As a daily reader of Arab News, it was hardly possible for me to miss your Dec. 6 edition, which bore a very prominently placed letter by an anonymous reader, who asserted that "Selassie did liberate Eritrea."

I send this letter not as an attempt to prove an already unequivocally proved fact or disprove an allegation because the truth is too evident as the event has been witnessed by many who are still alive leaving no room for research and historical evidences or claims.

Thus the assertion that "Haile Selassie did liberate Eritrea" can be made due to lack of knowledge of the historical facts or just as a baseless statement to arouse vague arguments. I doubt if the 'reader' knows that Eritrea had political parties and an elected Parliament to whom the government was liable at the time when Ethiopia had not heard of these institutions. More importantly, Eritreans had in addition to that, their own national flag.

Can anyone, be he a historian or of whatever status including the ‘reader,’ prove to us that Haile Selassie liberated Eritrea, established the Parliament and government there and gave the Eritreans their own national flag?

On the other hand, the statement by your reader that Eritrea became part of Ethiopia because 52 Eritrean elders agreed on that decision is a clumsy explanation of a very important phase of the Eritrean history of which I am sure the anonymous 'reader' has no idea. Eritrea has never been a sort of a village to have its destiny decided by elders.

I believe that your anonymous reader seems to be one of those Ethiopians of the 50s-60s who believed that everything in Ethiopia is done by Haile Selassie because they considered him to be a demigod of sorts to the extent that there is a cult known as "Rastaferrians," the term being driven from Teferri, which is the name of Haile Selassie before he became king. In fact I had heard a joke when I was in Addis Ababa, that "most Ethiopians have not seen their king except on paper." It was because whenever he ventured to go outside in an open convertible, surrounded by motorcade, the people lining the streets he passed through would bow down as a sign of reverence. By the time they raised their heads, they found that the motorcade had vanished leaving everyone wondering how His Majesty looked like in blood and flesh.

My point is that the 'reader,' whether he is anonymous or fictitious, has raised up the issue for no reason other than the reasons I stated above. — Abdulgadir Ismail, by e-mail