Eritrea slips off Ethiopia’s election agenda

ADDIS ABABA, May 14 (Reuters) – Former Ethiopian guerrilla Moges Tefera wants Sunday’s elections to deliver just one result – the return of Eritrea’s Assab port to his landlocked country.

The crippled ex-fighter is likely to be disappointed.

Ethiopia’s turbulent relationship with its neighbour Eritrea is a key foreign policy concern, but the issue has been drowned out in the campaign by domestic concerns over poverty.

And in any case Ethiopia’s ruling coalition, which sees no problem with Eritrea controlling Ethiopia’s former export lifeline to the sea, is set to win the parliamentary poll.

That doesn’t stop Moges, 37, and other former soldiers wanting things to be different.

“I love my country and all I want is unity,” he said.

Once brothers in arms, the current governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea shot their way to power in 1991 in a joint offensive to overthrow Ethiopia’s Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Eritrea, then Ethiopia’s northernmost province, voted for and won independence two years later with Addis Ababa’s blessing to become Africa’s youngest sovereign state.

That rankles with Moges, who says he fought for the unity of Ethiopia and felt betrayed by the loss of Eritrea, which Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie annexed in 1962, and its strategic Red Sea port.

But with a day to go before Ethiopians head to the polls, Eritrea appears to have faded from the electoral agenda, swamped by voter demands for more jobs, the end of poverty and greater freedoms in sub-Saharan Africa’s second most populous country.

Many voters remember the bitterness of Ethiopia’s subsequent border war with Eritrea in 1998-2000 and say they would rather have peace than a port linking Ethiopia to the sea.

The conflict killed 70 000 people and a dispute over an international ruling on the frontier has seen both countries mobilise their soldiers for the possibility of renewed war.

Moges took a bullet in the head fighting with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which joined forces with Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki’s Eritrean People’s Liberation Front to oust Mengistu.

Now, crippled and unable to work, Moges lives in a rehabilitation centre in Addis Ababa, where former TPLF fighters share rooms with ailing soldiers who fought for Mengistu, many paralysed or disfigured in fighting.

They pass hours listening to the radio or playing checkers. The state pays them a monthly pension of 100 birr (about R70), which one old solider said did not cover the cost of soap.

“I fought for Ethiopia’s freedom. I didn’t know I was fighting to lose Assab,” Moges said. “Meles and Isaias struck a deal, which they didn’t tell us about.”

The accusation is echoed by opposition parties, who have attacked Meles for accepting in principle the 2002 boundary ruling, and for seeking dialogue with Asmara.

“We opposed it, we knew it wouldn’t bring peace. We’ve been proven right, because we’re much closer to war than before,” opposition candidate Berhanu Nega said.

But compared to the poverty issue Eritrea has not gained much traction. And Meles defends the independence of Eritrea, saying it ended a 30-year uprising that had devastated Ethiopia.

Many in Moges’s centre will not vote in the elections, which is widely expected to give a third consecutive five-year term to Meles’s ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), in which the TPLF is the dominant force.

They say their wheelchairs make it difficult to travel to the nearest polling station.