Written on 20 December 2015.

    Despite much commentary to the contrary, the Islamic State is steadily losing ground.  It has already lost three quarters of the border between northern Syria and Turkey, pressure on the city of Raqqa is mounting, and its command and control capabilities have been steadily downgraded along with its loss in territory.  Perhaps most important, pressure on its main source of income, from oil, is now intense.

   To stave off its current attrition, the Islamic State needs to reignite the passions that have fuelled successive waves of terror and violence.  The most effective way to achieve this is to provoke further Western intervention in the Middle East; and achieving that response is the intention of the wave of recent attacks.

   The United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 largely created the Islamic State. At a time when al-Qaeda was on the back foot in Afghanistan, George W Bush snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in a stunning display of short-termism. Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, nor did he support and fund al-Qaeda – the two justifications used to justify the invasion. Operation Iraqi Freedom was based on poor intelligence or deliberate deceit, with long-term destructive consequences for the region.

   After a short military campaign, the US first deposed and then disbanded Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist and largely Sunni-populated security structures, elevating the majority Shia in Iraq to power. The country had been under a brutal minority Sunni-dominated dictatorship for half a century. Many were now left unemployed, angry and often still armed.

The Arab Spring allowed ISIL to spread its influence

   Al-Qaeda operatives from Afghanistan helped mobilise these disgruntled men (no women) to create al-Qaeda in Iraq. As the movement grew in influence and stature, so did its ambitions and self-image. Eventually, after an internal power struggle with al-Qaeda central (the core movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan), al-Qaeda in Iraq morphed into the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, or Daesh), having been disavowed by al-Qaeda.

   The US invasion of Iraq not only rescued al-Qaeda, but also revitalised its affiliate in North Africa – the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat; GSPC) – which was under significant pressure in Algeria at the time.

   Until the Islamic State arrived on the scene in Libya, GSPC was the largest and most capable extremist group in the North Africa. It trained terrorists in Chad, Sudan, Libya, Mali and Mauritania – and even the forerunners of Boko Haram in Nigeria, but was unable to maintain itself against the government forces in Algeria.

   In 2007, GSPC changed its name to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), reflecting its open support for al-Qaeda. One of the AQIM offshoots was responsible for the recent terrorist attack on the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali.

   The Arab Spring, which started in Tunisia in December 2010, further fed into the chaos created by the US in Iraq. The wave of popular uprisings spread to Egypt, and a host of other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Instead of greater economic and political freedom for the oppressed populations, however, its effect was to weaken government control in countries such as Libya and Syria.

If the US fathered ISIL through its failed Iraqi intervention, Saudi Arabia must be the mother

Eventually, the Arab Spring allowed ISIL to spread its influence much further than would otherwise have been possible. It was these developments, together with the spillover from Iraq, that facilitated the collapse of Syrian control over large portions of its territory.

But if the USA through its failed intervention in Iraq is the father of ISIL, Saudi Arabia must be the mother. ISIL is not about some type of medieval barbarism. It is deeply Islamic and closely identified with Wahhabism, the brand of Sunnism that Saudi Arabia promotes and enables throughout the Muslim world using its fabulous oil wealth.

   For its survival, the House of Saud relies on its alliance with a domestic and rich clergy that, in the words of Kamel Daoud, recently writing in The New York Times, ‘produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism’. By exporting fundamentalism, it purchases domestic serfdom, and through its importance as oil producer and its strategic importance for the West, Saudi Arabia has managed to avoid culpability for its role in the rise of ISIL.

   This has been changing as the US ramps up domestic oil production (it already imports more oil from Canada than from Saudi Arabia), and the rapprochement with Shia-dominated Iran (a function of the nuclear deal). Soon, Sunni Saudi Arabia will have to confront Sunni ISIL. Beyond personal friendships built up over many years around shared foreign policy endeavours, Saudi Arabia’s remaining leverage in the US will be its indirect role in securing Israel in a hostile neighbourhood.

   The downing of a Russian airliner over the Sinai and the deaths of Chinese citizens in Bamako mean that literally all countries in the world, including the permanent five members states of the United Nations Security Council, are now united against ISIL and al-Qaeda.

