I agree with most of the readers here that you went too far, and I also think that you should apologize to all eritreans for the German Nazi comments you made.

Obviously, your agenda here is not to bring peace between the two people. What you are trying to do here is to strengthen the mutual suspicion and hatred that hurt both people from advancing their lives positively.

I agree with you about the CAUTION issue, but you could have made your point about it without making a poisonous comments, besides, we all know that we both called each other all kinds of names. Eritreans have legitimate grievances with us too, but they don't seem to be hostages to history, they never complain of the past, and they focus on today and the future.

You are crippled by being a hostage to history, and Your thinking is of the mind of the weak, Woyane, or people with inferiority complex, and you can choose which ever one you want.

This is petty, childish and is a diversion from the real issue, which is the peace and the advancement of both people.

Elias understands what is at stake here and he is openly working very hard to free the Ethiopian people from your masters and to bring peace to the good people of both country. What are you doing to that effect? We know the answer is nothing, except to spew some poison hidden behind a computer.

Word matters, so my advise to you is to stop receiving your talking points from your Woyane masters and try to do something for the good of the humanity.

Thanks Wendim Elias and may peace come upon the Ethiopian and Eritrean people.

It is high time that the so called "intellectuals" (the likes of Wondem Tilahun, if he is any) get away from petty and trivial issues and get focused on cooperation. The poisonus remark that Eritreans call Ethiopians "Adgee or Ahya" does not hold water. If so, does it mean that those Eritreans who grew up in Ethiopia and refered to as "Anbeta Belita" hold grudges against all Ethiopians. I do not think so. I see "Wondem Tilahun" as a fox in a sheep skin trying to change course from the spirit of cooperation rekindled by the efforts of the Ethipian Review.

are you going to apologize to thousands of readers. Nearly all readers seem to agree that you are on the wrong foot. If you have morale and courage I am sure you will apologize for your nonsense piece of writing. I am just outsider and judging by the comment from readers what you wrote is labeled as rubbish and divider.

Thank You Man. Thank you for your comment.
"caution is important in any cooperation, planning ahead for an exit strategy is a quality of political leadership"

Please guys look at comment # 16 above. Please don't be suspicious too much. Otherwise we cann't move an inch. Above all if we have a party that we trust and support, we should be confident on the leaders. Thinking that they may be deceived by Isayas is like assuming the opposition leaders have a lesser intelegence than Isayas.
First be confident on the quality and commitment of the leadership and approch Isayas with caution until such time that mutual understanding is developed.

God Bless All of Us. (including Arbegnaw Elias)

Why beat around the bush? Why not declare your alliance with weyanes condemn any genuine ethiopian forces that is seeking support from Eritrea. You see, you problem is you think we all born yesterday… Elias has one stand and that is the current vampire regime could only be eliminated by talking the language it understands… and he advocates that any ethiopian force that seeks support from Eritrea or any other neighbor country has a legitimate right to do so. The very people you are indirectly protecting came to the helm through the help of the same Shabyai! The funny thing is you also repeated Aboy Sbehats' sales pitch i.e., Eritreans have been brainwashed to believe that they are superior! Wow, on that line , you couldn't even camouflage it. You are just another woyanne!

In all circumstances, good or bad, favorable or unfavorable, a seasoned journalist never misleads his readers intentionally with unsubstantiated information without first sending the raw material – the first draft of the report – into a filtering machine: the editing process; then we the customers, the readers, will get the final product – the news.

We know people have the power of tastes, and if the tang of the news is tasteless, has no spices in it, then the people will not consume it.

A journalist may have his own reason and judgment of reporting news the way he sees it, not necessarily the way we the readers see it, and some of us may or may not agree all the time with him, and that is okay for the true journalist.

For Wondem Tilahun, perhaps a one-year fan of ER and a fan of another media for a number of years, the main argument is about the trip to Asmara, Eritrea, by two different Ethiopian individuals at different times with or without the permissions of their own organizations.

I don’t have the slightest clue why Ato Iyasu went to Asmara, and what his mission was except that he mentioned to VOA that he had gone to Asmara to see Issayas Afeworki because he had never seen him since 1970s in Sudan. If that is the only reason he went to Asmara, then his mission remains obscure to me, and perhaps to many other Ethiopians, too. But Elias Kifle’s mission to Asmara is not a surreptitious one; it has been an open mission different from Iyasu’s.

The six page video interviews Issayas Afeworki contributed to Elias Kifle and Sheleshe Tilahun justify the clear missions of the two Ethiopians: Elias and Tilahun. From these lengthy and yet very productive interviews I have come to know that Issayas Afeworki is a committed leader with a vivid mission to help Ethiopia overthrow its oppressive and tendentious ruler. Issayas wants to have a close working relation with a future strong Ethiopia. And the help that he has been giving to various Ethiopian political organizations to remove the Woyanne government from power is not for a bargain to get something from Ethiopia. He wants to see the unity of Ethiopia, not its disintegrations.

