Cameron Duodu
LETTER FROM THE NORTH
The term “senseless war” should be a contradiction in terms. Because humanity was given the power of reasoning by Mother Nature, war should not be in our vocabulary at all.
But Mother Nature also gave us the power not to use our reason! And more often than not, we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are using our mental faculties when in fact we have palpably consigned them to the trash can. We glorify ourselves by denominating our race as Homo sapiens, whereas, if our performance throughout history is anything to go by, we should properly be labelled as Homo stultus!
Men have fought wars over a beautiful woman (Helen of Troy). They have been led to war by a naked woman (Lady Godiva). Wars have been fought over pieces of metal or other objects which would be worthless if we didn’t endow them with value (gold, silver and cowries).
And wars have been fought over whether there is one God or many gods, whether one should only face a certain direction when worshipping one God, and whether one God can be turned into bread and wine. Wars have even been fought over a football match.
But the most common cause of war is land. Land arouses men’s envy and their stupidity as nothing else. He’s got green grass: I want it for my goats. He’s got a water fountain or lake on his land: I want it for my camels. He’s got good fertile soil for his crops: I want it for my cattle. So the spears fly, the arrows whizz and the machine guns rattle their message of death.
Okay, in all these types of war, something may be gained (in addition to satisfied pride) though it is usually paltry when juxtaposed against the sacrifices needed to achieve the desired conquest – the painful squelching out of irreplaceable life, the destruction of families and communities, and the disruption of sophisticated social structures nurtured over centuries.
But pray, anybody: what has Ethiopia and Eritrea been fighting over? What do they hope to gain by their war? Does anybody know? Do the combatants know? A strip of near-desert land, isn’t it? Does it contain uranium? Petroleum? Zinc? Can that cursed bit of land be turned into njara for the people to eat?
I don’t know and I care even less. All I see is that a hapless people who, over the years, have taken a terrible death toll from the ravages of drought, civil war, Italian invasion, Allied salvation and/or shifta rustling, are again dying, or running for their lives, at a time when drought and famine are again giving them a drubbing and killing them by the thousand.
Can’t man’s reason see a point beyond which it simply refuses to unleash more misery upon fellow humans?
The annoying thing is that only as recently as 1993 most people of goodwill were hailing Ethiopia and Eritrea for setting “an example” to the world by agreeing, at a table rather than at the “normal” theatre of war, that their two countries would amicably come to the parting of the ways. The “liberation movements” of both countries, having co- operated to throw out the Mengistu dictatorship in 1991, had sat down and negotiated the settlement of a dispute that the Italians had created and the Allies had worsened after World War II.
“Hail Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia!” the world chanted. “Glory to Issayas Afeworki of Eritrea!” replied the chorus.
Had we but known we were in fact applauding military-minded macho Rambos who would, at the drop of a hat, reach for the gun. Look at the following figures from the CIA Factbook:
Eritrea – Exports: $95-million (1996 est.). Military expenditures: $196- million (1997).
Ethiopia – Exports: $550-million (f.o.b., 1998). Military expenditures: $138-million (98/99).
Can you believe your eyes? You would have thought that these two countries, having emerged from years of dictatorial repression, would be thinking primarily of how to step up development in education, health, transport and communications. Instead, you have the one country (Eritrea) spending twice its total annual export earnings on military expenditure, and the other (Ethiopia) a third. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, the figures are worth an entire tome.
The two countries now say they have accepted the Organisation of African Unity/United Nations ceasefire proposals and I hope against hope that they will implement them and put an end to this madness. But I bet you that even when the fighting stops, they will both use the excuse of the fighting to beef up their military expenditure to even more ludicrous levels.
And while you are puking over the Eritrea/ Ethiopia conundrum, can you spare a drop or two for Rwanda and Uganda? Two countries ruled by leaders who, like Zenawi and Afeworki, have been lionised, especially in the United States, as “soldiers with brains”, an “example” to the rest of Africa.
Balderdash. They sent troops to the Democratic Republic of the Congo ostensibly to protect their own borders from incursions from the Congo by “rebels” who have been harrying their armies. But instead of doing that, they have been backing rival factions in the Congo against Kabila, in a political jigsaw whose pieces only a genius can fully fit into any picture. The result has confused them so much that they have been turning their guns on one another.
The presidents of the two countries, Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame, meet and declare that they have agreed to stop the fighting. But whether it’s because they have no control over their own troops in the Congo or not, their words are as empty as the coffee cups they leave on the negotiating table. It would be farcical were it not for the poor Congolese people, who are caught between what, to them, must look like deadly military games played by madmen on the one side and lunatics on the other.