He also said that his government would not allow any American shipments to Yemen, and called on other Arab countries to boycott not only Israeli but also American trade in the region.

The Gaza conflict has several theaters. There is the Israeli war of genocide on the Palestinians of Gaza, which has killed over 18,000 people and wounded tens of thousands, the vast majority of them innocent noncombatants, and destroyed or damaged about half the region’s housing stock along with other essential infrastructure and buildings. It has also left the civilian population without sufficient food or water and exposed to deadly infectious diseases.

Then there is the tense Israeli-Lebanese border, where Israel has bombed from fighter jets and Hezbollah has fired rockets, necessitating the evacuation of some of northern Israel.

There have been Shiite militia attacks on US personnel in Syria and Iraq, with more threatened.

And then there is the really important Red Sea front, where the Houthi government has targeted commercial vessels it says are ferrying goods and supplies to Israel, though it seems also to be hitting just any old merchant ship. The Houthis are Zaydi Shiites and form part of the Iran-led Axis of Resistance to Israeli political dominance in the Levant and the occupation of the Palestinians. The Houthis survived an eight-year war with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, wealthy oil states allied with the United States that either recognize Israel (in the case of the UAE) or are considering it (the Saudis).

Yemen is a rugged country of impenetrable highlands and wildernesses. I’ve been there several times. The winding mountain roads outside Sanaa made me carsick. The Yemenis gave me khat for the nausea.

The country sits athwart the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the 20-mile-wide Bab al-Mandeb or Mandeb Straits through which traffic between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean passes. The UAE and its allies control the southern coast along the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, but the Houthis control some of the Red Sea coast and use their window on the sea to threaten shipping for their geopolitical purposes with drones, including Iran-made KAS-04 unmanned aerial vehicles. The Houthis have hit several container ships and a Norwegian oil tanker.

The Houthi government announced Saturday that it had launched a large number of drones toward the region of Eilat, Israel’s port city on the Gulf of Aqaba just off the Red Sea.

At the same time, the United States Central Command announced that its destroyers in the Red Sea had shot down 14 one-way attack drones.

The British Navy also weighed in, saying that a Sea Viper missile from the HMS Diamond had taken out a Houthi drone that threatened merchant shipping.

CBS News: “Houthis target ships in Red Sea, U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria face daily attacks”

As a result of the ongoing Houthi drone attacks on freighters, some of the world’s biggest and most important shipping corporations have announced that they will avoid the Red Sea and the Suez Canal for now. They are not only fleeing danger but also the dramatically spiking cost of insuring any vessels that ply those waters. The companies include Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), whose MSC PALATIUM III freighter was taken out of commission by a Houthi drone attack on Friday. They also include CMA CGM of France, Maersk of Denmark, and Hapag-Lloyd of Germany, according to the BBC.

Israeli shipping costs have shot up over 250%, and some insurers are refusing to insure their vessels.

The US plan to form a naval task force to escort container ships and protect them from the drones won’t work, because it won’t push down insurance costs. They could try to strike the Houthis, but 8 years of Saudi and UAE bombing of them did no good, so I wouldn’t hold my breath that lashing out would be effective. Moreover, the Biden administration doesn’t want the Gaza conflict to spread throughout the region and further destabilize it.

Some 10 percent of world trade goes through the Suez Canal on 17,000 ships a year. Nowadays, about 12% of the petroleum shipped by tanker goes through the Suez Canal, along with Liquefied Natural Gas shipments. These ships will now have to go around the Cape of Good Hope and skirt the west coast of Africa, adding over 10,000 nautical miles (over 12,000 landlubber miles) and 8 to 10 days to the journey, with all the consequent extra expenses of fuel and provisions. The shipping companies will be hurt by this change, as well as the countries along the Red Sea such as Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel. The detour will contribute to supply chain shortages and cause an increase in the price of imported goods for many countries in Europe.

( Middle East Monitor ) – One of the most pressing issues of the 21st century is the management and allocation of the limited freshwater resources in the world. Since an important number of those water resources are trans-boundary, crossing the political boundaries of more than one nation, the complexity of the problem has increased over the years. In dealing with trans-boundary water disputes, riparian states such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Sudan mostly prefer water diplomacy mechanisms that involve the processes and institutions through which the national interests and identities of sovereign states are represented to one another.

States’ claim of sovereignty

On the one hand, states have been the main actors in shaping trans-boundary water policies and conducting water diplomacy throughout the last few decades of water disputes. On the other hand, international organisations, international non-governmental organisations and science-policy initiatives joined the water diplomacy processes as new actors, with the coming of issues of scarcity, pollution and the sharing of water resources in order to take the attention of the international community. With the participation of these actors in water diplomacy, new approaches related to the management of trans-boundary water resources, for example, the sharing of benefits such as energy, food and services to be obtained from water resources instead of sharing water resources per se, have been developed.

With the increase in the use of trans-boundary rivers for consumption purposes, such as the expansion of irrigation since the last quarter of the 19th century, many states have claimed mutual sovereignty and rights of use over trans-boundary water resources. As a result of these discourses and actions, a series of international customary law principles have been adopted. The riparian states of trans-boundary waters have signed numerous bilateral and multilateral agreements, protocols and memoranda of understanding on the use, management and sharing of these resources. In other words, treaty (written) and customary (unwritten) international water principles of law, as well as traditional diplomatic methods, have been developed by the states as the main tools for resolving disputes regarding trans-boundary waters.

Trans-boundary water disputes in Middle East

The Middle East is regarded as one of the most challenged regions in terms of trans-boundary surface and groundwater resources management and allocation between two or more countries. In addition to the constraints of natural water resources, the region suffers from an abundance of issues that compound water security, including a rapidly growing and displaced population, uneven economic development, limited amount of water supply that is irregularly distributed, the negative impacts of climate change and variability and poor water management and allocation practices both within and between states. Some 60 per cent of the water in the region flows across international borders, complicating resource management. The geopolitical importance of the region and the conflicts that arise have consequently resulted in aggravating the usual problems of using water in a variety of settings in the Nile or Euphrates-Tigris river basins.

