An alliance with malicious intention
By Amdetsion Kidane, DBA

The Chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, the Honorable Senator Russell Feingold, on March 3 mentioned Eritrea by name as one of the states in the Horn of Africa destabilizing the political situation in Ethiopia.   On the other hand, Feingold strongly criticizes the current Ethiopian government for corrupting the democratic process of the country and the use of force to subjugate the people in general and its opponents in particular.  He even criticizes the Bush Administration for not living up to “its own rhetoric in promoting democracy and human rights by making it clear that we do not – and will not -- tolerant [tolerate – my insertion] the Ethiopian government’s abuses and illegal behavior.”  And yet, in spite of his acknowledgement and condemnation of the Ethiopian government for abuse and human right violation, and criticism of the Bush Administration for its inaction, he hints the importance of defending Ethiopia from allegedly hostile neighbors, including Eritrea, that surround it for siding the US government to fight terrorism in the Horn of Africa. He states that, “the US-Ethiopian partnership is an incredibly important one – perhaps one of the more significant on the continent given not only our longstanding history but also the increasingly strategic nature of our cooperation in recent years.”
At the outset, I like to say that Senator Feingold’s implication of Eritrea being a threat to peace in the area in general and Ethiopia in particular is unwarranted.  What I want to comment on extensively though are two issues that the Honorable Senator raised in relation to Eritrea and Ethiopia: (1) the importance of US-Ethiopian partnership noting that Ethiopia is surrounded by hostile nations including Eritrea, and (2) his claim that “Ethiopia seems relatively stable with its growing economy and robust poverty reduction programs.” 
The partnership of the United States of America and Ethiopia in relation to Eritrea is not new.  Four such partnerships are listed in chronological order. 

“From the point of view of justice, the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive consideration. Nevertheless the strategic interest of the United States in the Red Sea basin makes it necessary that the country has to be linked with our ally, Ethiopia.”
Breach of federal contract brokered by the US on the part of the Ethiopian government triggered the thirty-year struggle for independence that cost tens of thousands of lives.  Except for the fourteen years interruption when the Ethiopian Military Government chose to ally with the Soviet Union, the US has always been on the Ethiopian side against Eritrea, perhaps, with the perception that “bigger is better.”  

• After Eritrea’s military victory over Ethiopia in 1991, the United States, under the leadership of Mr. Herman Cohen, tried to derail the hard-fought and gained Eritrean independence in favor of some sort of confederation of the two countries.  
• Having failed in that attempt, the US in 1998 gave Ethiopia an implicit blessing to conduct war of aggression against Eritrea with the ultimate objective of eliminating the leadership and subjugating the people under the Ethiopian rule.  Eritrea withstood the war of aggression and defended its sovereignty with gallantry as it did during the thirty-year for independence.
• After a futile attempt to subdue the Eritrean government and subjugate the people, a peace agreement between the two countries was signed in Algiers on December 12, 2000 and witnessed by the sponsors of the agreement, the United Nations, the African Union, the European Union and the United States of America.  Following the Algiers Agreement, a commission known as Eritrean-Ethiopian Boundary Commission (EEBC) was established with a mandate to delimit and demarcate the border between the two countries and come out with what was to be “final and binding” decision. The Commission handed the decision on delimitation on April 13, 2002 swapping some land claimed by Eritrea to Ethiopia and some claimed by Ethiopia to Eritrea including “Badme”, the flashpoint of the two-year war.  However, the demarcation, which involves the actual planting of pillars on the ground, consistent with the map coordinates defined in the delimitation process, stalled for five years because of Ethiopia’s refusal to accept the Commission’s “final and binding” ruling. 

The fact remains that Ethiopia complicated and perpetuated the problem by sticking to a delaying tactic best described as “no-peace, no-war” situation.   It is obvious to anyone that Ethiopia would not stubbornly stick to this illegal delaying tactic without the blessing from the US and its surrogate, the United Nations.  John Bolton, the former US Ambassador to the United Nations blames Dr. Jandayi Fraser, the Deputy Secretary of State for African Affair, for her attempt to reverse the “final and binding” decision of the Commission to accommodate the wishes of the darling state, Ethiopia.  Ambassador Bolton writes, "For reasons I never understood, however, Frazer reversed course and asked in early February [2006] to reopen the 2002 EEBC decision, which she had concluded was wrong, and award a major piece of disputed territory to Ethiopia. I was at a loss to explain that to the Security Council, so I didn’t.” John Bolton, Surrender is not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad” p. 347.  With frustration for lack of cooperation from Ethiopia to demarcate the border by planting pillars on the ground, the Commission ended its mandate submitting to the United Nations Security Council a legal electric “virtual” border as specified in coordinates on the map in the delimitation process.  
As for the economic virtues the Honorable Senator has accorded Ethiopia, with all due respect to him, I, for one, disagree with his assessment.  Paraphrasing, Ethiopia’s dependency and its economic impact as recorded in www.wikipedia.org, Ethiopia has been a receipient of economic development aid since the end World War II.  Between 1950 and 1970 alone, one source estimated that Ethiopia received almost US$600 million in aid, $211.9 million from the US, $100 million from the Soviet Union and $121 million from the World Bank not counting the assitance in kind it receivied from other countries including Sweden.  Indeed, the aid from the West dried up under the military regime that followed the Ethiopian revolution, except for food aid to combat the widely-known famine of the 1980s that killed hundreds of thousands if not million of Ethiopians.  The post-2000 period, however, has seen a resumption of large disbursements of grants and loans from the United States, individual European nations, and Japan, and from the World Bank, the European Union, and the African Development Bank that totaled US$1.6 billion by 2001.
Ethiopia was also a beneficiary of the World Bank-IMF-sponsored debt reduction program for highly indebted poor countries (HIPC) designed to reduce or eliminate repayment of bilateral loans from wealthy countries and international lenders such as the World Bank. Ethiopia rceived a noteworthy advance toward these goals in 1999, when the successor states to the former Soviet Union, including Russia, cancelled US$5 billion in debt contracted by the Derg.  However, this amount did not eliminate Ethiopia’s external debt.  It only reduced by half leaving it with a balnce of US$5 billion.  On top of that, HIPC additional form the World Bank and IMF is expected to total almost US$2 billion.  Teketel Haile Mariam of Addis Tribune [October 2004] expressed his economic woes saying:
“Ethiopia had (and continues to have) a history of dependency on foreign assistance, whether that be in the form of food donations, military hardware, or loans for public investment. Although this history applies to all three recent successive regimes, non-military loans contracted by the current government over the last eleven years exceeded similar loans obtained over a span of about sixty years by the two prior regimes combined. And there had been negative correlation between the ever increasing loans and the levels of poverty. As loans increased, the per capita income (brute measure of the level of economic development) had stayed virtually unchanged, poverty had spread and deepened, and even by African standards, Ethiopia had lagged miserably and had become an example of most things wrong in that unfortunate continent, rather than being a symbol of freedom, unity, and prosperity.”

Ethiopia’s economic malaise continues as is reported by Economist Magazine of November 2007.  “Despite almost a decade of well-intentioned development policies, Ethiopians remain mired in the most wretched poverty.” Where then is the “growing economy and robust poverty reduction programs” that Senator Feingold is talking about?  You know what? Give Eritrea the money that was given to Ethiopia, with empowerment to spend it on development as it pleases to see economic miracle happening.