First commenter, As a propagandist you don’t seem to be communicating well with your leaders…your leaders use conflict and a perceived fear of ethiopian invasion as an excuse to indefinably lock their citizens in military camps, yet you are here telling us there is no conflict…Eritrea’s conflict may be with itself, but there is certainly a conflict between what’s happening in Eritrea and what propagandists like you try to sell to the world..
Secondly, you keep crying about a disputed piece of land being a reason for Eritrea’s failure to produce result, If given the land can you explain how a small dusty piece of land would contribute to your socioeconomic performance or political behavior? ….as for Ethiopia it is because it knows Bademe alone is NOT the reason for the stalemate, hence it wants real dialog before agreeing to border commission’s decision, and at least it never uses the dispute as an excuse for poor socioeconomic performance or political failures. So what is that you want to achieve through Badime and do you think Ethiopisn do not know it? I am just curious because no one seems to ask you why Eritrea is the only country that uses border dispute for stupidity while there are tens of countries around the world that have border dispute yet non of them use it as an excuse to oppress their citizens..

Dear Dr. Awet, Notwithstanding an academician like yourself need to appear a neutral and balanced on issues even sometimes the overwhelming evidence suggests otherwise; I agree with the essence and thrust of your article. That the US misguided policy on the horn of Africa has resulted the making of unstable and dangerous horn of Africa and made Eritrea a victim of these policies. And Yes, Eritrea was betrayed, bullied and left to its devices to ascertain its sovereignty not for the first time in its tumultuous history. If there was ever a manual of how not to resolve conflicts in Africa, then one can not go far from the handling by US officials of the Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict that is still smouldering todate.

If the Cohens, Shinns, … are a towering figures of US foreign policies on Africa, as you claim them to be, then why did they have to wait until they reach the shadows of their influential careers before they start to utter few sensible things to right the wrongdoings and unforgivable callousness that they themselves inflicted on Eritrea. Afterall, they are the architects of the present quagmire. Moreover, what I found totally unpalatable in your article is your description of the late Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. It appears to me that you have swallowed the hysteria and eulogy that was spewed in Ethiopian television after his death. I have always found him intellectually deficient and always relied on machiavellian politics of power control and constantly showing the signs of inferiority complex to the towering leader of Eritrea. He was always pushing himself to prove that he is better than President Isaias Afwerki. I would not be surprised if that is the main trigger of his final demise, a brain damage of some sort. Yes, this is the kind of speculation we are left with after witnessing the great length they have gone to conceal what is the cause of death of the late Ethiopian Prime Minister.

Finally, I really want to commend your well thought and delivered article and how I wish you did not feel compelled to add the final paragraph and completely jumped out of the subject only to show that you are balanced commentator. It might get you more readership but it does not make you more right on the subject. It made the article out of tune.

Sirak Bahlbi

oooops, that comment of mine was meant to be for Ambassador shinn’s previous pot.

@Addis Alem

It looks like you seem to be bewildered & dumb found on how Eritrea a very young country manages to stand tall & strong on it’s own despite refusing billions in aid & is illegally sanctioned, while your country ethiopia, with all the help it receives in billion dollars in aid just manages to survive, without the foreigners help ethiopia wouldn’t survive for a 1 or 2 years. That’s why we see you speaking some mambo-jambo nonsense about a ‘Egyptian Conspiracy’ to weaken ethiopia! That is laughable, Egypt is another country that is dependent on foreign aid it receives billions, it is in no position to be ‘backing’ or supporting Eritrea, matter of fact it is struggling to survive itself. Now if you said that Egypt, wants to learn & take advice from Eritrea, that would make more sense. As Eritrea is well known for being a truly Independent nation & takes orders from none. Unlike the puppet ethiopians who would invade there neighbouring countries on behalf of the US for a few breadcrumbs, like it did with Eritrea in 1998 & Somalia in 2006, ethiopia didn’t even care about the hundreds of thousands of it’s soldiers that had died & injured in these needless wars.

And on your obsession with Asab, im not going to waste my time on explaining to you the reality, all im going to say to you is to stop wasting your life on daydreaming & fantasizing on things you will Never have i.e. the Red Sea.

