The United States Department of State has issued its annual “Trafficking In Persons” country report where it classifies Eritrea as a “Tier 3″ nation, a dubious distinction Eritrea’s had for five consecutive years.

The State Department attributes this to the Eritrean government’s “strict exit control procedures and limited issuance of passports and exit visas” which have forced those who wish to travel “to do so clandestinely, increasing their vulnerability to trafficking.”

The report estimates that between 166 to 250 Eritreans leave the country every month and that “62,000 Eritreans, including 1,000 unaccompanied minors” live in refugee camps in Ethiopia with a smaller but unspecified number in Djibouti and Yemen.

With respect to abduction for ransom, the report states that international “smugglers and traffickers sought out vulnerable Eritreans in refugee camps, particularly in Sudan, sometimes extorting money from them or torturing them as they were transported through the Sinai Peninsula.”

Victims were chained together, whipped and beaten regularly, deprived of food, raped, and forced to do construction work at gunpoint at smugglers’ personal homes. Eritrean military officers sometimes colluded with Sudanese or Ethiopian military officers to exploit Eritrean migrants. Eritrean military officers sometimes operated within Sudan to abduct refugees from camps, particularly those who voiced criticism of the Eritrean government or were prominent political or military figures.

The report accuses the Eritrean regime of not meeting “the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.”

The State Department uses four categories–Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 2 Watch List, Tier 3–to determine a country’s human trafficking problem.  Categorization in Tier 3 is, as the report explains, “based more on the extent of government action to combat trafficking than on the size of the problem.”

Last year, for the first time since the issue surfaced five years ago, the Eritrean regime seems to have grasped the tier system and decided to at least engage–with the president publicly acknowledging the problem (albeit blaming others for it) and the party’s “mass organizations”  including in their literature human trafficking as a danger Eritreans face.  Nonetheless, the country remains in Tier 3 because, as the State Department says, the regime has not acknowledged its role in human trafficking and that it “lacked understanding of human trafficking, conflating it with all forms of transnational migration from Eritrea.”

Tier 3 nations like Eritrea may be “subject to certain sanctions” including withdrawal of non humanitarian aid  or any “funding for government employees’ participation in educational and cultural exchange programs” as well as “international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.”

Joining Eritrea in the Tier 3 classification are Algeria, Central African Republic, Congo, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, North Korea, Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania, Papau New Guinea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Uzbekistan.

To read the entire report, refer to Country Narratives: Countries A Through F

Reining our Elephant

I want to start this follow-up article by thanking Haile for the following very constructive comments that he posted for the first part:

“I know the topic ICT could be daunting, however your piece has come short in practical appraisal of the net effect of social media (say in the last decade or 5 years.) It uses practically no data to base the assertions made and spends too much time in rhetoric than analyzing the relevant factors (such as barriers, trends, regulations, controls…)…..The topic is very important and timely issue. I would have liked more rigorous treatment of the subject than utilizing it to purely indulge in an opinionated discourse.’’

Granted, much of the article was anemic in substance while at the same time being lax in pointing out the many ‘purported’ short comings. But, as Haile rightly mentioned, it was always going to be an uphill task to try to critically appraise the effects of social media tools (SMTs) on our burning national agenda. The space provided by SMTs is by its very nature social and based on a dynamic two-way interaction that makes it unruly, unpredictable, and very complex to assess. And, unfortunately, our very Eritreaness also adds to the complexness by making this ‘‘social beast’’ more rambunctious.

Besides, the dearth of available material on the raised topic makes tackling the task at hand more challenging. My googling came up with piles of Eritrean WebPages, social networking and multimedia platforms, blogs, and video sharing channels. But the search engine uncovered only less than half a dozen academic articles that tried to make sense out of the Eritrean cyberspace, and almost all these articles were published by foreigners, before 2005, and the focus was largely on dehai.com.

The commenter also remarked about the timeliness and importance of the subject. I could not agree more!

As I mentioned in the first part of this article, the illegitimate regime in Asmara is lying on its death bed. One of the last remaining pillars that continue to hold the roof over its dilapidated power structure is its almost total control of information by its monopoly over mass media; and, as in others, the tide (greatly helped by technology) has long since started to turn against this closely guarded domain too, and more and more Eritreans-at home and abroad- are now starting to surf in the freer Eritrean cyberspace in search of a better alternative for their regular ‘’diet’’ of information, news, commentaries and discussions about Eritrea. The forces of change (organized political parties, civic societies, youth, associations, etc) can capitalize on this largely fortuitous phenomenon. Pragmatic, wise, and strategic use of SMTs cannot only help the latter to consolidate their influence in this crucial sphere, but also to pass on a message to all Eritreans that they are a genuine, authentic, relevant, coherent and serious alternative to the regime that continues to misrule at home.

But the current culture and trend in the Eritrean cyberspace doesn’t give one space for optimism and it leaves much to be desired for. I tried to raise these worrying aspects in my last article by delving somewhat excessively into what may have been an ‘’opinionated’’ critique. But, truth be told, nobody can deny that almost tangible and organic disconnectedness of our politics (online and offline) from the reality of the miserable millions on the ground. There is a gaping and widening chasm between a resurgent online youth activism and the traditional organized political forces; a significant majority remains disengaged, silent, cynical, but watchful; and, I also believe that to a great extent our discourse is a long way from where it out to be.

In the following part of this article I will try to take you on a brief tour through the different stages of evolution of the Eritrean cyberspace. And the rest will be taken up by suggestions into how best we can harness the potential of this unruly ‘’social beast’’. In doing so I promise you (and Haile, particularly) that I will do my utmost to refrain from again unleashing another round of ‘rhetorical’ deluge.

The Eritrean Cyberspace

Eritrea and the Web made their entry into the world stage together in 1991. Sir Tim Berners invented the World Wide Web and set up the first website in 1991, and the internet was subsequently commercialized and became easily accessible to the wider public sometime around 1993. But it was to take another ten years before Eritrea went online in late 2000. And, 23 years after Independence and the commercialization of the Internet, Eritrea’s internet infrastructure remains the least developed in Africa. The 2013 estimates of Budds Comm, the largest telecommunications research site in the internet, indicate that Eritrea has an internet penetration rate of only 8% (i.e.: around 400,000 users out of an estimated population of just over 6 million). The site also shows the penetration rate for mobile and Facebook users as 7% and 0.3%, respectively.

What the above figures make clear is that the virtual space provided by SMTs (Internet, Mobile, Facebook, etc.) remains largely off-limits for the outstanding majority of Eritreans living at home. This also reflects the regime’s dogged and paranoid determination to keep this sector deliberately underdeveloped, and thus unwittingly revealing its weak spot, an almost pathologic fear of the public space.

This is in direct contradistinction to the situation that exists outside Eritrea’s borders. The last decade has seen a phenomenal birth of a vibrant online community of Eritreans going into the tens of thousands and growing. This was made possible by a fortuitous combination of a rapidly evolving and user friendly technological innovation, easy access to these tools, and a resurgent flood of largely youth fleeing population from Eritrea. As such, my discussion on the development of Eritrea’s cyberspace will for the most part pertain to this latter community; and, this evolution can be divided into three phases, each having a set of distinct and different features, including the socio-demographic characteristics and types of SMTs utilized.

Dehai’s Era

In 1992 a volunteer team of few Eritreans living in the USA entered the national record books by launching the first Eritrean webpage: www.dehai.org. This marked the silent and largely unnoticed birth of the Eritrean cyberspace amidst an overwhelming and euphoric feeling of national pride of achievement. The vision behind Dehai’s debut was to bolster this national accomplishment by providing a favorable medium for the diaspora population to engage in the project of nation building. In the words of its founders, ‘Dehai’s objective was to solve Eritrea’s problems by sharing information and proposing ideas, and to foster a speedy flow of ideas to and from Eritrea’ ( Asmerom et al.2001).

Dehai’s inaugural was also significant in another important aspect. The virtual space it created became the first Eritrean public sphere (though limited in scope) where Eritreans can enjoy their freedom of expression. This occurred long before the brief arrival and death of Eritrea’s private press towards the end of the 1990s. Dehai’s Charter states: ‘The purpose of this Charter is to promote freedom of expression and to facilitate an open environment in which members may express a diversity of opinion that is to be both welcome and respected. All subscribers are duty bound to abide by and preserve the spirit of the Charter’ (Dehai 1999).

In her research paper – Diaspora, Cyberspace, and Political Imagination: The Eritrean Diaspora Online- Victoria Bernal writes that Dehai ‘served as the first public sphere for Eritrean politics and fostered the development of Internet intellectuals and a wider public of readers and occasional posters…. and, perhaps most importantly, it has offered a comparatively safe space to develop ideas, perspectives and critiques and to experiment with dialogue across social ruptures, such as those between Muslim and Christian Eritreans.’

But throughout the 1990s Dehai largely remained an esoteric venture of a few educated elites with substantial barriers (foremost being access and literacy) for the ordinary Eritrean. ‘From inception to its heydays during the 1998-2000 border war (with Ethiopia) it was de facto a diasporic cyberspace, but one with an important link to Eritrean leadership’ (Bernal).

On the legacy of Dehai, Bernal writes: Dehai is a labor of love and obsession that was created and has been maintained and developed by its core founders and by its posters who have given large amounts of their time to the site. The social history of Eritrean cyberspace therefore consists of ordinary people inventing a public sphere that made possible the articulation of ideas and sentiments that could not be expressed elsewhere (certainly not with in Eritrea…), and widened participation in debates by linking interlocutors who were unknown to one another and geographically dispersed. Eritreans who work as taxi drivers and parking lot attendants have become pundits and poets online.’

From Ceasefire in Border War to Cyber Warfare

‘One good thing about this war, if there is any, is that we are finally talking openly about what is going wrong.’ This sentence explains best the brutal reality of the period immediately after the cease fire agreement that ended the 1998-2000 Ethiopian-Eritrean border war. They were the words of an Asmarino man, as recounted by Bettina Conrad of the Institute of African Studies in Hamburg, in her academic paper: Out of the ‘Memory hole’: Alternative narrative of the Eritrean revolution in the diaspora.

But the heated exchanges that the end of the war set off were limited not only to what had gone wrong before or during the war. The discourse that the two year war opened up and the crude handling by the regime of the dissent that ensued led to broader and deeper issues. Conrad writes in her research paper:

‘…while the government’s intolerance towards dissenting views had before been masked first by a general ‘selective amnesia’ and self-censorship and later by a war-imposed need for ‘unconditional solidarity’, the post-border war situation for the first time produced an audible and widespread discontent….’opening’ a Pandora’s box of interpretations of the past.’

Reckoning over the just ended war let loose a chain of events that birthed what can be called the second and clamorous phase in the evolution of the Eritrean cyberspace, ending dehai’s quiet dominance, single-mindedness of purpose and the harmony that existed within this sphere. What was a largely spent, marginal, and negligible force made a smooth, effortless, and opportunistic entry into what had become by this time an easily accessible medium; and ever since then the Eritrean cyberspace was never to know peace or calm.

It was as if this virtual space has been impatiently waiting for just any pretext to open up, diversify and ‘’unshackle’’ itself from the self-imposed taciturnity of dehai. Unlike traditional forms of media ( Radio, TV, printed media, etc.) which is a top-down, controlled, opaque, passive form of ‘polished ‘ content communication, social media prospers in a more freer, open, and unstructured environment that is conducive for a bottom-up and transparent communication with a dialectical content and intent. And the post-war period provided the perfect condition for the Eritrean cyberspace to revert back to its amorphous, innate and rather unpredictable form.

This period witnessed a remarkable rise in the number of websites accompanied by diversity in content and presentation. Whereas dehai has mainly been an English language based media with some transcriptions into Tigrigna, this later phase saw a flourishing of a host of different Arabic and Tigrgna language based websites. An EDA page posted in 2004 shows 18 different websites of the opposition camp, and the current link at awate.com shows 35 websites as belonging to the Eritrean opposition, resistance, and others in comparison to 5 websites of the PFDJ and sympathizers (notice the leanness, eh?).

Down below in the real world, inside Eritrea, the regime had instituted a series of repressive measures: dissent was mercilessly quashed, dozens arrested, and the young private media was nabbed in the bud. But the fate of the regime was sealed in the virtual space, and it was always going to be a losing fight. The century’s preeminent mode of communication has already started to level the political field, and unlike in Eritrea where political parties are not allowed, exiled foes of the regime were happily jumping to set up an ‘adobe’ in the virtual space with little difficulty; and, it was from the cyberspace that serious challenge to the regime’s legitimacy and ‘ownership’ of the recent and not so distant history was going to come.

Old and a new set of sub-national political parties, disgruntled top government officials, new civic society associations, and dissatisfied and apolitical members of the general public started resorting to the virtual space to use it as a platform to introduce and promote their different agendas, narrate their competitive versions of history, and substantiate their concerns and claims. Some of these include: nharnet.com and meskerem.com representing ‘hibernating’ ELF factions, Eritrean-kunama.com and farajat.com calling for minority rights, EGS’s eritreanglobalsolidarity.org and emdhr.org that campaign for democracy and human rights, and a host of other more popular web-journals, including this one, with their main focus on news, debates and commentary.

One modest study was carried out in 2007 by a researcher from the University of Glasgow to try to understand the socio-demographic characteristics of the diaspora online community and ways the internet was being used by this community (e.g.: economic, politics, social, cultural, etc.) 700 online questionnaire were distributed with the help of 12 webmasters, and analysis of data from the respondents showed that 82% were male, 67% aged 25-49, 17% above 50, and only 8% under 25. The results also showed that 47% of the respondents had left Eritrea before 1993 and 20% after 2000; and regarding education and occupation, the research showed that 50% of the respondents as having completed university education with 45% having professional or managerial job. One key aim of this survey was to investigate why individuals use Eritrean websites, and the results showed that 92% visit the sites in search of general information about Eritrea whereas 70% associated their intention with current news and regular affairs (Eritrea Diaspora Networks, Dr Emma Stewart.)

The major and all-important achievement of what I had termed the second phase in the evolution of the Eritrean cyberspace is that of accommodating and giving saliency to the public sphere, resulting in a permeating knock-on effect on the on-line and off-line communities. This phase widened the public sphere and opened up the first public arena for Eritrean politics by creating a more pluralistic and independent space for exchange of information, dissent, and debate on democratic procedures and norms. Conditions were also facilitated to start the process of documenting and deterring human rights abuses at home and abroad.

Another noteworthy achievement of this period relates to history. A victor’s version of history has been snatched from the ‘sanitized’ archives of the ruling regime and thrown out into the open; and a heated and acrimonious debate is still going on, with narrators vehemently disagreeing on dates, events, facts, and interpretations. They say history is about part forgetting and part remembering, and the selective side of the history narrators is only going to make it difficult to arrive at the historical truth.

This phase had also its main drawbacks and challenges. The dichotomous nature of SMTs makes it a lethal weapon with disruptive potential, and this period saw the atomization of Eritrean politics and fragmentation of the public sphere. Shirky writes: ‘There’s a fine line between pluralism and cacophony, between advocacy and intolerance, between the expansion of public sphere and its hopeless fragmentation…’ As the online community kept increasing, more and more actors were empowered, the voices got louder, less rational and less civil resulting in the despairing current situation of a ceaseless cyber-warfare with no end in sight.

Another characteristic of this second phase that is reminiscent of the era of dehai was the resemblance of the online community in the two and the persistent barrier issues pertaining to technology, access, and literacy. This observation is partly supported by the research mentioned above which shows a sample online community (2007) of the middle-aged, well established, well educated, and well off diaspora with the young and recent émigrés just starting to appear on the fringes.

Ascendancy of the Youth in the Eritrean Cyberspace

Though the SMTs that ‘leveled’ the political field in the virtual sphere became accessible for the public in the second half of the last decade (e.g. Facebook in 2006, Paltalk in 2007), it was the 2000-2001 tumultuous events in the Arab world that shook up and catapulted the youth into this sphere. Wael Ghonim, cyber-strategist of the Egyptian ‘revolution’, had described their tactics as following: ‘we use Facebook to schedule protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.’

Eritrean youth activists (EYC and EYSC) took cue and started working on a ‘strategy that fits the situation on the ground in Eritrea’ (Daniel Gebremichael in an interview with Awate Team, Feb 10/2012), and on 11/11/11 they took the ‘fight’ home, from the cyberspace into the streets of Asmara, thereby ushering in what I will call henceforth the third and current phase of the development of Eritrea’s cyber-space. They called their campaign initially ‘’empty the streets’’ of Asmara which subsequently they changed into the Arbi Harnet (Freedom Friday) Campaign, by now a popular and household name, with its own website, and scores of dedicated members. A few weeks back these dedicated campaigners, with the aid of Robocalls, managed to send 9390 messages in a single day calling for school and work boycott (www.npr.org).

This phase is still in its developmental stages, but it has filled the yawning gap in the cyberspace, by bringing in the missing link: the demographic and physical energy of the youth, which comprise above 70% of our population at home and abroad. And its entry into the virtual space has dramatically rejuvenated online activism, as shown by a series of grass-roots mobilizations and demonstrations in many major cities all over the world.

Moving Forward

Eventually, it is not tools and technology, but people, organizations, and strategies that will determine the fate of our country. But, through their gradual evolution, SMTs and the virtual space have helped our cause a great deal by facilitating the growth of our online-activist community to the present level. The biggest challenge now is on how to convert this into real political and socio-economic mobilization, a united front of ousting the regime in Asmara, followed by national reconciliation and the institution of democracy and normalcy.

The accumulated effort of many dedicated and committed Eritreans has succeeded in creating a ‘’microcosm’’ of the real Eritrea in the cyberspace, a virtual ‘nation’ that reflects our heterogeneity, dissonances, frustrations, and aspirations. Over the last two decades many devoted and erudite Eritrean writers – with noble, worthy, suspicious, or mediocre character –have shared with their readers their eloquently written and insightful articles on these very pages, and thus giving us and future generation of Eritreans troves of information that will definitely further enrich our rich national treasure. The sojourn into the past beyond the unlocked gates had not been pleasant and it was filled with mixed emotions.

The selective and prejudiced pressure that propels the pen of a narrator will always make it very difficult to arrive at historical truth, if there is ever one. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson writes that ‘national memory is part remembering and part forgetting.’ I think it is high time to arrive at a truce by doing the only sensible thing: ‘…the past remains a contested matter in the Eritrean diaspora and seeking to reconcile the various memories would require some more discussion between the various camps. Most of the parties involved use the Internet or other platforms mainly to monologize. The question is ‘whether diaspora forums’ can really create a sort of transnational public space…This seems to be increasingly the case within the worldwide diaspora’ (Conrad).

One crucial and timely issue that we all can agree upon is that our country has been spiraling on a downward course of decay, destruction and self-mutilation and that it hinges on the verge of implosion; and what is manifestly evident is that the diseases that currently afflict our beloved country have accrued over many decades. And they are variable: hereditary, malignant, infectious, but mostly man made, all requiring utmost care and a combination of different tested approaches.

Neither our hopelessly fragmented and hyper-polarized political system nor our resurgent techno impressionable youth can profess to have a ready remedy. This mammoth task will even challenge the best among the best of leaders, and what we currently have are far from average. This work is going to require the collective and conscientious effort of each and every one of us.

SMTs and the virtual public sphere are specially placed to help us in our struggle. Through a focused and reasonable discourse they can have a cathartic effect on the past and thus helping us to reasonably deal with the re-surfaced demons (and angels) of that period of our history. Social media can also immeasurably support to sustain the nascent online activism, engage and mobilize the cynical and disengaged, bring closer the democratic forces, and reinvigorate and expedite the struggle for peace, freedom, dignity, justice, democracy, and development.

10 Ways SMTs can help Influence the Struggle for Democratic Change.

1. Prioritizing and Setting the Agenda for National Debate. Much has been written about our recent past and present. The aspiring need of the overarching majority is how to bring about change! SMTs can help up disentangle the frustratingly entwined past, present, and future. This will to a large degree depend on the wisdom, boldness, and leadership quality of our elite. It will require the willingness to show self-restraint, exercise self-responsibility, engaging in intensive interaction and communication, and setting an example by sharing this virtual space in the spirit of mutual security and common future.

2. Use Social Media to Coalesce the Resurgent Youth Activism. The youth of Eritrea precariously stand at a historical junction, that of the past, present, and future. They are not impaired by the added burden of historical luggage, but they do have an existential political and socio-economic stake in the future. Their fragmentation will not help the national cause. The current online activity, properly utilized, can greatly help the momentum for a united youth voice, thus giving it the necessary and crucial weight to pressurize the disjointed forces of the political opposition and encouraging the forces of change at home.

3. Using Social Media as ‘’Trust Filters’’ for Politicians. For many years now, we have been witnessing so many alignments and re-alignments, sporadic meetings and conferences, and pious declarations and press communiqués. SMTs can be effectively used to destroy or re-vamp the pervading system that props-up mediocre characters by bestowing on them high-sounding titles with vacuous responsibilities, so that they can go on pretending to be ‘’somebody’’ while delivering nothing. There is a critical need to institute a vetting system and a need to look for fresh blood of leadership with new ideas and values, and capacity for critical and rational thinking (and not just regurgitated nonsense!) Political leaders and aspirants should be persuaded to come forth and expound their ideas and beliefs publicly, intelligibly, coherently, reasonably in such a way that reflects our ethnic, religious, regional, etc. divides.

4. Use Social Media to Evaluate Effectiveness of Political Parties. In the absence of ‘’home-grown’’ opposition, we have now scores of political parties with questionable support base and effectiveness that are mainly out of sync with the majority. Taking care not to reduce debates to personal issues, leaders of these parties should be persuaded and encouraged to come forth, introduce themselves, make known their part agendas, and thus helping to generate interest and following at the grass-roots level.

5. Use Social Media to Reinforce, Strengthen, and Complement Existing Political Institutions. Open a regular forum for debate in the virtual space that can help political actors to exercise, develop, and share a set of accepted norms and behavior that will improve their democratic functioning.

6. Widen the public sphere. There is a great need to adapt social media to our pluralistic society, bring together the linguistic drift (Arab-Tigrgna), and raise the level of civic engagement and consciousness by engaging the watchful majority, including economic, and socio-cultural components of our society.

7. Use Social Media for Direct Mass Mobilization at Home. Adapt SMTs to the challenging situation at home. In his interview with awateteam, Daniel had said: ‘We needed a strategy to enable our people to exercise their rights to protest…the missing link…Arbi Harnet is, therefore, the building block of our long term objective. Communication channels, capacity building, solidarity, and empowerment is what we are injecting into our activism through these evenings of protest.’ There is a need to share experience and sustain and add new momentum by adapting new SMTs to what is already a successful campaign.

8. Establish Contacts with the large Refugee Community in the Sudan and Ethiopia. There is a huge largely forgotten refugee population in these two countries eking out a frustrating life of subsistence, and bringing this community into the virtual world will not only give it hope and recognition, but also help to energize and motivate this formidable force and facilitate its entry in the struggle for democratic struggle. This would require financing and assigning administrators in the different refugee camps.

9. Use Social Media to Intensify the Diplomatic Campaign. What was recently achieved in Canada is a great victory for our struggle. Those dedicated Eritreans who achieved this feat should be acknowledged and encouraged to share their experience.

10. Use Social Media for Regional Constructive Engagement. Our existential diversity should and must be managed without external interference, but responsible use of social media can also help dispel the recurring theme of suspicion and mistrust that prop up whenever one or more of our neighbors are mentioned (especially Ethiopia). Externalization and empty long-winded articles (e.g. the current series running at awate.com) will not solve our problem.

Food for Thought: Reining In Our Elephant

“Can we all get along?’’ This appeal was made by Rodney King, a black man who had been beaten nearly to death by Los Angeles police officers in 1992. He continued: ‘’Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.’’

In order to get along, we need to understand and acknowledge our human limitations. Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist, writes in his book -The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion- that our mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider (1 %!) is our conscious reasoning and the elephant is the other 99% of mental process-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior!

Understanding our intuitive behavior will greatly help us in improving our ‘conscious’ deliberations and discourse.

Thank you for your patience.

Bereket.berhane@gmail.com

Virgil, Dante, Sartre, Milton and James Joyce all took turns describing hell.  But it took an Eritrean, Mulugeta, to surpass them all.  It is just what we Eritreans do, we are special.  This is what hell is like:

“Mulugeta said if he wanted to see his daughters, the traffickers would bring the girls to him and rape them in front of him. There was nothing he could do. They cried for him, but he was forced to watch as they screamed and were violated, stripped and beaten.” 

This was reported by Deutsche Welle on June 11, 2013 about yet another Eritrean victim of “human trafficking.” Now, if you—particularly if you are a parent—were to describe hell, can you envision something worse than what Mulugeta went through? I can’t. He was quoted saying this, through an interpreter, in Israel; that is: after going through hell, Mulugeta has to depend on the kindness of strangers to help him deal with the hangover of his daily hell. 

After I read the article, I packed my bags, headed to the airport and twelve hours later, I was in a Cairo cab headed towards Sinai to rendezvous with the soldiers of fortune I had recruited.  Most are Americans, veterans of the Iraq and Afghansitan wars, but the man in charge was an Eritrean: I can’t tell you his name, let’s just say he was in charge of EPLF’s 1984 “kiya 18 dekayk” commando operation that blew up the Ethiopian birds of destruction at the Asmara airport.  My only job was to give him the money and one instruction: make it painful, make it loud, make it so that henceforth everybody in the world knows that there is a price that will be paid if you mess with Eritreans…

Well, of course not.  Nothing of that sort happened.  I did what Eritreans do nowadays: I took it.  I seethed, I cursed, my blood boiled, my heart raced, but nothing else happened.  I waited for life’s banality to wash over me and for that to happen all I had to do was check what other headlines were competing with Mulugeta’s hell.  The shockingly tragic (“the traffickers would bring the girls to him and rape them in front of him.”) is just an event crammed between the mundane (“Confucius Institute opens in Asmara”) and the depressingly commonplace. (“They were detained on Saturday around Kassala town, said a leader of the Eritrean Islamic Reform Movement, who asked not to be named.”)   There is a strange quality to our lives: it is like being on bus tour and the guide says, to your right is hell, to your left is the absurd, and straight ahead is the surreal world where an opposition leader is asking not to have his name publicized.

