Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Saving Ethiopia From the Chopping Block

February 3, 2014

WE live in a time that gives new meaning to Shakespeare’s line in Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them…” Today we come face to face with the evil Meles Zenawi has done when he lived. A piece of Ethiopia is retailed once again to the Sudan. They call it “border demarcation.” I call it call it border slicing, dicing and pricing — all for thirty pieces of silver!
We are here today to help stop Meles Zenawi from completing his evil plans to dismember our motherland. When Meles gave away the Port of Assab, we remained silent and paid the price of being landlocked. In 1998, Badme was invaded and 80,000 Ethiopians sacrificed their lives and drove back the enemy. But Meles promptly converted Ethiopia’s battlefield victory into total diplomatic defeat by agreeing to deliver Badme to the invaders in arbitration… (Today) we are told by people who live in Western Ethiopia that Meles has delivered their ancestral lands and homes to Sudanese dictator [and fugitive from justice at the International Criminal Court] Omar al-Bashir in a secret agreement…
I deeply regret that six years after I gave that speech, we have not been able to thwart Meles’ evil plans to dismember our motherland. Meles is gone and we now face the evil that lives after him. Is it true that “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men and women do nothing”? Has evil finally triumphed?
Ethiopia on the Meles Zenawi’s chopping block
In December 2013, Sudanese foreign minister Ali Karti announced that the ruling regimes in Ethiopia and the Sudan “have ended their border disagreement on ‘Fashaga’ area” and “agreed to resolve all their border demarcation disputes.” Karti said the leaders of the two regimes have “signed a historical document putting the final demarcation lines.” Sudan’s foreign ministry rejected any suggestion of “border disputes” between Ethiopia and the Sudan indicating only that there were minor disagreements on “limited points at the border”. The public relations strategy of the regime in Ethiopia over the past weeks has been to been to underplay the “border demarcation issue” and overplay the “enormous significance” of the “strategic framework agreement” which allegedly includes “cooperation agreements on security, economic, agricultural, educational and cultural levels.”