Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

January 14, 2010

Land Purchase in Occupied Oromia is Illegal. Do not Invest in Ailing Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia)!

In an effort to involve foreign countries and murderous tyrants from allover the world, and thus ensure themselves a longer stay in power, the racist, anti-African regime of Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia) invented an incredible, irresponsible, viciously immoral and utterly criminal trickery, namely a foolish sale of Oromo lands to numerous dictators from allover the world.

The Oromo Liberation Front, as well as numerous Oromo parties, fronts, organizations, associations, political leaders, and activists, have denounced the extraordinary and shameful act perpetrated by the world´s most loathed butcher and Africa´s most barbaric dictator, the Tigray thug-in-chief Meles Zenawi.

The tyrants who effectuate similar transactions in the illegally occupied Oromia spend money that is not theirs but stolen from the peoples they have tyrannized. They must know that in fact they have no land in Oromia, and that "their" money is effectively lost.

The Oromo Liberation Front published a selection of related articles and features that I herewith republish, whereas I will expand on the subject in several forthcoming articles.

The Meles Zenawi's regime is selling lands while starving the Oromo people.

http://www.oromoliberationfront.org/news/2010/DICTATOR%20MELES%20ZENAWI%20SELLING%20LANDS.pdf?option=com_content&view=article&id=2&Itemid=3

Nigerian Ex-President gets 20,000sqm of land in Oromia

Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo joined President of Djibouti and the Ethio-Saudi Sheik Mohamed Al Amoudi by acquiring large plots of Oromia land. The size of the area is 20,000sqm, according to Capital Ethiopia newspaper.

(AfricaNews) Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, is to invest in Hotel and tourism sector of Ethiopia and has since secured a 20,000 square meter of land near Bishoftu (Debre Zeit) town of Oromia Region called Ada.

Obansanjo´s intention to invest in Bishoftu has come following the footsteps of Djibouti´s president, Ismael Omar Guelleh, who took 10,000 square meters of land last year to build holiday home in Bishoftu and also bought 3,000 square meters of land for agriculture in Bale, Oromia Region of the country.

After Bishoftu town´s administration approved anew master plan last year, many investors are now investing in the town, which is known for its eight unique lakes. Read full story: AfricaNews

"World leaders" taking notice of land in Oromia

300,000 hectares of Ethiopian land handed out for $15 birr per hectare

Until last year, people in the Ethiopian settlement of Elliah earned a living by farming their land and fishing. Now, they are employees.

They work for Bangalore- based Karuturi Global Ltd., which is leasing 300,000 hectares (741,000 acres) of local land, an area larger than Luxembourg.

Under the agreement with Ethiopia´s government, Karuturi pays no rent for the land for the first six years. After that, it will pay 15 birr (U.S. $1.18) per hectare per year for the next 84 years. Labor costs of less than $50 a month per worker and duty- free treaties with China and India also attracted Karuturi Global, he said. The $100 million projected annual profit will come from the export of food crops, including corn, rice and palm oil, he said. The company also is plowing land on a 10,900- hectare spread near the central Ethiopian town of Bako.

Ethiopia's ruling junta gives Egypt 20,000 hectares of land

Cairo (apa) — Egypt announced on Tuesday preparations to invest on 20,000 hectares of land in Ethiopia, with a multimillion-dollar investment.

The announcement was made by the visiting Egyptian Prime Minister, Dr.Ahmed Nazif who is on a working visit to Ethiopia starting on Tuesday.

The Egyptian delegation assured the Ethiopian officials that Egypt was keen to be involved in various investment opportunities in the country.

The Egyptian PM said that the National Bank of Egypt will initially develop 20,000 hectares of land of agricultural products as from 2010.

According to state media reports, Egypt will invest the undisclosed amount of agricultural investment in the Afar regional state of Ethiopia, known for its livestock resources.

The two countries prime ministers held talks late on Tuesday on how to boost their trade and investment cooperation, which in the past few years was poor.

The Egyptian delegation also showed interest to invest in other areas such as drug manufacturing.

It was also reported that Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan are expected to reach an agreement on installation of electricity connectivity in the near future to link the three countries with hydroelectric power supply from Ethiopia, which is currently undertaking a multi-billion investment on hydroelectric projects.

Ethiopian tribal dictator Meles Zenawi and his Egyptian counterpart Dr. Ahmed Nazif also expressed their commitment to work together in the efforts to ensure benefits for the peoples of the two countries.

Djibouti first lady gets 20 hectares of land in Ethiopia

By Groum Abate

Khadra Mohammed, First Lady of Djibouti, has received the 20 hectares of land in the Sebeta area for a flower farm, on Tuesday July 22, 2008, from Alemu Sime, Investment Bureau Head of the Oromia Regional State [another Woyanne donkey].

The First Lady received the plot on behalf of her son, Ayinashe Omar Guelleh, whom it was learnt, plans to engage in the booming flower sector.

Floriculture already earns Ethiopia over 150 million dollars annually. Meles regime is keen to encourage political allies, offering them a five-year tax holiday and duty-free import of machinery.

The area, 30 minutes south of Addis Ababa with green hills and lush valleys, is ideal for cultivating the country´s fastest growing export – flowers.

Ethiopia exports more than 80 million stems a month to 40 countries. 70% is to the Netherlands, from where they are sent around the world. It also exports to Germany, Britain, Russia and, in smaller amounts, to the United States and the Middle East.

Five years ago, Ethiopia made just $159,000 from exports of cut flowers, cuttings and summer flowers. Last year that had grown to $63.5 million and this year it is expected to hit $166 million.

Last week, President Ismael Omar Guelleh of Djibouti obtained 10,000 hectares of land around Bale, Oromia Regional State for investing in the agriculture sector. The multi-million dollar investment is expected to commence in the coming few weeks. The plot is mainly slated for growing wheat.

The president also visited the 10,000 meter square plot on Babogaya Lake in Bishoftu (Debre Zeit) town 45 kilometers south east of Addis Ababa and received a title deed for the plot to construct his vacation home.

Khadra, during the ceremony on Tuesday July 22, 2008 also visited the plot, which her son is going to invest. The title deed for a 20 hectare flower farm was also presented to the first lady last week on Friday July 18, 2008 during the ceremony that also presented President Guelleh with his title deed for both sites in Bishoftu and Bale.Warda A. Graham, owner of Wajag Gas and Alemayehu Ketema a businessman prominent in the construction sector facilitated the investment opportunity.

Indian company acquires 765,000 hectares of land in Ethiopia

By Billie O'Kadameri

Ethiopia's autocratic leader Meles Zenawi has embarked on a controversial policy of leasing huge amount of land to foreign private investors in an attempt to boost agricultural production for the local market and for export. However, environmentalists and agricultural policy planners fear the leasing of huge tracts of land to private developers in some countries could harm the environment. They are concerned that land which is already under strain from years of degradation will suffer more. They say the loss of trees in particular has caused an imbalance in the eco-system, resulting in regular drought and famine.

Indian businessman Ramakrishna Karuturi, managing Director of Karuturi Global Ltd, one of the world's top agribusiness transnational corporations, has acquired nearly 765,000 hectares of land in Ethiopia. His company is involved in flower and food production.

Karuturi told Radio France International (RFI) that the world should applaud instead of vilifying efforts by people like him. "When you look at the last ten years of world food production vis-à-vis consumption, I think over six of those ten years, we in the world have eaten more than we produced, and world food stocks are at a debilitatingly low 67-day stock. 67 days of food is disastrous and I don´t think in the history of mankind, the world has ever come this close".

With very low per capita electricity coverage, nearly 85 percent of Ethiopia´s rural population relies on wood fuel for domestic energy for cooking, according to Dr Gemedo Dalle, Head of Forest Genetic Resources Department at the Ethiopian Institute for Biodiversity and Conservation in Addis Ababa.

This already constitutes an emerging crisis for the government and policy planners. Yet more land tree cover will be under pressure as large-scale land investors flock to Ethiopia taking advantage of the country´s land policy that makes it easy to acquire huge land areas.

Professor Kwadwo Asenso-Okyere, Director of the Addis Ababa-based Knowledge, Capacity and Innovation Division of the International Food Policy Research Institute opposes the leasing of huge tracts of land to foreign investors:

If you are acquiring say hundreds of thousands of hectares of land and you clear all of this land, the impact on the environment is very severe, because you are going to cut all the trees. [...] Sometimes they don't grow food, sometimes it is for bio-fuel plants and other things so it is not going to improve the food security of the people. Sometimes they even cultivate food but the food is shipped completely out.

But 43-year old Karuturi rejects the claims that his investment will not address food security problems in Africa. "Africa is the world´s largest market for food. Africa imports 16 billion dollars worth of food every year. Out of 25 million tonnes of rice that is traded globally per year, 10 million tonnes is imported by Africa. Of course I will sell my food in Africa because Africa is the best place to sell food [...] people are acutely short of food here".

The Ethiopian government insists that its policy will seek to balance investment in agriculture, with a strict regime for protecting the environment.

Abera Deressa is Ethiopia's Minister of State for Agriculture and Rural Development. "They cannot harm the environment. We are very clear on this. We in the Ministry of Agriculture are developing an environmental code of practice for the private sector. [...] We are also advising them not to cut trees, they have to manage soil erosion".

"As you know very well the global climate change crisis is because of poor management of the environment in developing countries; the other is by emission of carbon dioxide into the air by developed countries through industrialisation process".

"But here in Africa, in our country pollution of the environment is by poor management of agricultural practices; deforestation, degradation, improper land management; these are the factors that we have to control".

Saudi Arabia joins in the Ethiopian land grab

Editor's note: The following is reported as is by WIC, Woyanne's own news web site. By proudly reporting about this latest land give away, Woyannes are saying to the people of Ethiopia, 'go suck your thumb, we'll do what we want with your land.'

(Walta Information Service) Addis Ababa — Saudi Arabia, which is making efforts to provide food security for its nationals, can look up to Ethiopia where huge tracts of unutilized agricultural land are available for growing cereals, according to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

A Saudi ministerial delegation, which visited Ethiopia to explore the prospects of investing in agriculture, is impressed by the country´s huge potential and as a follow up sending a team of experts to conduct specialized studies, said Zenawi who spoke in this exclusive interview with Arab News on a variety of economic issues ranging from rising oil prices and inflation to his country´s bilateral trade relations with Saudi Arabia.

Follow some excerpts:

Saudi Arabia is engaged in providing food security. A Saudi ministerial delegation has visited your country in this connection. Could you throw light on this?

Saudi Arabia has evinced interest in investing in agriculture, particularly in production of cereals, and has been looking at various options. One of the countries they are looking at is Ethiopia, which has a lot of unutilized land, particularly in the lowland areas of the country where all sorts of agricultural products can be grown. The Saudi delegation studied the prospects of investing in agriculture in this country. We told them we would be very eager to provide hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land for investment, particularly for cereal production. There is a broad agreement and understanding and this will be followed by visits by Saudi experts to conduct specific studies for investment.

What are the existing Saudi investments in Ethiopia?

Most of the Saudi investments have been in manufacturing and hospitality sectors. This has been the focus so far, but we expect a sizeable increase in the Kingdom´s investment in agriculture as a result of its decision to invest in cereals.

What are the other potential areas available for Saudi investment?

The manufacturing sector is promising, especially textiles, leather, leather products and iron bars. In fact, all sectors of manufacturing are open. Investment in infrastructure is also something we are looking for. Real estate development and particularly the hospitality sector including hotels and tourist places, as well as agriculture and agro processing industries are among the other potential areas.

What is the existing level of trade and investment between the two countries?

Saudi Arabia is one of our top three trading partners. Our trade volume is $1 billion, although much of the trade balance is in favor of the Kingdom. The trade gap is about half a billion dollars. We mostly import oil and petroleum products and export coffee, meat and other agricultural products. About 240 Saudi companies have been given the investment license. These companies including those who are operational are expected to invest $2.5 billion. Saudi Arabia is our very important investment partner. Economically, we have solid and fast growing relations.

What has been the impact of rising oil prices?

