Demeke Mekonnen, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, accompanied by a high-level delegation, paid an official visit to India from 17 to 19 February 2021, his first visit to Asia after taking over as Foreign Minister in November 2020.
Dr. S. Jaishankar, External Affairs Minister of India, held wide-ranging discussions with the Deputy Prime Minister on Friday 19 February 2021, during which they exchanged views on bilateral, regional and global issues. The External Affairs Minister also hosted the Deputy Prime Minister at lunch.
Earlier, the two Ministers jointly inaugurated the newly-constructed Chancery building and Embassy residence of the Embassy of Ethiopia in New Delhi on 18th February 2021. Demeke highlighted the importance of the India-Ethiopia relationship. He noted the historical people-to-people, trade, and investment relationship between the two countries that stretches back over many centuries and deeply entrenched with the beginning of formal diplomatic relations in 1948. He commended the high-level relationship that exists between the two countries which is manifested through expanding engagements in investment, trade, capacity building, and education sectors.
The External Affairs Minister of India addressed the gathering and spoke of the historic ties between India and Ethiopia and the fillip that these had received with the exchange of high-level visits over the last few years; he also touched upon the flourishing bilateral trade and investment ties and the growing people to people contacts.
ASSOCHAM, in association with the Embassy of Ethiopia in New Delhi, organized the India-Ethiopia Business Forum on 17th February, 2021 at which investment opportunities in Ethiopia were highlighted by the Ethiopian side and by Indian investors.
Demeke Mekonnen in his address, informed the gathering that the Government of Ethiopia was working on new measures to improve the business environment in Ethiopia. He noted the vibrant engagements of Indian companies in the economic life of Ethiopia serving as the main sources of FDI of the country and creating huge employment opportunities. Noting the current 1.3 billion US dollars’ worth of the trade volume between the two countries, the Deputy Prime Minister also appreciated the commitment of the 30 Indian companies who opted to invest in Ethiopia despite the global challenge posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. He said Ethiopia was working to be Africa’s beacon of prosperity by charting out a 10-year economic development plan where new frontiers of growth, such as the digital economy as well as science and technology are included, among others. The Minister also touched upon the advantage of doing business in Ethiopia stating its strategic
positioning in the continent, abundant and trainable workforce, competitive economic incentives, adequate guarantees for investors, and a policy of zero tolerance for corruption.
Shri V. Muraleedharan, Minister of State for External Affairs, attended the Forum and, in his address, invited the business communities to take advantage of the trade and investment opportunities on offer and expressed his satisfaction at the role played by Indian educators in Ethiopia.
During the visit, the two sides signed an Agreement on Mutual Visa Exemption for holders of Diplomatic Passports and a MoU between the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research – Central Leather Research Institute, India and Wollo University, Ethiopia.
Ethio-India ties continue to flourish
The Sudan Military Another Problem of Africa in the 21st Century?
Present day African history is intertwined with West European history in the context of colonialism. The major colonial powers such as the United Kingdom and France have tried to shape the destinies of their colonial possessions well before independence. The current boundaries of African states are by and large inherited from the colonial times. The farther north of the continent was predominantly French colony except for Egypt, which was ruled by Britain with the name “Anglo Egyptian Sudan” at least between 1899 – 1956. Sudan was (and it still appears to be) a client state under the shadow of Egypt. The first president of “independent” Sudan (1956) – Ibrahim Abboud – was a military officer under the Anglo Egyptian army. The last king of Egypt and Sudan – Fuad II (Turkish ancestry) was deposed in 1953 through the Jemal Abdul Nasir revolution.
Sudan got its name from the Arab north (AL SOWD -SOWDAN) meaning BLACKS as the original inhabitants of the region including the southern part of Egypt are black people or mixed. I am not sure if present day borders of Sudan with Egypt are marked following this color line! The politics of both Sudan and Egypt have been dominated by the military upper brass. Egypt has been under military rule since 1952. A military group that changes its cloth to civilian and dominate the political and economic lives of the civilian population. One exception was a civilian President – Mohammed Morsi who was elected to office but whisked out of office by the military and jailed where he died in 2019. Similar patterns have been observed in Sudan since independence where the military steps in every time there is civilian movement against military rule. Although there were political parties the military intervenes in their activities and at times dissolves the parties to pave the way for military rule. The military has always been supreme. In the 1960’s Sudan had the oldest Communist Party in Africa in addition to other ideological parties. Nimeiri decimated the Communist party totally and other parties have been put to a position of subserviency to the Military. The military has been at the helm of power throughout– Ibrahim Abboud, El – Nimeiri, Omar Al Bashir, and currently Al Burhan.
