's going on is a genocide is is very convincing, outside a couple of, you know, patterns in the violence that indicates this. The first is the extent of a nature of the sexual violence. So rape has been systematically employed as a weapon of war in this in this in this conflict. And what we're seeing is that the intent seems to be to destroy the reproductive capacity of women. We say this, first of all, because of the testimonies that have been gathered from the victims. They say that the soldiers that raped them tell them that their intention is to prevent them from giving birth to Tigrayans in the future. The nature of the rape also the violence that is committed after the rape also indicates that the intention is to physically and mentally destroy the woman that they're raping. There seems to be a clear, systematic way of destroying the reproductive capacity of the society. The other indicator that leads us to say that this is genocide is the use of starvation as a weapon of war. So, throughout the last six months, the soldiers have systematically been destroying the seeds, and agricultural equipment of farmers. They've been preventing farmers from farming, and they're preventing aid agencies from reaching the civilian population. And this has, you know, the testimonies we have of this is not simply from Tigrayans, but it's also from aid agencies, international aid agencies that are operating in Tigray. So when you put these facts, these patterns together, it seems to be the case that the intention is to exterminate parts or the entire population of Tigray for political reasons. The other thing I would point out, which I think is often overlooked in the media is the politics behind this genocide. It's often presented as, you know, some sort of apolitical event, some sort of violence without a clear political logic, when you read analysis of this in the media, in the international media, but what you have to do is you have to look at it in a broader historical context. When you do that, you see that this type of violence is recurrent in Ethiopia, this is not the first time that genocide is taking place in Ethiopia. In fact, this seems to be some sort of pathological characteristic to this violence. Ever since the state of Ethiopia was established in the 19th century, Mass atrocities against civilians have been regularly occurring events throughout history. So you have two types of periods here. One is the period before the age of nationalism, where that part of East Africa was led by different empires, and the biggest one of them being the Abyssinian empire. In that period in the 19th century and early 20th century, you had mass atrocities being committed against civilians, as a way of punishing rebellions or as a way of subjugating people. And that usually involved cutting off breasts of women's hands off of the men, cutting of legs, and these types of actions. But it didn't stop there. So in the 20th century, during the Communist regime in the 70s and 80s. The Communist regime also used starvation as a weapon of war against Eritreans and Tigrayans in particular, and it led to a man made famine in which 1 million people died. Fast forward today. And you see the same type of violence and the same type of tactics being used by Abiy Ahmed in Tigray. Where, you know, in addition to starvation, you now also have extensive forms of sexual violence and even the systematic destruction of cultural heritage, which indicates that ethnicity and and politics is a is a big driver, not just a military strategy essentially.
Kim Yi Dionne 9:05
So you bring up Abiy Ahmed So, now Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner, and in that award promised, gave some vision of the potential to bring peace, justice and prosperity to all Ethiopians, and there was optimism that he would bring an end to long standing tensions and unify the nation. Many saw for example the cooling of the tensions with neighboring Eritrea as a sign of real change in Ethiopia. But events since his Nobel award, including the ongoing civil war in Tigray have quelled that early optimism using Eritrean relations as an example, many of the atrocities that have been committed in Tigray during the Civil War have been committed by Eritrean soldiers. For months Prime Minister Abiy and the Eritrean government denied that Eritrean troops had even entered Tigray, though both governments publicly committed to the withdrawal of Eritrean troops after finally admitting, there's no proof that that withdrawal is happening. Now, in a recent article that you wrote with Mulu Beyene in African Arguments, you argue that, quote, any probe into war crimes that involves the African Union or the government's own human rights commission stands little chance of being effective. Now, why did you and Mulu argue that a UN led investigation was needed? And what would it mean to involve external actors for the long term peace efforts in the region.