It was not always so.

I had a vision of a loud booming man who died in 2009 (RIP) and my mind reeled back to 1995.    We (six of us) are at a friend’s house and he, the man with the booming voice, an Eritrean government official, was doing most of the talking.   He is loud, in-your-face, brutally honest and addicted to insulting and shocking people.  And those were not his only great qualities. This was: “Henceforth!” he declared, “no blood will be shed in Eritrea.  We have bled enough.  If we ever have to bleed, it will be south of Tigray.”

He was saying:  whatever doubts we had about his government’s commitment to democracy, civil liberties, or the free enterprise system–and we did, and the discussion was us pointing out the failings of his government and him dismissing us as know-nothings–we can always count on his government about one thing: it will aggressively protect Eritreans, particularly innocent Eritreans, because Eritrea will never be a war zone.  That we definitely believed.

What happened to us?

Our New Culture of Victimhood And Voyeurism

One of the worst things the Isaias Afwerki regime has committed against Eritreans is to condition them into emphasizing the status of a victim.   I make an effort to understand the thinking process of the Eritrean government on any given topic (a riddle, most of the time) so I read a letter Isaias Afwerki sent the UN Secretary General earlier this year (of course nobody proofread the letter and it had grammatical errors.) In the letter calling for an investigation, President Isaias Afwerki said that human trafficking “was unleashed in tandem with the decision to block the implementation of the “final and binding” arbitral decision of the border dispute, and, is part and parcel of the war declared against the country.”   

Help me out here, but I think the argument of the Eritrean regime goes something like this:

1. The Eritrea-Ethiopia border is not demarcated because they (US and its allies) don’t want it to;
2. This has forced the Eritrean government to maintain a large army indefinitely;
3. Frustrated with this, they (US and its allies) have aggressively courted Eritrean youth to leave their country so that Eritrea cannot defend itself;
4. This has resulted in a large number of Eritrean youth leaving their country;
5.  But the Eritreans who leave their country remain loyal to their “country and government”;
6.  This has frustrated them (US and its allies) even more: that’s why they are trying to deny them the ability to send remittances back home;
7. Many of these Eritreans are victimized by human traffickers;
8. Therefore, it is their (US and its allies) fault.

This line of reasoning makes Eritreans victims—victims of US/UN refusal to compel demarcation, victims of the West’s generous asylum process, victims of the US conspiracy to weaken and starve Eritreans.  The larger the conspiracy, the easier it is to rationalize why you haven’t solved the problem. The new Eritrean breed may, based on causes blessed by the government, be inspired (or ordered) to rise up against some “injustice” identified by the government—border demarcation, sanction, freedom to send money—but is incapable of taking the initiative to rise up against injustice period.

Eritrea’s human trafficking problem via the Sahara desert goes back to at least 2006 when Eritreans began flocking to Libya en route to Lampedusa.  The question then is: why did it take 7 years for Isaias Afwerki to write a letter to the Secretary General? Why did it take Independence Day 2013 for him to use his newly-minted phrase for human trafficking, “flset seb”? Wasn’t he downplaying the exodus by referring to it as a picnic? Why did it take the pro-government Eritreans 7 years to raise the issue?  The answer is that the government (and its supporters) are raising the issue to defend themselves against accusations that they have a hand in it because their policies (which have created a hopeless country) are contributing to it or because some of their military officers are profiting from it.    Their outrage is not that Eritreans are being victimized; their outrage is that the government is being accused.

The Eritrean government owns the lion’s share in the causes that contribute to the Eritrean exodus, and, as a government—whose first priority is to protect its citizens—has the responsibility to address the issue effectively.  Addressing the issue should not be confused with rationalizing it or affixing blame for it but actually solving it.  If Plan A—waiting for the US/UN/Ethiopia to demarcate the border so Eritrea can demobilize its soldiers and re-direct its budget from national defense to productive economy—didn’t work, what is Plan B?  Waiting with more “spirit of rebuff”?  Is seething and watching our blood boil now officially our national policy? 

How about the rest of us? When we are not seething mad, we have developed this strange “tragedy voyeurism.”  We read tragedies, we watch tragedies, we listen to tragedies.  We pass around articles, and audio/video clips of terrible things happening to Eritreans.  Then, we pass judgment on each other based not on our ability to plan solutions or execute them but on the volume of our tears and screams.  

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Virgin Suicides is a story about five sisters—ages 13-17—who commit suicide.  They don’t do it all at the same time—it is a slow suicide that happens in two phases over a year as the entire community is watching.  It is a book about how mundane tragedy (even the most horrific) can be, how you can’t stop a person set on suicide and how there is, sometimes, no wisdom to be gleaned because, as the author says, “all wisdom ends in paradox.”   There is a line in the book when the 13 year old first attempts suicide and the perplexed doctor says “you are not old enough to know how badlife is, why would you try suicide?” She says, ““Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13 year old girl!”   In Eritrea, when we are asked why are you, a nation only 22 years old, committing slow suicide, we tell the world, “obviously, you are not a young nation: you don’t understand the enemies arrayed against us including the unquo Hayal America.”  

WWTD

Here in the US, it is not uncommon to see people wearing a WWJD bracelet.  It stands for “What Would Jesus Do?” and the bracelet is supposed to be a moral and ethical guide for people when they are confronted with a problem for which they have no easy answers.  Ask yourself what would Jesus do, answer it, then do exactly that.

When we were stateless, we relied on the kindness of neighbors and people of goodwill—the people (never the government) of Sudan, the Catholic Charities and other religious institutions—for charity.  But for justice (or vengeance, take your pick) against those who would victimize us, we didn’t beg NGOS: we counted on our liberation fronts.  When we were struck with the massacres of Ona, Sh’eb, Weki Dba, Eritreans didn’t sit around and say, “Ewway, entai’mo kn’gebir? Eh! Edkum trkebkum!” We delivered justice.

I don’t know what exactly we should do;  but  I think one of the questions we should ask is What Would Tegadalai Do? It is a question worth asking because we have asked and failed to answer all the other questions.

salyounis@gmail.com

On April 9, 2012, Awate.com (Gedab News) reported that a class action lawsuits have been filed against Nevsun Resources [i]

Below is a summary of a securities fraud class action lawsuit brought on behalf of those who purchased the common shares of Nevsun between March 28, 2011 and February 6, 2012 inclusive, against Nevsun Mining Company. The plaintiff, claims that Nevsun, in violation of the anti-fraud provisions of the Exchange Act knowingly, or at least recklessly, made materially false and misleading representations about Nevsun’s only revenue-producing property, the Bisha Mine, a purported gold and base metal mine in Eritrea.

Bisha mining company is jointly owned by Nevsun Mining (a Canadian company) and Eritrean mining company (owned by the Eritrean government).[ii]

In January 2013, Human Rights Watch issued an extensive report titled “Hear no Evil: Forced Labor and Corporate Responsibility in Eritrea’s Mining Sector.” The following is what came in the report:

Nevsun’s experiences show that by developing projects in Eritrea, mining firms are walking into a potential minefield of human rights problems. Most notably they risk getting entangled in the Eritrean government’s uniquely abusive program of indefinite forced labor—the inaptly-named national service program. Through this program the Eritrean government keeps an enormous number of Eritreans under perpetual government control as conscripts. Originally conceived as an 18-month program, the national service scheme now requires all able-bodied men and most women to serve indefinitely, often for years and with no end in sight, under harsh and abusive conditions. Those who try to flee risk imprisonment, torture, and even reprisals directed against their families.[iii]

There is ample evidence that Nevsun has long crossed the “risk of getting entangled in” the abusive slave labor program, the Bisha mine is operated by state owned subcontractors whose work force depends on forced labor. This is a breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Canada signed in 1948.

Eritrean workers do not have the right to organize and negotiate their working terms, but are forced to work without pay in gold mines and other construction projects. Ex-victims of slave-labor are scattered all over the world but are very reluctant to speak out fearing retaliation and persecution of their relatives by the Eritrean Government.

Since no one can fight for the rights of the victims better than the victims themselves, we encourage people who have been subjected to forced labor, and those who have concrete information of the matters related to such exploitations and violations, to come forward and present their testimonies either publicly or confidentially.

Testimonies can help hasten the pursuit of justice. Gross human rights violations, crimes and abuses, should not be issues that are listened to and forgotten, but pursued through legal avenues. The ordeal of Eritrean victims is crying for justice and resolution. Those whose labor was extracted forcefully should be able to go after the entities that collaborated with the enslavers.

We also call on Eritrean human rights activists, particularly those in Canada, and Eritrean lawyers, to cooperate in pursuing this issue.

Please contact us at the following address: awateteam@awate.com

[i] http://awate.com/nevsun-and-its-eritrean-bisha-gold-mine-more-class-action-lawsuits-filed/
[ii] Nevsun resources website, www.nevsun.com
[iii] http://www.hrw.org/reports/2013/01/15/hear-no-evil ____________________________________________________

Summary (To read the full copy click here)

1. This action is a securities fraud action brought under Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the “Exchange Act”) and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder by the SEC, brought by Plaintiffs on behalf of a class of all persons and entities which purchased the common shares of Nevsun between March 28, 2011 and February 6, 2012 inclusive (the “Class Period”).

2. Defendants (as defined below) in violation of the anti-fraud provisions of the Exchange Act knowingly, or at least recklessly, made materially false and misleading representations about Nevsun’s only revenue-producing property, the Bisha Mine, a purported gold and base metal (copper and zinc) mine in Eritrea, a small country in the horn of Africa (the “Mine”, “Bisha”, or the “Bisha Mine”).

3. Throughout the Class Period, Defendants represented that the Bisha Mine had approximately 4.651 million tons of gold ore reserves and 919,000 ounces in the mine’s top layer (the Oxide zone), that Bisha was producing 1,000 ounces of gold per day, that Bisha’s gold ore reserves set it apart from competitor mines because Bisha’s gold ore reserves were high quality, abundant and easy to access. Bisha’s gold ore reserves and actual mining and production of gold at the Bisha Mine were material to investors.

4. The Bisha Mine’s gold ore reserves were also important to Nevsun’s partner in development of the Mine, the government of Eritrea. Through the Eritrean National Mining Company (“ENAMCO”), Eritrea owned 10% of the Mine, and at the beginning of the Class Period, was negotiating with Defendants to purchase an additional 30% interest. Bisha’s gold reserves would affect valuation of the Bisha Mine.

64. In December 2007, Nevsun announced that the Company had entered into an agreement with ENAMCO, under which ENAMCO owned 10% of the Mine and agreed to purchase an additional 30% interest at fair value that would be determined at the time of Bisha’s first gold shipment.

65. A mining license for the Bisha Mine was issued to Nevsun and the Bisha Mining Share Company in 2008 and construction of the Bisha Mine commenced in 2008.

66. On January 4, 2011, Nevsun issued a press release and disclosed its “successful first gold pour” at the Bisha Mine.

67. According to Defendant Trebilcock (in an April 14, 2011 presentation at the Denver Gold Group European Gold Forum), the Bisha Mine’s first gold shipment occurred on January 28, 2011 and triggered a 90-day valuation period for ENAMCO’s 30% stake.

68. On February 22, 2011, after a ramp up during January and February, 2011, Defendants caused Nevsun to begin commercial production at the Bisha Mine.

69. At the beginning of the Class Period, on March 28, 2011, represented gold reserves at the Bisha Mine increased by approximately 15%, to approximately 4.6 million tons of gold ore and the Bisha Mine contained approximately 1.14 million ounces of gold (throughout all zones), including 919,000 ounces of gold in the Oxide zone.

71. By the beginning of the Class Period, material negative trends were adversely affecting Bisha’s operations, and red flags had already appeared, that put Defendants on notice that Bisha’s reported gold ore reserves were materially overstated.

72. Unknown to investors by March 31, 2011, Bisha’s Strip Ratio was 4.9, approximately 81% over the 2011 Strip Ratio.

73. Also unknown to investors, Defendants caused operations at the Bisha Mine to mine through the Oxide zone materially faster than reported because there were significant pockets of worthless waste rock, instead of gold ore. The Bisha Mine’s waste rock was placed in waste dumps located to the east and south of the Mine pit.

74. This was material because acceleration of mining through the Oxide zone indicated that Bisha’s gold ore reserves would be exhausted sooner than reported, negatively affecting cash flows from gold sales and the Company’s valuation.

75. Defendants and Nevsun’s senior management at the Bisha Mine had access to the mining statistics and production reports through the Skire Unifier platform and, further, observed these negative trends based on routine reconciliations of actual production to the reported reserves and through the day to day observation of production.

76. Nevertheless, in the face of these material negative facts and red flags, Defendants represented that the Bisha Mine’s gold ore reserves were 4.651 million tons and that the Bisha Mine had 919,000 ounces of gold in the Oxide zone. In truth, at that time, Defendants knew or at least ignored with reckless disregard and failed to disclose that Bisha’s gold reserves were overstated by approximately 1.2-1.3 million tons, or by 35% (an overstatement of approximately 190,000 to 220,000 ounces of gold), Bisha’s Strip Ratio was materially higher than the 2011 Strip Ratio and was materially increasing, and Bisha’s production at the rate of 1,000 ounces per day was unsustainable. These material facts were not disclosed during the Class Period.

77. During April, May and June 2011 (the Bisha Mine’s first full quarter of operations), production trends at the Bisha Mine materially deteriorated. Specifically, Defendants knew that the Strip Ratio further increased and was at 5.1 by June 30, 2011, approximately 88% over the 2011 Strip Ratio.

78. On May 3, 2011, Defendants caused Nevsun to issue a press release that was filed with the SEC on Form 6-K that represented that Bisha continues to have a “strong operating performance” and that Defendants and ENAMCO agreed to “finalize the Bisha purchase price by June 30, 2011”, approximately eight weeks later than previously represented by Defendants.

79. On June 30, 2011, Defendants disclosed yet another delay in the finalization of ENAMCO’s purchase price pursuant to the 2007 Agreement.

80. In August 2011, Defendants and ENAMCO agreed to a purchase price of $253 million for ENAMCO’s 30% stake, resulting in a gain to the Company of $242.5 million.

81. During the second half of 2011 (July through December 2011), known to Defendants but not Nevsun investors, Bisha’s Strip Ratio continued to increase and was 6.6 for the second half of 2011, an increase of approximately 144% over the 2011 Strip Ratio and an increase of 35% since the beginning of the Class Period, and was 5.9 for 2011.

82. On September 2 and 6, 2011, Hardie sold 180,000 Nevsun shares – 100% of his Nevsun holdings at that time – for proceeds of approximately $1.3 million, on trading days when Nevsun common shares traded at or near Class Period high prices ($7.30 per share and $7.27 per share, respectively).

83. On September 18, 2011, Davis sold 224,600 shares at $6.68 per share for proceeds of $1.5 million.

84. Unknown to investors, in September 2011, Vickers, Bisha’s Operations Manager, and Pretorius, Bisha’s Project Manager, left Nevsun/Bisha Mining Share Company, and by November 2011, Rogers, General Manager of the Bisha Mine since 2005, left Nevsun/Bisha Mining Share Company.

85. The loss of these key executives was a blow to Nevsun and another red flag.

86. Also in late 2011, Defendants, concerned about the material shortfall in gold ore production that they had been observing since the beginning of the Class Period, caused two engineering companies, AGP Mining Consultants and another engineering company, to rebuild Bisha’s Oxide reserve model.

88. On November 15, 2011, on a conference call with investors, notwithstanding all of these red flags and negative trends of which Defendants were aware, or at least recklessly disregarded, Defendant Davis represented that “things were going very well” at Bisha and reported mining statistics, but he misled investors by failing to disclose the material negative trends that were negatively affecting the Bisha Mine’s operations.

89. Also, on November 15, 2011, Rogers sold 69,000 shares at $6.00 per share. On
December 1, 2, 7 and 9, 2011 Rogers sold an additional 306,500 shares between $6.00 and $6.05 per share. In total Rogers sold 375,500 shares, 100% of his Nevsun stock, for proceeds of approximately $2.28 million.

92. On February 7, 2012 Defendants shocked investors when, before the market opened, Defendants caused the Company to issue a press release titled “Nevsun 2012 Outlook Including Production Guidance” (“Feb. 7 Press Release”), in which Defendants disclosed, among other things, that Nevsun had materially overstated gold reserves at the Bisha Mine by 30-35% (or by approximately 1.2-1.3 million tons), and that the amount of gold to be produced in 2012 would be about half of what Nevsun previously represented to investors, a condition that negatively affected Nevsun’s cash flows and the Company’s net present value.

96. On February 7, 2012, following the above disclosures, Nevsun’s common shares declined by $1.94 per share on the NYSE Amex, from a closing price of $6.34 per share on February 6, 2012, to close at $4.40 per share on February 7, 2012, a decline of nearly 31% on heavy volume.

Outline:

1. Straw Man Argument;
2. Recycling Gedli;
3. Perils of Dependency;
4. Are we a Failed State?
5. Need for a Transitional Plan

An article appeared on Asmarino.com whose content did not surprise me considering ‘the Sobering Times’ we went through these days. It appears some latter-day ‘activists’ are deliberately confusing themselves in order to confuse matters and create a stage for their Ethiopianist tendencies. For instance, I found it astonishing why someone had to voice his objection over Eritreans singing the national anthem abroad. Why not? Isn’t that our national anthem? Perhaps it would have pleased the writer to hear the Eritrean refugees sing ‘wedefit gesg‘shi wud enat Etiopia’. ‘Anything the government endorses has got nothing to do with us’ mentality is immature, to say the least. If that is the case then we will have to repudiate public holidays just because the regime commemorates them, for instance.

As an expression of their fretfulness those who are being ‘inspired’ and supported by Ethiopia will continue to sink lower as they belabor their neo-Andinetist stand. Just read and learn how they do that – they are raising lurid and sub-national issues such as region, religion and other social deformities our nationalist struggle dealt with effectively in the past.

Those who would like to move house to Ethiopia remind me of the carpetbaggers. I see them as insidious ‘activists’ with questionable objectives meddling in our patriotic politics. We have to stand up to their reactionary social agenda and be counted now. That is where our patriotism comes in.

Another Asmarino.com writer by the name of Ghirmai S Yebio who paraded himself ostentatiously wrote an article under the title of Independent Eritrea, a crumbling nation and a tragedy: ‘The Architects of Destruction’. He preposterously stated:

The quagmire that Eritrea is in today is directly related to what transpired during the 40s, 50s and 60s and the ideological beliefs that the forefathers of the movement espoused.

Doesn’t this sound like the antiquated argument the Ethiopians used to use in the 60s? I am referring to the Eritra l’Areb atsheyeTm … and their Ajewjew argument. This argument is a typical example of the Ethiopia-led campaign which I have been highlighting in my recent articles–a futile effort to render Eritrea history-less by making a mockery of our history. In other words not a smidgen better that the straw man argument.

The logical fallacy of the argument presented is obvious and I am going to hate myself for being lured into this straw man argument – to clarify how real our people’s struggle was in the quest for freedom. There is no need for me to reiterate the fact that Ethiopia was the architect of destruction in our country; however, I just want to use the article as an example why neo-Andinet thinking is prevalent among those with backward-looking attitudes and beliefs.

What are the new perspectives gained by the passage of time–perspectives that attempt to debunk the history of the Independence Bloc? Eritrea’s freedom project started in the 40s and it was completed in early 90s when Eritrea freedom fighters drove the Ethiopian occupying forces out of Eritrea all together. The list of sacrifices Eritreans made to free their country is not for the faint hearted. The author deliberately skips crucial aspects of our history in order to validate his claim–that our forefathers and liberation fronts heralded Eritrea’s destruction. Yes, there was a lot of destruction because war is destructive by its very nature. However, let’s look at the bigger picture–despite Ethiopia’s superiority in manpower and arms, it failed to crush or weaken our struggle. Actually, in the end Eritrean freedom fighters destroyed the Ethiopian army in order to save Eritrea from total destruction. The Ethiopian forces were decimated in all their eight offensives, weren’t they? Throughout the conflict Ethiopia used anti-personnel gas, napalm, and other incendiary devices. And they still lost. Does the author know our history? Does he want us to include this historical fact in his list of myths he listed out in the article? Just because we happen to be struggling with the PFDJ government at the moment we cannot change our history to suit Ethiopianist analysis, can we? I thought the Tekeste Negash theories were dead and buried!

Let me avoid polemics and look at who are the architects of Eritrea’s intended ‘destruction’?

1. As it is well documented, the 40s and 50s marked a drastic rise in banditry for Eritrea. The Shifta, Unionist and Andinet groups worked together to see the destruction of Eritrea. Moreover, there were roles: a) the Ethiopians (through Colonel Negga); b) the religious establishment (through Abune Markos) terrorized Eritreans into submission. How can we forget the fierce and bloody campaigns the Shifta, with the help of Ethiopia, the Unionist Party and the Christian clergy, led against members of the Independence Bloc? Apparently, these issues are not pertinent to the author’s straw man argument.

Does the author realize that governors of Axum, Adua, Shire, Adiabo and many more had links with notorious Shifta leaders like Assresehey Embaye, Ghebre Tesfazion, Hagos Temnowo and the Mosazghi brothers? Besides, many of the Shifta gangs made Tigrai their second home during those turbulent times.

In response to the increasing numbers of Eritreans who wanted to see an independent Eritrea, the operations of the Shifta in the highlands of Eritrea began to accelerate.
Didn’t Eritreans have the right to fight for their rights? The twisted history and dismissive attitude of the writer cannot deal with the reality of the time and what ensued afterwards.

2. I was really saddened by the fact the author chose to desecrate the history of Abdulkadir Kebire. According to him “Kebire never espoused a nationalist agenda beneficial to the Eritrean people at large but rather a narrow agenda based on past grievances.” He concluded his vilification by stating he was ‘killed by an assassin’ … finito! How the bloody hell did it happen? We are talking about one of our giants here, aren’t we?

My fellow Eritreans, one incident that can very well describe the political edge of the fracas that existed then and was a pivotal fixture in Eritrean politics was the assassination of Abdulkadir Kebire, the president of the Muslim League of the Asmara branch. Kebire’s assassination, which resulted in the suspension of the Andinet group, was the culmination of iniquitous politics the Ethiopia-sponsored groups were engaged in prodding members of the Independence Bloc. How and why do you think Kebire was assassinated? He was assassinated in the main street of Asmara on 27 Mar 1949 as he, together with the Muslim League delegation, was getting ready to travel to New York to explain his party’s position against any form of Ethiopian trusteeship over Eritrea. Both Colonel Negga, the Ethiopian Liaison Officer, and Ghebreselassie Garza, president of the Andinet Movement, were implicated in Kebire’s assassination. The British absolved Negga and Ethiopian involvement in the assassination of Kebire. Guess who rescued the Andinet group, the perpetrators? In November 1951, the Unionist Party and Abune Markos both made representations for the successful release of Ghebresellassie Garza and Habtom Araya, ex-President and Secretary respectively of the Andinet Party. Bonds were signed for £500 with two sureties. The sureties were Tedla Bairu, Secretary General of the Unionist Party and Mebrahtu GoneTu, President of the Hamasien section of the Unionist Party, a rich Asmara merchant. Both prisoners were released on 26 Nov 1951.

When the US sponsored federal agreement between Eritrea and Ethiopia was adopted by the UN to have Eritrea enter into a federation with Ethiopia in 1952, a third wave of Shifta activities began to take shape in the country. The aim of the Shifta and their Ethiopian backers was to annex Eritrea with Ethiopia. The remaining few patriots had to be hounded, pushed out of position, and at times eliminated in order to put the finishing touches on complete annexation.

Now you tell me who are the architects of destruction? Eritreans? To me such disclosures are important because they show me the latter-day problems of our society and the gullibility of some sectors of our communities. The neo-Andinet article I mentioned above is a typical example how Ethiopia is walking all over our history with a purpose. To do that, allow me to be rude here, they need the services of our fifth columnists – the likes of Girmai S Yebio, Tesfai Temnewo, Yosief Gebrehiwet, Amha Domenico and others. dey Isayas men yedfrenna’lo! I wish President Isaias had the wisdom to see what he has exposed us to! To a pack of riff-raff! To tell me the ‘irrelevance’ of our forefathers who paved the way for the Eritrean armed struggle is revolting; to tell me the ‘ineptness’ of our liberation fronts is irresponsible; to promote Ethiopia’s interests is simply contemptible.

The president, who has forgotten the way things were and continues to monopolize power by driving away his former comrades-in-arms, associates and confidants is mind-boggling. He is the main culprit in this tragedy. All the miseries we Eritreans are experiencing now are happening on his watch. The disrespect our martyrs are receiving from Ethiopian officials and their marionettes can be traced back to him. The isolation Eritrea is suffering from can also be traced back to him. Who is he left with now? Almost nobody! Some are sidelined (‘frozen’), some are incarcerated, some are driven out of the country, and others are made to expire. Where are the veteran fighters who were with him in Ala? Where are those who took part in the 1977 Congress? If Zewdi, his secretary of 37 years, could only one day tell us the real story of Isaias and the musical chairs he played with the veteran fighters!
The tyrant, just like anybody else, will one day die and his rule will be over, but Eritrea will remain. And it will remain in the hands of Eritreans. However, the death of our martyrs is not death as we know it because it is that very death which should inspire us to look forward to better days. We have to constantly remind ourselves that Ghedli is the basis of our struggle, not Isaias. We relied on our own dexterity to defeat Ethiopia, and now we should think of new ways to reclaim our passion for our liberty. The president exploited ghedli, but we have to recycle it in order to rediscover ourselves. Avoid dependency on Ethiopia all together.
Perils of Dependency

To me debunking the myth that we cannot do without Ethiopian support in liberating ourselves from PFDJ inhumaneness is important. My belief is that we are better off without the Ethiopian ‘support’ because I have seen that very support turn into manipulation. Our weaknesses (discords) made us easy targets–easy to be controlled, easy to be manipulated. If we Eritreans fail to learn the tools of the trade, what it takes to drive the PFDJ lifeless and off the cliff, then we will have to bear the consequences of our failures. If we simply continue to follow our hopes, without any contributions to our campaign – that PIA and his henchmen will one day simply dissipate, then that makes us vulnerable. That is when we fall prey to Ethiopia’s structured deception–I call it the perils of dependency.