Instead of dividing their opponents, terrorism is providing a powerful uniting force

   These terrible twins may currently be at violent odds with one another, but they share a common gene pool. They are now recognised as a global scourge. Instead of dividing their opponents (such as through the recent proxy war between the US and Russia in Syria), terrorism is providing a powerful uniting force. It is not possible to speak of the grand coalition as advanced by French President François Hollande, but it is now only a question of time before the combined weight of the international community denudes ISIL of its territories in Syria, and eventually in Iraq.

   When that happens, the core challenges will remain; the lack of inclusion and the elevation of state religion as a self-serving path to political power and wealth for an extended family in Saudi Arabia, where all of this started. Family feuds are the bitterest, and this one will be no different.

   The Middle East is on a likely path to long-term instability given the extent of its exclusion in many of its constituent states, and the confluence of state and religion that stifles political, social and economic development.

   The purpose of terrorism is to goad one’s opponent into overreaction – leading to events that fuel resentment and expand the recruitment pool. This is already the case in ISIL-controlled Syria and Iraq, where the intensified use of drones and remote munitions – a hallmark of the Obama administration – is fuelling hatred and radicalisation. As the air campaign runs out of targets, the clamour for deeper Western engagement, particularly boots on the ground, will inevitably intensify.

   Despite the very natural urge to strike out at the perceived origins of terror, France and its disparate allies should learn from the disasters that have followed the war on terror. A careful and considered approach is needed.

   This must include control over the export of Muslim fundamentalism from Saudi Arabia, support for political reform in the monarchies and dictatorships in the Middle East, practical measures to shut down Turkey’s border to ISIL territory, support towards intra-Islamic peace and work to break down the divisive Sunni-Shia dynamics.

   Cool heads are needed. Now is not the time to repeat the mistakes of George W Bush and Tony Blair.

Jakkie Cilliers -- ISS Institute for Security Studies

Written on 19 December 2015.

Wahhabism

   During the 18th century, revivalist movements sprang up in many parts of the Islamic world as the Muslim imperial powers began to lose control of peripheral territories. In the west at this time, governments were beginning to separate church from state, but this secular ideal was a radical innovation: as revolutionary as the commercial economy that Europe was concurrently devising. No other culture regarded religion as a purely private activity, separate from such worldly pursuits as politics, so for Muslims the political fragmentation of society was also a religious problem. Because the Quran had given Muslims a sacred mission – to build a just economy in which everybody is treated with equity and respect – the political well-being of the ummah was always a matter of sacred import. If the poor were oppressed, the vulnerable exploited or state institutions corrupt, Muslims were obliged to make every effort to put society back on track.

   If 18th-century reformers were convinced that should Muslims ever regain lost power and prestige, they would have to return to the fundamentals of their faith, ensuring that God – rather than materialism or worldly ambition – dominated the political order, Wahhabism would come to pervert such desires.

   There was nothing militant about this “fundamentalism”; not yet, rather, it was a grassroots attempt to reorient society and did not involve jihad.

   Only, if the idea of going back to the root of Islam at a time when society had strayed from the path was indeed laudable, Wahhabism would work to betray such ideal by twisting on its head Islam’s most sacred pillars, perverting Islamic law and the interpretation of its scriptures to serve the mighty and enslave the weak.

   Under Wahhabism’s interpretation of Islam, women reverted to being objectified. Those many great women Islam saw rise under the strict protection of the Quran, those model Muslim women came to look up to and aspire to become – Maryam, Khadija, Fatma, Zaynab, Mohammed Abdel Wahhab would have had locked up in their home.

   When Islam gave women their rightful place within society, Wahhabism denied them everything.

   And for those of you who continue to live under the premise that Islam is profoundly unfair against women, do remember it is not Islam but rather men’s interpretation of it which is the source of your ire.

   Islam secured women’ status according to God’s will. Islam poses both men and women o a equal footing in terms of their faith – it is only in their duties and responsibilities which they differ, not worthiness. Islam calls on men to provide for women and offer them security, both financial and physical. Under Islam women are free to marry, divorce and work. Under Islam women cannot be bought, bartered or oppressed. Under Islam women enjoy more freedom than most western women have been given. It is society which has denied them those rights, not Islam. Read the Quran and you will see!

