For almost two years now, the US and the EU have desperately tried to downplay and whitewash the TPLF’s high crimes of War of Insurrection with all its security and humanitarian ramifications in Ethiopia and the wider region at large. The ploy has invariably included unwarranted accusations and scapegoating of Eritrea.

Indeed, the EU External Service issued a deplorable statement on October 6 this month accusing Eritrea, among other things, of “playing a destructive role in the Tigray conflict”. And on October 12 this week, the US, Australia, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, UK, and Canada have issued a Joint Statement along the same lines.

These concerted pronouncements of willful harassment of the victims of the TPLF’s war of choice are but an extension of decades-old policies of stoking conflict in our region pursued by these powers to advance their own narrow agendas.  The origins and dynamics of the current war are otherwise clear and unambiguous as the following sequences of events illustrate:

1. The almost two-years long vicious war in northern Ethiopia was triggered solely and only because the TPLF launched massive, premeditated and coordinated military assaults on all the contingents of the Northern Command on the night of 3 November 2020. The TPLF deployed 250,000 Militia’s and Special Forces that it had trained throughout the years for the operation that its commanders dubbed as “blitzkrieg”.
2. The TPLF’s pronounced objectives in launching its reckless War of Insurrection were to totally neutralized the Northern Command; capture all its heavy weaponry (which constituted about 80% of the EDF’s total ordinance) and topple the Federal Government.
3. Annulment of the historic Eritrea-Ethiopia Peace Agreement and subsequent acts of continued destabilization of Eritrea was an integral and pronounced part of the TPLF’s War of Insurrection.
4. The TPLF’s War of Insurrection was not confined to its reckless military assaults in November 2020. Even when the first offensive was foiled and against the backdrop of successive unilateral and humanitarian cease-fires that were declared by the Federal Government, the TPLF persisted in its war efforts to unleash the Second Offensive from June to September in 2021 and the Third Offensive on 24 August this year.  In all these acts, the TPLF commandeered and funneled humanitarian assistance and WFP trucks to its war efforts; and, conscripted tens of thousands of child soldiers as cannon fodder in its costly human-wave war tactics.

These are the indelible facts.

In the event, these countries cannot feign ignorance and/or claim the moral high ground to pontificate to Eritrea on “peace and human rights’’.  The litany of transgressions perpetrated against Eritrea in the past three decades with the support and collusion of some of these powers include: i) tacit and all-rounded support to the TPLF’s vicious and two-year long war against Eritrea when the former was at the helm of power in Ethiopia; ii) similar stance when it expelled over 75 thousand Eritreans and Ethiopians of Eritrean origin and looted their life-time wealth; and iii) deplorable collusion with the TPLF as it reneged on its treaty obligations and continued to occupy sovereign Eritrean territories in violation of the EEBC Arbitral Award in accordance with the provisions of the Algiers Peace Agreement that the US and the EU had brokered and explicitly guaranteed.

It is this backdrop of impunity that has emboldened the TPLF to unleash reckless military offensives in the past two years. Eritrea’s regional policy is otherwise centered on regional peace, stability and economic cooperation on the basis of full respect of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Member States.  Eritrea cherishes regional peace as it has been the victim, for decades, of imposed and intermittent wars perpetrated to advance unlawful extraneous and local agendas.