January 12, 2019 (KHARTOUM) The Sudanese parliament said a draft military agreement signed between Sudan and Russia would pave the road for the latter to build a military base on the Red Sea coast in the future.

In an interview with Sputnik News Service, head of the parliamentary subcommittee on Defence, Security and Public Order, Al-Hadi Adam Musa, described the draft agreement between the two sides to facilitate entry of Russian and Sudanese warships to the ports of the two nations as a step forward towards establishing strategic relations.

He stressed that Sudan, like other countries in the region, has the right to allow the establishment of Russian military bases in its territory.

Musa pointed out that several countries in the region have allowed foreign countries to build military bases in their territories, saying however the Sudanese-Russian agreement has yet to reach that level.

Last Wednesday, Russia’s legal information portal website reported that the Prime Minister of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev has approved a draft agreement with Sudan on facilitating the entry of warships to the ports of the two countries.

The draft agreement pertains to facilitating the entry procedures for warships to Russian and Sudanese ports but doesn’t provide for the building of a military base in Sudan.

According to the draft agreement, “the entry of warships shall be made after notification has been given not later than seven working days prior to the scheduled date of entry”.

The draft document stressed that “within the framework of the Agreement, no more than seven warships can be present simultaneously, in the territorial sea, inland waters and ports of the receiving State”.

During a visit to Moscow last year to attend the 2018 World Cup Final, the Sudanese President Omer al-Bashir met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both leaders pledged to promote military cooperation in the near future.

The two leaders last met in November 2017 in the Russian city of Sochi, with both expressing a desire to enhance military ties.

While in Russia in November 2017, al-Bashir offered to construct an airbase for Russia on the Red Sea coast and to re-equip the Sudanese army with the Russian weapons including SU-30 fighter jets and surface-to-air missiles.

Russia is seen as a major ally of the government of al-Bashir that faces isolation from the West. However, economic cooperation between the two countries has remained very low, with a trade balance that does not exceed $400 million.

(ST)

Source=http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article66908

January 9, 2019 Martin Plaut Ethiopia, News

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Eritrea’s President Isaias and Gedu Andargachew, President of the Amhara region, were in the Ethiopian town of Omhager to open the Ethiopia-Eritrea border checkpoint at Omhager-Humera on Monday.

But reports from the area suggest that the ceremony didn’t go to plan.

The event was apparently forced to move into Eritrea after local people protested at the presence of Gedu, since the Amhara region doesn’t have a border with Eritrea.

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Tigrayans are angry that thousands of people have been displaced from the Amhara region and are now camping in Humera.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday the Ethiopian army in the nearby city Shire started to move 50 heavy trucks of armaments from a military depot. The people blocked the roads with cars and forced them into the Shire stadium.

The soldiers, who seemed to share the views of the people and were sympathetic to their concerns that heavy equipment was being transported away from Tigray, ended up eating lunch there and holding discussing with local elders.

January 9, 2019 Martin Plaut News

 Source: Martin Plaut,  The Conversation

The regime’s survival cannot simply be seen as a domestic issue. He has strong international allies. The West once reviled Omar al-Bashir as an indicted war criminal. However, more recently they have begun to view him as a source of stability and intelligence in a troubled region. The president also has the backing – both political and financial – of key Arab allies.

Date: 09/01/2019Author: Martin Plaut

How foreign backing is keeping Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir in power

January 8, 2019

Day after day Sudanese are taking to the streets to protest against the rule of Omar al-Bashir. The president, who himself seized power in 1989 when he led a coup, is facing the most serious challenge in his three decades in power. Fury at sharp rises in the cost of bread and fuel, and allegations of corruption, have fuelled the protests.

Thus far the president has managed to resist the anger of his people. But Sudanese have a long history of overthrowing unpopular regimes. Twice before – in 1964 and then again in 1985 – revolts led to changes of government. On each occasion the armed forces abandoned the regime and sided with the people. This has not occurred during the current protests for good reasons, as university lecturer and author of Civil Uprisings in Modern Sudan Willow Berridge points out:

Al-Bashir’s regime clearly learnt from the mistakes of its predecessors. It has created a much stronger National Intelligence Security Services (NISS) as well as a host of other parallel security organisations and armed militias that it uses to police Khartoum instead of the regular army. This set up, combined with various commanders’ mutual fears of being held to account for war crimes if the regime falls, means an army intervention will not occur easily as in 1964 or 1985. This is one reason the current uprising has already lasted longer than its precedents.

