For Pacifica Radio, December 20th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Danny Sherson.
He was a major in the U.S. Army.
He was in the Iraq and Afghan surges.
He wrote Ghost Riders of Baghdad, and his latest book is called Patriotic Dissent.
He writes for every online publication in the world, including antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Danny?
I'm great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Happy to have you here.
Now, listen, I want to interview you all about this article you wrote about the civil war in Ethiopia right now, but you're one of the very few who's really up on Nagorno-Karabakh and the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over that territory that took place over the last, what, month and a half or what have you, and I guess, what is it, we're about two weeks into the ceasefire and the Russian intervention there that stopped it all and what have you, and I was just wondering if you could maybe catch us up on what happened with the war, how much territory was gained or lost, and how strictly held is the ceasefire and all these important questions.
Well, you know, it's funny.
One doesn't really want to be vindicated so much when the subject is as just brutal and bloody as it is, but frankly, in a rare case, because it's a difficult thing, a lot of the things that I had been describing in some of my articles and appearances on this came to pass, which is I had said that if this frozen conflict gets put back in the freezer, that it's going to be Putin who does it, you know, that if there's peace, it'll be some sort of Russian-brokered thing, and that turned out to be the case.
The question, of course, is whether this is lasting.
The big war that killed 50,000-ish people that ended in 1994, that became a frozen conflict because that truce mostly held for 22 years, which is a pretty long time, and there was some fighting across the border, and then in 2016, there was like a four-day war, and then in January of this year, there was another one, and then, of course, the big like 47-day war that just wrapped up came to an end, but I think what's clear here is no one's really particularly happy with this peace, this truce, really, the ceasefire.
Azerbaijan is happier because the Armenian army left Nagorno-Karabakh, which they've essentially de facto held since 1994, and they've been replaced by Russian peacekeepers, so this was a victory for them.
This was proof that force works for some, if America will let it.
If you're in a certain position, force can work, which is dangerous for its implications, but the Azeris really wouldn't like to see Russian peacekeepers there.
They'd like to take the whole thing back, so they're not perfectly happy with it, and the Armenians are pissed.
I mean, the Armenian citizenry stormed their parliament and looted the offices, and there was violence.
There was like punching of members of parliament because the government made this deal.
Now, they made the deal under duress because they were losing the war, and they were largely losing the war because of Turkish and Israeli drones that were kind of wiping out their armored force.
So as things stand now, Russian troops have gone in there.
Armenia has handed over three areas to Azerbaijan, and then essentially the rest of it, the majority of Nagorno-Karabakh, is going to be, for now, policed or kind of held by Russian peacekeepers, Russian soldiers.
But there has already been some fighting.
There's been a little bit, I think four Azeri soldiers were killed over the weekend.
There's just been ...
This thing's tenuous, and my point is because no one's happy with it, and especially because Armenia is not happy with it, this time, I don't ...
If I was in the predicting business, I wouldn't think this thing is ever going to be a frozen, a conflict again.
This may hold for a little while.
It may be days.
It may be months.
Maybe it's a year or two, but this thing's not over.
You know what?
So here's the thing.
Not knowing anything about it, maybe that puts me in a good position to ask an ignorant question and set you up to explain, but it seems like the way you describe it, the situation is more tenable now rather than less, if only the part about the, what, three major territories, I think, that Armenia has now lost to Azerbaijan in this, that those were the territories that were majority ethnic Azerbaijani anyway, right?
And so now you have ...
That was one of the major problems, was the Armenian section included these Azerbaijani suburbs kind of situation, right?
So now if that land has been transferred over to the Azerbaijanis, it seems like they have less of a claim and less of an emotional tie to the part of the area that really is Armenian territory in the sense that that's where Armenians live, and it seems like on the Armenian side, they have a lot less of a claim over the Azerbaijani sections that they just lost, but they still have, I guess, as you say, their army is gone and they have Russian peacekeepers there instead, but the actual ethnic Armenian sections are not being occupied by the Azerbaijanis.
So I don't know.
Maybe I just don't understand it and I'm oversimplifying it in the wrong direction or something like that, or maybe there are reasons I don't understand this is less acceptable to the sides compared to the situation before.
Well, no.
Actually, what you're describing is totally reasonable and it's the solution that has always sort of been there almost.
