Yemane Abselom's Blog

During the struggle for independence in Eritrea, the Ethiopian army was known for its brutal repression of Eritreans. The Ethiopian Army committed extrajudicial killings, murder and rape in Eritrea.  However, when the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) captured Ethiopian soldiers, they treated them with dignity and respect.  They fed and educated the Ethiopian soldiers with the limited resources they had.  At that time, the international community had refused to recognize both Eritrea and the prisoners of war.   At independence in 1991, Eritrea released its  hundreds  of thousands prisoners of war to Ethiopia.    Watch a video of this remarkable story from the 1980's:

Eritrea's Ministry of Information website shabait.com reports that "The Monitoring Group, in its report to the Security Council, explained that the accusation against Eritrea alleging that it sent three aircrafts carrying weapons to Somalia was unfounded and to the contrary external forces have entered Somalia uninvited and against Resolution 1725 (2006)." The timing of Kenya's accusation was very malicious to say the least.  It was designed to thwart Eritrea's successful attempt to set the record straight that it had no interest in supporting extremists anywhere let alone in its neighborhood.   The Kenyan government knows full well that the allegations about Eritrea's support for al Shabaab was peddled by Ethiopia to divert attention from its illegal occupation of sovereign Eritrean territories in violation of a final and binding international arbitration. Kenya's accusation came in November of 2011, a month after President Isaias afworki's succe...

Successive of its leaders have sold Ethiopia as “a Christian nation in the strategically important Red Sea region dominated by nations that are hostile to the interests of Israel and the United States.”  As such, Ethiopia has received enormous financial and military support from the United States. The current minority government in Ethiopia has gone even further by painting  the horn of Africa region as a hot bed of extremists and it has labeled itself as the front to the war on terror. This cannot be any further from the truth.   The fact is that Ethiopia's population of 80 million is evenly split between followers of Islam and Orthodox  Christianity.  That puts the Muslim population in Ethiopia around 40 million.  That is larger than the Muslim population of Eritrea (2.5 Million), Djibouti (880,000), Somalia (10 Million), Kenya (4.5 Million) and Uganda (4 Million).  The Muslim population of Ethiopia is even larger than of Sudan estimated a...