Nile River dispute

The Nile basin is considered one of the world’s hydro-political hotspots, and much has been debated in academic and policy circles about the likelihood of interstate conflict between the Nile countries. In the late 1920s, colonial water-sharing agreements were concluded in the Nile basin under the full control of Great Britain. Following the wave of independence in Africa in the 1950s, all upstream riparians declared void those agreements, including the most important one, namely the 1929 Nile Water Agreement, which was later replaced by the still legally binding 1959 Agreement for the Full Utilisation of the Nile Waters, under which the two riparians agreed to share the waters in proportions of 75 per cent and 25 per cent for Egypt and 25 per cent for Sudan, respectively. The 1959 agreement has never been accepted by any of the upstream riparians, causing recurring tensions and disputes over water. Moreover, tensions in the Nile basin waters were often raised by political rhetoric, particularly between the Egyptian and Ethiopian leadership. Egypt, so heavily dependent on the Nile waters, has used its military might and hegemonic status to warn the upper riparians, primarily Ethiopia, not to undertake any projects that would risk Egypt’s share of the Nile.

Article continues after bonus IC video
Al Jazeera English: “Will Ethiopia compromise on its Grand Renaissance Dam? | Inside Story

Challenging this historical status quo, in March 2011, the Ethiopian government announced plans to construct a hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile, namely the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which is planned to generate 6,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity, becoming Africa’s largest power plant. Concerns have been raised over the dam’s impact on Egypt. Tensions over the dam increased in May 2011, when Ethiopia temporarily diverted the flow of the Blue Nile as part of the construction process.

After exchanges of harsh rhetoric between the heads of state, the foreign ministers of Egypt and Ethiopia met and agreed to hold further talks on the construction of the dam. Hence, the water dispute in the Nile basin was intimately related to unfair clauses in the historical bilateral sharing agreements. Additionally, the increasing ability and desire of the upstream states, namely Ethiopia, to challenge Egypt’s status as a hydro-hegemon and the overall status quo constitute contemporary reasons for tensions over water. The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) was established in 1999 to find sustainable technical, institutional, legal and political solutions to the hydro-political challenges centred on a river embedded in regional geopolitical complexity.

Tigris-Euphrates basin

Trans-boundary water issues started to be a part of regional politics when the three major riparian states, namely Turkiye, Syria and Iraq, introduced major water and land resource development projects in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. In this context, large-scale dams and irrigation systems were initiated in the early 1960s. Owing to the competitive nature of these uncoordinated national water development projects, disagreements over trans-boundary water uses surfaced, and the riparian states opted for diplomatic negotiations to deal with their disagreements. As the national water development projects progressed, incompatibilities between water supply and demand occurred throughout the river basin. Even though no hot conflict was reported among the riparian states concerning water sharing, the sporadic technical negotiations could not prepare the ground for a comprehensive treaty on equitable and effective trans-boundary water management in the basin.

In the Tigris-Euphrates basin, the riparian states preferred water diplomacy mechanisms, namely diplomatic negotiations, to resolve the crises. Most of the crises were related to Iraq’s concerns regarding the impact of the construction and filling of the dams in Turkiye and Syria. Thus, diplomats and technocrats from the 3 countries met several times, although on an irregular basis, to exchange information concerning the technical details of the construction and the filling of the dams. In the period between the 1960s and the 1990s, the riparian states were too rigid in their position, emphasizing their absolute water rights over the rivers. With the emergence of a conducive overall political environment in the early 2000s, state representatives adopted a more needs-based approach by concluding a series of memoranda of understanding on the protection of the environment, water quality management, water efficiency, drought management and flood protection, with a view to addressing the adverse effects of climate change.

On the other hand, in the early 1980s, the riparian states in the Tigris-Euphrates basin managed to establish the institutional framework of the Joint Technical Committee (JTC), whose members included participants from all three riparian states. However, the riparian states did not agree to give the JTC clear and commonly agreed-upon functions. On the contrary, the states continued unilateral and uncoordinated water and land development projects, and the JTC meetings did not make an effective contribution to the settlement of the trans-boundary water dispute. It also did not provide a platform for delineating the priorities and needs of the co-riparians as a basis for addressing regional water problems.

Water diplomacy mechanisms, particularly at the trans-boundary level, have been introduced in the Tigris-Euphrates basin with the aim of reaching agreeable solutions between parties that have diverging interests as well as competing water development schemes. With the help of formal institutions like the JTC, high-level water diplomacy frameworks, water-sharing protocols and memoranda of understanding, the national interests and identities of sovereign states are represented to one another. Although these institutions may not have been effective most of the time in terms of the protection and efficient use and management of water and other related resources, they served to place trans-boundary water issues within a legitimate and peaceful realm, rather than mixing them with potentially conflict-laden issues, such as border security and territorial disputes, which might otherwise escalate into hot confrontations. However, there still does not exist a multilateral treaty regime involving all of the stakeholders concerned, including civil society organisations and private companies in energy, agriculture and the environment, as well as relevant development-related sectors, for the effective and equitable use and management of trans-boundary waters in the basin.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Human Rights Watch – (London) – Saudi border guards have killed at least hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers who tried to cross the Yemen-Saudi border between March 2022 and June 2023, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. If committed as part of a Saudi government policy to murder migrants, these killings, which appear to continue, would be a crime against humanity.

The 73-page report, “‘They Fired on Us Like Rain’: Saudi Arabian Mass Killings of Ethiopian Migrants at the Yemen-Saudi Border,” found that Saudi border guards have used explosive weapons to kill many migrants and shot other migrants at close range, including many women and children, in a widespread and systematic pattern of attacks. In some instances, Saudi border guards asked migrants what limb to shoot, and then shot them at close range. Saudi border guards also fired explosive weapons at migrants who were attempting to flee back to Yemen.

