Ethiopia attacks Eritrea

Okay sports fans, it looks like after a year of civil wars, revolutions, counter-terrorism, and all the rest, we're finally gonna have ourselves a conventional war to witness.

Ethiopia just committed a raid on Eritrea, a rival and former province of Ethiopia prior to 1993, for hosting anti-Ethiopian terrorist bases on its soil. They have an extremely militarized border and Eritrea is supposedly in Iran's pocket and very much the North Korea of Africa. Eritrea has also been accused of helping al-Shabaab. The US has already asked both sides to stop fighting, but that doesn't look likely.

So as we wait for more reports on the subject, considering where Eritrea is located (right across the Red Sea from Yemen and very close to Somalia), anyone think the whole region is gonna go up in smoke? Anyone know anything about either country personally or think anyone has the influence necessary to stop them? The last war they had (12 years ago) cost 80,000 lives).

Eritrea really is the North Korea of Africa, yes. It's surprising how few attention is paid to that. And despite often starvation level poverty they do indeed actively fund the Islamist militias in Somalia, plus yes, terrorist organizations in Ethopia. Whatever their government and armed forces get, they deserve it. However, Ethopia of course is dirt poor, too, so really, a war is the last thing either side really needs right now.

Yeah, I am going to need a source on the whole "Eritrea funds Al-Shabaab" thing

To be honest, that's nothing new. They were pretty much in a state of war with each other in the last 12 years. Border skirmishes mostly, and some raids in one or the other direction. Nearly never draws media attention.

China's got a lot of interest in Eritrea, by the way - they fund most of the infrastructure projects there. (Including the hospital were my ex-wife worked in 2007, before they kicked out nearly all western NGOs) Massawa was once one of the most important ports in the Red Sea, considering China's hunt for ressources, it's a good place for them to have under their influence.

And I third comparing it to North Korea. It is the only country with a worse Reporters-without-Borders ranking, or to put it in the words of a colleague of mine whose parents were born in Eritrea, 'it's the only place in the world where people are happy if they can escape to Sudan'.

Eritrea's a relatively new country, isn't it? I've noticed that it doesn't appear on any maps from the Cold War era or earlier.

[Wikipedia]

So, these are the bad guys?

I guess so . That first sentence is a bit of a giveaway.

edited 16th Mar '12 3:33:59 PM by feotakahari

sounds like the usual Islam vs. Judaism/the rest of the world fighting that goes on these days. Pathetic that we can't all get along over religion.

I really wish they had ever managed to break away from Ethiopia. It'd be one less drawn out war.

I think the major problem is the U.N. deciding that the smart thing to do is separating out the two religions and giving them their own nations. I think they should be forced to share the same borders and settle things themselves. Under punishment that if things go militant they will be invaded and put under a more brutal regime than either one could come up with alone. Brother Charlie and all that, Jews and Muslims just might unite under one banner for a while.

...Where did you get the idea that this is about Jews and Muslims?

EDIT: Wiki checked, both Eritrea and Ethiopia are majority Christian. I doubt religion plays into this.

edited 16th Mar '12 5:48:27 PM by DirectorCannon

Ethiopia is a highly Jewish country, and the Eritreans strongly support Islam. You can look it up if you don't believe me. Ethiopia is the African Israel.

I did look it up. Ethiopia is about 50-50 Christian/Islam.

Scratch that, its actually 60-30.

edited 16th Mar '12 5:50:08 PM by DirectorCannon

Nevermind, then. -_- They just have a loud Jewish segment there. Including one that claims to have the ark of the covenant in a church.

Well, yes. But it's only about 8,000. At most.

Sorry for hammering in the point. I had extra information and had to share it.

Oh, no worries. You corrected a misperception on my part. I'm all for that.

Okey Dokey.

This isn't about religion. It's about a dictatorial-totalitarian regime (Eritrea) and an at least, hm, authoritarian-leaning regime (Ethiopia) both needing to prop themselves up, about support of terrorism, and most of all about jingoist nationalism.

Well.

I hate to be the one who always goes against the current.

But it seems to me that Ethiopia is the one doing the invading so perhaps we should hold our horses before we include Eritrea in the axis of evil.

Besides Ethiopia doesnt have a good track record of being democratic anyways.

Lesser of Two Evils and whatnot.

nonetheless

If 2 massively corrupt and rotten regimes, even if the one that starts the war is better, go to war then I would argue that the one state that started the war is to be held acountable for all the extra missery such war yields.

You know guys... this trying to find the "GOOD GUYS" aint really a nuance way to evaluate international conflicts but for rare occasions.

edited 16th Mar '12 6:55:09 PM by Baff

Ethiopia is described as a "de facto" one-party state and is placed 118th in the Democracy Index, according to Wikipedia. So it's a pretty horrible place in that regard.

