Let me come right to the heart of the matter and admit to you my take on the US-led "international community" (The New World Order, if you prefer) and its complete disregard of the great tragedy unfolding in the Horn of Africa region in this "senseless" and "stupid" Eritreo-Ethiopian war: This war is being fueled by the hidden hand of the US and the European countries who have been providing the minority Tigrean regime diplomatic and political cover and economic succor to enable it to pursue its war of agression against Eritrean in the past 13 months. It is my firm conviction that if the US had truly wanted this conflict to be resolved without much complication, it could have easily done so from day one by leaning hard on its Weyane clients and pulling its economic aid strings. Prolonging the conflict unnecessarily is a way of teaching Eritrea (and any African states that opt for an independent nationalist policy) a lesson as to who really calls the shots in the region. In the eyes of the architects of the New World Order, by rejecting foreign aid, downsizing the role of foreign NGOs, and charting its own economic path towards recovery and development, Eritrea was getting way out of hand. Make no mistakes about it: Eritrea took its independence seriously and as a result is being punished for its "arrogance." And thus, even if Eritrea has again unequivocally accepted the OAU Framework Agreement and the Modalities for its implimentation at the recent OAU summit in Algiers, Ethiopia is going to be allowed (by the so-called "International Community") to once again torpedo this peace plan and prolong this war unnecessarily while 5 million of its citizens are on the verge of the biggest famine since the 1984-84 famine under the hateful Mengistu regime.

My stance above should in no way be misconstrued as a defeatist position. On the contrary, what I have always argued for, in this and other fora, is that we Eritreans shouldn't be naive in expecting "deliverance" from the "international community," that the US-led international community could care less about peaceful settlement in the Horn (and in the whole of Africa for that matter), and that salvation and the solution to our problems can come only from within ourselves and through our united effort to defeat this challenge as we have done so in the past. In this article, I want to draw attention to the reasons as to why a long drawn out conflict in the region, and for that matter all over Africa, may not necessarily be contrary to the interests of the New World Order -- to focus on the bigger global picture and "see the trees for the forest," so to speak. Africa, in the scheme of things in this New World Order, is an area were surplus resources are to be extracted with minimum resistance, unwanted competition for those resources from a booming human (surplus) population must be controlled (remember the UN'S agenda for population control), and a perpetual low-intensity warfare maintained to keep things going.

A while back ( on January 27, 1999, to be exact) under an article titled "Is the US Really For Peace in Our region? I wonder ..." I posted to dehai an article with lengthy excerpts from the NEW YORKER (Jan 25, 1999). It was a long article on the Sudan in that issue, with excellent analysis, by William Finnegan, staff writer for the magazine. The title of that article is "THE INVISIBLE WAR" with the reader "In remote terrain, two million Sudanese have died. Others are being enslaved. The fighting has lasted for decades , and no one is trying to end it." Finnegan has traveled to Egypt, Sudan (Khartoum), rebel-controlled Southern Sudan, Kenya and Uganda to write this excellent expose. The more I read that article, the more its significance for us is clearer to me, for it illustrates the strak reality for Africa after the Cold War what is meant by the Orwellian phrase WAR IS PEACE. Here is how I concluded my post then:

What I considered important for us in terms of the West's position on the Eritreo-Ethiopian conflict comes at the end of that NEW YORKER article, the last three paragraphs. It is my humble opinion that it will greatly help to disabuse us of any illusions we may have as to how the West, for the most part, thinks and views our country in the current conflict with Ethiopia. (This doesn't mean, however, that there aren't subtle differences and nuances of policy that we shouldn't exploit to our advantage).

Please bear with me and read on:

------------begin Finnegan quote-------------

"American policy toward Sudan since the end of the Cold War -- and since the rise of the Turabi regime -- has been a combination of open hostility, stemming mainly from the regime's involvement with Iraq and from its hospitality toward a remarkable number of terrorist groups; of humanitarian engagement, primarily through Operation Lifeline Sudan; and of tepid political support for the rebel alliance. Like Sudan's neighbors, who aid the S.P.L.A. and would seemingly like to see the regime in Khartoum fall, Washington does not appear to have any actual alternative government in mind. The fact is that Sudan's strategic significance to the United States today is negligible, with the Horn of Africa no longer a cockpit of American-Soviet competition. Egypt is our key regional ally; Sudan is a sideshow.

