Abiy damned: Ethiopia’s looming civil war

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Hello, and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. There's much to learn about China's place in the global economy from arriving boxes full of fluffy little chicks. After decades of breeding, they grow huge and fast. And as much as China wants self sufficiency, it lacks its own super chickens at home. And we speak with an author who's looked into the macabre practice of binding books with human skin. They trace back to the 19th century, quite some time before the concept of informed consent took hold in the medical community. But first, it's three days since Americans went to the polls and the votes are still being counted. The latest tallies show Joe Biden inching ever closer to the 270 electoral college votes he needs to become President elect. This morning, he took the lead in Georgia for the first time. He's up in Arizona and Nevada and is chipping away at President Trump's advantage. In Pennsylvania, Mr. Biden called for patience as the last votes are tallied.

We have no doubt that when the count is finished, Senator Harris and I.

Will be declared the winners. So I ask everyone to stay calm, all the people to stay calm. The process is working, the count is.

Being completed and we, we'll know very soon.

But Mr. Trump has filed lawsuits in an attempt to stop the counts. He's complained baselessly of corruption.

If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late, we're looking at them very strongly, but a lot of votes came in late.

For the latest on the election results and what they mean for a divided America, listen to our sister show on American politics, checks and Balance. It's out. Later today, When all eyes were focused on that vote in America, Ethiopia's Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed took a drastic step that may drag his country into civil war. On Wednesday, he sent troops into action against the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front, or tplf, which runs the country's northern region of Tigre. In a television address, Mr. Abe accused the TPLF of launching an attack on a base housing federal troops. He said that a red line had been crossed.

Heavy fighting has broken out in Ethiopia's Tigray region, according to diplomatic sources, amid rising fears of a crisis.

Since then, there have been unconfirmed reports of fighting, artillery duels and air raids. The TPLF had been the dominant political party in Ethiopia for decades. That is, before Mr. Aby's party swept to power in 2018 on a reformist agenda and then removed several Tigrayan officials from the government. Tensions have been escalating since earlier this year. Mr. Abe says armed action is needed to bring the TPLF to heel and to hold together Ethiopia's fractious federation of ethnically based states. Other conflicts are already raging in a country still delicately making a transition to democracy. This latest escalation threatens to tear Ethiopia apart and could draw in neighboring countries across the Horn of Africa.

Here in Addis Ababa, the capital where I am now, the mood is pretty grim.

Tom Gardner is the Economist's Ethiopia correspondent.

People are worried about returning to civil war, which the country endured for many years in the 1980s. It's also a very polarised mood in the capital and in some other parts of the country, people are rallying behind the prime minister. But I was in Mekele, the state capital of Tigray, just last week, where the mood was very different. They see Abiy as an aggressor. They see this as an existential moment for them, and they were very much prepared for what they described as a war of self defence.

And who are the forces of Tigray that the government is fighting?

Tigray's Rulers, the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front. The TPLF is an armed group turned political party. It led the fight against the Derg, a Marxist junta, in 1991 after a long civil war in the 1980s. Since then, for almost three decades, the TPLF basically called the shots in the federal government and Addis Ababa before massive protests in 2018, which eventually forced it to make way for Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister. And the tplf. They see Abiy as a usurper determined to tear up the constitution which guarantees self rule for each of Ethiopia's nine ethnically based states, including Tigray, and even the right to secede.

And so what's the government's position about this conflict?

Well, they view the TPLF as spoilers who are sabotaging Ethiopia's fragile transition to democracy. They see the TPLF hand in pretty much all the ongoing conflicts in various different parts of the country which are frankly threatening to tear Ethiopia apart. And it's the latest escalation, really. After months of bitter feuding, in September, Tigray defied the federal government and went ahead holding its own regional election, which the central government had declared illegal. The federal government responded by slashing federal funding to the region just earlier this week, which the TPLF said amounted to a declaration of war. They're now calling for Aby to step down.

And Mr. Aby seemingly tried to avoid armed conflict here, but now that he's got it, do you think he can win?

Three factors make this conflict particularly dangerous. Firstly, because Tigray was on the front line of the war with neighbouring Eritrea in 1998-2000. It has a large militia and a paramilitary force manned by veterans. It's also the home base for Ethiopia's most powerful military units, amounting to more than half its soldiers, its aircraft, its tanks. And it also has an officer corps which the TPLF reckons would switch sides or mutiny if Abiy ordered them into battle against Tigre. Added to that, it's unlikely to be a simple operation because it would draw in both neighbouring regional states within Ethiopia, specifically Amhara Regional State, which has territorial claims along the border with Tigray and seems to be already engaged in pretty heavy battles with Tigrayan security forces as we speak. But also neighbouring Eritrea, whose president has a score to settle with the tplf.

And we've talked not so long ago about the other conflict that Mr. Abiy is trying to put down. I mean, this just adds fuel to.

