No country is free if it is landlocked: top Derg official

Fikre Selassie Wogderess, who had served as prime minister for a few years during the military dictatorship between 1974 and 1991, told SBS Radio Australia that Ethiopia is chained to obey the demands of Djibouti as it doesn’t have any other choice. “If not, its existence would be in danger,” Fikreselassie said with a tone of resentment.

Fikreselassie, who was released in October 2011 after 20 years of imprisonment, said any country that doesn’t have its own port is not considered a free, self-reliant and independent country. “It’s very disturbing to any Ethiopian who has witnessed the downfall of the country to the state of landlocked. Future Ethiopian governments should never stop of addressing the landlocked issue.”

Fikreselassie also warned against the perils of the politics of ethnicity, the mainstay of TPLF’s divisive policy, and he said it was for Ethiopians to work together to save their country from the death-trap in store.

The Derg was toppled in 1991 when rebels of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), fully controlled by ultra Eritrean mercenary nationalists led by the late Meles Zenawi, took over the reigns of state power in Addis Ababa, and forcefully campaigned for the recognition by UN of Eritrea as the sovereign power over the entire stretch of the Red Sea up to Djibouti, thus leaving the second most populous nation in Africa landlocked.

Many, including top Eritrean officials, if not officially but privately admit that turning Ethiopia into a landlocked nation was solely the work of Meles Zenawi, the man who even deceived US officials to consider his solution to anchor “lasting peace in the region.”

For instance, when former US President Jimmy Carter met rebel-leader Meles Zenawi in 1989 in Sudan and elsewhere in European cities, and saw the future map of Ethiopia as a landlocked nation, a startled Carter asked Meles: “Where is Ethiopia’s Red Sea Port?” Carter went on warning Meles that he shouldn’t punish future generations of Ethiopia by turning ‘his country’ into the largest landlocked nation on earth. Meles posed as an Ethiopian and told Carter, “Ethiopia had never had its own port. The Eritreans fought against us for 30 years because we had annexed what belonged to them.”

Meles Zenawi died in 2012 but his toxic legacy remains largely intact as Ethiopians still drag their feet from forging a common stand to remove the regime.