The fantasy of liberal \u2018political correctness\u2019 was shattered this week when a raging mob of South Sudanese refugees rioted in the western Ethiopian region of Gambella and killed<\/a><\/em> at least 14 people.
\n<\/em>The rampage was sparked by a road accident in which an NGO vehicle crashed into and killed two young girls. The victims were Nuer and the car was driven by what some have termed a \u201chighlander\u201d, or an individual from the central mountainous regions around which the Ethiopian state historically crystallized, and this caused the majority-Nuer South Sudanese refugees to explode into an orgy of violence and carry out their killings. While the official death toll is slightly over a dozen people, another report<\/a><\/em> cautions that it \u201ccould rise further since the refugees chased the victims to the forest, where they mutilated the bodies\u201d. 41 refugees have since been arrested<\/a><\/em>, but it\u2019s unclear whether any more murder suspects still remain at large.
\n<\/em>Breaking The Narrative
\n<\/strong>None of this was ever supposed to happen, well, according to Western Liberals and Cultural Marxists<\/a> at least. In their \u2018picture-perfect\u2019 view of the world, only \u201cracists\u201d, \u201cfascists\u201d, and \u201cwhite supremacists\u201d would ever dare allege that overwhelming refugee influxes could destabilize host countries, but lo and behold, that\u2019s exactly what happened in Ethiopia\u2019s Gambella region. The western area of the country is hosting 270,000 mostly-Nuer South Sudanese refugees<\/a>, despite only having an indigenous population of about 300,000. This has contributed to Ethiopia becoming the largest refugee-hosting country in Africa<\/a>, and it also means that there are almost more refugees in Gambella than there are locals. Seeing as how most South Sudanese refugees are Nuer, this has destabilized the already tense ethnic balance in this part of Ethiopia and can be said to have demographically reengineered it to a large degree. Under such pressure, it\u2019s little wonder that all that it took was a small-scale vehicular accident to put the region on the edge of civil war.
\nPolitical Sabotage
\n<\/strong>Not even a week prior to the refugee riots, South Sudanese rebels invaded<\/a> Gambella, killed over 200 people, and kidnapped around 100 children, prompting the Ethiopian military to stage a cross-border operation<\/a> in attempting to free them. This incident shook regional stability and showed that South Sudan\u2019s conflict was increasingly spilling over the Ethiopian border, and no longer just in humanitarian terms, but militant ones, too. The timing of both of these attacks \u2013 the rebel and refugee ones \u2013 appears to have coincided with South Sudanese Vice-President Riek Machar\u2019sreturn<\/a> to the capital of Juba in order to implement the peace process that was agreed to in August. Tellingly, Machar, an ethnic Nuer, was in Gambella<\/a> at this time en route to returning to his home country from the talks in Addis Ababa, and the Nuer refugee riots and preceding rebel raid might have been timed to sabotage his return at the last minute.
\nThe Anti-China Plot
\n<\/strong>To expand on that idea, it actually makes sense if considered from a global strategic standpoint. South Sudan\u2019s civil war has served the tangential purpose of unleashing a couple hundred thousand \u201cWeapons of Mass Migration<\/a>\u201d against Ethiopia, which itself is a very ethnically diverse and demographically fragile state. In a sense, South Sudan\u2019s post-independence destabilization can be seen as also achieving the goal of putting long-term asymmetrical pressure on Ethiopia through the planting of hundreds of thousands of identity-conflict \u201ctime bombs\u201d, which is essentially what some of the Nuer refugees are regretfully beginning to function as. The reason that Ethiopia is being targeted with such uncouth weapons of war is because of its pivotal role in China\u2019s global One Belt One Road network, particularly through the Chinese-built Djibouti-Ethiopia Railroad<\/a> and the Chinese-financed<\/a> LAPSSET Corridor<\/a> from Kenya\u2019s Lamu port to Ethiopia\u2019s capital of Addis Ababa. Taken together, these two access routes will allow Ethiopia to unleash its full economic potential and become one of China\u2019s closest multipolar allies, provided of course that a series of internal crises doesn\u2019t offset that first.