For getting such valuable information from the President of Eritrea, Elias Kifle has contributed indispensable services to his country, Ethiopia.

The second argument Ato Tilahun has raised is that Elias Kifle has belittled Mersha Yoseph in favor of Iyasu, and, according to Tilahun, Mersha has become a scapegoat for criticizing Iyasu’s trip to Asmara without the permission of his organization.

The third argument Tilahun is making is that once upon a time Elias Kifle used to like Engineer Hailu, but later he changed his mind and became a friend of Dr. Birhanu Nega.

As I said earlier, a journalist’s view is not necessarily the views of all his readers, and we cannot expect a journalist to cover everything and to make everyone happy; therefore, favoring one person and disliking the other one does not make Elias Kifle a wavering journalist rather a winnowing machine that separates the chaff from the grain. In this case, either Dr. Birhanu Nega or Engineer Hailu Shawl may have been chaff or wheat, and it is up to Elias Kifle to identify the grain from the straw.

It would be naive to ignore the fact that there is a mutual suspicion among the political elites on both sides tracing back to about four decades. The question is, how many more decades should we keep it going?

In my view, Eritreans took constructive steps to mend the relations with their Ethiopian brothers as can easily be verified as follows:
1. After TPLF lost its border claims in the legal battle, it did everything to reconcile with Eritrean government. TPLF declared at the end of 2004 that it will accept the border ruling and give economic concessions to Eritrea if the later facilitates a graceful exit (look into Zenawi's papers addresses to TPLF cadres at that time). Eritreans would have used the opportunity to get short term benefits out of this game, but they rejected TPLF's offer in totality.

2. After the 2005 elections, Eritreans recognized the choice of the Ethiopian people, eventhough it meant that the winners were not their favourites. They fully knew that the CUD was an Ethiopian nationalist party who had demands that are not aceptable to Eritrea. Despite these differences, the Eritrean government attached more importance to the will of the Ethiopian people. We all know that Eritrean media served as the voice of the Ethiopian people following the November 2005 massacre. Many people who fled from the TPLF onslaught took shelter in Eritrea.

3. Eritrea is playing a big role in bringing the ethnic organizations with which it has good ties into main stream Ethiopian politics. It is a public secret that few influential individuals pursuing seccessionist agenda blame Eritrea for this. In some cases, the label 'the Asmara clique' is reserved for leaderships of ethnic fronts who would see themselves as part of a democratic Ethiopia.

On the other hand, if we want to stick with the negative aspects, it may not be difficult to write a whole book about the wrong doings of the EPLF before and after 1991. However, I am not aware of any political party (at least the veterans) who has the moral authority to do this.

As a forward looking person, the positive sides outweigh my misgivings. We should consider the initiative of the Eritrean government as a turning point and a new opening.

After all, who else will benefit from mutual hatred and suspicion other than incompetent and bankrupt segments of our society?

Elias is blessed by his free and independent conscience. He is devoted only serving the true cause of Ethiopia and Ethiopians

Keep the heat up on all pesudo patriots Elias!

It never fails to amaze me how some Ethiopians, particularly, those in the Diaspora who apparently have never had had the pain of enduring 30 years of bombing, burning and mass killings the Eritreans had suffered because of the misguided and myopic egos of the Ethiopian rulers. Wendem Tilahun is living in the cocoon nest of the past where unfortunately some Ethiopians, especially the Weyane supporters, have refused to see the light at the end of the tunnel. That light is not flickering any more, but is glowing brighter by the day, thanks to the realistic stand of many Ethiopians who have reached the inevitable conclusion that there is much to be gained by working with their kinsmen in the north than to antagonize each other. When one thinks about it, that is not such a great discovery at all; and one does not have to be a brain surgeon to arrive at that logical conclusion.

The successive Ethiopian leaders have waged war after war in a futile attempt to subjugate the Eritrean people. They did this with the help of foreign powers of one kind or the other. As a result of these unprecedented massive forces the Ethiopians had at their disposal, the Eritreans were the recipients of widespread bombing, mass killings, wholesale village and livestock set alight, many times including women and children burning alive. Sadly, the Ethiopian Diaspora were no were to be found expressing solidarity with the Eritrean people. Those who cared to write some pieces were invariably solely supporting and echoing the “Victory”, proclaimed by the Ethiopian regime of the day.

But, once the Eritreans were able to achieve their independence through untold level of heroism and hard to believe sacrifice of many of their best, they decided to let bygones be bygones and magnanimously stretched a working hand with their Ethiopian cousins. But as it takes two to tango, that wise window of opportunity for perpetual cooperation and peaceful coexistence did not last as most Eritreans and Ethiopians had hoped; and vanished in thin air.

So, are we, both Eritreans and Ethiopians, benefiting or hurting by such short sightedness? Thus, people like Wendem Tilahun need to wake up from their all night slumber and address the burning issue of liberating Ethiopia from the jaws of Weyanes and its many handlers instead of a veiled attempt to rekindle an old wound that should be left to heal.