U.S. TO BLAME FOR ETHIOPIA BORDER CONFLICT THAT KILLED 70,000, SAYS ERITREA’S PRESIDENT
BY
Eritrea’s president has blamed Washington for ongoing tensions between his country and neighboring Ethiopia, which have been in a state of near-conflict for almost two decades.
Isaias Afwerki, who has led the authoritarian regime in Eritrea since it gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993, wrote a letter to unnamed heads of state earlier in June, requesting support in overturning a U.N. Security Council arms embargo in place since 2009, according to state-run media outlet Shabait.
Afwerki urged the heads of state to use their influence at the Security Council to reverse the arms embargo, which was put in place after the U.N. claimed that the Eritrean regime was supporting Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Somalia, Al-Shabab.
Daily Emails and Alerts– Get the best of Newsweek delivered to your inbox
Eritrea fought a 30-year independence war against Ethiopia from 1961 to 1991, finally achieving self-rule in a U.N.-sponsored referendum in 1993.
Full-scale war broke out between the two countries in 1998 over the status of the border town of Badme, and an estimated 70,000 people were killed in the war. Since the conflict ended in 2000, relations between Eritrea and Ethiopia have been characterized as “no war, no peace.”
“The ‘border dispute’ was a simple ruse as the boundary between the two countries was defined and determined without any ambiguity in colonial times. But Washington feverishly worked at the time, through the State Department, to drive a wedge between the two peoples who have deep historical and strategic ties in order to foment a crisis and micromanage the affairs of the Horn of Africa,” said Afwerki in the letter, according to Shabait.
In 2009, the United Nations imposed an open-ended arms embargo on the supply of all arms and military equipment to and from Eritrea. The country is already isolated with few international allies and has been dubbed Africa’s North Korea for the authoritarian tactics of Afwerki’s regime and the absence of a free press.
The arms embargo was imposed after the U.N. Monitoring Group on Somalia found that Eritrea had provided political, financial and logistical support to Al-Shabab, which is waging a war against Somalia’s Western-backed federal government.
Afwerki said that the U.S. and its allies had “concocted a fictitious case…to impose unwarranted sanctions against the country.” The Eritrean president said that it was “high time” for the sanctions to be lifted and for the “incessant attacks” against his country to come to an end.
Relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea remain tense. The Ethiopian government has accused Eritrea of fomenting widespread protests in the Oromia region, which surrounds the capital Addis Ababa. Protests broke out in November 2015, and hundreds of people have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces.
Ethiopia and Eritrea have also traded accusations about an alleged attempted attack on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a flagship project of the government in Addis Ababa that will be the biggest hydropower dam in Africa when complete. Ethiopia claimed that 20 members of an Eritrean-backed rebel movement were arrested while trying to damage the dam, but Eritrea rejected the accusations as “preposterous.”
The U.S. State Department imposed further sanctions on Eritrea’s navy earlier in 2017 after a U.N. sanctions monitoring body said it had found a shipment of North Korean-made military communications equipment leaving Pyongyang for Eritrea in 2016. The U.S. proscribes trading in certain types of military equipment with North Korea, Syria and Iran.
This person has lost has gone mad. He has lost all his marbles. And he can say anything he wants. Why not? He can do anything he wants to his people. He has methodically castrated and silenced any living or imaginary opponent at home. His method has worked for himself without a hitch but his graduates Sebhat Nega and the gang have not been so successful next door. He can do and say anything he wants to his people and country. He sold the most valuable real estate for which the Eritrean people paid heavy price in making their own to the highest halawa drunk sheik bidder from the Arabian Peninsula. He has subserviently bent over backward to those who see him as such -al-abd, a house nigger!!! I hope he stays content with his own borders clubbing, jailing and killing his own people and leave my people alone. Look what he just did? He had his thuggish throngs stomp on a banner deified by many millions of colored peoples around the globe. He does not give a flying hoot even what his orphans like the G7’s feel about it. Those tri-color banners were the ones in the hands of those heroic and glorious patriots who beat the tar out of an aggressor at Adwa. Those colors were in the hands of my Barentu ancestors along with their Amhara, Tigrayan and other brothers when they galloped to victory on that battlefield. And when they were mowed down by the machine guns of those Askari sell-outs our martyred forefathers were holding those tricolors in their cold hands. Senegalese, Malians, Guineans, Ghanaians, Republic of The Congo people, Guinea Bissau and even Bolivians would be extremely upset about what has been done to their flag colors. But that is him, Al-Toweel Isaias, that eyal-al-souq, that who hatches nothing but what our Amhara brothers and sisters call ‘balegas’ like him. To celebrate Eritrean people’s heroic feat is one thing. I have always been an admirer of their heroic battle to liberate their country but I don’t believe the common Eritrean would approve such beyond the pale behavior by the hoodlums among them. I believe the Eritrean people have a big reason (historical also) to celebrate their independence day. Their problem proved to be what usually follows after a successful violent struggle led by a so-called liberation front, a demonic clique. It seems that Al-Toweel and his cohort firmly believe that they are the ones who created the present day Eritrea and think they are entitled to the first dips. As one Eritrean citizen put it, he has this fear that Isaias and his goons may even tell what is in his mind, what he is thinking in real time. That is, psychologically, debilitating. That is the technique he taught his cousins Sebhat Nega and Meles gang. And these two have been extremely successful in implementing such a total submission in their Tigray fiefdom. There the people praise The Almighty every time Sebhat sneezes and jump jack ass every time he whistles ‘laloye’. Complete and total submission!!! Look at many of them behave even after coming here. They turned themselves hermits and hold meetings and throw parties behind closed doors just Jawar and his cliques are doing with my own Oromos here among the Diaspora. But in Oromia and Amhara regions it has been no dice for Sebhat’s and the gang. Up yours!!! has been what they were told in these two regions.
I told you not to start with me about this demon, incubator of demons Al-Toweel Isaias. Otherwise, I would not stop telling him off.