Commentary:

Response to Boston Globe Articles on Ethiopia-Eritrea Conflict

Note: A two-week battle with the Boston Globe editors to publish the following story as a response to John Donnelly's lengthy series has failed to bear any fruit. The Globe staff have ignored well-written responses by other Ethiopians as well.

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The war that has been raging for 15 months between Ethiopia and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa has come to a standstill - at least for now.

The break in the conflict, which Globe staff writer John Donnelly dubbed "A Deadly Family Feud" in a two-part story (August 8 & 9), was brought about by Organization of African Unity (OAU) and US mediation efforts that spanned the entire length of the conflict.

But was John Donnelly's lengthy report - whose headline centered on the evocative word "family" - aimed at aiding the two nations achieve peace or at carving an Israel out of a fictionalized Eritrea and refeul the war?

Though the Ethiopia-Eritrea Conflict mainly revolves around the northern Ethiopian region of Badme, why did the reporter dwell at length on a peripheral flash-point - Tsorona - and shy away from writing about that focal point - BADME?

Yes, about Badme? The site the Eritrean army invaded in May last year and over which Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki swore by the sun and vowed his army's surrender over Badme means the end of the universe? Of course Isaias's army was flogged hands-down in an epic four-day battle, but why did the Globe turn a blind eye to the victory which stood out above everything else?

Covering the war entirely from the Eritrean side, the story remains not only critically deficient in facts, but also resorts to blackmailing Ethiopia as a belligerent state which dragged Eritrea back into another round of violence.

But is it Ethiopia or the unbridled militaristic adventures thriving within the Eritrean clique that prompted Eritrea to engage neighboring Yemen in a conflict over Red Sea Islands and to overthrow the Khartoum government in the last few years? Of course, thanks to Ethiopia's punitive measure against the rogue Asmara regime, now Mr. Isaias has been forced to mend fences with the said governments, having lost the islands to the Sanaa government after the start of the war with Ethiopia.

Since 1993, Eritrea has been preoccupied with sowing the seeds of discord and mistrust, death and destruction in the region, all the while carrying out acts of brigandage that range from Ethiopian money laundering to the smuggling of Ethiopia's number one foreign currency earner - coffee. With the downfall of Ethiopia's military regime in 1991, the expectation of the peoples of Ethiopia and Eritrea has been that peace had at last come to them and they would re-build their war-torn economies.

But from day one, Eritrea opted for a long march on the road of tyranny and violence, by instituting forced military training on its youth and effecting the massive deportation of 130,000 Ethiopians who had lived in Eritrea for generations. Instead of resorting to similar harsh measures, Ethiopia sidelined the issue, cut the size of its military expenditures and stepped up fighting poverty through which it thought to heal the wounds of war and open new vistas of peace and national growth.

Richard Cornwall, director of the African Division of the Institute for African Studies, says, "since 1993, when tiny Eritrea seceded from Ethiopia, Eritrea's dreams of prosperity have faded. The Ethiopian economy grew more than five percent annually for five years while Eritrea has not kept pace. As each new concrete factory and textile went up in Ethiopia, Eritreans feared their sister country would become financially independent, leaving them adrift."

To cope with Ethiopia, Eritrea continued to raise and impose port tarrifs on Ethiopia to alarming degrees. By the end of 1996, says a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Eritrea had amassed $120 million from Ethiopia from the port of Assab in that specific year alone - a huge sum of money considering Ethiopia's economy, which itself was striving to rise from the ashes of war.

Says Neely Tucker of the Knight Ridder News Services, in January 1998, Ethiopia stopped buying its gasoline from an aging oil refinery in the Eritrean port of Assab, instead buying refined oil gasoline directly from producers. Further, Ethiopian traders were ordered by the government to trade with the port in the nearby Djibouti, bypassing Eritrea.

"That was crippling," Cornwall adds. "Eritrea used to get tens of millions of dollars from that port and its refinery every year. When the Ethiopians pulled out, the economy took a hit."

In addition to the anarchic nature of the Eritrean regime, there are ample evidences that confirm the Eritrean trouble is rooted in economic crises and has nothing to do with territorial claims from Ethiopia. Invading the territories are false pretexts the Eritrean government used to divert public attention away from domestic concerns, including growing public concern over the disappearance of Eritrean political dissidents to a crumbling economy that has led to the shutting down of most of its rickety old factories.

"Ethiopians have been in the midst of rebuilding their nation when the Eritreans made a sudden attack," says Dr. Ann Waters-Bayer, a development expert who was involved for years with the "Indigenous Soil and Water Conservation" projects in now Eritrea-occupied Irobland. "To stop further bloodshed, the international community must help stop Eritrean aggression."

But such calls have so far fallen on deaf ears. Still worse, attempts have also been made by big newspapers like the Boston Globe to link that the war to the famine conditions prevailing in both countries. This is in tune with Asmara's obstructionist bid to create an artificial link that famine aid is being diverted to troops so that the international community would taunt Ethiopia to make compromises on its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Dismissing such allegations as baseless, Canadian Ambassador to Ethiopia, John Schram, told the Toronto Star recently that despite the border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea ...he was confident assistance to Ethiopia was not being diverted to the war effort. He said the Ethiopian government came up with 20,000 tonnes of wheat and had paid for the distribution of supplies. ``They certainly made their contribution.''

United Nations Country Team in Ethiopia on its part says it considers the war "a most unfortunate thing" but not a crucial factor in the current crisis".

What is left now for Eritrea to tarnish the image of Ethiopia in the international community? To avenge the successive military defeats it sustained in the battle-field, Eritrea is, with the help of a misguided media, struggling to draw foreign powers into the troubled Horn of Africa region. But would such activities help bring about solutions to the border dispute it is claiming was the cause of the conflict?

Currently, an OAU Peace Plan hangs in the balance - with Ethiopia seeking clarifications over the Peace Plan that Eritrea has already "accepted". In the meantime, Eritrea has set itself on multi-pronged tactics. While projecting itself as a new champion of peace in western capitals, the militaristic state on the other hand has continued to build up its defense forces - as the latest reports show the regime arming and training terrorist groups based in Horn of Africa.

As Ethiopian government spokesperson Selome Tadesse said, such actions are substantial proofs that Eritrea can never be trusted as a peace partner, and its continued activities signify at buying time to reinforce its army thrashed by Ethiopia's Defense Forces.

Defying an OAU appeal to desist from taking measures that would deepen the tension that is running high between the two countries, Eritrea has launched a new round of forced military conscriptions of youthful Eritreans as well as the elderly.

Such dangerous Eritrean activities only dim the peace prospects contained in the OAU Plan. As an age-old independent nation that has seen numerous invasions, there is no doubt Ethiopia would restore her territory even if Eritrea fails to give up hope on settling scores by means of the gun.

Is there a glimmer of hope at all? The future remains uncertain for Eritrea as John Donnelly out of a slip of the tongue ascertains by talking to an Eritrean youth opposed to the Isaias regime. "There will be a time when people can't tolerate it anymore," said the young Eritrean who declined to give his name to the Globe reporter. "If we keep on defending, defending, defending, the country collapses, more people die, what is there to come back for?"

Yes, what is there to come back for...from Eritrea's love for war and destruction? Peace would have been served better if the Globe had focused its report on such Eritrean victims of a blood-thirsty tyrant, than struggling to metamorphose a rogue state into a Mideast nation, and shove it into the inferno of war.