In other words, the solution that has been in waiting, if anyone just was willing to do it, was that the small Azeri majority areas that the Armenians were holding that kind of touched Nagorno-Karabakh would go back to Azerbaijan and then Azerbaijan would just accept that these wildly Armenian majority supermajority areas would go to Armenia.
That's the deal, but no one really was willing to accept that.
So in one sense, that part about giving three of those territories back to Azerbaijan does make sense.
It could make for some more stability and the Russians being there, if they say...
That wasn't the deal, right?
It was just that was when Putin called time out on it, was right at the right place, sort of.
Right.
And the reason Putin called time out was able to call time out is because Armenia was panicking.
They almost were about to lose the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, Stepenkort, I believe it's called, and they were losing bad.
The things had been going the Azeri way from the start, but right at the end, the last three or four days there, it looked like they could really lose the momentum.
But the problem here is that the Armenians who live in Nagorno-Karabakh, which is most of them, they want to be basically part of Armenia or independent or sort of a protectorate of Armenia.
The Russians being there is a temporary solution, but unless the Russians stay forever, they certainly feel like they are under threat from Azerbaijan, which still says it's their territory and they plan to conquer it.
And I think that the real thing that makes it more unstable now, more likely to keep flaring up, I mean, just yesterday, I believe a hundred soldiers plus Armenian soldiers were captured by the Azeri army.
It's already bad, in other words.
And so, but it also sounds like you're saying the Azeris would rather go ahead and cleanse that territory of Armenian civilians and take it and repopulate it or something like that.
Well, maybe.
I mean, they certainly want to take it back over and own it.
They claim that they'll give full normal rights and some degree of autonomy to the Armenian people living there if they take it over, but no one really trusts that.
And it's not that the Armenians have been innocent either.
I mean, during the 94 war, there were serious massacres and ethnic cleansing of Azeris in the area.
But I think the key thing here is Armenia is not happy with this deal.
The Armenian people aren't because this is like their patriotic thing.
So giving it over to Russian peacekeepers and accepting that Azerbaijan basically won is untenable because the people aren't going to accept it.
And the people in Nagorno-Karabakh, they took the desperate deal rather than have the Azeri army flood over them, but they're not happy at all with this.
And then also the thing is how long can the Russians stay?
Is it forever?
So I just have a feeling this isn't over.
If this thing starts again, it's largely going to be driven probably this time.
Last time it was driven by Turkey colluding with the Azeris to do the war.
If it flares up again, it's probably going to be because the Armenian people force their government to escalate in some way or Nagorno-Karabakh's kind of own security forces and militias, right?
The people who live there, not the Armenian official army cause like fighting to kick off again and therefore bring in like kind of wagging the dog, right?
Yeah.
Hey y'all, here's the thing.
Donate $100 to the Scott Horton show and you can get a QR code commodity disc as my gift to you.
It's a one ounce silver disc with a QR code on the back.
You take a picture of it with your phone and it gives you the instant spot price and lets you know what that silver, that ounce of silver is worth on the market in Federal Reserve notes in real time.
It's the future of currency in the past too.
Commodity discs.com or just go to scotthorton.org slash donate.
Hey guys, Scott Horton here for expanddesigns.com.
Harley Abbott and his crew do an outstanding job designing, building, and maintaining my sites and they'll do great work for you.
You need a new website?
Go to expanddesigns.com slash Scott and save 500 bucks.
Hey guys, check out Listen and Think audiobooks.
They're at listenandthink.com and of course on audible.com and they feature my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, as well as Brand New Out Inside Syria by our friend Reese Ehrlich and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there.
Reese might be one exception, but essentially they're all libertarian audiobooks and here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to Listen and Think audiobooks.
Just donate $100 to The Scott Horton Show at scotthorton.org slash donate.
All right, well, so let's switch to the war in Ethiopia, Danny.
The most important thing about Ethiopia that I know is that ever since 2006, the Americans have been paying them to rape and murder Somalis.
Well, you know, that's the subject of, that'll be even more depth, the subject of my follow-on column on the same subject, which is really going to look at the AFRICOM angle and the U.S. role in the Horde of Africa.
Ethiopia is another one of America's sort of problematic proxies, shall we say, and you're right, by the way, everybody go look at this.
It's called Eastern African Exposure, Ethiopia Ethnicity and Other Kindling for Tigres Backstory, and it's a real good one, as always.
West Point History professor Sherson here.
