Mereja.Forum

https://x.com/hawelti/status/1989626549771866467


"ዘረባ ኣደይ ለቱ፥ ኣየውፍር ኣየእቱ"

Potemkin Party's declared "war manifesto" seems to be morphing - through constant packaging and re-packaging - into "the aggrieved party" mode these days.

Indeed, the incessant and toxic mantra on "acquiring sovereign access to the sea by force if necessary .. the imperative to project naval power in the Red Sea.. the revisionist and blasphemous pronouncements on Eritrea's independence...etc. " that the war-mongering PP has been floating for the last two years has been temporarily turned on "mute-mode" in the past few weeks.

The transparent ploy is designed to hoodwink public opinion by rationalizing the unprovoked and reckless war that the PP has been itching to unleash against Eritrea for the past two years as a "legitimate act of self defense".

This is the gist of the long and monotonous diatribe that PP's Foreign Minister delivered at a "Foreign Policy Forum" in Addis Ababa on Thursday this week whose central theme was on "Eritrea's perennial acts of destabilization against Ethiopia".

Strange as it may sound, PP's senior officials seem to suffer from acute deficits of institutional memory - they claim they are not able "to retrieve them from Cabinet, Parliamentary and other archives". In the event and to refresh the memories of the FM and his Potemkin Party colleagues in a broad-brash and snapshot manner, we will dwell on the following indelible historical facts:

1. Eritrea's three decades war of national liberation was sparked because Ethiopia unilaterally abrogated the sham Federation and annexed Eritrea in flagrant contravention of international law. The Federal Act itself was a blatant violation of Eritrea's inalienable rights of decolonization. Ethiopia's surrogate role in the original illicit act; annexation, and intermittent relapse of its expansionist and irredentist agendas were, and continue to remain, the singular causes of the periodic conflicts that have raged between the two countries.
2. In a nutshell, Eritrea has invariably been on the receiving end for the costly and unnecessary conflicts that successive Ethiopian regime have and continue to unleash because they covet their neighbour's land and endowments.
2. The vicious 1998-2000 border war between the two countries was unleashed by the incumbent Ethiopian regime under the putative pretext of "dispute on Badme and its environs". Although they are singing to a different tune these days, PP's senior officials - including the current Army Chief of Staff - confessed only four years ago that they were ashamed and embarrassed at the time when the Parliament accused Eritrea for aggression and declared war in May 1998 while the army had been given explicit instructions to unleash war weeks earlier. The maximalist agenda of the war went beyond regaining the "disputed territory". In the early weeks of the war, the then Deputy Foreign Minister, Tekeda Alemu, publicly announced to a gathering of the Ethiopian community in Washington that "capturing Assab" was one of the central objectives of the war. During the 3rd Offensive, the Ethiopian regime halted the US-EU facilitated negotiations in Algiers while the Ethiopian army launched a massive military assault on Assab with disastrous consequences. Ethiopia signed the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement only after, and because of, this debacle. The Moratorium on Air Strikes brokered by President Clinton in July 1998; the Technical Arrangements; the Algiers Agreement, and later the EEBC Award were violated by incumbent Ethiopian regimes because they were not sincerely committed to nurturing and consolidating good-neighbourly ties between the two countries on the basis of each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
3. The Potemkin Party is suffering from the same irredentist malaise with its current war agenda cloaked in "sovereign access to the sea". The accusation alluding to Eritrea's visceral stance and "Isaias doctrine" of fomenting perpetual "destabilization" of Ethiopia is too ludicrous to merit elaboration. Small Eritrea must indeed have Providential powers if it is potent enough to destabilize its much larger neighbour for decades. The truth is the wars that are raging in virtually all of Ethiopia's Regions are incubated by the regime's own flawed governance architecture.
4. The FM further digresses to what has become normative among PP officials and trolls these days of disparaging Eritrea's economic endowments and growth as well as its governance architecture. Again, this is too audacious coming as it does from a country whose economy is overstressed and burdened by debilitating poverty in spite of over 84 billion US$ of receiving international development assistance over the last three decades; periodic IMF financial bailouts; and cyclical rounds of intensive care (Food Safety nets etc.). Currently, 21.4 million Ethiopian are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance, while 68.7% are multidimentionally poor. And as mentioned above, the country is seething under spiraling conflicts that emanate from misguided governance structures that polarize society along entrenched and centrifugal ethnic cleavages.

We could go on and on.. but it would be meaningless: "ዘረባ ኣደይ ለቱ፥ ኣየውፍር ኣየእቱ"፥ ስለዝኾነ እቲ ነገሩ!