Dependency on Ethiopia will just have to run its course, unless we change our course now. We, sitting on the poorer side of the formula, are being locked into detrimental political position. This introduces a paradoxical effect on us. Our campaign will be shunned by folks back home. In a future perspective, Eritrea will have no opportunity to improve the quality of life of Eritreans once sucked in the Ethiopian sphere of influence–a country that is losing tens of millions a year due to lack of access to our ports.

I know this issue of dependency requires deeper studies and careful analysis which I hope we will delve into some day. For now I just want to highlight a few facts: there is a political penetration in our opposition politics by Ethiopia; this penetration is producing an unbalanced structure between our opposition groups and Ethiopia; this imbalance is leading to limitations on self-sustained growth from our side; this limitation is creating certain patterns of woozy relations which is exasperating our people; therefore, we are required to change our ways immediately. We need to articulate our needs on the basis of demonstrable needs of our people and philosophy ascribed by our martyrs–Eritrean solutions to Eritrean problems.

I am tempted to have one more go at those who are depending on Ethiopia to resolve our problems. In order to gain the trust of the yes-men, Ethiopia had to cajole them first and then herd them into its own base. Once in base, it began to introduce them to simple instructions such as walk, halt, jump, sleep…, etc. Soon after that the Ethiopians started using the bridle and then the saddle in order to prepare ENCDC for a mount with the aim of leading them into a gallop towards battle. How?

Declaring Eritrea a Failed State

My fellow citizens, the situation is becoming more menacing than ever, to say the least. Our growing softness towards Ethiopia, our increasing lack of intellectual, organizational and political fitness, is a menace to our security. Not knowing what is going on is a menace to our future.

Here is a sketch how the Ethiopian officials have been dealing with us:

• Entice the opposition groups into Ethiopia;
• Buy the opposition off until they are ensnared and then train them to become Ethiopia’s yes-men;
• Set the stage for infighting and splits;
• Eventually have the yes-men declared as incompetent buffoons;
• Bring other groups (ENCDC and then the intellectual clique, Debrezeit, Smerr…, etc. all Ethiopian products’) while the infighting, splitting and side-lining processes take place;
• Set the stage to sideline the veteran fighters as useless (obstructive) elements; embolden the young to go after the veteran fighters;
• Nurture (concoct) a network of key people to provide ‘intellectual leadership’ (the likes of YG);
• Provide funding selectively-fund media outlets to serve Ethiopia’s plan.
• Launch campaigns to sully Eritrean history for independence;
• Under the cover of ‘support to the Eritrean people’ launch the unimaginable ‘go get him, we are with you’ campaign.
• Frustrate Eritreans until they are disorientated and succumb to Ethiopia’s wishes.

Oh, the fools! Those fools, if they knew what was coming! (The Reprieve, Sartre)

And now, most distressingly, Bereket Simon is campaigning to have Eritrea declared as a ‘failed state’. If he succeeds in bringing the international community to his side that can set the stage for many things, perhaps as far as gaining legitimacy to invade Eritrea. It suffices to go over series of events that took place in Somalia. Once Somalia’s situation was repeatedly declared that it was a failed state, that very declaration paved the way for Ethiopia to invade it in order to ‘rescue the poor Somalis’. Fill in the blanks. Now I have to back off … really going nuts here, am I not?

Is Eritrea a failed state? Or is it a dictatorial state? Is Eritrea more ‘failed-state’ than Ethiopia? Basically, there are indicators to assess how failed is a failed-state. The criteria include a state whose central government is so weak or ineffective that it has little practical control over much of its territory; non-provision of public services; widespread corruption and criminality and so forth.

Please take time to check the list of countries in accordance to Failed States Index and you will see Somalia (1), Ethiopia (19) and Eritrea (25). I will say no more on this subject for now. Let’s wait and see if our fellow Eritreans in Addis are going to join the glee club and declare Eritrea a failed state.

Need for a Transitional Plan

What do Eritreans have to do now before President Isaias and his regime become history? This is a question in everybody’s mind. We have seen entrenched leaders go within a short period of time. And certainly that occurrence will also pay Eritrea a visit one day. Until then what do we do? I believe part of the answer lies in what the patriotic front will do-to devise a transitional plan for Eritrea.

The above statement raises 101 questions. And that is quite natural. A carefully thought-out, well-planned and wide-ranging blueprint for a transition is necessary. It should be bold, inspiring and with a strong vision behind it.

We have to learn a lesson from what happened last January in Eritrea. You remember when Eritrea was thrown into confusion after brave soldiers stormed the Ministry of Information and took over the state-run television service in a coup attempt, don’t you? That didn’t come from Ethiopia-driven activities, did it? That was not inspired by the opposition groups who are flirting with Ethiopia, was it? That came from within. If it happened once it will certainly happen again.

What do we do for now? First of all to have clarity of and rule over our thoughts is very important. We have to stay clear off Ethiopia’s machinations and cling to the love of our martyrs for they are the only ones who can provide the basis of an Eritrean ideology. One needs to enlighten the mind, rein in passion, strengthen the spirit and shake off undesired elements from our struggle. These will be the initial weapons of our patriotism.

We have to remember that if the will of the people is not followed, then the PFDJ government, no matter how strong and roguish, will fall under its own corruption. In the meantime we have to be able to read the wishes of our people, their anxiety over our neighbor’s refusal to honor the ruling of the Boundary Commission, the irrelevance of ENCDC-like groups to their lives and so forth. To nurture the belief in Eritrean solutions to Eritrean problems is certainly worth pursuing.

I will say more on the patriotic front in my next posting.

By Admas Haile
July 4, 2013
admashaile91@gmail.com

NB: The author is an Eritrean observer

On the Cynics

You certainly have observed that now the time has come when the dead old demons are resurrected and its agents, seeing adventurous, optimistic Eritrea, at this time, standing amid its ruins, bewildered and confused, and although she knows perfectly well who the culprits were, she keeps bemusedly asking herself “whose fault is it?” in a sort of expression of awe and reprobation. But it took the agents of the old demons no time to misunderstand the expression and manage to have the audacity to point to the victim herself, screaming “You! It is your fault, you are responsible! ” They don’t forget, in the context, to slyly, and between the lines, to introduce themselves as the prophets to the lost world of the “Ethiopian Nirvana.”

These are charlatans and jugglers because they know that there is no question of Eritrea going back to Ethiopia now, not because of Eritrean reasons only (which are heavy and substantial), but also because of Ethiopian reasons as well, unless they are thinking of Tigrai-Tigrigna, and even that has its insurmountable ifs and buts. There is no doubt and, in fact, is clear from the get-go that there was no destination for the writings of Yosief Gebrehywet (“YG”) and his minions other than the fantastic and impossible Ethiopia. For them, the misery of Eritrea started with the revolution in 1961: only love and peace was prevailing over the land before that fateful day, they imply. They would like us believing that the 1st of September 1961 is the day in which everything began, the day of the cause of all causes, the big bang that nothing preceded. But they are lying through their teeth, claiming that. The revolution was never a cause, it was a result, and here lies the difference. It was the result of injustice, obstinacy and arrogance of the Ethiopian Empire and its collaborators whose ideology YG is championing and defending.

One can but only maintain that the contentions expressed by YG’s writings and his disciple, the power guy at Asmarino, are apologetic ideologies representing the world view of an Eritrean political class long since extinct, that theirs is the famous old wine in new bottles. The ideologues, by their own admission, are the counter revolutionary. We are not, here, speaking about the fops, the Gucci revolutionaries of the type IA is; we are speaking about a revolution which represented the aspirations of the Eritrean people, the people who rose and took up arms in defense of their hijacked fate by the Empire of Ethiopia and its Eritrean collaborating class which was holding the very same placards now risen high by YG and his disciples.

This class, which YG is defending, and whose ideology he trying to sanitize, is that same privileged political class through which the Amhara oligarchy was facilitating and imposing its rule on the rest of Eritrea. It was the class, the representatives of which misinformed, exhorted and lured the Emperor of Ethiopia into illegally dissolving the Federal arrangement between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and smash it against the advice of many well-meaning people, including that of Kennedy Trevaski of the British military administration in Eritrea, who prophetically warned in his book “Eritrea, A Colony in Transition” long before it happened, that if manipulation and exploitation of the federal arrangement by the Ethiopian crown is attempted, it will, most probably, bring about the destruction of the Ethiopian throne itself.  He was right and the Eritrean elite and its advocates then were wrong, as they are now. This was the privileged class which was imprisoning people, killing them and forcing them to flee their homes and residences. YG and his disciples must, necessarily, have heard about these atrocities and wouldn’t care to hear about them again now, not because of their sensibilities, No, that is only for fear that it might stand in the way of their business of wishy-washy in retrograde, promoting the case for those long dead demons.

That same class, moreover, was the class the Eritrean struggle (which took off in 1961) was directed against, as much as against the occupier… it, being fittingly, the collaborators’ umbrella. The inheritors and apologetics of that dead class must now, certainly, condemn the revolution that uprooted them and their master in one and the same strike and would love to avenge their defeat and undo it in retrograde if even, only, through lies and omissions. It is dishonest and hypocritical from the old demons part to pretend innocence and ignore the fact that it was the one who set in motion the multifaceted juggernaut which still is crushing and mangling all Eritreans in its path.

On the Frustrated

Paired with the above is another phenomenon, not wholly unexpected (given the frustration of long and extended years of suffocating tyranny), rearing its head and showing itself in the Diaspora communities.  I mean by this: the signs of giving in to factors of fatigue, pessimism, desperation, and fatalism. One clear instance to this is no less than Zekre Lebonna, a cool and well-versed Eritrean writer, coming with one of his articles, critical and sounding pessimistic of the dissonance displayed by Eritreans vis-à-vis their miserable conditions and the thoughtless embrace of their abuser’s cultural symbols. Zekre, further, sees it befitting that the funeral-like condition in the land be rather replaced by a defiant funeral mass song. Maybe Zekre shouldn’t be that disappointed and that pessimistic, for “a country ruled by a despot is an inverted cone” as Samuel Johnson said, and in such a world, the world of tyranny and inverted cones, dissonance is only the name of the game.

Besides, those whose attitude Zekre was wondering about, were only in their late twenties, at most.  This means that their intellectual system of reference is formed under the tyrannical fire of framing with no alternative window similar to the old waves of Eritrean refugee population enjoyed. If these young Eritreans have displayed signs of self-contradiction and dissonance, it is because they have no other ways of expressing themselves except in the only language their perceptions were formed from. Even expressing distrust and hate towards the abuser, in such circumstances, cannot be mentally represented and processed except in a language long defined in their consciences. What they need now is rehabilitation and reorientation, but their distaste for tyranny should not be doubted.

The Eritrean struggle’s requirements have now extended to a fresh additional area that of the struggle of changing this mind setting, a setting that was brought about by inconsistencies of tyranny, it is a stage and part of the struggle and it should be done.

There is a parable included in the novel “The Brothers Karamazov,” by Feodor Dostoevsky, which would accommodate Zekre’s pessimism and despondence. The title of the parable is “The Grand Inquisitor:” it is a story told by Ivan the elder brother, the intellectual atheist, to his younger mystical brother, Alexei (Alyosha). The scene is set in a dungeon, in a castle of medieval Spain, where Jesus Christ is held prisoner on the orders of the grand inquisitor for coming down to the world, at the wrong time, and mingling with the population, preaching the heresy of hope and freedom.  I leave you with the extract:

Extract from the Grand inquisitor

The Grand Inquisitor speaking to Christ: “Oh, we shall convince them that they cannot be free till they renounce their freedom in our favor and submit to us. . . . Too well, all too well, will they know the value of submission once and for all! Men will be unhappy till they grasp this . . . , however, the flock will collect again and submit once more, and then it will be forever, forever. We will give them, a quiet modest happiness, the happiness of feeble creatures such as they were created. Oh, we shall convince them at last that they have no right to be proud. . . . Yes, we will force them to work, but in their free time we will make their life like a game with songs, choruses, and innocent dances. Oh? We will even permit them to sin—for they are weak and feeble— and they will love us like children because we allow them to sin. We shall permit or forbid them to live with wives or lovers, to have or not to have children—according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient, and they will submit to us gladly and joyfully, . . . And they will all be happy, all the millions, except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For, we alone, we who guard the mystery, we alone, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy children and only a hundred thousand martyrs, who have taken on themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.”

Burhan Ali
July 5, 2013

What is left for the teetering HGDEF regime to cling on to? What keeps it going when for all intents and purposes it was stripped bare of almost all the structures that make up a functioning state – if one could ever call a consortium of shefatu (bandits) “a state” in the first place?

How do they still manage to wiggle their tails?

They are still gasping for air – so what could possibly be cited as HGDEF’s last lines of defence? Are they feeding of the army’s support? Perceived economic affluence? Or perhaps, perceived political clout?

Obviously HGDEF’s prolonged lingering couldn’t be pivoted on the army’s support for it because as we all know by now, the army itself is on life support. It never fully recovered from the last devastating border war. Besides, the army’s rank and file is made up of enslaved conscripts who were coerced to enlist under one dubious pretext or another. A day doesn’t pass by before we hear of the many attempts by these poor conscripts to flee their positions and mind you, they do so at a great peril to their lives.

HGDEF has lost sovereignty over huge chunks of the country for almost a decade and half now – and it knows all too well that there isn’t a hoot it can do about it. There is only one reason for this – it doesn’t have a functional army it can rely on. Not only can it not wage a war to regain sovereignty, but even more embarrassing is the fact that it can’t even stop further incursions from happening as we have seen its arch enemies do with absolute impunity. It is that bad.

In short, it goes without saying that there is no love lost between the conscript army and the HGDEF regime.

The regime’s military force – if you can even call it that is limited to a quartet of illiterate warlords, a rotten officer corps and a bunch of armed thugs who run the spy and enforcer network of the regime. They are only good at terrorizing a captive civilian population and keeping close tabs on the conscript army with the sole purpose of preventing a revolt against the regime.

It is also obvious that the HGDEF regime is not basking in economic affluence, so the economy couldn’t be cited as one of its pillars either. Devastating wars and punitive sanctions may have taken their toll, but even more devastating was the regime’s stupid policy of decimating the private sector; an instinctive shifta-mentality which has severely curtailed free enterprise in the country. The nation as a whole is at the rock bottom of almost every meaningful global economic indicator one can think of.

Even the mining sector could not provide enough of a reprieve because the bandits that HGDEFites are, they had to rush into getting their hands on the valuable minerals when they had no capital to invest (no seed money, in layman’s terms) – so they had to sign away the biggest chunk of the revenue pie to the mining companies. In other words, they had to settle for very little in return for quick bucks.   

With dictators like Gaddaffi and Mubarak gone and with the Qataris having second thoughts on their entire approach in the Horn region, HGDEF has lost its main financiers. Its coffers have dried up and it has been reduced to running a crime syndicate which specializes among other trades in the following operations:-

• Running a piracy network in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean in conjunction with Somali pirates and al-shabab fanatics thereby sharing the looting and kidnapping-for-ransom proceeds of their joint venture.
• Running extortion schemes targeting Diaspora Eritreans specifically those helpless folks who don’t have the benefit of dual of citizenships, under various guises of illegal taxes, exorbitant fees and coercive requests for contributions.
• The illegal confiscation of fishing and other marine vessels from poor Yemeni fishermen in full contravention of international maritime laws and against all moral and ethical norms of good neighborliness. They do so with the sole purpose of re-selling the confiscated vessels for cash to unsuspecting fishermen along the coasts of South-Eastern Africa, South Asia and even all the way to the Far East along the coasts of Vietnam and Cambodia. Typical shifta style – but lucrative enough to keep them drooling.
• Running prostitution rings (old sick habits) in Eastern Sudan, Djibouti and the newly formed republic of South Sudan and living of the avails of prostitution like typical back alley pimps.
• Conducting grain thievery (their favorite seasonal vocation) by raiding farms in the Kassala and Gadararef regions of the Sudan.
• And worst of them all, running a human organ trafficking network spanning all the way from the Eritrean hinterland (the source) to the Sinai peninsula in full collaboration with Rashaida and Bedouin gangsters (the middlemen) and various other Sudanese, Egyptian, Israeli and other Middle eastern and Eastern European crime rackets (the syndicates). In the process, life is sucked out in the most hellish and agonizing of ways from the young and the innocent – and HGDEF thugs marvel at their windfall.     

So as a pillar, the economy is totally ruled out. If the regime is still kicking, then it is because it had adopted these barbaric coping mechanisms to sustain itself and not because it has managed to create a booming economy.

HGDEF’s perceived political clout is also nothing but yet another big farce. The regime has no positive roles to play in the politics of the Horn region other than political prostitution of the worst kind. Long rejected by the Americans and the other Western countries as a player in the region, it has been reduced to nothing more than a player of subversive roles. Here are just a couple of examples of its day job – a sampler, if you will; 

It acts as a go-between for the different factions in the Sudanese conflict – ironically for conflicts it had concocted by itself in the first place and then turns around and demands payoffs. Anything will do – cash, fuels like gasoline or kerosene and even staples like lentils, sesame or “wedi-akker”.     

HGDEF also plays similar subversive roles in the Somali conflict and acts as a conduit through which various weaponry and ammunition are supplied to Al-Shabbab fanatics. It gets its cuts both ways – from the suppliers and the end-users, all the while conspiring to keep the Somalis mired in a perpetual state of strife.

The Nile waters conflict is also another fete for HGDEF where it plays the role of a little errand boy. It embarrassingly acts as though it has a major bone in the contention between the major players when the truth is, its role is nothing more than that of a bunch of irrelevant clowns trying to fish in dirty waters. They will always provide their “services” and mind you, they will do so to any side of the conflict, as long as there is money to be made.

So much so for the so-called political clout of a bunch of pimps which as indicated before, amounts to nothing but the provision of un-principled “services” to the highest bidder.

So HGDEF doesn’t have (1) a formal military it can rely on, except for a spy and enforcer network headed by a bunch of functionally illiterate bloody warlords (2) doesn’t have an economy it can live and thrive on – except for macabre coping mechanisms it had crafted for survival, and (3) has no political relevance, let alone clout in the entire region and even globally where it is shunned and hated by all – and yet amazingly most of us fail (by choice for some) to see where its last line of defense lies.

HGDEF has long been abandoned and rejected by the majority of the Eritrean people –  Tigrignas and non-Tigrignas alike with the exception of the real hardcore chauvinist bigots – those ardent adherents of the N’hnan E’lamanan cult order.

It is these chauvinistic bigots in particular that HGDEF is relying on as its last line of defence. They help it incapacitate the conscript army, run its macabre underground economy and they try to give it an aura of invincibility – this for a regime that has long been worn out.

And they do this under dubious guises – skills they have learned through years of mentoring given to them by none other than the bloody dictator himself through his venomous circulars of “sentik”, “anbibka’ahlif” and so and so forth. It is amazing even forty odd years on; the hate parlance used by these bigots is a boilerplate rendition of the dictator’s familiar diatribes – verbatim. His thuggery, typical sidinetn  b’elignan must have rubbed off to his minions so much so that you see them parroting him in their convoluted daily discourse in open public forums such as this one.

How do you deal with these thugs anyways?             

Here is an excerpt from a previous posting on how I described these thugs who now represent HGDEF’s last line of defence and more importantly, how to deal with them.

When people are bad, inherently bad that is, no amount of pleading will ever dissuade them from their evil actions or deeds, no matter how abhorrent and how disgusting those actions or deeds may turn out to be. Such people are not driven by causes – any causes just or otherwise, but rather, by innate instincts which harbour nothing but debilitating and poisonous hate towards all those they consider to be different, based on the “us” versus “them” mentality.

The World’s history is replete with the constant emergence and eventual demise of such groups. The Nazis, the Fascists, the Khmer Rouge, Hutu extremists, Serb barbarians and religious fanatics and zealots of all faiths and denominations are just but a few examples to mention.  

Eritrea’s unfortunate share of such groups is solely represented by none other than the notoriously wicked and repulsive thugs – the zer’ie shefatu. For over six decades now, these thugs have been committing untold bloody atrocities against their fellow citizens one way or another – atrocities, whose magnitudes and barbarity are a clear matter written and documented record.   

And mind you, they do so not because of any political expediency dictated by their narrow chauvinist agenda, but rather because hate and bigotry are deeply ingrained in their blood. The “elamana” thing may have worked well to galvanize the innocent, the wicked bigots, the fools, the naïve and the un-witting – each with their little dreams, to coalesce around what they thought was a common purpose – a bigger dream, if you will. 

But when the so-called dream turned out to be the worst nightmare one could ever imagine, all abandoned ship except for the wicked bigots – because true to their repulsive nature, theirs wasn’t a dream or even a cause to speak of. Theirs was just an ailment – a deep-rooted affliction with no known remedies.  

Do you try to reason with such people? Do you plead with them to come to their senses?

No you don’t, you just don’t, period. Unless of course, you entertain the thought that you can live forever to see the day when you can somehow instil a sense of humanity in the hearts and minds of hopeless bigots, whose conscience has long been worn out by years upon years of negative conditioning.

This however doesn’t mean that the status quo is fait accompli, not at all. These bigots and thugs can only be contained by defeating and destroying the system they worship and idolize, the system they draw their strength and inspiration from – in this case, HGDEF.

Many of the notorious groups I mentioned above, like the Nazis, the Fascists and so on, were not contained because they were pleaded to or cajoled, but rather because the systems they worshiped were destroyed militarily. They were decimated by force.

These groups still exist to this day, in one form or another; thanks to the protection accorded to them by the very tools they spent a lifetime fighting to destroy – the tools of democracy and the rule of law.

But even if they exist though – even if they are given their spaces where they could practice their rituals of hate and prejudice, they couldn’t hurt anyone for one simple reason:  They have been de-fanged and de-clawed by the rule of law. If they ever try to break the law, they get whacked.                

Likewise, pleading to zer’ie shefatu is a non-starter. It is like talking to a dead ass (adgi). If people can’t learn from their mistakes of sixty years, then chances are, they will never learn, ever. The only solution for them is the same setting of containment I mentioned in the preceding paragraphs.

Decent Eritreans, Tigrignas and non-Tigrignas alike, can not usher peace and tranquility to the nation by winning over the zer’ie shefatu, simply because they will never be able to win them over. Not in material numbers anyways. It is just a futile attempt. They could however, as mentioned above, contain them by destroying HGDEF.

How to destroy HGDEF will be the subject of the next posting.

Miscellany:

HGDEF’s New Mouthpieces:

Their entire take – berate the opposition and blame the Ethiopians for every problem under the sky…..

It is a whole new genre of convoluted political discourse premised on doing nothing – because frankly speaking, it offers nothing (fittingly, all the dictator wants to complete his chauvinist ethnic agenda).  

And then they sum up with their only one-liner – all they can afford to say about the regime….

“The regime will fall under its own wait” – in return, you are supposed to take that as a consolation and just sit tight and wait for it to happen.

It is amazing how they sweat so much in attempting to curb what little is available to push the teetering HGDEF regime over the cliff and offer nothing – absolutely nothing in lieu except for clichéd sloganeering – ki’kheid’yu (the regime will go) . Just don’t ask them how.

Well guess what – it is only natural that the regime will eventually go, but by then, so will you stupid. Nature doesn’t revolve just on your enemy and stand still for you. The only way you could win is by actually making your enemy go – by destroying your enemy that is, and not by wishing him away.  

Simple Advice

Never suck up to bigots – you will just feed their sick egos.

Bait of the Month

“General Store” (another funny tweaker) – just throw it in without the quotes and voilà!

The skin-deep prejudice spills out in no time – just like the mentor’s. 

Wa-Allah-ul-Muafiq

kurchai@hotmail.com

First, a true story for some perspective. From their school days, my brother remembers Jemil as a gentle fellow who stayed out of trouble. Then Jemil’s never-to-be-messed-with line was crossed when a popular Ethiopian general slapped him in a public place in Addis sometime in the mid-1990s. Jemil went out, came back with a gun and killed the abusive general on the spot.

Contrasting this with the indignities Eritreans have been experiencing under the very first regime of their own, it appears there is no limit to the suffering Eritreans are willing to endure. It started with the persecution of Jehova’s witnesses and we did nothing. Meeting no resistance, the regime kept upping the ante making persecution of other religions, disappearances, killings, confiscations and now, human trafficking part of Eritrean daily life.

There is even a joke that goes along with this reality, where Isaias asks God to give him another country to rule over because Eritreans are too docile and boring. “No matter how badly I treat them”, he tells God, “they refuse to fight back”. God denies the request telling him since there is no limit to your cruelty and no limit to how much your people are willing to suffer, you are perfect for each other. But don’t lose hope just yet – remember Forto 2013 or the 450 who busted out of thehell you created for them in Wia¹

A Squandered First Chance

1991 was supposed to be a great beginning when wide-eyed optimism and contagious positive energy were abundant. Then, in what can only be described as delight in cruelty, a feudal system took over and reversed everything back to the Dark Ages. The big bright dreams are gone, consumed by the darkness we all helped create – literally, considering the frequency of power outages.

