The United Nations is moving “expeditiously” to put in place a peace keeping team to implement the June 18 Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The UN’s pace may not impress the rest of the world. Indeed it would not be unfair to characterize the progress as snail pace. Still for anyone familiar with the UN’s ways of doing things, what the UN is doing is nothing short of extraordinary. The Security Council has unanimously accepted Secretary General Anan’s recommendation for 4,200 strong peace keeping force to go to the region. Early on, an advance team of 100 military observers has been approved to go to the area to act as a liaison to prepare for a full-scale peacekeeping operation. Forty six members of the team are already in the region surveying the proposed “security zone.” The entire peace keeping force will be deployed “soon,” perhaps by the end of the year, although the plan is for an unrealistic November target.

The UN’s uncharacteristic resolve in expediting the implementation of the June 18 Agreement and the OAU peace plan, has created a dilemma for the minority controlled government in Ethiopia, which never cared for the deployment of UN peace keeping forces in the first place. It only agreed to the proposal initially hopping that Eritrea would reject it. But much to Ethiopia’s disappointment, Eritrea accepted the proposal, in which case Ethiopia had no choice but reaffirm its initial acceptance, although it had to try to seize Assab, and fail, before Addis Ababa officially but reluctantly accepted the Agreement on Cessation of Hostilities.

 The dilemma for Ethiopia is that it cannot block the deployment of UN troops without creating the impression that Addis Ababa is not in favor of peaceful resolution to the conflict, which, in fact, is the case. The dilemma is embedded in a much larger contradiction characterized by a conflict between two mutually exclusive national objectives. On one hand the government in Ethiopia wants to project an image of a regional power committed to the stability of the region, on the other, it’s doing everything possible to destabilize its neighbor, Eritrea. But Ethiopia as a regional power is a contradiction. It lacks the resources to impose its will on its neighbors, nor does it have its own house in order. Insurrection is everywhere. Aspiring to a regional power status in an empty stomach is absurd. The country lives from day to day on hand out from the international community without which it cannot survive. More than anything else it is the painful recognition of the need for massive infusion of international assistance that has forced Ethiopia to think the unthinkable: to start talking about peace, even when it does not mean it.

Ethiopia has to appear it’s ready for peace for no other reason but to persuade the donor community to release the one billion dollars Ethiopia contends has been frozen because of the war. The TPLF has decided that if it can’t block the implementation of the June 18 Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities, it might as well ask to be rewarded with the resumption of financial assistance. But simultaneously, doing everything possible to block the implementation of the OAU’s principal peace package, the Framework Agreement, behind the scene.

All signs are that Ethiopia has made the strategic decision that it would project an image that it would accept the cease-fire agreement. But behind the scene it would work to frustrate the search for an honorable peace until an exhausted world prevails on Eritrea to give in to Ethiopia’s demands. Ethiopia’s working assumption is that a world so grateful to see the cessation of hostilities would put pressure on Eritrea to accept Ethiopia’s terms for the sake of peace, even if the terms undermine the OAU peace package, the U.N and the world community have endorsed. The government of Ethiopia has launched an all out campaign to convince the world that the war is over, and that international aid to salvage Ethiopia’s economy should continue. Addis Ababa hopes that the world accepts Ethiopia’s version of “peace” even if it undermines the OAU peace package, the very foundation of a peaceful settlement, and a package Ethiopia has said it accepts.

 Ethiopia has cynically decoupled the requirements for a cease-fire from what has to be done to achieve the final peace agreement. It hopes that it could convince the international community that aid should be resumed on the basis of Ethiopia agreeing to stop the shooting war believing that the world could be persuaded to substitute agreement on the cessation of hostilities to the real peace settlement. It wants to commit the donor community into putting assistance in the pipe line before peace has been signed, knowing full well that the terms for peace it has in mind will undermine the OAU peace package, and hence unacceptable to Eritrea.

With “peace!” on his lips, but not in his heart, yet with a bowl hat firmly in his hand, Prime Minister Meles has come to Washington. He has met with members of the U.S. congress, World Bank officials, and the media. The Ethiopian leader wants donors to “unfreeze” the one billion development assistance his country was denied because of the war now that he claims Ethiopia and Eritrea are about to sign a comprehensive peace treaty, too good to be true, and probably it is. Eritrea is not aware of a peace treaty waiting to be signed next month or any time soon. It would be splendid if it were the case, but Eritreans know that the much talked about comprehensive peace treaty is a cruel hoax, perpetrated by Prime Minister Meles for cynical purposes.

