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On December 27, 2007, Isaias Afwerki presented a “working paper” entitled United Resistance for Liberation, Development and Prosperity of Eritrea to his control group, his so-called Cabinet of Ministers. On December 31, he gave a New Year’s Address mentioning “United Resistance for Liberation, Development and Prosperity of Eritrea. As unbelievable as it may sound to outsiders, what this means is that the national policy of Eritrea—its foreign, economic, political, military policy—for the whole year of 2008 is going to be based on a paper one man introduced for the first time, four days earlier, to his sheepish cabinet.
This is a microcosm of what is wrong with the PFDJ. It is a political party that has ceded all authority to one man, whom it follows slavishly and who, in turn, has been steering Eritrea from one rock to another hard place. A foreign policy that was pursued to Eritrea's great detriment for five years has just been reversed with no accountability. It is a political party whose intellectuals are more comfortable rallying the faithful than they are discussing ideas. It is a political party whose supporters see no contradiction in highlighting the increase in Ethiopia’s defense budget without bothering to ask how much exactly is Eritrea’s defense budget. It is a political party which lives in a childish world of black and white where you are “either with us or the enemy.”
The “you are either with us or the enemy” is meant to shut off debate, to criminalize dissent and to intimidate the wavering into obedience. When you carry a name like Awate, it is unthinkable to be bought off by anyone, least of all by the Weyane—just as it is unthinkable to be bullied by anyone, least of all the PFDJ. So the name calling and false accusation were as futile now as they were when they were directed our way in 2000. We shall persist, come what may. Some will see the light; others will get burned by the heat.
Since 2002, when the Ethiopian government told the world that it has no intent to demarcate the common border without additional discussion with the Eritrean government, the Eritrean government has relied on a flawed strategy of: let us all pressure the international community to pressure the United States to pressure Ethiopia to comply with the terms of EEBC.
In 2003, this website told its readers the following:
In 1967, the United Nations Security Council passed “Resolution 242” whose first call was for the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” For 36 years now, Arabs in general and Palestinians specifically have been quoting “242”--sometimes using it as a battle cry, sometimes as diplomatic shorthand--to legitimize their request for Israeli withdrawal. And for 36 years now, Israelis have completely ignored the call. – A Call For Sober Dialogue, Awate Team, October 5, 2003
Our "resolution 242" is "final and binding." Whether we like it or not, whether we accept it now or ten years from now, the fact remains that an “international community” that has not had the will to do anything about the genocide in Rwanda, or the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, or the chaos in Somalia, is very, very unlikely to lift a finger to exercise its authority in Eritrea or Ethiopia. Except for humanitarian assistance, poor African states just do not make it to the priority list of the powerful countries.
For five long years, this basic fact was a mystery to the Eritrean regime and its supporters, who spent Eritrea’s meager resources trying to do the impossible—to get the “international community” to act on a matter that is nowhere in the priority list of the Security Council. And when it finally dawned on them that it won’t be, they resorted to the only thing they know: name-calling, and chastising the United States.
If the Eritrean regime thinks that the US will have a fresh review of the case following the 2008 US elections, they are setting themselves up for yet another disappointment. Barring some miracle, the next US president is going to be one of the following: Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudy Guliani or John McCain.
Every one of these candidates has a foreign policy advisor who is likely to be the main voice in the formulation of the candidate’s foreign policy. And who are their advisors? You can find them at http://www.sourcewatch.org.
Life After Bush
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have pretty much inherited Bill Clinton’s advisors as their foreign policy experts. Obama’s foreign policy team includes Susan Rice and Anthony Lake; Hillary’s team includes Madeline Albright and Richard Holbrooke. Do Rice, Lake, Albright, Holbrooke have fond memories of PFDJ?
What if the Republicans win? Guliani has Norman Podhoretz, the father of the neo-con movement. John McCain has Kristol, Kagan, and many other co-pilots of the Project for the New American Century, the breeding ground of the neo-con movement. And Romney has Dan Senor, who was the face of Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority, the experimental lab of the neo-cons.
