President Isaias conjures up another anti-Ethiopian ‘Front’ – yet again!
After an apparent hiatus, the regime in Asmara is back in business reinventing its campaign to destabilize Ethiopia. Not that the Eritrean regime has ever stopped its campaign of trying to destabilize Ethiopia, but it had appeared to be running out of options, having repeatedly used and reused an aging rogue’s gallery of desperate elements among the Ethiopian opposition in the Diaspora. Equally, despite a continuing anti-Ethiopian media campaign, it had almost begun to look as if Eritrea was giving up its old ways. There were frequent references to ‘renewed good faith’ for peace, and peace agreements being mediated by third parties in which Eritrea was supposedly taking an active part. Some in the UN managed to see the Eritrean regime as a potential broker for peace in the region, and even people usually cautious in their approach to President Isaias were apparently prepared to entertain the idea of giving the Eritrean regime the benefit of the doubt.
It wasn’t long, however, before any such ideas were revealed as a chimera. Whatever alleged overtures for peace that it might have been thought that Eritrea was displaying have now been revealed as no more than a rather facile attempt at window dressing. Scratch the surface of the supposedly peaceful façade and the old habits of the regime, as patently destructive as ever, immediately become apparent once more. In a recent interview in Arabic, President Isaias went as far as to deny that he ever agreed to withdraw his forces from Djibouti. At the same time, he claimed to have been ‘surprised’ to learn that there was any misunderstanding with Djibouti. His comments, in effect, demonstrated his government wasn’t serious about any peaceful resolution of the conflict, much less prepared to become a constructive partner for peace in the region. He was in fact delivering a very public snub to the very mediators whom he also affectionately referred to as brothers. Similarly, with regard to Somalia, Eritrea’s support for extremists has continued unabated. Indeed, Eritrea’s opposition to the TFG has become even more outspoken. The regime in Asmara has left nobody in doubt that it still refuses to play by the normal rules of international behaviour.
At the same time, Eritrea’s anti-Ethiopia campaign also seems to be showing a faint sign of activity and momentum after a period largely confined to vitriolic propaganda and farcical interviews by Diaspora politicians. Eritrea has never shown much sign of being able to learn from past failures, and it has once against tried to cobble together yet another recycled coalition of alleged fighters to ratchet up its destabilization campaign. There is now a new front, a new slogan, a new acronym, the UEDC, the Unity of Ethiopians for Democratic Change, to get used to before it too inevitably collapses. The regime in Eritrea has long had a weakness for churning out non-viable organizations designed to destabilize the governments of Ethiopia, Sudan, Djibouti and Somalia. Now the factory is back at work with a new Ethiopian front, bringing together the ever dwindling ranks of the Diaspora-based rejectionists prepared to join in the Eritrean-led campaign of cursing the government of Ethiopia. This new organization is a collection of desperate groups which have failed often enough over the past two decades. It won’t get very far this time round. The Eritrean regime itself knows perfectly well that none of its dreams of destabilizing Ethiopia can be implemented by a collection of failed nonentities. Its own enormous and dedicated military machine, after all, failed to make any progress in this direction. Despite this, the regime is apparently convinced that even a single threat, however insignificant, against Ethiopia will have an impact. It is an expression of the zero-sum politics that has long characterized the regime in Asmara.
What makes this latest effort by President Isaias any different from previous ones is that it has brought together virtually all those who lost out earlier in their efforts to inflict harm on Ethiopia. Most of them have in fact long since been given up for dead. What the Eritrean regime might be hoping they can now accomplish, other than being just another minor irritant with little or no security interest, isn’t clear. Then again, the Eritrean regime doesn’t seem to be bothered too much by the amount of failure or its inability to achieve its policies. It now seems to be driven more by an almost metaphysical belief that Ethiopia will one day disintegrate rather than by any realistic hope of being able to achieve such a goal through its own efforts. Its leaders are living in a universe of their own, one in which Ethiopia’s growing importance and increasing strength in all fields, including both politics and economics, is translated into weakness and marginalization. Only this can explain why the regime is still prepared to support the fantasy that non-existent, even virtual, ‘freedom’ movements might be able to achieve what its own 400,000 strong army has long since acknowledged as impossible. It is hardly surprising that these fronts only make the news in the web pages of Ethiopian Review or on Eri-TV in Asmara.