If there was any glimmer of hope that the TPLF government in Ethiopia was serious about finding a peaceful resolution to the border conflict with Eritrea, the hope is dimming fast. The October 21 statement from the Office of the Government's Spokesperson made it clear that the TPLF is not interested in peace: never was, never will be. Subsequent interviews Prime Minister Meles gave with various news organizations has reaffirmed Ethiopia's latest position.
The October 21 statement, which read more as a ransom note than anything else, makes clear what Eritrea must do to win Ethiopia's assent to a peace deal. Ethiopia expects Eritrea to go beyond the OAU peace package. Ethiopia wants Eritrea to give Ethiopia " a guarantee by advance verification" a list of "Ethiopian" territories it plans to withdraw from. Eritrea will prepare the list but Ethiopia reserves the right to approve the list. Ethiopia has given itself the sole authority whether Eritrea has turned over enough land to satisfy Ethiopia. Furthermore, according to Ethiopia's thinking, by preparing the list Eritrea will be acknowledging that the territories it has agreed to turn over are sovereign Ethiopian territories, and as such not subject to future negotiations. The demand was made in all seriousness by Ethiopia's new leaders who have taken leave of their senses.
Think of a bank robber who insists in counting the loot before he satisfies himself that the teller has surrendered enough money. Then imagine the bank robber instructing the teller to mark the bills to prove to future investigators that the robber had initially deposited the same amount of money, the same bills in the bank. So technically he was only withdrawing his "own" money, and not robbing the bank! That's what Eritrea is facing right now. Under the threat of the resumption of war Ethiopia is demanding that Eritrea concedes, what is at best disputed land, as sovereign Ethiopian territories, to undercut future negotiations.
What will it take to satisfy the TPLF? Minimally, nothing short of what's in the 1997 Map of Tigray. Once Eritrea meets this demand the TPLF may be persuaded to agree to demarcation and delimitation. Even this is not guaranteed since the TPLF keeps upping the ante. If and when the TPLF government is willing to sign a peace deal depends how Eritrea reacts to future, but yet unspecified conditions the TPLF is likely to impose on Eritrea. If one follows the trajectory of TPLF's ever changing demands it is unlikely it will be satisfied with anything less than having a say in Eritrea's internal affairs as a condition of signing a peace agreement. This is TPLF's agenda. Eritreans know the delusional agenda, although the TPLF does not think Eritreans know.
Ethiopia has no intention abiding by the OAU Summit's decision at Algiers. Her acceptance of the Modalities was a sham, never intended to be taken seriously. And the current talk about Ethiopia "dialoging" with the OAU is nothing but a public relations exercise meant to forestall United Nations Security Council action on Ethiopia's rejection of the package. Since the Technical Arrangements were not amendable, there was no point in an extended dialog. Points of clarification were asked, and were fully rendered. The final document, as Ethiopia knew all along, was not subject to modification, but modification was what Ethiopia had in mind. Instead of accepting or rejecting the document, Ethiopia killed the prospect for peace by subjecting the document to a series of deal breaker modifications.
All indications are that the US and OAU, but more so the US, have failed to deliver Ethiopia to the peace table. It must be understood that the US leaned heavily on Eritrea to accept the Framework Agreements although the document was tilted in Ethiopia's favor. The same can be said about the Modalities. It, too, was slanted to accommodate Ethiopia's concerns. Yet Eritrea signed both documents believing that giving Ethiopia short-term procedural advantage was preferable to denying Ethiopia another excuse not to go to the negotiation table. Eritrea accepted a flawed peace package believing that the US and the OAU were in a position to get Ethiopia's concurrence to the package. They did not. The worst casualties of the war occurred after Eritrea had accepted the Frameworks last February. Yet neither the OAU nor the US pressed Ethiopia to the degree they pressed Eritrea, to accept the Framework. Yet they asked Eritrea to make further procedural concessions. Eritrea took the gamble and accepted the Modalities. Again Eritrea was under the impression that the US would exert the necessary pressure to persuade Ethiopia to accept the implementation package to begin work towards a peaceful settlement. Now Ethiopia has come up with additional demands whose practical effect is to make the resumption of war a certainty.