There is a long history of tegadelti — those we took to be among the most fearless and daring — getting slapped by the bully-in-chief or smashed by whiskey bottles and simply taking in the indignity with bowed heads. In some cases, the stories go, while they were armed. It is an image that is hard to reconcile. How is it the very one we were led to believe was ready to die to bring freedom to others, fails so badly to fight for his own? Worse, those so abused turn around to unleash their own cruelty on others. And unbecoming of their ‘courageous’ past, they only retaliate down — against people who did them no harm. According to Asmara’s hyper active rumor mill, even the acid-tongued Naizghi Kiflu took a bottle to the head but continued to do the dirty work for his abuser and went on to play a key role in the disappearance of his former comrades. But there is no honor or mercy in bully land and Naizghi probably got the worst of it – both when alive and dead. Which begs the question, whatever happened to Eritrean manhood?

Eritrean womanhood has not fared well either. The Eritrean mother used to be THE icon of fairness and compassion. Now the sharp tongue that used to lash out heavy doses of ‘mergem’ (curses) against bullies and those who broke social norms, is tamed to uttering cultish ululations.

There are exceptions of course, but too few to make THE needed difference because by the only measurement that matters, the bully is still in charge. And bit by bit, our first golden opportunity slipped away. While Ethiopia accepted reality and moved on – with a peaceful power transfer to boot – we remain stuck in the mud unwilling to move on. That is the unpleasant story of our first big chance. 22 years later, 1991’s optimism is a fading memory. But it can’t and shouldn’t end there. Now what?

The Second Big Reset

At long last, the voices demanding change are getting louder and stronger. Gone are the days when the regime’s propaganda was consumed so readily and thoughtlessly. It is good to see the regime’s inner circle crumbling. Who would have thought Ali Abdu, Eritrea’s liar-in-chief, would abandon the regime? In ‘screw the science’ bravado, he even told us his idol actually “breathed with his knees”. Then came Forto 2013. Now there are reports Negash Afwerki, Kisha’s deputy, may have also jumped ship. Who is next?

A second big reset (1991 being the first) is about to unfold and the day of reckoning will come, one hopes, sooner than later. However, the culture of banditry and lawlessness the regime has created won’t be easy to reverse quickly. So, what to do to make sure our second chance is not wasted like the first? No question there are better ideas but here are a couple that come to mind.

Start Breaking the Silos Now

Silos take away the advantage of leverage. Eventually, you end up getting isolated and weak, like Eritrea’s situation today. Call it the arrogance of success (1991) but we got blinded by our bombastic “uniqueness” and went out of our way to alienate everyone. Isaias had his tirades against the UN, OAU and African dictators (for being too soft, it now appears). I remember Girma Asmerom arrogantly stating how the world will soon see that we are different from other Africans (and it still makes me cringe today). And boy did we show them?

Unfortunately, we did so in ways we never imagined – by plunging Eritrea to the bottom of the heap.

And as we ran out of external enemies, we just as quickly invented internal ones. The silos multiplied. Religious and regional differences we thought we had overcome got reincarnated. Believing this group or that group is the new enemy, the number of opposition groups mushroomed – often incoherent and very antagonistic towards each other forgetting the pink elephant in the room, as they say. Finding no opportunities within, a large segment of the population – the segment that is more likely to demand and bring about change left and continues to leave. The sense of Eritrean-ness 1991 made possible has been seriously eroded and will have to be stitched back thread by thread.

We got too busy arguing which group or sub-group has it the worst – always debating which group’s cup is half full or half empty. And since all this is done in the isolation of our self-imprisoning silos, no one has bothered to join hands to fill the cup.

To break these silos, it is going to need very deep soul searching by everyone – at personal and organizational levels- to re-evaluate ALL previously held assumptions and belief systems. Some to discard and the good ones to double up on.

Nurturing an Inclusive Culture

The regime understand power very well. And since power concedes nothing, the regime also stops at nothing to maintain it. To that end, the regime’s culture of exclusion first gave us the tegadalai vs gebar (intentionally meant to be demeaning) divide. It was routine practice for gebars to be excluded from relevant work-related meetings in their own departments. Not surprisingly, trust between the two plummeted as intended. The divisive negative tone slowly expanded to other areas where, very often, people are declared non-Eritrean for views they hold that happen to be different than ours.

Some so-called deqbats, for example, say Isaias hates Eritrea because he is not Eritrean, which besides being false, is simply unproductive. He never was anything else. Even using the lowest standards of honesty, we know Hagos kisha lived his whole adult life as an Eritrean. For me, denying him that would be inhuman. Is his role negative? Yes, but how is that different from the equally destructive roles played by the likes of Alamin, Wuchu, wedi Gerahtu, Ali Abdu, Dr. Woldeab Isaac etc (we all know the list is too long). That is why the identity question is always a non-starter. It tries to solve a problem that doesn’t exist and shifts focus away from the real ones that must be addressed.

We also know many Ethiopians fought and died for Eritrea. They did more for Eritrea than many so-called Eritreans — especially the loud mouths who trumpet the identity card so callously. Here is Here is Haile Kugne’s example² (goes well with long walks). Honoring them for their contributions, besides being the right thing to do, will also help deepen a much needed culture of inclusion. Haile tells his interrogator the only way he will be silenced from voicing his opinion is when he is dead. Strong character and strong ideals like Haile’s is what was missing and what we are going to need to make Eritrea’s second coming as successful as it can possibly be.

Maybe then, Eritrean children, like other children around the globe, will have the opportunity to unleash the power of their imagination by doing  (this³). That is what is at stake with the second big reset – a new Eritrea at peace with itself and its neighbors, where no devil has the power to limit the future of a child or other citizens ever again.

Tewelde Stephanos
Email: testifanos@gmail.com

Links:
¹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqDGIj36kf8
²http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLogaEaGTSo
³ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU

“In my view, accepting even an imperfect constitution (imperfect both in terms of the process of its making and its content) and using it as a unifying or rallying point would be a wiser way, leaving to another day the task of improving or substituting it by another constitution.” Dr. Bereket.

This concludes the part of the interview which focused on the constitutional making process (click here to read the first part: ) and the next part(s) will deal with the substance of the constitution and the questions that have been raised by readers. Dr. Bereket is an octogenarian who has impressively kept a full-time work schedule; written four books in the last ten years and scores of articles; travelled extensively to give lectures in many universities and international forums; and is currently working on a book while teaching a summer class. I’m honored that he made the time to talk to me and very appreciative of his willingness to keep the public engaged.

Semere: In the first step of the constitutional making process, the establishment of the Constitutional Commission, you’ve said that you relied on your own professional expertise, the EPLF charter and your own sense and knowledge of the EPLF that you’ve been a member of since 1975. Were you entirely responsible for this task or you had the assistance of others and if that is the case, do you care to tell us who those people were? Were you also responsible for drawing the “general plan of approach” and for “presenting the plan to the first meeting of the Executive Committee and then the general body (the Council) of the Commission” in the second stage?

Dr. Bereket: I was given a free hand to draft the law establishing the Commission as well as planning the organization and shaping the strategy of the process of constitution making. I was also given the choice of some of the members of the core organ of the Commission, namely the members of the Executive Committee. In particular, I asked for the following members to be among those to be included in the Executive Committee: Seyoum Haregot, Amare Tekle, and Paulos Tesfagiorgis. I had asked a couple of others who happen to be lawyers also to be included, but the Powers-that-be did not include them. They were Gebrehiwot Tesfagiorgis and Eden Fassil. Eden was understandably excluded because he is one of the principal legal advisers of the president. And Gebrehiwot was included in the Council of the Commission, but not in the Executive Committee.

So, to answer the question whether I was entirely responsible for the task the answer is yes for working out the strategy and laying down the parameters of the Commission’s work as detailed in the law establishing the Commission (Proclamation Number 55 of 1994). As to the conduct of the process after the Commission started its work, I had the invaluable assistance of several members of the Commission, including Paulos, Seyoum, Musa Naib, Zemehret, Gebrehiwot, Tekie Fessehatsion, Mehret Iyob, Taha Mohammed Nur, and Kibreab Habtemichael from the Council, and Amna Naib from the Ex-Com, to mention but a few. As I said previously, the entire membership of the Commission was involved in participating in seminars and other forms of meetings in propagating the philosophy behind the process, as we saw it and in answering questions coming from the public.

Semere: I understand the need for legal expertise, but, I’m sure you would agree with me that constitutional making is an inherently political process, and if so, why didn’t you try to reach out to other Eritreans who could have added more credibility and legitimacy to the process. Don’t you think it would have been better to include the late Seyoum Harestay instead of the late Seyoum Haregot or Amare Tekle? The former had a life-time record of fighting for Eritrea, while the latter had none and to the contrary, he waged a diplomatic attack on the Eritrean revolution while serving the Haileselassie regime. Let’s not forget that when the late former foreign Minister of Eritrea, Ali Said Abdella and his brave comrades were in jail in Karachi, Pakistan for highjacking an Ethiopian plane, it was Seyoum Haregot who was busy at work trying to obtain their extradition to Ethiopia where they could have been subjected to torture and possibly death. Why on earth do you want to honor somebody like Seyoum Haregot to be part of the process that is designed to have the utmost impact in our lives and the lives of future generation of Eritreans?

Dr. Bereket: As to Seyoum’s membership of the Commission, it is based on his legal qualifications as well as experience. I did not know about his involvement as a negotiator in the Ali Said case, or of his role in attempts to persuade Tito to help Ethiopia against Eritrea, a claim that I learned much later. On the whole, I believe in forgiveness, and it appears that Isaias was also, for his own reasons, inclined to forgive the kind of deeds of which you seem to think that should disqualify Seyoum from helping in the constitution making of Eritrea.

With regard to Seyoum Harestay, you know that I had recommended in my booklet that the ELF should be involved in post-independence Eritrean politics, a suggestion that was not only rejected by Isaias, but earned me his enmity. Any suggestion by anybody to include Seyoum Harestay, or any ELF leader would be rejected outright by Isaias.

When Isaias asked Seyoum Haregot to chair the Commission before he asked me. Seyoum did not feel able or willing to assume the responsibility of chairmanship of the Commission. Why Isaias then turned to me is open to speculation. Those close to him speculated that he was anxious to avoid seeming hostile to me. The rest is history, as they say.

Semere: Yes, you’re right I’ve read the booklet in which you advocated ELF’s participation in independent Eritrea, but, when push comes to shove, you should have stood your ground and drew the line somewhere. I’m not saying you should have made the perfect the enemy of the good, but this was so monumentally important that you should have made your views, at least, known to the public. How were you able to reconcile your political ideals with the necessity of being pragmatic? Any regrets about this?

Dr. Bereket: I don’t know what you are referring to when you say “this was so monumentally important.”

Semere: I meant the inclusion of ELF and others since constitution making is an inherently political process. I understand to err is human and to forgive is divine but I tend to believe that genuine forgiveness is a two-way street. When two generation of Eritreans fought for Eritrean identity, the late Seyoum was unapologetically Ethiopian and neither did he acknowledge his mistakes nor apologize for it. Why such generosity of spirit was extended to the likes of Seyoum Haregot and not to bonafide heroes like Seyoum Harestay who devoted their life to the cause of Eritrea since their teenage/student days? The involvement of the latter could have greatly added to the legitimacy of the constitution and played a crucial role in our nation building efforts and aspirations. You can understand why some are hesitant to embrace the 1997 Constitution? Why should they support the outcome of a process from which they were systematically excluded?

Dr. Bereket:  I think you are making the mistake of assuming that I could influence Isaias in the choice of appointing members of the Commission. I did not. I tried to have as many trained lawyers to fill the Executive Committee, which was to be the drafting committee of the Commission; but even there he rejected some names like Eden Fassil for his own reason. As you know and as I already pointed out, he was averse to having the ELF having any role in post-liberation political life. The alternative left for me was to invite ELF members in the Diaspora to take part in the process, and we did that with some moderate success. Frankly, I don’t follow your logic of comparing Seyoum Harestay with Seyoum Haregot asking me to extend the same “forgiveness” to the former. I knew of nothing for which Seyoum Harestay needed forgiveness! In any case, asking Isaias to include Harestay in the Commission would have been an exercise in futility; and I did not see the necessity of wasting my time and breath to that futile exercise. 

Semere: Reconciliation and reaching out to people that are not with you is always a good thing. I don’t have a problem with the Eritrean government reaching out to Eritreans who served in the Dergue and the Ethiopian regime, but, the priority should have been given to those who spent a life-time fighting for Eritrea. That would have been a positive step in narrowing the historical differences that are still negatively impacting our political life. This is one reason why some people have a difficulty embracing the constitution of 1997. What do you say to them? And what are some of the “moderate success” you’ve achieved in this regard—reaching out to “moderate” ELF members in the Diaspora?

Dr. Bereket: With respect to the choice of people, I totally agree with you that the priority should always be given to those who spent a life-time fighting for Eritrea. It is right in principle and is politically wise; but to repeat what I have already said, I was not in the position of deciding whom to invite or appoint. One response in such a situation would be to make a point of principle and decline to serve as chair of the Commission. However, in view of what I considered to be a historic opportunity to serve my people and help create a legal framework for Eritrea’s democratic future, I did what I did with what I was able to have. It was not an ideal situation, but one which was, in the circumstances, the only available option.

As to the refusal of some people to embrace the 1997 constitution, they are entitled to embrace or reject. In my view, accepting even an imperfect constitution (imperfect both in terms of the process of its making and its content) and using it as a unifying or rallying point would be a wiser way, leaving to another day the task of improving or substituting it by another constitution. That would be my choice if I were in the position of former ELF members who felt excluded from the process. But Eritrean politics, poisoned as it is by a legacy of bitter division and animosity, we may be condemned to endless wrangling.

When I said we achieved moderate success, it had to do with the participation, in Europe and America, of former ELF members who made valuable contributions in debates. I cannot tell you how many they were or details of their specific contribution; but reports by Commission members who facilitated the meetings attest to the fact of such contribution. It is no consolation to Eritrea’s loss caused by Isaias’ refusal to allow the ELF to take part in Eritrea’s post-liberation political life. But blaming the Commission in this respect is missing the point. Again, I repeat, by not using the constitution as rallying point, we Eritreans have missed a golden opportunity in driving Isaias and his regime out of power. Am I dreaming?

I think not, and I still think it is worth giving serious consideration.

Semere: You’ve said that the Executive Committee was to draft the constitution which would be the basis of a wider public discussion and participation. Can you tell us how that process started? There are two versions of how this process started. Some members of the Executive committee (“the ignoble six” and Paulos Tesfagiorgish) have asserted that there was only a Tigrinya draft which they used during the whole process. Of course, they had failed to tell us who wrote the Tigrinya draft. You’ve, however, said you were responsible for an English draft that was translated into Tigrinya by Mr. Zemehret Yohanness. Can you please elaborate?

Dr. Bereket: I am intrigued, indeed, disappointed that any member of the Commission that I chaired for three years and whose major strategy and organization I charted out could suggest that I had no hand in drafting the constitution!

I have drafts of the English version among my numerous papers. I consulted several constitutional models before I settled down to write a draft that I cleaned up and showed to Zemehret. He raised questions about some articles, and suggested a couple of changes. Then he took it to Massawa where he set forth to translate it into Tigrigna. Then the Ex-Com debated it extensively with some suggestions for change, which were incorporated into the English version. That is where Dr. Seyoum Haregot comes in. We asked him to translate the changes from Tigrigna into English. Such was the division of labor: members of the Ex-Com assisted in doing assigned works, particularly toward the end when I was obliged to attend to my teaching duties at UNC.

I sincerely hope that this subject is closed.

By Semere T. Habtemariam
July 15, 2013

Outline:

1. A Likely Breakthrough on the Horizon;
2. Rumblings;
3. Eritrean Refugees in Ethiopia;
4. Repeating Myself – need for a framework for responsible political lobbying;
5. Theatrics aka Activism; …

The pressure of history is enormous, and its judgment is the most burdensome of all. To throw a spanner in the works, a deliberate oversight into our historical account is tantamount to duplicity. No matter how tough the going is, we should always exert maximum effort in holding on to our heroic past, and make conscious effort at restoring the integrity our Ghedli created around our existence. We should celebrate our history all the time. Defacing it, as some collaborationists are doing, will have our dignity thrown into the dustbin of history. Considering the way we conducted our independence project, the way Wel-Wel and Ibrahim Sultan paved the way for the independence struggle, the Ghedli we ran to regain the land of our ancestors and many more national traits we possess are examples of the qualities and potential we have as Eritreans.

I hope that intense, fruitful and controversial but always educational discussions can take place in a calm atmosphere. The emotional outbursts that prevent us from running our campaigns in business-like fashion, the Internet chatter that distracts us from executing well thought out processes, the condescending attitudes we show towards one another, and many more attributes that are unruly are not helpful. My fellow Eritreans, there will be a breakthrough once we approach matters differently. Once we control our emotions, move towards project-based operations and apply a good dosage of professionalism in our operations then we will certainly see some changes in the way we run our campaign.

We know what we have been doing and how we have been conducting ourselves since we declared our divorce from the PFDJ regime. We have wasted a lot of time and energy going in circles, haven’t we? I am of the opinion Ethiopia was the major wrench in the works of our campaign all along. Do you remember how Hiruy was imposed on EDA as Harestay stood up to them? And the fights and splits that ensued afterwards? Ever since then how many Ethiopia-led cataclysms have we experienced? Mark my words, a day will come that folks will commend EPDP for not capitulating to pressure from Ethiopia.

Let’s focus on other matters for now. What we are not aware of is the excellent qualities we possess–qualities which are not being utilized in our campaign against the PFDJ regime. We know our patriotism is unbeatable, and it is the biggest asset we have aggregated over the years. I am convinced banking on our patriotism is how we will have a breakthrough.

We certainly are a diverse group: lawyers, political scientists and historians, activists; theoreticians and practitioners; experts on Eritrea and others with an expertise in similar fields. In other words, people either intimately affected by the situation inside Eritrea or intimately involved in the attempt to solve our problems on the one hand, and on the other hand people who can address concerns from a more detached position. Basically, we have many more amongst us who come from all walks of life. In short we have the character and foundation upon which we will rebuild Eritrea, that is if we add some kind of team working to it. I am not talking about exerting joint efforts at this stage but to work in various constellations that do not work against one another. Once we start seeing the results of our cordial constellatory efforts then we can create the breakthroughs that will define and shape our future together. So let’s not give others the chance to create rifts amongst our constellations.

Rumblings

1. As I write this article, let me register my grievance against the PFDJ government that is denying our people not only their basic rights, but also diminish the quality of life down to beggarly state and destitution. Lack of service provision has never been so acute in Eritrea – whether it is electricity, water or even housing, the lack of service provision is a crippling problem for tens of thousands of Eritrean households and businesses. How can a society function without electricity and water? Shops have been closed for weeks due to lack of electricity. Lives are being put in danger. The government is bent on driving citizens out of urban areas so population control becomes easier to manage.

2. Allow me to say a few words about the comments my articles have been generating during the last few months. Interesting comments–some question my motives; some are uncomfortable when I raise Ethiopia-related issues; some try to portray me as a loose cannon; supporters of the incompetent ENCDC group are totally angered; some like to embark on pointless merry-go-round discussions; some, I guess, are on a power trip. And of course, there are those who are seriously following and contributing to the discussion. As for me, I guess I like flexing my intellectual muscles–just a form of bullying exercise. I feel I am so amusingly arrogant when I recycle old ideas thinking they are my own. Although in some cases our differences and wounds run deep, we are demonstrating an important national trait to the Ethiopians amongst us–we care about our Eritrea.

It is indeed tempting to engage many of you on important issues you tirelessly raise for or against my arguments; however, with all due respect, I have decided to remain thrifty with my time because time is not on my side. Being an Eritrean and a parent of young children is not easy. Anyway, by now I am sure the reader has the gist of my arguments: a) to remain true to our history/identity; b) to conduct our campaigns in a dignified way; c) to bring our martyrs to the forefront of our deliberations/campaigns; d) to create a self-reliant movement that ties us up with our people living in Eritrea; e) to eliminate Ethiopian-dictates from our campaign formula all together; f) the creation of an Eritrean patriotic front to lead us through a transitional period.

3. Memory of comrades: How many of our heroes are silently sleeping in history’s memory? The dead are dead, aren’t they? And it makes no difference to them whether we pay tribute to their valour or not. I am thinking of TeTew, Karachi, Flansa, Wedi Sheqa, Affa and more. I am also thinking of the event that took place on 1 December 1970 when around 1,000 innocent civilians were massacred in the villages of Ona and Basikdira near Keren within 48 hours. Where are the courageous ELF fighters who eliminated General Teshome Ergetu, the commander of the Ethiopian army in Eritrea? They are all gone. However, to us, the living, the memory of our heroes means something. Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We construct ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory.

4. We need to change our ways. Don’t you think we have lost the meaning of struggle due to the fact that we got stuck in our comfort zones? There, in our comfort zones, we are waiting for something as our dreams gradually die. I feel we are being controlled by our respective comfort zones, folks. Has ‘struggle’ become a past time, a waiting game? This reminds me of the song by the villagers (Nothing arrived).

I waited for Something, and Something died
So I waited for Nothing, and Nothing arrived
It’s our dearest ally, it’s our closest friend
In this darkest blackout, is it our final end
My dear sweet Nothing, let’s start a new
From here all in is just me and you

We write a few articles, comment on written articles, attend pal-talk sessions, get a few things off our chest … job done. Perhaps that is why we attack those who really want to contribute to our campaign in terms of action oriented moves. Their actions will take us out of our comfort zones, if you know what I mean. If we want change then we have to change ourselves first. It is time for self-definition and self-creation. Let our patriotism be the main weapon for change as we self-define/create ourselves – we have it at our disposal. My fellow Eritreans, I want us to make history once again, not remain confined to keyboard campaigns. Our wounded hearts will heal in time, and if we want to expedite the healing process then we will have to rise up in the memory and love of our lost ones and start doing things differently.

5. Clusters of Operations: The fact is that we come in small clusters of campaigners stretched thinly over a wide area. At the same time we tend to cluster around bigger issues in order to change the world of Eritrea (as if we are a global cluster). Small clusters, unless they coordinate their work, can hardly become change agents. Until we master the art of global clustering, we will need to cluster around smaller issues that are manageable. Take the case of the Arbi Harnet project. I think the group is doing an excellent job–it is carrying out a project it can realistically manage. They defined their project well, identified their aims and objectives, continue to raise their own funds, and are beaming their messages in Eritrean households every week. Something very practical and a project that brings home-based Eritreans on board. And what is ENDCD doing? Bringing the scheming government of Ethiopia on board to create havoc? As far as I am concerned Arbi-Harnet deserves our support. Just pay-pal them some money and they will do the rest.

We can carry out similar projects of our own, on our own. We can further internationalize the plight of our refugees. Some activists are doing it already; we need to do more of it. We can seek legal means to address our problems within the international community. As a center, the Awate Team can do this very capably. I will help if my help is needed. Can we contribute enough to build a memorial of some kind for Wedi Ali?

Eritrean Refugees in Ethiopia

Let’s just mention some facts concerning Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia.

• Currently, there are 72,000 Eritrean refugees in four camps in Tigray region and two others in the Afar region.Most of the refugees are young and vocationally trained. Amongst them are some unaccompanied youngsters as well as mothers with children.
• It is estimated around 1,000 (out of 72,000) are given the opportunity to attend universities – education sponsored by Western governments (Norway being the major contributor). Is that 1.4 %?
• How many Eritreans graduated from Ethiopian universities this year: 16 individuals (big news at Asmarino.com).
• Do you know what kind of life our refugees lead in Ethiopian camps? Eritreans in the Tigray area are constantly harassed and exploited. ‘Enda-sewa’ bars are flourishing around the camps… the only place they are most welcome. Unemployment is almost 100%.
• Do you know how long it takes for Eritrean refugees to be processed out of the country? If the Ethiopians do not okay it then the refugee can stay in the camp for 5-7 years. Basically, if Ethiopia does not okay it then refugees will linger in the camps for years.
• Do you know that refugees are approached by Ethiopian security forces to support and join certain Eritrean opposition groups that are pro-Ethiopia in their construct?
• Do you know what ENCDC group is doing to alleviate the plight of Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia? Nothing.
• Do you know that some of the refugees who are instructed to join certain opposition groups are still exploited by the members of their sponsoring opposition group? There are strong rumors that sometimes the opposition groups transport ‘their new members’ to the boarder of Sudan for a fee!
• It seems the Ethiopians want to frustrate the refuges to a point of driving them to bear arms against Eritrea.
• Why are so many Ethiopians claiming asylum by feigning Eritrean identity? Are Ethiopians using Eritrean refugee quota (to go to a third country)?
• Many refugees are trafficked out of Ethiopia at colossal fees.
• One can say that refugee ‘ism has become a lucrative business in Ethiopia.

Repeating Myself

There is emptiness at the core of Ethiopia’s machination. We have seen their politicking around refugee issues and on a relatively unimportant issues served as a protective cover to help ‘their men’ secure dominance in diaspora politics, and to prepare to continue their unfinished business whenever power is usurped from PFDJ.
I know we, as concerned citizens, do not have a feasible strategy because we are busy running our lives and of course, fighting one another at the moment. Shall I say we are made to go at each other’s throats by various cliques amongst us? Be that as it may, we are all aware of problems that are devastating our country–poverty, mass migration, isolation, human trafficking, and of course a myriad of political, social and economic problems. Most of all, Ethiopia’s arrogance in rejecting the ruling of the Boundary Commission is one of the problems that is exacerbating the situation.