“Saudi officials are killing hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers in this remote border area out of view of the rest of the world,” said Nadia Hardman, refugee and migrant rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Spending billions buying up professional golf, football clubs, and major entertainment events to improve the Saudi image should not deflect attention from these horrendous crimes.”

A video published on TikTok on December 4, 2022 shows a group of roughly 47 migrants, 37 of whom appear to be women, walking along a steep slope inside Saudia Arabia on the trail used to cross from the migrant camp of Al Thabit. 2022 Private

Human Rights Watch interviewed 42 people, including 38 Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers who tried to cross the Yemen-Saudi border between March 2022 and June 2023, and 4 relatives or friends of those who tried to cross during that period. Human Rights Watch analyzed over 350 videos and photographs posted to social media or gathered from other sources, and several hundred square kilometers of satellite imagery.

Human Rights Watch wrote to the Saudi and Houthi authorities. The Houthi authorities replied to our letter on August 19, 2023.

Human Rights Watch: “Saudi Arabia Border Guards Commit Mass Killings of Migrants at Yemen Border”

Approximately 750,000 Ethiopians live and work in Saudi Arabia. While many migrate for economic reasons, a number have fled because of serious human rights abuses in Ethiopia, including during the recent, brutal armed conflict in the north.

While Human Rights Watch has documented killings of migrants at the border with Yemen and Saudi Arabia since 2014, the killings appear to be a deliberate escalation in both the number and manner of targeted killings.

Migrants and asylum seekers said they crossed the Gulf of Aden in unseaworthy vessels, Yemeni smugglers then took them to Saada governorate, currently under the control of the Houthi armed group, on the Saudi border.

Many said Houthi forces worked with smugglers and would extort them or transfer them to what migrants described as detention centers, where people were abused until they could pay an “exit fee.”

3D model of likely Saudi border guard posts and patrol roads near fences identified with satellite imagery near the migration route from the migrant camp of Al Thabit in Saada Governorate, Yemen, into Saudi Arabia. Graphic © Human Rights Watch

Migrants in groups of up to 200 people would regularly try to cross the border into Saudi Arabia, often making multiple attempts after Saudi border guards pushed them back. Migrants said that their groups had more women than men and unaccompanied children. Human Rights Watch has identified Saudi border guard posts from satellite images that are consistent with these accounts. Human Rights Watch also identified what appears to be a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle positioned from October 10, 2021, to December 31, 2022, at one of the Saudi border guard posts. The vehicle appeared to have a heavy machine gun mounted in a turret on its roof.

People traveling in groups described being attacked by mortar projectiles and other explosive weapons from the direction of Saudi border guards once they had crossed the border. Those interviewed described 28 incidents with Saudi border guards using explosive weapons. Survivors said the Saudis sometimes held them in detention facilities, in some cases for months.

All described scenes of horror: women, men, and children’s bodies strewn across the mountainous landscape severely injured, already dead and dismembered. “First I was eating with people and then they were dying,” said one person. “There are some people who you cannot identify because their bodies are thrown everywhere. Some people were torn in half.”

A Human Rights Watch digital investigation of videos posted to social media or sent directly to Human Rights Watch and verified and geolocated show dead and wounded migrants on the trails, in camps, and in medical facilities. Geospatial analysis revealed growing burial sites near the migrant camps and expanding border security infrastructure.

Location of burial sites identified on satellite imagery close to Al Raqw migrant camp.Image: February 9, 2022. © 2023 Maxar Technologies. Source Google Earth.

Members of the Independent Forensic Expert Group of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, an international group of prominent forensic experts, analyzed verified videos and photographs showing injured or dead migrants to determine the causes of their wounds. They concluded that some injuries exhibited “clear patterns consistent with the explosion of munitions with capacity to produce heat and fragmentation,” while others have “characteristics consistent with gunshot wounds” and, in one instance, “burns are visible.”

People traveling in smaller groups or on their own said once they crossed the Yemen-Saudi border that Saudi border guards carrying rifles shot at them. People also described guards beating them with rocks and metal bars. Fourteen interviewees witnessed or were themselves wounded in shooting incidents at close range. Six were targeted both by explosive weapons and by shootings.

Some said Saudi border guards would descend from their border guard posts and beat survivors. A 17-year-old boy said border guards forced him and other survivors to rape two girl survivors after the guards had executed another migrant who refused to rape another survivor.

Saudi Arabia should immediately and urgently revoke any policy, whether explicit or de facto, to use lethal force on migrants and asylum seekers, including targeting them with explosive weapons and close-range shootings. The government should investigate and appropriately discipline or prosecute security personnel responsible for unlawful killings, wounding, and torture at the Yemen border.

Concerned governments should publicly call for Saudi Arabia to end any such policy and press for accountability. In the interim, concerned governments should impose sanctions on Saudi and Houthi officials credibly implicated in ongoing violations at the border.

A UN-backed investigation should be established to assess abuses against migrants and whether killings amount to crimes against humanity.

“Saudi border guards knew or should have known they were firing on unarmed civilians,” Hardman said. “If there is no justice for what appear to be serious crimes against Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers, it will only fuel further killings and abuses.”

Egypt and Ethiopia have waged a diplomatic war of words over Ethiopia’s massive new dam – the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam – on the Blue Nile, which started filling up in July 2020. The political row has threatened to get out of hand on occasion but now the two countries have finally agreed to conclude “a mutually acceptable agreement” within four months. We asked John Mukum Mbaku, the author of a recent article on the Ethiopian dam and a co-author of a book on the Nile River’s changing legal regime, to answer four key questions.

What is the context of the current tussle?

Ethiopia, whose highlands provide more than 85% of the water that flows into the Nile, has long argued that it has the right under international law to manage resources within its own borders for its national development. It sees the “Nile as a gift of God” given to Ethiopians to use for their development.

Egypt, which depends on the Nile for more than 90% of its fresh water, has argued that the Ethiopian dam represents a threat to its water security and its very existence as a people.

