COMMENTARY

The fact that “Eritrea is a most terrible landscape” is what Eritreans have failed to come to terms with, and in pursuit of their imagined Singaporean Eritrea, they rather harbor quixotic dreams of conquering the vast country south of the Mereb River. They rejoice in dangerously wild dreams. For instance before the war, they named one of their mega land transport projects as “Eritrean Transcontinental Inc.,” a would-be industry whose goal stated that Eritrean buses would stream out of Asmara and stop only on the shores of the Indian Ocean Port City of Djibouti, of course taking Ethiopia for granted that it would roll out like a Persian carpet between the start and the finish.

For us Ethiopians, this may sound like a fiction, but years have been counted since what we Ethiopians call a “fiction” has been turned into the opposite meaning of “reality” in Isaias Afwerki’s Eritrea. As Eritrea seeks a larger territory in the size of the entire Horn of Africa, offering it a chunk of Ethiopian territory would be like a slap in the face of megalomaniac Eritrean leader. They want more than Badme, more than Irob, more than Assab, nothing short of Ethiopia.

In a press release that sounded more of a military war communique issued by a victorious army general, Eritrea used phrases like “strict compliance”, “full respect” and “immediate withdrawal” as part of its warnings to Ethiopia. The summary of Eritrea’s message reads: Ethiopia would suffer unprecedented consequences if it failed to meet Eritrea’s latest demands.
As though the death toll of 70,000 lives in the last war were not enough, Eritrea says it can clearly see a “cataclysm” visiting Ethiopia soon. To help clear any ambiguity, the dictionary defines cataclysm as: “a violent upheaval that causes great destruction or brings about a fundamental change.”

What does Eritrea want?

Unless the Eritrean regime speaks a different language than the rest of the world understands, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s latest five-point initiative, widely opposed by Ethiopians, would have been received as a “Document of Surrender” that should have sparked street celebrations in Asmara. Instead, gloom has blanketed the Eritrean tyrant.

No one understands what would please him, and the issue gets more complex given the background of Isaias that he was badly wounded in the last war, but was stretchered off to Algiers, from where he came out with medals of valor via The Hague.

In Ethiopia, the time should have been when our towns were awash with daily protests that call for the respect of Ethiopia’s sovereignty rights over the Red Sea Port of Assab, leave alone Badme and Irobland. Church bells should have rung out, and mosque muezzins should have echoed calls for nationwide protests for the removal of Meles Zenawi – the architect of Eritrean “independence” and belligerence, and the chief engineer who navigates Ethiopia’s continuous descent into the graveyard of a beggar nation. Except for the courageous Ethiopian scholars and fledgling opposition parties, nothing to the degree of massive protests seen in other countries with much lesser problems are seen in enemy-held Ethiopia.

And we believe Eritrea is aware of the eerie silence in a nation 15 times larger than itself but has been tied at the stake, a much different political scenario than in May 1998, when Ethiopia stood up in unison, and threatened to discipline the rogue Shaebia regime for its wanton acts of war and destruction.

Why peace is suicidal to the Eritrean regime

The Shaebia regime, which was recently described by one political scientist in Addis as a “lawless floating class of the Mafia,” is aware of three key conditions in Ethiopia:

a) The entrenched presence in Addis of an Eritrean ruling clique
b) The purging of patriotic Ethiopian commanders from the Army, and the ruling EPRDF party, and
c) The deliberate weakening of the Ethiopian Army whose Air Force – which played an important role in the last war – now lies ruined upon the orders of Meles the Agent.

These conditions are conducive to fire up the war spirits of Isaias Afwerki, and hence Eritrea’s planned all-out attack against Ethiopia. The recent visits by Isaias, a man who has not concealed that his lifelong pursuit would be to see the fragmentation and destruction of Ethiopia, to Qatar and Yemen via Libya are last-leg diplomatic efforts designed to mend broken fences with Khartoum and Sanaa, a crucial step before embarking on the planned devastations of Ethiopia.

Isaias has nothing to lose by going to war because of the fact that he is also the CEO of a “terrible landscape,” and making peace would only worsen his plight and loosened his grip on power that he has promised to keep lifelong. That is why he cannot make peace, as peace means releasing into a battered economy at least 200,000 of the 300,000 army conscripts Isaias has herded in army barracks for over the years. Releasing this resentful mass of Eritrean youth into the city that has failed meeting the basic needs of survival means adding fuel to the fire of an Eritrean inferno.

Ethiopia’s Opposition Parties and Their Historic Role

All evidences indicate that Eritrea is aware of the state of our military situation in Ethiopia. Meles cannot lead a war, and he has never led a war. His role in the last war was at first to sabotage Ethiopia’s drive for army build-up against Eritrean invasion, and when he couldn’t stop the national war effort, he picked up the motto “if you can’t beat them join them,” and joined the war effort as a government spokesman, and with plenty of time on his side, he worked his way up and reclaimed all the military and political powers that he had practically lost to TPLF dissidents at the start of the war. Once he made sure the state power was firmly in his grip, he aborted Ethiopian military advances, and turned costly military defeats into courtroom victories for his Eritrea. Since the role Meles played as an Eritrean mercenary are clear to all, repeating his crimes here would be to only bore readers with redundancies.

In the absence of a leader, it is natural Ethiopia looks for would-be leaders from among the opposition parties, whom we think have substantial reasons to call on the Ethiopian people to ready themselves for self-defense against the possible attack from within and without the country.

We hope our opposition leaders have picked up an unforgettable lesson from TPLF dissidents, who tried to put the cart before the horse, and ended up in the sad situation we all know today. If Meles had prepared the Book of Bonapartism to sedate TPLF dissidents into confusion, the “elections” are clearly the democracy-coated version of “Bonapartism” the enemy has set as a trap for the opposition.

As part of the people’s right to self-defense, the opposition parties have every right to declare even a temporary national emergency body, instead of waiting until the Eritrean invaders go on sowing the seeds of war and destruction, and the Eritrean agent in Addis responds, “we never thought they would stab us in the back.” The ongoing war of words between the two Eritrean camps is a diversionary tactic to position Ethiopia as a lame duck, and strike it hard where it hurts most. Any war of resistance must target Meles and Isaias on equal footing, and deal with them as the country has ever dealt with the marauding troops of invasion. In other words, our opposition parties must take themselves one step higher by forming an alternative government on the side that would not be taken by surprise during surprise attacks.