"Given the scale of Sudan's suffering, the ongoing catastrophe of its civil war, and the millions of lives already lost in the South, the geopolitics raise an extremely disturbing possibility. While the outside world's obviousness of Sudan's plight is real, it is hardly complete. There is, after all, Operation Lifeline Sudan, now the largest air-relief operation since the Berlin airlift, fifty years ago. O.L.S. is expensive, having so far cost its sponsors more than two billion dollars. For the price of one week's air relief, it is sometimes said, all the war-destroyed bridges and roads in the South could be repaired. Such reconstruction would, of course, require peace. THE HARD QUESTION IS WHY THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY -- THE WESTERN POWERS, REALLY, LED BY THE UNITED STATES -- IS WILLING TO INVEST SO HEAVILY IN HUMANITARIAN RELIEF AND, AT THE SAME TIME, TO INVEST ALMOST NOTHING IN THE DIPLOMATIC EFFORT THAT MIGHT COMPEL THE WARRING PARTIES TO MAKE PEACE. THE AWFUL POSSIBILITY IS THAT THE SUDANESE STATUS QUO, AN INDECISIVE, LOW-INTENSITY CONFLICT THAT WEAKENS AN UNFREINDLY REGIME AND SUITS OUR KEY REGIONAL ALLY, CAIRO, ALSO SUITS OUR POLICYMAKERS." (emphasis mine)

"And so I heard out Martine Mawiens Dut, the village magistrate in northern Bahr al-Ghazal [a province in Southern Sudan] who had recently lost his wife, his daughter, and his son in the war, as he explained his hopes for an American-sponsored, all-parties peace conference for Sudan. 'Only the Americans can do it,' he had proclaimed. 'We are all counting on them!' And I did not tell him what I had heard one analyst [euphemism for spook] say -- THAT THE WEST, FOR MARKET REASONS, WOULD PROBABLY BECOME INTERESTED IN SUDAN'S OIL RESERVES IN ABOUT THIRTY YEARS AND THAT SUDAN SHOULD THEREFOR EXPECT ITS CIVIL WAR TO LAST UNTIL THEN." (emphasis mine again)

----------------end Finnegan quote--------------

Well, folks, there you have it. Communism may be dead, but Imperialism is alive and thriving well and it rules the world. It would help us greatly in our efforts if we understand well the nature of the forces arrayed against us.

Six months later, I am getting more and more convinced that the US was from the beginning of this conflict against Eritrea and against a quick peaceful resolution to the conflict and they have been steadily pushing the Weyane down the dangerous path of war and destruction. In fact, come to think of it, ever since President Clinton's visit to Africa, the whole continent has been plunged into a series of deadly conflicts whose only explanation can be that these conflicts are being deliberately fanned by sinister global powers whose "strategic interests" may be served in a mysterious way from Africa's continued self-destruction. For a while after the end of the cold war and the demise of Apartheid regime in South Africa, there was real hope of an "African Renaissance," as then then president-elect of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, had put it in a historic speech over a year ago. These inexplicable conflicts all over the continent could be a way of sabotaging the renaissance and rebirth of a continent that had been for centuries suffering from continued exploitation and oppression by the West. Call it conspiratorial if you will, but as the saying goes "only the paranoid survive." So if not paranoid, we need to be extremely skeptical and on our guards when it comes to solutions and salvation coming from the "International Community."

The first step in this direction would be to do away with all obfuscation and euphemisms and call things by their real name. To begin with the so-called "International Community" is neither international in its make-up nor does it constitute a community. It is a New World Order that is the manifestation of the will of the US and the most powerful European countries. And the so-called "peace process" in the Eritreo-Ethiopian war has neither the aim of bringing about a lasting peace between the peoples of Eritrea and Ethiopia nor is it a process. It is a complex diplomatic game in which the cards are constantly being reshuffled and stacked so that the odds always come up against Eritrea. It has also been used as a clever maneuver to distract Eritrea and buy the minority Tigrean regime crucial time to recover from its latest military defeats and prepare itself for yet another offensive to destroy Eritrean sovereignty.

Before I conclude the first part in this series, let me leave you with the following relevant quotes to underscore what I have highlighted above.

"Since absolute security for one power means absolute insecurity for all others, it is obtainable only through conquest, never as part of a legitimate settlement."
-- Henry Kissinger, (Cited in John G. Stoessinger, THE MIGHT OF NATIONS; World Politics in Our Time, rev. ed. (New York, 1965), p.219.)

"It cannot be expected that the most powerful military nations will sit still while other nations reverse the balance of power by the mere process of breeding."
-- Bertrand Russell, in MARRIAGE AND MORALS (London, 1985), p. 161.