The decision by Addis Ababa to begin construction of the dam on the Blue Nile in 2011 exacerbated an already deteriorating relationship between Ethiopia and its two downstream neighbours, Egypt and Sudan, over access to Nile waters. After Egypt’s diplomatic efforts failed to stop construction, Cairo redirected its energies to securing a legally binding agreement for filling and operating the dam.

But no mutually acceptable agreement for filling and operating the dam was ever reached.

In August 2020, Addis Ababa began to fill the dam’s reservoir. That process was repeated in 2021 and 2022.

In 2023, Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed announced that the country would delay the fourth filling until September “to alleviate the concerns of neighbouring people”.

The dam’s reservoir filling in particular, and its operation in general, are issues that the three countries must resolve, most likely through a legally binding agreement or treaty.

In February 2022, the Ethiopian dam started producing electricity. Egyptians claimed that Addis Ababa was “violating its obligations under the 2015 Declaration of Principles” and endangering Egyptian “water interests”.

What are the main sticking points going into the talks?

An agreement would have to explicitly deal with issues that are important to Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan. The most important are Egypt’s and Sudan’s historically acquired rights to Nile waters. The rights were granted by the 1929 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty and the 1959 bilateral agreement between Egypt and Sudan (1959 Nile Treaty).

After estimating the average annual flow of the Nile River as measured at Aswan to be 84 billion cubic metres, the two treaties granted 66% of Nile waters to Egypt, 22% to Sudan and 12% to account for seepage and evaporation. These allocations exhausted all the Nile’s average annual flow of water. Egypt was also granted veto power over all construction projects on the Nile and its tributaries.

These rights came to be known as Egypt’s and Sudan’s acquired rights. They have been the main sticking point in efforts to conclude a treaty between all 11 Nile riparian states for the allocation of the waters of the Nile, as well as between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan over the Ethiopian dam.

While Ethiopia and other upstream riparian states see these two treaties as colonial anachronisms that have no relevance to modern Nile governance, Egypt and Sudan insist that they are binding.

What impact would a breakthrough have on other Nile Basin agreements?

The impact will depend on what type of agreement is reached. Assume that both Egypt and Sudan agree to abandon the rights granted by the 1929 and 1959 treaties. They could then enter into negotiation with Ethiopia to produce a new treaty that creates rights for all three states.

Such a treaty could provide the impetus for all 11 Nile Basin states to return to the Cooperative Framework Agreement, which was expected to provide a legal framework for governing the Nile based on equitable and reasonable water use. The framework agreement has been in limbo since Egypt and Sudan rejected it.

The other Nile Basin states see these colonial-era treaties as a violation of international law principles, and a breach of the vision of the Nile Basin Initiative.

What other claims threaten the status quo?

Egypt fears that if Addis Ababa is allowed to fill the reservoir without a legally binding agreement, other Nile Basin states might also take unilateral actions. This could harm Egypt’s water security and ability to control projects on the Nile River and its tributaries.

Then, there is the matter of how to manage issues related to climate change, such as droughts and floods. The existence of the dam means Addis Ababa’s cooperation will be required. In times of drought, for example, the Ethiopian dam will be expected to release some water to help Egypt and Sudan.

Ethiopia’s right to water for agriculture and household consumption is an issue that has not yet been agreed upon by all three countries.

Egypt and Sudan are worried about the harm that could come to them from activities upstream. Egypt remains adamant that the dam will hurt its water supply and threaten domestic development.

But Sudanese officials appear to have changed their assessment of the impact of the dam. They now see it as a potential regulator of seasonal floods and provider of clean energy.

These issues should be examined thoroughly during the negotiations. The three countries should adopt a treaty or agreement that is mutually acceptable and beneficial.

Over the years, the three countries have struggled to bring meaning to terms like “significant harm” and “equitable and reasonable utilisation”. The final treaty should define these terms. It should also create a mediation mechanism, which can include referring certain specified matters to the International Court of Justice for resolution.

John Mukum Mbaku, Professor, Weber State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Pre-colonial African history is alive with tales of civilisations rising and falling and of different cultures intermingling across the continent. We have now shed more light on some of these societies using the science of genetics.

In a study published in Science Advances, my co-authors and I used DNA information from people from the present-day continent to shed light on important civilisations that existed before colonialism. Genetic information from cheek swabs was extracted by machines. Once the sequence of “letters” in the DNA code had been read, or sequenced, we could use computers to compare genetic differences and similarities between the populations in the study.

One striking result concerned two ethnic groups in the north of present-day Cameroon, in west-central Africa, the Kanuri and Kotoko peoples. We found that these two groups were descended from three ancestral populations.

These ancestral groups most resembled people now living in coastal regions of west Africa as well as in parts of east Africa such as Ethiopia and populations living today in north Africa and the Levant. The populations intermixed – had children together – roughly 600 years ago. But what caused them to migrate thousands of kilometres across a desert into northern Cameroon?

We think the answer is the Kanem-Bornu empire, a civilisation that existed for over 1,000 years – beginning around 700 AD. At its height, the empire spanned what is now northern Cameroon, northern Nigeria, Chad, Niger and southern Libya. It operated vast trade networks across the Sahara and attracted populations from every direction.

This example highlights how our genomes hold information about major events of the past. Merchants travelling along trade routes or the formation of empires from smaller political units can leave footprints in our DNA. Previous work shows that the Roman empire, the Mongol empire, and Silk Road trade probably all left lasting legacies in the genomes of modern-day people across Eurasia.

Hidden in the genome

We analysed 1,300 newly collected genomes of people from across Africa. They came from 150 ethnic groups within five countries. We collaborated with anthropologists, archaeologists and linguists from Africa and elsewhere. They helped us understand the historical context of these events.

African genome data is underrepresented compared with that from other world regions. This means that lots of genetic diversity – or variety – in the DNA of populations is probably being missed by scientists.

