The Week - USA (2021-11-26)

Best columns: International NEWS 17

ARGENTINA

SOUTH AFRICA

Because of our history of corruption and dictator-

ship, the “bar for outrage” is set pretty high in

Argentina, said Claudio Savoia. Yet much of the

country reacted with fury last week when José

López, a former official in the Public Works min-

istry who embezzled more than $9 million, was let

out of prison on parole. López, who served during

the presidencies of Néstor Kirchner and his suc-

cessor and widow, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner,

was caught on film in 2016 heaving bags of cash

and luxury watches over a fence into a convent,

where his accomplices, “a group of elderly nuns,”

were waiting to receive it. The images were proof

of the breathtaking corruption of the Kirchners,

whose rule was “a festival of rigged tenders,” in

which government contracts were given to cronies

and cabinet ministers swanned around in “yachts

and private planes.” Few people were held re-

sponsible for those crimes—indeed, Fernández de

Kirchner is now the vice president—but López, at

least, was sentenced to seven years in prison. Now

a judge has released him on parole, after he posted

a mere $145,000 in bail. For a society “ravaged by

economic hardship,” with 40 percent of us living in

poverty and inflation running at 50 percent, such

leniency is “a slap in the face.”

Cue the nauseating eulogies, said Eusebius

McKaiser. F.W. de Klerk, the Afrikaner who as

president of South Africa helped end the racist

segregation system of apartheid in 1990, died last

week at age 85. De Klerk has been lauded for

releasing Nelson Mandela from prison and for

negotiating with him to dismantle apartheid; the

two shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. But

de Klerk is no hero. He’s “a villain.” The best

that can be said of him is that he “possibly short-

ened the pathway” to the end of white minority

rule. For years, de Klerk had served in apartheid

governments and defended white supremacy on

the world stage. Only after “the economic and
cultural chokehold” of international sanctions
and isolation had taken their toll, and Blacks were
rebelling violently, did he bow to the inevitable.
He chose “a crafty end game” that allowed his
fellow white oppressors to keep their property and
avoid jail for their crimes. Just before his death,
de Klerk gave a brief video apology for “the pain
and the hurt and the indignity” suffered by Black
and Brown South Africans, but he still failed to
acknowledge that thousands of people were killed
under his leadership. Those people did not get to
Ge “die quietly in their sleep at the age of 85.”

tty

Letting

a swindler

walk free

Claudio Savoia

Clarín

De Klerk

protected

white interests

Eusebius McKaiser

Sunday Times

The civil war in Ethiopia has now

entered its second year, said The

Standard (Kenya), and “there’s little

hope that it will end anytime soon.” In

November 2020, Prime Minister Abiy

Ahmed ordered the federal military

to the northern region of Tigray for

what he called a “law enforcement

operation” with “clear, limited, and

achievable objectives,” after accusing

the region’s governing Tigray People’s

Liberation Front (TPLF) of attacking

an army base. But the ensuing conflict

has been anything but limited. The

TPLF, which ruled Ethiopia for nearly three decades before Abiy

was elected in 2018, has forged an alliance with eight other

rebel groups, and its forces are now marching on the capital,

Addis Ababa. This war has killed thousands of Ethiopians, dis-

placed millions more, and left hundreds of thousands living in

famine-like conditions. Both sides have massacred civilians and

used rape as a weapon of war. “This is clearly a battle for su-

premacy,” says Harvard University lecturer Christopher Rhodes,

“between the current and former ruling powers of Ethiopia.”

Abiy is “both the protagonist and the victim” of this drama,

said Pietro Veronese in La Repubblica (Italy). When he came to

power in 2018, he seemed like an ideal leader after years of op-

pressive rule by the ethnic Tigrayan elite. The son of a Muslim

father and a Christian mother, Abiy had served in the military

and in official civilian roles, and was a member of Ethiopia’s

largest ethnic group, the Oromo, which had never governed

the country before. His first years in office were a flurry of

activity: He freed political prisoners

and ended two decades of hostility

with neighboring Eritrea, earning

Abiy the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.

But that peace deal left the Tigray-

ans feeling encircled; Eritrea, their

northern neighbor, is an old enemy,

one that would end up joining Abiy’s

offensive. So, when Abiy postponed

elections in the summer of 2020, the

Tigrayans feared a power grab and

declared he had lost legitimacy, pre-

cipitating the war.

This conflict has international implications, said Riccardo

Cristiano in Formiche (Italy). Abiy has angered Cairo by build-

ing a huge hydroelectric dam on a crucial tributary of the Nile,

which could reduce the flow of water to Egypt. The recent mili-

tary coup in neighboring Sudan is “clearly linked” to Egypt’s

need for an ally against Ethiopia. Kenya, Uganda, and Djibouti

also have reason to fear Abiy’s Nile schemes—and an inter-

est in who wins the Ethiopian civil war. This combination of

“regional geopolitical ambitions and fractious ethnic exclusion-

ism” could throw the whole Horn of Africa into chaos, said

Jenerali Ulimwengu in the East African (Kenya). Eritrea split

from Ethiopia in 1991; if Tigray goes, it could trigger a domino

effect among the country’s more than 80 ethnic groups. Somalia

is already a failed state, and we can’t afford for Ethiopia to go

the same way. Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo

is trying to arrange peace talks, and we can only hope the

warring parties come to the table. “The future of our continent

may depend on it.”

Ethiopia: A civil war that could destabilize East Africa

Farmers walk past an abandoned army tank in Tigray.