The year-long civil war in Ethiopia is a fight over power and money between two vicious groups of local capitalist rulers. It also reflects the sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry between China and the United States for control over the strategically vital Horn of Africa. Most of all, it reminds us that there are no good bosses, no side that represents the interests of the international working class. Workers in Ethiopia have no future under the criminal, Nobel Prize-winning prime minister or the fake-left, identity-based “liberation” forces that stole everything they could while in power.
Only communist revolution, led by a mass Progressive Labor Party, can stop the bosses’ endless blood-soaked clashes for maximum profit. Only communism, a society run by and for the working class, can put an end to sexism, racism, and exploitation.
Workers ravaged by bosses’ conflict
The latest conflict in Ethiopia began in November 2020, when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered an offensive against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The TPLF, a group long backed by the U.S. and widely rumored to be tied to the Central Intelligence Agency, had ruled the country with secret prisons and brazen corruption from 1991 to 2018. That’s when Abiy “was appointed by the ruling class to quell tensions and bring change, without upending the old political order” (CNN.com, 11/5). The move backfired when the TPLF—whose leaders were ousted from power and arrested for graft—rejected the new government and reportedly assaulted a federal army base outside Tigray’s regional capital.
The war has dragged on ever since—with workers, as always, bearing the brunt of it. According to a joint investigation by the United Nations and Ethiopia’s human rights commission, “both sides have engaged in violations of international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law…war crimes and crimes against humanity” (Guardian, 11/3). Numerous first-hand accounts have told of civilian massacres, torture, and gang rapes. While most of the terror appears to have been perpetrated by Ethiopian government forces and their Eritrean allies, a “youth group called Samri killed ‘more than 200 civilians’—ethnic Amhara—in Mai Kadra, western Tigray, with the help of local police, militias and others affiliated with the rebel TPLF” (Guardian, 11/3).
Despite loud protests by the UN and calls for a ceasefire by the Joe Biden administration, it’s clear that workers have no “human rights” under capitalism, where they are treated either as commodities for profit or as cannon fodder in the bosses’ cutthroat competitions. To date, despite a media blackout, it’s estimated that tens of thousands have been killed in the fighting in Ethiopia—on top of the 1.4 million that were killed in the earlier, 17-year civil war that originally brought the TPLF to power. More than two million workers have been displaced, and a “man-made famine”—created by government blockades against emergency food deliveries—have left hundreds of thousands on the brink of starvation (Aljazeera, /11/4).
China rising
The carnage in Ethiopia has been fueled by arms exports from an array of capitalist bosses striving to gain a foothold in the Horn of Africa, from China and Russia to Germany, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates (ipsnews.net, 11/25). Before a belated arms embargo declared by Biden on November 1, the U.S. had heavily invested in the “modernization” of the country’s military, dating back to the 1950s.
Besides the fact that it’s the second most populous country in Africa, why does Ethiopia get so much attention from the imperialist bosses? To begin with, it’s a matter of geography. Ethiopia is the dominant nation in the Horn of Africa, which controls the oil route from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea—from the Middle East to Europe. After being dominated by Britain and the U.S. and then invaded by Italy under Mussolini’s fascists in the runup to Word War II, Ethiopia became a semi-colony of the Soviet Union, pushing a state capitalist ideology that contributed nothing for the benefit of workers. After the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, the U.S. rushed to fill the void. In recent years, however, there’s a new contender for regional influence, the rising capitalist power of China.
For China, Ethiopia is “the gateway to Africa” and the continental lynchpin for China’s Belt and Road Initiative. China has flooded the country with inexpensive mobile phones, solar energy (in a country where only 30 percent of the population has access to electricity), and ambitious infrastructure projects. “By giving loans that are unable to be paid back in full, China holds Ethiopia firmly within its grasp, creating a never-ending cycle of debt…Chinese lenders require collateral: in this case land and resources. This places the country more into Chinese control, and supplies cheap land for China to build overseas manufacturing” (medium.com, 3/26/20).
The once-sleepy international airport in Addis Ababa is now the third busiest in East Africa, a major cargo hub for Chinese exports (medium.com, 3/26/20). China has also leveraged its growing power in the region by establishing its first overseas People’s Liberation Army naval base in neighboring Djibouti.
Fight for communism!
Never in Ethiopia’s history has there been a government that defends the interests of the working class. Workers have been oppressed by a succession of dictatorial, racist, and nationalist regimes and immersed in endless war. They have no role under capitalism except to suffer and die. The experience of Ethiopia shows the urgent necessity to end capitalism for all time with a mass international revolution that arises from the minds and hands of workers in the factories and fields. The revolutionary ideas of PLP will guide us to replace the dictatorship of the bosses with a dictatorship of the proletariat. Workers' internationalism will smash sexism, racism, imperialism, nationalism, and the exploitation of the working masses. Fight for communism! Build PLP in every corner of the planet!