The two-year war in northern Ethiopia resulted in approximately 100,200 deaths before an African Union-brokered ceasefire was reached in November 2021, a new report reveals. In comparison, the Ukraine-Russia war that began in February led to 81,500 deaths, the same source added.
One of the podcasts that I listen to has a Black host. She spent multiple eps around the start of the war talking with guests asking for their takes. What she kept coming back to was that Americans seemed to believe in supporting Ukraine because their population looked like white people in America.
I’d say she’s right. White people in America could generally not give two shits about black and brown people in Africa. It’s not right that it is that way, but it is that way.
The article is about the Peace Research Institute Oslo's report on annual conflict specifically for the year 2022. PRIO is a Norwegian institution.
Obviously we are now over halfway through 2023 so figures have changed.
Tagging you @agarorn because the above answers your question as well.
it seduces you to marginalize
To address your other point @Akasazh I think it's totally fair enough that Ethiopians might care about a war that displaced over 1.6 Million of their people and created a famine in which so many people are currently dying.
I don't think an Ethiopian newspaper article that points out the Norwegian 2022 data is "seducing" anyone to "marginalize" Ukraine.
If you look at my profile it should be obvious that I am not some sort of propagandist either.
I feel like it’s more about money and international implications than whiteness. If China attacked a country like Taiwan or Vietnam, there would likely be a ton of press over it as well. An Ethiopian civil war has less economic implications globally.
Plus it’s a civil war. I grew up in the Balkans and I can tell you that people gave so few fucks about the war of my country, that when the Ukraine war started they weren’t bringing up Yugoslavia as a recent European conflict, they were talking about WWII. If your country isn’t gonna make a huge impact on the global markets, nobody cares (even if you’re blonde like many ex-Yugoslavians).
when the Ukraine war started they weren’t bringing up Yugoslavia as a recent European conflict, they were talking about WWII
I find some anglophone westerners who aren't old enough to remember it for themselves don't seem to even know about the Balkan conflicts. It's kind of disturbing how quickly our cultures forget.
The lethality isn’t why the war in Ukraine gets media coverage in the west; it’s because there’s a war in the neighborhood that’s unprecedented in decades. A war in Africa isn’t unexpected. It’s sad of course, but there’s pretty much been war in Africa since… well, since forever. While all-out war in Europe was seemingly over since the late 90s.
I wouldn’t even say that it is because there is a war in Africa, but that it is a civil war between different Ethiopian political parties. How is the world supposed to encourage peace there?
You also have Ethiopia in a part of the world without that much strategic importance to major powers outside the impacts of building the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. In contrast, the Ukrainie War is on NATO’s frontier and is a contribution of aggression of Russia against Ukraine.
There were so many deliberate civillian casualties that this went far beyond a war with insurgents. The Eritrean forces - who the government forces spent months denying were there - were also there to target Eritrean refugees (the regime is about as bad as North Korea).
Send peacekeeping troops?
You say that like you don't think it would have been a reasonable option?
As this crisis unfolded, there were many reasons a UN peacekeeping force would have been a good option.
Particularly as the racial rhetoric ramped up, NGOs reported systematic rapes of minority women, and the nationwide ethnicity-based detentions began.
We now have a famine situation due to all the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure and crops.
We see that the African Union was able to intervene with a peace treaty. It didn’t seem like Ethiopia was willing to accept peacekeeping troops from any country while it did receive military support.
Peacekeeping troops that aren’t welcomed in a country is an invading army. It appears that diplomatic options were pursued to end the war, but it does not appear that Ethiopia would have accepted neutral troops prior to a peace treaty.
Yes, I agree, but I think this is because the muted regional and global reaction it got enabled it to continue that stance.
Which allowed it to further pursue its aims (weakening Tigray, sure, but it was essentially to fuse all national-level political parties together to create a de facto one party state prior to privatization reform).
The situation now, where the Ethiopian govt let it get to the point where the US and UN have both withdrawn food aid, creating fresh starvation deaths, speaks volumes.
The Rwandan govt prior to the Genocide would not have welcomed the UN either.
