SOUTH AFRICA, Dec. 4—The year-long conflict in Ethiopia started as a minor electoral dispute. It has become an open civil war and also an ethnic war.
It is fueled by rivalry between US and Chinese rulers. It is an example of the increasing conflict between these two major imperialist powers.
The Horn of Africa is strategically key. It controls the entrance to the Red Sea, a vital shipping lane ending in the Suez Canal. This route connects the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Ethiopia also controls the headwaters of the Nile River.
Our working-class family in Ethiopia is feeling the brunt of this war. One example is the owner of a neighborhood Ethiopian shop in South Africa. His family is in a Tigray village called Afra that the government is besieging. They are trying to find a way out.
The working class on both sides of the conflict is suffering. This untold suffering must be condemned in the strongest terms. But we can’t be cynical. Communist industrial workers, soldiers and sailors of all nationalities and ethnicities have the historical task of mobilizing the broader masses.
We must mobilize some of these shop owners and other migrants living among us who are fleeing this conflict, giving them our material. They need the communist outlook that we have, the understanding that to end this conflict we need to eradicate capitalism as a whole. We can’t do it just in South Africa and expect no pushback from the bosses. The fight has to be international.
The origins of the conflict
Before the pandemic, elections were planned in Ethiopia for summer 2000. The government faced opposition, especially in the Oromo and Tigray regions. It cancelled the elections using the excuse of Covid.
The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) regional government in Tigray held elections anyway. The federal government responded with economic reprisals. The Tigray regional army attacked a federal army compound in Tigray. The war was on.
Ethiopia is ethnically diverse. The previous government, headed by the TPLF, came to power in 1991 with support from the US CIA. They abolished the old provincial boundaries, divided the country into ethnic regions, and built ethnic nationalism within the working-class masses. This divide-and-rule strategy angered the bosses of major ethnicities, especially the Oromo and Amhara.
In 2018, the TPLF was defeated by Abiy Ahmed’s new Prosperity Party. While the TPLF leaders retreated to Tigray province, the central government has increasingly come into the Chinese orbit.
The genocidal civil war raging for the past year is a proxy war between the Chinese and US imperialists for control of Ethiopia.
Water Wars: Damming the Nile
Ethiopia has been locked in a dispute with Sudan and Egypt since 2011 over the construction of a dam on the Ethiopian headwaters of the Nile. Egypt and Sudan, downstream, depend on the Nile for their water and their very survival.
Any disruption of the Nile can disastrously unbalance Egyptian ecosystems and their food source. Egypt has been secretly lobbying the US to intervene in this conflict because the hydroelectric dam in Ethiopia is largely financed by the Chinese.
Nothing happens in isolation. Ethnic rivalries within Ethiopian society had already been exploited to serve strategic aims. The inter-imperialist rivalry between China and the US has gone on for decades. But since the conflict in Tigray began, the Nile dam project has ground to a halt. Each day lost means millions in profit lost by local bosses and their imperialist masters.
The US has always tried to appease the Egyptian capitalists because of their discord with Israel and Egypt’s participation in the blockade of Gaza. The US is also happy to cause problems for China, because the Nile dam will generate a huge amount of power for Ethiopia, which is increasingly a site of Chinese investment.
The US, the UK and the EU have not intervened openly. But they have participated in private meetings with their clients in Tigray. Rallies in the US in November called for “Hands off Ethiopia!” They recognized the danger that the US and its allies could intervene in this conflict.
Are the US and European Rulers the Only Imperialists?
Many activists globally think that the US and European rulers are the only imperialists. In reality, the main imperialist power in Africa today is China. The conflict in Ethiopia is between two imperialists, but it is the masses in the Horn of Africa who are dying.
The working class has no stake in this conflict. To end it, we need communism. Without communism, our working-class family will continue to suffer under the yoke of capitalism.
We need to mobilize worldwide with a mass outlook. We start with the ones and twos. And they will also recruit their ones and twos. That’s how you build a mass communist party.
Previous Articles:
Ethiopian War: Fight All Nationalism and Patriotism, Red Flag, vol. 11 #15, Nov. 2020
Ethiopia-Eritrea Peace Deal: No Peace for Exploited Workers! Red Flag, vol. 9 #10, Aug. 2018
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