Meles and the haste for sham withdrawal from Somalia
By Aklilu Demissie
Jan 7, 2007 — The real time agony for Meles is coming fast on him than he ever realized. After colluding with his perceptive architect of Somalia’s invasion, assistant secretary Jendayi Frazer, he is heading for a sham withdrawal from Somalia. He is aptly beseeching for African Union (AU) peace keeping forces.
The point that should not be forgotten is that the invasion was to divert his gruesome human rights abuses and killings from the home front and the presumption of hitting on any dissenting, mushrooming Ethiopian forces that could be a threat to his throne. His relentless poignant abuse of citizens, both in town and country has reached such unbelievable scales that people have decided to go against his brutal regime in the form of armed struggle.
The whole nation and Meles himself knows that getting a democratically elected system and peoples’ will, will never ever come as long as the entrenched Meles idolized the power of the gun.
To all intense and purposes Ethiopians have come to know harshly that they will never ever be able to change a regime by queuing in ballot box lines.
Right after the May 2005 election defeat, the regime warned and resorted to terrorizing the population of Rwandan type bloodbath. The propaganda machinery was showing “Hotel Rwanda” and how helpless the population was. It was then that Meles said openly, “If I do not like the color of your eye, be it Habesha [home people] or Ferenge [white man] will not save you from my wrath.”
Ethiopians have become unable to live in peace in their home and neighborhoods. Support for the opposition parties and even making a V-finger sign supporting the opposition will land you in a hell of a torture chamber.
The fully fledged Police State has inundated towns and cities with Agazze militia and the pugnacious Federal Police. Citizens do not have the right to gather. The beating, detention and killing of pupils and students are still the norms rather than the exception. With Orwellian grip on the media; the national electoral board, the judiciary, the legislative and executive branches of the government are pocket watches of Meles.
The realization of fighting for freedom has grown at exponential level, making Meles’ palace a sleepless den of preemptive attack on any real or imagined opposing forces to his stinking abuse and rule.
What he termed Jihadists in Somalia were not his concern nor were he really concerned about America’s interest-it is the possibility that Ethiopians aspiration for freedom may get a birth place in reclaiming their victory which had been gunned down from the ballot boxes by his private Agazze militia.
What he calls anti –Ethiopian elements [do not forget they are Ethiopians] are not at all seen by Ethiopians as anti-Ethiopia.
He is always short of calling them; the future of Ethiopia who will turn upside down his rejected brutal regime that is ruling the nation at gun point.
The absence of these Ethiopians [Meles’ anti Ethiopian forces] in Somalia has made the tyrant fume at AU and UN feverishly in to sending an African peace keeping force. His anti-Ethiopian elements, which he would have loved swallow them alive were nowhere to be seen.
Once he has made sure that his apparition of Ethiopians’ threat to his power grip was not there, he decides to run out as quick as he goes in. The army can not stay long due to the fact that domestic struggle against his regime is also escalating. The loyalty of the army is also scaring the regime as seen from recent defections; and the longer the army stayed out of his immediate grip is also disconcerting him.
Somalia’s peace or America’s ‘war on terror’ has never been his agenda. He has been lucky, especially since his bloody suppression at home to have found individuals like Jendayi Frazer who has been dancing to his tune and rhythm. Spell bound and mesmerized by Meles this one time knowledgeable diplomat of African affairs has been ditching and committing an historical mistake, one after the other.
The concept of an African peace keeping force in Somalia is another fiasco in the making. AU force from its recent history in Darfur has been a powerless play ground for the Janjaweed militia. The Janjaweed militias are able to do what ever they wanted with the AU force; from chasing them away to detaining them.
On the other side, this force is lead by often corrupt, nonfunctional management who couldn’t make a proper payment to the deployed troops, often leading to dereliction of duty. Member states that send these troops are also accused of siphoning off Millions of dollars from remuneration to the soldiers. How many Ethiopian AU soldiers got their due upon return from mission? How may were detained, executed for demanding due remuneration? Was there no mutiny related to returning AU Ethiopian soldiers from mission?
Another tyrant [Museveni of Uganda] in his corner is presently struggling to change his cloak of tyranny in to an accredited international peace keeper. His forces could barely pacify northern Uganda from the vicious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
War and famine are what regimes like Meles thrive on. Ever since his reign in power Ethiopia had never been able to feed itself. No wonder his regime being synonymous with the words, “Lords of Poverty.” His present rhetoric, often ridiculous rant, of telling citizens that he is waging war while doing development miracles is a stupendous fallacy. It is just a Xerox copy of what Mengistu was telling the nation of fighting anti-Ethiopian elements while focusing on development activities.
