Republican Virginia candidate to expand Ethiopia-US trade

Teshome M. Borago | Borkena

Republican candidate for Virginia governorship, GLENN YOUNGKIN, promised to “expand trading relationship with Ethiopia,” in a major contrast to the anti-free market Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration that threatened to cut trade to hurt the Ethiopian economy. Glenn Youngkin told Ethiopian-Americans in Virginia to go out and vote for him, becoming one of the first American governor candidates in US history to seek support from this growing immigrant community from the horn of Africa.

Despite Ethiopia (under the Nobel Prize winning new Prime Minister Abiy) democratizing institutions, promoting gender-equality and liberalizing the economy for the first time in history, Joe Biden’s foreign policy team has put all its eggs on the old marxist-Leninist TPLF insurrectionist rebels that triggered the ongoing unnecessary war in 2020. By employing bothsidesism that did not call for the rebels to disarm, the Biden foreign policy failure has emboldened the TPLF rebels to continue the war against the Ethiopian government, according to New Jersey Republican Congressman Chris Smith. Biden’s team has went as far as threatening to sabotage pro-women African trade programs like AGOA and a historic telecom liberalization in Ethiopia, while recklessly flaunting Sudan’s military regime (that invaded Ethiopia) as an example of liberal democracy in Africa. Such US foreign policy debacle has forced Ethiopian-Americans, some who voted for Biden before, to search for an alternative.

Various estimates put the Ethiopian-American population in the DMV area close to a quarter million, with tens of thousands living in various Virginia counties, including suburbs. While most are first & second generation immigrants, there is also a growing third generation Ethiopian-American population. With the leadership of diaspora organizations like the American-Ethiopian Public Affairs Committee (AEPAC), more Ethiopian-Americans are becoming involved and active in their communities.

After Tigrayan supporters of the marxist TPLF junta that robbed over $30 billion dollars from Ethiopia hired lobbyists like Von-Batten in Washington to shape Biden’s foreign policy, many Ethiopians who voted for Joe Biden have regretted their vote and disappointed Ethiopian-Americans are becoming inspired to participate in upcoming US elections. Thousands of them have held protest rallies recently in September, as well as a massive march on Washington earlier this year with thousands of demonstrators in front of the US State Department condemning Biden’s foreign policy. However, it is not just Ethiopian-Americans who have been upset with the destructive policy of the current Democrat President. Thousands of Eritrean-Americans have also joined Ethiopians to protest against Biden in Washington DC and other parts of the country. Eritrea began providing security assistance to Ethiopia, after the TPLF (Tigrayan) rebels shot rockets into the Eritrean capital city of Asmara to start the war and since TPLF used its previous monopoly of the Ethiopian security apparatus to paralyze the entire government military thru ethnic-profiling.

It is likely most Eritrean-Americans will join Ethiopians to help the Republican Glenn Youngkin win Virgnia, some due to the GOP’s anti-TPLF policy between 2016-2020; but most doing so as a “protest vote” against the Biden administration’s disastrous policy, not only in Ethiopia, but the whole region. Many Eritrean-Americans have also historically opposed the Susan Rice led US-Africa foreign policy establishment that enabled the TPLF dictatorship for years, going as far as praising dictator Meles Zenawi as “democratically elected.”

Since the end of 2020, in its effort to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the TPLF committed various atrocities to start an insurrection and hold the poor & aid-dependent portion of the Tigrayan community hostage. TPLF has been criticized even inside its own Tigrayan community as famous pro-democracy Tigrayan activists like Hermela Aregawi accused the TPLF rebels of using lobbyists and its global networks to gain Western support by pushing “famine” and “genocide” narratives on social media. One of TPLF’s global networks named Sahan, a “Policy and Research” group that had misinformed and influenced many Nairobi-based Western journalists, was recently charged by Courts in Somalia and is facing investigations in Kenya. In October, former European Union (EU) MP Ana Gomez, who have dealt with TPLF for decades, sent a warning to Joe Biden and western policy-makers not to fall for TPLF’s “lies,” describing TPLF rebels as a “dangerous band of criminal oppressors and liars.”

