Was Ginbot 7, the Tiananmen Square of Ethiopia?

Aymro

Ethiopian is now considered a safe place to invest by the MNC’s and foreign governments. This may be seen as good news by some but as often happens in Ethiopia; this comes with an unwelcome twist.

Investors are flooding in, taking advantage of dirt-cheap sale/lease of lands for major hotels to Belgium size farming lands (individuals and MNC’s of the Karuturi Global type). Allied to the foreign or Comme Ci, Comme Ça individuals and MNC’s are the quasi-military caste around the regime and a small comprador class that stands to benefit directly from its enabling and facilitator role on behalf of foreign Capital.

It is now possible to piece together the events of the last decade as efforts by the regime to demonstrate to foreign Capital that it is a reliable enforcer and controller of the population. It has shown this by its track record of ethnic fragmentation, massacres of those who asked for their rights especially land rights, its continuation of the Stalinist land policy that allowed the current land grabs and its general debasement and dehumanisation of the Ethiopian people as a whole.

Examples of the above are the suppression of the rights of the Welkait population with an eye to Humera, the rights of the population of the borderlands like Kwara, the massacre of the Anuak,on-going suppression of dissent in the Amhara and Oromo populations, the way it dealt with oil exploration and rebellion in Ogaden among others.

It is said that the signal event that persuaded the MNC’s to invest so massively and make use of the huge pool of Chinese cheap labour was the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. The mainly student and worker democracy movement whose emblem was the statue of liberty, was ruthlessly suppressed with many dead. It showed to what extent the Chinese authorities were prepared to go to control the population. This in turn led to a belief that investments were safe in the hands of the regime.

It now seems a similar process is happening in Ethiopia with a twist. Whilst China became the sweatshop and workshop of the world, Ethiopia seems destined to be a provider of cheap agricultural labour and land, a foreign owned plantation which would attract dirt cheap labour from a starving peasantry living on the margins. The whole process is to have an Overseer or Capo regime, which in all likelihood would have so called anti-terrorist, crack troops to suppress any revolts or uprisings.

This may sound like purveying doom and gloom but the evidence is there for those who care to see.

The last decade has seen the regime suppressing democratic and human rights aspirations and movements, the free press, falsifying elections, and conducting massacres. It has also seen it building infrastructure, like buildings and roads and promulgating a so-called anti-terrorist law that in effect bans all opposition to it as terrorist.

The infrastructure is part of the paraphernalia of the Comprador State and does not necessarily signify genuine people based development. How else are the MNC’s going to take away (export is not the right word) all that produce to their countries? The anti-terrorist law was probably put in place to reassure investors too. The MNC’s and the regime both anticipate opposition from the people to the gross pillage of the country and this law will be used to protect their interests. How else are the MNC’s to get away with the loot?

To summarise the last 10 years has seen the transformation of the TPLF into an agent of foreign capital almost wholly interested in exploiting the country’s farmland and poor rural population. This accelerated in the last few years after the collapse of the housing market /recession in the major Capitalist countries forced the prices of primary produce (cereals, other agricultural products) spiralling upwards.

This rise in prices, given a pro-Ethiopian people government could have led to prosperity for at least sections of the Ethiopian peasantry, as increased exports at higher prices took hold.

As outlined above, the regime and a nascent comprador class were positioned not to allow this to happen.