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CounterPunch
January
24, 2003
Do You Remember
the Last War?
The Holocaust
in the Horn
by THOMAS MOUNTAIN
As the US prepares to invade Iraq I think we should
all ask each other this question: "Do you remember the last
war? The one that took place a little over two and a half years
ago?"
You remember that one dont you? It wasnt
a little war. No, not little at all, it was a great big war.
Probably the last great land war in history. In this war an army
of at least a million invaded a little country, carrying out
a policy of scorched earth everywhere they went. Murder, rape,
looting, planting booby traps in peoples homes and poisoning
the water supplies. They even dug up graveyards and scattered
the bones of war dead in the wind.
Of course you know what war I am talking
about, right? The one where one poor, small country got invaded
and almost half of the people in the country became not "refugees"
mind you, but "internally displaced persons"? That's
right, almost two million people were forced from their homes
by this war and you know which one I am talking about...right?
No, not the Kosovo war, not the war against Yugoslavia. Only
800,000 were "internally displaced persons" in that
one. No, I am afraid that I am talking about the war where the
little country being invaded had the UN put an international
arms embargo against them. Ring a bell? No?
How about the war where the big country
that invaded the little country was "allowed" to divert
at least $3 billion in western aid to arms purchases? Aid that
was supposed to be meant for some 15 million people facing famine?
Start to ring a bell? Where the big country
went on an arms shopping spree noted in all the "Centers
for Stategic Studies", spending hundreds of millions, even
billions of your tax dollars in Russia, Bulgaria, Israel and...North
Korea? Now you remember, don't you, how US and EU aid got converted
to hard cash to buy weapons from that member of the Axis of Evil,
North Korea?
Where the latest Soviet era upgrades
got bought, enough to arm 15 armored divisions with the latest
non-US hardware money could buy?
Still don't know which war I am talking
about? The one were waves of invading soldiers attacked trenches?
The one were at least 150,000 soldiers died in a matter of weeks?
You mean you missed all the television footage of lines of dead
soldiers stretching off into the distance, dessicating in the
desert heat?
By now you probably think I am making
this all up, that this never happened, not in the last 2 or 3
years. How could it have happened and you never heard about it?
The war I am talking about I prefer to
call the Holocaust in the Horn--the Horn of East Africa. It's
one of the largest covert military operations in history. The
war known so disengenously as the Ethiopian-Eritrean "border
war". The war where the CIA set out to get rid of a pesky
little independent role model without generating any bad publicity.
Where the little country that got invaded is still blamed for
the crimes committed against her.
Where the pretext for the invasion by
Ethiopia was supposed to be a "border dispute" that
some how got out of hand. That little, resource-poor nation Eritrea,
population 3.5 million, supposedly instigated a war with giant
Ethiopia, population 60 million, with the largest, best equiped
army in Africa ?
Yes, that war.
Maybe if we had cared enough to learn
what really happened in that war we wouldn't be about to let
the US go start another one. This time with another little country
in the desert who for some reason or another does not meet with
the approval of those whose judgement we must never question.
So when I ask you if you remember the
last war, and you don't, then maybe it's time to start paying
closer attention to what is going on in the world.
At least the world's wars, anyway.
Thomas C. Mountain is a human rights organizer in Hawai'i. He can
be reached at: tmountain@hawaii.rr.com
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