FROM THE ARCHIVES

Ethnic Baiting: A Historic Glimpse at the TlPLF’s ‘Rwandazation’ Policy

NOTE: Here is a piece from the archives written in 1999 when the TPLF began to fully implement its dangerous policy of ethnic baiting, with a focus on the actions and statements by the group’s senior members in an attempt to justify the inhuman policy the party set in motion in 1998 against Ethiopians of Eritrean origin and Eritreans and set them up for genocidal crimes. However, as the article indicates, “ ethnic baiting, once set in motion, has a life of its own.”

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TPLF’s Politics of Hate and its ‘Rwandazation’ of the Horn

An Open Letter to Sibhat Nega

Ato Sibhat:

I am writing in response to your continued vengeful slander of the Eritrean people--not individual Eritreans or even the Eritrean government, but the entire Eritrean people, and all the Eritrean cultures. Over the last 18 months, you and your party have been using every possible label to demonize Eritreans in order to justify the TPLF-provoked carnage that has been the hallmark of the current conflict. You and your party labeled all Ethiopians of Eritrean origin and Eritreans living in Ethiopia “spies; you have been trying to portray this young, tiny nation as a “threat” to the region. And now, going even beyond the bounds of shamelessness, you have branded Eritreans as “racists,” and “supremacists.”

In order to put this letter into its proper context, let me tell you where I am coming from. This is not the first time that I have taken on individuals and groups who try to use hate or inter-ethnic hostility as a political ploy. I have been writing about the hatemongering by Ethiopia’s ultranationalists and other unreconstructed chauvinists the TPLF is in bed with today in one of the most unholy alliances we have seen in a long time, switching friends and enemies around in one sweep. I devoted the maiden issue of a newsletter in l996 to look into the social poison that these groups had been spewing by attacking the Tigrayan people as well as ethnic Eritreans in Ethiopia--with their primary target being Tigrayans. The newsletter exposed their campaign of hate, fear and blackmail against the Tigrigna-speaking peoples in Ethiopia for being who they are, and concluded that though they had every right to criticize or attack their government, these Derg remnants had no right to attack the Tigrayan people or any other people as a whole.

It is the same principle that drives me today to write this open letter to you and the likes of you. I am not really sure whether your vengeful anti-Eritrean pronouncements that hover way outside of the outer limits of reasonable discourse deserve any response. However, because your utterances tend to reflect those of your party, if not of your government, not responding to your campaign of hate was not a reasonable choice because when the state machinery resorts to inter-ethnic hatred as a political strategy, our fragile societies may be shattered beyond repair. In terms of its catastrophic impact, there is no comparison between a campaign by a disorganized, scattered fringe elements of the dethroned Derg remnants, and one orchestrated by TPLF’s well-oiled, high-financed party machinery.

You have been unrelenting in your vindictive accusations against the Eritrean people. In your latest utterances aimed at the Eritrean people, you said, “The conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia is not a border conflict, but rather, a war to crush Eritrean supremacy.” In previous statements, you attributed the current border conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia to the “supreme race mentality” of Eritreans. You also told an Arab television reporter that the Eritreans “call themselves the ‘Jews of Africa’ and ‘Black Israelis” and they consider themselves “a super race,” and you cited this again as the cause of the conflict between the two countries. Your party labeled all Ethiopians of Eritrean origin and Eritreans residing in Ethiopia as “Shaibia spies” to justify the Hitlerite policy against them it set in motion in June l998.

But, you and I know that is a red-herring, another implausible cause, in a long list of implausible causes the TPLF has been looking for to justify the continuation of the carnage on the war front. The real causes of this conflict are rooted in your desperate and calculated attempt to use the Eritrean card as an all purpose gold card a) to hold on to power by eking some kind of legitimacy at the expense of Eritrea and anything of Eritrean origin in Ethiopia, and b) furthering the TPLF’s plans for Greater Tigray by any means necessary. When all the multi-layered veils are lifted these two will emerge as the main reasons behind this senseless war you provoked and seem to have strong desire to continue. But, there is only so much you can do with the Eritrean card.

You also know, or should know, that supremacist attitudes and behaviors are the products of ruling or dominant cultures--not one that has had to fight for the most basic of rights, as the Eritrean people have. During most of the last one hundred years, Eritreans have been subjected to dominations of all kinds by colonial powers, as represented by such murderous figures as Benito Mussolini and Mengistu Hailemariam. True, the Eritrean people are proud of who they are and it was their can-do attitude that kept them fighting for 30 years against all odds, a common people who faced and still face an uncommon situation--a succession of semi-feudal elites bent on determining the destiny of Eritrea and Eritreans.

So, if you are looking for supremacist attitudes, you don’t have to look far. Look around you. Or maybe you cannot recognize these attitudes and behaviors that now you are too close to the individuals and groups who best represent these odious traits in Ethiopia. Now that the TPLF is running in all directions to release the chief murderers of the Derg era from prison to kill more Eritreans, you may not want to see what real supremacist attitude and practice look like. But, your newly-found partners are the same unconstructed chauvinists and ultranationalists who have been calling all Tigrayans as the cancer of Ethiopia that should be cut off from the main body..

I am citing all these not to convince you how detestable your new partners are. As detestable their actions are--as well as that of Mengistu Hailemariam, who by the way would be proud of your new alliance--their campaign of hate may not even register on a scale compared to what you and your party are doing. That gives you an idea of the magnitude of the damage you have wreaked on the societies of the region when measured against the deeds of even what was considered the most hateful regime in the region. The TPLF achieved in l7 days in June 1998 what Mengistu could not achieve in l7 years, in terms of rupturing the bonds between the peoples of Ethiopia and Eritrea. As for rupturing the bonds among the peoples of Ethiopia, it may have taken you more than 17 days, but the results have been equally frightening and catastrophic.

The torrent of social poison you are spreading against a people who sacrificed so much to achieve what almost everybody else takes for granted--independence--tells more about you and others like you than the target of your unrelentless attack. Words of hate generally reveal a great deal about the hater. Your attempt to define the Eritrean people who they are also tells us more about your perception of yourself and that of the TPLF in the scheme of things in the Horn of Africa. The intensity of your hatred for the Eritrean people is becoming clearer everyday from your escalating rhetoric of hate; but, one wonders how one can have this much hatred for a people who provided him with sanctuary and aid at a critical stage of his life and the life of his party.

For some people, it may be difficult to fathom why someone like yourself who fought for so long against the supremacist ideologies and practices of Ethiopia’s ruling classes would stoop to the politics of hate and to the “Rwandazation” of the region, setting the scene for potential bloodbath. But, the reasons are less confounding when one realizes the depth of the crisis of legitimacy the TPLF faces and how desperate it is to hold on to power, no matter what the consequences.

One of the consequences has been the “Rwandazation” of the Horn of Africa by the TPLF. So far, you have been playing a starring role in this effort. In fact, when all things are said and done, at the heart of your legacy and that of your party will be the Rwanda-like ethnic-baiting campaign you have unleashed. And there is no question that you will lead the list of inductees into this historic Hall of Shame. The killings, detentions, deportations, confiscations of property, and otherwise massive abuse of human rights you have unleashed will not end with ethnic Eritreans in Ethiopia; it will continue long after your party has left the scene. Once you inject social poison into the body politic of any country, especially in such fragile societies as that of Ethiopia and the rest of the region, the impact is bound to have a lasting effect.

But, as to who the next victims of such poisonous policy will be, it is anyone’s guess. Ethnic baiting, once set in motion, has a life of its own.

Asgede Hagos, Ph.D.

Delaware State University