U.S. Sets Stage for Libya-Like Regime Change in Eritrea, “Africa’s Cuba”
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“Eritrea’s fierce independence has put it in imperialism’s crosshairs.”
The United States is methodically setting the stage for a so-called
“humanitarian” military intervention
against the small northeast African nation of Eritrea, under legal
pretexts much like those used to justify NATO’s war of regime change
against Libya, in 2011. As in Libya, the U.S. has hijacked the United
Nations human rights apparatus to claim a “responsibility to protect”
(R2P) Eritrea’s citizens from alleged abuses by their own government.
War and regime change are the intended result.
Washington engineered UN sanctions against Eritrea, beginning in
2009, on the patently bogus charge that Eritrea’s determinedly secular
government provided “political, financial and logistical support” to
Islamist Shabaab fighters in Somalia. Islamic jihadism is anathema to
Eritrea, whose population of six million on the shores of the Red Sea is
about evenly divided between Muslims and Christians. But few people in
the United States knew Eritrea existed, much less its secular
revolutionary history and politics. The lies stuck, as did the
sanctions, even after the UN Human Rights Council conceded there was no
further evidence of Eritrean aid to the Shabaab.
A three-person UN panel now alleges that Eritrea is a lawless state that has committed “
crimes against humanity,”
enslaving up to 400,000 people and engaging in murder, forced
disappearances, rape and torture. Mark Smith, the Australian chairman of
the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea, demands that
Eritrea be put on trial before the International Criminal Court, a body
that has indicted only Africans – and only those that were on the wrong
side of U.S. foreign policy – since its creation in 2002. Smith laid the
legal groundwork for the overthrow of the Eritrean government:
“There is no genuine prospect of the Eritrean judicial system holding
perpetrators to account in a fair and transparent manner. The
perpetrators of these crimes must face justice and the victims’ voices
must be heard. The international community should now take steps,
including using the International Criminal Court [ICC], national courts
and other available mechanisms, to ensure there is accountability for
the atrocities being committed in Eritrea.”
“The UN
commission demands that Eritrea be put on trial before the
International Criminal Court, a body that has indicted only Africans.”
In February of 2011, the United Nations Security Council, led by the
U.S., Britain and France, referred the case against Libya to the ICC, to
provide a criminal justice rationale for the military assault that was
already underway against Muammar Gaddafi’s government. This time,
Washington has instructed its UN proxies to give “humanitarian” legal
cover in advance for an attack on Eritrea. The demonization campaign is
built around two Big Lies: one, that Eritrea’s system of national
service – a form of draft, which is the right of all nations – amounts
to “slavery”; and two, that domestic oppression in Eritrea is a prime
source of African refugees to Europe, with the tiny nation allegedly
accounting for more cross-continental emigration than every other
country except war-ravaged Syria.
National service in Eritrea, as in many other countries, includes not
only military duty on the front lines with Ethiopia – which still
occupies parts of Eritrea in clear violation of an international
arbitration agreement – but also labor in public works projects as well
as service in health and education infrastructures. (Most teachers in
Eritrea, for example, are national service workers.) Lots of folks would
call that socialism or nation-building – which is how the Eritreans see
it.
The Eritreans defend extended national service on grounds of
necessity, citing an existential threat from the Ethiopian military,
backed to the hilt by Washington. Economic sanctions have also
necessitated that Eritrea mobilize the population to develop its own
national resources. However, self-reliance is also a cornerstone of
Eritrean domestic development policy, and seen as central to maintaining
true national sovereignty and independence. Eritrea rejects foreign
“aid” and entanglements with structures of international capital, and is
one of only two nations in Africa that has no relationship with
AFRICOM, the U.S. military command on the continent (Zimbabwe is the
other).
“It is insane to believe that little Eritrea, with only
six million people, has set more people to flight than neighboring
Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world, with a population
15 times greater.”
Eritrea’s fierce independence has put it in imperialism’s crosshairs. Eritrea is “
Africa’s Cuba”
– and the United States treats it as such in a striking variety of
ways. Indeed, the other Big Lie against Eritrea – that it is the second
largest contributor to the waves of refugees risking life and limb to
reach Europe – is directly related to European immigration policies,
urged on them by the U.S., that put Eritrea in much the same bind as
U.S. policy towards Cuba.