Duh. I keep hearing about a war in Ethiopia since I was born, approaching 4 decades.
In the meantime, the war in Ukraine is just 5 hours from my home city.
So of course I will be interested in a war between a nation that tried (and succeeded in a way) to conquer my country previously, a conflict that is so close that I could easily drive to the warzone in less than a day, than in an eternal conflict in Ethiopia.
Because of history: Hitler started in the same way attacking Poland, and also Stalin did the same from the East (started with Poland too, and then proceeded to try to take Finland).
I recommend you to review your sources: before the start of the WWII, Stalin and Hitler signed an agreement so each could invade their own countries without interfering each other (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). Both sides were doing the same thing from each their side until Hitler broke the Pact by trying to invade Russia. Only then Stalin begun fighting the nazis as you claim.
1: The United States Bourgeoisie bankrolled the rise of fascism in Europe.
2: The bourgeois leaders of England, France, Poland, Finland and other Western European nations either ignored, enabled, or appeased Hitler’s worst behavior in the buildup to WW2.
3: The bourgeois leaders of these countries, England in particular, pushed for disastrous bilateral security arrangements which created a domino effect leading to war, while ignoring the USSR’s suggestion of collective, anti-fascist security arrangements.
4: The bourgeois leaders of these countries pursued a policy not of containing fascist aggression, but of diplomatically isolating the USSR, in the hopes that Hitler would go East and carry out an anti-communist genocide on their behalf.
5: The bourgeois leaders of these countries, having ignored or stalled collective security proposals from the USSR, actively made bilateral non-aggression pacts with Hitler before Molotov-Ribbentrop was signed, making the USSR the last in a long line of nations to sign non-aggression pacts with Hitler, after the USSR’s collective security proposals fell through.
6: The USSR only signed Molotov-Ribbentrop to buy time. The USSR only invaded East Poland to prevent a German front from forming right at the Soviet border. This is because attempts to make mutual security arrangements with Poland fell through. The Soviets only moved into the region after the existing government had literally fled the country, leaving it ungoverned. 2 million jews in eastern poland were saved from the nazis by this action.
7: The USSR tried to purchase a strategic corridor of land from Finland that the nazis could easily use to invade the USSR. The USSR not only wanted to legally purchase this land from Finland, but to trade Finland more acres of land in exchange. i.e. an asymmetrical trade that would have ultimately benefited Finland. Finland refused because the fascist leadership of Finland wanted to see Germany invade the USSR through this strategic corridor. This led directly to the Winter War. The Finnish lost the winter war but used their intelligence that they gathered during it to collaborate with the nazis.
8: When the North Atlantic allies finally teamed up with USSR after their strategy of appeasing Hitler backfired, they immediately attempted to make asymmetrical security arrangements that would have obligated the USSR to commit far more troops and resources to the war than any other ally, essentially using the USSR as a shield against the very fascist powers they had spent the better part of a decade appeasing. The British in particular kept stalling on arrangements and pretending to be confused.
9: When the war was over the North Atlantic allies, led by the USA, who came out of the war richer than any other country on Earth, immediately committed to rehabilitating nazis, blaming the USSR, who was decimated by the war, for causing the war, and created NATO to begin encircling the USSR, 6 years before the creation of the Warsaw pact.
10: The North Atlantic allies immediately set to using the Marshall plan to rebuild the fascist German, Italian, and Japanese economies, indebting them to the United States, and orienting them towards anti-communist policy.
11: The North Atlantic allies to tried to use the Marshall plan as a proto-IMF to privatize and deregulate the economy of the war-torn USSR, and open it up to foreign capital. That the USSR rejected this was framed as aggression and used as a justification for beginning the cold war.
But hey, don’t just take my word for it, or this rough outline of what is contained in well regarded books (I implore you to read some). How about we read Albert Einstein’s words spoken at the time these events actually occurred?
A lot to unpack in this speech but the basics of what Einstein says are:
The USSR made all efforts to stop the war happening.