A broader fire, quite possibly. Let Me just give you an example. Earlier this week the federal government started moving troops from the southwest from Abiy's own region of Oromia where he's waging a war against armed separatists. They moved these troops northwards, seemingly in preparation for a confrontation with Tigray. And within hours, it seems, a massacre took place there against minorities, about 30 to 50 maybe more people, women and children similarly executed by rebels. That gives you an example of just how fragile the situation is in other parts of the country which may well be inflamed and the military will be hard stretched to control with its attention and resources directed towards the north.

And with all that going on, I mean, how do you see this playing out? How could out and out war be avoided at this point?

Well, firstly, ABY and the TPLF need to stand their forces down. There needs to be international pressure on both sides to do that. Both sides will need to make compromises which unfortunately neither appears to be in much mood to do. They both claim they've done all they can to prevent escalation, I should say, but the terms that they put forward in order to sit down for dialogue are pretty tough. So as it stands, Abiy, the federal government risks rolling Ethiopia into another pointless, hellish war such as the one with Eritrea, which He ended in 2018 and won a Nobel Peace Prize for. And I think it's really important to underline at this point. Ethiopia is much, much too big to fail. It's the dominant hegemonic country in the Horn of Africa. It's home to some 110 million people. It could quite possibly Balkanize along ethnic lines. That instability could spread into neighboring countries. Eritrea, as we've mentioned, Sudan, which is going through a political transition. Somalia as well. The prospects are really frightening and all steps must be taken to avoid this.

Tom, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you very much, Jason.

At last week's annual meeting of China's Communist Party supremos, one message was a push to become less reliant on imports given the twin ongoing uncertainties of a trade war and a pandemic. The party wants to improve self sufficiency in a range of industries from airplanes to computer chips to electric cars. But the challenges of that kind of self reliance are laid bare. And if you take a look at another altogether fluffier commodity.

I've been on the trail of the high tech super chicken.

David Rennie is our Beijing bureau chief.

That led me to the east of China, to a city just north of Shanghai and to an industrial farm where they raise chickens that in China are known as white feather meat chickens. Broilers in the west, which grow to two and a half kilos in just 40 days, which is a huge amount faster than traditional Chinese farmyard chickens. The company that I visited is called a farm, but actually it looks a lot more like a very secure factory because they're very concerned about diseases. So the closest we got was to a loading bay at the back of a high tech breeding center. They were about to load cardboard boxes with 102 cheeping, rustling chicks a time into the back of this specialist truck. These are part of an international global supply chain spanning five continents. But the trick for China is that it has not yet been able to breed its own extremely high tech pedigree meat chickens. And so it actually relies on air freighted chickens flown into China to be fattened or to generate the other chickens that then turn into meat chickens.

I'm just trying to get my head around a super chicken. Tell me more about the science behind the super chicken.

So there's chickens that lay eggs and then there's chickens that have been bred intensively since the 1940s, mostly in the States, but also a bit in Britain, to just get fat and to grow enormous breasts and legs at incredible speed. And there's a couple of giant companies, both of them headquartered in the States, which have these incredibly valuable high tech pedigree chickens with genetic characteristics going back 80 years. And those high tech chickens never leave these maximum security farms which have their own DNA genetics laboratories attached and veterinary technicians. And that's because a single one of these pedigree hens will, over the course of her four or five year lifetime, have 4 million direct descendants. And those top of the line birds, they then have second generation offspring which then air flown either as eggs or as chicks to a whole bunch of dispersed high security farms belonging to the pedigree companies to hedge against diseases. And then the third generation chickens are air freighted to trusted local partners, including in places like China and the farm that I went to. They are given these air freighter chickens and then they immediately spend about six months growing them on. And then from those bred fourth generation chickens and finally fifth generation chickens which are what are turned into things like chicken nuggets and burgers.

But China hasn't made its own breed, essentially hasn't bred its own super chicken.

So China has some super chickens with Chinese characteristics. There are some big chicken companies that have what they say are almost as good, but the problem with almost as good is that when you are breeding hundreds of millions of meat chickens a year, the difference between a chicken which reaches full size in 40 days and one which reaches full size in 43 days is actually the difference between profitable and not. And because the big genetics companies are constantly tweaking and retweaking their top birds to be resistant to the latest disease, to have stronger bones, to have even quicker meat growth, if you don't keep getting your fresh genes from those, you're going to fall behind in the race. And one of the interesting dynamics is that China, as with so many things, whether it's high speed trains or airliners or autonomous vehicles, normally foreign companies that want to do big business in China, they come under tremendous pressure to transfer technology. And super chickens are no exception. So at various times, Chinese agricultural officials have said to the big players, you should really build one of those second generation, extremely high tech farms here in China. But to date, basically because it would presumably be commercial suicide for them to send their most valuable stock to China, they've always found a good excuse not to.