   Like Martin Luther, Abdel Wahhab claimed he wanted to return to the earliest teachings of Islam and eject all later medieval accretions. To achieve such ambitions he opposed Sufism and Shia Islam, labelling them as heretical innovations (bidah) as both opposed tyranny in faith. He went on to urge all Muslims to reject the learned exegesis developed over the centuries by the ulema (scholars) and interpret the texts for themselves, or rather under his guidance.

   This naturally incensed the clergy and threatened local rulers, who believed that interfering with these popular devotions would cause social unrest. Eventually, however, Wahhab found a patron in Mohammed Ibn Saud, a chieftain of Najd who adopted his ideas. Ibn Saud quickly used Wahhabism to support his military campaigns for plunder and territory, insisting such violence was all in the name of the greater good.

   To this day Al Saud’s house is following in such bloody footsteps.

   Although the scriptures were so central to Abdel Wahhab’s ideology, by insisting that his version of Islam alone had validity, he distorted the Quranic message in the most violent way. The Quran firmly states that “There must be no coercion in matters of faith” (2:256).

   It rules that Muslims must believe in the revelations of all the great prophets (3:84) and that religious pluralism was God’s will (5:48). Until Wahhabism came knocking, Muslims remained traditionally wary of takfir, the practice of declaring a fellow Muslim to be an unbeliever (kafir). Hitherto Sufism, which had developed an outstanding appreciation of other faith traditions, had been the most popular form of Islam and had played an important role in both social and religious life. “Do not praise your own faith so exclusively that you disbelieve all the rest,” urged the great mystic Ibn al-Arabi (d.1240). “God the omniscient and omnipresent cannot be confined to any one creed.” It was common for a Sufi to claim that he was a neither a Jew nor a Christian, nor even a Muslim, because once you glimpsed the divine, you left these man-made distinctions behind.

   After Wahhab’s death, Wahhabism became more violent, an instrument of state terror. As Al Saud sought to establish an independent kingdom, Abd al-Aziz Ibn Muhammad, Ibn Saud’s son and successor, used takfir to justify the wholesale slaughter of resistant populations. In 1801, his army sacked the holy Shia city of Karbala in what is now Iraq, plundered the tomb of Imam Hussain and slaughtered thousands of Shias, including women and children; in 1803, in fear and panic, the holy city of Mecca surrendered to the Saudi leader.

   Little do we remember the sacking of the holy city of Medina, when Al Saud’s legions ransacked mosques, schools and homes. Al Saud’s army murdered hundreds of men, women and children, deaf to their screams. As imams pleaded for the most sacred relics of Islam to be protected, Al Saud’s men pillaged and looted, setting fire to Medina’s library. Al Saud made an example out of Medina, the very city which proved so welcoming to Islam. On the ground which saw rise the first mosque of Islam, Al Saud soaked the earth red with blood.

   Where the footsteps of the last Prophet of God still echoed, Al Saud filled the air with ghastly cries of horrors.

   But such terror has been erased from history books. Such tale of blood and savage betrayals have been swallowed whole by Al Saud as this house attempted to re-write history and claim lineage to the house of the prophet.

   Eventually, in 1815, the Ottomans despatched Muhammad Ali Pasha, governor of Egypt, to crush the Wahhabi forces and destroy their capital. But Wahhabism became a political force once again during the First World War when the Saudi chieftain – another Abd al-Aziz – made a new push for statehood and began to carve out a large kingdom for himself in the Middle East with his devout Bedouin army, known as the Ikhwan, the “Brotherhood”.

   In the Ikhwan we see the roots of ISIS (Daesh). To break up the tribes and wean them from the nomadic life which was deemed incompatible with Islam, the Wahhabi clergy had settled the Bedouin in oases, where they learned farming and the crafts of sedentary life and were indoctrinated in Wahhabi Islam. Once they exchanged the time-honoured ghazu raid, which typically resulted in the plunder of livestock, for the Wahhabi-style jihad, these Bedouin fighters became more violent and extreme, covering their faces when they encountered Europeans and non-Saudi Arabs and fighting with lances and swords because they disdained weaponry not used by the Prophet. In the old ghazu raids, the Bedouin had always kept casualties to a minimum and did not attack non-combatants. Now the Ikhwan routinely massacred “apostate” unarmed villagers in their thousands, thought nothing of slaughtering women and children, and routinely slit the throats of all male captives.