The western powers(UK, France, US, etc) shut the USSR out of European discussions and betrayed Czechoslovakia.
Molotov-Ribbentrop was an unhappy last resort that they were driven to, that the western powers were attempting to drive the nazis into attacking the USSR and that’s why they would not help the USSR stop them.
The USSR supported everyone while the other powers (UK, France, US, etc) strengthened the nazis and Japanese.
The appointment of Hitler as Germany’s chancellor general, as well as the rising threat from Japan, led to important changes in Soviet foreign policy. Oriented toward Germany since the treaty of Locarno (1925) and the treaty of Special Relations with Berlin (1926), the Kremlin now moved in the opposite direction by trying to establish closer ties with France and Britain to isolate the growing Nazi threat. This policy became known as “collective security” and was associated with Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister at the time. The pursuit of collective security lasted approximately as long as he held that position. Japan’s war with China took some pressure off of Russia by allowing it to focus its diplomatic efforts on relations with Europe.
I love how you shills always bring this up without mentioning the Four-Power Pact because you’re utterly intellectually dishonest en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-Power_Pact
USSR was asking for an alliance with western powers against the nazis, and all the western powers ignored that and made peace pacts with the nazis instead. US companies even continued to do business with the nazis well into the war. The IBM famously enabled the holocaust.
But anyway, what some other states did nearly a hundred years ago has no bearing on today’s. There’s different motivations and actors involved for different reasons.
Russia has no interest in invading anywhere else. Remember Russia spent 8 years trying to negotiate peace with the west who had no interest in peace? (See Hollande and Merkel’s admissions). Even after the invasion Russia was still offering peace and their demand was independence for the breakaways, not annexation. Boris Johnson ordered Ukraine to reject the offer.
Of course the USSR lost millions fighting the nazis by the end of the WWII, I know and I’m not negating that, what I’m pointing out it that Stalin did the same as Hitler at the start of the war: invade Poland and tried to invade Finland (two points you and your friends at Lemmygrad carefully avoided to mention).
And sorry to say, but, what other states did 100 years ago is totally relevant. My grandparents suffered the Spanish civil war, my parents were raised in a dictatorship, I live now in Norway, another country invaded by nazis, I’ve friends from Finland who really hate Russians because what they did not so long ago. I’ve friends from Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine. Do you want to hear what all agree on? Russian are crazy dangerous people (not the street people, but their leaders).
I despise any imperialistic, paranoid egomaniac where their ideals are more important than human lives. Hitler, Stalin, Putin, Trump, all are the same bullshit and as dangerous as the others. Any country trying to invade another is bad, no matter what.
If you read the communications between Molotov and Ribbentrop, its clear the USSR didn’t want to occupy their part of Poland (which btw were soviet lands stolen by Poland during the Civil War), but keep a rump Polish state there as a buffer state. However, what happened is the polish government escaped to Romania, and from there to the UK. The problem is that Romania was neutral, and thus, it couldn’t allow the polish government, which was at war with Nazi Germany, to stay or pass through their country without them declaring war on Germany too. So the only way they could let the poles in their country was by interning them, meaning that they weren’t a government anymore. Thus, legally speaking, the Polish State had ceased to exist. And since the Secret Protocol of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact referred to Poland as “the Polish State”, not “the Polish lands”, this part of the pact was now invalid. And so the USSR had no choice but to occupy eastern Poland, since the alternative was to just let Nazi Germany occupy it and march right up to the Soviet border, which they could legally do without breaking the pact.nnThe whole thing was a legal mess, caused by the polish government cowardly fleeing and leaving their troops and people behind. If you want to read more on this I recommend the book “Blood Lies” by Grover Furr, which debunks many anti-Stalin myths including the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact.
And sorry to say, but, what other states did 100 years ago is totally relevant.
No I’m sorry, it’s totally irrelevant. I have friends all over the world who hate the USA and its war in Ukraine. You takes on Russian people being crazy are immature and bigoted.
I despise any imperialistic, paranoid egomaniac where their ideals are more important than human lives. Hitler, Stalin, Putin, Trump, all are the same bullshit and as dangerous as the others. Any country trying to invade another is bad, no matter what.
