The broken Horn of Africa

 

Open letter to President-Elect Barack Obama

 

By Golto Aila ǀ January 16, 2009

 

Dear President-Elect Barack Obama

 

May I take this opportunity to congratulate you on your historic election to the Presidency of the U.S.A. My prayers are with you and your administration as you take up the extraordinarily difficult task of leading our nation and the world. Expectations are high and there is good will all around, I wish you the very best!

 

As you well know, over the last three decades, since the overthrow of Haile Silasie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa has been one of the most unstable regions of the world, not to mention the fact that it has also been one of the poorest. If it wasn't for its geographic location, i.e. next door to the Arabian Peninsula and in the neighborhood of the one of the world's and busiest waterway, the Horn would probably be as important as Togo or some other obscure place on the face of the earth, as far as the rest of the world is concerned! Historically, because of this strategic geographic location, the outside powers have influenced life on the Horn in the manner which had been detrimental to its residents! 

Egypt, fearing a powerful Ethiopia would interfere with flow of the waters of the Blue Nile, and hence threaten her very survival, has done and continues to do all within its power to make Ethiopia and the region dysfunctional. The methods applied has ranged from direct threat to Ethiopia, using other proxies to destabilize Ethiopia, and even using the offices of the Secretary General of  the UN when her own son, Boutros Boutros Ghali was at the helm of that organization!

 

Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopia's strongman before Meles deposed him, made alliance with the former USSR and introduced communism into Ethiopia, to counterbalance American alliance with its old enemy and neighbor - Somalia! Mengistu destroyed Ethiopia and left, soon to be followed by the departure of Somalia's Siad Barre! Ethiopia fell into the hands of a separatist organization called the Tigrean People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which 18 years after taking power, has not yet seen the need to change its name (and I think they still plan to declare an independent state in the Ethiopia province of Tigray, if the going gets tough in Addis Ababa) and, of course Somalia has remained a failed state.

 

While Somalia took care of its own self-destruction, the wily usurpers of power in Ethiopia crafted a very sophisticated policy of deception whereby they convinced a large section of Ethiopia's population and the outside world that they would be the agents for positive and democratic change in Ethiopia! Meles, having duped Ethiopians and the world community, especially the leaders of US and UK, made sure the recognition of Eritrea as a sovereign by the UN was a shoe-in! President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair anointed Meles Zenawi and the President of the new state of Eritrea, Isayas Afewerki as the beacons of democratic light at the end of African dark tunnel of dictatorship! Alas, it did not take long before the dynamic duo came out in their true colors and presided over one of the most devastating wars in the Horn of Africa! Eritrea has never recovered from that war and has remained on the war footing ever since. For ordinary Eritreans, their country has become one massive prison! Ethiopia, thanks to Meles’ withdrawal of Ethiopian troops without negotiating for access to the sea, has remained landlocked after squandering about 70,000 lives in that war! Ethiopians, with good reason, do not consider Meles just a bad leader but a separatist, hell-bent on the destruction of Ethiopia as a sovereign entity!

 

Meles, having instituted regional division based on ethnicity in Ethiopia, used the Albanian brand of communist control to subjugate the population of 70+ million people! The George W Bush era of "War on Terror" was a God send for Meles, who would now use his regional military superiority to eradicate Muslim fundamentalists from Somalia in exchange for favors from the world’s only super power! I wrote to President Bush and complained that while I understood the strategy of setting a thief to catch a thief, it was baffling to me that he would set a regime which terrorizes its own citizens to destroy another terrorist in another country! Today the terrorists are multiplying like rodents in the Somali desert and have even spilled over into the Indian Ocean, and our warrior in Ethiopia is high-tailing out of Somalia with the Somali fundamentalists in hot pursuit!

 

You are well familiar with the fallacy of George W Bush's foreign policy and I don't want to get into that. My concern is that your administration's State Department in manned, to a very large extent, by the people who crafted President Clinton's foreign policy in the Horn of Africa, a policy which notwithstanding its sincere intentions, has unleashed the most devastating damage to the communities and countries across the region, and nearly two decades later, we don't think we have seen the worst yet! I have said this before in my letter to you and I repeat here, the main reason I supported your candidacy early in the primary period, is because of my fear of resumption of the Clinton policy in the Horn of Africa! And please don't get me wrong, I admire the Senator and President Clinton for all the wonderful way they have affected the lives of ordinary people here and across the globe!

 

It is in the human nature that when a project which took great efforts to formulate and implement go terribly wrong, that the first reaction is for one to be defensive and try to correct the error in a manner that does not betray the acknowledgement that the project was fundamentally based on a faulty premise! It is my profound concern and fear that your contingent which is about to move into the State Department will try to repair the damages caused by an experiment which was designed for Ethiopia and Eritrea outside the Horn of Africa!

 

I recognize the difficulty your administration will face when confronting the issue of the Horn of Africa given the fact that, especially in case of Ethiopia, there is no unified voice for ordinary people either inside or outside the country to present or offer a convincing alternative to Meles at this time! Given the instability in the Horn this becomes particularly tricky for your in-coming administration. But look back to Clinton's policy and Bush's policy in the Horn of Africa, particularly the latter! Massive resources were provided to Meles to fight Somali fundamentalists, but the fundamentalists multiplied manifold; George Bush set out to support the birth of democracy in Ethiopia and trusted his friend Meles to usher in the era of freedom, instead Meles unleashed the most violent repression in Ethiopia and practically destroyed the people's aspiration for democracy! Only two weeks ago he threw into jail the one credible voice for freedom and human rights – Birtukan Mideksa!

 

I am aware of the many Ethiopian-Americans who toiled night and day, for months, in your campaign for the Presidency! Many of us naturally expect your administration to take action to bring dictatorship in Ethiopia to an end! This is a tall order and my Ethiopian-American compatriots know my views very well. The task of putting Ethiopian house in order is squarely on the shoulders of Ethiopians! Ethiopians opposed to Meles must put their tribal, regional and ideological differences aside and come together in solidarity and present an agreed-upon plan of action to salvage Ethiopia and the Horn from implosion. Your administration must help with such a process and facilitate institution of such an organization, and then give a backing for a credible program! Anything else will be tantamount to yet another betrayal of ordinary Ethiopians who have been toiling under the yoke of violent repression dispensed by the successive regimes!

 

Mr. President-elect, you must resist the temptation of rewarding those who supported you in your campaign and thereby pave the way for yet another cycle of misrule in Ethiopia! You must enlist the assistance of scholars of Ethiopian ORIGIN, and that of unified opposition leaders in Ethiopia and in the Diaspora, to formulate your policy in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. Please resist and desist the use of purely foreign experts on Ethiopia, who graduated from foreign universities and who lack the most fundamental quality - ETHIOPIANESS! Incidentally, I am not soliciting for such a position for there are well qualified Ethiopian-Americans who are eager to help. Lastly, as I have stated before, the answer to Ethiopia’s problem is not just replacement of Meles regime by a “free and fair” election - we know what that did in Palestine! A neutral administration of National Unity is what Ethiopia needs to starts with, to craft a new constitution, institute independent judiciary and legislature, and educate the public on their rights and responsibilities as citizens of a free country.

 

Yours Truly

 

 

 

Signed