But the regime’s survival cannot simply be seen as a domestic issue. He has strong international allies. The West once reviled Omar al-Bashir as an indicted war criminal. However, more recently they have begun to view him as a source of stability and intelligence in a troubled region. The president also has the backing – both political and financial – of key Arab allies.

Arab support

Sudanese have traditionally been said to look North to Cairo for support. This crisis is no exception. In December Egypt’s foreign minister and intelligence chief visited Khartoum, pledging their support for Al-Bashir.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, who flew to Sudan with intelligence chief General Abbas Kamel, confidently stated:

Egypt is confident that Sudan will overcome the present situation.

This was followed earlier this month during a reciprocal trip to Cairo by the Sudanese president at which President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi commented:

Egypt fully supports the security and stability of Sudan, which is integral to Egypt’s national security.

But political support alone wouldn’t be enough to keep the Sudanese regime in power. There is also financial backing from across the Red Sea. In return for Sudan entering the Yemeni war Khartoum is reported to have received investments worth $2.2 billion. More than 10,000 Sudanese troops are fighting on the Yemeni frontline. Some are said to be child soldiers who were recruited by the Saudis, with offers of $10,000 for each recruit.

Other allies

The rehabilitation of al-Bashir in the US goes back to President Barack Obama’s era. As one of the last acts of his office, he lifted a range of US sanctions against the Sudanese regime. The CIA’s large office in Khartoum was cited as one of the key reasons for his policy shift.

Nor is Washington alone in this view. As Europe battles to restrict the number of Africans crossing the Mediterranean it has seen the Sudanese government as an ally. The ‘Khartoum Process’, signed in the Sudanese capital, is critical to this relationship. In November 2015 European leaders met their African counterparts in the Maltese capital, Valletta, to try to put flesh on the bones of this agreement. The aim was made clear in the accompanying EU press release which concluded that;

The number of migrants arriving to the European Union is unprecedented, and this increased flow is likely to continue. The EU, together with the member states, is taking a wide range of measures to address the challenges, and to establish an effective, humanitarian and safe European migration policy.

The summit led to the drafting of an Action Plan which has guided the EU’s policy objectives on migration and mobility ever since.

The plan detailed how European institutions would co-operate with their African partners to fight irregular migration, migrant smuggling and trafficking in human beings.

Europe promised to offer training to “law enforcement and judicial authorities” in new methods of investigation and assisting in setting up specialised anti-trafficking and smuggling police units.

These commitments were an explicit pledge to support and strengthen elements of the Sudanese state. A Regional Operational Centre (ROCK) has been established in Khartoum whose chief aim it to halt people smuggling and refugee flows by allowing European officials to work directly with their Sudanese opposite numbers. The counter-trafficking coordination centre in Khartoum — staffed jointly by police officers from Sudan and several European countries, including Britain, France and Italy — will partly rely on information sourced by the Sudanese national intelligence service.

Finally there is some evidence of Russian involvement in the Sudanese crisis. Russian troops, working for a private contractor, are reported to have been seen on the streets of Khartoum, suppressing the uprising.

Given the range of support for President Omar al-Bashir it isn’t surprising that he’s managed to resist popular pressure to step down. Much depends on how long demonstrations can be maintained, and how much force the regime is prepared to deploy to crush its opponents.

January 9, 2019 Martin Plaut News

Eritrean Muslims courted by Erdogan as they set up office in Istanbul

Source: Nordic Monitor

The Eritrean Ulama’a League (Rabita-i Ulama Eritriye), a Muslim organization that is seen as close to the Muslim Brotherhood, opened an office in Istanbul on Jan. 5, 2019.

The inauguration was attended by Yasin Aktay, chief advisor to ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) leader and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as keynote speaker.

The Eritrean Ulama’a League is supported by the Erdogan government, which has been pursuing a global campaign to woo various Muslim groups including the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami.

Among the guests were Abdul-Hamid al-Ani, director of information at the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI).

In February 2017 Sheikh Burhan Said, president of the Eritrean Ulama’a League, came to Istanbul and visited the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH), a charity group that has been identified as an arms smuggler to jihadist groups in Libya and Syria and was previously reported by Russia to the United Nations Security Council for links to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Sheikh Burhan Said, the president of Eritrean Ulama’a League visited headquarters of the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH) in Istanbul, Turkey.

