David Pratt: Dictators, drug cartels, and a nation sliding towards the abyss

In fact, so bad have his remarks been this past week that Facebook was forced to remove a post by him that it said was tantamount to “inciting violence”. Abiy is pulling no punches as fighting between Ethiopia and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) threatens to cast this country of 110 million people into all out civil war. For months now he has used dehumanising language calling the TPLF a “cancer” and a “weed” that must be trampled. But last week Abiy found new depths to his denunciations.

“The pit which is dug will be very deep, it will be where the enemy is buried, not where Ethiopia disintegrates... we will bury this enemy with our blood and bones.”

This, according to a translation by the Reuters news agency, were the words used by Abiy (below) as TPLF forces indicated that they could march on the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa and oust him from power.

Abiy’s blood and thunder speech is all a far cry from the man who was made a Nobel Peace laureate in 2019, for his contribution to ending the 20-year post war territorial stalemate between Ethiopia and Eritrea. To many in the international community Abiy was seen as the long sought-after mediator and democratic ray of hope in a region bedevilled by past authoritarianism. The constituent nations comprising what is sometimes referred to as the “Ethiopian Empire”, including Tigray, Amhara and Oromia, have always been something of a brittle and volatile entity subject to cycles of rivalry and violence. Now, as a leader column in The Economist magazine disturbingly noted last week, once again across Ethiopia “history is rhyming”.

“Once more the federal government is fighting rebels from Tigray. Once more it has deliberately blocked food and medicine from entering this northern region, where 400,000 people are now starving and millions are at risk.

“Once more the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front is marching on Addis Ababa,” the magazine observed, as the speed of unfolding events shook the region and global onlookers alike. This weekend the crises only further deepened after news agency reports on Friday suggested that nine anti-government factions were now forming an alliance to push for a political transition in Ethiopia, piling yet more pressure on Abiy with TPLF forces now said to be only 160 miles from the capital.

Calling itself the United Front of Ethiopian Federalist and Confederalist Forces, it includes the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) and the Agaw Democratic Movement (ADM), as well as the TPLF with several of the groups known to have armed fighters. The front is being formed “to reverse the harmful effects of the Abiy Ahmed rule on the peoples of Ethiopia and beyond”, the groups said, and “in recognition of the great need to collaborate and join forces towards a safe transition”.

But African and Western nations looking on are far from convinced that such a “safe transition” is possible and have called for an immediate ceasefire. So just how might all this play out in Africa’s second most populous country in the coming days and weeks?

The short answer is that no one knows for sure but are agreed that without swift regional and international diplomatic persuasion and pressure a catastrophe could ensue in a conflict where the fighting has unleashed obscene levels of violence and ethnically motivated atrocities by both sides.

The African Union (AU) is pivotal here and must use all the power and influence it has to remove in the first place Ethiopia’s embargo on aid entering Tigray. Just as aid needs to go in, so further supplies of arms need to be kept out and the UN Security Council has a role to play, not least key regional influencers like Russia and China. Whatever happens, Prime Minister Abiy must be made to change course. This however will not be easy for a leader who now sees himself as cornered and is described by some who have met him lately as exuding a near messianic zeal. If Abiy’s language at least suggests this to be true, it’s his actions that matter now in the search for a peaceful settlement.The alternative, a potential bloodbath, doesn’t bear thinking about.

Italy

WITH success in the European football championship and the Eurovision song contest, Italy has at least had some cause for cheer of late.

The country too this past year has also been governed by Prime Minister Mario Draghi (above) who has gained a considerable degree of international respect and is in office with a huge parliamentary majority.  

But after those dark days during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic when the virus took a terrible toll on the country there are again some worrying signs developing.

Figures released this past week showed that the number of Covid-19 patients in Italian intensive care units increased by 12.9% in the period from October 27-November 2. It’s a sharp turnaround after intensive care patients had been steadily dropping since the end of August.  

While it’s generally recognised that the country’s vaccination programme has so far proved decisive in limiting severe forms of the disease, as the campaign has slowed so the government has reignited the debate on whether to make vaccines mandatory in order to meet immunisation targets. 

As might be expected it’s a controversial issue and nowhere more so than in the city of Trieste which has become the epicentre of protests from vaccine sceptics. But simultaneously the port city has also emerged as one of Italy’s latest Covid hotspots. The reluctance by some citizens to be vaccinated in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, where Trieste is the capital, led its president, Massimiliano Fedriga, to comment last week that now “is the moment to say with clarity: enough idiocy”. 

Last month Italy set a new benchmark by introducing some of the toughest measures requiring proof of vaccination, a negative test or recent recovery from Covid-19 to enable its citizens to go to the workplace.  

