Good heavens, what an enlightening read. Here in the middle of America, I have heard exactly nothing about any of this, and I like to think of myself as tracking at least a little of events in the rest of the world! Americans need to pay more attention .Thank you.
Brilliant breakdown of a situation most folks dunno about. The paralel between Abiy's need for external conflict as internal distraction and historical patterns of authoritarian regimes is spot on. I've seen similar dynamics play out in Levant politics where leaders manufcature border disputes when domestic legitimacy crumbles. What's especially concerning is how UAE-Saudi tensions could turn this into a proxy battleground rather than finding any mediator with actual leverage.
I’m really curious as to what the historic situation was between the Ethiopians and the Eritreans, because I have to confess complete ignorance of this. Did Italian colonialism stoke a nationalistic conscience amongst people who identified as Eritreans as a way to divide and weaken any resistance to colonialism?
I’m getting whiffs of the Hutu-Tutsi divide that Belgium so successfully stoked in Rwanda, but on a larger scale, and with more powerful entities surrounding them.
Lee hi and thanks - the political entity that was "Eritrea" was a creation of the Italians from the 1860s to a 1890 declaration, but it did roughly correspond to a region and empire with ancient roots -- that of the Axumites, who were the first in the area to adopt Christianity. Ethnically, the region is diverse but not nearly as diverse as Ethiopia 'proper'; British and other colonial attempts -- not Italian-- to dismember and divide Eritrea along ethnic lines, followed by Ethiopian abrogation of federation in favor of absorbtion had the opposite effect, further uniting Eritreans against them, and creating the rebel movement(s) that fought Asmara for 30 years and ultimately won independence for Eritrea in 1993, following a referendum that was almost unanimously pro-separation. But yes, the effects of the colonial playbook and the divides it stoked live on.
I suspected that colonialism was at the base of all this - then coupled with a kind of nativist colonialism which, all together, led to the antagonism happening now. Thanks, Ethan!
Good heavens, what an enlightening read. Here in the middle of America, I have heard exactly nothing about any of this, and I like to think of myself as tracking at least a little of events in the rest of the world! Americans need to pay more attention .Thank you.
Brilliant breakdown of a situation most folks dunno about. The paralel between Abiy's need for external conflict as internal distraction and historical patterns of authoritarian regimes is spot on. I've seen similar dynamics play out in Levant politics where leaders manufcature border disputes when domestic legitimacy crumbles. What's especially concerning is how UAE-Saudi tensions could turn this into a proxy battleground rather than finding any mediator with actual leverage.
exactly... and thank you for reading/ commenting!
I’m really curious as to what the historic situation was between the Ethiopians and the Eritreans, because I have to confess complete ignorance of this. Did Italian colonialism stoke a nationalistic conscience amongst people who identified as Eritreans as a way to divide and weaken any resistance to colonialism?
I’m getting whiffs of the Hutu-Tutsi divide that Belgium so successfully stoked in Rwanda, but on a larger scale, and with more powerful entities surrounding them.
Lee hi and thanks - the political entity that was "Eritrea" was a creation of the Italians from the 1860s to a 1890 declaration, but it did roughly correspond to a region and empire with ancient roots -- that of the Axumites, who were the first in the area to adopt Christianity. Ethnically, the region is diverse but not nearly as diverse as Ethiopia 'proper'; British and other colonial attempts -- not Italian-- to dismember and divide Eritrea along ethnic lines, followed by Ethiopian abrogation of federation in favor of absorbtion had the opposite effect, further uniting Eritreans against them, and creating the rebel movement(s) that fought Asmara for 30 years and ultimately won independence for Eritrea in 1993, following a referendum that was almost unanimously pro-separation. But yes, the effects of the colonial playbook and the divides it stoked live on.
I suspected that colonialism was at the base of all this - then coupled with a kind of nativist colonialism which, all together, led to the antagonism happening now. Thanks, Ethan!