   In 1915, Abd al-Aziz planned to conquer Hijaz (an area in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia that includes the cities of Mecca and Medina), the Persian Gulf to the east of Najd, and the land that is now Syria and Jordan in the north, but during the 1920s he tempered his ambitions in order to acquire diplomatic standing as a nation state with Britain and the United States. The Ikhwan, however, continued to raid the British protectorates of Iraq, Transjordan and Kuwait, insisting that no limits could be placed on jihad. Regarding all modernisation as bidah, the Ikhwan also attacked Abd al-Aziz for permitting telephones, cars, the telegraph, music and smoking – indeed, anything unknown in Muhammad’s time – until finally Abd al-Aziz quashed their rebellion in 1930.

   After the defeat of the Ikhwan, the official Wahhabism of the Saudi kingdom abandoned militant jihad and became a religiously conservative movement.

   But the Ikhwan spirit and its dream of territorial expansion did not die, instead it gained new ground in the 1970s, when the Kingdom became central to western foreign policy in the region. Washington welcomed the Saudis’ opposition to Nasserism (the pan-Arab socialist ideology of Egypt’s second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser) and to Soviet influence. After the Iranian Revolution, in 1979 it gave tacit support to the Saudis’ project of countering Shia Islam by Wahhabizing the entire Muslim world.

   Just as Nasserism posed a threat to both the Saudis and the U.S. in that it entailed independence and a supranational sense of belonging and solidarity, in opposition to colonialism and feudalism, Iran Shia democratic movement presented too much of a pull for countries in the region to follow to be allowed to shine forth.

   And so the wheels of propaganda were set in motion and Iran became western powers and its allies’ designated enemy. Right alongside Soviet Russia, Iran became the source of all evil, while all the while Saudi Arabia was left to industrialize radicalism on a mass scale.

   The soaring oil price created by the 1973 embargo – when Arab petroleum producers cut off supplies to the U.S. to protest against the Americans’ military support for Israel – gave the Kingdom all the petrodollars it needed to export its idiosyncratic form of Islam.

   The old military jihad to spread the faith was now replaced by a cultural offensive. The Saudi-based Muslim World League opened offices in every region inhabited by Muslims, and the Saudi ministry of religion printed and distributed Wahhabi translations of the Quran, Wahhabi doctrinal texts and the writings of modern thinkers whom the Saudis found congenial, such as Sayyids Abul-A’la Maududi and Qutb, to Muslim communities throughout the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, the United States and Europe. In all these places, they funded the building of Saudi-style mosques with Wahhabi preachers and established madrasas that provided free education for the poor, with, of course, a Wahhabi curriculum.

   Slowly Muslims’ understanding of Islam became polluted by Wahhabism and Sunni Muslims began to think and breathe Wahhabism, no longer in tune with its own religious tradition, cut off from free-thinking Islam, moderate Islam, compassionate Islam and non-violent Islam.

   At the same time, young men from the poorer Muslim countries, such as Egypt and Pakistan, who had felt compelled to find work in the Gulf to support their families, associated their relative affluence with Wahhabism and brought this faith back home with them, living in new neighbourhoods with Saudi mosques and shopping malls that segregated the sexes. The Saudis demanded religious conformity in return for their munificence, so Wahhabi rejection of all other forms of Islam as well as other faiths would reach as deeply into Bradford, England, and Buffalo, New York, as into Pakistan, Jordan or Syria: everywhere gravely undermining Islam’s traditional pluralism.

   A whole generation of Muslims, therefore, has grown up with a maverick form of Islam that has given them a negative view of other faiths and an intolerantly sectarian understanding of their own. While not extremist per se, this is an outlook in which radicalism can develop. In the past, the learned exegesis of the ulema, which Wahhabis rejected, had held extremist interpretations of scripture in check; but now unqualified freelancers such as Osama Bin Laden were free to develop highly unorthodox readings of the Quran. To prevent the spread of radicalism, the Saudis tried to deflect their young from the internal problems of the kingdom during the 1980s by encouraging a pan-Islamist sentiment of which the Wahhabi ulema did not approve.