Time is running out. For the US, the next logical step must be going to the Security Council to inform the members of Ethiopia's failure to abide by the terms in the OAU sponsored peace package. The Security Council then must impose economic sanctions against Ethiopia. In the past the Council has imposed sanctions on lesser infractions of international law. There should be no doubt about the magnitude of the catastrophe awaiting the region, if Ethiopia follows the war option it had intended to pursue all along. There's no point in trying to stop the war once it has started. It will be too late. The TPLF must be stopped before it engulfs the region in a war no one can afford. At a minimum whatever sanctions the US persuaded the Security Council to impose on Libya, should be imposed on Ethiopia.
As the architect of the peace package the US is morally obligated to the people of Ethiopia and Eritrea to tell the TPLF that its plan to resume war is unacceptable. The US has to acknowledge that its "carrot and stick" policy to persuade Ethiopia to sign the package has failed for the simple reason that the policy has been all carrot and no stick. Yet it persuaded Eritrea to agree to an unfair package that Eritrea accepted in the end believing that the package would lead to a just and real peace. Now Ethiopia is running away from the peace package, and the US knows this. If war breaks out, as it probably will, blood will be in the hands of those who mislead the people of Eritrea and Ethiopia that an honorable and lasting peace was possible.
Three months have passed since Eritrea signed the Technical Arrangements. Ever since Eritrea agreed to the document we have heard a lot about "doves" and "hawks" in the Ethiopian government. Eritreans were counseled to be patient as the "doves" were working hard to convince the Thawks" that peace was better than war and that it was to Ethiopia's interest to sign the document. They had known all along that there were no such birds as "doves" in the TPLF, but US officials insisted that indeed some were. Of course, they were right: there were no "doves." But this is not the first time when Americans who insist in seeing the world through their experience have misread our part of the world.
Vietnam era political vocabulary cannot be used to characterize the political coloration of the principal actors in the Ethiopian government. As anyone who knows Ethiopia should know, real power is in the hands of not more than ten TPLF members. All are, without exception dedicated to the destruction of Eritrea's independence as the first step towards consolidating their power in Ethiopia. A dovish TPLF is an oxymoron. Anyone, who thinks there are dovish TPLF members, is perpetuating a fatal intellectual dishonesty. What such self-serving mischaracterization does is give the TPLF more time to prepare for the resumption of war.
The US has been sending mixed signals to Ethiopia about the peace package. On one hand there was the shuttle diplomacy of Presidential Envoy Anthony Lake to get the two parties together on the OAU package. As one who worked closely in the development of the Technical Arrangement, Dr Lake was anxious to get the two sides to sign the document. He argued that the OAU document was the best chance there was to avert another catastrophic war. Eritrea listened and agreed to sign the document. Ethiopia sought more time to think through, but ultimately rejecting it by attaching a series of killer riders.
It is a measure of the marignalization of Africa in the architecture of US foreign policy objectives that an unnamed midlevel staffer, acting independently, could be in a position to influence US objectives in the Horn of Africa. There are indications that this particular staffer, a TPLF sympathizer, had been working the phones to undermine Dr Lake's efforts by calling some African governments not to push Meles to sign the document. The calls were placed the past three months as the US was pushing to Ethiopia to accept the peace package. The staffer presented Meles to selected African governments as a "dove" who would be destroyed politically if he accepted the OAU plan. The staffer's interference created the impression among some African governments that the US was not serious about the document it helped craft. It is also possible that the staffer's role emboldened the Meles government to reject the package Dr Lake was pushing Ethiopia to accept.