Anyway im going to be heading to Eritrea’s beautiful Red Sea & Port Asab in a couple of months, so wish me a good time 🙂

@Haki

Enjoy your bath along with your battle-hardened skinny camels!!! Since you guys have been very good at giving your butts to every foreigner that visited the region – be it the Egyptians, the Turks, or the Italians – it is high time it needs a bath!!!

The greedy asmara generals have three options:

1) Continue to rot in their “independent” isolation

2) Hand over Assab to Addis, and nobody cares if they wanted to continue playing with their arab friends

3) Fall back to the open arms of the motherland

Other than those options, Addis would rather nurse an older mistake and continue to spoil little Djibouti than let the Egyptians run asmara with our port payments.

In a brilliant and yest incisive analysis, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs shot back with striking details of Eritrea’s bellicose , militant adventurism in its foreign relations. The piece is quite revealing in the sense that the attempt of Dr .Awet, Cohen and Shinn to evoke sympathy for Eritrea is grounded on faulty assumptions of the change of behaviour on Eritrea’s side. Here is the link and the entire piece . The piece is published in the Ministries weekly Bulletin Week in The Horn
http://www.mfa.gov.et/weekHornAfrica/morewha.php?wi=1309#1309

Bringing Eritrea “in from the cold” needs real policy changes by Eritrea’s government

Every year or two, there’s a wave of suggestions that it might be time for the US to try and once again engage with Eritrea. The latest such effort came in December from former US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa (1989-1993), Herman Cohen in a piece entitled: “Time to Bring Eritrea in from the Cold”. Ambassador Cohen now heads a lobby firm but his recommendation was picked up by former US Ambassador to Ethiopia, David Shinn and by the former US Ambassador to South Africa, Princeton Lyman, both of whom supported the idea but argued (on the same website) that this might not be easy. Ambassador Shinn thought the idea was “harder than it sounds”, while Ambassador Lyman in a masterly understatement said previous efforts by the US had proved “difficult”. They are likely to continue to be so. Only last October, the Eritrean regime publicly blamed the US (and later the UN) for the Lampedusa tragedy when 366 Eritreans, mainly youngsters, were drowned trying to reach Italy, having fled from their own country. This sort of rhetoric is a commonplace of the Eritrean regime which in the past has claimed the US created the 1998 Eritrean-Ethiopian war, and suggested the 9/11 atrocity was carried out by the US itself. Nevertheless, Messrs. Cohen, Shinn and Lyman seemed to think: “we should try”.

In principle, of course, no one would disagree. Everyone would like to see Eritrea change policies and lose its status as a pariah state, but none of these comments by former US diplomats, get to the heart of the problem. This lies in the nature of the regime in Asmara and, leaving aside its highly repressive internal activities, its external policies. Others, besides the US have tried to improve relations with Eritrea over the years. None have been more than minimally successful. The reasons are simple and relate largely to Eritrea and President Isaias’ insistence on ignoring all norms of international behavior and international relations. Eritrea has repeatedly demonstrated over the past 23 years that the fundamental principles of its external policies are force, aggression and violence, either open or clandestine. These attitudes also characterize its internal policies. President Isaias operates with little understanding or interest in the wider world, which he has tended to ignore, especially when it fails to treat him with the exaggerated respect he apparently believes he and Eritrea deserve.

In the past neither efforts to establish trust nor attempts to negotiate have made much progress. It is only now as sanctions have begun to cause problems with remittances and offer a possible threat to mining operations which provide the major source of revenue to keep senior army officers and party leaders quiescent, that awareness is creeping in that the regime is facing deep and real economic and social problems. The most recent IMF estimates are that Eritrea’s per-capita GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity will grow only around 1.7% between 2013 and 2018, a mark that will lead to the nation being ranked as the second-poorest country in the world before the end of the decade. This is despite the input of some quite substantial profits from mining, though there have widespread claims that these are dependent upon what amounts to ‘slave labor’.