Daesh / ISIS – the brain child of Wahhabism

   Like the Ikhwan before, ISIS represents a rebellion against the official Wahhabism of modern Saudi Arabia. Its swords, covered faces and cut-throat executions all recall the original Brotherhood. But it is unlikely that the ISIS hordes consist entirely of diehard jihadists. A substantial number are probably secularists who resent the status quo in Iraq – Baathists from Saddam Hussein’s regime and former soldiers of his disbanded army.

   This would actually explain ISIS’s strong performance against professional military forces. In all likelihood, few of the young recruits are motivated either by Wahhabism or by more traditional Muslim ideals. In 2008, MI5’s behavioural science unit noted that, “far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could be regarded as religious novices.”

   A significant proportion of those convicted of terrorism offences since the 9/11 attacks have been non-observant, or are self-taught. Misguided or disguised ISIS militants are certainly not looking for religious enlightenment; rather they have been sold to a violence which speaks to their own pain and sense of loss.

   Two wannabe jihadists who set out from Birmingham for Syria last May had ordered Islam for Dummies from Amazon. ISIS militants are no Muslim devouts, only sociopathic begots.

   It would be a mistake to see ISIS as a throwback; it is a thoroughly modern movement which has drawn its inspiration from the Ikhwan crusades. It has become an efficient, self-financing business with assets estimated at $2bn. Its looting, theft of gold bullion from banks, kidnapping, siphoning of oil in the conquered territories and extortion have made it the wealthiest jihadist group in the world. There is nothing random or irrational about ISIS violence. The execution videos are carefully and strategically planned to inspire terror, deter dissent and sow chaos in the greater population.

   ISIS is not just a terror army, it is a terror movement with imperialistic ambitions. And if its methods are terrifying and bloody they are hardly an innovation. There too ISIS drew from past examples – Mass killing is after all a thoroughly modern phenomenon, one which western powers gave into many times over.

   During the French Revolution, which led to the emergence of the first secular state in Europe, the Jacobins publicly beheaded about 17,000 men, women and children.

   The Soviet Bolsheviks, the Khmer Rouge and the Red Guard all used systematic terrorism to purge humanity of corruption.

   In the 1990s, Armenia slaughtered hundreds upon hundreds of Azeris in a grand scale flash ethnic cleansing campaign.

   Similarly, ISIS uses violence to achieve a single, limited and clearly defined objective that would be impossible without such slaughter. As such, it is another expression of the dark side of modernity – industrial killing to achieve politico-strategic goals.

   Above all ISIS wants rebuild the caliphate Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey declared null and void in 1925.

   The caliphate had long been a dead letter politically, but because it symbolised the unity of the ummah and its link with the Prophet, Sunni Muslims mourned its loss as a spiritual and cultural trauma. Yet ISIS’s projected caliphate has no support among ulema internationally and is derided throughout the Muslim world.

   That said, the limitations of the nation state are becoming increasingly apparent in our world; this is especially true in the Middle East, which has no tradition of nationalism, and where the frontiers drawn by invaders were so arbitrary that it was well nigh impossible to create a truly national spirit. Here, too, ISIS is not simply harking back to a bygone age but is, however eccentrically, enunciating a modern concern.

   The liberal-democratic nation state developed in Europe in part to serve the Industrial Revolution, which made the ideals of the Enlightenment no longer noble aspirations but practical necessities. It is not ideal: its Achilles heel has always been an inability to tolerate ethnic minorities – a failing responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. In other parts of the world where modernisation has developed differently, other polities may be more appropriate. So the liberal state is not an inevitable consequence of modernity; the attempt to produce democracy in Iraq using the colo­nial methods of invasion, subjugation and occupation could only result in an unnatural birth – and so ISIS emerged from the resulting mayhem.

   ISIS has declared war against all — Sunnis, Shias, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Yazidis — there is no escaping this reactionary band of Godless criminals and murderers.

   Interestingly, Saudi Arabia has now become the designated target of ISIS militants. As if playing out a Greek tragedy, ISIS seeks now to strike at its creator, intent on pushing the boundary of the acceptable to reinvent itself not a religion but a radical atheist movement which stands in negation of the Holy, in all its forms and all its manifestations.

   If Wahhabism did not scare you, ISIS should.

   Maybe just maybe it would be a good idea to choose those allies which intend to defeat and destroy ISIS and deny the one power which started it all – the Kingdom.