The dramatic increase in oil prices has hit Ethiopia very hard. Our oil import bill over the past three years has increased by over a billion dollars. This amounts to 3 percent of our GDP. That has upset our balance of payment very significantly. It has created a huge pressure on our balance of payment and complicated the inflationary issue. We are trying to tackle this problem by increasing our exports so that we can pay for our increased import bill, and improving agricultural production so that we can dampen our food prices. We are importing some food from abroad to check the rising trend of our agricultural prices. We are importing wheat. We are no doubt growing wheat but due to an inflationary pressure we are bringing more wheat from abroad to flood the market so that the rising trend of prices in the country can be checked.

How high-level exchange of business visits has benefited your country?

We have had frequent exchanges by leaders at high levels. My assessment is that these high level visits have contributed a lot to the fast growing economic partnership and contributed a lot to the political understanding that we currently enjoy. I expect such exchanges to continue. We are expecting a high level ministerial delegation to visit us in October. I would expect a similar high-level visit from Ethiopia to Saudi Arabia.

Note

Picture: Map of the Africans lands that have been occupied by the racist and tyrannical Amhara and Tigray regime. FromL http://www.younglives.org.uk/images/countries/ethiopia/ethiopia_map_650.gif

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/printFriendly/136687

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Ethiopia – country of the silver sickle – offers land dirt cheap to farming giants

Addis Ababa sells vast fertile swaths to international companies in effort to introduce large-scale commercial agriculture

Xan Rice in Bako guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 January 2010

Workers at an 11,000ha farm in Bako, Ethiopia, run by the Indian company Karuturi. The company also runs a 300,000ha farm in the Gambella as part of Ethiopian government effort to promote large-scale agriculture Photograph: Xan Rice

This is a country of the bent back and the silver sickle, where virtually all the crops have felt the calloused fingers of the peasant farmer working his tiny parcel of state-owned land. The ox pulls the plough and the donkey the cart, and fertiliser counts as agricultural technology.

Chugging into this picture on a bright green John Deere tractor came Hanumantha Rao, a former sugarcane farmer from India who is at the forefront of a revolution sweeping through Ethiopian farming. He hurried up to a hilltop on his company's farm in Bako, four hours' drive from the capital, Addis Ababa, and swept out an arm to indicate the land he has leased from the government: 11,000 hectares to grow rice, maize and oil palms.

In the fields below, boreholes were being sunk and roads graded. An airstrip will soon allow for a crop-spraying plane. Besides the new tractor Rao had been riding on that morning, there were 30 more on site. That was not many, he insisted, and neither was the farm especially large.

Further west in Gambella, Karuturi Global, the listed Indian horticulture company that employs Rao, is bringing in 1,000 new tractors to work the 300,000 hectares it has leased – making it one of the biggest farms in the Horn of Africa, if not the continent. "It is 120 kilometres [75 miles] wide," Rao said proudly. "Three hours to cross by Jeep."

Ethiopia's great land lease project is moved swiftly ahead. In an effort to introduce large-scale commercial farming to the country, the government is offering up vast chunks of fertile farmland to local and foreign investors at almost giveaway rates. By 2013, 3m hectares of idle land is expected to have been allotted – equivalent to more than one fifth of the current land under cultivation in the country.

The move is part of a wider trend that has seen other African and Asian countries seek to take advantage of high global demand and the cost of crops by offering agricultural land to foreign companies, private equity funds and governments, particularly those of import-dependent Gulf countries.

If done properly, the investments have the potential to increase local food availability and create badly needed jobs. If not – as was the case with the attempt by the South Korean firm Daewoo to lease half of Madagascar's arable land to grow corn for export in 2008, a deal many saw as 21st- century colonialism – they could prove disastrous.

In a food-insecure country such as Ethiopia, where several million people rely on food aid, the idea of offering fertile land to outsiders has raised concerns. But government officials point out that Ethiopia has vast reserves of underused land – 60m hectares of the country's 74m hectares suitable for agriculture is not cultivated – and insist no local farmers will be adversely affected. Esayas Kebede, investment support co-ordinator at the agriculture ministry, said that foreign companies were essential for the move from subsistence to commercial farming, a key part of the country's development strategy.

"There is no crop that won't grow in Ethiopia but we cannot produce quantity and quality. Why? It's a vicious cycle of the lack of capital and technology," he said. "So leasing land is a real opportunity for us."

So too for Karuturi. The Bangalore-based company, which is the world's largest grower of roses, has negotiated an extraordinarily good deal with the government. For its farm in Bako, Karuturi is paying no rent for six years and then only 135 birr (£6.50) per hectare per year for the remainder of the 50-year lease. In Gambella, a remote and sparsely populated region close to Sudan, the rent is only 15 birr per hectare (73p).

The company believes the potential for large profits is so great that it plans to invest nearly $1bn in its Ethiopian agricultural operations, according to managing director Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi. Within eight years, he hopes to be producing 3m tonnes of cereals – mostly maize and rice – a year on the Gambella farm, as well as palm oil and sugar. Some of the produce will be sold in Sudan and Kenya – where the company is in talks with the US Agency for International Development to build grain silos at a border town. Like all the foreign land investors in Ethiopia, the company is free to export as much of its produce as it likes, but Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi said most would be sold domestically, where there is a ready market.

"Ethiopia is a food importer and will continue to be for some time. With the high cost of transportation in Africa, it does not make sense for us to try to export beyond the region."

As with land, labour is also extremely cheap. The minimum wage in Ethiopia is about 8 birr (39p) a day. Karuturi, which hopes eventually to employ 20,000 people on its two farms, says it pays 10 birr (49p) a day and provides meals to its workers.

Rao, general manager of the Bako farm, said there was no shortage of locals desperate for jobs. "People here are very poor. They would work for 1 birr, and no one else pays more than 5 birr. So we are paying double."

Outside the farm gates, the feeling about Karuturi among peasant farmers was mixed. The company's 11,000 hectares were fallow before it arrived – the black clay soil is rich in nutrients but difficult to work without a mechanical plough – but some locals had grazed their cattle there and used to cross the farm to the nearest river, which is no longer possible.

Teresa Agassa, a 38-year-old man in gumboots who works a one-hectare plot, said it was good that some local people now had jobs – even if the wage was too small. But he spoke enviously of Karuturi's tractors.

"They're only for the company's benefit. Maybe there can also be benefits for us – but we will only know in the future."

Ethiopia's farming revolution

In the late 1970s Ethiopia's communist regime nationalised all land, and private ownership remains outlawed. The millions of small-scale farmers work under licence from the state, and most plots are one hectare or less, which has hampered efforts to improve food security. But the centralised tenure system has made it easy for the government to offer hundreds of idle farms to investors at cheap rates. A detailed database contains information on soil types, weather patterns, the nearest rivers, and suitable crops. The agriculture ministry is advertising 1.68 million hectares of land in the Benishangul-Gumuz, South Omo and Gambella regions. The greatest interest has come from India and Saudi Arabia, including Saudi Star Agricultural Development, which is growing 10,000 hectares of rice in Gambella. Firms from other Arab countries, and from China, Japan and the US have also expressed strong interest in leasing land.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/15/ethiopia-sells-land-farming-giants/print

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Anti-Somalia, Anti-Ogaden Falsehood of Western Academia: Fabrication of Fake Ethiopian History

Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
January 10, 2010

Most of the troubles attested in Eastern Africa are not due to the racist and barbaric elites of the Amhara and Tigray-ruled Abyssinia. By themselves, the rancorous, hatred-promoting, Monophysitic (Tewahedo) Abyssinians would never be able to expand their influence outside the small and arid land which is theirs, and which will be finally left to them.

Similarly, most of the plights occurred in the wider Horn of Africa region are not due to the colonial diplomats and military who repeatedly tormented the area, spreading death and facilitating genocides.

The main reason for the Hell, in which numerous Kushitic and Nilo-Saharan African nations find themselves engulfed, is the evil, fallacious literature that has been ceaselessly composed by Anglo-French academia and systematically diffused worldwide in a peremptory way in order to deceive all possible players.

Foe identification is the task no 1 for all the terrorized and tyrannized nations of Eastern Africa from Sudan´s Furis, Nuer, Dinka and Bejas to Abyssinia´s Afars, Oromos, Sidamas, and Ogadenis, and from Kenya´s Somalis, Oromos and Luos to the multi-divided Somalis.

What actually condemned all these nations to underdevelopment, tyranny, and even genocide is what stands at the origin of the European colonialism: a false perception of African History, a premeditated falsification of the historical past of many great African nations, and a systematic diffusion of the falsehood that the Anglo-French Freemasonic academia meticulously elaborated during the past two centuries.

Egyptology, Coptology, Islamology, African Studies, Kushitic Studies, Berberic Studies, and every other Orientalist discipline that has been developed with a focus on an African civilization is the result of a vicious and villainous will to superimpose Europe´s mediocre, poor and unauthentic past over the irreversible reality of six (6) millennia of great and genuine, inventive and unsurpassed Asiatic and African civilizations. Compared to them, the ancestors of today´s Europeans were low, ignorant, trashy, lewd, barbaric and cannibalistic.

Africans Programmed to Total Extinction

Worse than this, the falsification that has been methodically elaborated, systematically diffused worldwide (by means of many tricks), and tyrannically imposed on all Africans (by means of colonial rule) has another – definitely more inhuman – raison d'être: the production of socioeconomic, educational, cultural and political developments that will lead all the survivors of genuine African civilizations to total extinction.

False interpretation of the past could just be a researcher´s mistake, which is a possibility for every human. But dozens of thousands of lies involved in the fabrication of a pseudo-African History, geared only to eliminate all Africans by means of cultural, religious, socio-behavioural and even physical genocide, are not a coincidence, let alone a mistake. They are the elements of a fake reality that, projected on all Africans, becomes the means of the unnatural and cruel justification of today´s Africa´s troublesome situation.

The elaboration of the evil and inhuman Anti-African falsehood needs a 100-volumed encyclopedia to be enlisted, let alone commented. The interaction between Freemasonic Anglo-French academia and diplomacy brings the falsehood produced in institutes, universities, research centers and academia to the corridors of foreign ministries, embassies and decision making centers and lobbies.

Thence, the criminal Anti-African act is exported to the puppet regimes and the tyrants that the Anglo-French colonial power fittingly enthroned in the fallaciously divided continent. These gangster-like local elites, only to obtain the permission of further staying in power, do implement and enforce these lies, false concepts and anti-African interpretations of the African History at the local level; and this happens at the prejudice of all the indigenous nations that are thus menaced with ultimate extinction.

The falsehood diffusion process has been intensified with the involvement of mass media that generate tones of fallacious reports, analyses, and commentaries, thus totaling misleading either average Europeans and Americans or endangered Africans on the subject. Wikipedia represents only a more recent dimension of the intensified falsification of the African History. Every entry concerning African History, and Eastern African History more particularly, is full of falsifying data, innuendos, farfetched assumptions, and deliberate misinterpretations produced only to gear a most distorted version of "history". Truths are not said to leave therein enough space for lies.

False Contextualization of Events

In History, falsification takes very often the form of false contextualization of events; this means that, although the author mentions correctly an event that took place indeed, he misplaces it within a historical context that did not exist, and which is very difficult if not impossible for the average reader to detect, let alone refute.

Much of the falsification effort consists in skilful narratives, syntactical structures, and mere usage, involving attributive adjectives, resultative adjectives and the like – all correctly used in order to create a fake environment around the undisputed, but altered within its context, event. It takes strong skills in error analysis to detect this sort of falsification.

Of course, learned indigenous people with a background in the History of their nation are able to immediately identify the errors contained in a book or article about their past, but the Freemasonic colonial elite counts on the limited scope of these persons´ possible reaction.

In other words, an English historian or political scientist, who writes in order to falsify the History of Somalia, ´knows´ that the Somalis, who can easily demonstrate the fallacious nature of his text, have no access to mass media and publication houses allover the world to refute and discredit him.

They count on the fact that the inhuman tyranny imposed on almost all Africans nations reduces their life scope to mere survival, and thus they feel that their hands are free to further propagate their Anti-African falsehood.

