US Behind Ethiopia - Eritrea War

Posted: 03/12
From: Biddho Eritrea

By Sami Zerai

The majority of Eritreans have long suspected that the US was behind the 1998-2000 War between Eritrea and Ethiopia. It was no secret that Ethiopia did not have the means or the economic power to wage such unjust war against Eritrea in such a magnitude. In fact Ethiopia's betrayal of the Eritrean people and declaration of an all out war can be summed up in the following three simple reasons.

1. To reverse the independence of Eritrea if possible or at least bring a regime change favorable to Ethiopia.


2. To guarantee the US to have a base at the mouth of the Red Sea, in return securing Ethiopia's national, economical and political future.


3. To pressure the Eritrean leadership to blink to US demand, if not to bring a puppet government.

The US interest to dominate the Horn of Africa is an old one; it goes more than sixty years. The 30-years war between Eritrea and Ethiopia is concrete evidence of this. In the 1950s, the US, despite the demand of the Eritrean people for independence, used its UN veto power and fulfilled Ethiopia's interest of occupying Eritrea. In 1961, Ethiopia with the consent of the US, annexed Eritrea. In return the US enjoyed a Communications Base overlooking the Rea Sea for nearly 25 years. This marked the beginning of the Eritrean armed struggle for independence. Even when the Menghistu regime was openly Communist and was getting help from the former Soviet Union and its Communist allies the US continued to fight on the side of Ethiopia in order to crush Eritrea's just war for independence. In the end Eritrea prevailed and became free in 1991 not because it had super power help on its side but because it had determined children who were willing to give their lives for its independence.


http://mathaba.net/x.htm?http://mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=40045

The US already has military bases at the mouth of the Red Sea, in Djibouti, a French client state.

One's too many, and a thousand's not enough.

From The Center for Public Integrity, 28 October 2002

By the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists



2. Privatizing Combat, the New World Order

In 1998, unbeknownst to most Americans, the United States had a military presence in a remote African war that drew little attention from the media. Unlike other U.S. interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti and Kosovo, there was no hand-wringing over whether a deployment was justified by U.S. national interests, whether troops would be spread too thin, whether American men and women should be put in harm’s way in a fight that had little to do with Main Street America, or whether the level of barbarity justified, on its own merits, the deployment of U.S. troops on humanitarian grounds.

The conflict in Sierra Leone, in which the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front displayed a ghastly predilection for amputating the limbs and noses of their victims, could certainly compete with the horrors of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and Kosovo and the man-made famine engineered by warlords in Somalia. In November 1998, the RUF was in the middle of an orgy of looting, murder and decapitation, an operation codenamed “No Living Thing.” There was international intervention aimed at stopping the bloodshed. Sierra Leone’s demoralized and under-equipped national army was bolstered by Nigerian troops – flying the colors of the West African peacekeeping force, ECOMOG – and a handful of South African mercenaries in helicopter gunships who made constant forays into the battle zones to attack the RUF. In Freetown, the country’s capital, two large transport helicopters circled in the air, backing up the Nigerian troops. Painted on their fuselages were American flags.

This small U.S. contribution to defending Sierra Leone was not conducted by an elite unit of the Army, Navy or Marines, but by a private, Oregon-based company, International Charter Incorporated of Oregon (ICI), managed in part by former U.S. Special Forces operatives. ICI is one of several companies contracted by the State Department to go into danger zones that are too risky or unsavory to commit conventional U.S. forces. It also has been active in conflicts in Haiti and Liberia. ICI’s role in Sierra Leone was to back up the Nigerian troops, providing transport and medical evacuation services. The hot combat, as one former ICI employee explained to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, was left to the South African mercenaries. But ICI personnel inevitably and often were shot at and forced to return fire, according to team members interviewed by ICIJ, a right these sources claimed was explicitly extended to ICI in a letter from then-U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone, Joseph Melrose. The State Department did not respond to requests for comment by telephone or through the Freedom of Information Act on whether such a letter was issued. ICI refused to respond to a number of questions put to the company on several occasions.

The United States had little real interest in Sierra Leone itself. U.S. involvement was driven by the fear that the instability and anarchy caused by the RUF and its sponsor, Liberian President Charles Taylor, would prove a danger to Washington’s ally Nigeria, an oil-rich nation that is the fifth largest supplier of crude to the United States. For ICI, the mission to Freetown was business, but it also advanced U.S. foreign policy. ICI’s deployment is part of a global trend of military outsourcing and foreign policy by proxy that has become far more common since the end of the Cold War. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nature of international conflict shifted from U.S.-Soviet competition in client states to regional and ethnic conflicts requiring peacekeeping or other engagement. At the same time, the end of Cold War resulted in reduced superpower defense budgets, forcing even high-ranking military officers to sell their talents in the public sector. This collision of supply and demand resulted in a new age of military and security services on the world market.

In fact, a nearly two-year investigation by ICIJ identified at least 90 private military companies, or PMCs (as some of these new millennium mercenaries prefer to be known), that have operated in 110 countries worldwide. Most of these companies – defined as providing services normally carried out by a national military force, including military training, intelligence, logistics, combat and security in conflict zones – are headquartered in the United States, Britain and South Africa, though the vast bulk of their services are performed in conflict-ridden countries in Africa, South America and Asia. Eleven of the companies identified by ICIJ are no longer active, and the operational status of 18 others could not be determined.....

The strong links between the U.S. government and many of the private military companies that contract with them has presented questions regarding the revolving door between government and the private sector. In 1992, the Pentagon, then headed by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, paid Brown & Root Services $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones. Later in 1992, the Pentagon gave Brown & Root an additional $5 million to update the report. Brown & Root (now called Kellogg Brown & Root, or KBR) is a subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation, which Cheney, the U.S. vice president, headed as CEO from 1995 to 1999. Brown & Root was also awarded contracts in 1995 and 1997 to provide logistical support in the Balkans, where the U.S. military has been enforcing the 1995 Dayton Peace accord that ended the war in former Yugoslavia. Those contracts mushroomed to $2.2 billion worth of payments over five years, according to the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
http://www.zwnews.com/warbusiness.doc

I found the following a familiar "verse" about US involvements:

The US has been working behind the scene to bring Eritrea to its knees. It has time and again accused Eritrea as an undemocratic country and tried to portray its leader as a dictator and abusive. The media led by those in the US and Britain has launched an intense propaganda against the Eritrean leadership. The aim is to sabotage Eritrea's progress and development. Eyewitness reports have been testifying, repeatedly, that Eritrea enjoys a corruption free environment and is the safest nation in Africa.

I wish this bullsh*t corporatism crap would end. It is just plain evil-doing.

It makes more sense for the US to have supported Eritrea in this conflict, since Eritrea has the more strategic assets. That would be a more effective way to gain influence in Eritrean politics than some conspiratorial way by supporting Ethiopia.

,...doncha' think? I mean, seriously, putting the word "conspiracy" aside,...do you dismiss the possibility of collusion for purposes of gaining power (rather than merely influence) over a region?

rather strange assertion since the US had sanctions on ethiopia between 1977-1992 of some kind or another.

In fact the US is considering imposing sanctions again on both factions due to the breakdown in the current border negotiations...Algiers Treaty of 2000.

Interesting article here:
WAR BY OTHER MEANS
Geopolitics and Pop-Tarts in
the new agrarian order
by Shiri Pasternak

"...A World Food Conference was held in Rome in 1974 to discuss what seemed increasingly like an insecure global food system. Realizing that the world depended on the U.S. for food, the CIA in 1974 stated in a report for the World Food Conference: “This could give the United States. . . an economic and political dominance greater than that of the immediate post-World War II years,” and “Washington would acquire life and death power over the fate of the multitudes of the many”7.

The Carter administration responded to charges from critics that the U.S. was favouring food aid to high income countries like Israel and Taiwan instead of humanitarian aid by introducing legislation stipulating that at least 70 percent of Title I commodities must be allocated to countries most in need. But the decisions regarding which countries were most in need were clearly still politically motivated. Egypt was bribed to maintain good relations with Israel, for example, and Chile and Haiti’s brutal military regimes were supported. And then came Reagan. By monitoring U.N. votes, Reagan picked staunch U.S. supporters in Central America and the Horn of Africa to boost with food assistance. His theory was that funding non-socialist states that were near socialist states would collapse the Commies. Massive funding went to El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica, because of Nicaragua; Jamaica, Haiti and Domincan Republic, because of their proximity to Cuba; and Somalia and Sudan, because of the nearness of Ethiopia. "
.... more
http://www.tao.ca/~kev/fnl/zine2/food_aid.htm

Posted: 02/07
From: IPS

As the United Nations’s new envoy to Ethiopia and Eritrea settles into his post, relations between the two countries appear as inflexible as ever.

The appointment of Lloyd Axworthy, a former Canadian minister of foreign affairs, was confirmed at the end of last month after UN Secretary General Kofi Annan received approval from the Security Council.

Axworthy’s brief, according to Annan, is to “help move the peace process forward” between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The two countries are locked in a disagreement about a ruling made by the boundary commission that is mapping out their common border.

The work of the commission comes in the wake of a December 2000 accord, signed in Algiers, that put an end to a border dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Both parties agreed to accept the decisions of an independent boundary commission.

http://mathaba.net/x.htm?http://mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=36017