Independent analysts say TPLF had no agenda but only to create chaos in the hope of regaining complete control of Ethiopia, an analysis shared by Trump’s former Secretary of State for African affairs Tibor Nagy Jr. This aimless pro-insurrection agenda became evident as most of the demands the TPLF makes today after it began the war were benefits of autonomy that TPLF already enjoyed pre-war.

This was due to, despite the ethnic supremacist TPLF group being overthrown in 2018 thru a nonviolent movement, the new Prime Minister Abiy still provided TPLF the autonomy to rule in Tigray as long as it permitted democratic reforms of the central government. Since 2018, Abiy administration’s reforms included releasing political prisoners, relaunching independent institutions like the EHRC and working across the aisle to put leaders of the previously outlawed OLF and Ginbot 7 organizations to join his cabinet. However, what seemed to anger TPLF the most was the democratization of the powerful national election board. This historic reform of the NEBE institution ultimately became the biggest threat for the TPLF junta leaders who recognized they will not be able to rig elections anymore, as well as micromanage administrative referendums that enabled TPLF to enlarge its tribal jurisdiction. These issues, together with the TPLF’s interest in maintaining its decades old economic domination nationwide, ultimately drove the rebels to start a brutal war campaign in November 2020 that has now expanded the humanitarian crisis into Amhara and Afar states.

Faced with a choice between supporting the democratic aspirations of the Ethiopian people, and the marxist TPLF rebels, the Biden administration chose to support the insurrectionist rebels in the name of a “humanitarian intervention” narrative, which TPLF’s worldwide lobbyists manufactured for the profitable Western foreign aid industry that has kept Ethiopia more dependent on aid than ever before. In this endeavor, Biden’s administration continue to downplay both the TPLF’s original insurrection of November 2020 (which UNDP and the previous Republican administration blamed on the TPLF rebels) and the ensuing atrocities committed by the rebels.

While the Trump administration pushed a pro-Egypt policy on Ethiopia’s hydro-dam to appease Arab regimes who normalized relations with Israel, Trump’s Republican team in Ethiopia still blamed TPLF for starting this brutal and unnecessary war. Since 2017, Republicans also had a “hands off” policy on Ethiopia, (which weakened TPLF diplomatically and geo-politically) indirectly helping Ethiopian protestors end the TPLF dictatorship in 2018.

With the Eritrean and Ethiopian-American vote, the upcoming election in Virginia can paralyze Joe Biden’s entire party agenda for the next decade. To confuse and prevent more Ethiopians from helping the Republicans, some Joe Biden operatives recently began propaganda and fear-mongering Ethiopians and other African-Americans. On Friday, Joe Biden’s supporters were caught on video staging a fake “white nationalist” event holding “tiki torches” and pretending to be Republicans in Virginia. And recently, Glenn Youngkin’s Republican colleague Mrs. Winsome Sears, who is a Jamaica-born African-American seeking another government post in Virginia during this upcoming November election, exposed more of Biden’s team dirty plays. She recently revealed that “Joe Biden’s Democrats have been instilling fear in people who look like me,” as she exposed a racist political tactic reminiscent of the Democrat party’s deep KKK roots in Virginia. “I have had white liberals talk down to me — talk down to me, and as if I didn’t even exist — simply because I’m a black Republican,” she said.

Historically the Ethiopian-American vote tends to split both ways as the religiously conservative older Ethiopians choose Republican while the younger generation influenced by Cable News often picked the Democrat party. However, diaspora Ethiopian activists are now increasingly pushing for unity so most Ethiopian-Americans operate as one block and become single-issue voters focused on the more urgent matter of stopping Biden’s Susan Rice-Samantha Powers team from turning Ethiopia into the next Libya.

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