Ethiopia, London, finger

Hello Subscribers!

A new blog post went up on Friday, about the latest developments in northern Ethiopia (see also this previous Ethiopia post and this follow-up). The federal government has now suddenly withdrawn its troops from the contested province of Tigray, which I found a really surprising move. The official line is that this constitutes a “unilateral ceasefire”, but I find that hard to believe. In any case, the TPLF (Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front) have retaken the province’s capital Mekele; apparently to joyous cheers from the local population. Now the TPLF is recruiting scores of young men ready to go and fight on the south-western front line with the neighbouring province of Amhara, whose paramilitary forces still hold some Tigrayan territory. This could be the prelude to another stage in an escalating civil war. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of civilians are in dire need of humanitarian aid, as another famine looms. It’s all very volatile and disturbing.

For the new blog post I dipped into my archive from my trip to Tigray in January 2020 and selected a few photos, e.g. of the flags of the different factions involved and from the Tigrayan Martyrs Monument & Museum, including displays with involuntarily amusing labels. The featured photo above was one of them, showing displays of guns in the museum and a label with the rather dodgy English line “The weapons that commenced the arm struggle”.
  

Personally I’m not struggling with my arm – but with my finger. Twenty-four days since the operation on my “trigger finger” on my left hand, and two weeks since the stitches came out, the ring finger is still rather stiff, no improvements there. But at least the op wound is now closed so I can wash my hands normally again and no longer have to bag up my hand when showering. We had such hot weather here in Vienna that keeping the wound dry was impossible – that will have delayed the healing. I have another check-up appointment tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll get a better idea about the prognosis and clearer instructions as to what I have to do to try and retrain my finger to become fully flexible again.
  

For those with an interest in football (or ‘soccer’ for North Americans) today is a Big Day, the EURO 2020 (in 2021) final in London this evening! In England and Italy this topic will dominate the whole day, I’m sure. I will watch the match too, and I’m more neutral, though I admit it would be great for England to win its first major title since 1966 (and the second in total), and that at home. However, in this tournament Italy were putting on a tremendous show that’s been quite different from their old style of rather defensive and destructive football with which they won the World Cup in 2006 (for the fourth time). Now they’re suddenly super creative and really fun to watch.

But there have been dark elements in this tournament too, not least the near fatal sudden cardiac arrest of Danish player Christian Eriksen during Denmark’s first match in the group stage. Denmark’s subsequent fairytale recovery and success was only stopped by England in the semi-finals. The dark element here was the behaviour of some English “fans”, what with booing the opponents’ national anthem and using laser pointers to distract the goalkeeper … not very becoming for a country that lays claim to having invented the notion of ‘fair play’. Worse appears to have happened also outside the stadium, with Danish fans, even children, being vulgarly insulted and spat at by England “fans”. Similar things were reported after the England match against Germany. There has been suitable outrage and calls for abandoning such unsporting behaviour. Hopefully those calls will be heeded tonight. We will see. And then there’s the coronavirus element … with 65,000 spectators allowed into Wembley Stadium tonight, this could be a super-spreader event, also given that there have been numerous reports of very lax entrance checks of negative test results or vaccination certificates, as well as lack of bag checks. Maybe security controls will be tightened up a bit for the final. Well, fingers crossed, and may the better team win …

So much for this week.

Stay safe.

Best,

Peter