What exactly does Mr. Meles’ comprehensive peace treaty mean? If the OAU peace package is his frame of reference then the components of the treaty must be compensation, delimitation and demarcation, and determination of the origin of the conflict. But one suspects there may be other elements that he wants to incorporate, elements outside of the OAU peace package. Last June he sprung on Eritrea additional conditions for settling the conflict: the right of Tigrayans in Eritrea; replacing delimitation and demarcation with arbitration; compensation for losses of commodities left at the Eritrean ports when Ethiopia declared war on Eritrea; and, reduction of Eritrea’s military capability. Then there’s always Assab, never officially claimed by Ethiopia, but nevertheless Ethiopia did attempt to seize the port by force, and failed. It is not clear, therefore, how many of the extraneous issues the Prime Minister has in mind as part of his comprehensive settlement. To be sure a comprehensive peace treaty has a nice ring to it as it presupposes the tying of loose ends. But then one wants to know the details. Eritrea does not know what the Prime Minister is talking about.

 Ethiopia needs debt relief as urgently as it does relief assistance, another reason why Prime Minister has become a devout exponent of peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Ethiopia is one of 14 countries being considered for debt relief, but won’t be among the first 10 to qualify because of heavy military expenditures that the world rightfully considers a massive waste of scarce resources. The Prime Minister desperately wants to qualify, and he’s promising that he won’t squander the money since war with Eritrea would be a thing of the past.

The Ethiopian leader is asserting that there will be peace, not because he believes there should be a real peace between the two countries, but because he is pretending to be a champion of peace. That is the only way to get the 1.2 billion dollars relief, 23 percent of the total debt, which Ethiopia is seeking. As proof for Ethiopia’s commitment to reduce military expenditures to qualify for debt relief considerations, the Prime Minister has told World Bank and U.S. government officials that Ethiopia intends to demobilize 50,000 soldiers, and would need money to set them up in productive pursuits. The fact is that the Prime Minister may be talking about demobilization in Washington, but his government is engaged in a massive recruiting drive. In the end Ethiopia would use whatever debt it is forgiven to maintain the same obscenely large military at the expense of education, health and poverty reductions programs.

In an interview with the Washington Post editors Meles was nothing but giddy about the prospect for peace with Eritrea. He said he came to Washington to work with U.S. officials on concluding an agreement that would end hostilities with neighboring Eritrea and render the deployment of U.N. troops along the border unnecessary. It’s not clear why he thought that whatever was acceptable to the U.S. would be acceptable to Eritrea, unless he thought it did not matter what Asmara thought about the contours of the proposed peace deal as long as he persuaded the U.S. to go along with his plan. One would think that if an agreement has to be concluded, it must be with Eritrea’s knowledge and approval, and as far as anyone knows no one has asked the U.S. to represent Eritrea’s interest. But then the Prime Minister is trying to impress the editors with his commitment to pursuing peace with Eritrea, and if at all possible to force Eritrea to accept an imposed solution brokered between the Washington and Addis Ababa.

Prime Minister Meles has transmogrified himself from a warlord who sent tens of thousands of his countrymen to unnecessary death to an apostle of peace, a jarring role reversal. Indeed it is a strange transformation for a leader of one of the world’s poorest countries, who squandered one billion dollars of donated assistance for more than two years on a war he did not have to fight since he cynically passed up several opportunities to resolve it peacefully. Even now, while professing peace, he’s preparing for a resumption of the war. How else does one explain the forward movement of troops and the digging of new trenches and reinforcement of old ones in occupied Senafe? Or the trench digging in Shilalo? If peace is to be signed next month, as Prime Meles has been telling people in Washington how does one square his assertion with facts on the ground? Just a few weeks ago, a Bulgarian freighter, Kapitan Petko Voyvoda, was seen by international aid workers in Djibouti unloading crates of ammunitions and small arms next to another freighter unloading relief commodity for starving Ethiopians? Are these the actions of a responsible leader committed to peace? It could not be, unless one believes in fairy tales.

