It seems that the late 1990s just won’t go away. And it is partly your fault.

As if it is not bad enough that you have to relive the drama of the Clintons. Yay, watch them teeter on the edge of the cliff! Will they fall, will they pull back just in time? Nay, verily, they pulled back. What a comeback! The Bill was so pleased, he swaggered, he pointed his pointing finger and he bit his bitten lips.  And the Hill cried, and bopped her head in smug self-satisfaction. But wait, look yonder, they are standing on the precipice again! Will they pull it off?

Now the late 1990s have come in the shape of a polemic between the author of Alnahda and Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). You are to blame because you keep sending me e-mails and asking me, “did you read it?”
http://www.mfa.gov.et/Press_Section/Week_Horn_Africa_Mar_21_2008.htm

The MFA was responding to the last Alnahda, whose tone must have felt to some like a detour to the late 1990s. Now, if you want to avoid the detour and my point-counterpoint, if you want to avoid my rant, and if you want to get to “What the hell is your point anyway?” It was, and is, and will be the following:

Eritrea has a population of about 4.5 million, and a standing army of 200,000 to 300,000.  Military service in Eritrea is compulsory on all military-age Eritreans and the “military age”, when one includes the Reserve Army, is defined as all citizens between the ages of 18 and 50. There are three points, each with its own paradox:

Point 1: if I were to randomly pick 10 Eritreans from all corners of Eritrea, and if I were to visit a random Eritrean battalion, we would have a family re-union. This is, statistically, less likely in Ethiopia. It would be a re-union where each member would tell his or her horror story—of abuse, cruelty and torture.  The paradox: it would still be a family story. 

This fact, obvious though it may be, is entirely lost on people who talk about destroying “Isaias’s army” or “Shabbiyah” or “the chauvinists” or "the crusaders" or  the “army of the dictator.” This is why a military solution is a non-starter whether it is proposed by the Eritrean opposition, the Ethiopian government, or any clever regime-change engineer. The paradox: the only people that Isaias negotiates with are armed people that pose a threat to his rule.

- 

Point 3: The people of Eritrea and Ethiopia have a relatively rich culture in conflict resolution that if I were to pick, randomly, 10 Eritrean elders and 10 Ethiopian elders and give them a challenge to solve our problem, they would do it within 10 days. Paradox: the people have, in all their history, never been allowed to govern themselves. 

Put it all together and: the EDF is the people’s army and you can’t get to the government without going through them, and them is us. There is no military solution because Eritrea and Ethiopia have large, well-disciplined, war-tested forces.  There is no need for one, because the two countries have, if unleashed, a sophisticated culture of peaceful conflict resolution.

Now, if you are sick of polemical exchanges, you can stop here. Thank you for reading.  In the immortal words of Abu, “thank you for shopping. Come again.”

Quite The Case

You really shouldn’t listen to music while reading—because then you won’t know which one altered your mood—what you are reading or listening to.  As it happens, I was listening to Molly Hatchet’s, “Fall of the Peacemakers” when the e-mail alerts hit the box.   Fall of the Peacemakers has a line, which I used to think was one of the most devastating: “how many times must good men die, how many times must their children cry” but for us Eritreans it is even sadder because the line would be “how many times must good kids die, how many times must their mothers cry.”

The Ethiopian government’s response to that question is always: ask your guy, it is not our fault.  We are entirely blameless.  But phrased, of course, more diplomatically. Here’s an excerpt from MFA’s response to Alnahda: 

He argues that Ethiopia's priorities for the peace were to acquire a return to the status quo ante, the permanent removal of any threat from Eritrea and return to the Ethiopian Eritrean relationship of the period 1991-1997. This is not quite the case. 

Actually, this is quite the case. More accurately, these are quite the cases. Ethiopia did call for return to the status quo ante. You can read this here, here, and here.   Ethiopia did want a reduction in Eritrea’s armed forces.  You can read this here.  Ethiopia did want a return to the relationship that existed in 1991-1997 and to read that you don’t have to go good google hunting: it is reiterated by the MFA in its response to Alnahda: 

Ethiopia's main objective is to bring closure and finality to the dispute, to allow for the restoration of cross-border trade, movement of people, mutual ties, all good neighborly links.  [emphasis mine.] 

This is a laudable goal, but good luck finding it in the Algiers Agreement. This column also argued that in the battle to win the hearts and minds of the often heartless and mindless Internationalists, both the Eritrean and Ethiopian governments are engaged in divergent resume-building exercises: the Eritrean government is going for the “peacemaker” credentials and the Ethiopians have chosen the “peacekeeper” role. The MFA also found this objectionable and insulting: 

“The author makes a number of similarly inaccurate remarks even denigrating Ethiopia's record of UN peacekeeping missions as far back as the Korean war, and more recently consistently since 1994 when there were few ready to contribute to the stabilization of Rwanda after the genocide there.” 

