May 25, 2000

Late tonight we heard the long-awaited news that Zalambessa had been liberated and the Ethiopian flag raised over the town at midnight.

As soon as the Eritrean dictator realized his troops had been destroyed, he told his foreign minister to announce a troop withdrawal. Eritrean diplomats stayed up long past midnight in Asmara, and the Eritrean UN representative stayed late into the evening in New York to inform the UN.

In fact, the whole thing was bogus. Ethiopia had already captured the town. The only Eritrean troops left in Zalambessa were already dead by the time Issayas Afeworki announced to the world that he would withdraw.

The following was written before I realized the Eritrean scheme was a complete hoax:

Eritrea's announcement of a plan to pull its trooops out of Zalanbessa by midnight, May 25 is reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s announcement on Feb 25, 1991. Two days after allied troops shattered his lines, he announced that he was withdrawing his forces from Kuwait.

It is strange how entirely predictable this was. The world has noted the behavior patterns of Issayas Afeworki before. As the Washington Post wrote on May 20:

"Earlier military losses were restricted to the border. And each brought Issaias to the bargaining table. When Ethiopia took the Badame plain in February 1998, Eritrea's president instantly withdrew one set of objections to an Organization of African Unity peace plan. When an Eritrean counteroffensive failed to retake the plain that June, another set of objections fell... Outsiders are hoping it will happen again."

Why now? The press release from Ethiopia indicates that the Eritrean front is collapsing. But Eritrea withdrawing from Zalanbessa is meaningless unless it also withdraws from the Eritrean mountain located just north of Zalanbessa. Withdrawing from the town while holding the heights above the town would simply give the dictator time to rebuild his forces and come back again. Ethiopia should insist that the Eritrean army leave its weapons and withdraw many kilometers from the border.

There is a precedent in this as the withdrawal of Iraqi forces well-away from the Saudi Border was one of the 12 UN demands on Iraq prior to the start of the Gulf War.

- Dagmawi