Seatbelts posted:

Not to mention if the thing was round instead of a line it would be vastly more efficient and less of an ecological disaster.

guidoanselmi posted:

it’d be a lot harder to control the movement of people which is the purpose of a line.

’’ posted:

Abiy was confident that by the date of the talks, the Tigrayan leaders would be dead, hiding in caves — or he could take them in handcuffs to accept their surrender.

The Eritrean and Ethiopian armies didn’t meet the deadline, but they haven’t stopped trying. New attacks were launched on three fronts on October 14.

The carnage is said to be obscene. The Ethiopian conscripts’ job is to attack and die in large enough numbers to use up their enemies’ bullets, after which Eritrean armor can charge through to capture the towns. Two weeks ago, the best estimate was that the Ethiopian army had suffered over 90,000 casualties in a month. With rudimentary medical facilities, many of the wounded will die.

The Tigray Defense Forces losses are also horrifyingly high. The Tigrayans have every motive to fight to the death; they expect that if they yield, the occupiers will repeat the mass atrocities — killing, torture, rape, pillage — that they inflicted when they controlled Tigray in late 2020 and early 2021.

quote:

The Ethiopian conscripts’ job is to attack and die in large enough numbers to use up their enemies’ bullets, after which Eritrean armor can charge through to capture the towns.

i say swears online posted:

lol sure

quote:

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has warned that the situation is spiralling out of control and there is no military solution. Yet Mr Abiy and his allies still appear bent on one. Their current offensive is infantry-heavy, with poorly trained and equipped troops flung towards enemy lines, in addition to airstrikes. Eritrea has intensified mobilisation, reportedly detaining parents whose adult children try to avoid conscription. Despite significant setbacks, many Tigrayans have come to see this as a fight for their very survival; giving up may look as dangerous as persisting. The International Crisis Group has warned of a serious risk of accelerating atrocities, especially given the surge in hate speech against Tigrayans. There are also concerns that the war could spill over given the poor relations and long-running border dispute between the federal government and Sudan.

Torpor posted:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/10/14/tigray-faces-a-new-onslaught-by-eritrean-ethiopian-forces/

uh

Torpor posted:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/10/14/tigray-faces-a-new-onslaught-by-eritrean-ethiopian-forces/

uh

PawParole posted:

seems like tigrayan propaganda.

quote:

Staff
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft and Senior Advisor at the Quincy Institute. Previously, she served as Executive Editor of the The American Conservative magazine, where she had been reporting and publishing regular articles on national security, civil liberties, foreign policy, veterans, and Washington politics since 2007. From 2013 to 2017, Vlahos served as director of social media and online editor at WTOP News in Washington, D.C.. She also spent 15 years as an online political reporter for Fox News at the channel’s Washington D.C. bureau, as well as Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine.

quote:

It’s lights out for the TPLF

quote:

Nearly 30,000 people have signed a petition calling on Tufts to remove Alex de Waal from his position as director of The Fletcher School’s World Peace Foundation, alleging that his comments on the crisis in Northern Ethiopia “directly [promote] human right violation and atrocities” and violate international law. De Waal says the comments originate from Ethiopian war propagandists. Executive Director of Media Relations Patrick Collins confirmed that the university does not intend to remove de Waal.

The Tigray War, which is in its second year, has produced starvation, sexual violence and massacres in northern Ethiopia. Both sides have reportedly committed atrocities, with American Secretary of State Anthony Blinken accusing the Ethiopian and Eritrean forces of “ethnic cleansing” in Tigray. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front continues to fight against the central Ethiopian and Eritrean governments after the states’ armed forces launched an operation in November 2020 to overrun the Tigray region.

De Waal, who has researched the region since the 1980s, has called the violence against the Tigrayan people a genocide orchestrated by the federal government. De Waal stated that the accusations made against him in the petition are a result of the Ethiopian government’s war propaganda machine, which has included an “international social media campaign.”

“If you look at those who perpetrate mass atrocity, crimes against humanity, genocide, they have a propaganda public information machine to target those who they don’t like,” de Waal said of the calls for his removal.

“Tufts University is committed to the principle of academic freedom and the exploration of ideas and varied opinions and experiences, even on controversial topics. We support Professor de Waal’s right to express his views,” Collins wrote in an email to the Daily.

The humanitarian crisis has likely taken upwards of 500,000 lives, according to research out of Belgium’s Ghent University. De Waal says the Ethiopian and Eritrean coalition is guilty of starting a starvation siege against the Tigrayans, who are an ethnic minority.

“I think the violence that we will see against the Tigrayans will be genocidal,” de Waal said. “I’ve been very hesitant to use that word.”

He says that Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki is perpetuating the war to destabilize Ethiopia and that Eritrea is in direct control of about half of the Ethiopian army, and called the country “a vassal of Eritrea.”

“This is as bad as Rwanda. And then the repercussions of that are, the whole of Ethiopia will be destabilized [and] the state actually will collapse,” de Waal told the Daily. “It basically has collapsed already … and a state of 100 million people collapsing, we haven’t seen that.”