In the same pattern today, the aspirations of the Sudanese people expressed during the September 2019 Revolution are being dashed by the military who hijacked the Revolution. The Transition period for the Sovereignty Council of Sudan led by Al Burhan and the civilian prime minister Abdalla Hamdok is ticking. The civilian groups appear to be struggling to form a government that should be approved by the military. Recent foreign relation activities by the military council members sidelining the civilian PM indicate the dominance of the military. The patience of the September revolutionaries has reached its limits and protests have been a daily occurrence since the end of January.
The Sovereignty Council has been taking diversionary actions in all directions. In addition to crippling the efforts of the civilian government one such grave mistake taken by the military was the invasion of lands in neighbouring Ethiopia. The reader may recall the role the Ethiopian Prime Minister played in reconciling the civilian and military groups to help form a transitional government in Sudan and the subsequent diplomatic supports provided to the Sudanese people. The current PM of Ethiopia is a Pan-Africanist leader who has repeatedly took initiatives to strengthen regional and continental cooperation to promote Africa’s focus to change the lives of ordinary citizens. I remember Abiy Ahmed with the Mandela African T-shirt on that fateful support rally in Addis Ababa where he escaped an assassination attempt just 3 months in office in June 2018.
The unprovoked invasion of Ethiopian lands does not answer the ideals of the Sudanese Revolution for which scores of people sacrificed their lives but just an attempt to divert the attention of the Sudanese people and create a pretext for the total assumption or domination of power by the Sudanese Military Council leaders. The invasion is part of the larger scheme hatched by Sudan and its backers. The larger scheme was to weaken Ethiopia using internal collaborators such as entities that organized itself in the context of the Ethiopian Ethnic Federalism. There is clear evidence suggesting that the Sudanese military has been working with the now defunct political group called TPLF to behave like a de facto state and also create chaos in other ethnic based regional states in Ethiopia. God willing, I will come back to the sinister reasoning for dividing Ethiopian regions based on ethnicity in the near future if need be. It was meant to divide and rule and attack Ethiopian nationalism. It has been evident that the TPLF was conducting foreign relations of its own particularly with the Sudan, Egypt, the media groups and some international and NGO organizations where it was receiving various assistance and encouragement. One should remember the repeated claim it made that if it is attacked by the Federal government the fighting will not stop within the Ethiopian border – it will be regional! It is not unreasonable to suggest that its provocative missile attack on Asmara was part of the scheme to regionalize the internal conflict – and hence invite others to come to its rescue.
The total decimation of the TPLF leadership has frustrated the Sudanese military and its backers’ plans and had to take action fast and chose to back stab Abiy Ahmed by invading Ethiopian territories and support other armed groups. The Sudanese military is currently recruiting fighters from the “refugees” that enter its territory from Tigray region. The young male “refugees” are those who committed genocide in Mycadra in northwestern Ethiopia. It has also received members of the TPLF militia and special forces who fled to Sudan as they were overwhelmed by the national army, they provoked to start the fighting. Today diaspora adherents of the TPLF are hailing the actions of the Sudanese military as an ally.
The Sudanese government has also startled the world with its changed position on the GERD negotiations sponsored by our continental organization – The African Union. All Sudanese professionals and politicians have been hailing the benefits of the GERD for protecting them from perennial flooding and the development potential it will create for agriculture in Sudan. However, Sudan has absented itself from 2 of the last meetings with no substantive rationale. This is a delay tactic to frustrate the negotiation and put pressure on Ethiopia and portray it as an unwilling partner in the process. This was how Ethiopia was presented to the Egyptian Parliament last week. It appears lies are becoming frequent now adays among Sudanese and Egyptian military leaderships. The alleged reason for the first absence for Sudan was reported to be lack of communication about the exact date for the meeting! The date that was broadcast all over the media world was not clear to the Sudanese leadership! Let me add another white lie – Al Burhan’s statement that stated – his army crossed the Ethio-Sudanese border by the invitation of the Ethiopian PM. And in the same line he states that Sudan did not cross any border but took what belonged to Sudan. I wonder how many lies he has been telling the Sudanese public to divert their attention from the failures of his government to address the demands of the September Revolution.
