Audio: Interview with Nigat Radio’s Demis Belete

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Why did the EPPF International Committee fall apart?

To answer this and other related questions, Ethiopian Review interviewed Nigat Radio host Demis Belete Sunday, Dec. 16, 2007.

Ato Demis had witnessed every thing from the beginning — how the EPPF Int’l Committee was formed, its relations with the EPPF leadership in the field, what went wrong, who is responsible for what, etc.

What necessitated the interview is that some individuals and groups knowingly or naively are bent on destroying any effort by patriotic Ethiopians to help the people of Ethiopia defend themselves against the Woyanne fascist regime by creating alliances with friendly forces such as the Government of Eritrea.

Ethiopia is currently alone without friends. Even the U.S. Administration — the beacon of democracy and freedom — is fighting tooth and nail to stop a legislation in the U.S. Congress that would make Woyanne accountable for its crimes against the people of Ethiopia.

In a strange twist of fate, the Government of Eritrea is the only force that is currently willing and capable of supporting the Ethiopian people’s struggle against the Woyanne regime. Let’s remember from history that the successive U.S. administrations were working against the South African people’s struggle against Apartheid, while Libya was one of the main financiers of Mandela’s African National Congress. The U.S. foreign policy makers are blinded by temporary political gains to the detriment of America’s own security and economic interests.

Eritreans, on the other hand, understand that Woyanne is a source of instability and suffering in the whole Horn of Africa region. It is to the interest of Eritreans that a peaceful party such as Kinijit comes to power. They have correctly reached the conclusion that they can solve disagreements with a genuinely elected Ethiopian government on a mutually beneficial basis. They have also witnessed that the people of Ethiopia look at Eritreans as brothers and sisters, and when Woyanne displaced hundreds of thousands of Eritreans in 1999 and 2000 in an act of ethnic cleansing, it was the people of Ethiopia who sheltered and saved many Eritreans.

Concerned by this realization on the part of Eritrean authorities and some Ethiopian opposition forces, Woyanne, with the support of its opportunist supporters, as well as naive politicians, has launched a massive propaganda effort to derail alliances between Ethiopian pro-democracy and unity forces and the Government of Eritrea.

To clearly understand this issues, it is important to look at what had transpired inside the EPPF. There is no better witness to the whole thing than Ato Demis Belete, a professional journalist and the host of Nigat Radio.

Click here to listen the interview with Ato Demis Belete