At the center of the argument of Messrs Cohen and Shinn is the issue of Eritrea’s relations with Ethiopia. Both seem to accept the idea that President Isaias’ hostility to the outside world, the US and everybody else, is caused by insecurity in the face of a continued threat posed by Ethiopia, seen of course, as a US ally. The excuses for the increasing sacrifices demanded of the population is provided by the threat of the “evil, hostile, menace of Ethiopia,” or by the machinations of the US and its control of the UN and indeed almost everybody else. Indeed, to paraphrase an older US diplomat, referring to Stalin’s policies after the Second World War: “A hostile international environment is the breath of life for the prevailing internal system…” The “threat” of Ethiopia is the standard official line provided by Eritrea and has provided the excuse for keeping national conscripts mobilized since 1998, but it no longer appears to be working. The population is hemorrhaging at a rate of 600 people a week across the border with Ethiopia and similar numbers to the Sudan, in spite of shoot to kill orders along the frontiers. According to the UN Special Rapporteur for Eritrea, some of those now crossing the border are unaccompanied children as young as five or six.

In fact, any external danger to the concept or reality of an independent Eritrea vanished in 1991 when the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) took power in Ethiopia. The EPRDF played a major role in helping the EPLF win its war for independence. Once in power in Addis Ababa it immediately encouraged the assumption and recognition of Eritrea’s independence. There has been no change of policy since, despite Eritrea’s invasion of Ethiopia in May 1998.

Messrs. Cohen and Shinn go into some detail of the 1998-2000 war, but much of their comment is inaccurate. They also miss the central point, noted by the UN Claims Commission –“Eritrea violated Article 2, paragraph 4, of the Charter of the United Nations by resorting to armed force to attack and occupy Badme, then under peaceful administration by Ethiopia as well as other territory…in an attack that began on May 12, 1998…”. (Claims Commission’s Partial Award Jus Ad Bellum (December 19, 2005), paragraph 16). The war was the result of Eritrea sending pre-prepared mobilized infantry and mechanized brigades across what was, at the time, the accepted administrative border between the two countries. It was a very clear case of aggression.

Eritrea’s defeat in June 2000 and its signing of a Cessation of Hostilities Agreement, followed by the Algiers Peace Agreement in December, produced no change in attitude. The Algiers Agreements required the creation of a 25 kms wide Temporary Security Zone along the border inside Eritrea, and the deployment of a United Nations Peacekeeping Mission to Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) to monitor this and the ceasefire. UNMEE was also given the task of providing logistical and security assistance to the demarcation exercise which was due to follow the Decisions of the Eritrea Ethiopia Boundary Commission, announced in April 2002.

Eritrea began its efforts to underline the Algiers Agreements prior to 2002, and subsequently ignored Ethiopia’s acceptance of the EEBC Decisions in November 2004. Ethiopia had originally raised some concerns over the EEBC Decisions, but after failing to get satisfaction for these, it made it clear it was prepared to proceed to demarcation in conformity with international practice, and consistent with the Algiers Agreements and their aim of bringing about sustainable peace and the normalization of relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea. However, as soon as Ethiopia accepted the EEBC Decisions, Eritrea openly began to flout the Algiers Agreements, persistently violating the TSZ and imposing restrictions on UNMEE. By 2007, the UN Secretary General noted in a report to the Security Council that the Eritrean troops that had illegally entered the Transitional Security Zone in October 2006, not for the first time, had remained, and that Eritrea had also deployed additional troops accompanied by tanks and heavy armament. He described Eritrea’s restrictions on UNMEE as representing “a serious violation of the Agreement on Cessation of Hostilities of 18 June 2000, the 2001 Protocol Agreement of 17 June 2001 concluded between Eritrea and UNMEE, and relevant Security Council resolutions…”. When these activities met with no more than mild verbal criticism from the Security Council, it steadily expanded its activities until it had taken over the whole TSZ, rendering the Algiers Agreements, including the Agreement on Cessation of Hostilities, effectively null and void. The Security Council did pass a number of resolutions demanding Eritrea remove all restrictions on UNMEE, but it took any action and in February 2008 the situation reached a point where UNMEE, humiliatingly, was forced to withdraw.