Prime Minister Meles is shouting “peace!” to anyone within an earshot, but in his heart he harbors anything but peace. The Ethiopian leader is hoping the world would not pay much attention to the details of his road map for peace, as articulated by his emissaries in the last Washington proximity talks in early July, or as in the behind the scene involvement of his diplomats in the wording of UN Resolution 1320 of September 15, 2000. In both cases every attempt was made to gut the essence of the OAU peace package. In Washington the attempt was to exclude the UN Cartographic Unit from any role in the delimitation and demarcation of the border, knowing full the Framework Agreement Ethiopia has agreed to given the UN unit the special role in drawing and marking the boundary lines. In the Security Council, Ethiopian diplomats persuaded the sponsor of the Resolution, the U.S. to drop direct reference to the Framework Agreement, although Resolution 1320 contains several cross references that cite the Framework Agreement as the basis for the negotiations.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1320 of September 15, 2000 talks about “delimitation and demarcation” without any reference on the basis on which both would occur to comply with Ethiopia’s wishes. Ethiopia’s anathema to the OAU peace package was expressed at the same time the Prime Minister was making the rounds in Washington preaching peace. How can there be peace if the government of Ethiopia rejects the OAU peace package that it has sworn to uphold?

The reason Prime Minister Meles wants to circumvent the OAU peace package is because his principal aim is to keep the disputed territory for good in exchange for vacating sovereign Eritrean territory that his army is occupying. Even then he wants to have the final word on how much of its occupied territory Eritrea would be allowed to recover. Ethiopia has never disclosed where it thinks the May 6, 1998 line was. All the June 18 Agreement on Cessation of Hostilities does is to require Ethiopia to return to the May 6 line. But where is the line? Ethiopia will insist the line is wherever Addis Ababa says it is. The U.S. knows where the line was. But would Washington contradict Ethiopia’s claim? Only time would tell, although the behavior of some of the members of the U.S. facilitating team has not been reassuring. During most of the last two years they have demonstrated a disturbing habit of going the extra mile to appease Ethiopia.

Prime Minister Meles understands very well that the language of peace travels far in Washington and around the world’s capitals. He has espoused the “peace now!” with all the sincerity of a recent convert because he needs money, lots of money. The two year war, and in particular the invasion of Eritrea, has been very expensive. In preparing for the May 12 invasion of Eritrea, the government of Ethiopia spent 4 billion Bir (500 million dollars) during the four months of the year! The government run out of money and had to resort to borrowing from the public (commercial bank) to finance the operation of government for the rest of the year. The country was spared the devastating impact of hyperinflation because of the infusion of 200 million dollars worth of relief commodities, the donor community made available to cushion the cost of the war. Understandably the budget is swimming in red ink.

The country’s foreign exchange reserve is almost gone. The Ethiopian leader is asking a massive infusion (350 million dollars) of balance of payment support to cover his country’s import bills. And with another request of 150 million to import fertilizers, the Prime Minister has asked the World Bank for 500 million dollars total, the exact amount he spent in the preparation for the invasion of Eritrea. He’s asking donors to replace the money he squandered on war, and in return he’s promising peace. However, if the usual pattern holds, Ethiopia will get the money, but won’t deliver on the promise for peace. It has always been like this and it will always be, unless donors begin to do something they have never done before looking themselves in the mirror and begin to grasp the enormity of the harm they have done to the people of the Horn. Until such time the cycle of violence would continue.

The international community gave Ethiopia money for health, education, and poverty reduction programs, but Ethiopia diverted a good chunk of the money for the war effort. The donor community is well aware of the diversion of its assistance. Recently the Prime Minister was in Washington, hat in hand, to plead for more assistance. He was assuming that he can con the donor community one more time into releasing hundreds of millions of dollars to grease his war machine. A world community that wants so badly to see peace in the Horn is about to be deceived one more time by a smooth talking charmer who knows how to seduce his audience with the right language, the right phrases, to make his point.

The Prime Minster’s audience is not even aware that Ethiopia’s commitment to the cease-fire is full of invisible caveats and equivocations. While feigning acceptance of the cessation of hostilities deal, Ethiopia is likely to do everything possible to complicate its implementation, and to transfer to Eritrea any blame for the delay. This explains Prime Minister Meles’ current trip to the U.S., hat in hand while his government is provoking Eritrea to take steps to undo the June 18 Agreement. Given the gullibility of the donor community, similar ploys have worked before, and as far as Addis Ababa is concerned there is no reason why it should not work one more time.

Ethiopia is painfully aware that it cannot single handedly reverse the process with the ease with which it annulled the Technical Arrangements. But the TPLF believes that it can create enough roadblocks to cast doubt whether the June 18 Agreement can ever be implemented, and in doing so, its aim is to prolong its occupation of sovereign Eritrean territory while pushing demarcation indefinitely into the distant future. The challenge for Ethiopia is how best to prolong its occupation of sovereign Eritrean territory while indefinitely postponing final demarcation, without the world knowing what Ethiopia is up to. Ethiopia’s agenda is not the quest for real and final peace based on real demarcation of the border but rather the illusion of a commitment to comprehensive peace whose contents remain nebulous. The real purpose is to permit Ethiopia to profess a commitment to peace without meaning it; to buy time for another assault on Eritrea’s sovereignty, but in the short term, to persuade the donors to untie the aid strings.

