[.ca] I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small ... (ISBN 0060780924)

must reading for anyone who cares about geopolitics:
As the world ignores yet another war in Central Africa, maybe they ought to read this book on a pretty much previously ignored part of that continent and its wars. I had read Wrong's book on Central Africa (In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz) which is why I went for this one. Having said that, this is a much denser read. Chapters drag on but do stick with them as Wrong really does come up with great insights and detailed info on what exactly went on with Eritrea's struggles for independence. What I also love about her writing is it does not come from some bleeding heart liberal nor pro-war neo-con stance. She writes almost matter of factly yet is able to make you feel as if you know (maybe not understand) all the characters right down to the foot soldiers or today's taxi drivers or market vendors that shaped, and continue to shape, the region. The only thing I can add is this book should be required reading for every single citizen in the Western world. Maybe then, we'll start demanding our politicians wake up and make better geopolitical decisions.

SMALL COUNTRY, BIG HEART ACHE:
I do not know where to begin to praise this important book. The author, Michela Wrong, is a British writer who is passionate about Africa. She has spent a decade traveling around the continent and has written extensively about it for Reuters and the BBC. Absolutely, she knows her stuff and keeps the reader astonished with what she has learned. Ms Wrong's book is about the sad little country of Eritrea, the Biblical land of the Queen of Sheba. But it is also about the utter failure and betrayal of the United Nations to keep its promises to this country that was forced to wage so many destructive wars to keep its independence. Before the United Nation's miserable failures in Sudan, Dafur, Rwanda, Serbia, etc, there was its model disaster in Eritrea. And before the UN, there was Italy and its colonies in east Africa of which Eritrea, now regarded as a basket case, was once the most modern on the continent. Defeated at the end of World War II, Italy also lost its small colonial empire. The victor, Great Britain, picked Eritrea clean and sold off its factories and infastructure for scrap, leaving its people destitute with nothing to build a real country on. Shortly thereafter, the English dumped the ex-colony, allowing the UN to betray its promises and make way for Ethiopia to absorb Eritrea as a province. Hence the beginning of the wars. And the famines. And they were very nasty wars. Michela Wrong brilliantly communicates how the minds of the "rebels" worked. We are given an excellent lesson in the world of an underdog who knows it is right. And this confidence in a nobel cause gave the rebels the tenacity to take on not just the corrupt and cynical Haile Selassie, but his superpower backers: the USA and later the Soviet Union, who were using east Africa to fight wasteful proxy wars. I cannot think of any journalist who has been able to give a similar picture of today's celebrity terrorists, al-Qaeda. Eritrea eventually had its day at the UN in New York and made the organization eat crow. But its hard won independence is already eroding and the tiny wars which most of the world does not hear or care about are stirring again. Read this book. It almost makes you want to cry or scream. People should not have to live like this, nor be at the mercy of great powers with big picture self interests that always crush ordinary citizens. Michela Wrong has written a bench mark book about Eritrea and the devastated region around it.