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Cairo Times, Egypt, 24-05-2001
Both Ethiopia and Eritrea will celebrate their 1991 liberation from military dictatorship this week. But did those ten years bring them any further?
Last month Ethiopia's capital, Addis Abeba, was rocked by the worst riots in eight years. Students demonstrating peacefully for more academic freedom and against the presence of police on the campus clashed with riot police. Jobless youth joined in and the looting and burning went on for three days. About forty rioters died in the fights. Afterwards three thousand students were arrested and locked up for two weeks. Ironically, they were in the same camps where to-be-deported Eritrean nationals had been gathered during the last two year. Still now, three professors are imprisoned.
The nineties was a dramatic decade. Imagine the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall as the proverbial stone in the pond, the water still rippling. Ten years ago this week, Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam fled to Zimbabwe. Mengistu's flight was not just another cruel dictator escaping from his enraged people. It was the end of an era. The Horn of Africa had been one of the battlegrounds of the Cold War, a war never as cold as presumed.
When the Soviet Union went bankrupt, Mengistu could no longer finance the wars he was fighting against his own people. His soldiers were left behind and had to fend for themselves. In Eritrea's capital Asmara, a whole company gave themselves up. After a thirty-year struggle, guerrillas of the Eritrean Peoples' Liberation Front (EPLF) took their capital for the first time. They had been close before, but did not want to destroy the city by battling over it. For many young resistance fighters Asmara had always been a fabled city, one they had never seen. On 24 May 1991, they finally walked in.
In the days following, the Ethiopian capital of Addis Abeba saw a different scene. Guerrillas of the northern Tigray Peoples' Liberation Front (TPLF) met more resistance. Blood flowed through the streets. A limited number of Mengistu's soldiers fought back, albeit fierce, afraid as they were. People took their bloody revenge on the most hated regime members in their neighborhoods. On 28 May 1991, after seventeen years of fighting, the TPLF declared the downfall of the Dergue, Mengistu's Central Committee. With Mengistu gone, the prevailing idea was that finally everything would be alright.
And for some seven years, it was. In Eritrea, the EPLF immediately started reconstruction. Their former soldiers repaired roads, bridges and formed a transitional government, all for food, clothes and shelter. In a 1993 referendum, the Eritreans voted overwhelmingly for independence. Their society and economy geared up to pluck the rewards of development. But after decades in the field the guerrillas made a mistake. They expected every Eritrean to have as much obedience, self-sacrifice and patience as themselves. They deemed society not ripe for democracy and a multiparty system.
The TPLF's handling of Ethiopian politics and economics is open to more interpretations. When a three-year drought culminated in famine in April 2000, critics argued that a disproportionate amount of government money had been diverted to the TPLF's Tigray province and other party interests. When there were multiparty elections, opposition parties suffered repression and had no access to mass media to spread their message. Not that the average subsistence farmer could care less who has the government seat in the far away city of Addis Abeba, a place many have never visited.
Pity Amara Techle, the writer of Ethiopia and Eritrea, From Conflict to Cooperation. Before his book was properly in the shops, the two Horn countries started a vicious and bloody border war. The book became an instant ramsj . In 1999, a special issue of the Eritrean Studies Review was issued under the title Eritrea and Ethiopia: From Conflict to Cooperation to Conflict. And so on and so on?
In May 1998, things really heated up. This time the former rebels of the EPLF and the TPLF fought against each other. Some minor border disagreements turned into a full-scale conflict, showing once again that military men should not rule a country. None of them dared to back off, afraid to lose face, and a minor war had its "positive" effects too, they argued. The EPLF liked to keep its youth dedicated to the golden rules of obedience and self-sacrifice. The TPLF wanted to keep their opposition satisfied by claiming they would regain Ethiopia's sea-access. The Tigrayans would have liked to occupy a piece of Eritrea but not at any price. In the end, there was no way back - not after Eritrean warplanes had accidentally hit a group of schoolchildren in Tigray's capital Mekele, during the retaliation of the bombing of Asmara.
After two years of fighting, the loss of many lives, and the ruin of both economies, the Ethiopians won the war. During a huge offensive in May 2000, their army occupied big chunks of Eritrea. A humanitarian disaster happened in front of the world's eyes, as around a half million Eritreans were forced to flee the battles. At the same time, twelve million Ethiopians were threatened by famine.
Now there is the United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), the UN's showcase of a classic feel-good peace mission. Western countries were happy to participate as the mission appeals to the public. Though UNMEE provides a breathing space in the war, it remains doubtful whether it will help to end it.
The war has been good for the governments of both countries, as it has allowed them to postpone their peoples' burning questions for a few years. Now, however, they are confronted with the unfulfilled desires of their citizens. Ethiopians and Eritreans have had enough of self-sacrifice. They want fancy cars, food, and an end to dying needlessly. The Addis Abeba riots were a sign of widespread tensions.
Last February, the TPLF split over peace with Eritrea. An influential faction of the party blamed Ethiopian president Meles Zenawi for not reoccupying Eritrea. They luckily lost out, but Zenawi has problems holding his government together. Over the last two years, so much anti-Eritrean sentiments have been poured into the people that now they do not want to stop.
In Eritrea, president Isaias Afeworki tried to defuse tensions by promising the country its first multiparty elections in December 2001. A committee drafted a party law, but before it even got approved in parliament, the head of the committee was fired. Now Afeworki has said there won't be more parties after all, raising the eyebrows of many Eritreans. "The EPLF started as shifta [bandits] and they still are," said one Eritrean when he heard the news.
When the Ethiopian-Eritrean war started, the respective presidents said it would not stop until the other one's government changed. The war did stop before this happened, but it has aggravated tensions. Ironically, it may not be the war that brings in government change, but peace.
You need to have had war to appreciate peace; Ethiopia and Eritrea needed to have war again. Much of the wealth and development that had been build patiently during the years between the two wars was destroyed in only 25 months of war. Hopefully the last ten years of independence have brought some wisdom to the peoples and their leaders. If not, it's been a lost decade.