Studying genetic diversity has many potential uses – such as understanding risks to health and developing new treatments for disease. Our group was concerned with genetic diversity as a window into the past.

Dating events

We modelled a person’s genome as a mixture of segments of DNA inherited from their ancestors. If a person had DNA segments closely matching two groups of people – for example, Europeans and west Africans – it suggested that this person descended from mixing between those two groups.

Present-day human groups that were formed from a recent mixture of Europeans and west Africans should have long sections of DNA from both populations. Those ancestral DNA segments get shorter as the genetic material of their descendants is shuffled with each new generation.

This provides a way of dating when mixture events took place. The longer the DNA segments matching, for example, west Africans or Europeans, the more recent the mixture event was.

Peace treaty

Another historical event we found evidence for was the Arab expansion in Africa. This began in the seventh century, when separate Arab armies travelling south along the Levantine coast and north from Medina in today’s Saudi Arabia crossed the Sinai desert and conquered Egypt.

In Sudan at this time, the Kingdom of Makuria ruled along the Nile river. Makuria signed a peace treaty with the Egyptian Arabs in the middle of the seventh century that lasted almost 700 years.

The majority of mixing between these two ancestral groups, one closely related to Arabs and the other to Sudanese, dates to after the peace treaty began breaking down. This in turn coincided with the decline and eventual collapse of Makuria itself, which would have allowed Arab groups to continue down the Nile into Sudan.

Aksum. Via Unsplash.

But we also found evidence of earlier migrations into Africa from the Arabian peninsula, which occurred by sea. This intermixing coincided in time with the Kingdom of Aksum, located in northeast Africa and southern Arabia, during the first millennium AD.

Aksum was once considered one of the world’s four great powers, alongside contemporary empires in China, Persia and Rome.

The expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples

Genetic studies have also found evidence of a continent-wide migration known as the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples. “Bantu” is a language group, now spoken by around one-quarter of Africans.

There has been debate about whether the Bantu languages spread largely as a transmission of culture, or whether large-scale migration was involved. The latest research shows that the latter explanation is the likeliest. This migration started in a small area of western Cameroon roughly 4,000 years ago, before rapidly spreading south and east. It covered more than 4,000 kilometres in less than 2,000 years.

Bantu speakers mixed with local groups, changing patterns of genetic diversity in Africa forever. We showed that migrations not only occurred to the south and east of Cameroon, but also to the west. Why so much movement took place at this time is unknown, but climate change may have played a role.

It’s vital that scientists analyse more DNA from genomes of African people. As we do so, it will undoubtedly reveal an intricate picture of the continent’s rich past.

Nancy Bird, Postdoctoral research associate, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In 2021, the African Union voted to accept Israel as an observer nation, over the objections of South Africa, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt ,among others. Palestine, which has been an observer since 2013, also called for Israel to be expelled on the grounds that it is an Apartheid state.

WAFA reports that Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said that “the racist Israeli government has clearly stated that the Jewish people have the exclusive right to all the land of Israel, which is the land of Palestine, which means Israel’s desire to seize more lands and build colonial settlements in violation of all international covenants and laws.”

It may be that the African Union incident is the first response by the global South to the formation of a new Israeli government in late December that includes extremists, fascists and convicted terrorists.

Israel has long intensely courted sub-saharan African countries, most of them Christian and open to the blandishments of Christian Zionism or at least open to the economic benefits of good relations with Israel. Most recently, the United States has blackmailed post-Bashir revolutionary Sudan into recognizing Israel, making it a precondition for lifting the terrorism designation from that country, which has harmed its economy.

In 2022, the AU agreed to study the question of whether to continue proffering to Israel observer status.

The organization maintains that Ms. Bar-Li was asked to leave because she did not have a valid invitation. The invitation had only been issued to the Israeli ambassador to the African Union, Aleli Admasu, and was not, the AU officials said, transferable. AFP quotes Ebba Kalondo, spokeswoman for the head of the African Union Commission, as saying, “It is regrettable that the individual in question would abuse such a courtesy.”

Israel disputes this account, insisting that Bar-Li had had permission to be there.

The Israelis angrily blamed South Africa and Algeria for, they alleged, coordinating with Iran to get Israel kicked out of the hall. The office of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa retorted, “They must substantiate their claim.”

The Israeli attempt to drag Iran into the discussion is typical of the propaganda ploys of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has hundreds of nuclear weapons, but paints Iran as a nuclear threat even though Tehran has none. It is a form of what stage magicians call “misdirection.”

In any case, South Africa’s government is understandably touchy about Apartheid policies of the sort Israel implements in the Palestinian West Bank, which it militarily occupies. Algeria’s government has a long revolutionary history stretching back to the National Liberation Front’s struggle to get free of French colonial rule in 1954-1962, and it doesn’t need Iran’s prompting to take a stand for the occupied Palestinians.

(The Conversation) – Tens of thousands of migrant Ethiopian workers have been forcibly repatriated from Saudi Arabia each year since the early 2010s. Although this is carried out as part of a crackdown on illegal migrant workers, legally documented workers have frequently been caught in the dragnet. Another 102,000 Ethiopian citizens will soon be repatriated in another round that began in April 2022. Girmachew Adugna, who has researched Ethiopian migration for years, explains the background to the deportations along with concerns about human rights violations and the challenges that returnees face.

What is the broad picture of Ethiopian labour migration to the Gulf?

There are over 30 million migrant workers in the more than half-a-dozen Gulf countries. As the third highest destination for international migrants in the world in 2019, Saudi Arabia is the main destination. Ethiopia makes a sizeable number of the kingdom’s 13,122,300 migrant workers. It is estimated that about 750,000 Ethiopians currently reside and work in the kingdom.

However, the exact number is unknown due to routine deportation and irregular entry and overstaying visas. As many as 90% of the migrants entering Saudi Arabia illegally through Yemen are Ethiopian. Along with Ethiopians and Yemenis, the three largest immigrant groups in the kingdom are from India (2.4 million), Indonesia (1.7 million), and Pakistan (1.4 million).

