The situation in Ethiopia is rather simple to understand as long as you don’t believe western media spin doctors, Matthew Ehret writes.
Many westerners trying to make sense of the events in the “dark continent” of Africa have many barriers standing in the way of their minds and reality. This must be the case, for without such filters of spin proclaiming Africa’s problems to be self-induced (or the consequence of Chinese debt slavery), we in the west, might actually feel horrified enough to demand systemic change. We might come to recognize that the plight of Africa has less to do with Africa and more to do with an intentional program of depopulation, and exploitation of vital resources.
Despite a rich history and over a billion people living on the continent, Africa suffers from the lowest per capita rates of electricity and potable water in the world. Of the 30,000 children who die needlessly each day from preventable causes (disease, water availability, hunger, etc), the majority are from Africa. Living standards are in turn abysmally low for the 340 million Africans who live in extreme poverty while insufficient healthcare infrastructure, and sanitation has resulted in a massive rate of infant mortality that reaches as high as 80-100 deaths per 1000 for many African nations.
To the degree that certain uncomfortable facts are kept obscured, this façade has been maintained.
Recently, a stone has been thrown at the glass artifice of false narratives that has attempted to maintain the belief that Africa’s problems arise from authoritarian governments or “not enough democracy”.
On November 23, a zoom conference call involving American, British and Finish and French diplomats went public, having been filmed and leaked by an unnamed participant. What made this zoom call relevant is that the topic of the call dealt with the need for regime change in Ethiopia, and the main speaker of the call was Berhane Gebre-Christos, former Ethiopian Foreign Minister (2010-2012) and now spokesman of the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Movement. The call itself was hosted by the Peace and Development Center International which is a cardboard cut-out operation partnered with the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID (both proven CIA fronts) and set up days before the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front attacked Ethiopian government’s northern command on November 3, 2020 which launched a year of armed atrocities.
Featured among the participants of the conference call were none other than Vicki Huddleson (former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs), Donald Yamamoto (former U.S. Ambassador to Somalia), Tim Clark (former EU ambassador to Ethiopia), Robert Dewar (former British Ambassador to Ethiopia) and a plethora of other rules-based orderistas. The point driven home is the need to force international pressure on the current Ethiopian government of Ahmed Abiy to treat the foreign supported insurgency of the TPLF as a legitimate group in arranging a restructured Ethiopian government OR simply depose of Abiy directly by all means necessary.
Despite the fact that the TPLF have been found complicit in trying to stage a civil war in Ethiopia and also having been caught using child soldiers, and using terrorism, the same Obama-era team running the Biden administration that carved up Sudan and brought about the humanitarian destruction of Libya and Syria have continued to give support to the rebels. Over the past months this has taken the form of sanctions, the cancelling of civilian loan programs affecting millions of lives, and consistently demanding Addis Ababa treats the rebels as a legitimate power broker.
Why the Regime Change Effort in Ethiopia?
The situation in Ethiopia is rather simple to understand as long as you don’t believe western media spin doctors.
For one, Ethiopia is the only nation of all sub-Saharan Africa to have successfully resisted colonization. Ethiopia is thus also among the economically most sovereign nations of Africa, capable of emitting sovereign bonds for large scale infrastructure projects (which it has done since 2011 to build the Grand Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile) and also one of the nations most interested in working closely with China and the emerging Belt and Road Initiative.
In recent years, Ethiopia has also resisted pressure to bend to the depopulation lobby which exerts vast influence across Washington, Brussels and London.
It hasn’t merely said no to depopulation regimes, but has driven forward with the construction of the largest infrastructure project seen on this continent for generations: the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Once completed this dam will generate over 6200 megawatts (mW) of electricity for not only its own 118 million people, but for all of the Horn of Africa which currently represents 255 million souls. Most importantly, this dam, the largest in Africa’s history, will become a driver for industrial development for the entire continent, providing electricity for all residents and establishing a successful model for other nations across Africa to follow. With the growth of the multipolar order led by China’s successful win-win model of cooperation, idea of “managing poverty” in Africa is quickly becoming superseded by the higher drive to end poverty through industrial progress. This sentiment was loudly conveyed by leaders of the global south amidst the fanatical drive to impose de-carbonization regimes onto the entire globe during COP26.
Ethiopia has been one of the closest friends to China, which has provided expert training, funding and diplomatic assistance to Addis Ababa in recent years (which is an active member of the Belt and Road Initiative). Among the top Chinese-sponsored projects is the 756 km Addis Ababa- Djibouti standard gauge railway which has connected the landlocked Ethiopia with its Red Sea neighbor and driven home new industrial corridors that the World Bank had never permitted in the nation.
Although the construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam had been envisioned by the great Pan African leader Haile Selassie (and assisted with engineering surveys conducted by the United States of JFK), the project was killed with Selassie’s ouster in 1974, and only revived in 2011 through the tireless efforts of Sigmenew Bekele. Bekele was an engineer and nation builder who organized the construction of several major hydroelectric dams in Ethiopia and became known as “the public face of the GERD” until he was suicided in his car in 2018. When western powers refused to finance the dam, Ethiopia decided to do it themselves by rallying the population to purchase $5 billion in bonds which is ironically exactly how Abraham Lincoln financed the trans-continental railway during the Civil War and how the USA paid for much of WWII.
