First thing first: before discussing the contours of the Tigray conflict and the egos, hubris and man’s propensity for primitive scavenging for, acquisition and accumulation of wealth and power, all for want of control:
I must share my strong belief in the sanctity of the human life, dignity, faith, property and wealth. My revulsion and abhorrence for any unlawful and without due process infringements of any of these elements of a human being’s life is beyond measure.
It’s on this basis that I mourn the loses and dire humanitarian situation occasioned by the perpetrators and enablers of Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict. The perpetrators, some of whom the US had already targeted with sanctions, will not escape accountability for their heinous crimes against humanity. Their scheming and greed will backfire on them. END of humanitarian preface.
The Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict entered its natural third phase of mutually hurting stalemate right before ripe moment phase when it can be managed and transformed with third party mediation. Suddenly twitter was bombarded with armchair/paid Analysts’ hits claiming to have predicted this or that about the conflict when their blindness about it was clear less than 36 hours before GoE’s Tigray interim administration’s unilateral declaration of ceasefire and vacating Mekelle.
At this point of their yapping themselves silly, professional analysts’ work, which had been commissioned and approved early, was already being executed. Yes, the best conflict analysts and policy influencers have no need to hang themselves on social media. Yes, unlike professional analysts, mercenary analysts must put their amateur works on public display to justify their stipends as their work is for propaganda utility meant to affect public opinion.
Paid Analysts (“fans” is a befitting name for them as they are actually war profiteers who are supporters of one side)are the most hypocritical people on earth. As paid actors in the conflict, they often set their analysis to suit their interest and desired outcome — which never comes. They are typically propagandists giving professional analysts a bad name.
What transpired and what options the protagonists had before violence ticked off in Tigray did not offer them respite against suffering and will not offer them respite against accountability. Damage has already been done. Bravado and justifications aside, regret could be the only commonly traded stock right for their clients.
Partisans and neutral observers alike tend to conveniently forget that all conflict have causes. In reporting and analyzing the conflict, observers will no longer be guided by its genesis but by its generations— mostly in terms of loses, as every gain in war comes on the back of a loss.
With Tigray conflict seemingly plateauing out after months of trailblazing atrocities, partisan and paid observers are falling over themselves with their predictions of this and that coming to pass, even when the so-called prediction was made after the fact. Some of the paid “analysts”/propagandists’ cheap shots include tweeting screenshots of their day-old tweet about an already developed/ing story with the caption “vindicated.”
TPLF overplayed their hand with their underestimation of Abiy and Abiy opportunistically played them on. The Tigray tragedy was a zero-sum enterprise from the get go.
Abiy wanted to win a new mandate through some form of an election, sham or sham. The whole reason why he torched Tigray was TPLF tried to cut his political ambitions in the bud with their refusal to have Tigray participate in national elections with PP plans.
And now that Abiy got what he wanted by all unnecessary means, he let go of Tigray with all its troubles hoping against hope that he taught them enough lesson to try any more overreacting with his administration.
After all is in, neither TPLF, Mekelle, Addis, Abiy, his Nobel Prize and PP nor Ethiopia will be same again.
Every dog has its day. Used to calling others’ bluff for sport for 30 years and in the process kicking butts quite dramatically and frequently, finally TPLF’s turn had come and there was no stopping it.
TPLF should have only themselves to blame as they had invited and brought war on themselves. There is no honor in being a victim, especially when one puts themselves in that situation through choices of their own.
There’s a particular pain to TPLF butchers to have gotten a dose of their own medicine from one of their apprentices. The same bitter medicine that they for so long served the OLF, ONLF, Somalis in Gedo, Somalis in Bay and Bakool, Somalis in Mogadishu.
The f&$k with human folly: With all the trips man made to space and will all the technological and digital advancements, why is it that man is yet to learn to resolve his conflicts before bloodbaths? Or could it be that we understood logic for what it is not.
The reality of fate within our folly: Why did former foreign minister Mesfin had to die such a humiliating death only for TPLF to celebrate its return to a Mekelle that was reduced to a pale shadow of the one TPLF developed to an enviable standard decades ago? This is a total desecration of Meles Zenawi’s legacy for the Mekelle that he sprung up at the destruction of other cities.
While I blame Abiy for every slur, slight scar and the faintest of trauma he caused to mothers, their children and the elderly though his violent PP (poverty party), I felt great at his ridding Ethiopia of the relics of Zenawi and anything to immortalize him. Nowhere can this purge be felt more prominently than at Bole International Airport. Gone are all the banners and picture frames burdened with the weight of Zenawi’s life-sized portraits. Without Zenawi’s sinful portraits, Ethiopia’s public, business and private spaces have been rendered welcoming to greater majority of Ethiopians from every corner of this vast and unique-in-many-respects country that was run-down by successive imperialists and autocratic despots.
As a country with a long history of tragic ends to leadership Abiy too will await his date with Ethiopia’s traditional destiny. The tick-tock, whomp, whomp…the clock keeps ticking. Does it remind you of one of Hemmingway’s many seminal titles?
Mesfin, gone too soon before he could enjoy his war booty from TPLF’s Mogadishu invasion. I bet you could bet anything that Mesfin and the TPFL Generals who looted Mogadishu for Mekelle will not have done so had they known they will die in the hands of ferocious dogs set on them by one of their minions of an apprentice. Unfortunately, the curse leaves on as the warlords who replaced them looted whatever that was left of Mekelle after shell shocking it. For how long shall the accursed keep looting one city for another to feed a recurring curse? Human folly won’t allow us to rest the curse fueling this heinous cycle.
Abiy is no bastard: As a TPLF progeny, Abiy’s totalitarian politics reads like father like son. He too will have his rendezvous with fate that he shaped with his own hands— sooner or later.
For what Ethiopia is, Abiy might not have rested easy with or without his atrocious adventurism in Tigray. But for it he is now a prime minister with an elected mandate— which he found by all means unnecessary.
As TPLF found out the hard and atrocious way, Abiy is more than a mere scion of Meles Zenawi. How else could he have fooled and conned the world of a Nobel Peace Prize with his Afewerki rapprochement that he had prior motives for use against TPLF? A prize he used as a convenient cover to refill the prisons with his own political prisoners after he earned himself a Nobel Prize for emptying them of TPLF political prisoners, then using the Nobel honor to escape accountability on time and for a long time (an hour is too long in armed conflict).
Let’s see how far his shrewdness takes him now that he won in elections that he was running against himself. This was after his intimidation of all dissent with his making a worthy deterrent example of TPLF. As an unknown bully, all Abiy had to do to have his way was to go for the bully TPLF.
With his TPLF example setting, no regional community or entity with anything to lose can take on Abiy without first compulsorily contending with his zero-sum tactics of going for his opponents’ jugular and leaving the consequences to deal with for later. With his Nobel Prize in the bag and his Premiership to boot with, all Abiy has to do from here is to, as much as possible, scale back from offensive and be on the defensive as he tries to consolidate power through to the next elections.
In the meantime, let partisans and paid propagandists, who trade in the name of analysts, tweet “Vindicated!” Such is seeking validation from their imaginary “followers” as much as they do for their paymasters. That they are actually themselves people in need of help is clear from their cries for attention. For their not only hollow predicting the obvious but when it was already written on everyone’s nearest wall and in their boldest and best of color for their optimal visual advantage.
Oh, how predictable!— these predicters can be!
By: Aydid Guled
Muqdisho-Somalia