The IHH, backed by the Turkish government, works closely with Turkish intelligence agency the National Intelligence Organization (MIT).

In a televised interview last year, Erdogan aide Aktay advocated a caliphate vision for Turkey, calling the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami Turkey’s soft power proxies.

Aktay was deputy chairman of the ruling AKP responsible for managing the AKP’s foreign relations and served as party spokesperson. He is known to be an influential figure in shaping Erdogan government policies in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Abdul-Hamid al-Ani, director of information at the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI), attended the event.

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Background from Awate 2015

An Initiative To Form An Eritrean Muslim Council

Gedab News May 14, 2015 All http://awate.com/?p=107078">15

Gedab News learned that a  group of Eritrean sheikhs and scholars are in a three-day conference in Turkey; they are expected to form an Eritrean Muslim Council. Many Eritrean Muslims do not recognize the Dar Al Iftaa that was assembled by the Eritrean ruling party and which is headed by Sheikh Alamin who was appointed by the PFDJ regime.

Traditionally, the Eritrean Muslim Mufti was elected by the congregations of the mosque based on a Muslim consensus. The last formal Eritrean Grand Mufti was the late Mufti Ibrahim AlMukhtar who died in 1969.

The Eritrean government curtails the freedom of religious institution which are under the control of the Eritrean government which administers them through the government’s Religious Affairs Department. The interference in religious affairs is so pervasive that in 2007 the government forcefully dethroned Abuna Antonios the patriarch of the Eritrean Orthodox Church and appointed Abuna Deskorios in his place. The dethroned Abun had protested the interference of the government in church affairs and demanded the release of Christian prisoners.Abune Antonios, who was born in 1927, is still held under house arrest since 2006. The Abun was enthroned on March 2004 as the Patriarch of Orthodox Tewahedo Church of Eritrea in a ceremony presided by Pope Shenouda III,  the pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt. The appointment of Abuna Dekerios is rejected by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III who “refused to recognize [it] as a canonical act.” Several Oriental Orthodox Churches and an overwhelming number of Eritreans Orthodox Christians also reject the appointment of Abune Deskerios.

The other Eritrean churches also  do not fare any better; the Catholic Church had its publication stopped and some religious sects are denied any government service rights due to their conscientious objection to carry arms or get involved in political affairs. Many are languishing in unknown prison locations.Eritrea is mainly composed of Christians and Muslims. Christianity entered the region in the third century AD while Islam entered it while the Prophet of Islam was still being chased out of his birthplace, Mecca.

At present, while their Christian brethren have synods in the Diaspora, Eritrean Muslims do not have a council that airs their voice or attends to their religious affairs. In the past, several efforts to create a council that represents Eritrean Muslims failed and its absence left the matter in the hands of individuals and political groups.

There are great expectations among Muslims to see the creation of the Council succeed hoping that it will attend to their religious matters and provide them with spiritual guidance. An Eritrean elder told Gedab News, “The absence of such guidance has resulted in the fragmentations of Muslims and weakened their resolve; the vacuum is exposing our youth to the risks of religious fanaticism.”

A handful of Eritrean-European Muslims have fallen prey to fanatic forces like ISIS.  Several people contacted by Gedab News had cautious views about the Turkey meeting. Most of them expressed fear that it might dwell and reflect inter-Muslim sectarian issue of jurisprudence while at the same time hoped the council adopts a moderate, uniting outlook similar to the one that Eritrean Muslims had under the leadership of the late Mufti Ibrahim Mukhtar.In recent years, Turkey has taken the lead in reviving and promoting the forward looking traditional Islam. The meeting in Turkey is expected to issue a press release.

Source=https://eritreahub.org/turkey-woos-eritrean-muslims

Ethnic federalism also unleashed a struggle for supremacy among the Big Three: the Tigray, the Amhara and the Oromo. Although the ruling E.P.R.D.F. is a coalition of four parties, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front representing the Tigray minority has been in the driving seat since the 1991 revolution. The Amhara, dominant before 1991, and the Oromo, the largest ethnic group in the country, complained they were being treated as subordinate minorities.

When the government announced plans to expand Addis Ababa, the federally run city-state, into bordering Oromo lands, protests erupted in 2015. The Amhara joined and both groups continued to demand land reform, equal political representation and an end to rights abuses.