Not a very nuanced take. I note that you don’t have any American presidents in there or even, more relevantly to you, Stoltenberg.
This is US/NATO’s war. They overthrew Ukraine’s democracy and destroyed the country to try to “weaken Russia”. They failed and Ukraine paid the price.
Yeah, it's a mix of factors which lead to this neglect. The Ukraine war is obviously extremely important, it's just a pity it sucks all the oxygen from the room when it comes to humanitarian responses.
I think Tigray got a lot more coverage from a) organizations interested in preventing genocide,
And b) organizations in countries with geopolitical strategic interests in the GERD issues.
While headlines worldwide spotlight the distress in Eastern Europe from the Russia-Ukraine clash, a new report reveals the conflict in North Ethiopia has extracted a much steeper cost in human life, largely escaping international media coverage.
The Ethiopian and Ukraine-Russia conflicts accounted for 89 percent of battle-related deaths worldwide in 2022, according to a new report from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).
The institute’s annual conflict trends report found that last year was the deadliest in four decades, with 204,000 battle-related fatalities.
The two-year war in northern Ethiopia resulted in approximately 100,200 deaths before an African Union-brokered ceasefire was reached in November 2022. In comparison, the Ukraine-Russia war that began in February led to 81,500 deaths.
“While the war in Ukraine captured most attention, the parallel war between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front was more lethal,” the report states.
The Ethiopian conflict, already the third deadliest in 2021, drew in forces beyond the two warring parties.
The report counted an additional 22,300 deaths from other conflicts in 2022, accounting for 11 percent of the total.
About half of all casualties due to military conflict worldwide in 2022 happened in Ethiopia.
According to the report, battle-related deaths in Tigray have reached alarmingly high levels while the world’s attention has focused on Ukraine.
Yeah, it's crazy how little people talk about it despite it being incredibly deadly.
Today, Tigray province in Ethiopia has a man-made famine as a result of widespread deliberate destruction of crops, orchards, implements, seeds, and water infrastructure by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces during that war. 1.2 million people were displaced in the first year.
Food aid has been suspended by the UN and US because it was being diverted by government officials, which has led to an increase in starvation deaths this year, yet if they hear about it at all, most westerners seem to assume it's from "choosing to grow the wrong crops" smh.
I’m sorry, not to take away from the fact that, yes, news coverage is often insanely racist:
Tigray and Ethiopia are generally considered less likely to somehow spread into ww3.
Not saying there isn’t a huge component of “well, brown people dying…” I’m just saying when Europe has bullets flying people pay attention for historical reasons.
"Africa's World War"? Yeah amazing how no one gets taught about that. My mother's generation was never even taught about the Holodomor though so I guess we're making progress..?
I’m just saying when Europe has bullets flying people pay attention for historical reasons.
Yeah, I agree there are understandable geopolitical reasons people pay more attention to the facts of the Ukraine war. It's the disregard for the humanitarian aspects of other wars that rankles.
Western news coverage has been kind of patchy about other things though, like the BRICS membership situation, which will potentially have huge global effects if they adopt a reserve currency.
Edit: sorry, just realised you weren't actually talking to me!
Agreed, brics is a concern but considering where russia is, and how China is teetering on their first major recession in their modern era, the major player there is India, and they’re likely to go along with it under Modi who has taken a certain “ahh, fuck it” approach to certain things.
The holodomor, the Indian famine/genocides up to ww2 (mostly British incompetence with a fair bit of greed, think Indian corn laws), there are a bunch of forgotten crimes, but I think we’re getting better, tigray and Ethiopia prove we still have a long way to go.
22 nations have formally applied for membership in BRICS with another 20 or so expressing interest, so I think it probably does represent a shift. I was interested to see there's some talk of Sri Lanka adopting the Indian rupee to help with its economic crisis.
On the forgotten crimes front, I feel like we're still a bit in the "doomed to repeat history" phase, especially when it comes to genocides. But who knows how it will all shake out.
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