WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken departed early Tuesday for a five-day swing to Africa, where he will lend support for democratic principles and seek to advance diplomacy aimed at preventing Ethiopia from descending into a catastrophic civil war.
Mr. Blinken plans to begin his trip with a stop in Kenya, which borders Ethiopia and which has played a key role in diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful resolution to a conflict between the country’s central government and rebels in its northern Tigray region.
The conflict in Africa’s second most populous country has already featured numerous alleged atrocities, including rape, executions and looting. Experts believe that the fighting threatens the stability of not only a key U.S. ally on the continent, but of all East Africa.
“I hate to be alarmist, but all the warning signs are flashing red in Ethiopia right now, and we’re not using all the tools at our disposal,” said Cameron Hudson, a director of African affairs at the National Security Council in the Obama administration.
“This is Rwanda-esque,” added Patricia Haslach, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia from 2013 to 2016. Ms. Haslach didn’t say that genocide might have occurred in the country. However other experts have suggested that it is possible in a conflict more defined by ethnicity. The Clinton administration’s failure to intervene and potentially prevent the massacre of as many as 800,000 ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 has haunted former U.S. officials for decades.
Ms. Haslach said her immediate concern was the prospect of mass starvation in Tigray, where Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government has been choking off food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies to millions of people.
Some critics say the Biden administration has been inattentive to Africa, a common complaint about U.S. foreign policy but one that has gained more currency as China, America’s top strategic competitor, plants deeper political and economic roots on the continent and anti-American jihadist groups continue to thrive there. Mr. Blinken had originally planned to visit Africa in the late summer, but he delayed his trip after the sudden Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in mid-August.
The Biden administration has not articulated its vision for the continent, something Mr. Blinken was to address during a stop in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, where he planned to deliver a speech on the United States’ Africa policy. He will end his trip by visiting Dakar, Senegal’s capital.
American officials are concerned by democratic backsliding across Africa, which has seen a wave of military coups in recent months — notably including in Sudan, where a coup last month squashed a democratic transition that followed the 2019 ouster of the country’s longtime autocratic ruler, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Experts say the four successful military coups in Africa this year — also in Guinea, Chad and Mali — are the highest number in more than 40 years.
Democracy will be a central theme of Mr. Blinken’s visit to Nigeria, whose government Mr. Biden has condemned for endemic corruption and for violently cracking down on demonstrators seeking more civil-society freedoms.
Sudan’s coup also exposed the limits of American diplomacy on the continent. It occurred hours after Jeffrey Feltman (special envoy for Horn of Africa), visited Sudan. He believed that a mediated political solution was possible.
Hudson stated that the Biden Administration had failed to respond to the Ethiopian and Sudanese crises and called for more aggressive U.S. intervention.
“They are a little bit on their heels, I think,” he said, adding that the descent of Ethiopia into chaos would be “a huge strategic setback for this administration.”
After Mr. Abiy launched a military campaign against Tigray rebels, the fighting in Ethiopia began one year ago. The Tigrayan fighters quickly seized the advantage, and have been moving toward Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, a city of five millions people. The State Department repeatedly urged Americans to flee the country.
“I am very concerned about the potential for Ethiopia to implode given what we are seeing both in Tigray, but also as we have different forces and different ethnic groups that are increasingly at odds,” Mr. Blinken told reporters last week, saying that outcome “would be disastrous for the Ethiopian people and also for countries in the region.”
Mr. Blinken urged for a ceasefire, humanitarian aid to be freed from restrictions and a political settlement.
Leading the State Department’s efforts to date has been Mr. Feltman, who visited the Ethiopian capital and the Kenyan capital of Nairobi last week.
Ms. Haslach called Mr. Blinken’s trip to the region important, but warned that “we cannot do this on our own.” She said a diplomatic solution would require help from Ethiopia’s neighbors and the African Union, whose headquarters are in Addis Ababa.
Mr. Hudson was skeptical that the African Union, which he said often sides with the continent’s rulers, was in a position to force Mr. Abiy into real concessions. He said that the United States should take additional unilateral measures, including an embargo against arms that he claimed were being shipped by the United Arab Emirates to the government.
Complicating matters, some members of Mr. Abiy’s government have accused the United States of trying to topple him and install a government led by Tigrayan officials, Mr. Feltman said in remarks at the U.S. Institute of Peace this month. He dismissed these claims as false.
Mr. Feltman also warned of studies showing that “the average modern civil war now lasts 20 years. I repeat: 20 years.”
Others have called for more drastic American action to stop such an outcome. Bloomberg published an opinion essay last week by James G. Stavridis. He is a former four-star Navy admiral and recommended that the United States send troops to Ethiopia as part a United Nations-led peacekeeping force.
He, too, invoked the Rwandan genocide, adding that Ethiopia “is far larger and more geopolitically important than Rwanda.”
A spokesperson for the National Security Council stated that the United States is pursuing a diplomatic solution to the problem and was not considering sending military forces to Ethiopia.
Source: NY Times