In itself, their historical forgery´s political use that they intend to make is all that matters for them. Studying the history itself of the Orientalist disciplines helps discover how they maneuver politically the academic falsehood that they produce, and by projecting this situation into the future, one can anticipate further developments.

As the subject is vast, and the falsification effort was materialized in thousands of articles, entries and books, I intend to unveil the falsification contained in a single text, by progressively refuting all points of falsification.

This method serves as model for many young African scholars and students who want to counterattack and outmaneuver the Freemasonic Anglo-French conspiracy against Africa in its entirety.

I will therefore be publishing excerpts of a 20-page article about Somalia, criticizing the errors point by point. For this purpose, I selected the article "The Ogaden: A Microcosm of Global Conflict" by Ezekiel Rediker.

Ezekiel Rediker is a Senior at Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he wrote this paper for Mr. Paul Schaltenbrand´s U.S. History course in the 2003-2004 academic year. This article was selected by the Concord Review (http://www.tcr.org/tcr/essays.htm) for the Emerson Prize, so this means that in the United States, there are academic institutions (http://www.tcr.org/about.htm) that offer prizes and awards for the forgers, the falsifiers and the deceivers. For a country where people accepted with almost no protest that their monies be effectively stolen (in the form of trillion dollar level bailout) by the Wall Street plutocracy, this does not necessarily mean much. It does mean however much for the Ogadenis and the other Somalis because it demonstrates that they are all targeted for national annihilation and physical extinction.

I will therefore be progressively republishing excerpts, commenting, and refuting the fallacies contained in the said article. Latin numbers inserted in the text correspond to points of my commentary. Modern European numbers in the text corresponds to the author´s footnotes.

The Ogaden: A Microcosm of Global Conflict

By Ezekiel Rediker

The British author Salman Rushdie (I) once said: "To be Somali is to be a people united by one language and divided by maps."1 Rushdie was referring to the colonization of East Africa by European powers, a process that split the Somali people (II) and created enormous havoc in its wake. After the "Scramble for Africa", European nations did not respect ethnic and tribal boundaries as they created new states. (III) They divided the region inhabited by the large and geographically dispersed Somali tribe into Italian, British, and French protectorates. After Africa won its independence from Europe, borders were redrawn again. Four nations with significant Somali populations were created: Somalia, Ethiopia (IV), Kenya, and later Djibouti.

Yet independence did not create stability. Within a decade, Somalia´s dictator, (V) Siad Barre, an advocate of Somali pan-nationalism, (VI) attempted to unify the five regions that comprised "Greater Somalia." (VII) These included the two former British and Italian protectorates that formed the country of Somalia, the Northern Frontier Districts of Kenya, the former French Somaliland, which became the Republic of Djibouti, and the Ogaden and Haud regions of Ethiopia. Barre´s idea of Somali pan-nationalism eventually led to a major war over the Ogaden region with Ethiopia, intense Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, (VIII) and finally the collapse of Somalia. (IX) The Ogaden war not only helped to destroy Somalia, but had brutal repercussions in neighboring countries as well. To this day, guerilla warfare continues in the Ogaden region, (X) and the Somali Ethiopians (XI) of the region continue to suffer tremendously. (XII) The historic conflicts over the Ogaden are complex, involving longstanding ethnic rivalries, Asian and European imperialism, Cold War competition, and tribal nationalism. (XIII) The Ogaden is thus a microcosm of the many forces that have shaped the history of the African continent.

Commentary

(I) In the first line of his text, the author demonstrates his partial stance, helping every criticism, and infuriating any objective reader. Referring to the most loathed and most despised person among all the Muslims of the earth is a provocation against all the Somalis. As such, it discredits the author from the first moment. It is precisely the same with someone writing the History of Judaism and mentioning in the first line of his book Hitler´s views of the Jews.

Using terms and expressions about Somalia that have been aired by a renegade of Islam is an insult against the Muslim nation of the Somalis, and clearly demonstrates the premeditated nature of the entire undertaking. Knighted by the queen of England, Salman Rushdie merely added insult to infamy. The disastrous beginning heralds an ominous text.

(II) The term ´people´ is wrongly used here; whenever we refer to several historical periods (and the author covers the span of five – out of 35 – centuries of Somali History), we have to use the term ´nation´. ´People´ is the correct term when refer to present times or only to one historical period in the past. When we refer to the times of Caesar, we can use the term the ´Roman people´; if we refer to the Romans diachronically, we have to use the term the ´Roman nation´.

In this case, the author tries to deprive the Somalis of their great past that eclipses by far the meager and unimportant past of the Amhara and Tigray Abyssinians who have become the tool of the evil colonial powers in Eastern Africa over the past two centuries. As such, and only because of this attempt, the author should be considered as an enemy of the Somali Nation and be dealt with accordingly, through denunciations and condemnations.

(III) The sentence may be correct, but it is said as if there are no moral consequences; yet, the evident repercussions of this evil Anglo-French Freemasonic plan involve more than a dozen of genocides perpetrated throughout Africa. Narrating this truth without any comment of moral content deprives the author from any humane character. It is as if writing the History of Modern Europe, an author states amongst other details that Hitler exterminated so many millions of people. It is unethical, and as such, evil. It sheds light on the rancorous personality of the author who writes only to deliberately falsify. This personality belongs exclusively to Freemasons.

(IV) The country´s name is Abyssinia. Using the false term ´Ethiopia´ means automatic contribution to, or support of, the multileveled and multifaceted genocides perpetrated by the Amhara and Tigray Ethiopianist gangsters. The term ´Ethiopia´ was used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans for the Kushitic state of Sudan; its modern use for the colonial state of Abyssinia consists in Crime against the Mankind. See: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/calling-abyssinia-as-ethiopia-part-of-the-oromo-ethiopian-genocide.html

(V) Improper use of a term that would be rejected by the majority of the Somalis. ´President Siad Barre´ is the correct term. It would be interesting to know whether the author would call Hassan II of Morocco a Butcher, and not a king. However, the use of this term merely adds perjury to falsehood.

(VI) Another false term; there has never been "Somali pan-nationalism", neither can it be. Such terms refer to an all-union of several peoples speaking similar languages; terms like Pan-Turkism, Pan-Turanism or Pan-Slavism are correct because they call for a union among Turks, Turkmen, Azeris, Uzbek and others (for the former two terms) or among Russians, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Macedonians and others (for the latter term). But all the Somalis either in Ogaden or in Kenya and elsewhere speak the same language and are one nation.

And how should we call the criminal deeds of the English to illegally occupy Ireland and Scotland? Pan-Anglism?

Referring to the term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-nationalism

(VII) The term ´Greater Somalia´ is a metaphor; what corresponds to this term, as land and population, consists in mere expression of the Somali Nation´s wish to unite and form one nationhood. The term is void of any chauvinistic and nationalistic contents because it describes territories inhabited exclusively by Somalis.

Except, the villainous desire of the heinous author is to promote the permanent division of the Somali Nation. Such a desire, coming from a person so far and so irrelevant of the African reality, can only be due to bribery or chicanery.

(VIII) This assumption is totally false; the US did not support Somalia against the Soviet and Cuban armies that defended the illegal interests of the Amhara and Tigray cannibals. There was no "intense Cold War rivalry" because of the war between Somalia and the USSR.

(IX) This is another lie; there is no relationship between the defeat of the Somali army (1978) and the collapse of the Siad Barre administration (1990). The only link between the two events is the permanent, evil predisposition of the Freemasonic regimes of the colonial states of England and France against the Somali Nation. But this goes back to the beginning of the colonial times in Eastern Africa.

(X) There is no guerilla in Ogaden; there is a national liberation struggle against the illegal Abyssinian occupation of Ogaden. This predates the Ogaden War and the liberation effort undertaken by President Siad Barre. The Somalis of Ogaden never accepted the criminal and paranoid transfer of colonial territory from England to Abyssinia that occurred in the late 40s and the early 50s.

(XI) There are no ´Somali Ethiopians´; the subjugated Somalis of Ogaden have nothing in common with Abyssinia. They deny the right of that country to either occupy Ogaden or be called ´Ethiopia´, and they passionately act to irreversibly split and ultimately demolish the Hell ´Ethiopia´.

(XII) How comical! The author criminally lies by saying a half truth; yes, the Ogadenis are suffering. But because of whom? This is what the unethical character of the writer cannot afford to confess. Ogadenis suffer – as testified by the devastating HRW Report – because of the inhuman methods of tyranny, mass extermination and genocide applied against them by the racist Amhara and Tigray Abyssinian rulers, and more specifically the Meles Zenawi regime.

(XIII) Tribal nationalism is an inexistent term. A tribe is part of a nation, so there cannot be such a term, because its two components are contradictory to one another.

In a forthcoming article, I will republish and refute further parts of Ezekiel Rediker´s falsification effort.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/printFriendly/136027

==========================

Anti-Somalia, Anti-Ogaden Falsehood of Western Academia: Fabrication of Fake Ethiopian History - 2

Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

January 11, 2010

In an earlier article titled ´Anti-Somalia, Anti-Ogaden Falsehood of Western Academia: Fabrication of Fake Ethiopian History´ (http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/136027), I specified as main reason for African nations´ multifaceted mistreatment, inhuman persecution, and severe endangerment the evil, fallacious literature that has been ceaselessly composed by Anglo-French academia and systematically diffused worldwide in a peremptory way in order to deceive all possible players.

People can be successfully programmed for extinction only if people are forced to believe that they are insignificant, trivial and marginal. The success of the imposition of the colonial model, the triumph of the Western colonial interference, and the prevalence of colonially promoted pseudo-states (´Ethiopia´, Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Mali, Niger, Kenya) are all due to a multifaceted program of falsification of the African History and the ensuing historical self- minimization, cultural under-evaluation, socio-behavioural self-deprecation, and national diminution.

The Anglo-French Freemasonic falsification of the African Past has been methodically elaborated, systematically diffused worldwide (by means of numerous trickeries), and tyrannically imposed on all Africans (through indigenous, financially corrupted, intellectually besotted, and locally imposed tyrants) in order to facilitate the Freemasonic – Zionist plan of mass extermination of all Africans.

Only when you convince an entire people that their nation´s value is next to nothing, you ensure that, plunged in despair, they will fail to react to the evil plans that target them, as they will be assuming their reaction as useless or ineffective.

To exemplarily refute an Anti-Somali, Anti-Ogadeni falsification of East Africa´s History, I selected the article "The Ogaden: A Microcosm of Global Conflict" by Ezekiel Rediker (http://www.tcr.org/tcr/essays.htm); I republished a first excerpt of the 20-page article about Somalia, Ogaden and Abyssinia (fallaciously renamed Ethiopia), and refuted the errors point by point.

In the present article, I will continue the republication and refutation of the aforementioned article´s excerpts. Latin numbers inserted in the text correspond to points of my commentary. Modern European numbers in the text corresponds to the author´s footnotes. In the present article, I also the bibliography used by the author.