\nHybrid Warfare
\n<\/strong>For these reasons, the US would like to stir up identity conflict within the diverse state in order to incite another civil war there, but this time one which would result in the fragmented Identity Federalism<\/a> of the country or its formal dissolution into a scattering of tribal- and ethnic-based states. The grand strategic purpose of China\u2019s ambitious multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects would thus neutralized in comparison to their original intent, fully in line with the \u201cLaw Of Hybrid War<\/a>\u201d which states that the US is seeking to provoke such identity conflicts for these very same purposes. In response to this Hybrid Wa<\/a>r threat, the Ethiopian government has tried hard to foster a strong sense of civilizational patriotism in order to unite its disparate ethnic and regional identity groups, but the threat remains that local differences could still be exploited by foreign factors in order to spark an uncontrollable conflagration of chaos.
\nSetting The Stage
\n<\/strong>The author wrote<\/a> about the latest attempt to use identity conflict as a trigger for a nationwide crisis at the end of last year when the Oromo, the largest ethnic plurality in the country, staged a series of high-profile riots in response to the government\u2019s controversial use of eminent domain. Prior to that, the author also wrote two related pieces, one for Katehon<\/a> and the other for The Saker<\/a>, about how the GCC is planning to use Eritrea as a launching pad for anti-Ethiopian activity in the future, predictably through the provocation of internal identity conflict. The former article specifically warned that the \u201ccurrent tribal violence in South Sudan (could) motivate a spillover effect into the neighboring Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People\u2019s Region (home to 45 different ethnic groups) or Gambella Region that \u2018naturally\u2019 creates the state-fragmenting process\u201d, and as fate would have it, part of that forecast has already come true with the South Sudanese refugee rampage in Gambella and the preceding cross-border kidnapping raid. Although the situation presently appears to be under control, it can\u2019t be certain that a repeat of either of these two conflict triggers will occur, especially considering that the nearly 300,000 refugees in Gambella could once more fall victim to manipulative crowd control techniques in turning them into \u201cWeapons of Mass Migration\u201d for indirect use against China.
\nConcluding Thoughts
\n<\/strong>To wrap up the article, it\u2019s important to return back to its title and speak about how the weaponization of South Sudanese refugees against Ethiopia disproves one of the foundational tenets of modern-day \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d. It would never be countenanced by Western Liberals and Cultural Marxists, let alone admitted after the fact of its provable occurrence, that refugees could be used to destabilize their host country, let alone when the evidence of this happening is of African-on-African aggression. The post-modern employment of \u201cWeapons of Mass Migration\u201d is a very real phenomenon that the author investigated in a two<\/a>\u2013part<\/a> series earlier in the year, but in this specific context, it\u2019s being leveraged against China\u2019s New Silk Road interests in the Horn of Africa.
\nThe \u201cpolitical incorrectness\u201d of what happened in Gambella doesn\u2019t take away from the destabilization that it caused, and ignoring the on-the-ground facts in favor of maintaining ideological \u201cclarity\u201d and \u201cconsistency\u201d results in nothing more than the creation of an imagined reality that\u2019s completely divorced from actual events. Moreover, denying that \u201cWeapons of Mass Migration\u201d exist actually \u2018legitimizes\u2019 \u201cIsrael\u201d<\/a> and enables the use of such unconventional strategies against other multipolar countries as well. Therefore, it must be underscored that the sooner that observers come to recognize the use of this enhanced form of post-modern weaponry, whether waged indirectly against Russia by using Arab refugees in Europe or against China through the utilization of South Sudanese ones in Ethiopia, the sooner that they can collectively put their energy together in exposing other similar such plots and devising appropriate countermeasures in responding to them.<\/p>\n