Un accord entre l’Ethiopie et le Somaliland pour un accès à la mer Rouge par le port de Berbera indigne la Somalie et la communauté internationale. Cette revendication de longue date d’Addis-Abeba fait craindre un nouveau conflit à côté de l’une des routes maritimes les plus fréquentées du monde.

Tout part d’une revendication de longue date de l’Ethiopie, celle de retrouver un accès à la mer Rouge. Pour ce faire, le pays vient de signer, début janvier, un accord avec le Somaliland, qui lui ouvre les portes de l’un de ses ports, celui de Berbera, dans le très stratégique golfe d’Aden. Or, le Somaliland (qui a décrété son indépendance en 1991) n’est pas reconnu comme un Etat par la communauté internationale.

Ce traité ne tarde pas à provoquer un tollé en Somalie d’abord, qui considère le Somaliland comme une région séparatiste. Des protestations éclatent dans les rues de Mogadiscio, la capitale somalienne, pour dénoncer une « ingérence » et une « agression » de l’Ethiopie. L’Union africaine, la Ligue arabe, l’Union européenne, les Etats-Unis, la Turquie ou encore la Chine appellent aussi au respect de la souveraineté de la Somalie.

Vecteur d’instabilité

En concluant un tel accord, le Premier ministre éthiopien Abiy Ahmed joue avec les nerfs de la communauté internationale, un an après la fin d’une guerre civile qui a fait jusqu’à 600’000 morts, selon les différentes estimations. D’autant que les relations entre la Somalie et l’Ethiopie ont été marquées par deux guerres déjà, dans les années 1960 et 1970. La Corne de l’Afrique compte parmi les régions du monde les plus fragiles et les plus exposées aux conflits, mais pour le chercheur indépendant, René Lefort, le déclenchement d’un nouveau conflit est peu probable.

Cette opération d’Abiy Ahmed est essentiellement une opération de politique intérieure, pour caresser l’opinion éthiopienne, en particulier nationaliste, dans le sens du poil

René Lefort, chercher indépendant et spécialiste de la région

« Cette opération d’Abiy Ahmed est essentiellement une opération de politique intérieure, pour caresser l’opinion éthiopienne, en particulier nationaliste, dans le sens du poil », analyse le spécialiste de la région, pour qui de nombreuses conditions ne sont pas encore réunies pour rendre ce port opérationnel pour l’Ethiopie. Les termes financiers de l’accord doivent être négociés et les infrastructures pour atteindre Berbera sont inexistantes.

De plus, la situation dans la région est « tellement mouvante qu’il est possible que le contexte dans lequel cet accord a été conclu aujourd’hui ne soit absolument pas valable demain pour le mettre en œuvre », avertit René Lefort. Plus qu’à un embrasement de la région, le chercheur s’attend à de nombreuses réactions et protestations. Mogadiscio appelle d’ailleurs à une manifestation qui pourrait réunir un million de personnes.

Un accès « vital » à la mer

La mer Rouge est une véritable autoroute marchande où transite le 12% du commerce mondial. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que l’Ethiopie, deuxième pays le plus peuplé du continent africain, souhaite retrouver un accès perdu en 1993, après l’indépendance de l’Erythrée.

Le Premier ministre éthiopien Abiy Ahmed lors de sa participation à un forum à Pékin, en Chine, le 16 octobre 2023. [Ken Ishii – afp]

Le Premier ministre éthiopien Abiy Ahmed l’a longuement justifié dans un discours télévisé fleuve cet automne. En 45 minutes, cartes du monde à l’appui, il a comparé son pays, géant de la Corne de l’Afrique, à une « prison géographique », enclavée, contrairement à ses voisins, l’Erythrée, Djibouti, la Somalie ou le Kenya, qui ont tous pignon sur mer. Dans son allocution, Abiy Ahmed a affirmé qu’un accès à un port est « vital » pour l’économie de l’Ethiopie.

L’accord signé avec le Somaliland, qui lui garantit un accès au port de Berbera, présente ainsi un double avantage, explique le géographe François Guiziou, chargé de recherche au CNRS, basé au Havre. Le premier est d’ordre financier. « L’Ethiopie a un problème, c’est sa dépendance à Djibouti. »

Aujourd’hui, plus de 90% de ses flux commerciaux y transitent, selon The Economist, et les frais portuaires et douaniers s’élèvent à 1,5 milliard de dollars par an. D’après François Guiziou, avec le Somaliland, l’Ethiopie serait parvenue à négocier un accord avec des frais limités.