The Ogaden: A Microcosm of Global Conflict

By Ezekiel Rediker

The History of Conflict: 1400-1855

To understand the conflict in the Ogaden during the 20th century, it is necessary to go back to the 15th century, when the Abyssinian Christian Empire, (I) the predecessor of modern day Ethiopia, (II) and the Muslim city-state of Ifat (III) fought periodic wars (IV) for control of the Ogaden region.2 (V) In the 16th century, the legendary Muslim general Ahmed ibn Ibrahim al Ghazi, or "Ahmed the Left-Handed," led an offensive (VI) that drove the Abyssinians out of the Ogaden. (VII) Ahmed the Left-Handed declared a Jihad (VIII) on the Abyssinian Empire (IX) and attempted to convert to Islam the peoples of the lands he conquered. (X) He was assisted by the Ottomans who supplied food and weaponry.3 (XI) Yet Ahmed the Left-Handed soon overreached himself, (XII) leading his troops deep (XIII) into Abyssinian territory. There, he was overwhelmed by the forces of the newly-expanded, (XIV) Portuguese-backed Abyssinian army. (XV) Having defeated the armies of Ahmed the Left-Handed, (XVI) the Abyssinian Empire (XVII) reclaimed the Ogaden.4 (XVIII)

The Abyssinians struck a crushing blow against the forces of the Muslim Sultanates and the Ottoman Turks. (XIX) They became the dominant power in the region. (XX) Fighting between the two powers ceased, (XXI) and Muslim herders, (XXII) who previously avoided the Ogaden because of hostilities with the Abyssinians, (XXIII) migrated to the region in large numbers.5 (XXIV)

Muslim herders began to bring their livestock to the Ogaden for annual pasturage. (XXV) They migrated in and out of the Ogaden according to rainfall, and combed the region for the most fertile grazing spots. These Muslim herders were ethnic Somalis, and to this day, the region is peopled almost entirely by their descendants.6 (XXVI)

The Ogaden thus became a land of Muslim Somali herders, (XXVII) a migratory people (XXVIII) who followed the predictable patterns of rain and pasturage. According to Dr. Said Samatar, the "precolonial Somali lived in a world of egalitarian anarchy."7 (XXIX) Somali nomads have no centralized government, and according to British anthropologist I.M. Lewis, this "lack of formal government (XXX) and of instituted authority is strongly reflected in their extreme independence and individualism."8 (XXXI)

Lewis also noted that the Somali nomad has "an extraordinary sense of superiority as an individual" (XXXII) and believes that he is "subject to no other authority except that of God."9 (XXXIII) Various Somali tribes fought wars over territory and cattle, and a delicate power-sharing balance was created to preserve cordial relations between the clans. Fierce clan loyalty and the refusal (XXXIV) to accept a centralized Somali government later contributed to the collapse of the Somali state in the 1990s.10 (XXXV)

Between the late 16thcentury and the early 19th century, the peoples of the Ogaden lived largely in peace. They were relatively unaffected by the struggle between Arab merchants and the indigenous Somali clans for control of East African seaports (XXXVI) such as Mogadishu, Bimal, Merka, and Baraawe. As herders, people of the Ogaden did not play a major role in the slave trade, which was the primary cause for conflict between ethnic Somalis and Arab traders.11 (XXXVII)

Footnotes

1 Salman Rushdie, "Somalians are not Ethiopians,"

Washington Post (July 6, 1991) p. a17

2 Marian Aguiar, ed., Encyclopedia Africana: Third Edition

(Microsoft, 2000) s.v. "Ogaden"

3 Gamal Nkrumah, "Dichotomies and Dilemmas" (2003)

Available Online at http://www.uneca.org/water/

dichot_dilemmas.htm.

4 Ibid.

5 Aguiar

6 Graham Hancock, "Somalia: Wounds of Nationalism that will not Heal," New African Development Journal 11 (1977) pp. 634-635

7 Said Samatar, Somalia: a Nation in Turmoil (London,

The Minority Rights Group, 1991) p. 6

8 Ibid., p. 6

9 Ibid., p. 6

10 Ibid., pp. 6-8

11 Lee Cassanelli, The Shaping of Somali Society

(Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982) (no page given)

Bibliography

Primary Sources:

Binder, David, "Band and 19-Gun Salute Greet Somali Premier at White House," New York Times November 28, 1962, p. 10

Boyd, Oseye, "Educating the Future of Africa: Somalia

Relief Fund Builds Bridges," The Recorder March 16, 2001, p.

D1

Burton, Richard, First Footsteps in East Africa (London,

1856). Available online at http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/

East/east.htm

Frankel, Max, "Somalia Accepts Soviet Arms Deal," New York Times November 11, 1963, pp. 1, 9

Hancock, Graham, "Somalia: Wounds of Nationalism that

will not Heal," New African Development Journal 11 (1977)

pp. 634-635

Harden, Blaine, "Foes and Death Stalk Kenyan Nomads;

Modern Weapons and Land Pressures Escalate Rural Violence," Washington Post April 10, 1988, p. a01

Neil, Henry, "Kenya Screening Ethnic Somalis in Disputed

Program; Kenya Screening Somalis in Controversial Program," Washington Post December 27, 1989, p. a08

Oberdorfer, Don, "Eased East-West Tension Offers Chances—Dangers Series: Beyond the Cold War," Washington Post May 7, 1989, p. a01

Omar, Mohamed Osman, The Road to Zero: Somalia´s Self-Destruction (London, HAAN Associates inc., 1992)

Richburg, Keith, "Orphan of the Cold War: Somalia Lost Its Key Role; Local Embassy Workers Await Americans´ Return," Washington Post October 15, 1992, p. a24

Savage, Gus, "A View from Capitol Hill: An Independent Reports on Washington," Columbus Times October 15 1981,

p. 4

Topping, Seymour, "African Nations Wooed by Soviet," New York Times July 1960, p. 3

Vick, Karl, "Starved for Aid in Africa," Washington Post April 12, 2000, p. a1

Walz, Jay, "Somalia Facing Grave Problems," New York Times July 5, 1960, pp. 1, 2

Zalatimo, Dima, "Fall of Barre Government Welcomed by Somalis in Washington, D.C.," The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs March 1991, p. 24

Anonymous], "Somalians are not Ethiopians," Washington Post July 6, 1991, p. a17

Anonymous], "Africa Update," Christian Science Monitor July 25, 1991

Secondary Sources:

Aguiar, Marian, ed., Encyclopedia Africana: Third Edition (Microsoft, 2000)

Cassanelli, Lee, The Shaping of Somali Society (Philadelphia, University Pennsylvania Press, 1982)

Hashim, Alice Bettis, The Fallen State: Dissonance,

Dictatorship, and Death in Somalia (New York, University Press of America Inc., 1997)

Lewis, I. M., Peoples of the Horn of Africa (Lawrenceville, New Jersey, The Red Sea Press Inc., 1998)

Nkrumah, Gamal, "Dichotomies and Dilemmas," 2003,

Available Online at http://www.uneca.org/water/

dichoto_dilemmas.htm

Pike, John, "Ogaden Crisis," 2002, Available Online at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/ogaden.htm

Samatar, Ahmed, Socialist Somalia: Rhetoric and Reality (London, Zed Books LTD., 1988)

Samatar, Said, Somalia: a Nation in Turmoil (London, The Minority Rights Group, 1991)

Commentary

(I) Before already the first point of the commentary, I have to clarify that even the title of the chapter (or unit) is fake. It suggests two dates, 1400 and 1855, as historical landmarks of the Somali History or in a wider context, of the History of Eastern Africa. These dates are fake; they represent nothing. Nothing started in 1400 to end in 1855. No one can possibly find a reason or an argument to eventually substantiate the author´s attempt to start his falsification in the year 1400! He could have started in the year 1200 or more reasonably in 622 or at the times of the Roman Empire or even at the times of Somali kingdom of Punt whereto a great maritime pharaonic expedition was sent by Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt ca. 1475 BCE, when the ancestors of the Axumite Abyssinians were unknown among the unknown in Yemen, their country of origin.

Similarly, there is no sufficient reason to choose as historical landmark the date 1855; the author may have used the date to indicate the beginning of colonial times in Somalia, but again this is totally wrong.

The truth is hidden in the first sentence of the next chapter (unit); for East African History´s iniquitous forger Ezekiel Rediker, the ´beginning´ of a historical period in Somalia starts with the travel of a shameless racist, Anti-African, Anti-Islamic and Anti-Somali English Freemason who believed utterly in, and promoted, slavery, felony, perjury, incest and Satanism: Richard Burton.

Prominent among the incestuous, the English Orientalist represents one of the most nefarious figures of the History of colonialism, one of the filthier names that brought disaster, venom, hatred and fallacy to Africa and the Orient in general.

He traveled illegally to Mecca disguised as a Caucasian Muslim. Then, he proceeded to Somalia and went up to Harar advancing through Somalia´s northwestern provinces. He then composed a report of his travel under the title ´First footsteps in East Africa or, An Exploration of Harar´ (first published 1856).

The fallacious, racist, Anti-African contents of the book would be enough reason for all the African nations to prohibit the presence on African soil of any English or English origin person.

I republished the whole book in fourteen (14) parts, exposing Burton´s villainous predisposition against the Somalis and other African nations, notably the Oromos.

Here are links to some of the aforementioned articles:

R. Burton´s Undeserved, Racist Insults against Oromos and Gadabursi and Issa Somalis

(http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/69301)

English Orientalist R. Burton exploring Berbera, slandering Oromos, and denigrating Somalis

(http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/69652)

R. Burton´s Preface: Fervent Call for Urgent Colonization of Berbera – 1856 (http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/69970)

References to the rest can be found in the aforementioned.

Richard Burton is the main reason of all the Somalis´ troubles; in fact, he acted as an agent of the English Freemasonry, and the Foreign Office, and it is on his advice that the English illegally invaded Berbera and thence expanded their tyrannical control over Northern Somalia and Ogaden. Less known is the fact that Richard Burton is also the author of several classified reports kept in the Foreign Office and other papers sealed in the darkness of a heretic Freemasonic Lodge located in London. Access to them is allowed to high levels of Freemasonic hierarchy, and these documents bear witness to his real evildoings in Africa.

Then, this evil person´s travel to Somalia was pathetically taken as Somalia´s historical landmark by the vicious falsifier Ezekiel Rediker. The author disregards the fact that for all the Somali authorities of that period, Rishard Burton was an insignificant mosquito with which they did not bother to deal. If they did not do so, they should not be blamed; they just undermined the extent of the Satanic possession of a human being. As normal human beings, all the Somali authorities of that period could not imagine that barbarism, inhumanity and iniquity could possibly reach so far.

Proceeding through the text now, we find Ezekiel Rediker´s reference to a 15th century Abyssinian Christian "Empire" as absolutely false and utterly ridiculous. The territory controlled by the tiny Abyssinian state was less than one fourth of today´s province Amhara in Abyssinia. It spanned over parts of today´s provinces Amhara and Tigray. Whenever wars occurred, either the Abyssinian ruler undertook a temporary raid in a nearby land or foreigner invaders occupied parts the tiny area of the Abyssinian state.

By definition, small lands do not entitle the local rulers to an empire. These rulers may eventually pretend anything but no such claim can be seriously taken into account by a modern historian. It would be comical!

And more importantly, such claims were not taken into consideration by any other ruler, king or emperor in the entire area that spans from North Africa and Egypt to India.

The so-called Solomonic dynasty of Abyssinia ruled a tiny and impotent state, that was constantly attacked by its Muslims neighbours; Ezekiel Rediker´s fictional Abyssinian "empire" did not have a fixed capital precisely because, in order to survive, the barbaric Amhara rulers had to run from caves to cliffs and from remote peaks to invisible bird´s nests to keep themselves out of the enemy´s direct eyesight.

This does not make anyone, from Yekuno Amlak to Amda Siyon I and from Dawit II to Gelawdewos, much of a king, let alone an emperor!

Size of the state is one point, royal and/or noble descent is another. None of the pseudo-Solomonic dynasty´s rulers was of noble descent. Yekuno Amlak, the vulgar pseudo-dynasty´s founder, was of low descent and rose to power after he was guided by the villainous black magician Tekle Haymanot to disobey and betray his own king, the last ruler of the Agaw Kushitic dynasty.

The gang of Satanists that imposed Yekuno Amlak (under pseudonym Tasfa Iyasus) as head of the Amhara kingdom assassinated the last Agaw king, deleted his name from every document, and declared him "unknown" or "hidden".

Of so lowly descent Yekuno Amlak was that the Mamluk Sultan Baibars of Egypt and the Rasulid Sultan Al Muzaffar Yusuf I of Yemen made foul of him, and did not allow the priest (abuna) sent from Alexandria´s Coptic Patriarchate to reach the unimportant Amhara state and become there the head of the local Christians.

At their best, the barbaric, heinous, villainous and rancorous rulers of the pseudo-Solomonic dynasty were the execrable offspring of voluntary incestuous intercourse suggested by the pseudo-Christian Amhara monks in order to help them perpetuate their grip over a minor people, decimated in the battles and reduced because of the voluntary acceptance of Islam from the part of many Abyssinians.