My fellow Eritreans, are we clueless when it comes to figuring out why we cannot work together to resolve our problems? I am convinced that cliques of negative forces are interspersed amongst us to cause havoc by encroaching on our basic rights with their unionist agenda. Secondly, too many of us are blinded by hatred of Isaias Afewerki and intoxicated by empty platitudes. That very hatred of Isaias is making us forget who we are, tarnishing our emotional association with our martyrs, and peroxiding the cruelties we suffered under Ethiopia!
Just to get a few things out of my system allow me to muse over the plight conscientious campaigners have been confronted with of late. The sedition lies within a scheme of exploiting the current status of many seasoned Eritreans who have been relegated to the rank of silent observers. I see many around me leading a life of quiet resignation and desperation while others are scurrying to receive hand-outs from Ethiopia. The resignation comes from the infighting and desperation comes from absence of inspiration. The lives Eritreans are leading are so abject a conducive platform has been created for those who are moseying for unattainable positions–theatrics aka activism. In other words, the Ethiopians are hijacking our struggle by feigning support. They are in the process of creating an aura of indispensability around our commiseration. Of course, that is not going to work for we Eritreans have invested too much in our Eritrean identity through blood.

My fellow Eritreans, this is real life as we know it; and where there is life there is hope. Hope at least gives us the option of living to embark on the right course of our struggle. I know hope is one of the most effective and practical solutions to cure despair. And that is because hope is based on practicality not theory. I am interested in the possibilities in bridging the gap that has been created between those of us who are calling for a clean campaign and our people back home. I am not interested in those piggybacking on Ethiopian experiments. We are not campaigners united by hatred towards Isaias, but love and wellbeing of our beloved country and memory of our martyrs. We should hope for a clean transition when change comes.

The primary objective of the campaign is to prepare ourselves for a future transition in Eritrea, so that we are well equipped to deal with the challenges and opportunities that will arise as soon as the PFDJ extinguishes itself–once again, an inevitable fact. We cannot afford to allow Ethiopia or Ethiopia-sponsored ‘activists’ lead the way.

There is no need for me to tell you what everyone has been talking about for the last decade or two–that we as Eritreans need justice, peaceful co-existence with our neighbors, unity amongst us, respect for our democratic and human rights. There is also no need to tally the frustrating experiences we have been going through in this dog-eat-dog campaign where conscientious campaigners have been silenced by those who are championing Ethiopian interests. For instance, I find the language of the ‘Smerrr group’ and their rhetoric too obtuse and confrontational. Their politics is based on a ragbag of things I cannot understand. Like any other Eritrean diaspora initiative which was susceptible to Ethiopian meddling–Smerrr group too will dissipate. It is only a question of time. On the contrary Eritrean perseverance will continue to prevail.

I think I have said enough for now.

Admas Haile is an Eritrean observer.

“Rational choice theory”, proposed by economists to describe market economies, has been adopted in criminology, religion and, of course, political science. Essentially, the theory assumes that, prior to every decision, people make cost-benefit analysis because they are “self-interested, purposeful, maximizing being.”  Of course, what I consider rational you will consider absurd and the sum total of each rational choice—the aggregate–is often surprising, even fascinating.  That particular study in macroeconomics is called game theory which, thank God, has nothing to do with this article.

The alternative to rational choice theory is to believe that people are irrational (bigoted, fundamentalists, wrong-headed, emotional, sentimental) but that you, the observer, or some hero you idolize, are rational because you, with the help of your idol, were the only ones (or the few) to discern it.  You could cite many examples to illustrate that people are not always rational—particularly if you work in marketing– but I think that subscribing to “rational choice theory” is less likely to make one cynical and bitter at the people—past and present.  You know: the ones who look at the Eritrean predicament and say izi hzbi Hmaq iyu::

In politics, rational choice theory demystifies a problem by reducing it into a quantifiable, measurable series of data points.  Rational choice doesn’t just explain why Eritreans are sticking with Isaias Afwerki right now but what conditions must be met for them to abandon him.   It begins with researching the objective.

How do we research in politics?  Well, if the population is small enough, you can just gather them all and ask questions.  I once read that you can fit the entire population of the world, all seven billion plus of us, into Texas. What’s that? No, I have no idea if people want to voluntarily move to a state where they have runways and taxis for mosquitoes but you are not helping.  Using that parallel, we Eritreans are so few that we could have a gigantic tent with nothing but tenkobet from end to end and we can assemble the entire people for a real waEla.  

But then you would ruin it with your practicality questions.  Yes, you? No, I am not taking engineering questions about tent assembly…. Yes, you, young man.  Of course, elderly Eritreans can exercise their God-given right to introduce their speeches with eneheleka d’asi preambles and you can exercise your right to roll your eyes.  Moving on… yes, you with the Paltalk t-shirt? No, it is not necessary to say segud, hade hade because everyone will have a megaphone.   What? Who invited whom and who paid for it? Yes, I paid for it, and here’s the receipt.  Yes, you, my Isaias-Afwerki t-shirt wearing sister.  No, we will not be asking for IDs and we won’t have a bouncer asking people if hagerawi gubu’om amaliom.  No, there is no sitting arrangement:  everybody sits wherever they are comfortable.  No, we are not having a moment of silence, we are not singing the national anthem, we are not decorating the damn tent, we are not electing a Secretariat.  We are just sitting in peace. Yes, there will be smoking breaks… and please ask anyone with grey hair where the bathrooms are. It is a flat land, and it is broad daylight, but watch your step.

So, ok, it is not that practical.  So we have to do it the traditional way: survey, sample size, focus groups.  But those things have their rules and when you have a country that hasn’t had a census since, let me check my calendar, since 1949, there is a risk that you may not have a representative sample.  You form friendships based on shared values; your immediate and extended family share your values; you talk to them and, voila, you have what statisticians call self-selecting opinion poll, or SLOP.  You are sloppy.

But we have to start somewhere.   First, we have to list a comprehensive people’s wish list (the what), then we prioritize it by asking why (why do they want what they say they want), then we whittle it down by asking “how” (can it be done.)   

1. The What: The Objective

The following is an expression of what Eritrean activists in the Diaspora say is of urgent priority to present day Eritrea to help solve its ills:

Down!Down! Dictator!
The dictator must go!
The people want the regime gone!
Isaias Afwerki Must Resign!
Isaias Afwerki Must Be Taken To International Court!
Just Leave!
Return power to the people!
Free prisoners of conscience!
Free political prisoners!
Implement the constitution!
Rule of law!
Say No to the Ghedli Culture!
Return land to its rightful owners!
Purge “non-Eritreans” from Eritrean government!
End national conscription!
End slave labor!
End human trafficking!
Demarcation now!
Democracy now!
Justice now!
We Demand political pluralism!
We Demand Arabic to be a co-official language!
No Taxation Without Representation!
Federal System is the Answer!
Self determination up to and including secession!

Now, let’s assume that Eritreans in Eritrea were polled and they were voicing what really mattered to them right now.  Would these be safe bets to add?

We need affordable food!
We need affordable housing!
We need jobs!
We need water!
We need electricity!
We need peace!
We want our children back!

Let’s now assume we are taking our survey at our tent.  Everyone is given two flashlights—one flashes green, one flashes red.   A man with a booming voice is reading out our demands.  After each demand, we flash a green if we strongly agree; a red if we strongly disagree; and yellow if we are indifferent or we don’t think it is relevant right now.  This will be a challenge because if you don’t care about an issue you won’t even have the energy to flash a light: but that’s why it is yellow: it is you saying, “this issue is so irrelevant, you better not make it an issue.”

That’s our vote.  If we are doing it with a smaller sample, we do it using the Indian Voting Machine, which re-answered the question the Greeks had already answered: you don’t need to be literate to vote.  You can use colored pebbles.

Who votes is not as important as who counts the vote, said some colossal thief, probably Stalin.  So we need a Secretariat: but we already have it in the tent: it is our religious leaders.  For our focus group, the Secretariat is the computer itself, which will be audited just in case.

Our objective now is to politely eliminate all the statements that were overwhelmingly red (strong opposition) or yellow (strong indifference) and net out the green.  Those who make a living with political messaging say that phrasing matters a lot.  A person who is completely turned off by “the dictator must go” might be amenable to “the president must resign.”  Of course, on the flip side, a person may be totally disgusted that somebody who has never been elected by the people is being addressed as “president.”  That’s why politicians conduct polls to determine which one generates more support.   

2. The Why: The Moral Cause

Now, that’s a long list so we have to ask the next question: why are we calling for whatever it is we are calling for?  Some are, of course, self-explanatory (“we need affordable food.”) And some will be answered with “because it is morally right AND urgent” (“release political prisoners.”) Others are things we will haggle over: persuade one another why they are supremely important for Eritrea.  Remember, if you believe in the “rational choice theory”, you accept as natural when people advance their self interest.  When you call somebody “self-interested”, “selfish”, you may think that you are trying to shame him into “seeing the light”, but all you are doing is complimenting him for being rational; a favor he returns by recognizing your “self-interested” motive in being a Diaspora Eritrean.  All your activism is driven by self-interest: not what our friends in hgdef think (“they are all in the payroll of Weyane”), but because it makes you feel good to think, to know, that you are doing whatever you can to alleviate the pain of your people.

3. The How: Strategies and Tactics

We have agreed on the “what”, we have asked the “why”, now comes the “how.” Of course, I am cheating because it is not sequential.  For example,  a person may not flash green for “the dictator must go” unless he or she gets assurances of HOW that will happen.  But that, I think, is where we have to insist on sequencing: let’s first agree on the objective, then we will decide on the strategy.  And, if we don’t agree on the strategy, the objective will be modified or dropped.  This happens to us in real life all the time: objective: I want a new car.  how: I will save money, I will join an uqub, I will borrow money, I will rob a bank, I will carjack, I will sell my guitar.   We may end up settling for a used car, or give up on it.

In politics, the first “how” is to pool resources, also known as to organize.  You can’t do anything–you can’t strategize, you can’t exploit tactics,  unless you organize and this is something our people know from experience (ELM, ELF, EPLF.) It is the most visible sign of our failure and, without it, perfecting the what (knowing, agreeing on, and defining the objective) and having all the answers for the why (the moral, legal imperative) is simply inadequate.  Our ability to organize is the biggest threat to the PFDJ which is why the entirety of its counter-attack is focused not on disagreeing with our objective or its moral imperative (some of which it reluctantly, grudging, agrees with in principle but says it is a matter of wrong timing; or, in the case of the prisoners of conscience, it tells us that it actually has the moral high ground because it is hiding them from a vigilante group who would kill them) but they attack any sign of our organization.  There is nothing original about this, of course, that is exactly what Derg did to EPLF: to turn its strength, organization, into a weakness, by labeling it a tool of Arabs.  We, on the other hand, are tools of “Weyane”, “CIA”, or whoever else is the bogeyman of the week.

I do not necessarily see coerced “unity” of the opposition as important or even necessary.  We have learned from the experience of the last 12 years that coerced unity—something put together under our pressure—collapses for the flimsiest causes.  What I think is important is that we advocate our best interpretation of the people’s demands (from the “what” list), we find appealing language to describe them and categorize them, link the why it is happening to the misrule of the Eritrean regime, and work obsessively to organize Eritreans in the Diaspora and link them to Eritreans in Eritrea.  That is: 3 smaller, well-organized groups are better than 1 large dysfunctional organization.  Most importantly: if we  assume that people are intelligent and make rational decisions—we will work hard to show them that supporting us is, in the longer run, the rational decision.

Sal Younis
06.18.2013

Eritrea is a small country in the Horn of Africa. No state census has been released since 2003, but its population is estimated to be around six million. Eritrea’s a coastal state that borders Ethiopia to its south, Sudan to its west, Djibouti to it south-east, and the Red Sea to its north. Because of the country’s strategic geo-political location – nestled in between a turbulent Middle East and a defiant Somalia – it has become sought-after real estate in America’s global surveillance project. But I digress. The point of this article is not to analyze Eritrea’s place in the ‘War on Terror’, Arab Spring, Somali intervention etc. Nor does this article examine Eritrea in any other regional context. Instead, I focus almost entirely on the internal politics and power relations that have plagued Eritrea since emerging from a 30-year armed struggle in 1991. This article has two goals. First, I want to analyze the recent coup attempt that unfolded at the Ministry of Information on January 21^st, 2013, and the diaspora’s response through a digitized international social movement.  Second, I want to discuss the January 21^st movement as a reaction to – and an extension of – Eritrea’s unfinished national liberation struggle. In entering the topic, my story doesn’t begin with the events of January 21^st, but rather travels back in time to the fist days of Eritrean ‘independence’.

I visited Eritrea for the first time at the age of nine. As a young Eritrean born and raised in the diaspora, my visit helped to inform the far-removed homeland my parents always spoke of, but that I never knew myself. I arrived in August of 1993. Just two years after a bloody and protracted liberation war came to an end, or so we thought. And three months after the United Nations and Organization of African Unity recognized Eritrea as Africa’s newest state. The ironically named People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (formerly the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front) was in power, and the new Eritrean state was being hailed by the West as a beacon of what President Clinton referred to as the ‘African Renaissance’. Alongside Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, Eritrea was said to be spearheading a new crop of accountable, transparent, and socially responsible government. The interests of former liberation fighters, peasants, women, the urban poor, and other marginalized groups would now govern the state, and not the other way around. Under a framework of democratic socialism, women, youth, ethnic and religious minorities would all be entrusted with leading ‘post-independence’ reconstruction in the bourgeoning nation. As an early gesture of such radical democracy, the PFDJ announced that a minimum of one-third of parliamentary seats would be reserved for women. The gesture was meant to recognize women’s active and sacrificial role in the revolution, during which they comprised one-third of all tegadelti (guerilla fighters). As a reward, the rights of women were to be enshrined in the power structures of the new state.

If Eritrea’s history came to a close alongside the armed struggle, then the guerilla-turned-President Isaias Afwerki would have been remembered as a tireless liberator. His legacy would have been one of feverish work ethic, courage, discipline, and boundless optimism. But Eritrea’s history wouldn’t end there. Like Isaias, history is also stubborn.

I arrived in Eritrea with romantic expectations. Part of me expected to walk the streets of Asmara and see families reunited by peace, parades for heroes returning from the front, and children lined up outside schools excited to begin an education uninterrupted by war. What I saw instead surprised me. It shook me from the idealism of what I hoped Eritrea to be, and woke me to the besieged reality of what it was. Driving around the country’s highlands I saw rusted tanks abandoned along the roadside, beautiful mosques split in two by bomb blasts, and mothers in the streets still grieving the loss of their children. Thousands of nameless martyrs swallowed up by the sea, rivers, deserts and hillsides became one with the landscape. Their bodies still scattered across the nation’s many battlefields. In the absence of a proper burial, friends and families created urban tombstones by carving their names into the sides of buildings. The half empty houses along my grandparents’ street were a chilling reminder that not everyone returned home from meda (the front). Those who survived had done so at a cost. They lived with the psychological tolls of war. From the scars of war engraved on the national body and consciousness, as well as the possibilities that were opened up for the future, I quickly realized that the Eritrean liberation struggle was a sacrificial and visionary process.

As jarring as some of these images were for a young child, I came to understand them as the inevitable costs of protracted anti-colonialism. These images were the scars that accompany a new nation forcing itself into existence, but also the seedlings of a new optimism.  

National Liberation and Its Discontents

2013 is an important year to reflect on the legacy of the Eritrean revolution. In entering the twentieth anniversary of Eritrean statehood, we should take time to critically reflect on the first two decades of ‘independence’. If Human Rights Watch describes Eritrea as “a country under siege – from its own government”, then I hope to explain some of the ways this ‘siege’ is taking place.

Since the optimism of the early 1990s, the people of Eritrea have largely lost faith in the state. The PFDJ has used the last two decades to advance a counter-revolution premised on media repression, the criminalization of dissent, and by building a military industrial complex heavily reliant on forced (particularly youth) labor. Parliament has been all but disbanded and the 1997 Constitution remains un-ratified. Unlike the PFDJ’s early 90s lip service to women’s empowerment through state participation, women have been shut out from key posts. Including the omnipotent inner circles of the President’s Office.

In September 2001, while the world’s eyes were still fastened to New York City and the events 9/11, the PFDJ carried out a large-scale crackdown on its political opponents. Deep Party purges through arrests, torture and even executions ensured that President Afwerki was left with a consensus of support. September 19^th, 2001 marks an important historical moment in Afwerki’s genesis. On this day he jailed (and later had executed) Vice-President Mahmoud Sherifo, banned all private media, and advanced his imprisonment of an estimated 10,000 political prisoners. In an ironic reproduction of colonial violence experienced under the Italians, Afwerki reopened Alla and Nakhura Island. In the early twentieth century, Italian colonists used Alla and Nakhura Island as prisons to house Eritrean nationalists in particular, and anti-colonial resisters more broadly.

In a sense, state violence in Eritrea is very much architectural in nature. Like in the case of Alla and Nakhura Island, it’s built right into the walls of prisons and underground torture centers used by the Italians, then the British, then the Ethiopians, and now Eritreans themselves. State violence in Eritrea is layered to reflect those forgotten colonists who mentored the revolutionaries-turned-statesmen in their current campaign of imprisonment and torture. Indefinite and mandatory conscription ensures that the military has a steady supply of young bodies to police the people. The final grades of all high schools nation-wide are relocated to Sawa, the country’s largest military training camp. Sawa is notorious for its ‘shoot to kill’ policy for escapees seeking to cross the border into Ethiopia or Sudan. Those who make it out tell stories of routine rape, violence against women, torture, murder, and public humiliation rituals used to beat compliance into dissenting minds. For the country’s young people, whose labor is predetermined by the Warsay-Yikealo campaign, Sawa represents the final destination in a school-to-prison pipeline. For many, but for women in particular, dropping out of secondary school before Grade 12 poses better prospects, and allows them to delay forced national service.

For those lucky enough to avoid Sawa, or at least survive it, national service continues in other forms. Human Rights Watch recently released a report detailing Canadian mining companies who use forced labor made available through Warsay-Yikealo.

Although the Eritrean state operates behind a cloak of mystery and paranoia, the most recent statistics reveal that it spends as little as 1.4% of GDP on education. Whereas 20.9% of GDP is spent on military buildup. The former number is good for a bottom-rung score when compared with other African states. (Which explains why the University of Asmara was closed in 2006 – leaving the country without a single active university). The latter number is good for Eritrea’s top spot worldwide in military spending proportional to GDP. We should be asking ourselves, what does a little country that hasn’t been to war in over a decade need with one of Africa’s largest militaries, if not to deploy it against its own people?

The Eritrean military is relied upon to guard the country’s borders. Not only from external threats seeking to transgress state borders, but also to police Eritreans seeking to escape them. The PFDJ’s ‘shoot to kill’ policy doesn’t just apply to Sawa, but the country at large. Those brave children, families, and military deserters who test the policy are routinely hunted down in the northern border region. In spite of the grave dangers facing escapees, 2011 witnessed 222,460 people escape into lives as refugees. Some registered by the UNHCR, but many more who live life under and beyond the reach of UN documentation. Some lucky enough to make it out with their families, but many aren’t. Eritrea remains one of the top refugee producing countries in the world. For refugee producing countries per capita, it ranks number one in the world.   

So why does it seem like Eritrea’s internal crisis is under-reported by international media? Because it is. This is the case for two reasons. First and foremost international media tends to show a disinterest in African stories that aren’t told through tag lines of war, famine, disease, ethnic cleansing, or claims of ‘tribalism’. In the Western imagination in particular, Africa must remain a place of perpetual backwardness. It must exist not just outside of history and civilization but also against it. The continent’s problems are believed to unfold beyond the reach of the ‘aid’ and ‘development’ handed down by the West. To put it candidly, the information gap on Africa is primarily the result of a general disregard for African life. Even within an already marginalized continent, international media is especially unfamiliar and disinterested in Eritrea. Caught in between the occasional interest points of Ethiopian famine and Somali Islamists, Eritrea isn’t quite as sexy a story as its neighbors.

This brings me to the second reason for Eritrea’s underrepresentation in international media. Given the banning of all domestic media in 2001, the world beyond Eritrea’s borders is left with no local news sources; or at least no sources that aren’t monopolized by the state. In their 2012 Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders ranked Eritrea last in journalistic freedom. A title Eritrea’s maintained for six straight years. The combination of domestic and international media neglect has worsened the global information gap on Eritrea. Forcing many Eritreans to visit or phone home for updates on the political situation.

January 21^st: The Unfinished Revolution

fter January 21^st, 2013, what media coverage lacked was a historical analysis of the coup. We can only understand the events of January 21^st in light of the incompleteness of national liberation, and the resulting state violence experienced by Eritrean people in the ‘post-independence’ period.

More than anything else, January 21^st was a response by segments of the military to the PFDJ’s false promises of democratic socialism, free speech, open media, de-militarization of the border, women’s participation in governance, and youth empowerment through education. Rather than recognize this, mainstream media opted for overly-simplistic explanations of the coup as just another ‘military takeover in Africa’, ‘a stand-off between the President and his critics’, and so forth. What these narratives ignore is that the international social movement that January 21^st ignited has very little to do with President Afwerki the individual, or even his party. (Although these things are inevitable focuses of the movement). Instead, the January 21^st movement is about completing the national liberation struggle that began with the first shots fired in 1961, and can only end with a truly decolonized Eritrea. It’s about restoring an Eritrean national consciousness and direction premised on self-determination, justice, education and popular participation. The movement’s driven by a holistic vision of what it wants to create for itself and for Eritrea. To understand the courage and political vision that characterizes the movement, one only needs to take to Twitter, Facebook, PalTalk or the many other digital outlets where diaspora activists lay out their demands.  January 21^st, and the hope that its restored to Eritreans around the world, is yet another reminder that even a people exhausted by thirty years of war will find the energy to push forward.

Like many other post-national liberation nations, Eritrea remains unsettled. Its visions of African socialism from decades ago have been hijacked by state bureaucrats and elites. But Eritrea still remains haunted by the expectations of what it was meant to become. This haunting will continue to take shape through more coups, rebellions, and acts of everyday resistance by Eritreans – both at home and abroad. Even though the front-turned-state has turned its back on the promises of national liberation, the Eritrean people, steadfast in their commitment to full and unrelenting liberation, will see it through. They are not simply fighting to overthrow the post-‘independent’ government, they are fighting to complete a revolution started long ago.
___________________

Aman Sium is an Eritrean activist and doctoral student at the University of Toronto. His writings focus on Indigenous communities and social movements in the Horn of Africa. His most recent publication is From Starving Child to Rebel-Pirate: The West’s New Imagery of a ‘Failed’ Somalia (Borderlands E-Journal, 2013).

On July 13, 2013, the Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea (SEMG), which is mandated by the UN to observe and report on sanctions violations by Somalia and Eritrea, submitted its annual report to the Security Council. Even though the 500-page report on Somalia was released, a shorter 80-page report on Eritrea, recommending a “gold for food” scheme, was blocked from publication because of objections from Russia, pending further consultation.

Responding to a reporter’s question as to why the report was not released, the US head of Mission to the UN, Ambassador De Laurentis, said: “Well, there are two reports – the Somalia report and the Eritrea report. The Somalia report was released, and we remain deeply troubled by some of the Monitoring Group’s findings, and we encourage the Eritrean Government to play a productive role in the region. With respect to the other, as it remains with the Committee, it’s still a confidential document, and we’ll continue to discuss the release of it. But beyond that I’m really not able to make any further comment about it.”

The report on Eritrea, leaked to awate.com’s Gedab News by a UN diplomat, provided evidence that shows Eritrea’s continued involvement in destabilizing Somalia by threatening its international community-supported fragile government through financial support of a network of political agents and warlords with links to al-Shabab. For the last three years, the Eritrean government has been denying such links and refuses to cooperate with the UN monitoring group.

The panel expressed its concerns about the “opaque management of hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues obtained from mining production.” According to Nevsun’s financial statement, Eritrea was paid 148 and 317 million USD, in 2011 and 2012, respectively, from taxes, royalties and return on equity.

The panel could not determine how these payments were made and was unable to obtain transaction records of bank accounts from Nevsun or Eritrea. Because of the opacity of the transactions and the fungible nature of the hard currency, the panel proposed an application of due diligence measures to ensure that the proceeds will not be used in any activity that potentially violates the sanction.

Below are the three options and the panel’s recommendation.

1. Voluntary disclosures and earmarking
2. Joint Supervision
3. Mandatory disclosure

Option 1: Voluntary Disclosure and Earmarking.  This would  require the government of Eritrea’s voluntary enrollment in organizations like the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), requiring the mining companies and the Government of Eritrea to publish revenues and payments.

Option 2: Joint Supervision:  Under this option, mining companies would be required to make payments to an escrow account administered jointly by the Government of Eritrea and a designated international body.  The designated body could be appointed by the Security Council, or, in the alternative, the SC could delegate the task to the World Bank or a regional bank.  This would be similar to the model used for Liberia, the Governance and Economic Management Assistance Program (GEMAP.)

Option 3: Mandatory Disclosure:  Under this option, the Government of Eritrea would be compelled to disclose all payments related to mining revenue, making transfers of money easier to detect by the Monitoring Group.

Of the three options, the Monitoring Group is recommending Option 2 because Option 1 and Option 3 have built-in problems.  Option 1 could only work if there was a vibrant and active civil society demanding external audits in Eritrea.  Similarly, Option 3 is not practical: even if the Monitoring Group is able to follow the transfer of payments, it would face too many legal obstacles from overseas banks and money transfer agencies to conduct any meaningful monitoring.  

Thus, the Monitoring Group is recommending Option 2 (Joint Supervision) as the only viable alternative as long as it is mandated to monitor sanctions on Eritrea and Somalia. 

Eritrea Likely Candidate for HIPC

Two years of border war with Ethiopia, followed by thirteen years of a no-war no-peace environment, has resulted in a huge public debt for Eritrea, a figure that the Eritrean government does not disclose.

However, twenty years after gaining independence, when it was debt free, Eritrea along with Somalia and Sudan, is being considered for entry into Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt services program by the IMF and World Bank.   The IMF/World Bank estimates Eritrea’s debt to be 114 % of its GDP or USD 3.5 Billion, the 6ths highest in the world in terms percentage of debt to GDP. [see update below.]  Loss of financial support from Libya’s Gadhafi has left the regime cash-strapped and unable to import fuel.

