The media has reported. The human rights groups are outraged. The pope has prayed. But everywhere else, but especially in the State media, it is radio silence.
One hundred fifty individuals, mostly Africans, mostly female and underaged, most of the most being Eritreans, drowned in the Mediterranean Sea.
These Eritreans, like the ones before them, were escaping the country of their foremothers and their birth, Eritrea. They were doing so since she was liberated, in small numbers and hushed silences. Then on October 3, 2013, they had the bad taste of loudly dying and, in the process, awakening many a dead soul, who had made a comfortable compromise with their predators. How very rude of them to die so loudly.
That was 6 years ago: 363 died and 150 young souls (average age 22) staggered on. The predatory State continued to create conditions– conditioning them to State ownership in Grade 8; confiscating them in Grade 12; subjecting them to the uncertainty of indefinite servitude with the innocuous name of “national service”–the same conditions that had forced their exile. And the exodus continued.
Because to stay means to be the property of the State. To be the serfs of the ruling class–the military bosses, the political bosses of the sole party, PFDJ–engaged in futile get-busy work that does nothing to develop the country. To stay means to be rounded up to military camps. To stay means to see no difference in the state of affairs before or after the peace treaty with Ethiopia. To stay means to host your Diaspora countrymen clicking their cameras at you, as if they are White Tourists visiting natives. To stay means to watch yourself, just like the town you live in, corrode and wither away.
So now it was the turn of another “mostly Eritreans” group of 150, in the same sea (Mediterranean) from the same point of origin (Libya) en route to the same place (Western Europe.) Except now, everybody is more, um, empathy fatigued, led by the callous leadership of the Eritrean regime. Remember when we were outraged that it called its own people, Eritreans, “illegal African immigrants”? Now it hasn’t mentioned them. It is not publishing the no-doubt dozens of condolence letters it is receiving from the rest of the world. Remember when we were outraged that the Diaspora PFDJ did not interrupt their party out of respect for the prematurely departed? Well, now, even the Eritrean opposition is in on the act: they were dancing away in Sweden as the news spread.
The fate of the survivors is appalling but we are too exhausted to be shocked. We are desensitized. Why does the detention center in Libya look familiar? Oh, wait, it is exactly like the Adi Abeyto prison in Eritrea where the “sgr dob” (unsuccessful border-crossers) are detained: people kept like sardines.
In 1991, when the combatants of Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) liberated Eritrea, they settled down, got married, and had families. Those years (1991-1994) were Eritrea’s “baby-boom generation.” Now between the ages of 25 and 28, these young Eritreans have been sent to the military-academic hybrid school of Warsay Yikealo in Sawa; they have been herded in a 126 kilometer foot trek to Heyday to be taught a lesson about something; they have been rounded up and incarcerated in Adi Abeyto, at Dahlak Island, at Wia, at Karshelli, and the other 300 plus official and unofficial “correction” centers. They have been kidnapped, smuggled, trafficked, raped, extorted, organ harvested, frog-marched across the Sinai, endured leery and corrupt UNHCR officials, rounded up again, and swam in seas of betrayal and indifference and callousness before they were swallowed up by the Mediterranean Sea.
And those who didn’t die in the Sea were returned to the same sardine cans and told, wait, we are packed. After sleeping with the dead, they were told: why don’t you just die quietly? And they are off, on their own, aliens in an alien land, alone with nobody to think of them or care for them or bother to know their names.
The dilemma of Eritrea is that those fire-breathing Eritreans who were too bold to be cowed by superpowers from the mission of liberating their land are too timid to save their own children from a regime they helped install in Asmara. They are co-opted in the enslavement and exile of their own children because it will “help them build character” or something. “After all, we endured harsher days,” they rationalized, “it will toughen ’em up.” The job of the liberator was not to liberate the land and the people so they can be liberated and have a normal life, but to raise liberators who will live as liberators so that the country will never be un-liberated.
The siege mentality was created and once created ever-more imaginative causes found to sustain it. By the time the liberators woke up, they had lost their children, and they barely remembered what they fought for. And their children looked at their elders and the return on their investment and said: this is not worth fighting for.
And until we solve this riddle, this enigma, popes will pray, people will shake their heads, human rights activists will agonize: but there will be no change. There are no half-mast flags flying in Eritrea because, to the regime, you are either its supporter, flunkie, apologist or a nobody. More worrying still is the apathy, indifference and sympathy-fatigue of our people.
So now, openly and with open heart: to the loved ones of those who perished, our deepest condolences. To the survivors, we are deeply sorry your country and countrymen have failed you. Those who are morally and emotionally struggling cannot lift those who are physically staggering.
Waiting for Bolokh!