In fact, to be true and to correspond to the historical facts, the so-called Abyssinian emperors were mere captains, chieftains or rather thugs-in chief.

It is really paradoxical that Ezekiel Rediker, who so well studied Richard Burton´s published book, does not mention the English Freemason´s reference to the Muslim Hadiya king´s attitude, who - as late as the mid 19th century - turned down an invitation sent to him by the Abyssinian king, whom the Hadiya king despised as barbaric, vulgar and extremely low, although the Abyssinian state had expended meanwhile.

To end, I have to point out that the Ethiopian Christian kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia – which all spanned in the area of Northern and Central Sudan – were far larger and more developed than the state of the pseudo-emperors of Ezekiel Rediker.

(II) Calling the tiny and isolated Amhara kingdom, which never controlled even part of today´s Eritrea´s Red Sea coast, "predecessor of modern day Ethiopia" is a filthy lie. More than 82% of the population of today´s Abyssinia (falsely called Ethiopia) would undeniably reject the assumption that their past has anything to do with the Amhara kingdom of Yekuno Amlak.

You cannot attribute the historical past and the cultural heritage of subjugated nations to that of the cruel and illegal invader.

It is as if you pretend that Spain is or can be considered as "predecessor of modern day Mexico".

Does this sound strange?

If yes, this happens only because the Mexicans removed the Spanish yoke, whereas the tyrannized Ogadenis, the Oromos, the Afars, the Sidamas, the Kaffas, the Kambaatas, the Gedeos, the Shekachos, the Hadiyas, the Anuak, the Wolayitas, and the Gumuz have not yet removed the Amhara – Tigray Monophysitic (Tewahedo) Abyssinian yoke.

(III) After the monstrous hyperbole "Abyssinian Empire" comes the equally paranoid sarcasm "city-state of Ifat"! Ezekiel Rediker´s double-faceted forgery involves at the same an enormous exaggeration and an incredible shrinking!

Ezekiel Rediker´s "truth" and historical analysis is simple indeed; of those whom he wants to intentionally promote he makes a hot air balloon! And of those whom he wants to intentionally combat he makes a chewing gum!

Thank God, modern technology, the Internet, and the existence of the various search engines offer now to anyone, erudite historian or inquisitive reader, the possibility to check the veracity of a pretension.

If you search in Google, placing within brackets the words "city-state of Ifat", you will need only seconds to realize that allover the world the only falsifier to incredulously postulate this falsehood is …. the parsimonious Mr. Ezekiel Rediker!

Such is the degree of the calumny that the equivalent would be to call today´s China as the "city-state of Beijing". The extraordinary attempt demolishes Ezekiel Rediker´s entire composition because it reveals a pernicious character and a malignant predisposition to distort.

Ifat was the capital of the great Afar – Somali Empire of Awdal, which at the period under discussion was ten times larger than the tiny and barbaric state of Abyssinia of which Ezekiel Rediker makes a fake empire in order to pass under silence the real empire of Awdal that was highly developed, spanned throughout the Horn of Africa, and in addition, it was fully accredited and respected at the international level.

(IV) Periodic wars is a comical and false term; the Awdal empire was far too wealthy and developed to be possibly interested in warring with the Amhara kingdom for the arid mountain cliffs that the latter controlled. Usually, the Amhara kingdom was involved in wars with other Kushitic kingdoms, of the same small size as its own, and when over-pressurized, the Abyssinians attacked Aedal with the hope of possibly controlling some stretch of the Red Sea coastland and thus have access to the maritime trade that could become a source of increased income.

(V) The Ogaden region was totally out of the scope of the Awdal Empire´s wars with the tiny Amhara state. The best proof is that there was never a single battle fought on Ogadeni soil. Most of the battles took place on the territory of today´s provinces Afar, Oromia, Amhara and Tjgray, plus in parts of Eritrean territory. To offer an example, the battle of Amba Sel was close to a Blue Nile´s tributary named Walaqa! This is hundreds of kilometers far from Ogaden´s easternmost borderlines.

(VI) Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim was certainly a religious leader who rose to supreme political power. He was therefore a king and not a general. Of course, the racist and barbaric, pseudo-Christian monks of the Abyssinian state did not want to accept this reality, but their sick minds, evil desires, and inhuman attitudes cannot possibly influence the sound mind of an objective researcher today.

If the demented monks of the barbaric Abyssinian state did not accept Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim as King of Awdal, too bad for them! They went to Hell, when the great Somali conqueror burned their filthy palaces and pseudo-Christian temples.

By calling Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim merely an imam and a general, the racist Anti-African pseudo-historians of the West try to place him at a rank lower than that of the trashy Amhara pseudo-king.

The extent of the falsification is again enormous because in real History, the head of the Amhara king Dawit II was crushed to death in the battle of Debre Demo, under the Somali foot, which is a permanent and irreversible humiliation of the entire Amhara nation and its memory typified the rancorous Amhara soul.

And where is Ezekiel Rediker´s responsibility to respect - as an author – the existing historical sources?

Nowhere.

Even the Portuguese historical sources (those of the real enemies of the Great Somali King Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim) call him as "King" (Cristovao da Gama). In this regard, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crist%C3%B3v%C3%A3o_da_Gama

(VII) This is Ezekiel Rediker´s fictional history or rather Baron Münchhausen's Narratives about Eastern Africa. How could King Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim possibly drive Abyssinians out of a land (namely, Ogaden) where they had never even dreamt to reach, let alone occupy? Already, Ezekiel Rediker´s case of methodic falsification seems to reflect a pathological case.

(VIII) There cannot be found any historical reference to confirm this lie; King Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim, to detroy the Abyssinian barbarism, did not need to declare a Jihad, and there hasn´t been any historical source to ever mention something similar. The falsification in this case is purely intentional and absolutely political of content; by involving the term ´Jihad´, a term widely diffused to essentially uninformed and deliberately besotted (because of the mass media) Western readership, Ezekiel Rediker intends to portray the King Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim as sort of Osama bin Laden before his time!

Then, if we consider the great visionary, intellectual, mystic and King Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim as a terrorist, how can we accurately describe Menelik and Haile Selassie, except by labeling them bestial cannibals and inhuman monsters worse than the most ulcerous Nazi gangster?

(IX) Times and again, there was no Abyssinian empire at those days.

(X) Another fallacy is the reference to a fictional effort supposedly carried out by King Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim in order to convert people to Islam! In most of the lands he invaded, trying to eradicate the Abyssinian barbarism, the local populations were Muslim and they accepted him wholeheartedly because he removed the burden of the Amhara threats that were due to the tiny Amhara state´s efforts for expansion.

I will continue my commentary in a forthcoming article.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/printFriendly/136140

=============================

How the Falsehood Ethiopia was Created - Refutation of Ezekiel Rediker´s Falsification. Part 3
Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
January 12, 2010
In two earlier articles, titled ´Anti-Somalia, Anti-Ogaden Falsehood of Western Academia: Fabrication of Fake Ethiopian History´ (http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/136027), and ´Anti-Somalia, Anti-Ogaden Falsehood of Western Academia: Fabrication of Fake Ethiopian History – 2´

(http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/136140), I specified as main reason for African nations´ multifaceted mistreatment, inhuman persecution, and severe endangerment the evil, fallacious literature that has been ceaselessly composed by Anglo-French academia and systematically diffused by them worldwide in a peremptory way in order to deceive all possible players.

To exemplarily refute an Anti-Somali, Anti-Ogadeni falsification of East Africa´s History, I selected the article "The Ogaden: A Microcosm of Global Conflict" by Ezekiel Rediker (http://www.tcr.org/tcr/essays.htm); I republished two excerpts of the 20-page article about Somalia, Ogaden and Abyssinia (fallaciously renamed Ethiopia), and refuted the errors point by point.

In the present article, I continue the refutation of the aforementioned article´s excerpts. Latin numbers inserted in the text correspond to points of my commentary. Modern European numbers in the text corresponds to the author´s footnotes. In forthcoming articles, I will complete the analytical refutation.

The Ogaden: A Microcosm of Global Conflict

By Ezekiel Rediker

The History of Conflict: 1400-1855

Ahmed the Left-Handed ….. was assisted by the Ottomans who supplied food and weaponry.3 (XI) Yet Ahmed the Left-Handed soon overreached himself, (XII) leading his troops deep (XIII) into Abyssinian territory. There, he was overwhelmed by the forces of the newly-expanded, (XIV) Portuguese-backed Abyssinian army. (XV) Having defeated the armies of Ahmed the Left-Handed, (XVI) the Abyssinian Empire (XVII) reclaimed the Ogaden.4 (XVIII)

The Abyssinians struck a crushing blow against the forces of the Muslim Sultanates and the Ottoman Turks. (XIX) They became the dominant power in the region. (XX) Fighting between the two powers ceased, (XXI) and Muslim herders, (XXII) who previously avoided the Ogaden because of hostilities with the Abyssinians, (XXIII) migrated to the region in large numbers.5 (XXIV)

Muslim herders began to bring their livestock to the Ogaden for annual pasturage. (XXV) They migrated in and out of the Ogaden according to rainfall, and combed the region for the most fertile grazing spots. These Muslim herders were ethnic Somalis, and to this day, the region is peopled almost entirely by their descendants.6 (XXVI)

The Ogaden thus became a land of Muslim Somali herders, (XXVII) a migratory people (XXVIII) who followed the predictable patterns of rain and pasturage. According to Dr. Said Samatar, the "precolonial Somali lived in a world of egalitarian anarchy."7 (XXIX) Somali nomads have no centralized government, and according to British anthropologist I.M. Lewis, this "lack of formal government (XXX) and of instituted authority is strongly reflected in their extreme independence and individualism."8 (XXXI)

Lewis also noted that the Somali nomad has "an extraordinary sense of superiority as an individual" (XXXII) and believes that he is "subject to no other authority except that of God."9 (XXXIII) Various Somali tribes fought wars over territory and cattle, and a delicate power-sharing balance was created to preserve cordial relations between the clans. Fierce clan loyalty and the refusal (XXXIV) to accept a centralized Somali government later contributed to the collapse of the Somali state in the 1990s.10 (XXXV)

Between the late 16thcentury and the early 19th century, the peoples of the Ogaden lived largely in peace. They were relatively unaffected by the struggle between Arab merchants and the indigenous Somali clans for control of East African seaports (XXXVI) such as Mogadishu, Bimal, Merka, and Baraawe. As herders, people of the Ogaden did not play a major role in the slave trade, which was the primary cause for conflict between ethnic Somalis and Arab traders.11 (XXXVII)

Commentary

(XI) This is true and normal; all the Eastern African sultanates, similarly with many other peripheral Muslim states and realms, exerted political authority at the local level only in the name of the Caliph, who after 1517 was rightfully the Ottoman Sultan. There is nothing wrong in it, and similarly, the Abyssinians were greatly helped by the Portuguese colonials.

At this point, I have to stress the qualitative difference of the two alliances. The Somali – Ottoman alliance was a natural phenomenon reflecting the political will of the populations of the two entities, namely the Somali Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire. The two respective authorities represent legitimate states and political establishments with a great historical tradition in their spheres of influence. The Somalis, the Afars and other Kushitic nations of Eastern Africa had early accepted Islam, and at the times of the great King Ahmed ibn Ibrahim, the Western Red Sea coastlands, the Horn of Africa inland, and the Eastern African coastlands in general, had a 700 years long Islamic past.

On the other side, the historicity itself of the Solomonic is totally rejected.

Christian continuity in Abyssinia is a fake.

Only the fallacy diffused by the Anglo-French pseudo-scholars, the likes of the Freemason forger Edward Ullendorff, helped create this erroneous assumption of a plausible continuity. The Abyssinian Axumite kingdom was not connected with the Ethiopian Kushitic and the Nilo-Saharan Christian kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia that all emerged in the area of today´s Northern and Central Sudan in the 5th century CE.