The message is now clear that such government-issued health passes – the “certificazione verde” or green pass – are required by all of Italy’s workforce. 
Italy of course is far from alone in seeing a rise in cases, with Europe generally according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) experiencing a surge in coronavirus infections.

While for now the Italian authorities have no indication as to when vaccinations could be made mandatory, or for which groups, there seems little doubt that the issue is already settled in the minds of the Italian government. Prime Minister Draghi after all has a reputation for getting things done. 

Mexico

IT’S a transnational business said to be directly linked to at least 350,000 deaths and 72,000 disappearances over the past 15 years. 

That grim tally rose with a few more fatalities last week after a shootout involving rival gangs on a beach near the Mexican resort of Cancun left two drug dealers dead.  

It’s only the latest episode in a series of drug gang violence that have tarnished the once tranquil image of Mexico’s popular Caribbean coast. Last month Mexican security forces responded to what appears to have been a similar incident in Tulum, a popular resort 80 miles south of Cancun.  

In the gruesome world of Mexico’s drug wars brutality knows no bounds. Likewise, the vast profits gleaned from, cocaine, opium, marijuana, methamphetamine, and fentanyl provides the kind of financial resource many terrorist organisations can only dream of.  
It also ensures an army of hitmen, assassins and neighbourhood foot soldiers equipped with state-of-the-art technology such as assault rifles, rocket launchers, satellite communications and parts to build improvised submarines able to ferry drugs along coastlines. 

Fortunately for most of us our only experience of such cartel wars is through the mediums of popular culture in movies like Sicario, or TV series like Narcos which tend to depict Mexico as top to bottom corruption, violence and depravity.  

But as a new book entitled The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, makes clear, this is only part of the story.  

Written by University of Warwick Professor Benjamin T Smith, this is a study that shows how many of the myths surrounding the trade and cartels serves a purpose.  

As Ann Deslandes a freelance journalist and researcher based in Mexico City explains it in the current edition of Foreign Policy magazine and quoting Smith’s findings, these myths “demonise the drug traffickers and cement the narrative of the drug war as a struggle between good and evil”. 

Such cliches, explains Deslandes, help enable the Mexican authorities to commit extraordinary violence against entire populations in a manner reminiscent of earlier 1970s US led counterinsurgency operations.  

In fact, by all accounts according to Smith’s book, up to the 70’s violence was rarely employed to sort out disputes between Mexico’s drug traffickers as “both state governors and state cops were keen to avoid conflicts that risked exposing their own ties to the traffickers”.  

Smith goes on to explain how it was US President Richard Nixon’s 70’s drug war that transformed the counternarcotic policing response with “US drug agents, Mexican cops, and Mexican soldiers descending on areas of drug production and trafficking like an invading army”.  

Ever since then of course the stakes and levels of violence have risen with the prevailing eye for an eye war of attrition between rival gangs and the police becoming the order of the day.  Cancun last week was just the latest sideshow in that much bigger theatre of cartel conflict.  

North Korea

IT’S being seen as an effort to wipe away the shadow of his predecessor and put himself fully front of the political stage. Yes, it’s official, and woe betide those who ignore the doctrine of “Kimjongunism”.  

Gone are the portraits of the country’s venerated founder Kim Il-sung and 
his predecessor as supreme leader, Kim Jong-il, from Pyongyang’s main buildings.  

And if reports from South Korea’s spy agency the National Intelligence Service are anything to go by then already the new term is being used in government circles. Not that anyone actually knows precisely what the term means, even if The Times newspaper this week concluded that “rather than describing a clearly defined political idea, it is probably no more than a broad assertion of Kim’s greatness and wisdom”. 

But while erasing elements of the past are one thing the North Korean leader is finding it a lot more challenging to cover the pressing political and economic woes of the present. 
Obtaining accurate information out of North Korea is notoriously difficult due to the regime’s tight control of the country and has become harder still since the pandemic caused most diplomats and aid agencies to leave the country last year. 

But if accounts by defectors based in South Korea give a true picture, then their northern neighbours could be in for a very difficult winter with reports of many families going hungry.  

Chronic food shortages are nothing new in North Korea, but the pandemic has compounded the problem these past few years with the country’s near total isolation.  
Even Kim Jong-un himself has compared the current situation to the country’s worst disaster in the 1990’s, known as the “Arduous March”, where hundreds of thousands of people died in a famine. 

Faced with such a crisis, Kim Jong-un might have no choice but to loosen up on his nation’s isolation not least given that North Korea counts on China for more than 90% of its trade. 

Already the signs are that the authorities in Pyongyang have in recent months accepted increased shipments of emergency supplies. It would seem that even the introduction of “Kimjongunism” and the “state ideology” juche, meaning self-reliance, cannot disguise hunger.