The outlines of the strategy have been evident for a while for alert students of Ethiopian diplomacy: tell the world that Ethiopia is deeply committed to peace, but then do everything possible to instigate war. Tell the world that the “war is over,” but then mean not a word of it. Remember the “un-amendable” Technical Arrangements? Eritrea accepted the TA taking at face value the OAU’s admonition that the document had to be accepted or rejected “as is,” without any request for changes. Ethiopia requested clarification after clarification to delay its official response, to buy time to complete preparation for a military attack on Eritrea. Without Eritrea’s knowledge, the American team, working secretly with Addis Ababa, amended the “un-amendable” TA to comply with Ethiopia’s request for changes, but changes that undermined the OAU peace package. The so-called consolidated TA was unacceptable to Eritrea because it undermined the Framework Agreements in key areas. When Eritrea balked, Ethiopia was quick to brand Eritrea not seeking peace. In a matter of days Ethiopia invaded Eritrea, a strange response for a country professing a commitment to peace.

Prime Minister’s latest mantra that the “war is over,” cannot be taken seriously. Never mind that for Eritrea the war cannot be over as long as even one square inch of Eritrean sovereign territory is under Ethiopian occupation. Either peacefully or by force, Ethiopia has to let go of Eritrean territory. But the mantra has been heard before, when Prime Minister Meles announced that his troops were withdrawing from occupied Eritrean territory from the Gash-Barka area, when they did not. He announced the war was over when he sent division after division to seize Assab even after agreeing to cease-fire. Close to ten thousand Ethiopians died in the failed attempt to seize Assab after Prime Minster Meles had announced to the world that the war was over and that Ethiopia had agreed in “principle” to the cease fire Eritrea had accepted and honored. Eritreans know the man cannot be trusted, and will say so to anyone who would listen. The donor community knows he cannot be trusted, but will not say much for fear ruffling diplomatic feathers. The few fearless souls that told the truth, Congressman Gilman, and U.K Secretary for Overseas Development Claire Short are denounced in no uncertain terms as anti-Ethiopia. Unfortunately for Ethiopia any application for debt relief in the U.S. has to go through Representative Gilman.

Ethiopia intends to postpone the eventuality of real peace as long as possible. The key, however, is to manufacture a crisis, to stealthily wreck the onward march to peace only to pin the onus for the failure on Eritrea. Once aid has been resumed, Ethiopia could go on obstructing the final determination of the border through interminable mini-crisis that Ethiopia would orchestrate. The most probable “excuse” for the next offensive would be the alleged mistreatment of Ethiopian nationals in Eritrea. The government of Ethiopia has blocked the orderly repatriation of Ethiopian nationals. It wants them to stay and live in Eritrea so that they can be used as a built-in catalyst to justify military intervention in Eritrea’s internal affairs.

The generosity of the international community that had naively made assistance available to help Ethiopia’s poor has made it possible for the government to divert funds for the war effort. Addis Ababa has conned the donor community into financing the invasion of Eritrea. As far as Ethiopia is concerned there is no reason why history should not repeat itself. There’s no way for one of the world’s wretchedly poor countries to spend 500 million dollars a year in persecuting a war that did not have to be fought since peaceful avenues for settling the conflict were available. The money to persecute the war came from donor countries and multilateral agencies that knew their development and relief assistance was diverted for the war effort. And because they knew, and did nothing to stop it, they must bear the ultimate responsibility for the human wreckage their assistance has left behind.

It is most welcome that Prime Minister Meles is saying he wants peace. He has to prove his sincerity by agreeing to the terms of the OAU peace package he said he was committed to. Sticking to the cease-fire agreement is good, but cannot be a substitute for the real thing—peace. Not a penny in development assistance should be released, not a penny in debt should be forgiven, unless real peace has been signed and agreed to. The Horn has seen enough bloodshed financed through diverted development assistance. Enough is enough!

The people of Ethiopia and Eritrea deserve peace. The least the international community could do is to refuse to provide funding that could easily be diverted for war. It has been said repeatedly that money is fungible. Any development assistance provided, or any debt forgiven, will eventually, if indirectly, finance one of Africa’s largest war machines. The donor community should not be an accomplice to death and destruction. Enough damage has been done already. Stop funding the immoral war.