The Abyssinian Axumite kingdom´s contacts with the Coptic Patriarchate evolved around the dispatch from Alexandria to Adulis (in the area of today´s Massawa) by boat (and thence to Axum) of the Abuna, the supreme religious head of the Axumite Christianity. Despite the fact that, following the early 7th century Islamic explosion, Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia survived, and Nobatia even expanded occupying Upper (South) Egypt (that was not invaded by the Islamic armies), Axumite Abyssinia collapsed.

The disintegration of Axum was complete, and the entire administration of the Christian state was dismantled with the early Islamic occupation of today´s Eritrean territory. We can be sure that there was not even a certain, organized effort of retreat to remote areas in the African inland. There is no evidence that the Axumite dynasty survived the 7th century Islamic onslaught.

When a 10th century African, non-Christian queen, supposedly named Judith (the name can be a posterior legend attributed in order to disfigure her), attacked Axum, we have definitely to assume an earlier Axumite re-emergence of apparently brief duration - not an undocumented and totally hypothetical continuity.

The two centuries of Agaw royal power do not represent any sort of cultural, religious, ethnic, linguistic and political continuity of the Axum times´ Abyssinia. The Kushitic Agaws were totally unrelated with the Semitic Abyssinians who were one the Ancient Yemenite tribes that was kicked out of Yemen and sought shelter on the other side of the Red Sea coastlines.

There are certainly appearances of religious similarity between 5th CE Axum and 12th century Lalibela; but they are so inconsequential as the Abuna dispatches from the Alexandria Patriarchate. A critical dimension is the indifference for political interaction with the then ailing Eastern Roman Empire; this shows the limited scope of the Agaw state and its evident position within the Eastern African context. As a matter of fact, calling the Kushitic Christian Agaw state "Abyssinia" is simply an aberration.

Abyssinia terminated in the 7th century CE, and all the traditions about the fictional marriages of Mararah, the first Agaw ruler, with Masoba Warq, hypothetical daughter of Del Na´od, the mythologized last king of Axum (see: http://www.dacb.org/stories/ethiopia/del_na'ad.html) relate to later times´ reconstruction.

When the ´Solomonic´ debteras fabricated their forgery ´Kebra Negast´ in an attempt to draw a bloodline as back as the Yemenite Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, they were forced by the scope of their own attempt to reconstruct the non-Abyssinian, Kushitic Agaw History as per own needs. In so doing, they certainly destroyed many Agaw times´ sources that, if left intact, would discredit their forgery from foundations. Mararah´s other name Mara Takla Haymanot is also a posterior attribute, part of the historical falsification undertaken by the Amhara debteras.

Last but not the least, the forgery of the Solomonic dynasty does not represent any historical continuity with Axumite Abyssinia. At all levels, religious, cultural, political and ethnic, Solomonic times´ Abyssinia is an abruption from the Axumite kingdom.

The aforementioned suggests that the historicity of the Amhara kings who opposed the Somali King Ahmed ibn Ibrahim did not exceed 250 years (going back to the rise of Yekuno Amlak).

Useless to add that the Portuguese allies of the Amharas were totally alien to Africa and the world of Islam, and therefore the Amhara – Portuguese alliance had a direct, Anti-African nature, thus bearing witness to the need of isolating the genuinely Anti-African Amharas today.

(XII) The use is highly subjective, and academically wrong; it is purposeless for a modern researcher to use the verb "overreach" for military expeditions. What can one say then for Assurbanipal´s expedition to Egypt and demolition of Thebes (666 BCE)?

In fact, the trajectory of the expedition led by the Somali King Ahmed ibn Ibrahim outside his borders was smaller than the distance between his own country´s two opposite endpoints.

How could we compare this military expedition to that of the Achaemenid Shah Kambudjiyah (Cambyses) of Iran, who left Pasargadae to proceed as far as Napata of Meroe (in today´s Karima in Northern Sudan – this means 2100 km only on African soil!), or that of Alexander the Great who crossed the distance between Macedonia and Northern India? Did they also overreach themselves?

As a matter of fact, King Ahmed ibn Ibrahim did not overreach himself; he achieved something easy, possible and logical. If the Portuguese colonial army did not intervene to support their allies, today there would not be a single Amhara left. East Africa´s most excruciating tyranny and most inhuman moments would thus be spared.

(XIII). This term is also false and geared out of the author´s predisposition and determination to complete his forgery. No one can lead an army "deep" into a small country. It sounds comical to use an adverb in the case the adjective already does not fit.

Indicatively, we can make a sentence such "Hitler´s generals led the German troops deep into the Soviet territory" because they truly advanced much and in addition, the Soviet Union consisted in a very large territory.

But we cannot say that in August 1974, the Turkish generals led their troops "deep" into the Cypriot territory because Cyprus is a small island with no strategic depth.

It was exactly the same for the tiny and barbaric Amhara kingdom that the Portuguese only managed to save.

(XIV) This is another fallacy! The Amhara kingdom had not expanded on the eve of King Ahmed ibn Ibrahim´s invasion. Neither Dawit II (1508 - 1540) nor Naod (1494 – 1508) nor Amda Sion II (1487 – 1494) nor Eskender (1471 – 1494) managed to expand their territory. They merely warred for their survival; thus, leaving the great kingdom of Awdal out of this discussion, I want to underscore the fact that Eskender failed to win over the small African kingdom of Maya and even was killed at the battle field at Enderta. So, contrarily to Ezekiel Rediker´s pathetic assumption, the Amhara kingdom had not expanded in the eight decades that precede the death of Dawit II under the Somali foot.

(XV) In the sentence itself, it is contradictory to state that, although "newly-expanded" (as per Ezekiel Rediker only), the Amhara kingdom was "Portuguese-backed". Why on earth a newly expanded (and therefore strengthened) state would still need the "backing" of the colonial intruders? This automatically suggests that either there had not been any "recent" expansion or (if it ever occurred) it was small, insignificant and ineffective, and because of this, foreign backing was badly needed.

(XVI) According to all the historical sources, the Portuguese defeated the army of King Ahmed ibn Ibrahim, not the Amharas. Despite the continuous Portuguese presence in the Horn of Africa, and in spite of the absence of direct Ottoman involvement, the Portuguese technological superiority in terms of weaponry was not enough to end the Somali pressure on and occupation of the Amhara kingdom. It took no less than twenty three (23) consecutive years (1520 – 1543) for the Portuguese to manage to kill the bravest African of the Second Millennium, the Awdal King Ahmed ibn Ibrahim.

The location of the battles matters greatly in this regard. At Wolla (28 August 1542) King Ahmed ibn Ibrahim defeated and killed most of the Portuguese; Cristovao da Gama died there too. It was then King Ahmed ibn Ibrahim´s turn to be defeated and killed at the battle of Wayna Daga (21 February 1543).

As it is indicated, these battles took place nearby the lake Tana. Even King Ahmed ibn Ibrahim´s camp was nearby the lake! Under these terms, how could possibly the Amhara state "reclaim" faraway Ogaden after the death of the Somali king? This is the extreme effort of overall falsification that Ezekiel Rediker had to write in order to get an award in America!

(XVIII) The fallacy is better viewed in the light of what the modern Abyssinian pseudo-historians say about that dark moment of their past that they incessantly try to lessen so passionately.

Taddesse Tamrat writes the following: "The Muslim occupation of the Christian highlands under Ahmad Gragn lasted for little more than ten years, between 1531 and 1543. But the amount of destruction brought about in these years can only be estimated in terms of centuries" (Church and State in Ethiopia (1270 - 1527) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 301).

Waw! This is quite a statement indeed!

But although this sentence is enough to be taken as a reason for the Abyssinians to be removed out of Ogaden today, because of their proven anti-Somali and anti-Ogadeni rancor and hatred, it also illuminates another interesting point – at Ezekiel Rediker´s absolute disappointment!

If such was the destruction at the very center of the tiny, destitute and quasi-defunct Amhara kingdom, would it make sense in the aftermath of King Ahmed ibn Ibrahim´s death for the Amharas to demand …… Ogaden?

Who could possibly believe that Nazi Germany, a few days after Hitler´s demise, could raise claims on Tibet, an area that Germany had never invaded before?

For as much true it is that the Germans ever invaded Tibet so much veracious it is that the 16th – 19th century Abyssinians attacked – let alone occupied – Ogaden.

(XIX) This is another lie. The Amharas were in such disarray that they willingly exchanged prisoners, notably the son of King Ahmed ibn Ibrahim with the Amhara chieftain Gelawedewos´s brother Menas. All the lies of Ezekiel Rediker are erased in view of the historical facts, notably the wars between the tiny Amhara kingdom with the Tigray petty-king Yeshaq, who was a subordinate of the Pasha of Massawa, Ozdemir.

Not only Menas´s wildest dream would not possibly include Ezekiel Rediker´s fictional "crushing blow against the forces of the Muslim Sultanates and the Ottoman Turks", but also he was terribly defeated at Enderta, his minuscule state´s heartland, by the Tigary petty-king Yeshaq, while the Pasha of Massawa had also become Governor of the Ottoman province of Yemen!

Just 14 years after King Ahmed ibn Ibrahim´s death, the Ottoman empire controlled (on Eastern African soil, and excluding today´s Djibouti´s, Ogaden´s, Somalia´s, Sudan´s and Egypt´s territories) land that was three or four times larger than that of the Amhara state of Gelawedewos´ insignificant, impotent, yet rancorous and racist successors.

(XX) Amhara and Tigray Abyssinians never became an important, not dominant, power in the region before the end of WW II and the subsequent transfer of Ogaden to the colonial state´s barbaric head, Haile Selassie. For this to happen, the criminal Amhara and Tigray 19th and early 20th century kings were supported for more than a century and half by the English and the French colonial powers so that they be later used as a tool of the Freemasonic regimes of the West against all the Eastern African nations.

As late as the 1930s, the Abyssinian soldiers were good only to perpetrate genocides against the subjugated nations that they had incorporated only because the French and the English had sold them modern weaponry whereas the Africans nations of the Kaffas, the Oromos, the Sidamas, the Afars, the Shekachos, the Kambaatas, the Wolayitas, the Anuak and the Gumuz were totally defenseless.

The Italian armies that were defeated by the Greeks in Albania in 1940 – 1941 made however an easy East African promenade to invade and demolish the colonial Abyssinian state, duly incorporating its territories to their East African dominions, only to be later superseded by the English who mobilized Indians and other colonized nations to be able to defeat Italy´s African armies.

In a forthcoming article, I will continue the refutation of Ezekiel Rediker´s forgery.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/printFriendly/136333

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Sanctions Watch: Arms Embargo on Eritrea (What It Means to Own the Sanctions)

Thursday, 14 January 2010

Sanctions Watch: Arms Embargo on Eritrea
(What It Means to Own the Sanctions)

There are two critical questions that the Eritrean opposition in Diaspora needs to ask regarding the sanction: Will it work? And do we want it to work? But since wanting it to work has a critical role to play in making it work, to ask the one is to ask the other. By the same token, those who are dead set to prove it won’t work do so with the full realization of the intimate link between the two; that is, that to inhibit the one is to inhibit the other.

Let me frame the issue that these questions raise in terms of “ownership”. It is true that the opposition has not contributed an iota of input into the making of the sanction. It is also true that the UN has not framed the sanction with the plight of the Eritrean people in mind. Despite these two drawbacks though, there is no reason why we cannot still “own” the sanction; for the question of how it came to be can be held separate from the question of how it can be exploited to serve one’s purpose however it came to be. Let me provide an example that I used before to elucidate on this distinction:

Suppose in a poor neighborhood there is a factory producing a huge toxic waste that has been blamed for a lot of chronic diseases, from asthma to cancer, among the population. The people in the neighborhood have been complaining about this for years but because they are poor nobody has been listening to them. But luckily for them, the Queen of England is set to visit their neighborhood in the near future. Now, the image conscious mayor is rushing not only to close down the polluting factory and clean the toxic waste, but also to build a brand new park on the toxic-free land. Imagine now an idealist from the neighborhood crying in protest, “Do not accept the mayor’s offer because the solution is not being proposed with your health plight in his mind.” Then the fool doesn’t know what it means to “own” or “appropriate” something that is not made with him in mind, but which is just as fine, from the jaws of reluctant providers. The advice of some naysayers in the opposition amounts to the same thing as the idealist’s.

