On Tuesday, October 2, 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that has the potential of harming U.S. national security interests in the volatile region of the Horn of Africa. Sponsored by an African-American Congressman Donald Payne (NJ-D), the bill essentially threatens to stop military aid to Ethiopia. At the same time the, U.S. Department of State is considering listing Eritrea as a state sponsor of terrorism. At the same time, Somalia teeters on the brink of a kind of anarchy that only a Taliban-style flogocracy can manage to arrest. And then there is Darfur.
Wake up America! Your national security is being held hostage by a group of Ethiopian American lobbyists whose only agenda is to seize power in a struggle that began thirty-five years ago on the campus of Addis Ababa University. And because one group of students went to the bush in a seventeen year struggle against the military regime of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam while others fled to the far corners of Washington, DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco and elsewhere, your security is being traded to promote a “regime change” for the benefit of a few Ethiopian Americans who now want Ethiopia back.
Who are the allies of this group of Ethiopian Americans? Eritrea, the country to the north of Ethiopia that the U.S. is considering listing as a state sponsor of terrorism. And of course, the recently defeated Somalia Union of Islamic Courts—the Taliban-style flogocracy. Other allies include the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) whose leaders are implicated by the United States as the very same terrorists who blew up the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
And let us not forget Congressman Donald Payne and his advisor, Mr. Ted Dagne. Mr. Dagne, although hired by the Congressional Research Service to produce independent and objective research to assist the Congress in making informed policy, serves as Mr. Payne’s personal advisor on all matters relating to the Horn of Africa. Mr. Dagne is himself an Ethiopian American who, coincidently, was one of those Addis Ababa students who fled to the United States. Sympathetic to both Eritrea and the Union of Islamic Courts, Mr. Dagne provides the kind of advice to Congressman Payne that serves the interests of his own political agenda—an agenda that hardly speaks to the interests of all the American people.
There you have it, America. U.S. foreign policy is in the hands of a few hyphenated Americans who want to go home in style—as a Head of State. And Congressman Payne? What’s in it for him? Perhaps he wants to go down in the history books as the first Congressman to successfully challenge the sovereignty of an African country that had remained independent for three thousand years. Well done, Congressman Payne.
W Asa
Oct 05, 2007