China’s presence in Ethiopia frightens many western game masters who are afraid of losing Africa to the prospect of win-win cooperation as they have already begun to lose the Middle East. In March 2021, the two nations signed a Memorandum of Understanding to “protect major projects under the BRI framework”, with Ethiopia’s Commissioner General stating:
“Ethiopia and China are countries with long history, ancient civilization, and splendid culture. To achieve our goal, the support from China and its esteemed embassy plays a significant role… We like to see a continuation of our joint efforts for building a long-term and strategic partnership and today’s event comes at an important moment.”
More recently, on December 2, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited PM Abiy and recommitted China to defend Ethiopia’s sovereignty. Standing next to Abiy, Wang Yi stated: “China will not interfere in internal affairs of any countries. We don’t interfere in the internal affairs of Ethiopia as well”. Speaking to those seeking to sever the two nations, Wang Yi also said the “Ethio-China friendship is very solid and unbreakable.”
Having failed to break the Belt and Road Initiative’s growth within the center of Mackinder’s World Island with Russia stopping the regime change operation in Syria during the dark years of Obama, and now China extending a powerful vision of east-west development corridors through the Middle East, the same bag of tricks has been deployed to Ethiopia using rebel fighters from the Horn of Africa.
The TPLF: More Terror and Less Rebel
The Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (now renamed the Tigray Defense Forces) are not a “democratic peoples’ movement” as western propaganda portrays.
In fact, this group has been caught conducting mass atrocities across occupied cities like Mai Kadra and Lalibela, broken cease fire treaties, using child soldiers and working closely with foreign Anglo-American interests in pushing regime change in Ethiopia as the leaked Zoom conference call demonstrates. Anyone doubting these claims need only read the rigorously compiled essays produced by one of the most competent investigative journalists Jeff Pearce living in Ethiopia whose articles can be found here.
In fact, only one month ago, on November 5, the TPLF announced a new “United Front of Ethiopian Federalist and Confederalist Forces” at the National Press Club in… Washington D.C.! This new insurgency group has attempted to link as many ethnic minority interests of Ethiopia together under one umbrella organization in order to project a semblance of legitimacy to this obviously undemocratic operation. The group’s press release stated: “This united front is being formed in response to the scores of crises facing the country; to reverse the harmful effects of the Abiy Ahmed rule on the peoples of Ethiopia and beyond; and in recognition of the great need to collaborate and join forces towards a safe transition in the country.”
At the press conference Berhane Gebre-Christos threatened the government of Adiy saying: “We’re trying to bring an end to this terrible situation in Ethiopia, which is created single-handedly by the Abiy government. Time is running out for him.”
It’s all Perception
The fact is, that none of these groups has the means to actualize their objectives under current conditions, with the Ethiopian population both in Africa and among the diaspora rejecting the western-directed propaganda. Protests across the world in defense of Ethiopian sovereignty, and the government’s success in combatting these scattered rebel forces indicates that reality is far different from the projection which perception managers wish be believed.
Just as we were told repeatedly that Venezuela would fall to the democratic movement of Juan Juan Guaidó, or that Navalny’s democracy forces would depose of Putin’s authoritarian system, or that Syrian rebel forces would topple the “Butcher Assad”, or that Hong Kong and Taiwan would certainly win their freedom from evil Beijing… the rulers of the unipolar system have shown themselves to be little more than modern day illusionists caught one too many times trying to scam credulous townsfolk.
As Geopolitics.Press outlined in extraordinary detail, the replication of perception management operations used in Syria have taken the form of the Command and Control Fusion Center (C2FC) based in Kenya which gives the U.S. Government the ability to “conduct cohesive multi-pronged operations against the Government of Ethiopia across the domains of economic, information, diplomatic and kinetic warfare”… [the C2FC] has delegated some of its tasks to disparate subsidiary fusion cells that enjoy some degree of operational autonomy but organizational dependence on the fusion center.”
The Danger of Libya 2.0
If this fails, as it will, the greater danger waiting in the wings, is that the trans Atlantic population will be so confused and misinformed about the nature of the Ethiopian crisis that they will give their consent to a U.S.-led attack onto the nation, as was done in Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11. In a November 9, 2021 Bloomberg op ed former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, James Stavridis called for American-led forces to intervene into the civil war both “to counter Chinese influence” and avoid a new Rwandan-style massacre from occurring.
African analyst Lawrence Freeman, recently echoed this danger eloquently in an interview with the Addis Media Network on November 18 saying:
“The enemies of Ethiopia will use humanitarian concerns as an excuse to potentially deploy military forces under the pretext of protecting the Ethiopian people from their own government. This doctrine, known as R2P-the responsibility to protect- was created by George Soros and Tony Blair. Samantha Power and others in the Obama administration used R2P to justify the overthrow of President Kaddafi and the destruction of Libya.”
Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review.
The author delivered an interview on this topic to Ethiopia’s Prime Media which can be viewed here: