Only outsiders can end war in the Horn of Africa
By Dan Connell
LONDON: Ethiopian aircraft on Sunday bombed a new power plant financed by Middle East and Italian backers near the Red Sea port of Massawa, according to the Eritrean Foreign Ministry.
This followed the launch on Sunday of a large-scale Ethiopian offensive pushing deeper into the Eritrean heartland and sending tens of thousands of Eritrean civilians fleeing from their homes.
This war is about much more than remote border claims. It is a product of resurgent nationalism within Ethiopia's northern Tigray region -- home of the country's ruling party -- that has merged with a powerful Ethiopian nationalism whose supporters were never happy to see Eritrea break off from Ethiopia a decade ago, when it won its independence after a 30-year war.
The question now is whether Eritrea will be forced by international inaction to fight its way out of the corner or whether pressure will be brought to bear on Ethiopia. Calls by the EU, the UN and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to halt the fighting have fallen on deaf ears.
Ethiopian leaders are publicly voicing what Eritreans always feared -- that this war was never really about borders. It is a power struggle over who will dominate the strategic Horn of Africa.
Now that Ethiopia has gained the upper hand, its army is pressing on to restructure Eritrea's political leadership while trying to cripple its ability to hit back in the future. These tactics may backfire, however, and fuel more fighting.
Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawe, said last week that he will not stop the war until Eritrea's military capacity has been substantially reduced, whether or not Eritrea pulls its forces out of all disputed territories, as it pledged to do on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Ethiopian commanders inside Eritrea are turning over control of captured cities and towns to Eritrean surrogates groomed for the purpose.
These forces, grouped under the banner of the Alliance of Eritrean National Forces, include the Democratic People's Movement of Eritrea and Saghem, extreme leftist parties that were sheltered by the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) within Tigray from the mid-1980s after they were driven out of Eritrea by the independence movement.
Others represent an Islamist right nurtured by neighboring Sudan until recently. Their presence in the alliance masks deep and potentially explosive differences.
Several of these opposition groups were given bases within Tigray in the late 1990s, as tensions mounted between the two neighboring states.
After war broke out, Ethiopia gave the dissident groups radio facilities, although there was no sign of them as recently as March when I toured the areas of western Eritrea that are now under Ethiopian control.
But these surrogate militias could set the stage for civil war within Eritrea after an armistice is reached.
Unless the international community succeeds in bringing the two countries to the negotiating table soon, the war itself could escalate. Ethiopia holds a clear edge now, but that may not last.
The coalition that rules Ethiopia is flexing its political and military muscle, both within the country and against its former Eritrean mentors. In the mid-1990s, the government redrew its internal boundaries to reflect ethnic identity.
The upshot was a federation of mini-states, with Tigray dominant for the first time since the dawn of the 20th century. The Tigrayans then turned their attention to Eritrea, seizing control of small border communities, until the Eritreans sent in tanks to assert their claims on May 12, 1998. The next day Ethiopia declared war.
This war is a bid by the Tigrayan nationalists to whittle down their northern neighbor. The cost in human terms is already staggering and will almost certainly worsen. Since the present fighting started two weeks ago, more than half a million people have been displaced within Eritrea. This comes on top of an estimated 200,000 driven from their homes in earlier rounds of fighting.
With at least this many also threatened with starvation by persistent drought affecting much of the famine-prone region, at least a quarter of Eritrea's 3.5 million people are now at risk. Should fighting continue into the summer rainy season, preventing Eritrea's subsistence farmers from planting their annual grain crops, the country could face a humanitarian catastrophe.
With such highly charged forces unleashed, there is little likelihood that diplomatic shuttles between the two capitals will slow the killing, unless strong sanctions are applied to force both a cease-fire and the immediate and full implementation of an OAU peace plan which has been on the table for nearly a year.
There is no other way to settle this dispute that will not lead to renewed fighting in the future. However, the longer the conflict continues, the more possible it is that wars-within-wars will keep the region off-balance and open the door to a resumption of fighting once the pressure is off.
-- Guardian News Service