Who are the Tigres and who's in charge in the capital and why are they fighting so bad?
Yeah, so the big fight here is over centralization, whether they're going to have a central state, right, or whether they're going to have what they call ethnic federalism, where there's more autonomy at the local level in these regional states that are based on ethnicity.
Now, throughout Ethiopian history, they've been generally an empire or a military dictatorship until 1991.
And during that period, they were ruled from the center, from the capital and largely the Amhara ethnic group, which is the second largest and the most important kind of linguistic group, had always kind of run the show.
The Tigrayans are about six to seven percent of the population.
They're in the far north and sort of northeast of the country.
It's one of the wealthier areas, actually, of a very poor country, Ethiopia.
They border Sudan as well as Eritrea.
So this is an important region.
Now, the thing about the Tigrayans is when there was a guerrilla war against the Derg dictatorship, it was called the Derg, which I can't remember if it means like council or something like that, but it was a Marxist, you know, sort of communist military dictatorship allied with the Russians, with the Soviets.
There was like a guerrilla war against them.
And after the Soviet Union sort of falls in 91, as, you know, their proxy, their patrons were getting weak, the Derg is taken down by this insurgency.
Now, there was a conglomeration of different ethnic militias that fought as insurgents.
And one of the most important ones, even though they were a relatively small ethnic group, was the TPLF, the Tigrayan force.
So in 91, when the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Forces, which was the central committee of all these different insurgent groups, when they took over the government, until 2018, okay, so now we're talking like 27 years here, the Tigrayans actually were kind of the dominant force.
They were like the kingmakers and the kings.
There was only two prime ministers before this most recent one.
It was always a Tigrayan.
They had outsized influence, and they populated the security forces, right, the army, that kind of stuff.
But there was always a problem with that in the sense that the Amhara and the Oromo groups, which were much, the two biggest ethnic groups, they didn't like the Tigrayan influence and control.
There was this idea that there was some corruption among the Tigrayan leadership, which there was, but it was also overplayed.
And so what happens is, in 2014, 15, 16, there's massive street protests.
The Tigray-dominated prime minister kind of overreacts and shoots a bunch of protesters, about 1,000 die.
And in 2018, the guy resigns.
I think his name is Zanawi, or it's actually the successor of Milo Zanawi.
So anyway, this guy, Abiy Ahmed, who is a Nobel Peace Laureate now, okay, he comes in in 2018.
He's Oromo.
He's the first non-Tigrayan to be in charge of the new government since 91.
He says he's going to free market, liberalize the economy, open up to Western investment.
He's going to free up the internet, make it a less oppressive state.
He does do some of that initially, lets people out of prison.
And he's going to make peace with Eritrea, which he does.
And he wins the Peace Prize for that.
Of course, the problem is it's a very informal peace.
Now, he's a Western favorite, but he's not quite as popular among all the Ethiopians, many of whom think he's trying to be a new emperor and re-centralize.
The Tigrayans left the coalition when he basically rebranded it as a single political party with him as the head, because they sensed he was trying to get rid of ethnic federalism and centralize the government.
All this comes to a head when he cancels the elections that were supposed to be the first time that he actually was going to get elected, because he was appointed by the party largely.
He hadn't been elected by the people.
So there were supposed to be elections in August to see what the new government would look like, and he would stay prime minister.
But they were delayed because of COVID.
Tigray said, this might be the first COVID denier maybe war ever, right?
But the Tigrayans said, F you, we're still having our election in September.
They did, which at that point, both sides basically stopped recognizing each other.
Then the Ethiopian federal central government cut off funding to Tigray at that point, basically shut down all their tax receipts and stuff that they would be getting from the federal government, which they called tantamount the Tigrayans did to a declaration of war.
Then on November 4th, allegedly it seems, there was an attack on a Ethiopian army base by the Tigrayan militias, which number up to 250,000 soldiers, by the way, the regional state forces.
And that started the war, which basically took about a month.
Tigray's been reconquered, but there's some guerrilla fighting that seems to still be going on.
So the national government was pretty quickly successful against them then.
Yeah, they were.
And for a couple of reasons.
I mean, first of all, they are recipients of pretty strong AFRICOM and US largesse, especially over the years since they invaded Somalia, essentially on our behalf, right?
Certainly green-lighted and supported in 2006.
And they've been getting a whole lot of anti-terror money, right?
