In today's LA Times, Ronan Farrow, a Yale Law School student and son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, wrote an opinion piece entitled "Ethiopia's war against its own". In the article, he writes about the human rights violations committed by the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) against ethnic Somalis living in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia. Farrow, however, seeks not only to bring the story to light but he takes it further quoting Ogadeni refugees in Kenya as blaming the United States more than the Ethiopian government because the US supplies Ethiopia with military aid and arguing that because the US needs Ethiopian cooperation to fight the war on terrorism it looks the other way regarding human rights abuses. Farrow concludes by saying the US should make aid conditional on Ethiopia taking action to prevent future human rights violations.
I have a number of problems with the piece. First, while the Ethiopians may indeed be guilty of their alleged crimes, Farrow neglects to mention that ethnic Somalis in the Ogaden have been fighting a separatist war against the central government since at least 1977, when Somalia invaded Ethiopia in order to make good on irredentist claims for the region. I say this not to excuse the ENDF but to point out that the Ogadenis are not completely innocent and the situation is not as clear cut as presented.
Second, Farrow writes that historically the US has supplied Ethiopia with military aid. This is not true. While a defense pact was signed in 1953, from 1974-1991 Ethiopia was ruled by a Marxist-Leninist leader Haile Mariam Mengistu. During this period the US provided no military aid to Ethiopia which in fact was supplied by the Soviet Union in another episode of Cold War rivalry, this time played out in Africa. Much of the military hardware still used by the ENDF including tanks, aircraft and helicopters are are Soviet made. Further, the main infantry assault rifle is the AK-47. Only after Mengistu was overthrown was US military aid resumed.
Finally and in my view most importantly, Farrow makes it seem that the US contributes a massive amount of military aid to Ethiopia and that Ethiopia relies on that aid to arm and pay its soldiers. He writes: "The bullet that shattered Hamad's hip, and the gun that fired it, were likely supplied by the United States. The soldier who pulled the trigger was almost certainly compensated with U.S. military aid." The numbers, however, tell a different story. The ENDF is 200,000 strong and the 2008 defense budget is 3.5 billion Ethiopian birr or $385 million. How much is provided by the US? In FY 2007, Foreign Military Financing (FMF) and International Military Education and Training (IMET) from the US to Ethiopia was a grand total of $2.7 million and the requested amount for FY 2008 was $1.5 million. Given the tiny proportion of US military aid relative to the overall defense budget, it seems that in fact the bullet that shattered Hamad's hip and the gun that fired it were NOT likely supplied by the US and the soldier who pulled the trigger was almost certainly NOT compensated with US military aid. Farrow tries to link the human rights abuses to the US military aid and to the uninformed reader it seems plausible, looking at the numbers though it seems highly suspect.
For me the piece reflects something larger. A worldview and an understanding of how US foreign policy should be conducted different from my own. Farrow believes, I think, that human rights should be a primary factor in influencing which countries the US engages and the manner in which that is done. His argument regarding Ethiopia is that it doesn't matter how valuable Ethiopia is in terms of fighting terrorism in the Horn of Africa or how important its role a strategic ally, if it is guilty of HR abuses the US should make aid to conditional. Further, he argues US support is largely self-defeating because by supporting a government that commits human rights will only increase the number of terrorists.
I am not anti-Human Rights, although I have quite a different idea of what human rights are relative to the UN Human Rights Council. However, I don't believe that HR should be the primary factor driving foreign policy strategy especially when in regard to military and security issues. We are not yet at a point in time where US national interests play a secondary role to greater global concerns. Realpolitik is oftentimes the necessary mindset for conducting proper foreign policy. The world is not a safe and happy place and sometimes to achieve our goals we must work with unsavory characters, just like the US was an ally of the USSR during WWII and the US funded the Mujahadeen when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. So to in the war on terror; right now the chief threat to the US is Islamic terrorism. And while sometimes in the past that threat has been exaggerated, it is nevertheless a clear and present danger. There are bad people who want to do harm to our country, our citizens, and our interests because they don't like our values and our way of life. Protecting America and American interests is paramount to our allies' human rights records. Aid to our allies in Africa should be appropriated with that in mind.
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4 comments:
Although it is certainly satisfying to see a Yale Law student put in his place by an unemployed, over-educated blogger, I do believe that there is more legitimacy to Mr. Farrow's contentions than you give him credit for, even if the specific points made are not the strongest. It seems clear that his central idea is an all too familiar one: nation of questionable moral standing is supported and propped up by US aid aimed at a singular US interest, thereby tacitly condoning human rights and other violations (see, for example, Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on Kenya from last week: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/opinion/21Kristof.html?scp=6&sq=ethiopia&st=nyt. )
It may be the case that the lions share of Ethiopia's military spending does not come from US tax dollars, but if a Pentagon spokesman can claim, a little over a year ago, that the US and Ethiopian militaries "have a close working relationship," and have ties that include intelligence sharing, arms aid and training that gives the Ethiopians "the capacity to defend their borders and intercept terrorists and weapons of mass destruction," (see this article from USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-01-07-ethiopia_x.htm) I would say that Mr. Farrow is not quite as off the mark as your raw numbers would suggest.
Also, is the diminished amount of FY 2008 aid not due, at least in part, to Rep. Payne’s efforts at bringing these abuses to Congress’s attention, which Farrow talks about in the piece? (That’s not rhetorical - I don’t know if that is the case).
While you may disagree as to what issues should be paramount in deciding US foreign aid, stating that there are bad people in the world and that you sometimes have to ignore the bad things they do oversimplifies the moral struggle we should be engaging in before giving away our money. The end result may be the same in this particular instance, but it is extremely important for human rights considerations to play a major role in the decision making process.
I concede that the statements in the last paragraph were hyperbolic and perhaps taken to the extreme in an effort to counterbalance the message I believe Mr. Farrow to be espousing. Nevertheless, I still don't believe that a moral struggle, as you put it, should be part of the process when engaging how to give aid nor do I believe it to be "extremely important for human rights considerations to play a major role in the decision making process". They should be factored in but strategic foreign policy cannot be driven by emotional and moral calculations. At base, the interests of the United States must come first.
Further, while we may wish for human rights to drive policy, recent history has in fact shown that it does not. In the past 15 years both Republican and Democratic administrations have chosen not to get involved in situations which morally compelled action. I refer of course to Rwanda and Darfur. And when the US did get involved on such grounds, it either left after the first US casualties ie Somalia or did not arrive early enough to prevent the vast majority of death and destruction ie Bosnia and Kosovo. In none of these five cases does the US have strong national interests and thus to me it seems that in a democracy, the execution of foreign policy must be based on more than moral compulsion and human rights. Obviously, the Ethiopia case does not regard US troops but I believe that the underlying strategies and philosophies are similar.
Your point is well taken, and I can certainly respect the notion that the interests of your own population come before those of a foreign population, but our inaction and late action in Rwanda, Somalia and Bosnia and Kosovo are stains upon our national history as Darfur will be very soon. The fact that Democrats and Republicans alike have been responsible for their own shares of the responsibility excuses neither.
Again, I think you and I have different philosophical beliefs as to what the US' responsibilities are which is why I completely disagree with your conclusion that inaction is a stain on our national history. Nor does US inaction need to be excused. The US as a superpower is not required to get involved every time there are ethnic killings, human rights violations around the world. From my perspective it seems you philosophically cannot accept that if something bad is going on, the US can stay out of it. Further, it would seem that those who share your thoughts want to have it both ways. The US should intervene on occasions that were mentioned above but not be a super power and imperial policeman. Its either one or the other.
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