Goitom Gebreluel 10:37
So we oppose the involvement of the EU and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, based on their partisan history, in this conflict, so initially, in the war, the African Union Commission chair, Moussa Faki embraced the war, very overtly justifying it saying that this was within the sovereign rights of Ethiopia to, you know, crush the rebellion in the north, as he called it. And this, I think, was problematic for many reasons. First of all, this was not a domestic affair, the involvement of Israel makes it an international conflict. Secondly, the mass atrocities being committed also means that one cannot hide this under, you know, the concept of sovereignty. And the African Union, I think, was the actor that had the biggest moral responsibility and was the closest and could potentially be the most effective in stopping the conflict early on early on in November, but instead, Moussa Faki embraced the war and encouraged Abiy Ahmed to continue with his conflict. Now this, I don't think the African Union would have done this with any other country in Africa. The African Union has a long history of treating Ethiopia differently. Doesn't I cannot recall a moment throughout its existence when I actually confronted Ethiopia on its human rights, and democratic deficiencies. And many people attribute this to the fact that the African Union's headquarters is in Addis Ababa. And that, yes, and that gives them leverage that other African countries do not have. So based on this history, we fought it, we would be very unreasonable to involve an actor that has so vocally embraced one side in the conflict to be involved in, in the investigation. And the same problem with the same problem applies to the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission. The commissioner, Daniel Bekele, has since been appointed by Abiy Ahmed as as, as commissioner has displayed a very selective and almost curated reporting pattern when it comes to human rights violations in Ethiopia. Some of the patterns that we see are that the Human Rights Commission is very quick to investigate cases that the government can use for propaganda purposes. So there was a massacre in a place called Mai Kadra in Tigray a few weeks into the war. And it took the Human Rights Commission just a couple of days to send a team to investigate that massacre. And within two weeks, they concluded that the perpetrators were from the Tigrayan side, and the government used this as a propaganda tool to mobilize people for the war. On the other hand, there was a major massacre in action that has now been fairly well covered by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and so forth, in which hundreds of people were massacred for several days by Eritrean Ethiopian troops. I think it was late November. Now this was, you know, a lot of people were talking about this. They were waiting for evidence that this had happened early on, but this was ignored by the European Human Rights Commission until Amnesty International made a report about this in February, in which case after that happen, they they immediately said that they would investigate, and this is, you know, the pattern in which legal and Human Rights Commission has been curating the reports that it may it produces in order to cover up or benefit the government.
Kim Yi Dionne 15:16
So we're now talking in May, which is three months after these reports of what happened in Aksum have been public and and has the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission written any issued any report
Goitom Gebreluel 15:28
Nothing substantial. So do you know the moment they cannot hide their atrocities anymore? They sort of halfway recognize these, these atrocities have to have taken place. And they say that they're going to look into it. So for example, Mai Kadra, which they concluded, were committed by Tigrayans exclusively in November. Now they tell us that they've also come across evidence that suggests that the government was also involved or that Amhara militias were involved. And this is six, seven months later. And apparently, they've been sitting on this information, but not reporting it. So it's very, after it's a very sophisticated PR machinery that they're running, because they managed to produce just enough to be seen as somewhat credible human rights organization, internationally, but they produce although they they managed to sort of conceal as much as possible, of the government's atrocities for as long as possible.
Kim Yi Dionne 16:47
When people aren't paying attention to it anymore. Right? Yeah.
Goitom Gebreluel 16:50
And that's a much more effective way of covering up atrocities than simply denying them from the outset or just
Kim Yi Dionne 16:56
Right to say, well, there needs to be more investigation.
Goitom Gebreluel 17:01
So because of this, they have now also actually had been given the opportunity to conduct investigations together with the UN Human Rights Commission. Because they've managed to create this image of a somewhat responsible human rights organization.
Kim Yi Dionne 17:21
Now simultaneous with the violence that's ongoing in Tigray, Ethiopia is also facing armed uprisings in its western region, where the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is located. The GERD, the dam, is a development project that could potentially solve Ethiopia's electricity shortfall. But it is also expected to affect water supply to the countries and people further down the Nile River, specifically Egypt and Sudan. Now progress on the dam has thus elevated tensions with these two countries. In your doctoral thesis, you examined Ethiopia strategies for managing regional conflicts, focusing on Ethiopia's rivalries with Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia between 1991 and 2018. Now, in light of your research, how would you put the Civil War in Tigray and the foreign policy challenges associated with a Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in a broader historical context? What are some continuities and changes in Ethiopia's foreign policy?