Similar comments by de Waal about Ethiopia’s collapse from a November 2021 interview have sparked an online campaign calling on Tufts to remove de Waal from his positions as a professor at The Fletcher School, as well as from his role as the executive director of the World Peace Foundation.
...

Atrocious Joe posted:

Kelly Vlahos probably doesn't care about Ethiopia at all.

The author of that piece is Alex de Waal, who has very strong opinions about the conflict.

https://tuftsdaily.com/news/2022/10/24/fletcher-world-peace-foundation-director-responds-to-online-backlash-over-ethiopia-comments/

quote:

It is in this spirit of accountability that we, a group of academics and practitioners, initially contacted the influential think tank Carnegie Europe after the publication of a problematic article by Thomas de Waal on 30 April 2021 entitled “What Next After the US Recognition of the Armenian Genocide?”

On 18 May 2021, some of the signatories of this letter sent a protest letter requesting a retraction or a published response from our group of signatories to Thomas de Waal’s article. While de Waal’s article had already been corrected by Carnegie Europe three times for its inaccuracies, we pointed out that it still contained falsehoods and a minimization of the intentional, centrally planned, and organized genocide of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. We affirmed that these inaccuracies and minimizations have, in essence, contributed to denial of the Armenian Genocide, and could be used to do so in the future.

This is not an abstract intellectual debate. Think tanks that cannot admit mistakes perpetuate the oppression of the very people who are the subjects of their articles. Currently, Azerbaijan is engaging in ethnic cleansing, the destruction of millennia-old monuments, a gradual invasion of Armenia, and the torture and execution of illegally held POWs. At a time when denialists, propagandists, and governments are waging a literal war, think tank pundits who gloss over and distort facts are complicit in the enactment of real violence.

i say swears online posted:

yeah



things don't look good, but previous times this happened in the last two years they fled to the hills, regrouped and performed lightning-quick advances that crushed the national military. i wonder if this time it's different since the ENDF is so close to the tigrayan capital

PawParole posted:

seems like tigrayan propaganda.

https://mobile.twitter.com/MapEthiopia/status/1584575250678747136?cxt=HHwWgMCoifGyxf0rAAAA

It’s lights out for the TPLF

i say swears online posted:

things don't look good, but previous times this happened in the last two years they fled to the hills, regrouped and performed lightning-quick advances that crushed the national military. i wonder if this time it's different since the ENDF is so close to the tigrayan capital

Spergin Morlock posted:

Yea if they ever get it to the point where lots of people move in that place is going to end up like the Kowloon walled city on steroids

guidoanselmi posted:

it’d be a lot harder to control the movement of people which is the purpose of a line.

really queer Christmas posted:

Is there a primer or good post someone has made up for the Ethiopian conflict? I have not followed the region for a couple years and I'd like to get a better grasp on it.

PawParole posted:

this is going to have a lot of parentheses and explanations of explanations. It's the Horn so the politics are extremely complicated


the Ethiopian junta (mainly made up of ethnic Tigray) which had held power over Ethiopia since they ousted the DERG in 1990, was overthrown in a popular movement that started off after they tried annexing land to expand Addis Ababa (capital of Ethiopia) and they first tried to assuage the protestors (who were mostly Oromo farmers from the region surrounding Addis Ababa (the Oromo name is FinFinne, and Addis is claimed by the Oromia Region) by making a half Oromo Half Amhara prime minister.

he wasn't the puppet they thought he would be, and really hated tigrayians from how they treated him in the Badme war (war against the Eritreans (who are closely related to Tigrays but really dislike each other), so he allied with the dictator/president for life of Eritrea, signed a peace deal that had a secret clause that included an alliance against Tigray, got the Nobel prize for the peace deal, then he tried to replace the leaders of the Northern Command (note that 90 percent of all officers were Tigray, Abiy was one of the only non-Tigray officers they could find) w/ non-tigray, but the Northern Command refused, Abiy took that as a declaration of rebellion, and a year on, here we are.



Ethnic Map of Ethiopia

Map of the War in Tigray

really queer Christmas posted:

Is there a primer or good post someone has made up for the Ethiopian conflict? I have not followed the region for a couple years and I'd like to get a better grasp on it.

PawParole posted:

Some Guy TT posted:

The three vaccine candidates include one developed by Oxford University, another by the nonprofit Sabin Vaccine Institute, and one from Merck, which recently discovered 100,000 undisclosed doses of its experimental vaccine in a freezer.

Atrocious Joe posted:

what

Atrocious Joe posted:

what

AnimeIsTrash posted:

https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1586364135469895683

Lol

fits my needs posted:

https://twitter.com/W7VOA/status/1586572872671174658?s=20&t=-DGrkJ_clDPJwO_WUhZbrw

i say swears online posted:

on the face of things this fall i'm partial to al-saqr's analysis that saudi is moving toward detente with iran under the wing of china, though i can't square it with the overtures to israel. i wonder if any reversal on that front is imminent