Reading the news articles from Addis Tribune about the departure of US Ambassodr to Ethiopia, David Shinn, I make a slight detour in my "WAR IS PEACE" series to say a few words about the person who is viewed by many knowledgeable sources as perhaps most resposnible for prodding the Tigrean Mafia down the slippery path of war and the the creation of this mess we all find ourselves in. Having greatly contributed to the implementation of WAR IS PEACE policy of the New World Order, and helped to plunge the Horn of Africa region into untold misery, chaos and destruction, I suppose Ambassodor Shinn can now rest on the laurels of a long and illustrious diplomatic career and look forward to a comfortable life of tenured position in academia (and help train the next generation of American diploamts to Africa!). The legacy of WAR IS PEACE in the Horn, however, will conitnue to affect the lives of millions of Ethiopians, Somails, Eritreans and Sudanese, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of youth who have perished and will continue to perish as sacrifices to this cruel policy. The scourge of famine already hovers over the lives of millions of poor Ethiopians.

To understand better the mentality and inner workings of people like our esteemed American diplomat in Addis, here's an excerpt from a book titled "EXCESSIVE FORCE: Power, Politics & Population Control" published by the Information Project For Africa. (It is a book worth reading and you can purchase a copy from Information Project For Africa, PO BOX 43345, Washington, DC 20001; ISBN 1-886719-15-2, $13.00). In chapter three of that book under the heading "Puppet Rulers and Client States" (pp. 12-130) the book highlights the background of US foreign policy towards Africa and its lasting legacy to this day. It begins with an embarrasing quote from a National Security Council meeting:

------------begin quote EXCESSIVE FORCE -----------

"We must recognize, although we cannot say it publicly, that we need the strong men of Africa on our side. It is important to understand that most of Africa will soon be independent and that it would be naive of the U.S. to hope that Africa will be democratic ... Since we must have the strong men of Africa on our side, perhaps we should in some cases develop military strong men as an offset to Communist development of the labor unions. The President agreed that it might be desirable for us to try to "reach" the strong men in Africa. The President asked Stans whether he was now an expert on Africa since his trip to that continent. Mr. Stans, while disclaiming any expertness, said he formed the impression that many Africans still belonged in the trees."

[ The full text of the above 14 January 1960 meeting is published in the U.S. Government's "Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, vol. 14 (Washington, D.C.) 73-78. "Mr. Stans" refers to President Eisenhower's budget director, Maruice Stans. Also present at the meeting were Gordon Gray, National Seurity Advisor and former head of the Psychological Strategy; Allen W. Dulles, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Marion W. Boggs, Deputy Executive Secretary of the National Security council; Livingston T. Merchant, Unders Seretary of State for Political Affairs; Robert B. Anderson, Secretary of the Treasury; and James H. Douglas, Jr., Deputy Secretary of Defence.]

The foregoing exchange took place among some of the most powerful men in the world; the same men who helped shape early U.S. foreign policy toward the developing world in ways that are still evident, and by all appearances, permanent. The suggestion that the United States establishe ties to the "srong men" of Africa and "develop military strong men" was put forward by Richard M. nixon, then vice president of the United States and, from 1969 to 1974, its president. The president at the time, Dwight Eisenhower, openly agreed about the political usefulness of dictators.

At one point in the meeting, which was recorded by Boggs and classified at the time as "top secret," CIA Director Allen Dulles (the brother of the famed John Foster Dulles) urged that a system be worked out for "rewarding the individuals who are assigned to give advice to native leaders." The vice president added that a great deal could be accomplished in Africa if "the quality of our diplomatic representation were improved [and] if we sent politically sophisticated diplomats to the area." Gray advised the group that the total of $5 million in economic assistance had been budgeted for the years 1960 through 1963. Vice President Nixon then questioned whether this amount would be enough, and State Department official Merchant responded that "a special Africa Fund for special technical assistance on a regualr basis was under consideration as part of the Mutual Security legislation for 1961." All this money was in the hands of those who were anxious to establish control of Africa through military dictatoriships and capable of contemptously stating the African people "belonged in trees."

------------End quote EXCESSIVE FORCE-------------

Of course, nowadays no American diplomat would dare to outrighlty claim that "African people belonged in trees," (at least not openly, although Clinton's reference to the Eritreo-Ethiopian war as "tribal conflict" leaves one to wonder) but the mentality of people who make the policy for Africa at the Sate Department and the National Security Council, as well as the CIA and other US governemental agencies involved with foreign policy, is fundamentally not different than that of the old Cold Warriors of the Eisenhower adminstration. Today America has over 30 million citizens of African descent, yet its policy towards Africa remains racist and hostile. Diplomats like David Shinn are the rule rather than the exception, and they leave in their wake devastating impact on the course of history African countries and their development, and they are rewarded handsomely for such services. One wonders when America will reverse her traditional hostile relationship with Africa, and instead assist in the rennaisance of the continent that is has plundered for centuries.

A Luta Continua!

Elias Amare Gebrezgheir