Le deuxième avantage est d’ordre stratégique. Le grand opérateur mondial Dubaï Ports World s’est installé à Berbera, transformant cette base autrefois très modeste en un port « intégré régionalement et un corridor naturel », constate le géographe. En plus de services maritimes commerciaux, l’Ethiopie compte aussi installer dans ce port « une base navale permanente ».

Turbulences en mer Rouge

Depuis la mi-novembre, il ne se passe plus une semaine sans une nouvelle attaque des rebelles yéménites houthis contre des navires commerciaux en mer Rouge et dans le golfe d’Aden, des actions qui marquent leur soutien, disent-ils, à la bande de Gaza.

Les tensions entre l’Ethiopie et la Somalie ne sont pas directement liées à ce conflit, mais elles risquent de déstabiliser encore davantage une dynamique régionale compliquée avec des acteurs présents sur plusieurs terrains, selon David Rigoulet-Roze, chercheur à l’Institut français de relations internationales et stratégiques. Il mentionne les Emirats arabes unis implantés sur l’île de Socotra, dans le golfe d’Aden, et qui entretiennent des liens étroits avec l’Ethiopie. Ou encore l’Egypte qui a condamné l’accord en question, en raison du contentieux autour du méga-barrage éthiopien sur le Nil. « Il y a une articulation systémique qui suscite beaucoup d’inquiétudes », conclut celui qui est aussi rédacteur en chef de la revue Orients Stratégiques.

Si bien que les pays de l’Est de l’Afrique tiendront une réunion extraordinaire ce vendredi, en Ouganda, avec au menu les tensions entre l’Ethiopie et la Somalie.

Par Julie Rausis – RTS info

L’article L’Ethiopie revendique un accès à la mer, au risque de déstabiliser la région est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

Before COVID-19, my family would holiday in a welcoming village near Boston. But has America’s darkness infected it too?

To go or not to go, that is the dilemma.

For me, planning travel to the United States can be a complicated experience. Perhaps this is true for you, too.

There is a big, brash and beautiful America brimming with kind and considerate people, many of whom are the unforgettable, eccentric characters you can only find in that country.

Then there is the angry, seething and scarred America where guns, hate and extremism are everywhere – ready, on a hair-trigger, to explode into violence and mayhem.

You can encounter both aspects of the country at any time, in any place, in America. That is the risk and reward, I suppose, of going on holiday there. Hence, my quandary.

I have visited America many times – with and without my family.

I have been lucky. During each of those stays, I have enjoyed the big, brash and beautiful side of America and the kind and considerate people who largely populate it.

I like that America.

I have not been to America in three years even though it is only about 90 minutes away from Toronto by car. A lethal pandemic has made sure of that.

Now that COVID-19 has eased its grip on the world, my family and I intend to return to a special place outside of Boston where we have spent almost every summer since my two daughters were born more than 20 years ago.

My wife has asked me not to name the seaside village we visit or when we usually go. So, I won’t.

It is a sweet, sun-bronzed home to mostly sweet, sun-bronzed people who open their old, well-manicured cottages to strangers from around the world and across America with a warm handshake and a smile.

Our trips have been a soothing respite from the hurly-burly of life where we have found rest and quiet for a fortnight each year. We dip into the ocean and walk along a beach that disappears into the horizon and doubles as a toasty, healing blanket for my sun-bath-loving girls.

This magical slice of America is familiar to us. It has grown on us – deeply. And that familiarity breeds a powerful kinship and a longing to return.

Still, truth be told, part of me doesn’t want to go on our belated getaway to America this summer. Part of me would rather retreat to Prince Edward Island (PEI), a distant, beguiling piece of Canada my family has discovered over the past two summers.

PEI is a revelation. The thin, small island is blessed with golden, sweeping hills and vistas dotted with bright-coloured farmhouses that suggest a slower, more humane way of life.

There are, of course, the island’s pristine, calm beaches that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean’s sometimes jagged, clay-red coast. The water is warm and inviting, just like the mellow Maritimers who call this lovely, sanguine province home.

When, late last year, we had to decide where we would spend the most wonderful time of the year together as a family, I was torn.

I knew my younger daughter had made up her mind. As much as she liked PEI, her heart and soul were in that seaside village in Massachusetts she has visited – like her sister – since she was in diapers, but that she hadn’t seen for a few years. She missed it – dearly.

At the height of the pandemic, my wife had arranged for the shop owner of a famous candy store in the village centre to post a note in its window urging my delighted daughter to come back.

I understand the pull of a place that has been the fount of so many joyful moments that are forever fixed in my family’s history and memory.

But I worry that we are making a mistake. I worry that a village we adore that seemed – on its sun-kissed surface, at least – to have avoided the darkness that sadly defines so much of America, may have become infected by it. I worry that the place we knew no longer exists.