So if the overall the national push is towards self sufficiency, then why aren't Chinese authorities leaning that much harder on these firms to give up the really good breeding stock?

Well, there are two things in tension. One is China's desire not to be reliant on foreign imports. And that is pushing them to try and make some local firms breed their own chickens. But they also really want to be able to feed China's increasingly affluent middle classes meat every day. And so cheap clean meat is another top priority. And this is a really interesting example of how overall the Chinese Communist Party's push for self reliance is in tension with their desire to get prosperous and rich and give good quality products to their citizens as soon as possible. Because by far the quickest way to cheat meat is to use the most advanced genetics from these Western Companies which have 80 year gene banks behind them. But that does lead you dependent on these airplanes coming in with day old chicks.

And so what does that tension in the world of super chickens tell you about that broader tension of a China that is trying to be self reliant, but also to operate in a wider world.

So there's clearly real reasons to worry about being completely dependent on air freighters full of day old chicks. Not least because with COVID the flights got disrupted so much that some of the chicken farms had to charter planes. So it's a fragile link with the outside world. China does have a problem. It lacks clean farmland, it lacks clean water, but there's a larger problem, which is that China can't decide whether it's more concerned about being reliant on the outside world, or is it more keen to keep telling foreign companies with good technology that China is a friendly, open place to do business? Because here's the trap. The more that the Chinese leadership talks about self reliance as a vital national strategy, the more that foreign companies think, well, hang on, do you actually really want us to stick around for very long or are we just here to hand over our best technology and then you plan to throw us out? So you can see that China's increasing concern, even in some cases paranoia, about being dependent on the outside world, is self fulfilling because foreign companies are hearing a China that may not have long term plans to have foreigners around forever.

Thanks very much for your time, David.

Thank you.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, subscribe to the Economist. Get a great introductory offer by going to economist.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show Notes. In academic libraries, there are books made not from plant matter like paper, but from animals, parchment or vellum, some even stitched with sinew. In some specialist libraries, there are some even more, shall we say, personal tomes.

So there are some books bound with human skin.

Erika Shin writes about culture for the Economist.

They aren't these ancient Dark Age things. They're actually from the 19th century. And the author and librarian Megan Rosenbloom recently wrote a book about them called Dark Archives.

And what did she find in the Dark Archives?

So I spoke to her and a few skinbound books exist, but but not a lot is known about them.

It seemed to be this bit of an open secret that some alleged books existed, but no one really knew for sure. And a lot of people didn't necessarily believe they were real, even if someone had written inside bound in human skin.

There are about 31 books from public libraries that have been tested in the lab, and 18 have been found to actually be made of human leather, while 13 are actually made of animal leather.

And what about the content? What's inside the human leather?

So Ms. Rosenbloom also does historical research into these books backgrounds and she found that these were mostly medical books.

So it was interesting to discover that almost every book had some doctor in the background of the book, whether the doctor was just the person who removed the skin during an anatomical dissection or whether it was a doctor book collector who made.

So it's actually doctors who made these books?

Yeah, yeah. So medicine was at a tipping point in the 19th century and that's when doctors and medical students started doing rigorous training, including dissections, which was great for the development of science, but it had mixed ethical impact and led to the objectification of bodies.

There was a bit of a side effect, which is a tendency toward viewing patients more as like organs and diseases to be cured and not full people. And then you add that with the social elevation of doctors doing things like collecting art and books, and it led to these real examples of human skin books being created.

So this really becomes a reflection on medical ethics, consent, and mortality.

It wasn't like just the Hannibal Lecter kind of serial killer type people that you would imagine, these well respected doctors. It was the mindset that made it so that they didn't feel it was any different to save a piece of skin when all the rest of what's left over after you do an anatomical dissection is going in a bucket anyway.

Is there a sense for whether anybody agreed to have their skin used for these things?

Yeah, so there wasn't really a lot of consent over your dead body at the time. It wasn't really an established medical concept. And a lot of these people weren't friendless. They had family members, they had friends, but they unfortunately just couldn't afford a burial. So a lot of bodies would end up on the dissection table from the hospital. So, for example, one patient, Mary lynch, she was an Irish immigrant and she had tuberculosis. And then when her family visited her in hospital, she also got trichinosis, which is ultimately what led to her death. And sadly, they couldn't afford to take her home. So then she ended up on the dissection table of John Stockton Huff, a doctor. And three of the books in the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia are actually bound from her skin.

And so what ethical questions do these things raise now, now that we know they are actually made from human skin?

Yeah. So the big question here is, of course, what should we do with these? Do you keep them in a library or do you keep in a morgue? So Ms. Rosenblum believes that we shouldn't destroy them.

We can't change the circumstances in which they were created. But I do think that we can apply context to them, to use them to learn from in various ways, use it as a tool to teach about the ethics of. Of medicine.

Thanks very much for your time, Erica.

Thanks, Jason. It was nice to be here.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here on Monday. Sam.