The Nobel Peace Prize awarded Friday, October 8 two investigative journalists, the Filipino Maria Ressa and the Russian Dimitri Mouratov. “Free, independent and factual journalism serves to protect against abuse of power, lies and war propaganda“said the president of the Norwegian Nobel committee. A committee which has sometimes awarded the prestigious prize to the wrong person, for example in Burma and Ethiopia.
WhenAung San Suu Kyi receives the Nobel Prize in 1991, she is still under house arrest by the authoritarian regime in power. The award saluted the symbol of the fight for freedom that it represented. When his government was elected to power in 2015, Western democracies all thought they would see the country finally slip into an era of freedom. But in reality, they became disillusioned quite quickly, because of the reaction ofAung San Suu Kyi on major topics. There was the Rohingya crisis in 2017. Before the International Court of Justice, she defended the soldiers, who were accused of genocide of the Rohingya ethnic group, explaining that Burma was a country with complex ethnic relations. At that moment, Europe opened its eyes and began to think that there was perhaps another side to this person, once erected as a perfect figure of democracy.
The government ofAung San Suu Kyi was also accused of attacking journalists and activists. They denounced flaws in the country’s political system, such as the famous case of journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were investigating the assassination of Rohingyas by the Burmese army. They spent more than a year in prison before being forgiven.
Despite everything, Aung San Suu Kyi remains widely popular in his country. The debate abroad to decide whether or not she deserves her Nobel Prize hardly exists in Burma. But it is still criticized by certain minorities. The multiple ethnic groups that make up the Burmese population have been calling for more rights and autonomy for years. In these areas, Aung San Suu Kyi like a politician who did not fight to defend the rights of ethnic groups, she embodies a government that would rather smooth the country. For these populations, a little new blood in politics would be welcome.
11 months. It is the time that separates the speech of Abiy Ahmed, a young Ethiopian Prime Minister, at the platform of the Nobel Committee in Oslo, from the start of the Tigray War. For many, especially in Europe, the rapprochement between these two dates was particularly shocking. Because Abiy Ahmed, 43 years old at the time of his Nobel Prize in 2019, ticked all the boxes of the reformer, ready to heal the wounds of Ethiopia, a country torn by intercommunal tensions. It is presented as the peacemaker with neighboring Eritrea. In Norway, he notably presented his new doctrine: the philosophy of Medemer, an Amharic word which means “synergy”. It announced the end of the spirit of revenge in the country of the Horn of Africa.
Yet, it seems that this was the spirit that prevailed in November 2020, as his government and Tigray province went to war. The conflict has been going on for almost a year and has created its share of destruction, with most likely tens of thousands of deaths. Today, at least 400,000 people have crossed the threshold of famine in northern Ethiopia because of the fighting. The Tigrayan rebels and Abiy Ahmed are blaming themselves for the causes of the conflict, above all political.
Abiy Ahmed has radically changed his image. He is sometimes seen wearing a military uniform to mobilize his troops. He even called for the general mobilization of young Ethiopians to go and fight against the Tigrayan rebels. A kind of conscription which allowed him to raise an army of militiamen to go and fight against the rebels of Front for the Liberation of the Peoples of Tigray. This party that he sometimes qualifies as “junta”, but also of “Cancer” and of “weed that must be uprooted from Ethiopian landThis rhetoric, of course, is frightening and has forced the United States to react to avoid the generalization of these calls to hatred. A former hope of the international community, Abiy Ahmed has revealed himself to be a warlord in less than two years.