By:
Abeba Isahac
Just
imagine for a moment a high ranking military official from a highly regarded
nation, made in charge of the middle east without knowing much about Jewish
history, and yet, takes it upon himself to authoritatively implicate the first prime minister of Israel,
David Ben-Gurion, just because he happened to originate from Poland, and had
married a Russian born woman, despite his having fought all his adult life for
an Israeli homeland, to accuse him as being
a double edge sword whose heart lay in his origins of Poland and not in the
interest of the nation he had fought for all his life so that Jews all over the
world would have a homeland to come to, especially after their awful experience
with Hitler and the holocaust. Had
anyone dared to even suggest such a blasphemy, the whole Jewish world
communities would have been up in arms to force such an individual to rescind his
statement.
That is
exactly how Major General Timothy
Ghormley, who is the commander of the Combined Task Force Horn of Africa for
U.S. Central Command, painted the picture of the relationship between our
president Isaias Afworki and the woyane
leader. Where he got his information that our president’s origins come from Tigrai
is not difficult to guess, but it is an information that is neither here, nor
there, and does not have any importance or relevance to anything; yet, for a man of his rank, with the responsibilities he carries in
that region, he should have known better than to speak so authoritatively before
a group at the Defense Department Special Briefing about something he whatsoever
had no clue. To speak in that manner about
a leader of a nation, and at that, a nation
the leader had sacrificed the best years of his life,
fighting for thirty years to liberate it from the hands of its southern
neighbor, with whom yet an additional three years war had to be fought
in order to maintain and protect the nation’s sovereignty, to speak of such a
leader as working against the interest o f such a country which he had helped
to liberate, is simply crude, cruel,
mean spirited and farfetched, in addition to being in bad taste, insensitive as well as undiplomatic and
unprofessional.
The
following are the verbatim words which the Major General chose to describe the
situation between Eritrea and Ethiopia; words which had sounded like music to
the ears of the so-called Eritrean opposition, so much so, that they had it
hanging high on their walls as a badge of honour, since they were the source of
all the misinformation and farfetched theories usually repeated by the gullible
western nations.
“If you look up in
Eritrea and Ethiopia, where you see the Tigre, just so happens that there are
some issues up in that area. And it's
over a town up along the Ethiopian-Eritrean border, which happens to be in the
Tigrean area. Both Prime Minister Meles
and President Isaias are Tigrean, so neither are willing to really take too
serious of a look at trying to solve that issue at this particular time.”
How disgraceful and disrespectful is a
super-power allowed to get! If this theory, albeit its inaccurate, unintelligible
gibberishness and simplism, truly is
the understanding that the Marine Corp Major General has, it is very scary to note
that these are the type of people who have been assigned to our area to become
the source of whatever decisions comes from the super power, not to mention misleading the people. It is
these type of people who are fed only by opposing groups, who allow drastic and
wrong decisions to take place out of ignorance and poor research. This is what
happened in Iraq under the direction of opposing groups lead by Ahmed Chalabi,
who was at one time the darling of the
State Department whom they lavished upon with millions of dollars for years, as they propped him up to become
the next leader of Iraq as soon as they got rid of Saddam Hussein. So where is Ahmed Chalabi today?
The
Marine Corp Major General seems to be ill informed and completely ignorant
about the whole situation and is therefore vulnerable to any suggestions that
are fed to him. He does not seem aware of the thirty years of Eritrean struggle
for independence, or of the war that took place from 1998 to 2000, nor does he
seem to be aware of the Algiers agreement or the final decision taken by the international
court that Badme is on the Eritrean side of the map, and not, as the General
implied, on the “Tigrean area” He also does not seem to be aware of the flip
flopping that occurred after the verdict was out, with the woyane leader
breaching his contract and the international community, especially those who
had witnessed and guaranteed it all, reneging their promises and declining to
live up to their responsibilities, while all along Eritrea kept to her word and
agreed to accept whatever final and binding decisions came out from the courts.
Alas, all these facts seem to have escaped the Marine Corp Major General’s attention and therefore made him
to be completely ignorant of the whole situation; this is said of course so as
to kindly be giving him the benefit of the doubt, rather than to suggest that
he was being mean spirited, and deceptive despite having known the truth.
This is
even worse than the ex-president James Carter’s unsolicited statements, who,
when asked about the results of the Ethiopian election which he and his wife had
attended as observers, decided to answer by blaming Eritrea for his friend Melles Zenawi’s problems. And lately we had the woyane
Foreign Minister telling the United Nations that what the Eritrean
Representative had said in his
statement at the 60th UN session, reminding the world
community of the Eriitrean land still occupied by Ethiopia, was, in Seyoum Mesfin’s words “a mockery of the
truth and an insult to the intelligence of the international community.”
Since
truth seems to have eluded Seyoum Mesfin
for so long, to the point that he no longer can distinguish it from its
opposite, in a perfect world, the
representative of the UN Secretary General in Ethiopia and Eritrea, Mr. Joseph
Legwaila would have stepped forward to Eritrea’s rescue and to confirm that, indeed,
besides Badme, other Eritrean territories
remain occupied, leaving tens of thousands of displaced citizens to live
in make shift places, waiting for their land to be freed. Immediately upon signing the Algiers
agreement the prerequisite for having peacekeepers in the area was that both
countries were to first go back to their original places of before the war; and
while Eritrea complied, Mr. Legwaila is on record as saying that the woyane had
refused to budge from certain Eritrean land. He even told Eritrea to live with it until demarcation took place,
because at that time he said he was unable or maybe unwilling to do anything
about it. So Eritea, instead of
succumbing to the desires and expectations of many for a renewed conflict,
decided to patiently wait it out until demacation took place; a demarcation which
was never to take place, again because
of the untrustworthiness and delinquency of the woyane, as well as that of the
international community, especially those who had been guarantors and witnesses
of the peace agreement which was signed in Algiers.
Of
course we do not live in a perfect world. As a matter of fact, we are living in
dangerous and sad times where lies,
intrigues, deceit and intransigence are openly and shamelessly being rewarded,
and where the word “democracy” has been reduced to mean rigged elections,
unheeded voices of the people, and
acquiesced hypocrisy and lawlessness, in situations of justice, civil and human rights and freedom
of speech. We live in a world void of
principles but full of greed, deception and cruelty, where promises and
agreements sealed by signatures are not worth the paper they are written upon,
and where those endowed with plenty look to take away from the less fortunate, even
the little that they have, and if they were at all to do a semblance of a good
deed, it always comes with some attachments, if ever it does take place at all,
since most often the announcements are the end of the story, as in the case of
fighting poverty in Africa, which the world hears about every G8 meeting with
no plan of action, but always ends up in the backburner as a subject matter to be
raised for the next G-8 meeting.
.
As a
well known author of many books, Mr. Kurt Vonnegut put it to the effect that, there could come a time when even the earth
itself would have had enough with the bad taste; feeling disgusted with the evils of humanity that it might very
well just spit it out from its belly, altogether. Hopefully, there will be
enough good people to turn it all around.
With
truth as her only weapon, and by the Grace of God, Eritrea will prevail always.
October
31, 2005