Because this Christian majority country that considers itself the oldest Christian kingdom in history, still existing, is really bullish on fighting Islamism, right?
And really bullish on invading Somalia repeatedly and flexing its muscles there.
So we've been giving them a lot of money.
And then the other reason is that, interesting, their mortal enemies, the Eritreans, right, who broke off from Ethiopia in like 93, and by doing that, Ethiopia becomes a landlocked country.
These people fight a major war from 98 to 2000, these two states do.
100,000 people die in that war, at least.
But he makes this peace with them.
It's an informal personal peace.
It's not really in writing, by the way, but he gets the peace prize for it.
They are now on the same side, the Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy, right, and the Eritreans.
And it looks like, and even the US State Department says that there is corroborating evidence of this, and you would think we'd be the last ones to say it, that Eritrea sent combat brigades of their army over the border to help, so to front war against Tigray, because they share the same enemy.
Because wouldn't you know that since they bought up on each other, that the Tigrayans, who had long dominated the Ethiopian army and their different militias, have long had a lot of antagonism with Eritrea.
So that's another reason that this thing wrapped up pretty quick.
But the Tigrayans haven't really quit yet.
Right.
They're just in the hills.
And as the former government and the former core of the military, and with hills to go run to, it sounds like then this thing is far from over.
Let me say one last thing about this real quick.
You mentioned Somalia.
You mentioned Ethiopia being tied to AFRICOM. They still have thousands of soldiers in Mogadishu and stuff.
They're always sowing discord in Somalia and trying to rip off different regions like Somaliland from the central Somali government.
They're a bad actor in Somalia.
But the Ethiopian government is so worried about this Tigray war and the ethnic components are all like splitting apart so much that there are numerous reports factually that the Ethiopian army has started to disarm its soldiers in even Somalia, like the people, the peacekeepers in Somalia that are really like raping and murdering.
They've started disarming the Tigrayan members of the armed forces, the people who are Tigray ethnic.
So this thing has reverberations across the core.
This is a big deal.
Well, I wonder if they'll have to pull the rest of their troops out of Somalia and come home so they can occupy the north there.
What a disaster.
Maybe that's a pandemic silver lining or something.
I don't know.
It's interesting that you're saying the guy that's in charge now is in Amora?
He's in Oromo.
Oromo.
Okay.
And now they were the ones that the previous government massacred repeatedly and oppressed, right?
Now they're the ones in charge?
Yeah.
See, so that's where it gets complicated because the Oromo are the largest group.
They're slightly larger than the Amhara who had dominated when it was an empire, right, for like thousands of years.
But the problem with all this is that the Oromos have always felt like, hey, we're the biggest group, but we're kind of oppressed.
So there's two types of Oromo sort of dissidents.
There's the mainline ones who went into the streets protesting for more power, many of whom were shot in the streets.
But then they eventually kind of did take over the government because they got a bay in, right?
So they're angry at the TPLF for that.
But then there's also a subset of Oromo liberation forces who actually basically want to secede, right, who want to just be their own country.
Oromia is one of the states.
And the current prime minister, what he did before he was prime minister was he was the vice president of that regional government.
So he comes out of that, but he's not really quite as radical.
But there's another element of Oromo who actually just want to fight the government even with like an Oromo in charge and they want to be a separate country.
So there's a lot of forces at work here.
Yeah.
Well, at the very least, obviously, step one toward peace is, you know, as much severe federalism and autonomy for the different regions as possible so that they have less cause to fight over control over the national government in this way.
But is the capital city right in the middle or right on a fault line of these different ethnic states there?
Well, yeah, it is kind of in the middle.
It's...
I mean, I know from Iraq that matters a lot, you know, I mean, whose population dominates in the capital?
Well, and this is another issue here.
So and actually the capital region is part of what started the conflicts.
Okay.
It's like part of what started the conflicts in 2016 and 2017 with the protests.
So it's in the middle of the country and it's swallowed up by Oromia.
Right.
So it's like it's a separate region, the capital region, like the district in America.
But it's inside, deep inside Oromia.
But in the capital, pretty much all the ethnic groups live there.
Similar to Baghdad, right, in a sense.
And so the problem is that there's like competition there.
There's a lot of reports that Tigrayans are being like kicked out of the police.
They're being kicked out of their government jobs.
They're checking IDs on the street now, including in the rural areas where they're checking IDs, which on your national ID there, not your passport, but your national ID there, it shows your ethnic group.
