ADDIS ABABA (AFP) – The United Nations said Thursday Eritrean and Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers facing off along their disputed border exchanged gunshots Wednesday.
In a statement, the U.N. Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea said that its Indian battalion posted on the border heard an exchange of fire in the early hours of Wednesday.
“UNMEE expresses concern about this firing incident between Ethiopia Woyanne and Eritrea and is calling on both parties to show maximum restraint,” the statement said.
Some 200,000 troops are deployed along the border, fueling international fears of a new flare-up after the failure of a mediation between the two foes.
A border panel was dissolved a month ago with Ethiopian Woyanne refusing to recognize a ruling that granted Eritrea a flashpoint border town.
The two Horn of Africa neighbors already fought a bitter war between 1998 and 2000 that left an estimated 70,000 dead.
Eritrea’s Information Ministry accused Ethiopia Woyanne of launching a small scale attack. [Correction: The Ministry did not say Ethiopia. It said TPLF as quoted below.]
“In continuation of its ongoing provocations against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Eritrea, the TPLF regime has unleashed a relatively small scale attack,” a statement said.
It said the attack targeted Eritrean forces tasked with patrolling the border area and that it “met with utter failure.”
The Ethiopian government Woyanne flatly denied Eritrea’s accusations and said it hadn’t carried out any hostile military operation along the border.
“This is simply an outrageous accusation by Eritrea. Ethiopia Woyanne has declared that it is not going to start any war or organize any form of provocation,” said Bereket Simon, spokesman for Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
“The government in Asmara, it seems, is trying to hide the internal situation to the outside world by accusing us on the international stage,” he added.
“There has been no attack from Ethiopia Woyanne. The Ethiopian government Woyanne is not interested in any provocative actions,” Bereket added.
The Ethiopian Woyanne Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that an incident took place but returned the accusation, blaming Eritrea.
“There was an incident, it is true. But the incident is of Eritrea’s making which is being looked into. It is possible that it may have been a result of an accidental encounter between the reconnaissance missions of the two parties,” the ministry said in a statement.
(Biddho.com, Asmara) – In continuation to its ongoing provocations against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Eritrea, the TPLF regime has unleashed a relatively small scale attack at exactly 03:00 am local time on December 25 in Southern Tsorona area of the Southern region upon dispatched Eritrean militias and security forces assigned to patrol the Security Zone, but was met with utter failure, Colonel Zekarias Okbaghabir Commissioner to the Eritrean Ethiopian Peace Keeping Coordination Commission disclosed in a press statement to ERINA in the evening hours today.
The statement further noted that the TPLF regime had planted land mines during the past three days at Igri-Mekhel area in which a peace keeping vehicle was met with casualty.
The Commissioner further added that yesterday’s attack comes in continuation to the TPLF’s ongoing provocation and aggression in the Gash-Barka and Southern regions whereby it planted mines, carried out incursions, abducted nationals and burned crop fields to the ground.
Although the TPLF regime had tried to deny or disclaim responsibility for yesterday’s attack it was forced to accept accountability for the attack in the final hours upon the tangible evidence acquired by the Eritrea-Ethiopia peacekeeping force after carrying out first hand surveillance in the area, the statement concluded.
The executive committee of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party (Kinijit) will attempt to convene the party’s supreme council again this coming Sunday.
Last Sunday’s attempt failed when a splinter group led by the estranged chairman of Kinijit, Ato Hailu Shawel, blocked council members from entering Kinijit’s official headquarters in Addis Ababa.
The executive committee is also in the process of replacing council members who have resigned or exiled with new members as required by Kinijit’s rules. Some council members who are currently in exile abroad have asked to be replaced. Kinijit executives are confident that this Sunday, the council will reach a quorum, allowing it to make decisions on how to move the party forward. Read more by zikkir News Service.
Ethiopian Review will try to have a live interview with members of the Kinijit supreme council after Sunday’s important meeting.
On Friday, it will be is exactly a year since Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, fell to Ethiopian Woyanne troops and the occupation has been one of the most brutal on record. The resistance started at once, and Ethiopian counter-insurgency tactics are not gentle.
As early as last April, Germany’s ambassador to Somalia, Walter Lindner, wrote a public letter condemning the indiscriminate use of air strikes and heavy artillery in densely populated parts of Mogadishu, the systematic rape of women and even the bombing of hospitals. By now, the Ethiopian Woyanne army’s attempts to terrorize the residents of Mogadishu into submission have driven 600,000 of them – 60 percent of the population – to flee the city.
The Ethiopians Woyannes and their local allies indignantly deny these figures, but they come from the United Nations aid coordinator for Somalia, Eric Laroche, and the makeshift camps along the roads leading away from Mogadishu are there for all to see. It is, says Laroche, the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa, worse even than Darfur. But “since it is in Somalia, no one cares.”
You will notice that some of the phrases used above do not appear in the agency reports about Somalia. The wire services do not talk about an Ethiopiann a Woyanne occupation of Somalia, and they refer to the local Somali collaborators as the “transitional federal government,” or TGF. This is mainly in deference to the United States, which organized and backed the Ethiopian Woyanne invasion of Somalia.
The curse of Somalia is the clan system. It is the main point of reference for most Somalis, and it really became a crippling burden when long-ruling dictator Mohammed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991. In the pre-independence days and the early years afterwards, the clans were able to unite against their Italian and British colonial rulers, but in 1991 they had to create a new government without an external enemy. They couldn’t do it.