Power outage in Asmara has become more frequent and longer in duration. With the exception of several blocks in downtown Asmara, which experiences interment outage of few hours, the entire city has been without power for the last three weeks.

The UNSC is scheduled to take action on the recommendation in its July 24 meeting.  Our diplomatic sources inform us that there are not enough votes at the UNSC to adopt any of the recommendations at this time, but there will be a strong warning against the mining companies and especially Nevsun whose predatory practice led Human Rights Watch to issue an extensive report entitled “Hear No Evil: Forced Labor and Corporate Responsibility in Eritrea’s Mining Sector.”

//END
awate.com
inform. inspire. embolden. reconcile.

Update 1: 07.22.13.  Eritrea’s debt is actually 3.7 billion, making its debt to GDP rate 123.18%.  This ranks Eritrea the 5th highest indebted country in the world, when debt is measured as percentage of GDP.  The Eritrean currency, the Nackfa, is now trading at 52 Nakfa to 1 USD.  As recently as April, it was trading at 40: 1.

Following the report of the Somalia-Eritrea Monitoring Group (SEMG), the United Nations Security Council passed  resolution (2111) on 24 July to relax the arms embargo on Somalia and Eritrea, to extend SEMG’s mandate until November 25, 2014, to “underline” the importance of Eritrea granting access to the SEMG.

The UN bases its authority to impose embargo on Eritrea and Somalia on Chapter VII of the UN Charter.  This, the UN maintains, is because it has determined that “Eritrea’s influence in Somalia, as well as the dispute between Djibouti and Eritrea, continue to constitute a threat to international peace and security in the region.”

SEMG’s original mandate was to monitor arms trafficking to Somalia; however, following repeated demands that Eritrea cease from arming Somali rebels including Al Shabab;  following repeated pleas that Eritrea enter into negotiations with Djibouti to resolve their border dispute–demands and pleas that were ignored by the Eritrean government–the UNSC expanded the mandate of SEMG to include Eritrea.

As anticipated by Gedab News on 22 July, the SEMG recommendations on heightened monitoring of mining revenues to Eritrea were not accepted by the UN.

The arms embargo on Eritrea will remain in place, with some changes to accommodate “humanitarian or protective use.”

Since 2009, the UN has called on Eritrea to provide access to the monitoring group.  Just as emphatically, the Eritrean regime has been denying access to the monitoring group claiming that the group is politicized and often demanding information which is outside its mandate.  Resolution 2111, once again, “underlines” its expectation that the “Government of Eritrea will facilitate the entry of the Monitoring Group to Eritrea without any further delay.”

The Eritrean regime continues to state that Ethiopia’s refusal to abide by the ruling of the Eritrea Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) decision demarcating the Eritrea-Ethiopia border is a bigger threat to international peace and regional security and the UN’s refusal to act demonstrates its lack of fairness as well selective application of the UN Charter.

//END
awate.com
inform. inspire. embolden. reconcile.

The following was written on July 18, 2013 by “Haile” at awate forum in response to “Asmara”, an archetypal government supporter. It is being posted here because of your requests. It is one of the greatest take downs of the PFDJ talking points. The PFDJ defenders have somehow convinced themselves that they are the only ones who have family members in Eritrea that they talk to. They have convinced themselves that we, in the opposition, don’t have family members that we talk to every day. Family members who tell us what is going. They have convinced themselves (or they would like to fool themselves) that everyone who visits Eritrea is a supporter of the government. What makes Haile’s takedown so effective is because it is fact-based, spontaneous, and written from the perspective of the ordinary Eritrean who has been muzzled.  

Selam Asmara,

Your disapproval of the nature of the current opposition shouldn’t be reason enough for you to support a regime that is dead beat and has no chance in hell of making it out alive.

The majority of Eritreans are opposition to the regime and their grievances as well as fundamental interests are not reflected by the current vocal opposition organizations. So, try to deal with the Eritrean situation vis-a-vis the dismal regime. You are not obliged to analyze matters through the lens of your judgement as regards the integrity and character of the groups you have issues with.

The Ethiopia Eritrea border issue is legally settled and all there is to it is for Ethiopia to leave occupied territories for resumption of normal relationship.

The Eritrean regime will not survive very long after that as it is rejected beyond redemption by Eritreans and the world.

If you are an Eritrean farmer commenting from the fields around Hazemo, I need to remind you that there is a proclamation prohibiting you from selling your produce in the market.

If you are an Eritrean business entrepreneur commenting from the side cafes of Asmara, I need to remind you that there is a proclamation prohibiting you from possessing foreign currency, obtaining business license or importing and exporting goods.

If you are an Eritrean academic commenting from one of the Technical collages, you need to be aware that the government has removed your ability to work in collaboration with other Universities around the world independently.

If you are an Eritrean high school student commenting from your school library in Asmara, I need to remind you that you shouldn’t think of your university courses because you will be told what to study for a qualification that has no international recognition.

If you are an Eritrean Fisher man commenting from the coastal regions of Eritrea, I need to remind you that there is a proclamation that requires you to hand over your catch to the government and not attempt to sell it in the market.

If you are a driver in Eritrea, you need to be reminded that you can only purchase fuel from contraband vendors.

If you are a patient in Eritrea and commenting from a hospital, be aware that your family may be required to purchase contraband fuel for the hospital generator to perform your urgently needed operations.

If you are a family person in Eritrea, be aware that you have safe place to store a government issued gun in your home, else the kids may shoot each other thinking it is safe to do.

If you are a medical doctor in Eritrea, make sure you know that you have wardia (night patrol) duty armed with Kalashnikov. So organize your research times.

If you are national service discharge in Eritrea, make sure to report to your local zoba mimhdar, to pick up a gun and do duties of guarding banks and other government offices.

If you are a young Eritrean thinking of traveling abroad, there is a proclamation prohibiting you from doing so. Try your luck…you know where.

Ration food, intermittent electricity, little or no water supply, no right to seek employment or be self employed….

Refugee camps, human trafficking, high seas tragedy. You name it.

Asmara, you think the regime will be fixed and things will be better. I beg to differ.

Regards

Prelude

Recently, my attention was pulled by a compelling attraction, a subject called “political psychology” – a new branch of political science. It is a field dedicated and aimed to understand the political behavior of politicians and political organizations from psychological perspectives. The theory is applied to many contexts, some among others include policy making, behavior of ethnic contradictions, political extremism, group dynamics using cognitive and social explanations.

Some scholars in this field are making creative research to study the psychological factors that could influence any political decision where “psychological manners” of individual leaders or group for that matter becomes at the center of their study. In psychology deferred gratifications is referred as “impulse renunciation” or self-imposed postponement of gratifications or satisfactions [1].  So the subject “deferred gratification” will be investigated through the prism of politico-psychology as to whether it has an application in the political manual of a given social revolution, especially in the Eritrean proper.

When Walter Mischel launched a research on delayed gratification – the “Stamford marshmallow experiment,” he hasn’t in mind that it will have a broad effect into different discipline of studies. Currently deferred gratification is linked to a host of field of studies that includes social science, behavioral science, economics, socio-politics, and politico-psychology.  

In pluralistic society there is nothing undisputable public good, and the social policy problems are always bound to fail because they are “wicked problems” and it makes no sense to talk about optimal solution [2].  Wicked problems as such are problems difficult to resolution. So in this essay we will observe the wicked Eritrean political problem and the consequence of deferring of certain issues (social values), the factors that makes the Eritrean problem unsolvable parallel with the psychological manners of our political practitioners, and the interplay of politics and psychology in the discourse of our resistance. My attempt is far from a powerful description of clinical psychology, but will explore the minds that are fixed on old psychological perceptions through spatiotemporal approach and correlations.

Eritrea’s Wicked Political Problems

According Rittel wicked problems have no stopping rules, and the solutions for them are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad. In that, there is no matrix of measurement as such – despite certain individuals have the ability of self to transcend society. Wicked political problems have psychological character to define the behavioral activities of the society as a group or individuals. Recently psychological services are thought and accepted practically in all field of human activity and psychologists have considerably the power to influence opinions and behavior of the public (Kipnis 1987, pp 30). Obviously we are not clear about the dimensions and characteristics of our social problem. That in itself makes it to be more complex and wicked and hard to resolutions.

 What are the wicked problems in our politics? Our wicked problems that hold us from moving forward are “Mistrust and lack of Unity” which in effect resulted  in the psychology of group identities and cultural identities to persist their  existence. Hence the current grouping is the microcosm expression and end product of the two unresolved and deferred social values.

Does deferment always bring gratifications? Interestingly enough, a sociologist from Chicago University, Hollingshead said no. He has illustrated and shown in his book, that in a job area, a lower class boy, eager to pay his own way and escape from family domination, seeks a full-time job at a very early age, and accordingly left a school. The boy who obtained freedom has happened to be illusory and found himself caught in continuous low pay job with little or no promise to continue education [3]. Understandably, deferment does not always bring gratifications. In this case, the boy who hoped to get delayed gratification of obtaining a more elaborated education after seeking a job didn’t materialized.

It is no surprising then, that we are surrendered to our own faults and fates built in on our mutual mistrust and chaotic political disarray both inside and outside of our nation. The political practitioners in their subtle staging and dainty petite-type performance could not match to the complex problems of the nation and the legal cognizance of geopolitics of the horn. The inaptness of the Eritrean government, who took the assignment of governing the nation and its people by sheer force have disfigured the can do spirit of our people. Like in a Pokémon’s move, it has only two characteristics of moves with no evolutionary moves and no effort to adjust with the international political dynamics. These moves are embedded on (a) narrow nationalism that alienate the nation and its people from international community (b) fighting against perceptual enemies and perceptual conspiracy theory that negatively affect people to people diplomacy, nation to nation diplomacy and the socio-politics of our diversity. Surely, all these are signaling to no detour from edging on the cliff. On the other hand the opposition’s leaders in the “opposition camp” with no compass to guide failed to prioritize the nature of our struggle, failed to rally our people with a clear vision, and indeed are now stuck at a deadlock to adjudicate our past history while their deciding fate is at the hand of our people. Hence it is quintessential now that our young generation to read this perceptual politico-psychology and do something to change the psychological relations within our diversities, the psychological relations with our neighbors, and with the international communities at large.

Economy: A Vector of Deferred Gratification

In this global age, deferred gratifications are more applicable in economics (as they called it the economic of deferred gratifications) in various sets of economic development. For instance the deferred gratifications is what gives us the savings that are in turn loaned by the banks to businesses who create jobs and wealth; the pension funds that keep us comfortable in our old ages; the willingness of parents to invest in their children education[4].

 Recently, Norbert Walter criticized the Harvard economists as the onlookers of shortsighted remedies, who advocate for the “purchasing power theory” and argued in relation to Germany’s imminent labor shortage due to ageing population and he summed it as follows:

“In order to create a cushion for that period we should continue to generate current account surpluses and use the corresponding savings now to specifically finance infrastructure investments in emerging markets and developing countries, so that the recipient countries become more productive. They can then help us to finance our import surplus from 2015 onwards via dividend payments on these high-yielding investments. Germans should not indulge in overconsumption now and then have to endure poverty in old age.”[5]

Norbert foresaw prosperity not for just here and now but also for posterity founded on behavioral maxims and regulations, focusing on satisfying the interest of global clients – a call for deferral gratification. For now I will leave this particular argument for economists and revert back to the subject I am interested to address.

Shifting Positions to Meet Late Gratifications

In the last decade or two, the shift in United Nations’ policy to wards “a responsibility to protect” or “the right of humanitarian intervention” as emphasized by Evans and Sahnoun (2002) [6] and the shift of African Unions’ (AU) policy from “non-interference” to “non-indifference” right after the dissolution of the Organization of African unity (OAU), have improved the resolutions of conflicts settlements. Despite it was too little and too late to intervene in Somalia (by AU), Bosnia and Kosovo (by NATO), the right of humanitarian intervention by coercive action for the purpose of protecting people at risk in those states was appropriate and have stopped the continuous human catastrophe. Hence with AU’s non-indifference policy, the regional states in the horn could form an intra-security arrangement that eventually extend to military pact to defend vulnerable states from rogue regimes as well as to protect peace and stability of the region. [7]

 Therefore it is of particular interest to investigate whether there are significant corresponding alternative political variables applicable to our realities. For sure the reciprocal relationship of the dependent and independent variables will play in the frame work of empirical analysis. Here the dependent variables are the regional and International actors in the horn, while the independent variables are “the mismatched forces of changes” [8] in the Diaspora and the determinant forces of change from inside.  Since the external and domestic drivers of conflict are enmeshed together, problems will no longer contained within the boundary of the state of Eritrea, where it clearly becomes difficult to have distinction between internal and external domains [9].

Traditional analysis either assumed or asserted has some particular root cause usually traced to historical grievances. Hirschliefer (2001) who pioneered much of the analytical research on conflict proposed by the Machiavelli theory argued that no profitable opportunity for violence would go unused [10]. Tiptoeing on Hirschliefer’s analytical prospective approach, I will argue that “Forto-2013” though it sets the precedence, it failed when it lacks the external factor as a pressure from IGAD’s humanitarian and security intervention and the so called forces of change in the opposition camp.  Indeed Forto-2013 missed the opportunity to oust the totalitarian regime, setting a social revolution to occupy the niche. In any case, the opposition camp should always shift strategies and tactics to meet what ever they set for late gratifications, with the change of geopolitics in our region.

To bring a new dynamic politico-psychology within the thinking of our people, we have to eradicate the politico-cultural psychology of self-reliance (in all its facets) brought by the ghedli (specifically EPLF) – a political rhetoric’s conditioned to the Eritrean people. This political philosophy aside its rhetoric’s wasn’t practiced in their political house now and then. Two examples have proved that self-reliance wasn’t practiced (a) the united front EPLF/TPLF – in all war fronts, against Derg doesn’t show Bi’Sefrna (b) the 3.7 billion Eritrea’s debt (courtesy Gedeb news) doesn’t show Bi’Sefrna. So in my opinion this conditioned politico-psychology doesn’t hold water on the ground, hence it is easy to de-condition the political thinking of the Eritrean people.

Psychology of Unity: The Virtue of Eritrean Spirit

 The political and social climate of Eritrea today emphasize on differences, disunity, and destruction which perpetuate our alienation from basic human co-existence – a unique vision of humanity, which fosters unity without uniformity and diversity without fragmentation. Today Eritrea is facing an existential threat from its regime and our nation is subjugated by an evil man, one of the worst human nature. Our people are looking for a daring rescue of humanity by all means with all possible alliances. The paradigm of unity in their psychology, as a way to a new pipe-dream of social ecumenical movement is paramount at this stage of our struggle. We need these changes as a matter of “fact” and as a matter of “value”. As a matter of facts, our struggle can not succeed without unity and as matter of value – unity reflects the common norms such as reciprocal respect and respect of individual and group rights with an interest in practice of all the social variables in play.

 In theory the Eritrean people cried unity for generations. In spite the desire for unity, the very different moves of the actors, without drawing the boundaries of the lines of interactions and integrations which best describe the actual practice of unity; certainly undermine the moral value and principles of unity. Consequently, their modus operandi as practiced is nothing other than oasis of power that induces wrapped threads of tension and friction. Unity has history and logic how to get it. Unity is not like religious monotheism. It has a pluralistic behavior that requires the equilibrium of its variables. Unity is determined by the rules of analysis of ideas into elements and their synthesis into combinations. Because we failed to make a demonstrative study and allow disputes to be resolved by precise social calculations, it is always involuntarily deferred from time to time. Deferring unity is deferring your success. Unity is a philosophical currency of success. Unity in its social and political relevance, its pluralistic properties should often be defended against pure skepticism of nothing goes and pure indifferentism of anything goes.

Since Nagel’s influential model of reduction by derivation, most discussions of unity are cast in terms of reduction between concepts, entities they describe, and between theories incorporating the descriptive concepts. And the level of reduction is fixed by “parts-whole relations” [11].  In light of Nagel’s conceptual model of reduction, what are the social and political variables in the landscape of Eritrean sociopolitical arena in the analysis of its parts and in the synthesis of its combinations? Here is the area where Eritrean scholars must make in depth studies to contribute to the process and efforts for unity in its conceptual schemes and frameworks.  After the aforementioned thorough studies, then the social behavior (desires) distributed about the ontological status of related elements (parts) and their pluralistic contextual manifestation of power or dispositions can be formulated [12]. In such scenario, pluralism applies widely to concepts, explanations, virtue, goals, methods, models, and kind of representations.

Unity doesn’t come by let us go to the table and talk spontaneously without enough preparations and enough studies on the parts and whole relations, the political variables pronounced by different social groups, and how we could synthesize a political platform from the variables. The existing political practitioners have no capacity and know how to do that and they couldn’t even reach out to the pool of our intelligentsia in the Diaspora. The experience of the “national congress” clearly shows the deficiency of preparations and meticulous study as to the concept of unity, its analysis of its parts and synthesis of its parts. Hence as always the deferment of the process and the ineffectiveness of the leadership to do what the public expect them to do. The current leadership of ENCDC has two setbacks from moving forward (a) the gap between the members in understanding the complex Eritrean politics and our wicked political problems; and how to tackle them and adjudicate them within the context of our region (b) the mistrust among our social groups couldn’t help the leadership to have a forward looking organizational structure and coherent strategy in the struggle of our people. These in themselves remained as wicked problems far from solutions.

Philosophical Inquiry on the Values of Trust

Trust is the ingredient of positive relationship fostering to identify the diverse needs of a given society.  Building trust is justifiable if some “values” could emerge out of it with all the conditions and mental attitudes that govern it – the psychological manners. One important criterion for trust is that the truster can accept some level of risks of vulnerability (Becker 1996). Trust involves being optimistic. Such optimism is absent in cases of therapeutic Trust (Horsburgh 1960). Therapeutic trust is the psychological treatments devoted to building trust. In our case we have to explore the psychological effect rendered from the grievances of our social groups and how to alter it by addressing their grievances.

Surprisingly, trust is explored by a variety of disciplines such as social sciences, economics, social psychology, and political sciences. Though there is no universally accepted scholarly definition of trust, there are some agreements on many significant ways. Rousseau defined trust as a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intention or behavior of another. Russell Hardin also called it “encapsulated interest.” Apparently a considerable number of philosophers believe that trustworthiness can be compelled by the force of norms, or more generally, by the force of social constraints (Hardin 2002, O’Neill 2002). This in all outward appearance reflects the social contract view. But I for one support “a will based view” that accounts trustworthiness or the “goodwill view” where the actors are motivated by goodwill (Jones, 1999, 68).

 Trust reduces harmful conflicts, decrease transactions, promotes effective responses, and facilitates rapid formulation of ad-hoc work groups (Weick, Kramer, 1996).  Of all the different implications of trust, the most interesting to my inquiry was when Deutsch (1962) used the term “trust” referring to cooperation within groups. Generally trust is now identified as the key element for conflict resolutions, negotiations, and or mediation.

Equally, armed with the definition of trust and description of the benefit that brings with it, Lewicki set a theory how trust is developed on three fronts (a) explaining differences in the individual (or group) propensity to trust (b) understanding the dimension of trustworthy behavior (or activity) and (c) levels of trust developments as building blocks (Roy Lewick, 2003). As I mentioned earlier and if we want to test Lewicki’s theory on our politico-psychology, one has to make enough study as to the propensity of our social groups towards building trust and the possible dimensions to the path of trust building. Otherwise this non-factual utterance that there is no division within our social groups is simply erroneous assumptions that hold us for generations. There more we acknowledge its existence the more it makes us ready to find solutions.

Trust Building And The Role of Leadership

 For two generations the Eritrean scholars failed to make the necessary study on how trust could be built within our diversity and strengthened the social fabric of our society. I hope the existing social quagmire will make them to see the importance of the subject in context to the challenges of our nation as we speak. In politics the interpersonal relationship of individual leaders matters great. Because they are the interlocutors of different political groups, their personality matters (the psychological manners) on how the development of trust building will accelerate or decelerate the process of trust building and bridges of unity for the Eritrean people. Look the personalities or political practitioners (exhibit-A) in our resistance force: they are not constrained or compelled by moral or circumstantial force to do the right thing to build trust. In fact they are clinging on the division of power to satiate their individual political interest – and understandably behind the existing social cleavages. Now both the internal members of each political group (their base) and the external public are increasingly cynical towards them. Their politico-psychological manners as it stood are not conducive and nor could they change by their own will unless they are challenged. If in the final analysis Building trust is creating common values, then changing the current politico-psychological manners is a must to meet our national challenge.

Leaders are people who are followed said Diana Bean, executive vice president of communication for Manulife Financial. Diana is right that people won’t follow leaders they don’t trust. Trust always makes it easier to get alignment with. With the public confidence on our leaders in the opposition camp at an all time low, leadership, communications, performance, and reputations are extricably linked. Leadership is often equated with positions of authorities and is measured by leadership metrics; such as leadership capital and leadership conditions (Sam Miller, 2008).  Leadership capital is referred to competency – the innate qualities of individuals which are useful for an effective leadership. These innate qualities are wisdom, trust, courage, voice, values, and vision. While vision and values are philosophical framework, wisdom and courage are attributes for leaders to make effective decisions and solving problems. However, innate qualities in themselves alone do not make leaders successful. Environment and the prevailing conditions they work on are also very important factor to their success. The council’s strategy of performance and competitive challenge against the regime is viewed unproductive and appeared dishonest on the eye of the public to exactly explain the problem that exist within the political organizations that dominate the composition of the council. Now the result as it stand is a wake up call to the Eritrean people who are disregarded their role in the process of democratic change. The political organizations are disregarding the public as subservient who takes the orders of their leaders and regard the council body as the council of the political organization  in contrast to the “council of the people” – a prototype of future “Eritrean parliament.” As a matter of fact this was the bone contention between the representative of the civic society including the intellectuals from the public pool and the representative of the political organizations. This contention is also reflected even in the isomeric leadership, isomeric ratio of the council, and the executive body of the council. For external observer it looks strange but in the realm of politics anything is possible. In the long run though it is all a learning process to the apolitical section of our society to engage and deter the ill will of our leaders as they continue to set their interest first in the fight for democratic change.

 References:-  

[1] Louis schnieder and Sverre Lysgaad, “The different gratification patterns: preliminary study”; American sociological review, 1953, pp 142-148.
[2] Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a general theory planning.” Boston, Dec. 1969.
[3] A.B. Hollingstead, “Elm town’s youth”, NY, John valley and sons, 1949, chap-14.
[4] – Gerald   O’Neill, “The economic of differed gratification: Turbulence ahead”, June 23, 2009
[5] Norbert Walter, talking point, “The world’s leading exporter to become the consumer of the last resort”; Deutch Bank research, June 23, 2009.
[6] Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun (2002) “The Responsibility to protect”, Foreign Affairs, pp 99-110.
[7] A. Hidrat, “Leadership and geopolitics of the horn” Awate.com, Sept 29, 2012
[8] Y. Gebrehiwet, “Disconnect at the top: Mismatching disjointed Eritrea”, Asmarino.com, March 14, 2013.
[9] A. Hidrat, “Leadership and Geopolitics of the horn”, Awate.com, Sept. 29, 2012.
[10] Jack Hirscleifer (2001), “The dark side of the force: Economic foundation of conflict theory” Cambridge University press.
[11] Nagel, E. (1951), the structure of science, New York, Harcourt, Brace and world.
[12] McArthur, D. (2006), structural realism, ontological pluralism, and fundamentalism about laws, 151: 233-253.
[13] CW the collected works of Ralph Waldo, Emerson, Robert spiller, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University press, 1971.
[14] Baker, L. C. (1996), trust as non-cognitive security about motives, Ethics, 107.
[15] Hardin, R. (2002), Trust and Trustworthiness, New York, NY: Russell sage foundation.
[16] Jones K. (1999), Second hand moral knowledge, 96: 55-78
[17] Horsburgh, H.J.N. (1960), the ethics of trust, 10: 343-354.

Amanuel Hidrat
7/28/2013

The Unionist movement, which was mostly restricted to a highlander/Christian movement, was the creation of Haileselassie. Abune Markos was instrumental in coercing ordained and lay priests to create mass bases for the Unionist movement; Tedla Bairu ushered in the Federal era while Asfeha Woldemikael, with Qeshi Dimetros, engineered Annexation. At various stages of our history these individuals with many others who collaborated with them acted as the Emperor’s instruments in dismantling Eritrean autonomous existence and budding sense of nationalism in order to pave the way for Ethiopian takeover.

It took our ghedli 30 years to deconstruct what the above mentioned individuals and their collaborators constructed in the 40s and 50s.

Outline:

1. Collaborationism and its Stains;
2. In Honor of those who fell in Operation Fenql;
3. A Few Thoughts;

In these times of adversity those in the collaborationist camp seem to be confused about many things, one of which is in our dealings with our own history. And I think that is, to a degree, to be expected as revisionist and negationist attitudes have always been there with us. However, at this stage, acknowledging the essential components of our national identity which are shaped by our successful struggle for independence is important because that is our best distinguishing feature. Any attempt by members of the collaborationist camp to take our distinguishing feature away from us will provide: 1) an opportunity to the ruling government to strengthen its stranglehold on Eritrea; 2) our people with a reason to reject the opposition and side up more with the government; 3) the opposition camp with more motives to splinter further into inconsequential factions. Eritreans, whether they are PFDJ supporters or their opponents, believe in this most distinguishing feature of our identity – our victorious campaign in driving Ethiopians out of our country which led to our sovereignty; and to muck this sacred belief up is a recipe for disaster.

Devoid of grandeur and imagination, content that portrays mediocrity wallowing in the most boring sort of revisionist history, narratives of disloyalty, reflection of fear and insecurity leads to a stunted growth. Collaborationist stances, with the stains they emboss on our social fabric, lead us to shift our focus on guarding our sovereignty above everything else.

