Yamamoto’s Visit To Eritrea

Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Ambassador Donald Y. Yamamoto is scheduled to visit Eritrea, as part of his swing in the Horn between April 22nd and April 26. The itinerary, according to a press release from the State Department, is:

Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Ambassador Donald Y. Yamamoto will travel to Eritrea from April 22-24 for bilateral consultations with Eritrean government officials, to meet with the diplomatic community, and to visit the Embassy’s staff based in Asmara. He will then lead the U.S. delegation to the U.S.-Djibouti Binational Forum April 24-25 in Djibouti, our annual dialogue on matters of political, economic, assistance, and security cooperation. Ambassador Yamamoto will travel to Ethiopia on April 26 to meet with Ethiopian government officials to discuss shared interests and concerns.

According to the supporters of the Government of Eritrea, this is great vindication for its policies because it is concession by the United States that all its prior policies– instigating wars, regime change, sanctions–have failed and the only way forward is engaging with the Government of Eritrea.

This, of course, assumes that most of the people who hear this do not know how to use Google. Because, the Obama Administration had attempted to engage directly with the Government of Eritrea and the reason it couldn’t was because the Eritrean president (a) refused to take the call of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for ten days (Source: wikileaks)  and (b) refused to grant a visa to Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Johnnie Carson in 2009. (Source: VOA)

But, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki has a long history of accepting the exact same offer after rudely rejecting it for months and years and subjecting the country to massive misery because he calculates (properly, it turns out) that people have very short memories. In this case, the US has made no changes to its policies while the Isaias Administration has made one huge change: disassociating itself from Al-Shabab.

While reasonable people may disagree on whether the Eritrean government provided military support to Al-Shabab, what is undeniable is that, from 2006 to 2012, the Eritrean government was the de-facto voice of Al Shebab calling them “Somali stakeholders” even after they pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda. Its media was All Somalia All The Time, much of it embarrassing. After it received the second sanction (in 2012), it appears to have learned its lesson that that advocating for Alshabab and ridiculing the internationally-recognized Somali government is a dead-end and now its media never mentions Al-Shabab and when it does, it calls them “terrorists” (because its new benefactors, the Saudis and the UAEs call them that.  Its previous benefactor, Qatar, was suspected of being a funding source for Al Shabab)

In any event, in the bilateral discussions promised, Yamomoto is likely to lead with the same topic the US has been leading since 2001. No, it is not human rights. No, it is not democracy. It is, “can you tell us the whereabouts of our two embassy staffers: Ali Alamin and Kiflom Gebremichael?” And the Government of Eritrea will go on its circuitous talk because it doesn’t have good answers–or any answers for that matter–why people, including the embassy staff, continue to rot in prison (assuming they are alive) for a decade-and-half.

Yamomoto is likely to get a more positive input from the diplomatic community in Eritrea which has somehow found a way to fall in love with the fact that it has no freedom of movement and has come to dismiss massive human rights violations against Eritreans (including underage Eritreans) in front of its nose as an “African thing.”

As for faithful implementation of the Eritrea Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC), it is something that the US should have instited on in 2004 and the fact that Ethiopia is now in post-TPLF governance, and the fact that President Trump is instinctively for reversing anything President Obama did AND the fact that his National Security Advisor, John Bolton, went on record (book) opposing the Obama Administration’s about-face on EEBC all bodes well for demarcating the Eritrea-Ethiopia border. But, the Isaias Administration has a sterling record of pulling defeat from the jaws of victory and now we await to see how it will mess this up too.