This demonstration of UN weakness encouraged Eritrea in its bellicosity, its aggressiveness and its disregard for international norms, and another example followed almost immediately. In June 2008, Eritrea invaded Djibouti and seized several strategic locations just inside northern Djibouti, including the islands of Doumeira and Kallida. In subsequent fighting nearly sixty Djiboutian soldiers were killed or wounded, and a senior officer and 18 others captured. Eritrean losses amounted to around 200 killed or captured. President Isaias denied there had been any clashes and persisted in this despite all the evidence of fighting. Eventually, two years later, in June 2010, following mediation efforts by Qatar at the request of Djibouti, Eritrean troops withdrew from the border areas, though the government still refused to admit there had been any conflict. A Qatari observation force was deployed to monitor the border area until a final agreement could eventually be reached, but no progress has been made in releasing Djibouti prisoners of war or in reaching a settlement as President Isaias still denies that anything happens. This time, the Security Council did react and imposed sanctions. Subsequently, with no apparent change in Eritrea’s attitudes or policy over Djibouti, extremist support or destabilization policies in the region, the Security Council, not unreasonably, repeated its belief that Eritrea was a threat to international peace and security, and extended sanctions by another 16 months, to the end of 2014.

Another area of activity by Eritrea which also led to the imposition of UN sanctions was over Eritrea’s persistent interference in Somalia and its support for extremist and terrorist organizations there. After the fall of the ICU in Somalia in December 2006, Eritrea gave refuge to Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys and other leaders of what later became Hizbul Islam and supported its anti-government operations in Somalia with planeloads of arms as well as training and funds. These activities included support for Al-Itihaad, Hizbul Islam, and Al-Shabaab, and the UN Monitoring Group produced detailed evidence of its transactions. President Isaias has also repeatedly insisted that Al-Shabaab and similar organizations must be considered Somali stakeholders, claiming despite all evidence they are not terrorists and they should be brought into government. Eritrea, unlike all other IGAD states, refused to recognize either the TNG or the current Federal Government of Somalia. It even withdrew from IGAD in anger that other IGAD states refused to follow its line, though it has now asked to return. It hasn’t changed policy. In 2013, the Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea issued two separate reports and concluded that Eritrea had diversified its support for extremist operations to Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda and Yemen in addition to fronting a number of business operations.

This is, indeed, a government that relies so totally on the fiction of external threats to maintain its own internal legitimacy that whenever and wherever the fantasy appears threadbare, it has deliberately recreated it with another outbreak of violence or aggression. This is in the conflicts it started with Yemen in 1996/7, Ethiopia in 1998-2000 and Djibouti in 2008. On other occasions it has repeatedly backed opposition forces, extremists and known terrorists, consistently attempting to destabilize Ethiopia and Somalia and interfere in the internal affairs of Sudan and later of South Sudan. Its foreign policy has, in fact, consistently and persistently continued to demonstrate a pattern of aggression and hostility.

In fact, like any bully, Eritrea rapidly backs down when faced by firm action. Indeed, it is clear from past experience that the government in Asmara only responds to the threat of superior strength. Nothing less will produce change. As the UN Monitoring Group reports for both 2012 and 2013, as well as a mass of additional evidence, make clear, Eritrea has continued its efforts at regional destabilization. There has been no change of policy, merely some misrepresentation and verbal fiction. To lift sanctions now would send very much the wrong signals, giving Eritrea a green light to continue its policies of aggression and regional destabilization.

The lack of movement, whether in normalizing relations between Eritrea and Ethiopia, in response to UN sanctions over regional destabilization or UN demands over the conflict with Djibouti, is quite clearly the responsibility of Eritrea, and Eritrea alone. It has nothing to do with Ethiopia or Eritrea’s border “dispute” with Ethiopia. Bringing in Eritrea “from the cold” can only come after a visible change of attitude in Eritrea, with implementation of a fundamental shift in attitude, an end to all aggressive policies, dismantling of training camps for extremists and terrorists, abandoning support for armed opposition groups and all other efforts to destabilize its neighbors. This needs to be accompanied by acknowledgement of the necessity for dialogue and acceptance of the norms of international diplomacy and adult relationships. Then and then only the lifting of sanctions and Eritrea’s reintegration into regional organizations and international politics might follow.
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