I don’t know where they picked up the denigrating tone; there was none. I was born an involuntary Ethiopian subject and I was indoctrinated with “Ethiopia hagere ye netSanet Arma” which included the refrain: “enquan lageru le’Ethiopia Kidist: le-lelochm yhonal meswa’et" so I know the role of foreign engagements to the Ethiopian ethos. As a polite neighbor, I won’t even question whether having Ethiopians in Korea was an Ethiopian record or a Haile Selasse record—when you have absolute rulers who rule without the will of the governed, it is hard to say where the will of the ruler ends and that of the subjects’ begins.   

The Rant (An Interlude)  

No, there was no attempt to denigrate at all. If I were in a denigrating mood, I would have brought up the fact that, last year, the Ethiopian government built a statue honoring Cuban “friendship” in Ethiopia, for Cuba’s role in the Ogaden War of 1977-78, a role that was denied at the time, but blown wide open after the de-classification of Cold War documents following the fall of the Berlin Wall. I would have mentioned the fact that when Mengistu bellowed ye debub dl be semien ydegemal--The victory in the South shall be replicated in the North--he was talking about extinguishing the Eritrean and Tigrayan revolution.  And I would have asked why those who were targeted for extinction are rewarding those who were going to help the extinguisher.

I think the politicians call it statesmanship—whenever they poke the hell out of your wound. It is statesmanship to erect monuments to Cubans; it is statesmanship for Isaias to hold the hands of Mugabe, the host of our butcher Mengistu; it is statesmanship for Ethiopia to have a 17-year long trial of the brute and give him a life sentence when his deputies got the death penalty; it is statesmanship for Eritrea to not even bother with a trial at all. 

- 

After all, we are just Africans and our lives are extinguishable, our dignity perishable, and our wounds ignorable, and our past tormentors are never held accountable. In We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, the author interviews a Rwandan who forgave Bill Clinton for ignoring them, so pleased he was that the man stopped by the airport and placed a plaque at the memorial.   

Haven’t you noticed that while we are completely and absolutely mesmerized by the border issue; how when we quote chapter and verse of the Eritrea Ethiopia Border Commission, there is the ruling of another commission, the Eritrean Ethiopia Claims Commission that never makes it to the headlines?  And why is that?  A war was ignited; people were deported by the tens of thousands; innocent people were abused; women raped; properties expropriated, buildings demolished, lives lost. But nobody is accountable. Nobody is even being asked to give a progress report. Why? Why else: To do so is to hold a precedent—to teach the people a bad lesson in accountability: a lesson learned can be applied to present and future tormentors. 

But this is just a citizen’s rant, and said in passing: but the problem is that it just won’t pass, so excuse the digression to the 1990s, the decade that will not leave us alone.  

Back to MFA

The larger point is that however meritorious Ethiopia’s arguments might be (and many of them are), they are not intrinsic parts of the Algiers Agreement.  What Ethiopia is having now is a simple case of buyer’s remorse. It is hubris for the Ethiopian government to lecture the UN and the EEBC on the true meaning of international law—hubris of the same magnitude as the Eritrean government lecturing the Ethiopian government about its electoral flaws. It is insulting to people who can witness: “are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?”

What we need is a breakthrough—and it won’t happen as long as both governments zealously adhere to their Vanguard  dogma that there is no mistake to their rigid policy—a policy that has given us two years of war, and eight years of paralysis.

The MFA says that it is all Isaias’s fault and can’t understand why this “usually rather more objective writer” just can’t see it that way. Thanks, but it ain’t so and has never been so. But that won’t stop the MFA for trying, for the next 10 years, to prove that it is so—to the same UN agency that has written dozens of resolutions calling on Ethiopia to accept the boundary decision “in full and without delay.”  And that won’t stop Eritrea’s MoFA from trying for the next 10 years to convince the UN to compel Ethiopia, despite the fact that every UN resolution and every US press release has told them, “it is your problem; deal with it.”

The reason that 20 random elders would solve the problem when the governments can’t is simple: unlike the governments, the elderly actually care about the lives of the boys wearing their countries uniforms more than they do about which chair and which office the politicians are sitting at. It is this knowledge that gives all but the most hardened partisans a belief that the two governments, for their own peculiar reasons, just do not want the problem solved.

And this is why we are stuck in the late 1990s. 

This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it