The United States needs to remain allied with a strong Ethiopia, nearly as much as Ethiopia needs continued support from the U.S.

Ethiopia is at the heart of Africa's Horn. A mountain fortress-nation, today, as so often in the past, it is surrounded by chaos. To the north is Eritrea, Ethiopia's break-away province, now an independent (but probably untenable) state. To the west, war-wracked Sudan. To the south, Kenya, which just exploded into ethnic violence following presidential elections. And on the eastern border is Ethiopia's long-time foe, the failed state of Somalia. The United States has provided support and aid to Ethiopia ever since the communist dictatorship of General Mengistu fell in 1991, but should the U.S. continue to ally itself with a country that has been accused of violating the human rights of some of its citizens? I believe that we should, and that we must.

To properly evaluate the question, though, it's important to weigh the gravity of the human rights violations, the strategic relevance of Ethiopia to the U.S., and the relationship between the two countries.

The Ethiopian government has been accused of harassing, arresting, and torturing members and sympathizers of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), a Somali separatist group, as well as restive members of Ethiopia's largest ethnic group, the Oromo, in the south. Historically, these separatist movements arise from the foreign policy strategy of Emperor Menelik II, who ruled Ethiopia in the late nineteenth century. As colonial powers swallowed up surrounding areas and began to eye the Ethiopian highlands greedily, the Emperor went on the offensive. He conquered and annexed the lowland areas to the south and east of the heartland, incorporating them into his empire, and thus creating a buffer zone between Ethiopia proper and the encroaching British and Italian colonists. Problem solved- Ethiopia was the only part of Africa that was never truly colonized by Europeans.

The solution to Menelik's problem, though, has created a host of new problems for his successors. The newly-annexed areas were home to primarily Muslim and animist tribes of nomadic pastoralists, members of the Somali, Oromo, Sidama, and other peoples ethnically and linguistically unrelated to the Orthodox Christian Amhara and Tigrayan rulers. Now, more than 100 years after their incorporation into the Ethiopian Empire, the Oromo and Somali still want out. In today's climate, the so-called

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