At 3am on Wednesday, November 4, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed appeared on state television to declare a six-month state of emergency in the country’s northern Tigray region. According to Abiy, the Tigray regional security forces had committed ‘treason’ by attacking federal military bases in the regional capital Mekelle as well as Dansha, killing and injuring an unspecified number of soldiers in the process. This announcement set in motion a chain of events which could eventually lead to the breakup of Ethiopia itself with far-reaching consequences for the Horn of Africa.
As has become customary, the recent war in Karabakh is viewed from two sides in Russia: liberals extol the virtues of Turkish generals trained by NATO and Israeli drones, while both secret and obvious Putin admirers tell us on Liva (russo-ukrainian media) that revolutionaries (in quotes or without) always lose wars. There is not a grain of truth in this dichotomy. The militia armies created by the bourgeois revolutions have had great victories. Not only in the 19th century. Actually, the history of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic began with the victory of the Armenian militia in the war three decades ago. Then, Azerbaijan was richer, had a more numerous and well-armed army, but if Azerbaijan had local successes in that war, then they are associated not with former president Mutalibov, the director of a local refrigerator plant, or the KGB general Aliyev, but with a short period of rule by a half-crazy dissident-pan-Turkist, Elchibey. Unlike the draftees, students and workers who were arrested on the streets of Baku, his supporters at least understood why they were fighting. It was this factor that ensured the victory of Armenia in that war; high fighting morale and conscientious discipline of the militia army, formed against the background of a high level of education and general culture. The war in Karabakh, and the hardships and casualties associated with it, became the foundation of modern Armenia.