There are a number of factors responsible for outward migration from Ethiopia. Although the economy is one of the fastest growing in the world, this growth has not been accompanied by considerable poverty reduction and job creation, particularly for young people. With migrant workers in Saudi Arabia earning five times what they could earn for similar work back home, the incentive to migrate is strong.

Ethiopians who migrate to the Gulf countries are mainly single, uneducated young people. Women account for about 95% of all documented migrants going to the Gulf.

Ethiopian workers in Saudi Arabia are mainly engaged in domestic work. Other popular jobs include cleaning, casual work and herding.

What is the backdrop to the intermittent deportations?

In recent years, the large number of undocumented workers has become a source of diplomatic friction between Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia. At the height of the Arab Spring which spread across North Africa and the Middle East in the early 2010s, Saudi Arabia began imposing strict immigration policies targeted at foreign workers. As a result, around 170,000 Ethiopians were deported in late 2013 and early 2014.

More than half a million Ethiopian migrants have been deported from Saudi Arabia since 2017. Overall, over 6.4 million people have been detained since 2017 and 2.1 million undocumented migrant workers deported from Saudi Arabia.

The latest round of repatriations involves 102,000 migrants. It began in April 2022 and is expected to be completed by the end of the year, according to the Ethiopian government. So far, 70% of the 102,000 citizens have been returned home on 198 flights.

While both governments haggle over the deportations in regular diplomatic exchanges, deportees suffer the direct consequences.

On many occasions, returnees end up as internally displaced. They do not realise their migration objectives and they return home in the context of poverty and conflict.

In Saudi Arabia, migrants repeatedly have their human rights violated. They are routinely placed in detention centres indefinitely.

Once back home, they are faced with a difficult reintegration into their communities. This happens if they are perceived as having “failed” to achieve the economic objectives of migration.

The Ethiopian government banned labour migration to the Gulf and Sudan after the first wave of deportations in the early 2010s. This was in order to come up with policy and legislation to improve the protection of its migrant workers.

The ban was lifted in February 2018. At the same time, Ethiopia proclaimed that workers could migrate to only those Gulf countries that had signed bilateral agreements: Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

What needs to be done

Signing a bilateral agreement increases legal migration pathways for Ethiopian domestic workers. It also addresses the safe, dignified return of undocumented migrants.

But these arrangements don’t go far enough. Negotiations should also address the conditions of the detention camps and protection assistance for Ethiopian migrant workers. They should widen legal pathways for more Ethiopian migrants to work and live legally in Saudi Arabia.

Lastly, the Ethiopian side should press to regularise the status of irregular Ethiopian migrants. Saudi authorities are likely to resist this.

For its part, Ethiopia should do more for returning migrants. Lack of financial resources and skills makes it harder for returnees to re-enter the local labour market. This is partly because there are limited resources allocated for reintegration. Conflict in parts of Ethiopia makes the reintegration efforts difficult too.

Female returnees face stigma and discrimination from families and communities. This is partly because they are believed to be engaged in socially unacceptable practices such as commercial sex work.

Prioritising the reintegration of vulnerable migrants is key. This should seek to address individual needs as well as those of the family, community and structural problems. Community-based approaches to address stigma, prejudices and discrimination should be encouraged.

This task calls for a lot of resources. Ethiopia doesn’t have what’s needed and should look to the international community for help. But it will require hard work. The issue attracts little or no attention from international donors such as the European Union, which prioritises the return, readmission and reintegration of far fewer Ethiopian migrants working and living in Europe illegally.

Ethiopia has drafted the first ever national migration policy. This could possibly help improve the migration governance including return and reintegration efforts. It is key to strengthening the implementation capacity of government institutions at all levels and involving civil society, media, and the private sector in the reintegration process as they help facilitate labour market absorption, reduce stigma and discrimination.

Girmachew Adugna, Advisory Board Member, Research Center for Forced Displacement and Migration Studies, Addis Ababa University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Horn of Africa is facing its worst drought in 40 years. Scientists suspect that a multi-year La Niña cycle has been amplified by climate change to prolong dry and hot conditions.

After multiple failed harvests and amid high global food prices, the Horn is confronted with a severe food security crisis. Some 37 million people face acute hunger in the region, which includes Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda.

In Somalia alone, 40% of the population is facing food insecurity: about 6.7 million people. In neighbouring Ethiopia, the proportion is lower – 20% – but the absolute numbers are higher at 20.4 million.

It was not too long ago that drought led to highly divergent impacts between Somalia and Ethiopia. In 2010-2011, a devastating drought led to more than 260,000 deaths beyond normal levels of expected mortality in Somalia. Yet almost no one died in Ethiopia after a severe drought in 2015.

Why did so many people die in Somalia but so few in Ethiopia? I explore these and related questions in my recent book, States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security.

Using the cases of the two countries, among others, the book shows why Somalia had a famine in the early 2010s while Ethiopia did not, despite both being exposed to severe droughts.

The biggest differences were that, compared with Somalia, Ethiopia enjoyed a state with more capacity and more political inclusion, and made good use of foreign aid. These are factors that I identify in the book as contributing to how climate change is affecting the security of states. I include famine as a form of insecurity.

Better outcomes are expected in states with high capacity to deliver services, high political inclusion where all social groups are represented in government, and where international assistance is welcomed and shared broadly.

Two sets of conditions, two different outcomes

So how did Somalia and Ethiopia stack up on the three factors that contribute to a bad situation being made worse?

In the lead-up to Somalia’s famine in 2011, the country faced persistent problems of a weak national government that was being challenged by Al-Shabaab, a violent Islamist militia that controlled significant territory in the south of the country. The Somali government had limited ability to deliver services in the areas it controlled, let alone areas under Al-Shabaab.

For its part, the Ethiopian government invested in social safety net programmes to feed people in the midst of the drought through cash transfers, employment programmes and food assistance.

