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Now that Ethiopia has managed to invade and occupy undisputed Eritrean territory -- with the help of hundreds of Russian military officers who designed the offensive plans and piloted the newly-purchased SU-25 and 27 fighter planes and MI-24 helicopter gun ships -- it also has managed to pull Eritrea to its level -- to sheer dependency on the charity of the international community to feed its people. A third of Eritrea's 3.5 million has been displaced fleeing the Ethiopian invasion, according to the UN. We have witnessed also the despicable acts of violence by the Ethiopian army in occupied Tokombia, Barentu, Guluj, Ali Gdr, and Tesseney. Soldiers raping 30 year old mothers and 60 year old grandmothers; Looting private homes and small businesses; tanks demolishing government buildings and destroying brand new hotels, gas stations, modern farming equipment, and carrying the rest back to Ethiopia. Senseless violence and wanton destruction!

The Ethiopians, particularly these vindictive Weyane regime, their supporters abroad including foreign Ethiopianists, apparently resented Eritrea's success and the self-reliant way of dealing with its own problems. Resented it because primarily Eritrea has proven them wrong. Historically, successive Ethiopian regimes in the last half of the 20th century - from Emperor Haile Sellassie, the Dergue Marxist dictatorship to the current regime of the "newly-minted-Ethiopians" -- attempted very hard to prove that Eritrea was not economically viable and that it could not survive without the support and help of "mother" Ethiopia. However, Eritrea proved them all wrong since it became free and independent in 1991. Not only was Eritrea viable economically, but its economy was growing at an amazing annual rate of 7-8% (World Bank estimate) from 1991-1998. Eritrea is not only economically viable but an economically successful state, thank you very much!

Graham Davis, a reporter, wrote last month the following in an article entitled, "Horn of Africa: two bald men fighting over a comb":

"There's enough food in Ethiopia to feed the population, according to one of the biggest relief agencies. It's just that having lost their cattle in the drought, the herdsmen have no money to buy it. Pay up or die is the sentence pronounced on these unfortunates by some of their own rulers. And if the rest of the world doesn't like it, then by all means be our guest and come and feed them yourself."

The shameless war-mongers at Walta and other Weyane/Ethiopian Internet sites need to hear what foreigners such as Davis, their guests at posh new hotels such as the Addis Sheraton, are saying about them. Then again, they, the Weyane are shameless, so it does not matter! Why? Because war mongering and beating war-drums is in the soul and blood of the Ethiopian ruling class! They can't survive without it specially when it comes to Eritrea and Eritreans.

Only in Ethiopia do we see the logic (if there is logic in war) twisted beyond recognition. In a democratic country such as the United States of America, Britain, India, or Israel, the head of state - the president or the prime minister - would have been chased out of office and forced to resign in humiliation, had he or she behaved the way PM Meles of Ethiopia has been behaving. Unfortunately, and in spite of Ethiopia's pretensions to the contrary, Ethiopia is not even remotely resembling a democracy.

The parliament of Ethiopia is utilized only for political expediency by the ruling party's "politburo" members - an exclusive club of 5-7 member of the leadership of the Tigray People's Liberation Front(TPLF), some of whom do not even have official position in the government. The foreign minister, Seyoum Mesfin, said he needed to consult his government before giving a final decision whether to accept the 15-point peace package in Algiers on June 8, 2000. Eritrea had accepted the cease-fire agreement unconditionally, despite the fact that it was biased to Ethiopia's favor. The Ethiopians were said to be consulting the "government" including the "elected" parliament. This was all pretension and deception. While Meles and his cohorts pretended to be consulting with the rest of the government, the Ethiopian army was ordered by the same leadership to try and capture, if possible, the Eritrean port of Assab. Thus, fighting raged between June 6-10 and Meles expended thousands of his troops in the process. The Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF) managed to successfully repulse the offensive 37 km from Assab, where the EDF had, by order of the political leadership, withdrawn from its original 71 km border position. This had been verified by diplomats and journalists.

Are We Dealing With The Same Meles Zenawi?

Addressing the Eritrean people at the independence ceremony in Asmara in 1993 after Eritrea declared its independence from Ethiopia following the popular referendum in which 98% of Eritreans said yes to independence, the then-President Meles Zenawi declared, "I just spoke to you representing Ethiopia, and now I speak to you as a comrade. I ask you not to scratch your wounds." It's safe to assume that almost every Eritrean who attended the ceremony or saw the footage on TV or on video afterwards was touched by the Ethiopian head-of-state's words. This writer remembers how, as Meles Zenawi spoke, the video zoomed towards the disabled war veterans on wheel chairs who were seated in front of the VIPs. They were applauding Meles' words.

Eritreans, thus, continue to wonder if this was the same person who told them to forgive and to not dwell on the past for the sake of the two brotherly people of Eritrea and Ethiopia. How glad the Eritrean people were to hear the Ethiopian president say to them 'let's bury the past; for this is a new day.'