Catherine Shakdam -- New Eastern Outlook
First appeared:http://journal-neo.org/2015/06/14/wahhabism-al-saud-and-isis-the-unholy-trinity/

Written on 20 December 2015.

Despite recording double-digit economic growth in recent years, Ethiopia is in serious need of food aid. Observers consider the current food crisis to be the worst in thirty years, similar to the famine of 1984-85, which led to thousands of deaths. According to a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs the number of relief food beneficiaries in Ethiopia has increased to 4.5 million people this month.

 

A drought affected farm in Ethiopia.  Photo: Kimberly Flowers/USAID. Released under Creative Commons.

 

Government officials estimate that 10.1 million people will face critical food shortages in 2016. The figure includes 5.75 million Ethiopian children.

The food crisis in the country is being played down by the Ethiopian government, which has decided to rename famine and starvation as “food insecurity”:

According to some inside Ethiopia, NGOs are being warned not to use the words “famine, starvation or death” in their food appeals. Neither are they to say that “children are dying on a daily basis,” or refer to “widespread famine” or say that “the policies of the government in Ethiopia are partially to blame.” Neither are they allowed to “compare the current crisis to the famine of the eighties.” Instead, the latest drought in Ethiopia is to be described as “food insecurity caused by a drought related to El Nino.”

While the Ethiopian government says that the cause of “food insecurity” in the country is drought related to El Nino, Dawit Ayele Haylemari, a graduate ttudent of Political Science at University of Passau, thinks otherwise:

Many experts relate Ethiopia's cyclical famine with the country's dependence on Rainfed smallholder agriculture, drought, rapid population growth or agricultural market dysfunctions. Although these factors do have significant role in the matter, they tend to hide the critical cause of hunger in the country – lack of rights and accountable government […]

A historical investigation of famine also identified 30 major famines during the 20th century. All happened in countries led by autocratic rule or that were under armed conflict, four being in Ethiopia […]

Why does autocracy lead to famine? The most fundamental reason is that autocrats often don't care enough about the population to prevent famine. Autocrats maintain power through force, not popular approval. This argument has been proven true in the case of Ethiopia.

The food crisis, in the fifth largest economy in Sub Saharan Africa, has become one of the hot topics discussed by Ethiopian netizens online.

Adisu Habte took a jab at Ethiopians in the Diaspora talking about the issue on social media while their fellow citizens are dying:

Well the hunger continues in Ethiopian while Ethiopians living in Philadelphia continue to do nothing but post on their social media page and have conversation about politics at Dunkin Donuts and at the Hookah lounge […] Let's not watch as Ethiopians are starving to death.

Endalkachew Chala writes:

Yep! The ‘fast growing’ economy in Ethiopia is busted …

While Betelhem Ephrem advises Ethiopians not to politicise the issue:

For once lets make this issues about the people who are desperately in need of survival than our political discourse. lets not make a mockery of the people at this time of crisis.

Answering to a Facebook user, Anania Sorri, who wanted to know the source of the information that 4.5 million are facing hunger, Addis Standard writes:

Dear Anania Sorri – It is widely known that figures in this country are often the results of negotiations between the government and aid agencies (in this case) or the government and financial institutions (in the case of growth). But in the face of eminent crop failure in many parts of the country in the coming harvest season, this one doesn't seem to be overly exaggerated.

Responding to calls from some Ethiopians that citizens need to pray, Biyya Oromiyaa says:

How is praying a solution to hunger in Ethiopia? Hungry people need emergency food, and a good agricultural policy with political will and democracy. Hunger has nothing to do with God in Ethiopia, maybe elsewhere. Hunger is created by the combination of regime policy failure, political oppression and climate change. So good advice would be to remove the regime than instruct us to pray.

Fikrejesus Amahazion, a Horn of Africa scholar focusing on African development, human rights and political economy, points to another irony of the current food crisis:

Ironically, while Ethiopia is facing a hunger crisis and making urgent appeals for aid, tonnes of food are actually leaving the country. This illogical development is due to the fact that the regime in Addis has sold large tracts of arable land to a range of foreign investors and corporations in transactions described as “land grabs.” The process also involves “villagization,” a government-led program which entails the forcible relocation of indigenous communities from locations reserved for large, foreign-owned plantations. Reports by rights groups list a plethora of human rights violations, including murders, beatings, rapes, imprisonment, intimidation, and political coercion by the government and authorities.