Goitom Gebreluel 18:21
Ah, Yes, I think to answer that question, we need to go back to what sort of a national strategy to appeal is employed prior to the coming of this government. The previous Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front ,EPRDF, pursued a developmental state national strategy from 2002 to 2018. That strategy was a reflection of the domestic developmental state economic model that they were pursuing. And the priorities of that strategy, or its premise was the understanding that Ethiopia was a poor and fragile state that needed to prioritize economic development and international internal stability. So based on this premise, they concluded that they needed to manage their regional rivalries through diplomatic means, or by establishing diplomatic ties extensively in the region, and avoid military confrontation because of its impact on internal stability, which would, again, have an impact on economic development. So this led to isolating Eritrea instead of fighting a second war and in relation to Egypt and the Nile. This led to about 5, 10 years of diplomatic work to bring or to strengthen their alliances with Sudan and persuade Sudan to support its best stance on the Nile. And once they had built that diplomatic network in the region, and particularly with Sudan, there was very little Egypt could do to stop Ethiopia from pursuing its goal on the Nile. Now, Abiy Ahmed has changed that significantly. Once he came to power, he reverted back to Ethiopia's traditional way of looking at foreign policy and national security. Like so many leaders before him, he simply took it for granted that Ethiopia was this big state that deserved recognition and diplomatic capital was not in his view, something that had to be cultivated and maintained regularly, he simply took it for granted that this was something that could be exercised. So he gave up a lot of those or he neglected many of those regional ties that EPRDF had built. And the crucial one he neglected was Sudan, Sudan was key for everything. So instead, he found we made an alliance with Isaias Afwerki, and Mohammed Abdullahi Farmaajo of Somalia, and sort of excluded the other states in the region and when that happened, then Sudan had no incentive to side with Ethiopia anymore. So they increasingly became closer to Egypt. And there was this area called al-Fashaga in Sudan which had been occupied by Ethiopian farmers for many decades, due to the good relations that Ethiopia had with Sudan under the EPRDF. They've come to an agreement that the farmers could remain there. But if you did, they would recognize Sudan sovereignty of that territory. Now, Abiy Ahmed when he came to power. He had this, as I said, conception of Ethiopia as this regional hegemon that could do whatever it wanted. When the war in Tigray began, I think Sudan moved its troops into that area. And Abiy Ahmed became furious because he said that that was Ethiopian territory. That's still the claim of the government. And then, of course, relations with Tehran totally collapsed. And Sudan, in fact, began laying new claims, new territorial claims that we haven't heard of, before on Ethiopia. So yeah, what you see is this move away from that developmental state strategy of restraint and focusing on internal stability, and managing rivals through diplomacy to one of hubris and status seeking militarism. And of course, the problem is that you do but do not have the material basis to exercise that type of a Germany that IBM had and Ethiopian elite imagine that they have. So we see that in the conflict with Sudan, it doesn't have the capacity actually to resist or to push them out of that territory and this has also incentivized Egypt and Sudan to be much more confrontational on the Nile question. So I think I'll stop there.
Kim Yi Dionne 18:43
That does not it does not. It does not strike me as someone who wins a Nobel Peace Prize would, would, would act in such a way. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that. Now, here in the United States, where I'm based, there have been a number of demonstrations in solidarity with the people of Tigray, for example in Boston, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Washington D.C. I should also note that there are Ethiopians in the diaspora here in the US and in Canada that are protesting in support of the Ethiopian government as well. Now, the political situation in Ethiopia and its deadly consequences for civilians raised concern throughout the Ethiopian diaspora and in the broader international community. I'm curious to hear what you think are potential routes that people including our listeners, who want to advocate from afar, in in ending the violence and the genocide against Tigrayan people.
Goitom Gebreluel 24:32
I think the most effective way is contacting, particularly Americans in America have a very important role to play here. Contacting local or their Congress and representatives and senators, is a great help. Those that have special influence if they can make that public is also immensely important, the most important contribution anyone else I think, you know, as much as you can if you can draw attention to this on social media and and in no other way you can. Those are great contributions, I think, but the most important is actually to talk to local representatives.
Kim Yi Dionne 25:30
And I know that you've been very active on Twitter sharing information about what's happening. Are there particular hashtags on Twitter that you think our listeners should be following?
Goitom Gebreluel 25:40
Yeah, the main one is Tigray Genocide. That's the one everyone is using. And if you follow that, and if you follow some advocacy groups like TGHAT, that's T G H AT, and Omna. You will keep yourself updated on the latest on that front.
Kim Yi Dionne 26:02
Great, thank you so much for your time this week and for sharing your insights with our listeners.
Goitom Gebreluel 26:06
Thank you so much for having me.
Kim Yi Dionne 26:10
That's all for this week. Thanks for listening to this episode of Ufahamu Africa. To find any of the articles, books, or links we talked about, head to ufahamuafrica.com. Don't forget to follow and share your thoughts with us on Twitter at Ufahamu Africa. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Stitcher. If you like what you're hearing on Ufahamu Africa, please share this episode and review our show on Apple Podcasts. This podcast is produced by Megan DeMint with help from research and production assistant Fulya Felicity Turkmen. We are generously supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and received research assistance from Cornell University and the University of California Riverside. Our music is courtesy of Kevin MacLeod.