Letter from Ethiopia
I hesitate to attempt an analysis of the hostilities between Ethiopia and Eritrea, but, from the day the conflict began two years ago, I have watched with growing horror the waste of tens of thousands of young lives only nine short years since the removal of the dark shadow of Haile Mariam Mengistu's military regime, known as the Derg, from the people of both countries. I have not the slightest hesitation in condemning the all-out invasion launched by the Ethiopian government, whatever lies behind the border dispute.
At the height of a three-year drought that affects both countries, south-east Ethiopia most severely, such an invasion was destined to place hundreds of thousands of already suffering people at risk of death by the most horrible means imaginable — from thirst and starvation.
It impresses few that the prime minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, tries to justify this invasion on world television by saying that Ethiopia is itself a victim of invasion. It beggars belief to be told by him that, in order to deal with the plight of 8-12 million people of the Ogaden who today face conditions worse than those in Wollo and Tigray in 1984-5, first the border dispute must be settled!
The enormous force that has invaded, the logistics involved in their advance and their own supply with food and water in a parched land, let alone the hundreds of million dollars literally blown away in dealing death, would have speedily resolved the worst aspect of famine's spectre in south-east Ethiopia. Now the situation has been made immeasurably worse, by a million more in Eritrea.
What resources were Ethiopia trying to free for famine relief by this invasion? If there ever were any, and the news from Harar and Jijiga is that there was almost nothing done despite the clear signs of a looming disaster, they will now have vanished.
The invasion was planned to be unleashed two days before national elections in Ethiopia, by a government whose popularity was, to be charitable, not universal outside Tigray, the main beneficiary of its policies. It is cynical jingoism that places Meles in the exalted company of Margaret Thatcher, Menachem Begin, Ronald Reagan and Saddam Hussein.
Yet, interviews with both Eritrean prisoners of war and their Ethiopian captors show the same common disbelief and astonishment that there should be any war at all. Both say we are brothers and sisters. The conscripts who have been forced to act as human mine-sweepers by the Ethiopian high command must turn their guns on them as war criminals and conspirators against the interest of the ordinary people of the Horn of Africa.
The government of Eritrea cannot escape its responsibilities either, though they are of a far lesser kind. It was they who were party with the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front regime to the manipulation of the birr [the currency shared by Ethiopia and Eritrea] from 1991-7 that allowed an unprecedented exploitation of the commodity producers of much of Ethiopia by smugglers and entrepreneurs. That accompanied the use of the port of Massawa to bring in the infrastructure to develop Tigray out of the sight of and at the expense of the remainder of Ethiopia.
I have heard that parasitism rationalised as the only means of extracting reparations for the damage done to both by the Derg, but parasitism it remains since it was not Mengistu Haile Mariam's backers that paid, but the poor, and it was the compradors and the traders who enriched themselves in both countries. There is certainly little sign that the unemployed of Asmara and Addis or the farmers and herders of the countryside benefited at all.
The parasitic economic axis became plain for all to see in 1996, by which time the government of Eritrea had sufficient foreign reserves to float its own currency, the Nakfa and thereby regularise foreign investment from the Gulf, South Korea and, it is said, the coffers of the former Shah of Iran.
The launch of the Nakfa in 1997 put an end to the Ethiopian government's enrichment of Tigray, by removal at a stroke of the huge benefits of paying port dues at Massawa and Assab in its own currency. If anyone wishes to trace the source of this invasion to its roots, they need look no further than the common macroeconomics, indeed elementary school economics of both governments. That is why there has been a "hands off" policy by the larger powers, and now an attempt to cover their compliance by letting the government of Ethiopia run its cynical war policy to its ultimate end.
I believe that there is more to emerge linking the horror that is western Eritrea to wider African conflict. What has been the conduit for arms to Congo? They can only have come from the east, and both wars are being fought with weapons bought, without end-user certificates, from Russia and the Ukraine. Rwanda arms the forces hostile to Kabila, yet it was Rwanda that offered fruitless mediation in this war.
Addis Ababa