As the clans fought it out in the streets, the whole infrastructure of an organized state collapsed. By 1992 American and United Nations forces arrived to help the millions of famine-stricken refugees, but they were only drawn into the inter-clan fighting as well, and by 1994 they had all withdrawn, leaving Somalia to anarchy and civil war for the next decade. But in fact most of the country was fairly stable under the control of one clan or another, with only the Mogadishu area still a battleground between rival clan warlords.
This did not greatly inconvenience the United States, which developed a keen interest in the politics of the region after the atrocities of 9/11. At first the U.S. just made deals with the various warlords to ensure that no jihadi fanatics created a base there. But it got more upset when an organization called the Union of Islamic Courts chased all the warlords out of Mogadishu in 2006 and gave the capital its first taste of peace and good government since 1991.
The UIC was actually created by prominent merchants from the locally dominant Hawiye clan who wanted a safe environment in which to do business. The “Islamic” aspect of it was mainly there to provide a rallying point that other clans could identify with, though that obviously also attracted a certain number of earnest and bearded young men. Some of them, unfortunately, favored a rhetorical style that triggers a knee-jerk reaction in jittery post-9/11 Americans.
The people of Mogadishu, enjoying their first taste of normality in 15 years, overwhelmingly supported the UIC, but the United States decided it must be overthrown. To do the job, Washington turned to its close ally Ethiopia Woyanne. The Ethiopians Woyannes, who have no interest in a stable and strong Somalia, were happy to oblige – and for diplomatic cover, the U.S. could use the “transitional federal government” of Somalia.
The TFG had been created in Kenya in 2004 under UN auspices. Each of the major clans (Hawiye, Darod, Dir and Rahanweyn) appointed 61 members to a “parliament” while all the minor clans shared 31 members between them. The “parliament” then chose a president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed. It was the 14th attempt since the overthrow of Siad Barre to create a Somali government.
The TFG set up in the town of Baidoa in early 2006, and promptly went to war with the Union of Islamic Courts that controlled the capital. Since it had only about 5,000 soldiers of its own, the TFG depended from the start on far larger numbers of Ethiopian Woyanne troops to do the actual fighting. Large numbers of government members resigned as it became clear that the TFG had fallen into the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Ethiopians, but a force of about 20,000 Ethiopian Woyanne troops (with some U.S. air support) fought its way into Mogadishu a year ago.
With the occupation of Mogadishu, the interval of peace ended, and the past year’s fighting has driven more than half the city’s population into flight. The TFG has been permanently discredited by its link to the hated Ethiopians Woyannes, but it will probably take more years of war to end the occupation, and a lot more Somalis will die. All because they called it the Union of Islamic Courts.
If only they had called it the Union of Buddhist Courts. Or Protestant Courts. Anything but the “I” word.
— GWYNNE DYER is a London-based independent journalist.
One of the arguments used in favour of “humanitarian interventions” is that conflicts, by uprooting large numbers of people, have a destabilising effect that extends beyond the borders of the state in which they take place. It is, therefore, in the self-interest of the countries of the rich world to intervene to help bring such conflicts to an end. The number of refugees peaked during the mid-1990s, which coincided with humanitarian crises such as Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and has largely been declining since that date.
Last year bucked that trend and it is not difficult to think of the reason. According to the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNCHR), the number of refugees rose by 14% to almost 10 million in 2006 and this was “mainly due to the crisis in Iraq”. Around 1.2 million Iraqis sought refuge in neighbouring Jordan and Syria while a further 300,000 Iraqis fled to other countries abroad, which was a more than fivefold increase over the year. Although there has been some small-scale return in recent months, the basic trend remains upward.
The other main groups of refugees, under UNHCR’s mandate, are Afghans, Sudanese and Somalis. The number of Afghans returning home has been falling year by year since its peak in 2002, just after the ousting of the Taliban. The end of the conflict in southern Sudan has seen a significant return there, but this has been balanced by many leaving the country due to the crisis in Darfur (do please support the appeal for helicopters for the peacekeeping mission).
The humanitarian crisis of the year, though, is Somalia. The country was illegally invaded by Ethiopian Woyanne troops, backed by the US military, last December and has been descending ever deeper into catastrophe since. Over a million people have been displaced from their homes and 60% of Mogadishu’s population have fled from renewed fighting. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) describes the current situation there as “desperate” and fears are rising about another famine.
Eight journalists have been killed in Somalia this year. The transitional Somali government has repeatedly shut down media outlets. It has also harassed and obstructed humanitarian organisations trying to assist the displaced population, including detaining the head of the UN’s world food programme (WFP) for five days in October, causing the suspension of food distributions to at least 75,000 people. Ethiopian Woyanne troops have carried out mass summary executions and rapes of civilians in retaliation for recent attacks by rebel groups in the predominately Somali Ogaden region and burned down villages as part of a “scorched earth” campaign. Although UN officials have described the situation in Somalia as the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa, the security council has failed to sanction Ethiopia for its actions.
________________________ Conor Foley is a humanitarian aid worker. He has worked for a variety of human rights and humanitarian aid organizations, including Liberty, Amnesty International and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He currently lives and works in Brazil, and is a research fellow at the Human Rights Law Centre at the University of Nottingham.
