Scholar Advises U.S. to Revise Policy Towards Terrorist TPLF

August 25, 2021

BY YESUF ENDRIS

ADDIS ABABA – U.S. policy on Ethiopia which is directly aligned with terrorist propaganda needs to be revised, Director of Balsillie School of International Affairs urged the Biden’s Administration.

The Director Ann Fitz-Gerald, in her piece of writing on Nation, exposed that “despite its high crimes and the TPLF being listed for years by the US government as a Tier 3 terrorist organization, Washington has suddenly decided that, contrary to the declaration by Ethiopia’s parliament, it no longer is.”

Commenting on U.S. intervention, Fitz-Gerald said “the U.S. has been supporting the TPLF which adopted an increasingly belligerent stance towards the Ethiopian federal government’s handling of the terror in the northern regional state of Tigray, home to five percent of the country’s 110 million-plus population.”

“More disturbing than the images of  desperate people in Kabul scrambling to flee from Afghanistan is the realization that the United States may not have learnt from experience and could bring havoc to another global region,” she wrote.

 As to her, “the outcome of Washington’s negotiations with the Taliban, a non-state armed group, should have appeared inevitable.”

 TPLF has also “planned and coordinated attacks on northern command outposts of the National Defense Force, in which thousands of federal troops were murdered. It is not an overstatement to call this Ethiopia’s 9/11.”

Noting the government’s effort, she has clearly pointed out that “the unilateral ceasefire in June came as a result of both international pressure and the potential risk of civilian casualties. The international community appealed to the Abiy Administration to give the region a chance to work with aid workers without a federal military or interim political presence.”

“The federal government withdrew from Tigray; blame for the crises could not be simply placed at Addis Ababa’s feet. The humanitarian disaster mushroomed, so did the conflict zone, and TPLF atrocities were revealed.”

“The West can ill-afford a repeat of the Iraq inquiry and the inevitable cost to humanity that will follow its sudden extraction from Afghanistan. Ongoing US-led support to non-state armed groups in the face of questionable evidence justifying this position and in the face of “aid blackmail” towards Ethiopia, risks destabilizing the Horn of Africa. African solidarity has never been more important,” the director stated.

The Ethiopian Herald August 25/2021