There are those Eritreans who argue that since the sanctions are made to punish the Asmara regime for what it did in Djibouti and Somalia and not for the horrendous humanitarian crimes it has been committing against its own people, we shouldn’t accept it. Here is how G. Ande puts his objection, “If we read through the resolution carefully, the sanctions have not been designed to address the crucial problems facing the Eritrean people …” (Will the Targeted Sanctions Hit or Miss the Bull’s Eye) It is like arguing that since a baseball bat is designed to hit a ball and not to knock down a man, you should never use it to defend yourself from a violent intruder. Instead of this inanity, prior to “owning” the sanctions, the only question we need to ask about it is: Whatever the sanction is designed for, will it do the job we assign it to do? Will it prick the bubble of nationalist frenzy enshrouding Eritrea and bring it down to earth? If it can do that job, we ought to grab it and milk it for all it is worth.

One “owns” or “appropriates” a baseball bat when one uses it not necessarily for the purpose it was intended to serve by its designer (or owner) but for the purpose that the appropriator makes out of it, one that the occasion calls for – which may or may not comport with that of the designer. If so, there is no such thing as “owning it” prior to using it. So is it with the sanctions. We cannot claim to own it prior to using it to serve our purpose that the occasion calls us for. This kind of “ownership” makes it impossible for pretenders to “support” the sanction, for that momentous occasion is right here with us to stay in its extended, inescapable form. Having said that, it doesn’t mean there is no particular way of owning it. If so, how should the opposition own the sanctions?

The role of “security threat” in regime change

In Eritrea, two types of “security threat” have been vying with each other for dominance in people’s minds. The day the “security threat” from the Isaias regime is found to be more of an existential threat than the “security threat” from Ethiopia in the daily lives of both the masses and teghadelti would be the day the Isaias regime would collapse. On that day, it would be the interests of these two population groups that would come into a critical convergence. If so, how could we use the sanction card to expedite the arrival of this momentous day?

If there is anything that has significantly changed in the last decade, since the G-15’s dissent, it is that by now most Eritreans inside Eritrea have become aware that Isaias/Shaebia is the number one security threat in their daily lives; we see this in the chronic famine, in the mass exodus, in indefinite national service, in the enslavement of the youth, in the destitution of landless peasants, in bankrupted merchants, in the gutted out educational system, in the hundreds of prisons, etc. What needs a critical push is on the side of teghadelti, in general, and the leadership, in particular, to bring about this critical convergence – that is, on those who have so far been spared from the long hands of ‘halewa sewra.

In “Sanctions Watch: Lessons from the G-15 Dissent”, I tried to draw lessons out of the G-15 dissent, both in its making and in its unraveling, that could be applied on a similar context, where it to arise. I concluded that, with sanctions, that rare Isaias’ moment of vulnerability that emboldened the G-15 to dissent might be recreated; the point being that if any segment of the leadership is to meaningfully dissent, it is only when two conditions hold:

when their survival is threatened; that is, when Isaias, either through his blunders or his policies or both, becomes an existential threat to themselves as he has all along been to the masses.

when they feel that Isaias is at its most vulnerable moment; that is, when the pressure from inside and outside not only come to converge, but also are at their most intense.

So how should we in the opposition contribute to the making and facilitating of these two conditions so as to bring about the critical convergence between the security threat of the masses and that of the leadership? The short answer would be: by owning the sanctions. The long answer would involve looking at the four parts that make the sanctions carefully, asking ourselves what we could do in each case to facilitate regime change. Our focus should be:

on arms embargo, with the goal of fully realizing the import of firearms imbalance with Ethiopia to the larger context of regime change;

on the mining companies, with the goal of stopping all mining prospects in the country and denying the regime any revenues that would come from them;

on the PFDJ-owned companies and their external dealings, with the goal of totally debilitating the regime’s economic arm;

on the PFDJ’s Diaspora network, with the goal of stopping all clandestine funding and the sinister moral support that goes with it.

To reiterate the main point, when we embark on these four “sanctions projects”, it is with one single goal in mind: how to create among teghadelti the existential angst – the “security threat” – that the masses have been feeling all along, the idea being that it is only when they feel their wellbeing and survival threatened by Isaias that they will be ready for dissent (as was the case with the G-15 dissent). [For a detailed version of this argument, please refer to my Sanctions Watch: Lessons from the G-15 Dissent]

The other security threat

Unlike the other three sanctions projects, where we have a direct role to play in making them work, there is not much that we can do on the arms embargo front (which is the subject matter of this posting). Our role would remain mainly confined to realizing its import and framing our resistance based on that knowledge. And part of that realization is where the opposition stands on this issue.

We have to realize that “security threat” is a two edged sword. Isaias effectively used it to rally his supports and many more from the opposition against sanction the first time it was proposed by the US. And now, some in the opposition are openly airing their discontent when it comes to arms embargo because they feel it poses an existential threat to Eritrea. Whenever “security threat” is invoked, their suspicion over Ethiopia takes over any other worries they had before. The existential threat that the masses face in their daily lives in the form of horrendous humanitarian abuses by the regime immediately attains secondary status the moment they sense the slightest threat from outside to the “Eritrea” of their own making.

It is interesting to look at many of the opposition’s stand on arms embargo, for it provides us a rare glimpse into their inner workings, as they viscerally respond to their deepest fears that motivate them to reflexively react the way they are doing now. It is amusing to see strange bedfellows like awate.com, assena.com and Shaebia-oriented opposition sharing the same existential angst when it comes to sanctions, in general, and arms embargo, in particular – the very same angst that the regime supporters are also displaying. And, as pointed above, since whether the sanction will work partially depends on whether opposition groups really want it to work, it is important to focus on their stand on arms embargo.

The “battle lines” that are now enshrouded with unanimous vows of “support for sanctions” would gain some clarity if they are delineated in terms of “ownership”: the lines are to be drawn between those who own the sanctions and those who don’t. We can use the arms embargo issue as a litmus test to their claim of “ownership”. Once we do that, while we leave those on the “disowning” side of the line do what they do best – making preparations for the take over – we will take stock of our side of the line that wants to fully own the sanctions and finish off the Isaias regime.

The reluctance to sanctions can easily be seen in the Brussels conference. And one need only read between the lines in the editorials of awate.com and assenna.com to detect the very same reluctance, albeit written in “supportive” moods. Saleh Younis, in a frivolous yet puzzling article, Wey Gud” is not A Good Strategy, comes up with a Nostradamus conspiracy theory – one that even semi-literates wouldn’t fall for – to save Shaebia from itself. But it is G. Ande, unfettered with the pretense of “supporting” the sanctions and not beholden to any tarot reading, that does an effective job of disowning the sanctions. Although he uses the same tactics as the others to save Shaebia from itself, he does it more cleverly; or rather, more “plausibly”. Below, as I look at the vulnerability phenomenon as applied to the subject matter of arms embargo only, I will put G. Ande’s article on this issue to scrutiny. But whatever I say against his arguments could be easily extrapolated to others.

[I will deal with the three other “sanctions projects” – the case of the mining companies, the PFDJ-owned companies and the regime’s Diaspora network – in another posting.]

Will the arms embargo work?

Will the arms embargo work? And if does, will it mean anything?

Let’s not forget that the only reason we are interested in the arms embargo is, as it is with the sanctions in general, only so far as it facilitates regime change in Eritrea. And we have already identified the mid-objective towards such a final goal as being the convergence point of the masses’ and teghadelti’s interests, as they irreversibly diverge from that of Isaias and his henchmen. Would the arms embargo help us in achieving that?

Imposing arms embargo on Eritrea will have a tremendous impact on the psychology of the army in Eritrea, in general, and among the colonels and generals, in particular. Given that the nation is still on war footing, with the arms embargo the same existential angst experienced at the time of “Woyanie werar” will come back to haunt Shaebia. The teghadelti that have began to feel so comfortable in their safety, so much so that they even dared to do away with the Temporary Security Zone (TSZ) buffer, will soon experience existential threat with the drastic shift in military fire-power balance towards Ethiopia. And that is exactly where we want them to be if any meaningful change from their side is to be expected. But this is only if the arms embargo works in the first place.

G. Ande doesn’t believe the arms embargo will work; or, at minimum, he doesn’t want us or the military to believe so, for in this case perception is everything. He invokes the Iraqi experience to this effect (Will the Targeted Sanctions Hit or Miss the Bull's Eye?):

“… A broad based economic embargo was imposed on Iraq through UN Security Council Resolution 687. Iraq complied to six of the eight propositions. But those sanctions did very little to unravel Sadam Hussien’s regime. There was also a lot of corruption involved in managing those sanctions. Sadam’s regime was ousted by direct U.S. military intervention and not by sanctions …”

G. Ande’s straw man argument goes as follows: first, he implies that the Iraqi sanction set by the UN was aimed at regime change. Then he goes on to show us that it was a failure in that regard. Not that he succeeds even in that regard (I will come back to that below). But even if we assume that the sanction had nothing to do with the regime change of Saddam, it was never intended to achieve that in the first place. Its twin major goals were to force Iraq to withdraw its troops from Kuwait and to eliminate any weapons of mass destruction. After 1991, the sole major goal remained the elimination of WMD, and in that regard it was a success by any measurement. Economic strangulation, arms embargo and constant inspection had totally destroyed Iraq’s military machine, in general, and its WMD program, in particular. The fact that there were no WMD whatsoever to be found anywhere in Iraq after the war and the fact that Saddam’s military machine fell to pieces at the slightest bit of tweaking are testimonies to the spectacular success of the sanctions. Here is what George A. Lopez and David Cortright say on the subject matter, (“Iraq containment: Sanction Worked”, July 2004 – Foreign Affairs):

“… In reality, however, the system of containment that sanctions cemented did much to erode Iraqi military capabilities. Sanctions compelled Iraq to accept inspections and monitoring and won concessions from Baghdad on political issues such as the border dispute with Kuwait. They also drastically reduced the revenue available to Saddam, prevented the rebuilding of Iraqi defenses after the Persian Gulf War, and blocked the import of vital materials and technologies for producing WMD.

“The unique synergy of sanctions and inspections thus eroded Iraq's weapons programs and constrained its military capabilities. The renewed UN resolve demonstrated by the Security Council's approval of a ‘smart’ sanctions package in May 2002 showed that the system could continue to contain and deter Saddam. Unfortunately, only when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003 did these successes become clear: the Iraqi military that confronted them had, in the previous twelve years, been decimated by the strategy of containment that the Bush administration had called a failure in order to justify war in the first place.”

Instead, G. Ande wants us to dwell either on goals that were never set in the first place or on side issues, like UN corruption – the very tactics the regime supporters use for diversionary purposes. But more importantly, he deliberately ignores that part of the sanctions success that is relevant to the Eritrean case: the complete degradation of Iraq’s military machine.

Sanctions might not force Eritrea to withdraw from Djibouti or to withhold its support of Islamists in Somalia. But as G. Ande pointed out, these are “nonissues” when it comes to Eritrea (“These issues are ‘non issues’ as far as the Eritrean people are concerned.”). It is true that the UN has not framed the sanctions with the humanitarian plight of the Eritrean people in mind. Conversely, there is no obligation for us to embrace sanctions for the reasons that the UN holds. Once we OWN the sanctions, it is up to us to use it with internal variables only – on how to bring the humanitarian plight inside Eritrea to an end through regime change – in mind. So what would be considered failure by the UN – in case they don’t force Eritrea to withdraw from Djibouti and to withheld its support of Islamists in Somalia – would not necessarily be considered as failure on the Eritrean side, for all that we want from the arms embargo is to degrade the arms arsenal in Eritrea to such a low level that the existential threat would be acutely felt by the army and the leadership so as to facilitate regime change. And what is more, if regime change takes place, the UN’s conditions will also be met. So, in its finality, it will be a win-win case; the peoples of Somalia, Djibouti and Eritrea will all come out as winners.

