The recent disagreements between Germany and Eritrea are probably only an episode of a much longer history, which began a long time ago and still far from ending. Certainly relations between the two countries will not improve until Germany adopts a more constructive behavior.
by Filippo Bovo
In recent days, both in Berlin and Asmara, aroused the intensification of relations between the governments of Germany and Eritrea, first with a declaration by the Bundestag Development Committee, decidedly very critical of the government Eritrean and its willingness to collaborate with Germany and Europe, and therefore with an even more severe reply by the Embassy of the State of Eritrea in Berlin, released by the Shabait government agency. As reported by the Eritrean authorities, in its conclusions on “economic cooperation with Eritrea”, the Bundestag Development Committee literally did everything to insult the Eritrean government, not hesitating to resort to false data. and tendentious and even going as far as to incomprehensibly put other issues in the background which it would certainly have been much more urgent and sensible for Germany to deal with, such as the emergency from Covid-19.
The Bundestag Development Committee, for example, “sees no possibility of bilateral development cooperation” simply because “the Eritrean leadership rejects any form of cooperation”. Not only that but, again according to the Committee, there would even be a real lack of Eritrea of ”interest in improving trade relations, although it has the right to benefit from the exemption from customs duties”, but which moreover “because of serious human rights violations, Eritrea does not meet the requirements for German bilateral cooperation. ” However, these declarations are wrecked in the face of evidence of other facts: from the experience so far conducted, in fact, it has always been Germany that has slowed down and put continuous preconditions to continue cooperation, even when an Eritrean delegation had visited Berlin with excellent prospects and potential to be exploited for the future. To be silent, then, of the continuous courtships that Germany has made for a long time to the Eritrean authorities, even with visits by their ministerial personalities to Asmara, even in that case at least apparently harbingers of good premises.
It should also be added how Eritrea has entertained and continues to calmly continue to maintain commercial relations with various European countries, including Germany itself, with which, however, there was a sharp cooling of these exchanges when, in 2009, the US State Department exercised on Berlin of explicit pressure to cut off an economic negotiation on which the German and Eritrean diplomacies had been working together for a long time before the birth. It was a decidedly advantageous project for Germany, which could have imported copper at advantageous costs from Eritrean mines, which at that time had already risen to decidedly sustained market values, and extremely important for its industry, in addition to participating in the processing of gold in the Bisha plant. There was a financial consortium formed by the German Development Bank and the IDC of South Africa, and it was practically all ready but, due to the American appeal, everything was revoked at the last minute. With some malice, the Eritrean Embassy in Berlin thus wanted to remind the German government of the not-so-distant episode, adding that abundant mention can also be found in the Wikileaks cables.
There is also another knot that has weighed heavily on relations between Germany and Eritrea, and consists of the fact that Berlin has supported until the last moment the previous Ethiopian government led by the Popular Liberation Front of Tigray, responsible for the war of aggression against Asmara of 1998-2000 and that even after, despite having signed the Algiers Agreements, it violated its contents by continuing to occupy the Eritrean border areas which instead it should have immediately evacuated, as required by the UN delegated Commission precisely to trace the precise demarcation. Obviously, it was not only a political support, but also a military one, given that in all these years Germany has supplied with its war industry the Ethiopian arsenals of armaments probably also used in other contexts,
Finally, as the note of the Eritrean Embassy in Berlin correctly points out, German and the EU as a whole also continue to encourage the emigration of young people from Eritrea (as well as from the rest of African countries) with the policy of easy and facilitated “asylum applications” represents a further low blow, aimed at impoverishing the country as well as the rest of the Continent of the workforce and its human resources, inevitably compromising its future. In short, it is difficult to have constructive relationships with those who, in reality, do everything to work in the opposite direction.