Eritreans have been too slow in realizing that conflict has very little to do with a dispute about borders. It has everything to do with TPLF's undying hatred of everything Eritrean. One is hard pressed to locate the source of the hatred. What matters is that the hatred is so strong that the mere thought of an independent Eritrea triggers uncontrollable psychotic eruptions among top TPLF officials. Think about the latest deportation of Eritreans. What normal human being would even think of force-marching the old and the sick, some carried on stretchers, through four kilometers of heavily mined no man's land, in the darkness of the night? What is the source of this type of meanness, this type of cruelty? Where did the brutality come from? Or consider the remark made recently by a TPLF official to a visiting American official. The visitor asked the TPLF official how long the war would go on. The TPLF's response was until Eritrea is defeated, even if that means sacrificing half of Ethiopia's population of 60 million, defeating Eritrea is worth paying the price. The TPLF cadre wants to sacrifice 30 million Ethiopians, 25 million of whom it cannot claim to represent, to bring 3 million Eritreans under Mekele's control. Oh, how easy, how expedient it must be for a minority-controlled government to sacrifice people for whom it feels no empathy.
By all accounts the TPLF is looking for every excuse possible to launch another war. The pretext for another war could come up any day now. The TPLF thinks it is now or never. It controls Ethiopia's resources, economy and the army. It knows that it may never get another chance. The regime's very survival depends in continuing the war since peace means having to explain to the Ethiopian people what the sacrifice had been about. The border dispute could have been settled peacefully had the regime not used the border as an excuse to build up its might to control the rest of Ethiopia by attempting first to bring Eritrea under TPLF's influence. In a very real sense the war with Eritrea is a first step in TPLF's quest for hegemonic domination of the entire region while deepening and strengthening TPLF's control of Ethiopia, for generations to come.
An appreciation of TPLF's increasingly delusional agenda built on circumscribing Eritrea's sovereignty has reduced the once sizable peace constituency in Eritrea. The sheer size of the constituency once made it possible for the government to make a series of procedural concessions knowing full well it had the public's support. Thanks to TPLF belligerence the peace constituency is a mere shell of its previous size. Eritreans, young and old, smell the resumption of the war in the air. They can see troop movements from the Ethiopian side of the border. They know about the North Korean missile experts who are in Ethiopia to train, and if need be, to operate the missile batteries Ethiopia had purchased from North Korea. Credible information has reached Asmara that Derg era pilots, and tank commanders, have been released from prison to operate fighter planes and tanks, recently purchased to replace the ones lost in the last engagement.
What TPLF's most recent rejection of peace means is this: Whatever elbowroom President Isaias had to wait for the TPLF to come to the peace table is slowly vanishing. The failure of the series of procedural concessions Eritrea has made to persuade the TPLF to come to the peace table has vindicated those in Eritrean society who were always skeptical about TPLF's commitment to a just peace. President Isaias persisted with the pursuit of peace believing that all avenues must be explored to settle the dispute through negotiation. With the peace package now as good as dead, even a leader as popular as President Isaias is with the Eritrean public, may not be able to continue talking peace when Prime Minister Meles is screaming war. The people of Ethiopia want peace; need peace. Same is true with the people of Eritrea. Unfortunately the TPLF does not want peace, and will make sure there's not any. Here lies the tragedy.
The TPLF has single handedly eviscerated a golden opportunity to resolve the crisis to allow the people of Eritrea and Ethiopia to live in peace. It has finally pushed the people of Eritrea into something they thought they had left behindQwar. If war is what TPLF wants, war is what it will get, notwithstanding the huge population advantage it thinks it has. Eritreans detest war, but under the circumstances they have no other choices. But feel no sorrow for Eritreans for they know how to fend for themselves. But pity the citizens of the accursed land. They are in far worse trouble now than they were under the Derg.
As far the peace package, one can only ask, "What peace package?" Right from the start the package was stillborn, although the nurses on whom people put a lot of trust pretended otherwise. If God had meant to save the baby he would have located the maternity ward at a hospital in Kosovo and not in the Horn of Africa. In the eyes of the head nurse, some babies are more valuable than others, and hence worth saving. It is called triage.