Evading the arms embargo

G. Ande marshals another argument to show that arms embargo won’t work:

“The UNSC may be aware of the fact that if there is anything that it will be able to achieve through the sanctions, it will be the dimming of the spotlight for Mr. Isayas’s super ego and his relevance as a major player in the Horn of Africa. But then the Eritrean government is being led by a shrewd leader who has the capacity to navigate through the underworld and provide clandestinely for his war machine. He has close to 30-years experience as a leader of a liberation movement that has successfully weathered many storms and upheavals. Mr. Isayas has successfully made ends meet for his liberation army against all odds and against a strong undercurrent of world power indifference and at times outright opposition for his liberation efforts. So, I am not sure if that the arms embargo imposed on his regime will have any effect on his fire power nor on his ability to provide continued support for the Al Shabaab.”

Leaving aside his unabashed admiration for the Grand Fool of Asmara, he is telling us that Isaias can outwit the UN where Saddam failed. He completely ignores the glaring contrast between arming a guerrilla movement, and for that matter one that couldn’t manage to get a single shoulder fired anti-aircraft missile throughout its 30 years of existence (unlike many other movements), and arming a national army, one that requires fighter jets, helicopters, tanks, armored vehicles, missile and rocket launchers, radar systems, boats, warships, etc. This is especially so in the case of Eritrea, a nation that is still on war footing with Ethiopia. The Kalashnikovs that the Arab world so readily provided or were captured from the Ethiopian army during ghedli provide no justification for granting extraordinary ability to the “shrewd leader” that he never had. Then, as now, the fool managed to prevail by taking unacceptable horrendous human costs. Ghedli’s victory was not only pyrrhic because of the unacceptable human cost it required to sustain itself, but also because it has proven to be unsustainable given its trajectory that has led us to this dead end. It is the very “calculated risk” (another phrase that G. Ande invokes to infuse intelligence to Isaias’ suicidal deeds that provoked sanctions) that Isaias perfected during the ghedli era that have been causing havoc in independent Eritrea.

But that doesn’t mean the Grand Fool of Asmara won’t try to outwit UN inspection. Given the contempt that he (and Shaebia) has for all world institutions, he might still believe that he can get away with anything. After all, isn’t that what has led the nation into one disaster after another? I actually hope he gets “smart” and ensnares himself into such a trap. Already, the AU is calling for the creation of no-fly zone over Somalia. And if the despot is found sneaking in arms to Eritrea, that no-fly zone could easily be made to extend over Eritrea. Given its heavy dependence on “tourism” for its revenue, that would be the end of the regime.

Arms embargo, security threat and regime change

Above, I have tried to show that even if we are to assume with G. Ande that the sanctions on Iraq didn’t cause regime change, it was still a success on that aspect that is relevant to the Eritrean case. Here, I will argue that even though regime change was not one of the objectives of the sanction on Iraq, that in fact it did play an indirect role in facilitating regime change. And what is more important, “security threat” figures large on this one; hence its applicability to the Eritrean case.

When the US was threatening Saddam Hussein with military invasion of his country, it seems now, in retrospect, so irrational for him not to have let the UN look wherever and however it wanted, given that he had no WMD whatsoever to hide. But Saddam had a plausible reason why he didn’t want the world to know that he did NOT have WMD. The question is: which part of the world? He would have gladly opened his arsenal of weapons to the demands of the West had there been a way of the latter keeping its findings secret to itself. What he was scared of, more than anything else, is for Iran to find out that he had no weapons of mass destruction. It goes then without saying that Saddam wouldn’t also want the “security threat” that he felt to prevail among his military or the masses, or else they would start getting funny ideas of how to exploit his vulnerability.

After the Iran-Iraqi war, years of sanctioning had degraded Iraq’s military capacity and tilted the balance of fire-power towards Iran. So, for Saddam, the only weapon left to him to discourage any kind of military adventure from the Ayatollahs was to bluff that he would use his WMD if that ever took place. Given that he had heavily used chemical warfare in the North against the Kurds and in the Majnoon fields to thwart Iranian offensives, such a threat would definitely carry much wait. [If you google up “Saddam WMDs bluffing” you will find more than one thousand links making a connection between Saddam’s bluffing and the fear of Iran, one of those being: (Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein bluffed about WMDs fearing Iranian arsenal, secret FBI files show, NY Daily News, Jun 25, 2009)]

To reiterate the main points, Saddam wanted to keep the facts of his vulnerability – that he had no WMDs – secret for two reasons:

to keep the Iranians in the dark so as to discourage any military adventurism from the Ayatollahs;

to keep Iraqis in the dark so as to prevent similar adventurism from inside, be it from the military or from the Shiites in South.

This then is the story of how the “security threat” felt just by one man – Saddam Hussein – came to unravel his regime. Had he not felt that existential threat, he would not have taken the ambiguous stand that he took in the last days that doomed his regime. It is true that in the last days Saddam found himself between a rock and hard place. His ambiguous stand then was meant to keep this delicate balance of meeting the US demand for transparency while keeping the Iranians and his people in the dark. Here then is a plausible scenario of how a nation unraveled as a result of fire-power imbalance created by sanctions without firing a shot against or by the enemy it feared most. In the end then, however indirect it might have been, sanctions did play a role in unraveling the Saddam regime. The case of Eritrea is similar, in that “security threat” could eventually cause the unraveling of the Isaias regime without shots being exchanged between it and Ethiopia. It is only that, in the Eritrean case, the security threat that has to be felt is not by the head of the state but by the rest of the leadership and the military.

The Eritrean government, of course, has no WMD with which it could bluff its way out of this self-made trap. Sooner or later, the balance of fire-power will drastically shift towards Ethiopia, especially in regard to air force; something that Ethiopia has already an edge. And whoever dominates the sky, dominates the war – a source of much anxiety among the generals. The reason why the Commander of the Eritrean air force rushed to Ukraine as soon as the UN resolution to sanction Eritrea was passed was precisely because of this realization. And if Ethiopia wants to accelerate the downfall of the Isaias regime, all it has to do is buy more armaments, buffer up its army and increase its army’s presence in the border area. All of this will, to some extent, bring back the existential angst that the former teghadelti experienced during the last days of the border war. And that, in turn, means that they will begin to look at Isaias as a liability, as a significant number of them did during that brief window of vulnerability which the G-15 exploited to conduct their dissent. That is to say, with sanctions, there is a high probability that the respective interests of the masses and former teghadelti will come to overlap, but not so much as to cause an uprising on its own. What needs to be added? [The case of the mining companies, the PFDJ-owned companies and the Diaspora network will be addressed in another posting.]

Normalizing Shaebia’s blunders

Another tactic G. Ande uses to save Shaebia from itself is by providing plausibility to Shaebia’s implausible behavior, so that by the end the reader will come out believing that, after all, it didn’t commit such a gross mistake. In one of his deceptive moments, he portrays what Shaebia has done as “calculated risk”:

“This is not to suggest, however, that the Eritrean regime is oblivious of western interests and policies on the Horn of Africa. In fact, the Eritrean government‘s involvement may have been motivated by a calculated risk. The government may have been trying to take advantage of Eritrea’s strategic location as a leverage to pull some strings on the major western countries in order to urge them put pressure on Ethiopia to honor the border demarcation ruling and to bring the border stalemate to an end …”

Translated into normal terms, what he is telling us is that Eritrea, with its misadventures in Djibouti and its aid of Islamists in Somalia, is trying to blackmail the West in making Ethiopia comply with the border ruling. Of course, such an act has nothing to do with calculated risk, but with sheer stupidity. But look how nicely he has put it to make it seem that it is this kind of calculation that, under normal conditions, could have easily gone the other way. The intention is someone who reads this would come out with the impression that even if Eritrea has lost in the end, it was in fact conducted with cool headed people that have done all the homework they could in cost-benefit analysis. All of this is meant to hide the recklessness with which the regime has come to the sanctions dead end.

Has there been anything in the pattern of behavior of Shaebia’s past that warrants such an assessment from G’ Ande’s side? If so, what kind of “calculated risk” could he have in mind? The calculated risk that drove the tyrant to go to war with Yemen? The calculated risk that he took in instigating war with Ethiopia and lose 20 thousands souls? The calculated risk that made the idiot to occupy a contested area in Djibouti and drove France into alliance with America and England to approve the sanctioning? The calculate risk he took in Somalia even as the AU peace keepers were being killed by Al Shabaab?

Only someone who doesn’t give a damn about the human cost such “calculated risks” would take would ever attempt to embark on such foolish endeavors. This holds true now as it did during the liberation era. Calculating risk requires that one works within a slight margin of error. No such context existed in mieda. Shaebia allowed itself the greatest margin of error possible in every major act it conducted, all at the expense of the masses. It is only that in the ghedli era, even though every foolish risk came at horrendous human cost, such acts didn’t have regional or international ramifications as they do now. Shaebia could get away with what it did mieda, as it does now in Eritrea, simply because there were no consequences to its acts. Now, of course, nobody outside of his country is allowing the Grand Fool of Asmara to provide him the kind of margin of error he allows himself within his own country. And the result has been: war and sanctions.

In a stanza that I wrote on how Shaebia prevailed during ghedli era, I talk about this kind of “calculated risk” that required the largest margin of error possible:
“Shaebia’s past

Despite doing everything wrong

if a family remains healthy and plumb

at a time of great famine,

count and recount its children:

it could have been eating its young!”

Shaebia literally prevailed by eating its young during the liberation era, and now it is prevailing by devouring its young – tens of thousands dead and maimed and hundreds of thousands exiled. It didn’t know any other way then; it doesn’t know any better now. But even more critically, it is hollowing out the whole nation in its quest for survival. Anyone who thinks that this Khmer Rouge of Africa knows how to take “calculated risk” either he is doing it to save it from itself or he ought to have his head examined.

Some other clever, but equally deceptive, arguments that G. Ande uses are: (a) The sanctions are easily reversible, and if reversed, the regime will come out stronger; so why bother. (b) Sanctions will harm the people, not the regime. (c) The world body has some other unarticulated ulterior motives in doing what it is doing (although I would grant his conspiracy theory has more “plausibility” than Saleh Younis’ the-stars-are-aligned-against-Eritrea mambo jambo). But none of them hold water. For lack of space though, I won’t address them here.

Conclusion

If sanctions are to work anywhere in the world, it would be in Eritrea. Unlike anywhere else where sanctions have been imposed in recent memory, there are many factors that militate against Eritrea to make it vulnerable to sanctions both economically and militarily. Economically we could mention three factors: (a) Eritrea is already in precarious condition; its economy is literally melting down. (b) Its sources of revenue are mainly from outside, and hence easy as targets of sanctions. (c) The complete monopolization of the nation’s economy by PFDJ-owned companies means that if one targets them, the whole economy would be in tatters. And militarily, the fact that the nation is still on war footing with Ethiopia makes the role of arms embargo in these sanctions even more critical. To the contrary of the naysayers then, the unique case of Eritrea is what should give us hope that the sanctions will work.

We know that the battle we are conducting, distanced as we are from the homeland, is a battle over the minds of our people. If the people of Eritrea are made to believe that Shaebia has conducted a simple reversible error or that the UN or USA is much to blame for the state that they find themselves in or that the arms embargo or economic sanction are impossible to implement or a combination of these, then the likelihood that they will feel the level of “security threat” essential to make them rise up against the regime will never be reached. So the likes of G. Ande know what they are doing. They know that the psychological frame of the masses is essential for the success or failure of sanctions in facilitating regime change, and that is exactly where they are aiming at. And that is what I meant when I said the battle lines are to be drawn in between those that want to own the sanctions and those that don’t. When the mission of “saving Shaebia from itself” is done by the likes of Ghidewon Abbay and Sophia Tesfamariam, every argument they muster carrys its stupidity in its sleeves that nobody, except for the foot soldiers, is fooled by them. It is the writings of the likes of G. Ande and Saleh Younis in the opposition that give plausibility to an otherwise implausible world of Shaebia’s making. Hence, the need to counter every move they make in that direction.
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01/ 12/2010

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