I worry, as well, about the threat that America can pose to the mind and body. I worry that America is a risk not worth taking.

I have talked to my wife and elder daughter about my reservations and concerns. They sympathise. They stress that chances are slim that we will be harmed. They are surprised that my usually rational self has been replaced by irrational fears.

I haven’t spoken to my younger daughter about any of this. I don’t want to disappoint or upset her. (Happily, she doesn’t read her father’s missives. She is too preoccupied with the demands of school and navigating a busy teenager’s world, bursting with friends and fun.)

In spite of the reassurances, I can’t shake this disquieting feeling.

Much of America, for all its allure and possibilities, is toxic and dangerous. The country appears broken, consumed by discord and a festering fury that shatters people and places day after disfiguring day.

No one and nowhere is safe.

The divide has deepened between enlightened America and too many other Americans, in too many parts of America, who believe that guns are more valuable than books, and who share in the seething ignorance and bigotry of the false prophets they follow religiously on TV.

This is not a new phenomenon. America has always been a dangerous and divided nation.

But that danger and division appear more acute these days, stoked as they are, by a gallery of grifters and charlatans eager to leverage America’s cleaving into viewers, votes and profit.

Beyond the constant tumult and depressing cacophony, America has become exhausting. Try as I might, I can’t avoid paying attention to the drama and convulsions that jar America one news cycle after another.

I can’t escape America. I am obliged to write about the promise and madness of America.

There is an impulse in me that wants to stay away to avoid being exposed to a nasty, ugly America. Returning to America – even for two weeks – is, in this context, a little absurd.

Then, my family reminds me that the America we know and the Americans we have met, are good and decent.

I will remember this when we pack our bags and head out to an imperfect country that, without fail or hesitation, has welcomed us.

By Andrew Mitrovica – Al Jazeera columnist

L’article My quandary: Is the US worth visiting any more? est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

On July 29, a white Italian man beat to death Alika Ogorchukwu, a disabled Nigerian street vendor from Civitanova Marche in Italy, as bystanders looked on and merely recorded the homicide.

On finding out about Ogorchukwu’s demise, I contemplated whether to watch footage of the murder and inevitably run the risk of suffering the anguish that George Floyd’s similarly traumatic demise inflicted on my soul in May 2020.

In the end, to truly bear witness to the immense suffering he had been subjected to in his final moments, to experience a small measure of the pain that he felt, I watched it. The footage left me teary, sick and trembling with fear. Ogorchukwu was like me, after all: a middle-aged African migrant who was trying to build a better future for himself and his family.

According to Italian police, the frenzied attack occurred after Ogorchukwu persistently attempted to sell merchandise to Filippo Claudio Giuseppe Ferlazzo and his girlfriend.

However, the Association Center Services for Migrants in the Marche Region said Ogorchukwu was attacked not for assuming a hard sale approach, but for allegedly addressing Ferlazzo’s girlfriend as “beautiful” (and touching her arm).

Listening to the discussions over the alleged motivation behind the senseless, racist murder, I couldn’t help but think about the “unresolved” 1955 murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, the United States.

Fourteen-year-old Till was kidnapped, beaten, shot in the head, tied to a massive metal fan and thrown into the Tallahatchie River, for the “crime” of supposedly whistling at a 21-year-old white woman. He had allegedly “flirted” with her and that sealed his shocking fate. Six decades later, Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman at the centre of the allegations against Till, revealed that she had actually lied about everything.

The crude and degrading caricature of a “black brute”, a violent beast that is “crazed with lust” for white women, was critical to 19th and 20th century American “negrophobic” discourse and white supremacist ideologies used to justify racism, and the lynching of Black men. White supremacists have long used made-up “attacks” on white women’s dignities to commit violence against Black men and perpetrate white terror.

Ogorchukwu’s recent murder demonstrates that the very public, incessant and systematically imposed dehumanisation and criminalisation of Black people that led to Emmett Till’s gruesome murder in the US more than half a century ago – and the murder of countless other African Americans in modern-day America – is also claiming lives miles away in Italy.

Indeed, Ogorchukwu, unfortunately, is not the first, and sadly will likely not be the last, among countless African men and women shot, injured and killed in racially motivated attacks in Italy.

In 1979, for example, unknown assailants burned to death Ahmed Ali Jama, a Somali refugee. Giacomo Valent, a 16-year-old student of Italian and Somali descent, was beaten and stabbed to death in 1985 for being a “dirty n*****” by two white classmates. And Senegalese migrant Assane Diallo was shot ten times and killed in Milan after asking a stranger for five euros in 2018.