Ethiopian army soldiers controlled protestors from the capital and those displaced by ethnic-based violence over the weekend in Burayu, as they demonstrated demanding justice from the government in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia last September.CreditMulugeta Ayene/Associated Press

Prime Minister Haile Mariam Desalegn, who took office in 2012 after the death of the long-term premier and Tigray leader Mr. Zenawi, responded brutally to the protests. Security forces killed between 500 and 1,000 protesters in a year. Faced with a spiraling crisis, the ruling E.P.R.D.F. coalition appointed Mr. Abiy, a former military official and a leader of the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization — a constituent of the ruling coalition — as prime minister.

Mr. Abiy’s reforms have been applauded but have also led to greater ethnic mobilization for justice and equality. The E.P.R.D.F.’s achievement since 1991 was equal education for girls and boys, rural and urban, leading to greater prominence of women, Muslims and Pentecostal groups.

The recent reforms of Mr. Abiy, who was born to a Muslim Oromo father and an Orthodox Amhara mother and is a devout Pentecostal Christian, have further broadened political participation to underprivileged groups.

Mobilization of ethnic militias is on the rise. Paramilitaries or ethnic militias known as special police, initially established as counterinsurgency units, are increasingly involved in ethnic conflicts, mainly between neighboring ethnic states. A good example is the role of the Somali Special Force in the border conflict with the Oromia state, according to Yonas Ashine, a historian at Addis Ababa University. These forces are also drawn into conflicts between native and nonnative groups.

Nearly a million Ethiopians have been displaced from their homes by escalating ethnic violence since Mr. Abiy’s appointment, according to Addisu Gebregziabher, who heads the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission.

Fears of Ethiopia suffering Africa’s next interethnic conflict are growing. Prime Minister Abiy himself is constantly invoking religious symbols, especially those linked to American Protestant evangelical megachurches, and has brought a greater number of Pentecostals into the higher ranks of government.

Ethiopians used to think of themselves as Africans of a special kind, who were not colonized, but the country today resembles a quintessential African system, marked by ethnic mobilization for ethnic gains.

In most of Africa, ethnicity was politicized when the British turned the ethnic group into a unit of local administration, which they termed “indirect rule.” Every bit of the colony came to be defined as an ethnic homeland, where an ethnic authority enforced an ethnically defined customary law that conferred privileges on those deemed indigenous at the expense of non-indigenous minorities.

The move was a response to a perennial colonial problem: Racial privilege for whites mobilized those excluded as a racialized nonwhite majority. By creating an additional layer of privilege, this time ethnic, indirect rule fragmented the racially conscious majority into so many ethnic minorities, in every part of the country setting ethnic majorities against ethnic minorities. Wherever this system continued after independence, national belonging gave way to tribal identity as the real meaning of citizenship.

Many thought the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, representing a minority in the dominant coalition, turned to ethnic federalism to dissolve and fragment Ethiopian society into numerous ethnic groups — each a minority — so it could come up with a “national” vision. In a way it replicated the British system.

But led by Mr. Zenawi, the T.P.L.F. was also most likely influenced by Soviet ethno-territorial federalism and the creation of ethnic republics, especially in Central Asia. Ethiopia’s 1994 Constitution evoked the classically Stalinist definition of “nation, nationality and people” and the Soviet solution to “the national question.”

As in the Soviet Union, every piece of land in Ethiopia was inscribed as the ethnic homeland of a particular group, constitutionally dividing the population into a permanent majority alongside permanent minorities with little stake in the system. Mr. Zenawi and his party had both Sovietized and Africanized Ethiopia.

Like much of Africa, Ethiopia is at a crossroads. Neither the centralized republic instituted by the Derg military junta in 1974 nor the ethnic federalism of Mr. Zenawi’s 1994 Constitution points to a way forward.

Mr. Abiy can achieve real progress if Ethiopia embraces a different kind of federation — territorial and not ethnic — where rights in a federal unit are dispensed not on the basis of ethnicity but on residence. Such a federal arrangement will give Ethiopians an even chance of keeping an authoritarian dictatorship at bay.

Mahmood Mamdani is the director of Makerere Institute of Social Research in Uganda, a professor of government at Columbia University and the author of “Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism.”

Source=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/opinion/ethiopia-abiy-ahmed-reforms-ethnic-conflict-ethnic-federalism.html