It is widely believed that the study of history is at the center of human enquiry. A deeper knowledge of history will enable us to put present-day thoughts and actions into contexts. And contextualized knowledge of the past is what makes us understand who we are and where we are going. We can also say that history does not only provide us with a frame of reference that enables us to recognize dangers to our society, both from the inner and outer margins, but also becomes a guidance as to how to deal with those dangers when they arise.

Some Eritreans, rather disgracefully, have become practitioners of negationism. Some writers, driven by loss of nerve and self-doubt, and others prompted by inducements, attempt to alter our history to reflect the Ethiopian line of analysis that distorts established historical facts of Eritrea. These Ethiopia apologists can’t keep up the masquerade anymore – their Unionist sentiments and ‘ajewjew’ism’ are defined by faulting the ghedli, our struggle for independence, in every way they can imagine. What a futile attempt, moral bankruptcy!

Based on the above-mentioned principle, the need to explore the recent history of Eritrea is self-evident. To know the way the Eritrean society came to be formed, to have some understanding of the conflicting forces within it, not only it is an advantage in the conduct and understanding of its national affairs but also indispensable. Eritrean history, since the colonial era, is very interesting because it covers three important eras – Federation (1952-1962), the struggle for liberation (1961-1991) and of course, post-independence eras. During those eras, led by the mavericks of the federation era, championed by the heroes of our armed struggle and of course, spoiled by PFDJ, Eritrea went through the process of self-actualization, self-determination and unfortunately, self-constricting paths that have arrested its development. Simply stated, one can think about the post-independence era as the outcome of the struggles that were waged during the federation and liberation eras. But one cannot say the post-independence era is the total-sum of the preceding eras because Eritreans are still, rather ineptly, struggling to implement their dreams of yesterday.

What is in a name?

As an Eritrean it is important to know what Operation Fenql was all about – a Ghedli operation which once and forever forced out the Ethiopian occupation forces from Massawa. That should remain vivid in the minds of all Eritreans. The battle took place in 1990 in and around the coastal city of Massawa. The operation, uprooted the vital lifeline of Ethiopian forces while at the same time heralded the inevitable demise of enemy forces.

Through name association, one needs to remember who Nguse wedi Fenql (BeraKi Nguse) was – one of the most renowned freedom fighters Eritrea had ever witnessed. I have serious doubts that the ET-apologists have any knowledge of neither wedi Fenql nor Operation Fenql – names one should include in his/her historical vocabulary.

I am in no doubt that we Eritreans know about and are taken with, to a great extent, stories like Operation Fenql – heroic activities of our combatants that changed the direction not only of our ghedli struggle but also our lives. At least we know Operation Fenql is a piece of history that was generated by the price the selfless members of EPLF’s 18th brigade had to pay to achieve the ultimate price – our pride and Eritrea’s sovereignty. The sum of the blood and sweat of our Tegadelti that was invested in that operation, buttressed by the partaking of the masses who bore a great big brunt of Ethiopian cruelty, finally paid off when Eritrea breathtakingly moved from that particular operation towards winning its independence. That is the kind of name our Ghedli created for us. And how do the likes of YG describe the Ghedli situation of the time? He writes: “The reality is that, often camouflaged in revolutionary rhetoric, the Ghedli generation set out to finish the colonial task that the Italians had left incomplete.” What in the world is that? I think Melles Zenawi had better respect for our Ghedli than the likes of YG. Is this ‘who outpopes the Pope’ contest? For the record, in YG’s and Ethiopia’s face … the many Operation Fenqls we have witnessed as a country are the very events that heralded the inevitable liberation of Eritrea and the return of the country to its owners.

Now, as we thought that aspect of our history has safely been put aside, we find ourselves in a different era all together – an era that harbors members of the Ethiopia-led ‘Ministry of Truth’ who attempt to erode that magical history of ours. Regrettably, the unforeseen ominous post-independence era that has dawned on Eritrea has so unsettled many of us it is fast making us forget how our prized success was achieved. The main source or culprit of this shifting mind-set is the unruly and officious Government of Eritrea. We are also seeing that some individuals who are angered by the developments that have gone pear-shaped in the country are beginning to challenge and at times refute certain facts of our history. Clearly, such analysis is either influenced by past abrasions or present day frustrations. The sad part of the story is the fact that Ethiopia, through those morally corrupt individuals it coached in adopting unionist tendencies, is trying to taint our history in accordance to its interests. Alas, they fail to recall Operation Fenql, and what is in our name.

Here are some facts that I would like us to remember before jumping to shady conclusions about Eritrean struggle for independence:

• Our fighters were selfless and they literally sacrificed their young lives to free Eritrea.
• The campaign to free Eritrea was effective. Mass mobilization, literacy campaigns and political education were successfully conducted during the campaign leading to high level of discipline, political consciousness with strong ideological principles.
• Gender gap between fighters and the mobilized supporters of the revolution became narrower.
• Camaraderie between fighters from all over the country was solid. Our Tegadelti fought side by side irrespective of their gender, background, locality, religious beliefs and social standings. On the whole, their camaraderie crossed cultural, religious and other social divides.
• The enthusiasm of the time! Our Tegadelti defeated and forced Ethiopian forces out of Eritrea.

The casualties of that history and the historical incidents that took place during that era of intense and death-defying operations should be addressed aptly; however, we need to be careful not to amplify the blemishes above and beyond the realities that were on the ground then. Putting it differently, and perhaps sentimentally, in our moments of bleakness we tend to look back to that era in order to jog our memory of all our age groups who faced martyrdom heroically while some of us pursued and supported the struggle from afar.

People change, and so do groups, organizations and institutions when conditions under which they operate change. It was quite a life our Tegadelti lived during the campaign to free Eritrea. They were never frugal with their lives, were they? However, when victory dawned, the leaders, quite mistakenly, began to shape Eritrea’s future in the image of the former world they were familiar with – a system that was highly regimented. The post-independence administration was rigged with superiority complex and monopolistic attitudes that were crammed with unapproachability. The leaders were dismissive of everything they could not identify with – our elder’s wisdom, diasporic potential and evolutionary changes that are required of a newly established State. Instead of embracing the changes that were influenced by Eritrea’s new statehood, they simply fought against them. They went ahead to form PFDJ – an exclusive political party unfit to lead Eritrea. Gradually, through PFDJ, the course changed direction and journeyed towards self-preservation – a journey more important to the leaders than preserving the country’s wellbeing. And so they began to dismantle the Eritrean dream and dragged the ghedli reputation through mud.

I have said this in the past and allow me to say it once again. I take the view that the current thinking, the prevalent predilection towards Ethiopia among those who are opposing the Eritrean regime, is severely limited by the attachment to a model based on ‘neighborliness’ . Many may find such treatment is somewhat palliative, but certainly it is not curative. We should base our new models not on causations but consequences. Understandably, many are frustrated by the lethargic pace of the struggle. I may also be able to understand other sources such frustrations that are giving way to dangerous impairments; but one should not sympathize with lopsided and mean-spirited logic. If we ascribe such approaches to our faculties, we will need to keep a stack of apologies handy when we face the wrath of our people.

A Few Thoughts

• My fellow Eritreans, we need to rethink our engagement practices that foster more collaborative approaches from the general public that is opposing the current regime back home. At the same time it is our responsibility to prevent our activities from descending into back room deals – I am thinking of the worthless ENDCD approach.

• We need to understand that we, as Eritro-diasporic people, have the political rights to influence our host-country officials by voicing our concerns to them regarding the waywardness of Eritrean officials. However, this right is only legitimate if balanced by the obligation to act responsibly.

• The Ethiopians have time in their hands now. They will taunt us, use some of our opposition groups to their advantage, deploy false messiahs … all designed to loosen our grip on our sovereignty. We should remain steadfast and rebuff Ethiopia’s intrusion in our affairs.

• What is the situation of the opposition who are living in Addis Ababa? Sitting in corners of Addis bars, being ignored, not only by the powers that be but also by the waiters? Some are licking their wounds and others continue to live outside the Eritrean reality. How embarrassing! Can they separate reality from illusion? When will they ever take that voyage to self-discovery?

• Let’s not be fooled by the pack approach we see around us. They feign magnitude, substance and of course patriotism. Just like fear and its reactions – it has a large shadow, but it itself is small.

The end / for now

Children can help. In a world of diversity and disparity, children are a unifying force capable of bringing people to common ethical grounds. Children’s needs and aspirations cut across all ideologies and cultures. The needs of all children are the same: nutritious food, adequate health care, a decent education, shelter and a secure loving family. Children are both our reason to struggle to eliminate the worst aspects of warfare, and our best hope for succeeding at it. (Excerpts from a speech delivered by Graca Machel to the UN General Assembly in Nov. 1989, during the adoption of The International Convention on the Rights of the Child)

A gloomy joke from a similar gloomy era, empire, and system long gone by goes like this: ‘’what does a Soviet optimist say?’’ ‘’It can’t get any worse.’’ Not so in Eritrea, apparently. Twenty three years (and counting) after our Independence, things are just getting from bad to worse…and worst. And, still, the proverbial ‘last straw’ has proven elusive for the hardy (but weary and sagging) backbone of the Eritrean ‘camel’.

It will be tedious to go through the long list of atrocities and deprivations that our countrymen and women are going through. This is a well trodden path of anguish and misery of a promising young country whose dream was stolen by a handful of home-born scoundrels. What’s more, insistent recounting of these atrocities have so far succeeded only in making banal and tolerated what is morally repugnant and deplorable.

But the current spectacle is utterly pathetic.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has just once more extended for another eighteen months its sanctions against the regime in Eritrea, but despite these punitive measures the forces of violence and repression continue unabated at home. An already anemic and depopulated country continues to hemorrhage, shedding its vital human capital across its borders. The National Commission for Democratic Change (NCDC), an institutional body on which so many had invested so much upon, is unraveling, embroiled by infighting. One or two political organizations are heaving with the familiar spasms of an impending fission. Unperturbed, the Eritrean People’s Democratic Party (EPDP) is preparing for yet another annual conference in exile, in Germany, where another opposition organization had held a similar event a few weeks back. The youth associations are slugging it out in the cyberspace and seem hell-bent on erecting yet more artificial barriers over non-issues and polemics.

God forbid! But, in all likelihood, the latest round of UNSC’s sanctions may once again expire before the current impasse is overcome.

What has become unmistakably manifest though is that there is a disturbing but familiar pattern in the ongoing chaotic and damaging political developments. A cursory political audit of just the last decade reveals a series of marriages of convenience with a fleeting honeymoon period that eventually ended in disastrous divorces. A closer look will uncover an atmosphere rife with suspicion, mistrust and intolerance; and an unwillingness or lack for rationality and reasonableness. A systematic appraisal will also show a deficient organizational edifice, flagrant disregard for organizational procedures, ethics and norms, and lack of accountability and transparency. In this kind of atmosphere it becomes almost impossible to reach an enduring consensus for building a reliable, stable and mutually assured framework for a fruitful political interaction and discourse.

The underlying causes may be traced back to our turbulent past of the pre- and post-independence period, and the generations that came of age in those different but just the same uneasy times of political, social and economic upheavals. Both these two groups – dwindling grizzled and nascent youthful population, despite the generational gap, share a disturbing, ill-judged and short-sighted zealous obsession with the recent past, and reckless disregard for the future. Biological age aside, the deafening discourse of both groups is severely disjointed from reality, replete with rhetoric, exaggeration of trivial events, and aggrandizement of artificial ethno-linguistic, religious and regional barriers. Both also shun serious engagement and try to hide behind the unconvincing and flimsy masks of blame game, conspiracy, and the tactic and strategy for bringing about change in Eritrea.

In this article I am going to argue that some explanations might be available if we take a closer look into the past. But not with the current misdirected and zealous fixation that has turned the past into an apparition with psychotic dimensions, a discourse that has become the cause of an arrested development, a retro version, where the past and present have colluded and are conspiring to destroy the future.

No! I do not want to redig and undig anymore graves than already dug. I am asking you, dear readers, that we go and revisit an entirely different past of the Eritrean child. A forgotten past that hides the unsung tragedy of generations of Eritrea’s children. Because by doing so, and acknowledging and appreciating the injustices done to the child, we may-just- be able to emphasize with the child that has now become an adult. And, more importantly, this process might-just- help us all to break our inertia by recognizing the urgency of saving an all important future.

Frederick Douglas said ‘’ it’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.’’ And he should know. He was a self made black man who rose from slavery to become a mammoth figure in the struggle of black Americans for their human rights.

Another huge historical figure, John F Kennedy, remarked: Children are the world’s most precious resources and its best hope for the future. But our current adult discourse is heedlessly ruining this precious human resource.
On a recent visit (June 4-5/2013) to the Adi Harish refugee camp for Eritreans in Tigray region, Ethiopia, I saw 306 of these precious children in a pre-school compound, a fenced off bare compound with just an overhang tent for sun protection, a place more fit for cattle than little children. And according to Mr Ghirmay (Gandhi Foundation’s country director in Ethiopia) there are 400 such children at the nearby Mai Ayni refugee camp.
In the remaining part of this article I will try to give you a brief and updated scientific description of the early childhood period and its importance for adult acquisition and behavior; and, with this premise in mind, go on to discuss the local context.

The Early Childhood Period

The newborn child enters the world with a limited range of skills and abilities. And the period from birth up to eight years of age has come to be recognized as the most important phase in life, critical to the complete and healthy cognitive, emotional and physical growth of children. The newborn baby has around 100 billion neurons (brain cells), and although formation of these is complete at birth, brain maturation and important neural pathways and connections are progressively developed after birth in the early childhood period. The brain reaches half its mature weight by six months and 90% of its final weight by age eight.

Previously it was thought that the growth of a brain is largely determined by inheritance (genes), and a baby’s brain was assumed to be much less active than that of a high-school or university student with a linear growth that peaks in adulthood, with earlier life experience having a little impact on later development. But accumulated empiric evidence and an explosion of scientific research in the relevant fields have shown that that brain development and growth is much more vulnerable to environmental influences than previously thought. And exposure to adverse environmental stressors during this critical period can lead to permanent deficits which are very difficult for the brain to revive later in life.

There are a whole range of different parameters that are used to measure a child’s growth and development, such as language skill and motor development (e.g. sitting, crawling, or walking). But psychosocial development (behavior, emotion, cognition, etc.) is not easily amenable for assessment as it evolves subtly with little or minimal measurable physical signs. Some investigators use self-expression skills (a child’s attempt to express himself using arts, crafts, music, dance, etc.), social skills (sharing, cooperating, and emphasizing with other children; learning to respect and listen to adults; etc), and language skills to assess for attainment of social skills. But these have not been accepted as universal methods of measurement.

Therefore, stunting (low height for age) is commonly used as a proxy indicator for early childhood development. And the results of a mega-research project released by Save The Children on May 27 of this year shows that not having a nutritious diet can severely impair a child’s ability to read and write a simple sentence and answer basic math questions correctly. ‘’It is well known that malnutrition is an underlying cause of mortality in children under five. What’s less known is the chronic impact of malnutrition. Poor nutrition is a leading driver of the literacy and numeracy crisis in developing countries’’ said Patricia Erb, President of the organization that released this report.

The research found out that stunted children are 12.5 percent more likely to make a mistake writing a simple sentence and do 7 percent worse answering simple math questions like ‘’what is 8 minus 5’’ than they would have been expected to do had they not been stunted.

But this above study does not even begin to address the numerous other direct and indirect environmental factors that can negatively impact on a child’s growth and development, including maternal health during pregnancy and delivery, diseases, sanitation, schooling, home and community environment,…etc. Besides these multitudes of factors, their vulnerability and helplessness makes children the most numerous victims of socio-political and economic upheaval.

The increasing recognition of the external environment on this critical period of life has led to a paradigm shift with the early childhood period now being seen as more of a social than biologic designation. Implicit in this break with old thinking is the acknowledgment that children are morally and politically shaped by the attitudes, yearnings, frustrations, stereotypes, prejudices, and tensions of the adult world around them. And the lives, thoughts, and actions of children-though subtle-can tell us much about the societies in which they live in, and they can also foretell about what kind of adults they will become.

A psychologist by the name of Niel Postman says it better: Children are the living message we send to a time we will not see.

The Pre-Independence Child Generation

The typical Eritrean child had never known a normal life for the better part of the last century. The combined forces of political and socio-economic conditions, sometimes colluding with the vagaries of climate, have all connived to seal its fate, even before it had the chance to breath-in its first volume of fresh air on its own. A vicious cycle of destruction and multi-deprivations have throughout the decades conspired to deal it a huge disadvantage, blighted with recurring sickness, malnutrition, poverty, illiteracy… or, in short, a womb-to-tomb infirmity.

Thus had been the fate of the children of the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s, a long and tragic national journey that left its ugly scar across an entire generation. It is a human story of wanton destruction, burning villages, indiscriminate killings, pillage, rape, and destitution that shattered whole communities and homes resulting in wide-ranging and far-flung repercussions that are still reverberating to these days.

Many of these children were brutally uprooted from their communities and ties to their past, forced to flee, leaving behind child friends, familiar playgrounds and surroundings. Most were either born or grew up as refugees or displaced children, in wreaked households, with missing or incomplete family, or in orphan hood; their experience leaving a lasting imprint, an emotional and physical stigmata on their life.

What eventually became the fate of this pre-independence generation of children can only be surmised. Some were snatched away by death in their very early years, leaving without trace, except in the minds and memories of their close and loved ones; thousands were swept-up by the revolutionary tide (child pupils of the revolutionary schools, cultural troupes such as the ‘red flowers’, child soldiers or ‘fet’awrari’, fighters, politicians, etc.); through sheer perseverance and determination, a few managed to build couriers and become successful professionals, merchants, or artisans ; and many more have simply drifted away, like chaff in the wind.

The dwindled down present-day survivors of that era’s child generation have now become grayed, weathered, and stooped; the younger ones are now in their fifties and the few lucky (…or unlucky) ones are frail septuagenarians and octogenarians, many still living as exiles. Unlike physical aging, memory remains relatively stable throughout human life, remarkably durable and impervious to the abrasive effects of time. And their uneasy childhood period and its distinctive influence can be discerned in the uncouth and arrogant behavior of the ‘victors’, the sour gripes of the exiled ‘losers’, and a perturbed politics fraught with the seeds of hate, mistrust and intolerance.

A Stunted Post-Independence Generation

Eritreans thirty plus years of struggle for liberation and Independence and the heavy sacrifice that this exacted was supposed to have been a worthy moral cause for a better future. But more than two decades after Independence a regime of perverse criminals rules that ‘’uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts – for support rather than illumination.’’

Let me hold myself here. I want first to share my modest experience in the health sector in Eritrea and then show you some data before proceeding to satisfy what has become a persistent urge to condemn and denounce.
In the spring of 1992, I was part of a small mobile health team sent from Adi Ugri hospital to the Zyda-Akelom area around Areza. An outbreak of measles had been reported from the area; and we set off late in the night from Areza , with our supplies strapped to a donkey’s back. It had dawned when we reached the first village in our way-Etan Zer’ee. We found most of the villagers near the church, gathered around the cemetery. That night the virus had claimed another victim and they were burying the dead child. I remembered counting fourteen fresh and small mounds of earth.

By the time we arrived the measles virus had already exhausted its destructive sweep across a whole swathe of villages in the area extending down south and west into the Qola Meraguz and Dembelas regions. We went from house to house in each village dispersing our supplies of oral antibiotics, eye ointments, and other medications. Those who survived were rudely vaccinated by natural means (the virus itself!), but they still have to grapple with severe upper and lower respiratory tract and eye infections and their severe lifelong stigmata, including blindness and recurrent lung infections.

Eight years later, at the turn of the millennium, Eritrea was almost free of this scourge. Another virus with debilitating paralyzing sequel was soon to be declared eradicated.

This was a huge feat and a remarkable achievement for a young country which started from scratches, with the barest minimum of health infrastructure. The job required a total political commitment and a crucial financial and technical support from the international community. But, above all, this mammoth task would not have been achieved without the all-important support of Eritrea’s rural community. This part of Eritrea had witnessed, helplessly and from close range, as a series of viral epidemics and outbreaks decimated generations of children across the years. They wanted so desperately a better future for their children, and no prodding or persuasion was needed for their total participation in the campaigns against these lethal microbes.

In 2002 I was working in Senafe. One eventful night I was woken by a call from the nurse midwife on duty. She needed my assistance. A lady had just been brought in on a stretcher from the village of Kesh’aat near Tsorena. One after another, we helped the poor mother deliver a triplet, two girls and a boy. But the mother was in such a poor state that she managed only one glimpse at her babies before she died.

The newborns spent almost one month in our facility. Finally we sent word through the village administrator for the father to come and collect his babies. A one legged (right above knee amputee) veteran of Eritrea’s liberation struggle came one day to my office. He had three children in tow, the youngest around two years and the eldest around six. He told me he was the father. He had left three more back in the village, older ones that can support themselves, he told me. He had come to ask the Subzonal government authorities to either help him support raise his children or to find somebody, humanitarian agency, organization or anybody to take care of the three ones with him. I didn’t utter a single word. Neither did he wait for me to do so. He didn’t ask to see the triplet and left without seeing them.

We managed to ‘kill’ the two baby girls within the following two months. The good Catholic nuns at Hebo heard of our plight and reconsidered their earlier refusal to accept the triplet. Their small orphanage was so crowded. I drove the surviving baby boy to the orphanage at Hebo, near Tsegeneyti.

One of the biggest frustrations for any health worker involved in the care of children is treating severe malnutrition. It is a medical emergency that requires an intensive twenty-four hour a day care and usually with a fatality rate approaching more than 50 percent. For the effort to bear fruit it usually takes weeks of exhaustive work requiring patience, discipline and diligence of all staff members and parents. But the rewards of success are also enormous too. Nothing is as gratifying as the re-appearance of a smile on the face of a child that on admission had been wasted, shriveled and withered, a little child with the appearance of an old person.
But the smile usually doesn’t last that long. Once discharged, and in the absence of any meaningful supplementary feeding program, the relapse rates in these children are high. Some do return back to the health facility, usually in a much worse situation that on their earlier admissions. But, mostly, the mothers are too ashamed or exasperated, and they just give up. The poor mothers don’t understand that the basic problem is far too complex and lay far beyond their kitchen and meager possessions.

A conceptual framework on the causes of malnutrition developed by the UN child agency (UNICEF) classifies these causes broadly as immediate, underlying, and basic.

Lack of food intake (due to decrease in appetite) and disease are the immediate vicious causes, which feed into one another. And the three most important underlying causes are household food security (inadequate access or availability), limited access to health care and poor sanitation, and inadequate home and community environment (less child friendly). The basic causes originate at the national level, where policies and strategies that affect the allocation of resources (human, economic, political, and cultural) influence what happens at community level.

In Eritrea’s local context, all the three factors mentioned might, on the surface, look closely interwoven, all influencing each other in an additive manner; but the crucial driving factor for the vicious cycle lies at the political level. A series of misguided and disastrous government policies are to be blamed for wrecking the Eritrean household and community.

The regime and its supporters (i.e. if there are any left) usually flaunt a few statistical figures to emphasize the correctness of the national policies and strategies taken over the past two decades, and the ‘huge strides’ that were demonstrated in some sectors. For more than a decade now, and ad nauseam, we have heard how the government’s down-to-earth policies have succeeded in eliminating certain diseases and in realizing remarkable improvement in the life of the Eritrean child. There is no denying the fact that infant and under-five child mortality rates have been halved by almost 50 percent.

But the above health indicators don’t tell the whole story. These dry figures do not reflect the real experience of the Eritrean child, household, and whole communities. You cannot feed the malnourished child on statistics.

Two nationwide comprehensive health surveys were done in Eritrea, in 1995 and 2002. These were known as The Demographic Health Survey, Eritrea (DHS, Eritrea), and they were undertaken by the national Statistics Office with technical and financial help of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The figures in the 2002 DHS were damning and go a long way to point the disastrous policies of the regime. The ensuing government actions, taken under the guise of self-reliance (hah!), tell much more than the measures themselves. They were purposely done to restrict prying eyes from looking into the kitchens of Eritrea’s households. And, as a result, no such survey has been undertaken since then.

The regime didn’t have any qualms to manipulate the surveys. But the same two surveys, freely available online, also show a grave nationwide chronic malnutrition level, bordering on disastrous levels.

Prevalence of malnutrition in children aged six months up to five years is used as an important indicator for nutritional status of an entire population because this subgroup is more sensitive to nutritional stress.  And stunting (low height for age) is the preferred anthropometric measurement. The same proxy parameter used to assess for psycho-social development of the child.

The two surveys showed levels of stunting have not improved over the interim period of seven years, standing at 38.4% and 37.6%, respectively.  You can guess what a follow-up DHS survey might have shown.

Saving the Future

 Does anybody anyone give a damn about the future?  I don’t know.

 But, at least, if you persevere up to this…well, you must have some reason for doing so. And, I am sure you are not particularly impressed by my amateurish literary style. I take it then you must have some concern for the future of Eritrea’s children.

Saving the future requires nothing more elaborate than what the wife of Nelson Mandela, Gracha Machel, mentioned in that opening remark: food, health care, decent education, and a loving family and stable community.

It definitely doesn’t require more festivals, political parties, and associations. It also doesn’t need our chaotic social media discourse. It demands that we start to look deep into our conscience and acknowledge that we have become the unknowing or willing accomplices of the ongoing tragedy. It will require us to get out of our issue cocoons, to stop incubating, hatching, and scheming more plots and conspiracies than are already there.

Let us start by considering the following meaningful and proactive conscientious step: Donate for the future.

 There are already a few foundations active in this area. A school for children just re-opened a few weeks back in one of the old refugee camps in the Sudan (the director was bemoaning lack of funds, and his reliance on foreign humanitarian NGOs); and, there is Ghandi Foundation already active in some of the refugee camps in Ethiopia. They can use our help.