In addition to the brewing discontent within the civilian population that initiated the September Revolution, Sudan has internal ethnic/regional problems for a while now in Darfur west, South and other parts of the country. The agreement Khartoum inked with Kordofan has not dried yet. There is the questionable car accident death of the governor of the Blue Nile State which has been hash hashed for now. Sudan is as very diverse as Ethiopia both in ethnic and linguistic terms. It is black and mixed as is Ethiopia. Previous governments in the 1970’s and 1980’s in both countries had played Ethnic cards to destabilize the other. As a result, both countries were dismembered (Eritrea and South Sudan). For the Africa we aspire to unite and develop its citizens, using ethnic cards to destabilize each other is not a card Sudan should play in the 21st Century. As the old saying goes “one who is in a glass house should not be the first to throw stone”.
The Sudanese military brass appears to be unhappy by recent developments in Ethiopia. These are movements taking place in Ethiopia that worry its distractors in general. The first is the movement in action to depoliticize the national army and require it to play its mandated role of keeping the country safe by being within its barracks and not be involved in national politics. The second is the ascendance of a Pan-Ethiopian movement that transcend parochial ethnic affiliation and focus on what unites us and close ranks in light of the sinister motives of internal and external parties that perennially work to weaken our country. Such developments within Ethiopia are detrimental to their evil designs to destabilize Ethiopia.
One short note here: Ethiopia never crossed its borders to attack any neighboring country in its long history– all wars fought throughout its history have been waged to defend itself – Italy (1896; 1936); Egypt (1875;1876); Sudan (1889) and Somalia (1960’s; 1977). It had truth on its side and kept its independence. It has never ceded what belongs to us and never aspired to ask what belongs to others. Ethiopia is a Pan-Africanist nation that promotes good neighborliness, regional cooperation & development and African Unity. Ethiopian leaders have demonstrated this by Ethiopia’s participation in multitude of peace keeping missions in the continent (Congo in 1960 and others from the 1990’s to date) as well as in Korea in 1950; recently it boldly resolved the dispute with Eritrea and is closely working with other IGAD states including Sudan. War should not be Africa’s choice in the 21st Century.
The Sudanese military invasion of Ethiopia does not fulfill the national interest of the Sudanese people and particularly the requests of the September 2018 revolutionaries that sacrificed their lives. The Sudanese military should go back to its barracks and keep its hands out of civilian administration and the ECONOMY. Leave Ethiopian territory and reach an agreement on the border through diplomacy.
God/Allah Bless the People of Ethiopia and Sudan!
The writer can be reached via atachble@gmail.com
Why the Military Establishment Backed Joe Biden?
(Continued from last week)
Following the election of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States, the United States military establishment breathed a sigh of relief. Nearly 800 former high-ranking military and security officials penned an open letter in support of the Democratic candidate during the presidential campaign.
Since its official establishment, June 14, 1775, more than a year before the Declaration of Independence, the United States Army has played a vital role in the growth and development of the American nation. Drawing on both long-standing militia traditions and recently introduced professional standards, it won the new republic’s independence in an arduous eight-year struggle against Great Britain. At times, the Army provided the lone symbol of nationhood around which patriots rallied.
In the 2019 State of the Union address President Trump said, “We are now making it clear to China that after years of targeting our industries and stealing our intellectual property, the theft of American jobs and wealth has come to an end”. By August last year, President Trump had slapped tariffs on $550 billion of Chinese goods, with a targeted campaign against tech giant Huawei, which had been tipped to overtake Apple in global phone sales.
While Republican and Democratic politicians have backed a hardline approach to China, President Trump’s erratic protectionist approach to trade has alienated large sections of the capitalist class otherwise happy with domestic tax cuts and deregulation. A Bloomberg Economics report, released before the pandemic gripped the country, estimated that the escalating tariffs on China would cost the United States economy $316 billion by the end of this year.
Chloe Rafferty, a noted American Military Analyst in Washington D.C stated that more worryingly for the United States establishment, President Trump adopted a dismissive attitude towards US allies, particularly the European Union. President Trump prided himself on his ability to cut deals with other nations that favoured the United States. He signaled that the multilateral approach to trade was over when he tore up the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP), and followed that by applying tariffs on German cars, Canadian steel and French luxury goods.
According to Chloe Rafferty, for much of the United States elite, these moves have simply created a void that Beijing is attempting to fill with its own free trade deals and the $1 trillion Belt and Road initiative, which aims to incorporate more than 138 countries into trade routes and production chains centred on China.
The International Monetary Fund, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the UN and other international institutions project United States dominance by drawing allied nations behind United States leadership. President Trump’s presidency delegitimised or sidelined those institutions as he focused on an “America first” posture. The military establishment believes that this has threatened, rather than strengthened, United States power, although there is now an acknowledgement that those institutions failed to keep China in check, something a Biden presidency will also grapple with.
