3 April 2025

Opinion – The History of Ethiopia's Defeat Will Repeat Itself in Its New Threatened War!

Ambassador Andebrhan Welde Giorgis
 

Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels asserted that telling a big lie and keeping repeating it creates the illusion of truth and makes people believe it. Emulating Goebbels, several former senior TPLF leaders, military officers and cadres have widely spread the narrative that the Ethiopian military central command’s decision to seize Asmera and Asseb during its 1998-2000 war of aggression was reversed by the order of the then Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. The big lie, told to rationalise Ethiopia’s failure to achieve its war objective to reoccupy Eritrea, has been making the rounds among certain elements of the Ethiopian and Tigrayan elites. In particular, has retired General Tsadkan Gebretensae, who fabricated the big lie and has constantly repeated it, perhaps forgotten that he cried rowdily like a baby at the humiliating defeat and total annihilation of his attacking forces at Igri Mekhel (Tserona), subsequently accused of military failure and spared of the death penalty by being pardoned?   

The fact is that the Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF) successfully repulsed Ethiopia’s largescale and repeated human-wave attacks on the Alitena-Mereb Front (Aiga, Alitena, Zalambesa, Tserona); on the Mereb-Setit Front (Badme, Geza Gerehlase) and the Bure Front (26). Despite a serious setback, the breach on the Mereb-Setit Front (Badme, February 1999) due to failures of top leadership and actionable real-time intelligence, the EDF brilliantly crushed Ethiopia’s bloodiest last-ditch battles targeting Asmera at Igri Mekhel (March 1999), Adi Begi’o (May 2000) and Senafe (June 2000); and Asseb at Bure (June 2000). Division after Ethiopian division was thrown into the fray and decimated in the killing fields. 

It is an open secret long in the public domain revealed by a former state minister of the regime at the time that the war ended when all attempts to seize Asmera and Asseb failed and the three Ethiopian generals in command of the three fronts, approached one by one, informed Meles that their exhausted, demoralised and badly mauled troops had no capacity to launch an offensive or continue the war.

Unwilling and unable to learn from history, Ethiopia’s expansionist regime is waging an intensive and extensive propaganda war threatening to invade Eritrea and seize the port of Asseb. If Ethiopia invades, the invasion should not be conflated as a war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The international community should duly condemn the Abiy regime’s unjust war of aggression against Eritrea as illegitimate belligerence in violation of international law and support Eritrea’s just war of national defence as legitimate resistance upheld by international law. History is bound to repeat itself in the humiliating defeat of the new aggression. 

At this critical juncture, Prime Minister Abiy’s regime has, by perpetrating wars and conflicts on the peoples of Ethiopia, especially in Oromia, Tigray, Amhara and Somalia, become an existential threat not only to the victimised peoples but also to the unity of Ethiopia. To successfully challenge the existential threat, the time has come to establish, with the tacit political and moral support of Eritrea, a strategic alliance that gathers the Oromo Liberation Front, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the Fano, the Ogaden National Liberation Front and all Ethiopian democratic forces. To build the reciprocal trust essential for the victory of the various allied forces, the strategic alliance must be founded on an unequivocal commitment to the following four (4) basic principles: 

1^st, recognition and respect of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Eritrea in accordance with the international boundary between Eritrea and Ethiopia established by the colonial treaties of 1900, 1902 and 1908 and implementation of the physical demarcation of the boundary in accordance with the Demarcation Directions of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission and the technical support of the UN Cartographic Unit at the soonest suitable time for the two countries. 

2^nd, resolve all pending issues of contestation among the alliance forces through peaceful dialogue in a manner that serves the interests and meets the consent of the concerned parties.

3^rd, establish a genuine federal system that shuns the hegemony of a single nationality and guarantees the equitable participation and harmony of all Ethiopian nationalities substituting Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s regime of Oromuma Prosperity Gospel.

4^th, establish institutionalised good neighbourly relations, cultivate mutually beneficial bilateral cooperation and negotiate and agree on the terms of Ethiopia’s use of Eritrea’s ports in accordance with the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to update the Transit and Port Services Agreement signed between the Transitional Government of Ethiopia and the Government of the State of Eritrea in 1993 which Ethiopia unilaterally broke in 1998. With the breaking of the agreement, Ethiopia started aerial bombing of the Eritrea’s ports of Asseb and Massawa and warned international shipping to cease using them.