Eritrea did not bother to ask reparations from Ethiopia for the thirty years of destruction of the Eritrean economy and its infrastructure, and for the lives of thousands of innocent Eritrean civilians killed and sometimes massacred in the hundreds by the Ethiopian army during the rules of successive Ethiopian regimes. Countless Eritrean civilians indeed were killed or driven out of their lands and into exile in the Sudan and other neighboring Arab countries. Many Eritreans deserving of such compensations for the catastrophic loss of lives and other property were left out of any hope of gaining their property and other form of compensation, because the Eritrean government in particular and the Eritrean people in general decided not to "scratch [their] wounds". Instead, Eritrea and its people opted to work hard together with their Ethiopian counterparts for the benefit of both countries in areas of trade and other bilateral issues of development. (In hindsight, this writer believes that Eritrea should have demanded from Ethiopia war reparations for the destruction the latter wrought in its decades long rule in Eritrea. For, ostensibly, the Ethiopians interpreted Eritrea's magnanimity and forgiveness simply as ignorance or weakness. It is not too late and Eritreans should pursue this until Ethiopia pays for its crimes in Eritrea).

Five short years latter, after his government consolidated power in Ethiopia with the help of ethnic Eritreans living in Ethiopia ( 70,000 of whom Meles has since expelled from Ethiopia) and the Eritrean government with its army, the Meles regime's Tigrayan elite in Tigray began encroaching into Eritrean territories. This encroachment, thoroughly documented now, was, inter alia, the cause of this so-called 'border war'. Although the current regime and the Ethiopian elite, blinded by hatred towards the success of Eritreans, tried to twist the truth beyond recognition, it is clear from the documents that have emerged since that the Tigrayan-Ethiopians had been trying to provoke Eritrea into reacting to their encroachment into Eritrean territory and unilaterally demarcating the international, albeit un-demarcated, border in the Badme and Bada region.

Fast Forward To June 2000

Thousands of Ethiopian soldiers (4125 "actual body count" in 48 hrs at the Assab front) were killed and thousands more wounded after the Prime Minister of Ethiopia (yes, the same Meles Zenawi) unilaterally declared the war with Eritrea "over" on Wednesday May 31, 2000. His declaration was a calculated political move. He wanted to tell the world Ethiopia had won the war and, at the same time, he hoped to obtain the blessing of the world for his occupation of undisputed Eritrean territories. But Meles, this often-described brilliant intellectual, failed to factor into his calculations that his pompous declaration might backfire badly if Eritrea decided not to cooperate with him. Of course Eritrea did not; how could it when its territory was occupied by an army that was raping Eritrean women, looting and destroying towns and villages deliberately and systematically. Therefore, it responded that there would be no cease fire as long as Ethiopian troops occupy undisputed Eritrean territories. Thus the war continued killing thousands more soldiers.

How does one declare a war over anyway? A glance at the history books would tell us that in any conflict the two sides have to come to some sort of "agreement", whether forced or not, in order to declare the conflict over. Either one side is subdued decisively and declares defeat and surrenders as in the case of Japan in the Second World War, or the war continues until the enemy is completely wiped out and its leadership has collapsed as in the case of Germany in 1945. And there is the case of Iraq in the Gulf War in 1991. Even the superpower in the Gulf War declared the war over only after it became painfully clear to the world that the United States forces and their allies were not fighting an Iraqi army, and described the final battle of the "highway of death" (if it could be said battle) as a massacre. (The Highway of Death was a scene of a massacre on a highway where hundreds of Iraqi vehicles were heading north fleeing Kuwait. The allied war planes simply crippled the lead vehicles and proceeded to pound the stranded convoy from the air for hours. A truly gruesome sight, thus, the name).

Dr. Martin Luther King wrote: "I am not afraid of the words of the violent but of the silence of the honest." In the second Ethio-Eritrean war, what disheartens Eritreans is the indifference and the deafening silence of the International community. Where is the outrage in Africa and the world when 70,000 Ethiopians of Eritrean origin were stripped of their identity, their hard-earned property confiscated without any due process, and expelled from Ethiopia? Where was ex-President Mandela, for God's sake, when thousands of Ethiopian youth were sent to their death in a "human wave" tactic? Where? And why the silence?

After the signing of the cease-fire agreement on Sunday, June 18, there is now talk of deploying a merely 2000-4000 contingent of UN peacekeeping forces between the two armies. Utterly inadequate number when one compares it with the 50,000 NATO troops currently stationed in Kosovo.

And today, June 20, as Eritreans all over the world and in Eritrea remembered the fallen heroes of the Liberation War as well as this second Ethio-Eritrean conflict, Meles' war in Eritrea seems to be over for now! Or has it? Only time will tell.