The issue of sections of the society being excluded was also in greater evidence in Somalia than in Ethiopia. A number of marginalised groups, notably the Bantu Somalis and the Rahanweyn clan, were among the most affected by the drought. Better connected groups diverted aid that otherwise would have benefited these communities.

Finally, Somalia was in much worse shape when it came to aid. Al-Shabaab militants were blocking aid into the country, which led to a number of humanitarian groups withdrawing from Somalia. In addition, the US, through the Patriot Act, discouraged NGOs from providing aid for fear it would end up in Al-Shabaab’s hands. Together, this meant that little humanitarian assistance came into Somalia precisely at the time when the country needed it most. Hundreds of thousands died.

Ethiopia was a favourite of the international community for foreign assistance. It received funds that supported its social safety net programmes, which helped it prepare for the drought and administer emergency aid supplies.

The current food security crisis in the Horn of Africa, however, reveals persistent vulnerability in both countries.

As Ethiopia’s case shows, progress can be undone. Rising political exclusion is leading to huge food security risks, particularly in the Tigray region where aid is currently largely blocked amid the ongoing violent conflict.

Equally worrisome is Somalia’s situation, where both local and external actors have struggled to build state capacity or inclusion in the face of a long-running violent insurgency.

What can work

My book provides some hopeful insights, as well as caution. It shows that for countries like Ethiopia and Bangladesh, international assistance can help address weak state capacity. Donors worked with local officials to address specific climate hazards, like drought and cyclones.

Such international assistance helped compensate for weak state capacity through discrete investments in early warning systems, targeted social services, such as food assistance or cash transfers, and hazard-specific protective infrastructure, such as cyclone shelters.

Those examples suggest that climate adaptation can save lives and contribute to economic prosperity.

However, as the unfolding dynamic in Ethiopia shows, progress can be reversed. Moreover, it’s far more challenging for external actors to build inclusive political institutions if local actors are not so inclined.

With climate change intensifying extreme weather events around the world, it is incumbent upon policymakers to enhance the practice of environmental peacebuilding, both to resolve ongoing conflicts through better natural resource management and to prevent future emergencies.

Joshua Busby, Professor, University of Texas at Austin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I must confess that I, too, am part of this trend. Over the last year, I’ve written more on the Ukraine conflict than any other issue. Every Monday morning for the last six months, I’ve appeared on KPFA radio out of the Bay Area to provide a weekly update of the situation in Ukraine. In part, I’ve followed the war there because I have a background in Russian and Soviet studies. I feel a certain obligation to write about a region of the world that has occupied so much of my attention over the years.

But as many voices especially in the Global South have pointed out, other wars are going on around the world. Why aren’t they getting as much media attention? Why hasn’t the West rallied so readily behind the victims of those wars? Where is the determination to punish the aggressors in those other conflicts?

These are good questions, which deserve answers regardless of what one feels about the conflict raging in Ukraine.

The Centrality of Geopolitics

The importance of Ukraine, some argued in the days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, boiled down to race. White folks in majority White countries—in Europe, North America, and Australia/New Zealand—sympathized with the plight of White Ukrainians in ways that they didn’t with the non-White victims of wars in other places like Yemen or Ethiopia. Ukrainian refugees in Europe have been welcomed with an enthusiasm that was largely lacking during earlier waves of Syrian, Afghan, and Libyan refugees. In the most extreme case of this racial sympathizing, White supremacists have largely backed Russia, seeing Putin as their staunchest global ally, though some White nationalists have instead backed openly far-right formations in Ukraine.

It’s true that White folks in the Global North have routinely thrown up their hands in the face of conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Skipping over those articles in the newspaper, they refuse to figure out the reasons for the fighting or accept the role of European or U.S. governments in the perpetuation of the wars. In the American case, at least, this tendency to ignore large swathes of the world is part of a general refusal to learn other languages or pay attention to other countries except as part of tourist itineraries. Race and racism may indeed play a role, but never discount the importance of sheer laziness and ignorance.

But let’s look at some other reasons for the current focus on Ukraine. For instance, the country is of supreme interest to Europeans because of sheer proximity. Ukraine is on the edge of Europe, has expressed strong interest in joining the European Union, and has extensive economic connections through energy and food to European consumers. Then there are the ties of genealogy, with many people of Ukrainian heritage now living in Western Europe, the United States, and Australia.

Ultimately, though, the war in Ukraine garners the lion’s share of the headlines—and thus the intellectual bandwidth of journalists, pundits, and policymakers—because it historically lies at the very center of geopolitics.

The originators of geopolitics—Mackinder, Mahan, Spykman—focused on the control of the Eurasian “heartland” and the waters surrounding it. Preoccupied with global hegemony, they were naturally drawn to the huge expanse of territory, resources, and industrial capacity of the Eurasian continent. Africa, Latin America, Australasia: these were peripheral concerns.

By this distorted view of the globe—a perspective that still informs the policies of the United States, Europe, and (arguably) Russia—Ukraine is at the very heart of the struggle for control of the globe. It is at the center of the Eurasian territory, and its coastline provides critical access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean beyond.

A war in Ukraine matters in a way that, say, the current conflict in Ethiopia does not, because it is vitally important in the internecine battles within the countries of the Global North over control of the entire game board.

But let’s take a look at some other reasons why Ukraine dominates the headlines.

Scale of Conflict

There actually aren’t that many interstate wars going on in the world today. The internal conflict in Yemen has become international with the intervention of Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies. The civil war in Ethiopia has an interstate dimension because Ethiopian leader Abiy Ahmed has allied with Eritrea to defeat a Tigray insurgency. Armenia and Azerbaijan have sparred over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, but that fight has abated, at least for the time being.

Other international wars have now become almost entirely national. The withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan allows the Taliban to refocus on fighting against its internal enemies. The war in Iraq has settled mostly into a simmering civil conflict, though a full-blown civil war could indeed return. The war in Syria, which still engages the United States, Turkey, and Russia, failed to dislodge Bashar al-Assad and has burned down to the embers, though another flare-up is possible. Similar conflicts in Kashmir, Libya, and Palestine have become intermittent, with relatively few casualties, though these conflicts could escalate quickly and become regional conflagrations.

