“Time to bring back Eritrea from the cold” A reply to Ambassador Hank Cohen

by Minga Negash

Many observers agree that recent unfortunate developments in the Middle East can easily spillover to the Greater Horn of Africa region. There are groups that are fanning ideologies advanced by the various actors in Middle East’s sectarian conflict. In the light of the new developments in the region, it makes sense for the United States to review its relationship with Eritrea and Ethiopia and rebalance its portfolio. The interesting question for Eritrea and Ethiopia is therefore how to respond to the apparent shift in superpower policy towards the region. In this rejoinder I review the recent articles that were written by two former Ambassadors, examine the difficult areas in the relationship between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and outline the options that are available for Ethiopia.

Figure 1 Disputed lands and “awards” according to the EEBC

On December 16, 2013 Ambassador Hank Cohen, the Former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa wrote an important article under the title “time to bring back Eritrea from the cold”. Between 1989 and 1993 Ambassador Cohen drove the United States’ policy towards Africa. He not only witnessed the birth of new states in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 but also in the Horn of Africa. The birth of the State of Eritrea was a concomitant event that took place with the takeover of the rest of Ethiopia by the rebel forces of the Tigrean People Liberation Front (TPLF). On January 13 2014 Ambassador David Shinn, the Former United States’ Ambassador to Ethiopia also wrote a commentary supporting Ambassador Cohen’s piece. Ambassador Shinn drove United States’ policy towards Ethiopia during the 1996-1999 period. His term of office was also characterized by another historical episode. Despite the radical change in Ethiopia that was supported by Eritreans and the United States, the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia resurfaced again and consumed close to 80 000 people. Ambassador Princeton Lyman, the Former United States’ ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa also supported Ambassador Cohen’s piece and enumerated his effort to bring back Eritrea out of the cold. The articles have sparked intense debate. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia has also responded. In short, the authors of the pieces are witnesses and have the institutional memories of the events that were unfolding in the Horn of Africa. The series of articles that came out in a short period of time suggests that Washington might be rethinking its policy towards the region and the lobby industry is at work. Notwithstanding these, their continued engagement on the Horn of Africa will also help to reflect on the achievements and failures of the past, and more importantly help in charting the roadmap for sustainable peace and development in the region.

Ambassador Cohen’s article contains two central issues. His first point is that the sanction against Eritrea must be lifted because there is no evidence which incriminates the country to be “a state sponsor of terrorism”. As flabbergasting as it may sound, as Professor Jack Derrida notes “a text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game”. Derrida’s analogy is similar to the Eritrean-Ethiopian q’ene, a form of philosophical enquiry commonly referred to as the wax and the gold. Ambassador Cohen has been successful in hiding the gold in the wax. The task of critical enquiry is to find the gold. At face value, in the wax, the article is just an addition to the chorus for the removal of the sanctions which have seriously undermined development efforts in Eritrea. Read more…