Author: GP Editor
Affiliation: Geopolitics Press
Organization/Publisher: Geopolitics Press
Date/Place: July 27, 2021/USA
Type of literature: Analogy
Word Count: 2950
Keywords: Basma Project, Weaponized Narrative, Regime Change, Ethiopia, Tigray, Yugoslavia
Brief:
The Western media narratives on the ongoing war in Ethiopia between the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) of the central government and the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF) of Tigrayan People Liberation Front (TPLF) resembles the methods and techniques developed in the Basma project, which was an information warfare campaign conducted to overthrow the government and bring regime change in Syria. There is a belief among Western governments that Ethiopia is on the brink of collapse that is attributed to wars in the various parts of the country, mainly in the Tigray and Oromia regions. In this case, the scenario considered by the Western governments and their regional allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates is the potential wave of refugees from the second most populous African state (Ethiopia) and a destabilized region, the Horn of Africa (HoA) into Europe, Red Sea region and Gulf states. For that reason, the American government and its European partner have sought to manage the Ethiopian political crisis in ways that promote their interests and agendas for Ethiopia. The Western governments have planned to bring regime change in Ethiopia mainly through narratives that call on rebel coalitions to overthrow the existing government to either stabilize the country as the Federal Republic with strong decentralization or non-violently disintegrate it. The West assumes that if a coalition of rebels takes the power of the central government, it enables the ethnic-regional states to referendum for secessions. The US government and its European Allies consider this as a peaceful version of Yugoslavian disintegration and will pave the ways to prosecute Abiy Ahmed Ali for crimes against humanity in an international court just like that of the last President of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic. To this end, Command and Control Fusion Center (C2FC) is running a Basma-like campaign on Ethiopia where the key opposition to the Ethiopian government, Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front and its military wing the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF)—which are designated as a terrorist group by the Ethiopian parliament—are being presented in Western mainstream media outlets and their local cells as a “functioning, inclusive, disciplined and professional” political party and defense force respectively. Basma was covered as a civil society group that engaged in defamation activism against the Syrian government under the cover of humanitarian activism in order to mobilize international pressures and sanctions against the latter. Similarly, the civil society organization called Civil Society Reference Group, a front for the anti-Abiy faction in Kenyan Defence Force (KDF) and National Intelligence Service (NIS) has been lobbying the Kenyan government to back rebels fighting against the Ethiopian government. The mainstream media has been extensively covering humanitarian conditions in Tigray since the outbreak of war in November 2020 and human rights violations in Oromia in ways that accordingly disadvantage the Government of Ethiopia and justify combatants in Tigray and Oromia regions.
By: Jemal Muhamed, CIGA Research Associate
