The predecessor of today’s African Union, the Organization for African Unity, OAU, was launched in 1963 with the glorious goal of uniting Africans to help liberate the continent from colonialism. Unfortunately, despite the dreams of Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture and others, reality quickly showed its face and the dream turned out to be a fantasy.
Why do I say this? Because the OAU was founded in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where the US-backed compradore Emperor Haile Sellasie regime was actively engaged in a counter-insurgency war against the Eritrean Liberation Front fighting for independence from…Ethiopia! To put it simply Addis Ababa, Ethiopia was the headquarters of the OAU which was formed for the purpose of ending colonialism in Africa all the while Ethiopia was killing Eritreans in an attempt preserve its control of its Eritrean colony.
Yet this hasn’t stopped all to many Africans and blacks in the west from continuing to propagate the line that the OAU, and the African Union that took its place were and are anti colonialist by every year celebrating African Liberation Day on the anniversary of the founding of the OAU.
Being that Eritrea is the only country in Africa that won its independence on the battlefield by defeating the Ethiopian ruler Haile Mengistu Mariam in 1991 and subsequently running Mengistu the butcher out of Ethiopia on the wings of a US military jet it is important to take a deeper look at Eritrea and its history of problems with the OAU and todays AU.
One of the best places to look at the corruption and bootlicking role of the AU is when it guaranteed the Algiers Peace Agreement between Eritrea and the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) regime in 2002. This took place after the TPLF regime had launched a war in 1998 in what was ultimately a failed attempt to re-colonize Eritrea. Despite major US help, both with funding, arms and intelligence in support of the TPLF, the western backed TPLF invasion of Eritrea was defeated by the Eritrean Defense Forces in 2000 at the battle of Tsorona.
After the defeat of the TPLF invasion followed by two years of negotiations a “final and binding” peace agreement between Eritrea and the TPLF was signed in Algiers on Dec. 12, 2002. The AU, alongside the EU, UN and the USA all promised in writing to enforce another “final and binding” agreement with UN sanctions if either party violated the deal. Part of the deal was to enforce a border demarcation between Eritrea and the TPLF, to be carried out by a supposedly neutral party overseen by the UN because the “border dispute” allegedly being the reason for Ethiopia launching its invasion of Eritrea in the first place.
Like what the world has witnessed in Ukraine regarding the war against the Russian people of the Donbas by the CIA coup government installed in Ukraine in 2008 the western powers had no intent in honoring the Minsk Agreement they “guaranteed”?
It turns out the AU really had no intention of enforcing the deal with the TPLF, following meekly in the footsteps of its masters in the west. What could the AU do, bite the hand that feeds it for the EU is the majority funder of the AU. And could the AU seeks sanctions against Ethiopia where it made it’s home from its birth and which it had help glorify with blatant falsifications of history claiming Ethiopia had never been colonized?
The AU literally never lifted a finger to see the deal implemented and allowed the TPLF to continue to violate the deal until November 2020 when Eritrean fighters, at the request of the new Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed intervened in Ethiopia after the CIA instigated coup attempt by the TPLF in 2020. While destroying the backbone of the TPLF terrorist army Eritrea liberated the town of Badme and its surrounds, which had been awarded to Eritrea by the “final and binding” border demarcation deal later signed, again, with a promise of enforcement by the AU, EU, UN and the USA.
Today is should be clear for all to see that the purpose of the “final and binding” peace deal between Eritrea and the TPLF regime was not to bring peace to the Horn of Africa, just the opposite, rather to help the TPLF regime to lick its wound suffered in its defeat by Eritrea and consolidate its rule in Ethiopia while continuing to be the US policeman on the beat in the critically strategic Horn of Africa.
And where is the AU in all of this? I guess you could say its silence proven golden for it has received billions of dollars from the EU and USA over the past twenty years for loyally keeping its mouth shut about the crimes committed by the TPLF.
Today, the AU leads delegations of African leaders to sit down with the criminals in the US government to talk about whats best for Africa? How the US is blackmailing Zambia and DRCongo into giving the US all of their cobalt and copper? How the US will not restore free trade access to the US with Ethiopia unless the CIA is given control over the supposed “investigation” into crimes committed in the war in Tigray from 2020-2022. If what the CIA through its mouth pieces in the western media has been saying is anything to go by, a whole cesspool of lies will be spewed about fabricated crimes by Eritrea and Ethiopia in Tigray. And the AU remains party to all of this, the judas goat leading the African sheep to slaughter in Washington DC.
There was a great dream involving the founding of the OAU but that dream quickly ran into the brick wall of reality and was still born at birth, never to actually do anything concrete to help bring about real independence from Africa’ former western colonial masters as well as the Ethiopian home-grown imperialists colonizing Eritrea. Actually the opposite, the AU did what it could to help prevent Eritrea from achieving its independence from Ethiopia and beginning its historic leadership of Africa.
When it comes to the African Union its not about the dream, its all about the reality of a compromised, corrupt, subservient organization.
Views expressed the author’s own