Incapable of Sustaining Weeds, by Tom Stevenson – 25 January 2024

From the London Review of Books

Review of: Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War, by Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan. Hurst, 2023

What are​ the major wars of our time? Ukraine and Gaza, of course. But what about Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Sudan? Most of these are civil wars with very large numbers of fatalities. But they inspire much less interest than Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine or Israel’s attack on Gaza. The war in Syria received years of diligent consideration, if only because the principal crimes were carried out by designated enemies of the US and UK. On the few occasions when the British government was forced to defend its co-sponsorship with the US of the catastrophic Saudi intervention in Yemen (including its supply of at least £23 billion worth of arms), it offered up paper-thin arguments but was met with little criticism. The attitude to Yemen has been affected ignorance, but the conflicts in Myanmar, Sudan and especially Ethiopia have been greeted with something closer to indifference. None of them greatly increases the risk of global thermonuclear war, so the stakes are lower than in Ukraine. But that alone can’t explain the almost complete lack of interest.

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Tom Stevenson is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books.

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