Eritrea, though, is something else: about as democratic as North Korea, and it officially bans human rights organisations and independent press. Ethiopia isn't even close to anything as disgusting as that.

The difference in democracy between Finland and Russia is probably somewhere around the same range as that between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

There is also Ethiopia's fragility to consider: Ogaden still wants independence and so do the Oromo. Other ethnic groups may make trouble, too. So, yeah, any support for terrorist groups within its border is very problematic for them, and they'll react very thin-skinned to it...

Eritrea deservedly won its war of independence; it was one of those cases in which colonial powers shoved together areas with little in common together into artificial "countries". Of course, they had different histories prior to WW 2 anyway; Eritrea was an Italian colony for a long time, while Ethiopia was independent. Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in the later 1930s was one of the things that fractured the League of Nations. After WW 2, the British had control of both, having kicked out the Italians; they joined both areas together and granted independence to the whole mess as Ethiopia. Bad idea.

Unfortunately, successful freedom fighters often make very poor post-Independence rulers. It didn't start off bad; I remember reading reports from the early days praising the new country's freedom and can-do spirit. However, the government got increasingly paranoid and authoritarian, and the fact was the war with Ethiopia never really ended for real; it was an uneasy ceasefire, and both sides never really demobilized completely. Tensions remained, and these fed the Eritrean paranoia, in which everything that went wrong was due to Ethiopian influence and agents.

And some of it probably was.

So the country has slowly gotten worse over the years, and it's a damn shame.

Ethiopia is far, far from being innocent in this, though.

Well, no.

I disagree wholeheartedly with that description.

You most see that it by no means fit the case. Its hyperbole at its finest.

So Ethiopia is like Finland and Eritrea like Russia??? Come on!! even if you do so to describe the gulf between the degrees of democracy between those countries, you have to concede that what we have here are different flavors of totalitarianism, with some difference in the degree said totalitarianism is carried out. Nevertheless, the gulf between said degrees is nowhere as big as the one between Finland and Russia.

Comparisons to NK are rather uncalled for. So every country that is totalitarian is the NK of its region???

i.e Saudi Arabia is the NK of the middle east, Belarus the NK of Europe, Cuba the NK of America, Fiji the NK of Oceania????

Useless comparisons I say.

edited 16th Mar '12 9:00:52 PM by Baff

They're not useless. Even in a totalitarian society, you usually have at least some semblance of a press that at least claims to be private or free; in Eritrea and North Korea, any kind of press that isn't state-owned and state-controlled is forbidden.

In a totalitarian society, human rights groups aren't respected or even allowed to act or be formed. This applies to Eritrea even more than it does North Korea, though in both cases this varies, as they both do from time to time enter periods of allowing certain groups in, though with limited access.

In totalitarian societies, opposition groups (including political parties) aren't allowed; only one party is, and trying to form or join another or to express major criticism of the only party, from within or without, results in a jail sentence. This applies to North Korea and Eritrea.

And so on.

There are degrees to which a country can be democratic or authoritarian, and Eritrea is by all standards much more authoritarian than Ethiopia, which in turn is much worse than most of the world. Still, you can compare things that are horrible and come to the conclusion that one is more horrible than the other.

Now, obviously I'm not gonna say that Ethiopia is faultless or that it's an open society to the extent that, say, Jordan or Turkey is, but it's still much better than Eritrea.

There are people who measure these things. The Economist Intelligence Unit produces an annual listing of countries by Democracy Index, which is a collection of measures of openness of society and fairness and frequency of election and such things.

The most undemocratic country on Earth, according to the Index for last year, is North Korea, which ranks as number 167 out of 167. It has an Index of 1.08 (where the bigger the number, the more democratic the country; number 1 is Norway, with an Index of 9.80.) For Eritrea, the rank and number are 154 and 2.34. Ethiopia is at rank 121, with an index of 3.79. Those are some pretty horrible numbers, and they're all within the range that's defined as "authoritarian regime."

BTW, I must say for honesty's sake that I also looked at Russia and Finland, and it seems that Finland had a higher Index than I would've though, and Russia was worse that I would've thought, so my comparison was indeed an exaggeration; the difference is much greater than I suggested.

edited 16th Mar '12 10:18:39 PM by BestOf

Yea, that is a good summary of the situation actually.

Do I disagree strongly with some of those categorizations in that list... some of the listings I thought where actually quite bizarre...

but overall the ranking seems to reflect a more or less accurate representation of how democratic said countries are at least in respect to each other.

Nonetheless if you take a look at the HDI index (which I quite franly consider to be more important than the Democracy index) you will see both countries are nearly tied.

edited 16th Mar '12 10:01:50 PM by Baff