Ethiopia’s hunger crisis is an important humanitarian issue meriting immediate attention and concern. In order to fully understand the crisis it is imperative to recognize that while the environment has been an important contributing factor, a range of other structural socio-political and governance dynamics, including corruption, the lack of rule of law or democracy, poor governance, failures in long-term planning, and misplaced national and development priorities have also been highly influential.

Finally, Paul Dorosh, Director at the International Food Policy Research Institute's Development Strategy and Governance Division, and Shahidur Rashid, Senior Research Fellow at the institute’s Markets, Trade, and Institutions Division are hopeful that the drought will not lead to famine:

The 2015-16 drought and production shortfall need not cause a famine in Ethiopia. By heeding the lessons of past famines, the government and the international donor community can help ensure that there is sufficient availability of cereals to supply Ethiopia’s food needs and sufficient transfers in cash and in kind to provide needy households with adequate access to food. Other food security issues will still need to be resolved, including ensuring adequate nutrition for all individuals. However, there is ample reason for hope that this drought will be remembered, not for a deadly famine, but wise policies and timely interventions built on Ethiopia’s progress of the past 25 years.

 

 

Ndesanjo Macha -- Global Voices

 

Update

 

The UK will provide an extra £30m in aid for Ethiopia, where a prolonged drought means that more than 18 million people will need urgent relief in the next year, according to the Department for International Development (DfID).

Half of the cash is earmarked for the UN’S World Food Programme to supply emergency food supplies to around 1.9 million people, while £14m will go to a pooled fund that can be accessed by UN agencies and NGOs providing emergency water and healthcare.

Guardian

Written on 17 December 2015.

   The British Prime Minister, Mr David Cameron, has ordered a review of the Muslim Brotherhood and its link to extremism. The review project was highly controversial from the start. Its main author, Sir John Jenkins, was until recently UK ambassador to Saudi Arabia -- one of the main enemies of the Brotherhood.

   germanpages.de -- Deutsche Rundschau is publishing the conclusions of the government report as it is presented to the House of Commons. The Brotherhood has already announced that it will legally challenge the report.

********

" Conclusions

39.Both Sir John Jenkins and Charles Farr drew the following overarching conclusions from their work:

- the Muslim Brotherhood have promoted a radical, transformative politics, at odds with a millennium of Islamic jurisprudence and statecraft, in which the reconstruction of individual identity is the first step towards a revolutionary challenge to established states and a secularised if socially conservative order;

- the Muslim Brotherhood historically focused on remodelling individuals and communities through grassroots activism. They have engaged politically where possible. But they have also selectively used violence and sometimes terror in pursuit of their institutional goals. Their public narrative – notably in the West - emphasised engagement not violence. But there have been significant differences between Muslim Brotherhood communications in English and Arabic;

- there is little evidence that the experience of power in Egypt has caused a rethinking in the Muslim Brotherhood of its ideology or conduct. UK official engagement with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood produced no discernible change in their thinking. Indeed even by mid 2014 statements from Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood-linked media platforms seem to have deliberately incited violence;

- much about the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK remains secretive, including membership, fund raising and educational programmes. But Muslim Brotherhood associates and affiliates here have at times had significant influence on the largest UK Muslim student organisation, national organisations which have claimed to represent Muslim communities (and on that basis have sought and had a dialogue with Government), charities and some mosques. Though their domestic influence has declined organisations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood continue to have an influence here which is disproportionate to their size;

- the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK claimed to act in support of Muslim communities here and use London as a base for activism elsewhere, notably with other Muslim Brotherhood organisations in Europe, in Egypt and the occupied Palestinian territories and in the Gulf. This activity is sometimes secretive, if not clandestine;

- the Muslim Brotherhood have been publicly committed to political engagement in this country. Engagement with Government has at times been facilitated by what appeared to be a common agenda against al Qaida and (at least in the UK) militant salafism. But this engagement did not take account of Muslim Brotherhood support for a proscribed terrorist group and its views about terrorism which, in reality, were quite different from our own;

- aspects of Muslim Brotherhood ideology and tactics, in this country and overseas, are contrary to our values and have been contrary to our national interests and our national security."