And so like we saw in Iraq, this checkpoint game is starting where if like you're out in the rural area and these youth militias, these ethnic youth militias, which are roaming around free now, and it's all the different ethnic groups, not just one or the other.
There's been massacres.
There was one village massacre of 600 people clubbed to death and like cut their throats and stuff.
They didn't use guns.
And what they're starting to do is check like identity.
So there's a possibility of real state fracture here.
There's real worries about it.
Yeah.
And then what happens is you have all people on the wrong side of the lines and you know, quote unquote.
And so, you know, it's funny, not funny, but terrible that all of these borders, virtually all of these borders, even as you say, Ethiopia was mostly independent from the Europeans, even during the worst of the days of the imperialism, but still their borders were drawn by the Europeans from the outside at least.
And it's not just divide and conquer, right?
It's grouped together people who had always sort of been separate nations into one group to keep them divided inside a new larger grouping.
But the point being essentially then that all of these nation states of Africa are all way too big and all of the borders are drawn in the wrong places.
And so, I mean, are there any borders in Africa that aren't drawn in some weird, arbitrary way by the Belgians or the French or the Germans or the English here?
Besides a couple of besides like Madagascar, right?
Besides the islands.
I mean, unless nature created the border.
Yeah.
River somewhere or something.
Yeah.
Here or there.
But yeah.
And so, you know, I mean, the idea here is that, I mean, I guess it's not the case, though, that in all African nations that there's really, you know, fights over this all the time.
They figured out how to get along together most of the time in most of these places.
But you could also see how that there's just an equation for permanent strife here in a way that, you know, maybe could be overcome by peace conferences from the bottom up and strong federalist policies and a willingness of people maybe even to redraw borders in some cases.
But it seems like more likely you'll just have fighting over these lines forever.
Well, yeah.
Ethiopia is a particularly bad case.
You know, some countries have done better than others.
The more homogenous ones, the ones that were lucky enough that the borders got drawn a little more homogenous around ethnic groups, they tend to do better.
But Ethiopia has 80 ethnic groups, minimum ethnolinguistic groups.
Ethiopia conquered the people around them.
And there's a really good book about, it's called Competing for Empire, I believe.
And it's about the British and the Ethiopian Christian empire that, like, thinks it still has the arc of the government and traces its lineage, 275 straight kings, they claim, in one line, right?
Haile Selassie, right?
Where the Rastafarian movement comes from, because his name was Rastafar, right?
They think—that was his given name.
They think that he is like, you know, kind of a second coming of Jesus.
I mean, there's a lot of really important Christian, Christendom, really, legacy here.
And they stayed independent largely because they were an empire in their own right.
And so they conquered.
And they continued to conquer areas of other ethnic African groups well into the late 19th century and early 20th century.
So when, like, England and France and Belgium are snatching up territories, Ethiopia is in on the game and doing the same thing.
And there's a lot of reasons why that's allowed to happen, you know, some of which has to do with the Christian angle, right?
This, like, ancient biblical angle.
But it is problematic.
The thing about Ethiopia, though, is because they were an empire, because they were ruled for the center for so long, the tension between ethnic federalism and the centralization instinct is particularly strong there.
And there's 108 million people, and their per capita income is still $2 a day, despite real serious economic gains since the early 90s.
And man, it's a mess.
It really is a mess.
And America is not helping.
You know, we're not helping by backing these guys.
We're not helping by looking the other way with what they do in Somalia and with what they did in Tigray.
Because believe you me, if this had happened in a country that was our enemy, there would have been massive calls about why is the Ethiopian Air Force bombing, you know, cities and civilian areas in Tigray and not letting aid workers in and then shooting at and even killing aid workers.
You know, it's not one sided.
The Tigrayan forces have done their own massacres.
But this federal government has been given a real blank check, or at least we've ignored it.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I'm sorry that we're out of time.
I know you got to go to but I really appreciate your time on this important subject and Nagorno Karabakh as well.
And everybody, you know, you can catch Danny Sherson at anti war.com.
This one is called Eastern African exposure, Ethiopia, ethnicity, and other kindling for Tigray's backstory.
Appreciate it.
Yeah, glad to do it.
And listeners can check out I'm going to talk more about this in the next anti war column next week.
Great.
All right, Sean, that has been anti war radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm your host Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