Black, brown and migrant bodies are in as much danger in Europe as they are in America.

The violence is not just physical, though: it is often verbal, too, and cleverly embedded in nationalist philosophies and anti-migration policies.

Italy’s first Black minister Cécile Kyenge has been likened to an orangutan by a right-wing senator, for instance, and professional footballer Mario Balotelli has repeatedly become the target of monkey chants in football stadiums.

Meanwhile, right-wing political parties, such as the League, led by former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, have deliberately stoked anti-migrant sentiments to win votes. “We need a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza, neighbourhood by neighbourhood,” Salvini said ahead of parliamentary elections in 2018. And he’s unashamedly claimed that people like Kyenge and Balotelli are just “pawns” in some mysterious grand scheme to erase “identities, diversities, histories” in Italy.

Like so many “America first” nationalists in the US, Salvini seemingly subscribes to the racist “White Replacement Theory” and this explains his astonishing animosity towards migrants. As interior minister, he notoriously barred foreign ships carrying sick and desperate migrants rescued at sea from docking at Italy’s shores. At the time, Spanish newspaper El Mundo said, “Europe has not experienced such alarming levels of racial intolerance since the consolidation of the fascist movements in the years leading up to World War II”. It added, “Europe cannot continue to tolerate the violent attitude of an EU member who does nothing but undermine the values on which the European project is based”.

Italy is currently gearing up for snap parliamentary elections on September 25 and Salvini has once again managed to make immigration the decisive electoral matter. Despite El Mundo’s admirable observations and protestations, I don’t consider Salvini to be an oddity in Europe or the “European project”. His endlessly strident utterances against racial diversity, for one, echo Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s recent discriminatory assertion that Hungarians don’t want to become “peoples of mixed race”. Salvini’s electoral promise to process refugees in North Africa sounds eerily comparable to the racist Rwanda-United Kingdom asylum deal concluded in June. Plus, it is somewhat similar to the anti-migration deals that the European Union concluded with Turkey, Libya and Niger to curtail migration from North Africa and the Middle East. And Salvini’s decision to bar migrant rescue ships from docking in Italy is no different from Polish security forces systematically forcing asylum seekers to return to Belarus, or Greek authorities “pushing back” ships carrying asylum seekers from Greek waters, with the complicit assistance of Frontex, the EU border guard agency.

So the difference between Salvini’s Italy and the supposedly “progressive” European nations is simply a matter of style and not substance. Spain’s problematic policies and actions, for example, are also undermining the EU’s supposed commitment to racial diversity. On June 24, at least 23 African men died at the Melilla-Morocco border as they attempted to cross into Spain. Human rights organisations rightly characterised the deaths as a tragedy and called for a thorough and independent investigation into the questionable actions of Moroccan and Spanish border guards. However, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez described it as an “attack” on Spain’s “territorial integrity” and framed irregular migration as a security threat.

That Sanchez claimed Spain is under attack from Africans is hardly surprising. Right-wing and conservative elements in Europe – just like their counterparts in the US – are infatuated with conspiracy theories about elaborate and highly implausible migrant “invasions”.

The EU claims all forms of hatred and intolerance are incompatible with European values. Plus hate-motivated crime and speech are illegal under EU law. Yet, across Europe, politicians are openly using inflammatory speech to target religious and racial minorities and criminalise migration. To be sure, reckless talk about ethnic homogeneity and migrants “flooding” Europe creates the conditions under which xenophobia can flourish and people like Ogorchukwu, people like football player Adama Traoré, people like myself become “legitimate” targets for police brutality and racist violence. How many more migrants like Ogorchukwu must die at the hands of seemingly indoctrinated protagonists before Europe realises racism is a continental crisis?

The EU must do more than proclaim its undying commitment to establishing “vibrant democracies” and “pluralistic societies”. It must ensure that racial and religious minorities are not subjected to the incessant Nazi-like hate speech and racism that has gone mainstream in Europe. As Europe becomes an increasingly hostile place for Black and brown people and migrants, the EU must seriously consider implementing the so-called Article 7 procedures against delinquent nations that threaten its core values.

Europe so easily criticises and condemns American racism. But it is hard to say it is doing much better than its younger sibling across the Atlantic when it comes to fighting white supremacist ideologies, attitudes and conspiracies.

Ogorchukwu and countless refugees didn’t have to die violent deaths in Italy. Nobody – Black, white or brown – must. But until Europe acknowledges and takes serious action to address its racism crisis, Black, brown and migrant bodies will be in as much danger there as they are in America.

