Mereja Forum

[sesame]

Although this is funny and describes what Tsadqan said, still even it had been the old war that the rag-tag militia knew, the Agame record is horrible. In 2 years of war with Eritrea, they sacrificed over 130,000 Ethiopian lives. The Agames invented a strategy of using people, known as fenji-regatch, to clear mine-fields. It was the hapless Tsadqan who was responsible for the huge defeat at Tserona. That the TPLF expected this failed general to lead them to victory tells the whole story about their cluelessness.

World news
Human waves fall as war aims unfold
Ethiopia's Tigrayan-dominated regime wants a path to the sea - through neighbouring Eritrea
By David Hirst in Tsorona, on the Eritrean-Ethiopian border
Tue 18 May 1999 01.24 BST

The Ethiopian [TPLF] commanders' strategy was simple. Deploying tens of thousands of barely trained recruits along a 3-mile front, they drove them forward, wave upon wave, with the sole mission of blowing themselves up on minefields until they had cleared a path to the Eritrean front line for better trained infantry, mechanised forces and armour.
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Nothing illustrates its unsustainability like the horrors of Tsorona. If the conduct of war is a measure of a government's fitness and ability to rule, then Tsorona is a terrible indictment of the TPLF. It was Oromo peasants it selected as human minesweepers, and Tigrayan officers who shot them from the rear. Yet it showed hardly less contempt for its own people. Local Tigrayan villagers were pressed into that suicidal baggage train, and mainly Tigrayan soldiers died in the tanks that were entrusted to no other nationality.