Martin Plaut

London

Writer and Senior Research Fellow at Freelance

South Africa, the Horn of Africa. Fellow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies. Made in 🇿🇦🇪🇺🇬🇧

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Articles

President Trump imposes double taxation on Africans - adding a tax on remittances

2 days ago | martinplaut.com | Saikou Jammeh |Martin Plaut

After slashing foreign assistance and introducing steep tariffs, the Trump administration is proposing a new tax on remittances. African nations would be among the hardest hit. People sending money from the United States already pay income tax on their earnings, so they would effectively be taxed twice, critics say. Under the new legislation, immigrants would pay an additional 3.5 percent federal tax on top of the roughly 6 percent they pay banks and remittance companies.
EEPA Situation Report, Horn of Africa, No. 636 - 2 June 2025

4 days ago | martinplaut.com | Martin Plaut

Kamil Idris was sworn in as Sudan’s new prime minister on Saturday. His informal predecessor was Dafallah Al-Haj Yousif, Sudan’s former ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Idris is the first prime minister since the coup in 2021. Idris announced the dissolution of the Sudanese caretaker government on Sunday. It was not specified when a new government will be announced. The current government will continue its duties until then.
The plight of Eritreans driven from their country - their most reliable support? Local people

5 days ago | martinplaut.com | Martin Plaut

This study provides a detailed analysis of what the Eritrean diaspora faces. These are two of them:Eritreans have more generally been able to rely on better transnational connections, these networks are under increasing strain.
India’s Little-Known Role in the African Slave Trade

6 days ago | martinplaut.com | Martin Plaut

By Martin PlautSource: The WireThis complicity is rarely acknowledged today, yet it is essential for understanding the full scope of the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slave Dealers and Slaves Zanzibar. Photo: Wikimedia commonsThe role of African slaves in India and the participation of Indians in slave administration has, until recently, received little attention. Africans were not the first people enslaved in India, but Arab traders trafficked them to the subcontinent as early as the 6th century CE.
Eritrean girl, burned on a boat, dies at 16 after finding her mother

6 days ago | martinplaut.com | Martin Plaut

“Her story is the tip of the iceberg but we are in contact daily with other situations that are no less tragic.”Chiara Vitali Saturday 31 May 2025The girl had been hospitalized for months at the civic hospital after suffering burns from an explosion during a crossing to Lampedusa.
Fractured Promises: How Ethiopia’s Reform Era Spiraled into Crisis (2018-2025)

1 week ago | martinplaut.com | Martin Plaut

“If you talk about us without us, you continue to fail us”By Haimanot Atinkut: Independent Political Analyst Specializing in Horn of Africa AffairsThe content includes all major historical and analytical sections from 1974 to 2025, and concludes with references and source listings. 1. Derg to Democracy? The Shadows That Still LingerIt’s hard to talk about Ethiopia’s present without revisiting its past.
Tigray - evidence of the death toll in the 2020 - 2020 war

1 week ago | martinplaut.com | Martin Plaut

Source: Population Health Metrics, , , Mervat Alhaffar, Lucia Cassini, Jennifer Palmer, & Population Health Metrics volume 23, Article number: 19 (2025) Cite this article491 Accesses9 AltmetricMetricsdetailsThe war in Tigray Region, Ethiopia (November 2020 to November 2022) ended with formal commitments to accountability, but these have yet to produce publicly available accounts of the harms caused by the conflict.
Ethiopia: The massacre at Birakat dissected

1 week ago | martinplaut.com | Martin Plaut

Source: The EconomistMay 29th 2025|NairobiShareTwo months ago, in the early afternoon of March 31st, gunfire erupted in Birakat, a town in the Amhara region of northern Ethiopia (see map). Panicked residents ran for cover as the Ethiopian army battled local militias. Five hours later the guns fell silent, briefly. But after the army had taken control of the town, according to three eyewitnesses, a massacre began.
Libya’s refugees and detention centres

1 week ago | martinplaut.com | Martin Plaut

By Jérôme Tubiana Source: London Review of BooksIn 2019, I made several visits to Dhar al-Jebel, a Libyan detention centre better known as Zintan, after the nearest town. Around a thousand migrants, most of them Eritreans, were being held there indefinitely. Nearly all had been arrested by the Libyan coastguard in 2017, the year it began to receive EU funding to stop migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean, which was still a crime under a Libyan law dating from the Gaddafi era.
EEPA Situation Report, Horn of Africa, No. 635 - 26 May 2025

1 week ago | martinplaut.com | Martin Plaut

The Joint Forces group of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) announced the recapture of Al-Dabiabat in South Kordofan state, which is a strategic city linking South Kordofan, North Kordofan and East Darfur. Large-scale displacement is ongoing in South Kordofan due to clashes between SAF and Rapid Support Forces (RSF). RSF has turned the Zamzam displacement camp near El Fasher in North Darfur into a military barracks and artillery base. RSF uses the camp as a base from which to shell El Fasher.