Obviously from Ethiopia’s experience when these rhetoric combine and come out of tyrants, they invariably end up in decimating the sacred right to life and dignity as it was in Mengistu’s era and as it is now in Meles’.
It was not pundits’ speculation that the Horn would go in to quagmire if Meles went ahead against a rag –tag militia as he purported. He just twisted it to his propaganda bee hive. Imagine Meles-“Alexander the Great” coming out victorious against the formidable “Persian Empire” forces in just four days.
His cronies were even tempted of comparing the victory against Islamists to the Six-Day Arab- Israeli War of 1967 to that of their four day victory.
The rag tag Islamic militia, God knows if it had a back bone as Meles glorifies himself of breaking, were merely a lightly armed volunteers. It was not an army that one can gleefully bask in the sun as if defeating a super power. It was a militia group that took to its heel to an obsolete squeaky and creaky Russian left over jets and tanks. In one of his blurting he was even pitiful for Islamists [he has always said to have no enmity with them, except the Al-Qaeda fugitives and terror list marked] for pushing fast to be on war footing with out strengthening themselves.
These were the Jihadists Meles saved Ethiopia from.
Meles and his cronies had the audacity to tell the world to have presented a new year’s present to America by defeating a rag tag Islamic militia and closing the third front line against terror.
Meles, a village ethnic Warlord himself, inebriated by his delusion thinks he has done what Americans couldn’t achieve. Alas! What an illusion!
With his sham withdrawal scheme, the relatively stable Somalia that was for a while will inevitably descend in to anarchy. This is the same Somalia he never cared for after the 1993 “Operation Restore Hope” fiasco. He is the one who kept dealing with the break away, the non- UN recognized Somaliland, deepening the divide of Somalia.
The current so called “President of Somalia,” Mr. Yusuf, has become a recipe for disaster. He has to be confined to Baidowa since he [from Darod clan-unpopular in Mogadishu] doesn’t come from the dominant Mogadishu area clan [Hawiye- Gedis’s clan].
The complexity of Somalis clan lines and feuds is not something that can be rammed by jets and tanks and military bravado.
As usual Meles will come and tell the world, the ‘I told you so’ story of that the African Union peace keeping force failing to do its job. This calculated face saving gimmick is contorted in order to avoid any responsibility that would follow his brazen and irresponsible invasion.
His scare of a force of Ethiopians gaining ground and toppling his regime: and equally important the diversions of attention from human rights abuses are basic facts that rushed him to the invasion of Somalia. He definitely knows that, had it not been for Siad Barres’s generosity and Somali passport and Sudan’s complicity, he would not have come to power. That is what he will not let any body do except over his dead body. Let us not forget that tyrant Mengistu was calling him anti- Ethiopia and ant-peace element, as Meles is echoing him currently in fear of the growing challenge to his brutal rule, quite comparable to his predecessor’s.
It should also be the duty of the US government identifying the true, ulterior motives of a tyrant.
The moral dignity of US policy towards protecting democracy and human rights is no where starkly compromised than in Ethiopia. How will war on terror could be won if policy failures from the US side favor working with a regime that is terrorizing its own population? How can things be back to business as usual when people are mowed down in broad daylight, tortured day in and day out, thrown in to unmarked jails and concentration camps, just for demanding respect for their overwhelming voices?
No wonder as the region brinks again to chaos caused by a cynical tyrant who is befittingly called “East Africa’s Charles Taylor.”
United Sates should not override the demand for democratic rule in Ethiopia. America should distance itself from doing business with a regime that is soaked with its citizens blood for perceived justification of no alternative in winning the ‘war on terror’ in the Horn than allying with a pagan terrorist.
What about those democratically elected leaders languishing in jail who have mobilized the entire nation for democratic rule and respect for human rights? Don’t they know the term and importance of the war on terror? Or are the people of Ethiopia a threat to global peace that the US should contain through a brutal dictator?
It is high time for US policy makers to stand with the people of Ethiopia who by the day are rapidly getting disillusioned with what America stands for.
* The author is based in the USA. He can be reached at [email protected]