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Eritrea: Leader Shows His True Colours
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The Nation (Nairobi)
OPINION
24 September 2007
Posted to the web 24 September 2007
Chege Mbitiru
Eritrea's President Isayas Afewerki seems to have fallen in love with insurgents. Hopefully, it's puppy. Otherwise, additional violence in the Horn of African and environs will follow.
Jack Kimball of the BBC put it succinctly: "From Sudan to Somalia, insurgents have descended on tranquil Asmara?" President Afewerki owned up mid this month and supported a most high profile group, the Alliance of Re-Liberation of Somalia.
Ms Jendayi Frazier, US assistant secretary of state for African affairs hit back.
Ms Frazier said the US might, counting rocket launch style, use its second-the first is The Marines-real weapon of diplomacy and designate Eritrea "a state sponsor of terrorism." Penalties include a myriad of sanctions.
From Washington's view, President Afewerki had audacity to host a conference of Somalis opposed to the Transitional National Government, TNG, of President Abdullahi Yusuf, which the international community recognises.
When formed in 2003, the TNG remained stuck in Baidoa while the fundamentalist Union of Islamic Courts, CIC, expanded Islamic rule from Mogadishu. The union got cocky.
While supporting rebels in Ogaden, it also sought to oust the TNG.
Moreover, the presence in its ranks of Hassan Dahir Aweys, a long-time Jihad adherent also in the US list of wanted "terrorists" wetted US appetite for blowing up the bad guys. Last December, Ethiopia did a mince job of the union and accomplished some hatchet jobs for Uncle Sam.
At the conference, Mr Afewerki said, "Eritrean people's support to the Somali people is consistent and historical." That, as well as Somalia being Eritrea's "neighbour" are historical and geographical distortions.
Mr Afewerki's Eritrea supports opponents of the TNG in ways other than diplomatic.
In July, the UN Monitoring Group said Eritrea provided huge arms consignments to the union by chartered flights.
Fabrications, said Eritrea. Maybe the flights ferried sweets.
Waging war by proxy
Actually, Eritrea is waging war by proxy against Ethiopia. Both fought a two-year border war that ended in 2000. A UN border commission, whose findings are binding, straightened the mess. Mr Meles rejected the findings. Mr Afewerki saw red.
Rightly, Afewerki complains the international community, specifically the United States, isn't pressing Meles to accept the commission's findings.
Surely, he can't be that naïve. The US, which now verges on seeing a terrorist in anyone who isn't Caucasian, has a proxy, Meles. That's not withstanding his gargantuan-like Afewerki-human rights violations record.
However, while a quarrel exits between Eritrea and Ethiopia, it's poor wisdom for Afewerki to undermine the TNG.
He should back the UN and the AU in getting Somalia to resemble a state, for good reasons.
Somalia's collapse increased foreign powers, particularly the US, meddling in the region. Yet everybody knows trouble follows the US as water does a downward slope. In case Mr Afewerki doesn't know, a Nato fleet is cruising up the Somali coast, heading to the Red Sea.
The cover story is that the fleet is circumventing Africa in the event of future operations.
Actually, the goal is refining tactics for maintaining control of the Horn of Africa, the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.
The goings-on in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Iran nuclear row create a bigger picture. In addition to Oromos and Ogadenis, other unhappy groups exist in Eritrea's neighbourhood.
They include, naming a few, the Afars, Sidamas, Kafas and Gambellas in Ethiopia.
Southern Sudan is already grumbling. Nubians and Beja'a aren't bubbling love for Khartoum and neither are Nubians. Trouble isn't far in Kordofan and everyone knows about Darfur.
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"Come ye, all," were Afewerki to say and additional conflagrations and more big powers meddling would follow.
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