By Johannesburg-based social and political commentator / Aljazeera

L’article Murder of Alika Ogorchukwu: Is Europe just as racist as America? est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

I have said it many times, and it is no more true or real than when we think about the events of January 6: We are in a battle for the soul of America.

I have said it many times, and it is no more true or real than when we think about the events of January 6: We are in a battle for the soul of America.

A battle that by the grace of God, and by the goodness and greatness of this nation, we will win. pic.twitter.com/2qDmf3q2tg

— President Biden (@POTUS) January 6, 2022

A battle that by the grace of God, and by the goodness and greatness of this nation, we will win.

Tune in as I deliver remarks to mark one year since the January 6th deadly assault on the Capitol. https://t.co/nvklC2pgl8

— President Biden (@POTUS) January 6, 2022

President Joe Biden forcefully condemned former President Donald Trump on Thursday for promoting a “big lie” that the 2020 United States election was stolen and inciting an angry mob of his supporters to attack Congress on January 6, 2021.

In a blistering speech delivered in Statuary Hall, an ornate and marbled chamber that was choked with tear gas a year ago, Biden delivered a blistering attack on Trump as a “defeated president” who today still threatens American democracy.

“We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie,” Biden said. “Here’s the truth. The former president of the United States of America has spread a web of lies about the 2020 election.”

“For the first time in our history, a president not just lost an election, he tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob breached the Capitol,” Biden said.

In 2020, Trump had refused to accept the outcome of the presidential election that Biden won by a decisive seven million popular votes and 306 to 232 margin in the US’s Electoral College. When Congress met on January 6 to certify the votes – a constitutional requirement – Trump gave a fiery speech to a rally of his supporters and urged them to march on the Capitol.

I’m saddened to learn that Lawrence Brooks – who was the oldest surviving U.S. WWII veteran – has passed. I had the honor of speaking with him last year, and he was truly the best of America. I’m keeping his loved ones in my prayers. pic.twitter.com/HBNLTy8aHL

— President Biden (@POTUS) January 5, 2022

“You and I and the whole world saw with our own eyes,” Biden said, asking his audience to close their eyes and recall what they saw that day, as he described the harrowing, violent mob attacking police, hunting the Speaker of the House, and threatening to hang the vice president.

Thousands of Trump supporters had converged on the Capitol building where Congress was meeting and forced their way past police barricades, smashing windows and doors and marauding through the hallways.

While all that was unfolding shockingly on national television, Biden said, Trump sat at the White House watching. “Here is the God’s truth about January 6, 2021. They were looking to subvert the Constitution,” Biden said.

Since that day, Biden has cast the state of American politics as a contest between democracy and autocracy and he warned on Thursday that voting rights are under attack by Trump’s Republican allies in state legislatures across the country.

“We are in a battle for the soul of America,” Biden said. “I did not seek this fight, brought to this Capitol one year from today. But I will not shrink from it either. I will stand in this breach, I will defend this nation. I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of this democracy.”

Trump issued a statement shortly after the speech calling it “political theater” and accusing Biden of using “my name to further divide America”. He repeated claims that the 2020 election was rigged, and said the “big lie” was the vote itself.

The former president, who still holds great sway among Republican voters, had planned to hold a press conference on Thursday but cancelled it.

Trump has denied any role in the January 6 riot and has accused leaders of a House of Representatives investigation into the events of January 6 of a cover-up.

Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking ahead of Biden at the Capitol on Thursday, compared January 6, 2021 to September 11, 2001 when al-Qaeda hijackers flew airliners into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia.

“What the extremists who roamed these halls targeted was not only the lives of elected leaders,” Harris said. “What they sought to degrade and destroy was not only a building, hallowed as it is. What they were assaulting were the institutions, the values, the ideals that generations of Americans have marched, picketed, and shed blood to establish and defend.”

Biden and Harris’s speeches were among several ceremonial remembrances organised and attended by mainly Democratic lawmakers at the Capitol on Thursday. Almost every Republican was absent, a mark of the division between the two parties over the meaning of the riot that happened a year ago.

Representative Liz Cheney, one of the few Republican lawmakers attending the Capitol ceremonies on Thursday, warned that “the threat continues”.

Trump “continues to make the same claims that he knows caused violence on January 6,” Cheney said.

“Unfortunately, too many in my own party are embracing the former president, are looking the other way, or minimising the danger,” she told NBC.

Cheney is vice-chair of the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.

Republican Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, two allies of the former president, are scheduled to give a rebuttal to Biden at a press conference on Thursday afternoon.

WORLD OPINIONS AND NEWS AGENCIES

L’article Analysis. Biden condemns ‘big lie’, blames Trump for January 6 violence.. Video est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.