Bereket.berhane@gmail.com

NB: 1. This article is not meant to be a scientific article. Its main intent and purpose is to highlight the plight of Eritrean the Eritrean child. 2. The promised third follow-up article on Eritrea’s Social Media is going to take me some more time.

“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in Heaven” Mathew 5 V13-16

I sense, smell and taste an onset of melancholia hovering over us Eritreans, no matter where we live; what we do; what age group; what occupation.

What was a latent symptom that took years to coalesce, I am concerned, is slowly becoming chronic. It is affecting us individually and as a group in myriad of ways. So unless we fight it back, our future shall be bleak. Our survival is at Risk. We are approaching (I assure you we not there yet) the ultimate survival stage: fight or flight. The alternative is grim and it does not need any clarification.

There is nothing wrong to be sad and angry when you live under, face, hear or see brutality, cannibalism and incessant injustices day in day out. It is just that, sadness and anger become problematic when they are internalized and misdirected. Internalized sadness and anger are perfect fertilizers for haplessness, low- esteem and apathy- bed rocks for self-destruction.

What can one expect from a dispirited individual or group? No one with a sane mind expects valued results from a helpless entity and who wants to associate with the afflicted? People run away from self-affliction not only because it is uncomfortable, harmful and useless but more because it is infectious.

We know the Principal Cause of our problems even though we might not fully know or comprehend the existence or the extent of effects by other causes that work in juxtaposition, unison or parallel to the main cause.

The good news is identifying and then standing your ground against the principal cause to your misfortunes, is the first and vital step to the road of recovery.

In struggle for Freedom and Justice, Clarity is paramount! Clarity is the window to honesty. Trust is paramount! Trust is the cement that holds and strengthens the structure. Simplicity is paramount! Simplicity opens wide the door to honest communication. Directness is paramount! Directness eliminates waste and is economical.

We have a resilient, flexible, strong, experienced, and vicious enemy. He is unique among the unique creatures of darkness. And worse, he knows us better than we know him. Even Satan is scared of him. Our enemy has become the competitor to Satan itself. To tell the truth, this beast has already controlled the physical and psychological aspects of the majority of our people.

The question then becomes is there anything left for the beast to control? Does our enemy possess any weakness or weaknesses that we should be aware with?

If you closely watch the beast, you will notice something is bothering him. Something is keeping him awake at night. Something is forcing him to be restless. Something is forcing him to be on the run. Something is making him tick and sick. He looks wasted and is withering away. He does not even trust his own waning shadow.

On the outset, this assertion (or call it good news) does not make sense. But if you ponder and utilize the immense capability of your brain and open your eyes and ears to it, you shall agree with the assertion because it is true. It is shrouded but it is there! (Are you confused with shall and will? I utilize shall on issues I definitely believe to be absolutely true. I hope this explanation shall eliminate any confusion on my selection/preference of words.)

To control the physical and psychological aspects of your subjects, what you need are the state and its coercive tools. You also need to use them arbitrarily, disorderly, senselessly, ignorantly and spontaneously. But there is an aspect in human beings which none of the tools could suppress no matter how brutally, efficiently and smartly or otherwise are used. This aspect is the spiritual benefaction of beings.

When we say we are created in the image of God, this statement of belief or assertion has nothing to do with our physical or psychological semblance to God. God is Cosmos and every individual being, possesses, an aspect of Cosmos; gift from the Creator to the Created.

The highest manifestations of this gift are Faith and Hope that are integral part and parcel of our life as human beings in this world. And the glue that holds Faith and Hope together and keeps them intact is Love. Faith and Hope are our umbilical cords that attach us to the space-less and timeless Source of our creation. While the physical and psychological aspects are bound by the confines of space and time, Faith and Hope are definitely not.

When The Sage said that “man cannot live with bread and water alone”, what else then is needed to exist, live or survive? The answer is clear: Faith and Hope. And this is precisely the reason why our beast is restless. He realizes, he like his subjects, is bound by time and space. By now he also realizes that he is not endowed to control the uncontrollable. After all he is god (taot) and self-made as such, and not God. But this does not mean the beast does not try.  Erroneously thinking that he will find and choke Hope and Faith in Churches and Mosques, he anointed himself Chief priest and Imam but to no avail. Hope and faith are individual’s born gifts.

What all these demonstrates is, his actions are futile. This is his vulnerability. If road to recovery start with identifying your enemy, knowing his vulnerability is the first blue print for the success of your journey. And that is why it is imperative that us, the victims, defend and cherish our Hope and Faith at any cost. They are sacrosanct and everlasting.  Do not even think to sell your soul to the devil.

Hope and Faith also signify that we are created to be immortals, by no means in physical or psychological sense. But immortality signifies we are not created in vain. The beast can beat and beat our physical and psychological being but he shall not even come close to touch what matters most: our Spiritual being. In this context, who do you think should mourn: us to mourn our martyrs or our martyrs to mourn for us? Or to put it slightly different, should we mourn or celebrate our martyrs?

Our enemy belongs to the category of people who believe that human beings are mortals. The pitfall in this belief is extraordinary. According to them, this life is on this earth is accidental thus Limited and has a beginning and end. So if one choose to or have anti-social disposition one is allowed to do anything he wanted to survive, to dominate, to stay in power, to abuse, to benefit at the expense of others. According to them it is free for all and the strongest survives. For them conscience is a waste and a realm of the weak and fools. That was why Dostoyevsky aptly wrote “in the absence of God, man becomes god and anything is possible”. Isn’t this articulate sentence from the lover of humankind obvious to us Eritreans for we are living witnesses to atrocities by the self-made god?

Now back to the question of melancholy. What is melancholy?  Why is melancholy considered affliction if it affects an individual but a plague when it affects groups or society at large?

I always equated melancholy to darkness. Have you even walked alone in pitch darkness? How did it feel?

In my time, metaphorically and realistically, darkness was a king. The force of darkness was compounded by the landscape, full of hills and valleys; mountain ranges and gorges; precipices and deep and scary shadows. Walking at night was akin to walking through the shadows of the valley of death, the most terrifying experience one encounters. Walking in darkness was a risky endeavor because there was no reference. Inhabitants never got use to it. I never got use to it. Who can get use to Death? And it was apt to recite Psalm 23 that goes like this….

“…Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. 5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. 6 Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever”

Darkness dominates everything that came to its grip. Its ego is out of proportion. Its ambition is behemoth. It causes disequilibrium. It has weight and is heavy. It unsettles inner peace. It neutralizes conscience. It blurs the boundary between good and evil. One can easily feel its claws. The mind is overwhelmed. Fear and suspicion take root and blossom. Anxiety bubbles. Hatred sets foot. In darkness one loses one’s control. Hope and faith are severely tested. And if the possessor is weak hope and faith can became the first causalities.

But I also learned that darkness was shallow thus easily defeated. I use to forget darkness and death in an instant as soon as I see a flicker of light somewhere in the horizon be it far or near: A shepherd lighting fire or a flicker of light that emanated from far away hudmos, agnets or caves.What did I learn from my experience waking in darkness?

1.     I am not alone,

2.     I am not defenseless. I am equipped with the everlasting and indestructible gifts of Hope and faith. Both are my shields much greater than my immune systems or the nuclear shields of the super powers,

3.     To act on my faith and hope. With faith I feel I am in solid foundation and with Hope I never entertain to give-up.

4.     Living in this tempting world I might not be Absolute. Living in this transient world I might not be able to be whole. But God will be satisfied if I play a part to the Whole; a part that will add something to making the whole. Parts which will make the whole wholesome, a part that will make the whole complete. Kindness is a part; humbleness is a part; trust is a part; respect my fellow human beings is a part; to fight for the meek and disadvantaged is a part; to oppose wrong doing is a part; to bring peace is a part; humility is a part; sharing is a part; sacrifice is a part; deference is a part; self-abrogation is a part; to fight for justice is a part; forgiveness is a part; to listen and learn is a part; prayer is a part but Love is more than one part because it is the foundation upon which the Absolute whole is built.

5.     To genuinely love myself first (not the hedonistic, narcissistic or materialistic type)  so that I shall be able to love my neighbor, my friends, my comrades, my people as I love my self.

6.     To stay positive; to spread positivity and embrace positivity,

7.     Never to succumb to Fear, Doubts or Temptations.

When did I start to notice the plague?  What are the causes of this plague other than the obvious? Did it start in 1980, 1998, 2001? Is it Srhit Forto? Is it the mushrooming of organizations? Is it the failure of the opposition organizations? Is it the lack of unity in the opposition? Is it the stumbling of our beloved ENCDC? Is it the unresolved issue of Badme? Is it the news of the false death of the living dead?  Is it the new format of our Awate.com where it is allowing some beal afs to dominate beal tafs? Please help me fill the 22 questions that might help me find the other causes?

Or is it trivial to ask since I know the Principal cause?

Why would Srhit Forto cause melancholy? Did it matter whether it was “successful” or “unsuccessful”? How do we measure success? Who did it affect? How could the valiant effort and selfless sacrifice of Wedi Ali & Co. cause melancholy and not jubilation?

Wasn’t Wedi Ali our salt of the earth and light of our world? Didn’t Wedi Ali flicker the light to alleviate our doom and gloom? Didn’t Wedi Ali Acted on his faith and hope? If the beast represented darkness, didn’t Wedi Ali represented light?

Unlike darkness, light works on the background. Yes indeed. It is only in light that nature become magnificent; beautiful; vibrant; lively; attractive and wonderful. It makes nature shine while itself stay in the background. It does not say “look at me”..”hear me”..”do what I say”..”I am the only one”..”I am the state; the archbishop, the Imam” etc..etc.. Like salt, light is devoid of ego, pride and dominance.

Who knew Wedi Ali before Srhit Forto?

Wedi Ali was a wonderful, energetic, friendly and keen teenager when he joined our company in 1975. What I remember of him most was his eagerness to learn and neatness at handling his tasks. He was way too mature for his age and was endowed with highly positive disposition and pleasant demeanor. He took his duties and responsibilities very seriously. He was the first to raise his hand to volunteer for any task, be it mundane or risky. He covered his comrades’ sentry duties at night so they will rest. I never heard him complain. As a good learner, it did not take him time to be competent in Tigrigna.  He was social and loved by his team mates. How he loved and interacted with villagers! Village women loved and adored him. Simply he had magnetic personality. As part of a deal between Ibrahim Afa, Wedi Sheka, Beraki Ghebreselassie and I, Tesfay Temnewo, was tasked with literacy campaign as part of his “rehabilitation” (I call it brainwashing). Tesfay was Wedi Ali’s teacher and I might suspect that Tesfay might also have mentored him on Justice, freedoms, democracy and fairness. But I left EPLF in 1976 and never heard again about Wedi Ali until Srhit Forto.

I was not surprised of Wedi Ali’s involvement in Srhit Forto even though I was sad, angry, jubilant and ecstatic, all at the same time, afterwards. He was born hero and died heroically. He gave his life for just cause. He was created for purpose and he fulfilled his purpose. He did not sell his Hope and Faith. He made his Creator happy. His contribution to chipping away at the powers of the beast is significant. What was built methodically in decades cannot be expected to disappear in a moment but piece by piece.

When I was a child, growing up in Senhit ((few years during my formative stage but that left in-erasable memory on me) I use to love rocks, big massive rocks and gigantic boulders. Senhit is full of them and other natural wonders thus I always say “those who don’t know Senhit don’t know Eritrea”. I was curious especially on those huge boulders that stood precariously on a cliff; on mountain tops, on weak soil or on top of other boulders. In awe, I use to ask myself “how could they stand with little support?” By little support I mean, tiny winy pebbles; little flints; little wedges; little sands or the poor soil and nothing else! Being curious and rambunctious, I even use to try to nudge and push them if they could roll down to no avail. But there were times when they roll and tumble down from where they stood for ten thousand years. They rolled down not of their own volition (mass, gravity..) but due to rebellion of those little guys: the pebbles, the wedges, the flints, the sands and the poor oppressed and unrecognized soil.

Big things have humble beginning. Big things start with little things. Little things have the capability and potential to bring big things. Woe to those who disregard little things!!

For me Srhit Forto is an antidote to melancholy. What about for you? For me Wedi Ali & Co. are my salts of my earth and lights of my world. What about for you? For me Wedi Ali is the shepherd that lighted fire to alleviate my darkness. What about for you?

But if Wedi Ali is the cause of melancholia to the beast and his followers, may Wedi ali’s and Cos. names be blessed for ever and ever.

This summer, I crossed the Atlantic for the first time in thirty odd years. Paris, London and Stockholm were my destination. I came back home with mixed bags of feelings.

I did not like what I witnessed in Stockholm. On my first day, every one I met said “here in Stockholm, Eritreans don’t greet one another”. When I asked “what happen if I greet any Eritreans I see or meet?” They said “they will take you either as a fool, or a visitor or a new immigrant”. I said to myself “this is an onset of melancholia”, so for the duration of my stay in Stockholm, I greeted every Eritrean and who looks Eritrean (Deki Tigray; Amharu, Somalis) I saw or met. I don’t know if they took me for a fool; a visitor or new immigrant (probably or improbably from North America) but they reciprocated well and in kind. But the question still lingers in me “Why of all places in Sweden?”

In France, I met my good friend from H.S University in Addis Ethiopia, good comrade in ELF Kutsri 9 and my Best man when I wed my still beautiful and ever young good woman in Khartoum. How true when our fathers and mothers said “Zeimote Yrakeb”!!

Bitsay (I call him Bashai) Semere Fessahaie was and is a very positive and pleasant man. His energy and laughter are highly contagious. He had and still has insatiable appetite for knowledge. And he does not flinch from what he believes. He does not compromise on freedom, Justice, democracy and fairness. In some ways he reminded me of Wedi Ali and I was happy. He is a rare jewel like our reformists and renaissance men and women of Awate.com. He keeps in touch with everyone he met and they number thousands. I declare we need more people like Semere.

On my last day in Paris, at 9:00 PM in the evening, my cousin Goitom Amine asked me a Question. Mind you, not a question but a QUESTION: he said “Aklilu, don’t you think the Woyanies are holding us hostages by not abiding by the ECCB ruling?”

I asked Goitom “how are they holding us hostges?”

Goitom replied “If the Badme issue is settled once and for all, then change is imminent.”

I have a habit. Like what our ancestors said “amel ms megnez”, if I sense honesty and integrity in a person who asks questions, I hesitate before I give answers. There are times I ask the person to give me time and the time could be days. I ponder and take my time. I do this because I respect honest people and I want to maintain my honesty and integrity to them.

While I was pondering for what to say, I felt out of body experience, and traveled back to 1975. It was a good time and bad time in PFLF (Hizbawi Hailtat not Hizbawi Gnbar). Good time because the nasty civil war hadended. Bad time because the prisoners of conscience were still in prison. Everyone was antsy and anxious about the prisoners, the pros and opponents. But everyone wanted fair and just closure. The pros wanted absolution and opponents were expecting either light prison sentences or discharge (mrfat).  The situation was exasperated because of total secrecy. Only few knew the situation.

Rumors started to seep. No one knew whether those rumours were true or false. All of us were hostages at the mercy of very few leaders (no more than four) who knew everything and decided everything. Then came the bombshell news: The leaders of Menkae movement were sentenced to die and the order was enacted. Awe and shock overwhelmed the front.

But end was end. Chapter was closed. But did peace prevail? No!

As soon as the news of murdering the prisoners of conscience was announced, with no delay, action was taken against Yemanawyan and us the fools were made more foolish and such tactics never stopped. You the reader is a living witness and perpetual hostage.

Let’s say, today, the Ethiopian government announced that it abides fully with the ECCB ruling and handed Badme not in Sefii but in a Silver plate. Do you think everything that follows will be good and dandy? If your answer is yes then You don’t know your enemy.

What about the new format of our Awate.Com? Is it a culprit to our onset of melancholy?

I don’t believe so. But, when every time I open the site and see Tamrat-Tamrats and Hailes all over the product of sweat and tears of the farmer (the article and the writer) I wonder if it is adding something to the onset?

The old format was good and democratic. The forum was at the background. So those who want to see what was going on could, as per their choice, and peep. Not now when everything is mixed up. Saying this, I trust our venerable administrators, and I shall try to adapt.

But please help me with the 22 Questions.

In 2009, after repeatedly warning the Eritrean regime to moderate its behavior, the UN designated Eritrea as threat to regional peace and, using the powers of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, imposed sanctions: total arms embargo on the state until such time that a panel of experts (Monitoring Group) reporting to a Sanctions Committee persuades the UN that the regime has ceased its activities and is complying with the sanctions.  The rationale the UN used to classify Eritrea as a threat to regional peace is the Eritrean ruling regime’s support for Somalia’s Al Shabab organization (an armed group with avowed loyalty to Al Qaeda) and its failure to acknowledge and resolve its border dispute with Djibouti.   On June 19^th, the Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea (SEMG) gave its report on Eritrea to the Security Council.   The following is a digest and our analysis of the report.

The Eritrean regime has provided several arguments to prove its innocence.

On Somalia:  The argument goes something like this: “Al Shabab is not a terrorist organization; there is no evidence that we supported them; what if we supported them, anyway? If we did support them, and we are not saying we did, it is only because, on principle, we believe that all Somali stakeholders should have a say in how Somalia is governed.  This is in stark contrast to Somalia’s other neighbors (Ethiopia, Kenya) who, for their own reasons, want a fragmented Somalia and it’s us who actually represent the aspirations of Somalis.   In any event, we are too poor to support them materially, even if we wanted to.”

For the Eritrean ruling regime, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), which has spent the last 20 years excluding Eritrean stakeholders from Eritrean governance, to lecture the world about its affinity for involving all Somali stakeholders in Somalia’s governance would be laughable if it were not so tragic.  But the PFDJ has never let things like shame and hypocrisy get in the way of its grandstanding.

On Djibouti: The Eritrean regime’s argument goes something like this:  “This so-called border dispute is a fabrication; or, at the very least, it’s blown out of proportion: it should not rise to the level of the UN imposing sanctions.  There are many other violations of sovereignty (for example: Ethiopia’s occupation of sovereign Eritrean lands, which date back to 2002) that the UN has done nothing about.  Isn’t that a bigger threat to regional peace?  In any event, the Djibouti-Eritrea border dispute is being mediated by Qatar, and it should be allowed to take its course.”

These are all arguments that would have been persuasive to the UN if the Eritrean regime had made them BEFORE the sanctions were imposed.  They are less persuasive now because much of the investigation that follows AFTER sanctions are imposed on a country has a meta nature to it: are countries (including the targeted country) co-operating with the UN to ensure that the sanctions are being implemented? Are countries, including the targeted country, cooperating with the UN in enforcing the sanctions?

The PFDJ’s power (since the days when it was the EPLF) has always relied on a mafia code of Omertà: a code of silence and refusal to co-operate with people who want to know about the inner-workings of “their” party.  The “I am too poor to do all the things you are accusing me of doing” argument is harder to make when a UN-empowered panel of experts—with expertise in finance, arms, armed groups, transport, and human rights—are traveling all over the world interviewing people with first-hand knowledge.   It is exceptionally hard to make that argument when your policies are draining the country of people who are not only knowledgeable but motivated to spill the beans on you.

Ironically, the Eritrean regime is now, regionally “better-behaved” than it was in 2009 when the sanctions were imposed. Its dealings with Somalia are not exceptional—it is the stuff that countries all over the world euphemistically refer to as “national interest:” a chess game in the dark.  Its dispute with Djibouti is the kind of low-humming frictional noise that any two random countries in the world have.  What is noteworthy is that, thanks to the SEMG’s resources and ability to break the code of silence, the very nature of the PFDJ is  is seeing the light of day.  Let’s briefly look at all three.

Somalia

In response to the report of the Monitoring Group, the Eritrean ambassador to the UN wrote, “I would like to emphasize again that Eritrea supports earnestly the efforts of the Government of Somalia to stabilize the country. Eritrea upholds the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Somalia and supports the Federal Government.”  

Some Eritreans misread this to mean that the Eritrean regime has reversed its position but the Monitoring Group gives a more nuanced answer.  What appears to have happened is that the Federal Government of Somalia and the Eritrean regime have overlapping interests on a number of issues: both, for example, agree that the Ras Kamboni militia in control of Kismayo (a militia supported by the Kenyan Defense Forces) weakens the hand of the Somali Federal government.    It may be true, as the SEMG says, that the actors, which the Eritrean regime supports in Somalia are “spoilers,” but that is not the kind of activity that gets a country a sanction. 

Djibouti

How the Eritrean regime allowed itself to be ensnared by the Djibouti issue is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence that Eritrea truly is not just a one-party state but a one-man state.  Even in one-party states, where power is divided between different power centers—an oligarchy—that level of screw up would not be allowed, especially in a country that is struggling to recover from the devastation of a war with one neighbor (Ethiopia) and is under the watchful eye of the world for its role in another country in the region (Somalia).

Isaias Afwerki ignored repeated appeals, entreaties to do two minor things: (a) recognize that Eritrea had a military clash, even a minor one, with Djibouti; (b) Eritrea would engage a dialogue with Djibouti.   Even a one-party state run by a despot can manage to issue a statement reluctantly agreeing that there was a military clash, even if chooses to minimize it, even it chooses to blame others for it.  Isaias categorically denied there was a conflict.   Even a one-party state run by the most belligerent tyrant could issue a statement saying that we don’t think we have anything to mediate with our neighbor but in interest of good neighborliness, etc.   But for over a year, the Eritrean tyrant just stonewalled, ridiculed, trash-talked and, bam, he got sanctioned.

But Isaias Afwerki always had the good fortune of having at least one benefactor and, this time, it is Qatar’s Emir.  He negotiated a toothless, meaningless mediation agreement between Djibouti and Eritrea.  What matters is not that the mediation agreement will solve any problem (it hasn’t so far), or that anything will happen if the two parties ignore the recommendation of the mediators (it is not binding), it is that Eritrea gets to say the issue is now with a third party.   And, amazingly, even Djibouti—which had been complaining bitterly about its prisoners of war for years—seems to have pulled back and is pinning all its hopes on the Qatar-sponsored mediation.  So we don’t expect this to be a big component of future reports of the Monitoring Group, unless Djibouti starts singing a different tune.

Unfortunately for the PFDJ (whose timing has always been poor), its behavior-moderation came only after it gave experts a license to study and analyze its can of worms.  And it is that particular invitation to well-funded and well-prepared experts which is going to tie the regime in knots for years to come.

Breaking Omerta – The Code of Silence (Sqta)

Every Eritrean who has heard the ruling party officials bragging about how, if there is real accounting done, the State would owe the ruling party a lot of money and the State is standing only due to their ingenuity already knew about Eritrea’s parallel economies.  For the rest of the world, here it is, courtesy the panel of experts at SEMG:

“Eritrea manages two parallel economies: a formal economic sphere ostensibly managed by the State, and an opaque, largely offshore financial system controlled by elements of the ruling PFDJ party and their supporters.  [T]he formal economic system involves transactions almost exclusively in nakfa, the non-convertible Eritrean national currency, and is characterized by a chronic hard currency deficit that theoretically curbs Eritrea’s ability to provide financial support to foreign-armed groups. The informal… involves a much higher proportion of hard currency transactions than the formal economy and is managed almost entirely offshore through a labyrinthine multinational network of companies, individuals and bank accounts, many of which do not declare any affiliation to PFDJ or the Eritrean State and routinely engage in “grey” or illicit activities. “

Thus, a great deal of what the SEMG itemizes is the nature of the grey and the illicit.   There is the pay-to-play racket the ruling party runs on Eritrean businessmen: donate money to the party and you will be given opportunities to invest in…Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan.  There are the various “national obligation” fund sources: recovery tax, MH: 1:2:3, drought relief, martyr’s trust fund, martyrs family support, hzbawi mekhete, food security.  There is contraband trade.  There is human trafficking.  There is mineral revenue.  All this backed up by evidence:  an addendum of exhibits, testimonies, confessions…

Of all these sources of funds, the only one that we know for sure is the revenue from the sale of minerals—and that’s only because the company which has partnered with the Eritrean regime, Canada’s Nevsun, is a publicly-traded company, and it is required by law to tell its shareholders financial statements on how much of the loot was shared.   Apparently, it is not required to disclose that the revenues were generated via slave labor—that is up to organizations like Amnesty International to disclose.  In any event, the digging shall continue for another sixteen months as the SEMG’s mandate was renewed.

Conclusions

In the eyes of the Security Council, the scary menace that the PFDJ was in 2009 while it hosted and funded every scary organization is no more. Tin cup in one hand, a whip on the other, the PFDJ is a comic monstrosity to the Security Council and the Monitoring Group’s recommendations that the host States police the activities of PFDJ fund-raising, or that the UN implement a more rigid due diligence to account for mine revenues (in the millions, not billions like Iraq), seemed like an overkill, and it was not accepted.  What the Eritrean regime is doing to get around the total arms embargo seem like the work of a desperate regime and not one which poses a danger to the region.  This is why the Security Council did not accept the recommendations of SEMG on establishing a food for minerals type or regime, or even a stronger enforcement of the bully-beggar state’s tax fiat on Diaspora Eritreans and, in fact, has somehow relaxed the arms embargo. 

Still, the mandate of the Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea (SEMG) was extended for another 16 months.    The same team remains intact—and is less restrained than prior years (fewer reports to submit probably because it complained that its reports are being leaked by the Eritrean regime to its defenders.)  This means that the team will continue to dig and rummage through and find more evidence of human trafficking, shady business practices that have shut out Eritreans and forced their escape from their own country.  They, in turn, become fresh voices and testimony-providers to the SEMG.  In short, the biggest achievement of the SEMG is that it is breaking the omerta (sqta) culture of Eritreans and, without it, the PFDJ’s days are numbered.

awateteam@awate.com