It is insane to believe that little Eritrea, with only six million
people, has set more people to flight than neighboring Ethiopia, one of
the poorest countries in the world, now in the throes of a devastating
drought, with a population 15 times greater; or neighboring Sudan, also
desperately poor and afflicted by multiple wars, with 40 million people;
or nearby Somalia, a nation without a state, inhabited by 10 million
people. Indeed, economic, political and war refugees from all across
Africa claim to be Eritrean because, unlike citizens of any other
African country, Eritrean refugees are afforded special status on
arrival in Europe as presumptive political refugees who might face
torture if returned home. As with U.S. Cuba policy, the Eritrean
exception was designed to weaken and destabilize the country through a
brain and human resource drain. Inevitably, however, the policy has made
Eritrean identification papers the hottest selling documents on the
streets of Khartoum and other refugee gathering points. Europe is awash,
as is Israel, with fake Eritreans fleeing various military, political
and economic catastrophes – most of them rooted in Euro-American foreign
destabilization policies and the global capitalist Race to the Bottom.
If Latin Americans could pass for Cubans, the populations of U.S.
“Little Havanas” would number in the tens of millions, full of
Hondurans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Mexicans.
“Economic, political and war refugees from all across Africa claim to be Eritrean.”
Ethiopians pass most easily as Eritreans, since millions of them
share the same ethnic background. About half of Eritreans are Tigrayan,
the ethnic group that is the fourth largest in Ethiopia and dominates
the ruling party in Addis Ababa. The Austrian Ambassador to Ethiopia,
Andreas Melan, last year
estimated
that “among the thousands of Eritrean migrants in Europe, 30 to 40
percent are Ethiopians.” That may be an underestimate. And many more
“Eritreans” actually hail from as far away as West Africa.
The Eritrean ambassador to Israel believes that Ethiopians
account for half
of the purported Eritreans seeking refugee status in that country.
"They know the Eritreans automatically receive a six-month visa, so they
pretend to be Eritrean," said the ambassador.
The Eritrean refugee scam is an open secret all across Europe, and is
well known to the American and European governments. The Big Lie is
maintained to serve imperial purposes, and will now be deployed to
justify an armed assault on Eritrea as an alleged mass enslaver and
rogue nation. The UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea
will submit its manufactured findings to the Human Rights Council on
June 21, setting the imperial lynch mob in motion.
“They know the Eritreans automatically receive a six-month visa, so they pretend to be Eritrean."
Eritrea cannot expect a fair hearing from a UN apparatus that is
puppeteered from Washington. As the Eritrean government stated in its
preliminary response to the UN commission’s charges:
“The purposes of national service in Eritrea are clearly stated in a
legal proclamation of 1994 and are three-fold: national defense,
economic and social development and national integration. The service
is not indefinite although for a time and in certain cases it has been
prolonged due the already explained existential threat of war.”
The commission based its findings on the testimony of about 800
(alleged) Eritreans interviewed in various foreign cities, while
ignoring the 42,000 Eritrean expatriates that have petitioned the world
body to lift sanctions against their home country.
The UN panel is ignoring what is “effectively a continuing state of
war with Ethiopia, the illegal occupation of Eritrean territory which
constitutes a flagrant violation of human rights, repeated armed
aggression, sanctions and mistaken policies that consider almost all
Eritreans asylum-seekers,” said
Eritrean government spokesperson
Yemane Gebreab. That’s a diplomatic way of putting it. By referring the
case to the International Criminal Court, and implicitly threatening
military action against Eritrea, the commission has become a warmonger.
On Monday, the
New York Times reported
that thousands of Ethiopian and Eritrean troops were rushing towards
the disputed border, the site of heavy artillery duels. The
Times
quoted an Eritrean dissident living in Sweden as their expert of the
moment. “If there is a war, or the rumor of a war, it could be a way for
the Eritrean government to get support and divert attention,” said the
dissident. The newspaper also relayed a Twitter message from an Eritrean
American in his homeland’s capital. “Here in Asmara, it’s peaceful
despite #EthiopianAttacks against #Eritrea on the Tsorona front. And you
wonder why there’s national service?”
President Obama seems intent on adding War #8 to his imperial legacy. source
.blackagendareport
