President Joe Biden’s administration certainly does not seem to be making any secret of its intentions of creating massive confusion through interference and disinformation in the Tigray Conflict to cause an implosion of Ethiopia. It has always been a well known hidden agenda of the current US Administration and it’s predecessors to control the Horn of Africa through a corrupt puppet TPLF regime in Addis. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), has largely constituted the majority of the former ruling party in Ethiopia – the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, that dominated power from 1991 to 2018.
The TPLF is now quite busy (with the active support and blessing of the Biden Administration) conducting a dangerous disinformation campaign to camouflage its illicit schemes to arm itself and topple Abiy’s government. All this hypocritical talk of opening a corridor from the ports of Sudan to transport food and other humanitarian aid supplies to Tigray is just a smokescreen to effectively arm the TPLF. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that it makes much more sense to use the ports of Eritrea for any such ventures. But the “master minds” in Washington and Mekele know full well that their sinister plot is doomed to fail miserably under the scrutiny of Eritrea. Sudan on the other hand would be only too glad to turn a blind eye on those covert operations given that they have an axe to grind with Abiy over the GERD issue.
Previous US Administrations have always enjoyed a pivotal role in claiming a stake at using Ethiopia under the leadership of the TPLF as their own personal playground. It was perceived as a very important and strategic ally from which they could effectively (among other issues) stabilise Somalia. In return, the TPLF enjoyed limitless privileges to bully all their opponents both at home and in the Horn at large under the support and protection of the powerful US. The US even helped sway the opinion of the United Nations Security Council to slap some rather dubious sanctions on Eritrea at the whim of the TPLF. The “new” Biden Administration is towing the same line. However, there is nothing new in the present US dispensation as Biden was around when the US administration under President Barack Obama was aiding and abetting the TPLF to create all sorts of mischief causing great misery in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. The then-national security advisor Susan Rice, who was a long-time personal friend of the TPLF strongman Melles Zenawi, was the architect and guardian of the infamously destructive US policy of the Horn. Biden has better been advised what used to be the order of the day then is totally unacceptable today. Africa will no more let herself be bullied or bought – rather, other sources of mutual co-operation are readily available. Russia and China are proving to be more reliable partners and their influence is rapidly growing in Africa so the US must turn a new leaf and change their ways otherwise they will be taught the hard way.
The tide is indeed beginning to turn as Samantha Power, head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) embarrassingly encountered during a visit to Addis Ababa during the first week of August. She was seeking a request for a personal meeting with Prime Minister Abiy to discuss the Tigray Crisis. On the day when the meeting was scheduled to take place, Abiy coolly chose to be somewhere else on some other mission. When asked at a press conference in the Ethiopian Capital on 4 August why she had not met with the Ethiopian Prime Minister as planned, she embarrassingly replied: “He was not in the capital today on my day here.”