Chloe Rafferty noted that the war criminals hope that President Biden will restore political legitimacy to the office by rehabilitating the liberal ideology that manufactures consent for American imperialism, pitching United States aggression as necessary to “make the world safe for democracy” and defending the “rules-based liberal world order”.
Above all, the United States establishment hopes that President Biden will restore relationships with United States allies and construct a coalition of nations to confront China, after a disastrous four years that called into question United States global leadership. As the National Security Leaders for Biden open letter bemoaned: “Our allies no longer trust or respect us, and our enemies no longer fear us”.
Patricia Kime, Senior Military Analyst for Military.com stressed that President Biden has a proven record as a hawkish proponent of United States empire. For decades, he served on the Senate foreign relations committee. He was an early proponent of the expansion of NATO to project United States influence into the former eastern bloc after the fall of the USSR. He backed United States intervention in the Balkan war, supported the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, voted for the war on Iraq in 2003 and, as vice president, backed the United States intervention in Libya.
According to Patricia Kime, there is consensus within the United States ruling class over the need to “get tough” with China. The military establishment expects Biden to turn the screws. On the campaign trail, he accused President Trump of “getting played” by Chinese President Xi Jinping, whom he called a “thug”. This is consistent with Democratic Party practice in the Congress, which is to criticise Trump for not being tough enough. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, for example, accused President Trump of “selling out” by cutting a trade deal with China. Schumer also spearheaded legislation to implement bans on Huawei when Trump appeared to back down.
Since his first days in Congress, Biden has also made a name for himself as a staunch supporter of the apartheid state of Israel. According to Israeli publication Haaretz, Biden is said to have a “real friendship” with Israel’s far-right president, Benjamin Netanyahu. He was vice president when the United States signed a $38 billion military aid deal with Netanyahu, which the State Department called the “single largest pledge of bilateral military assistance in United States history”.
So while President Trump pushed pro-Israeli rhetoric far to the right, abandoning any pretence of support for Palestinian statehood, Biden put his money where his mouth is when it came to propping up Israeli apartheid in Palestine.
On Afghanistan, Biden may prove to be to the right of Trump. As vice president, he supported an enduring United States military presence in the country. Trump, by contrast, shocked the United States military when he announced on Twitter that he wants all troops out by Christmas. In contrast, Biden in an interview with Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper, said he would maintain a troop presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Chloe Rafferty argued that anti-imperialists need to judge President Joe Biden by his record in Congress and by the company he keeps. The bulk of the United States military establishment has backed Biden precisely because they think his multilateral approach will restore credibility to United States interventions. It’s for this reason that Forbes magazine senior contributor Loren Thompson predicted last month: “A Biden presidency … would be more likely to use United States military forces overseas than President Trump has been”.
Global capitalism is facing a profound crisis that is reshaping international relations and putting pressure on the fault lines of existing conflicts. Open rivalry will be a feature of the coming period, along with wars over regional disputes. There is no length to which the United States ruling class won’t go to safeguard its position as global superpower. And President Joe Biden is the commander-in-chief. He is now the most powerful man in the world.
Gudaf Tsegay smashes world indoor 1500m record in Liévin
The athletics meeting at Hauts-de-France Pas-de-Calais had been billed as the stand-out event of the season so far and it will go down as one of the best in history, with a series of storming performances in Liévin capped by Ethiopian middle distance star Gudaf Tsegay who set world Indoor 1500m new record of 3:53.09.
By the time world bronze medalist Tsegay took to the track, there had already been a near world indoor 3000m record by Getnet Wale and a European indoor 1500m record by Jakob Ingebrigtsen, while Laura Muir’s time in second behind Gudaf broke the British indoor record and Grant Holloway rounded out the evening by missing the world 60m hurdles record by just 0.02.
In the women’s 1500m, Ethiopia’s Gudaf took more than two seconds off the world indoor record set by compatriot Genzebe Dibaba in 2014, managing to hold on after being paced through some fast early laps.
Following the pacemaker through 400m in 58.97 and then passing 800m in 2:05.94, the 1.63 meter light weight had already created a significant gap on the rest of the field. She went through 1000m in 2:37.36, with European champion Muir who was running solo behind her.
Gritting her teeth, the 24 year-old former bronze medalist Gudaf Tsegay stormed over the finish line with the clock reading 3:53.09 before she erupted into celebrations.