It can be reasonably assumed that the incoming American administration is going to be hostile to, or more likely, indifferent to the PFDJ government. What then, four more years of hzbawi mekhete?
Life After Meles
A strategy that seems to make a lot of sense to the PFDJ (and nobody else) is for Eritrea to pursue a policy of defeating the Meles regime by “encouraging” (training, funding, hosting) the Ethiopian armed opposition groups. As usual, not much thought seems to have been given to these questions:
- What is the probability of the Ethiopian opposition groups forcefully removing the Ethiopian government from power? 5%? 10%? 50%? 90%?
- How long is this project supposed to last? A year, five years, ten years?
- What will be the cost of the project to Eritrea?
- Are the Weyane going to leave peacefully or will they go to the hills of Tigray and wage their “armed struggle?”
- Is the Eritrean regime going to be the broker among the various Ethiopian opposition groups once they come to power?
There are no answers to these questions, just slogans and prayers. “The weyane is about to crumble: it is on 59th second of the 59th minute!”, “the Ethiopian opposition is on the march.” The PFDJ befriends and shuns people on the basis of short-term needs, regardless of what this will mean for the long-term interest of Eritrea. Some of the Ethiopian opposition groups that are being courted do not even accept the existence of Eritrea as an independent nation-state.
An Alternative Policy
Tserona and Fort Codorna belong to Ethiopia but Ethiopia said, "they do not belong to me, they are Eritrean" and they were ruled Eritrean. This is not our conjecture: it is what the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission stated in its ruling (refer to 4.69 and 4.70 at (http://www.pca-cpa.org/upload/files/EEBC-4.pdf). This is no small thing: it gives lie to the Eritrean regime’s claims that the Ethiopian government wants land that doesn’t belong to it.
The question is this: how many Tseronas and Fort Codornas are out there that Ethiopia wants to negotiate and hand back to Eritrea? Lands that are historically populated by Eritreans but handed to Ethiopia? Or, vice versa: lands that are historically populated by Ethiopians but handed to Eritrea? The Eritrean regime says, “we don’t care.” Uppermost in the regime’s concern is not the “rule of law”; for the PFDJ talking about the primacy of law is like a murderer talking about the sanctity of life. No, their priority is not even that Eritrea gains land but that Ethiopia, and especially the TPLF, loses land. As for those who repeat “final and binding” like a mantra, we are certain that they do not know a single Eritrean or Ethiopian from the areas of contention, nor have they ever heard of them until 1998.
The way out is:
(a) for all the border area that is not in dispute to be immediately demarcated. This will bring about engagement, goodwill and dialogue. More importantly, it will free up thousands of Eritreans wasting away and becoming human border posts;
(b) listen to all the Witnesses who are directly (like the US) or indirectly (like the UN) calling for a discussion in the implementation of the border ruling. Despite the propaganda of the PFDJ, there is nothing in the Algiers Agreement that prohibits the two parties from discussing and dialoguing.
In this regard, it would be helpful if Ethiopia were to give the totality of the areas it wants to discuss. Not as a negotiation ploy of re-opening the case, but a good-faith discussion of micro lands. For starters, as Eritreans, we would like to know which areas it considers Eritrean lands that should be returned to Eritrea and have been wrongly ruled Ethiopian by the EEBC. How many other Tseronas and Fort Codornas are there? The Eritrean regime and its supporters may want to turn their backs on them but we surely want to know.
Call our working paper "Resistance Against PFDJ's Insanity." This is, by no means, a perfect solution. Nor does it mean there will be an agreement or that it won't take time. It is not a coincidence that border conflicts are some of the messiest in the world. But it is a vast improvement over the PFDJ policy which squandered five years trying to do the impossible (imagine how much progress would have been accomplished in the last five years if, instead of posturing, it had chosen to lead) and is now, 16 years after the independence of Eritrea, asking the people of Eritrea to sign on for a policy of its “liberation.” Given the track record of PFDJ, which has not coincidentally, named its satellite Somali opposition, the Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia, "liberation" surely means a strategy for a protracted war.
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