Civil wars remain active in Myanmar and Somalia, while various extremist factions such as the Islamic State continue to launch sporadic attacks throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

Finally, there are the frozen wars—between the two Koreas, between China and Taiwan, inside Georgia—that could heat up if the various adversaries decide to supply the necessary spark.

But in terms of actual casualties, the conflict in Ukraine is clearly the most troubling war going on today, with tens of thousands of military and civilian deaths. The closest conflict in terms of scale would be the civil war in Myanmar with about 13,000 casualties so far in 2022. Other conflicts have generated fewer death tolls with about 5,000 deaths each in Ethiopia and Yemen this year.

Ukraine has also been in the news because of the number of refugees who fled the country—more than 7.6 million Ukrainians went to Europe in the aftermath of the February invasion— along with the hundreds of thousands who have left Russia to avoid the draft, prison, or economic uncertainty. Of course, Ukraine is not unique with regard to refugees. Nearly 7 million Syrians escaped persecution and civil war, over 6 million Venezuelans have left for other countries, and approximately 6 million Afghans have fled their homes.

Then there are the reports of war crimes taking place in Ukraine, involving summary executions, torture, rape, and indiscriminate targeting of civilians. Here, too, the Ukraine war faces stiff competition from the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar, the ongoing repressions in Syria, and the deliberate starvation of Yemenis by Saudi Arabia and its allies.

Yet, today’s horrors tend to crowd yesterday’s horrors out of the spotlight. As conflicts drag on, those with attention-deficit disorder—in some sense, all of us in this brave new world of information overload—begin to focus on something else. The sheer length of a conflict inevitably increases both attention fatigue and compassion fatigue. If the Ukrainian conflict goes into a second or a third year, a lot of people will begin to turn the dial and change the channel.

Beyond Good and Evil

Another reason why Ukraine is so much in the news is that the victims are “relatable.” That’s a term used to explain the popularity of characters in fiction and film. In the case of Ukraine, the average reader is drawn in by what they believe—and what so much media coverage implies in so many ways—is a basic conflict between “good guys” ad “bad guys.”

Most people love an underdog, and the Ukrainians have battled hard against a band of merciless invaders. So strong is this basic moral narrative that various complications fall to the wayside. Many Russians oppose the war. Some Ukrainian fighters come from the extreme right. Russia has some legitimate grievances about NATO expansion. The Ukrainian government has made some stupid moves like a state language law that “requires that Ukrainian be used in most aspects of public life.” Nothing is ever black and white.

Still, the Ukraine conflict can be explained in relatively simple language to people who know nothing of the complexities of the region. Russia has invaded a country to seize as much of its territory as possible; Ukraine is fighting back to avoid disappearing as a country. It’s hard not to stand on the sidelines and cheer the victories of the victims.

Other ongoing wars do not lend themselves so readily to such packaging. Take, for instance, the war in Ethiopia.

Prime Minister Ahmed, of Oromo background, has waged a political struggle against what had once been the ruling party from 1991 to 2018: the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. That political struggle turned violent when the TPLF, sidelined from Ahmed’s government, relocated to northern Ethiopia and, in November 2020, attacked an Ethiopian army garrison in Mekelle, the regional capital of the Tigray region. To defeat this Tigray insurgency, Ahmed teamed up with Eritrea, which battled Ethiopia until a 2018 peace agreement, brokered largely by Ahmed, finally ended the dispute. In addition to Eritrea, Ahmed enlisted the help of another ethnic group, the Amhara. The Oromo Liberation Army has also been involved in the fighting, though its role in committing atrocities is controversial. The Ethiopian government also stands accused of trying to starve the Tigrayans into submission through siege tactics.

As Jon Lee Anderson writes in The New Yorker:

Most of the international observers I spoke with believe that Abiy’s soldiers and the Eritreans have committed violence on a greater scale than the Tigrayans, but none of the partisans in the conflict seem to have avoided brutality. A recent U.N. report described war crimes and human-rights violations on both sides. In addition to the widespread starvation caused by the siege, Abiy’s forces and allies had killed and raped civilians, and carried out scores of air strikes on civilian targets, including one on a displaced-persons camp in which some sixty civilians died. The Tigrayan forces, the report said, had committed “large-scale killings of Amhara civilians, rape and sexual violence, and widespread looting and destruction of civilian property.” The senior Western official told me, in disgust, “They’re all as bad as each other.”

Similarly, although the Saudi coalition has committed an enormous number of human rights abuses in Yemen, their adversaries, the Houthis, are no angels either. Both India and Pakistan are responsible for human rights abuses in the areas of Kashmir that they occupy. The United States acted abysmally in Afghanistan, but it’s not like anyone in the world was exactly rooting for the Taliban to take over.

Meanwhile, despite the various defects of its government, Ukraine remains a democracy. Defending Ukraine is essential in this age of creeping authoritarianism. It is today’s version of Republican Spain trying to fend off fascism. In other words, there are sound political reasons for standing up for the underdog. Ukraine is not just a country, it’s a symbol.

Still, none of these reasons justifies the scant coverage that other conflicts have been accorded in the media compared to Ukraine. Just because a war drags on, takes place far from the Eurasian heartland, or doesn’t easily resolve into a battle of good versus evil, it still deserves the attention of journalists (who need to cover the casualties and explain the complexities) and policymakers (who need to try to end the bloodshed). The deaths of a few score people in a war is a lesser tragedy than a full-scale genocide, but it is a tragedy nonetheless.

But Ukraine also commands the world’s attention for understandable reasons. The war there is the result of an unprovoked attack, and it represents a gross violation of international law. When it comes to fighting injustice and promoting peace, we must embrace the dictum of improvisational comedy: “yes and…” Yes, the wars elsewhere in the world deserve our attention and we must decry Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus