Engineered by a coalition of revolutionaries, infiltrators, civil rights activists and not-a- small contribution from Eritrea’s ruling party, People’s Front for Democracy & Justice (PFDJ), the overthrow of an entrenched Ethiopian political party, Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), was supposed to herald Ethiopia’s Great Realignment. Instead, they ended up transforming Ethiopia from an ethnic-federalism dominated by some ethnicities into an ethnic-federalism dominated by other ethnicities. It was quite a feat. The question is: has the new Ethiopian Civil War, 2020-present, brought about Eritrea’s Great Realignment, with not- a-small contribution from Ethiopia’s former ruling party, TPLF? Has this happened by crystallizing the choices? Political party dis-alignments and realignments are all-too-common in Eritrean history, going back to 1940’s politics, although the historians among you will find examples of those that go back decades, if not centuries, earlier. So, is what we are witnessing the Great Eritrean Realignment or a Collective Primal Scream?
2. For those of you who are too young to remember the political literature of our Eritrean Fronts, both of whom were Marxist-Leninists who took their ideologies extremely seriously, to the point of translating the prevailing gospels to Tigrinya, there were some discussions on thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis, as postulated by the German philosophers Fichte, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Specially Marx, who based his philosophy of feudalism-capitalism-communism (“Do you hear that, Mr Anderson? That’s The Sound Of Inevitability!”) on Hegel’s (actually Kant’s) theory of thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. ድርሳን: ጸረ -ድርሳን: ጽምራ:: The vicious cycle of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis is non-stop: no sooner has a synthesis been born before it becomes a thesis inviting an anti-thesis.
Let’s see if this applies to what we see happening in the Eritrean Diaspora:
3. Thesis: ድርሳን: Eritreans are great examples to the world of how self-determination can be achieved, against-all-odds, through persistent effort, a spirit of volunteerism, self-sacrifice, and tenacity to defeat Superpowers.
Anti-thesis: ጸረ -ድርሳን: Eritrea is an artificial country which defines its existence and nationalism by its hatred of Ethiopia (later Tigray), daring to deny Mother Ethiopia (later Tigray) its God-given and history-proven right to the Sea. Their combatants, Tegadelti, were bandits; and now their soldiers are rapists responsible for genocide, and there will be pay back, and we are coming, here we come….. PS: ጥባሕ ጥባሕ::
Synthesis:ጽምራ. I may have my differences with the government that Isaias leads, but I very much like having a sovereign country. I don’t have a parliament or even a Council of Ministers to sit around and discuss it, but I will out-sing and out-dance anybody.
I. A Non-negotiated Settlement
4. In the Diaspora, it appears like an alignment has been formed between Eritrea’s ruling party (PFDJ) and….Individuals With-No-Requests (IWNR). Because, unlike 1987 with Sagem, there is no party to negotiate with now, even if the PFDJ was inclined to. What we have is just individuals trekking to the Neo Nationalist camp for reasons stated above and below. Individuals only, because Eritrean opposition has only groups just-forming, or groups just-dying. Groups liberated from the chokehold of TPLF; groups pledging solidarity with the TPLF. The speed of the alignment between the Eritrean regime and “Individuals With No Requests” was dictated by the frequency and amplitude of pro-TPLF war-talk by some: “Eritrea is an artificial country, a disfigurement whose nationalism is held together by hatred towards Tigray; it has an army of barbarians who have committed genocide. They are guilty. We are coming, and this time we will have no respect for your sovereignty just as you didn’t for ours.”
5. Moreover, 31 years after Eritrea’s independence, 29 years after it joined the UN as a sovereign nation, there is still a large segment of Ethiopians that Ethiopian politicians feel compelled to pacify, by making vague promises about reclaiming The Red Sea. The weary view that “When It Comes To Ethiopia, Eritrea Has To Always Have One Eye Open” (ሰለም ዘይብል ዓይኒ ዓሳ) was recently re-enforced by Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed Ali (or his social media guru), who just reminded the world that all that ails Ethiopia can be solved by a prayer, if only Ethiopians would stretch their hands to God, and also, let’s remember that domestic and historical enemies denied Ethiopia its access to The Sea. Forever and ever amen.
6. Well. If you don’t want to hear only your country is artificial (as if all aren’t); if you don’t want to hear that your love of your country–your good-will and good-wishes towards your people to have freedom, equality, stability, full citizenship–is driven by hatred; if you don’t want to hear that your siblings have committed war crimes; if you don’t automatically accept that you committed genocide and now you are genocide-denier; if you don’t want to be bullied into fearing and believing that war, occupation and destruction and vengeance is coming to your people; if you are tired of hearing that what is yours is not really yours and the Repo Man is coming…,what do you do? Many Eritreans took a look at two bullies and assessed that one (Foreign TPLF) is a bigger existential threat than the other (Domestic PFDJ.) The domestic one had only exiled them; the foreign one is threatening to come after their families and homes with malice aforethought.
7. For two decades, waves of the youth, the Prey that had escaped the Predator, were looking for shelter in the Diaspora. But, as we all know, the Eritrean opposition has a logo, not a location. Efforts to elevate it to a Coalition, to a Government even, have been rebuffed. “I don’t want to drive the bus; I want to sit on the sidewalk and analyze the driver, the passengers and its speed,” they said. The Opposition has not been able to create a community, a center, to provide emotional shelter to the battered and traumatized Prey. There was no organized and sustained effort to give them a spread of Tayta and chopped onions. So many of the Prey just fell off Eritrea-sphere as they navigated survival in the jungles of Europe and America. Some eventually found a way to reach some kind of co-existence with their tormenter. In the study of species adoption, this is called co-evolution. The result of the co-evolution is the youth recognize social events (festivals, expos) as Eritrean and not PFDJian; in return they don’t have to wear a flag to attend it and they are exempted from all the Mekete (Challenge!) demonstrations and you, PFDJ, can forget your 2% bilking. In exchange, they avoid social isolation; they are with their people and their tongue; the strength in numbers assures them the country will be fine. They listen to musicians they love, and they get to travel home.
8a. They still have siblings in indentured servitude; they still have family members who disappeared; they still have people they know in refugee camps who are abandoned or targeted by all the combatants in Ethiopia’s Civil War; they still have their weddings at some third country; they still have to live off half of their meager wages because they have to send the other half to support their families; they still know that by setting the exchange rates artificially low, the government is confiscating 75% of what they are sending. ($100 becomes 1500 NKFA instead its free market equilibrium rate of 6000 NKFA with the Mafia Regime robbing 4500 Nakfa.)
8b. The only thing that changed is now maybe some think the government had to do all the vile things it did, to fight the conspiracy of The Named and The Un-named. They are hopeful that those bad times are now over because Team ኩራዕ ኤርትራዊ! ኣርዓዶም! ኣህደሞም! ደምሰሶም! prevailed (?) over Team በሎም! ኣይሰምዕን’ የ. Jr. The lessons of “እኔም ዜሮ ዜሮ ኣንተም ዜሮ ዜሮ” (we both lost), a song that was famous after 1998-2000 war–that war brings nothing but destruction, no winners; only losers–have been forgotten. The new ዜሮ ዜሮ song is a taunt, it’s sports-trash-talking, except the Sports is War.
8c. Ask our traumatized youth, “should Eritreans have been arrested without charges over the last 30 years”, they may say they wouldn’t know–because, for some, it is about things that happened BEFORE they were born. But would they say the same if you changed the question to: “should they still be in jail?” The youth shall ask, “After all, isn’t this triumphant celebration I am part of, right now, an end of an era– an era when people used to be arrested without charges, without self-defense, without visitation rights?
9. While TPLF’s ecosystem was the vehicle that decided the speed by which the synthesis arrived, it was Eritrean media, and Opposition media at that, which countered the anti-thesis; and, it is partly responsible for the synthesis. Obviously, the Eritrean State media could not comment on a war it hadn’t even admitted it is involved in. How can you report on the activities of that which you called dead-and-buried in November 2020? In the absence of State media (just as it was absent in the early stages of 98-00 Eritrea-Ethiopia War), it was opposition media like AAN and Solo Media that was calling bullshit on the TPLF narrative. So, for those of you who will say, “hey, Saleh, remember when you used to write and post pics saying PFDJ is left only with the elderly; it has lost the youth: check this, in your face!” the answer is you had lost them–not to us in the Opposition, but to the ether. And it was partly thanks to the opposition media like AAN and Solo Media who brought them to Eritrea: they had given up on it.
10. In prose and poetry, Awel Seid, the Spokesperson of the Neo Nationalism, the Citizen Ambassador, has little to say except መንግስትና ደው ትበለልና (long live our government) with a hyper-focus on another competing Marxist Leninist organization (Marxist Leninist League of Tigray, MLLT, ማለሊት), an organization that mostly lives rent-free in the propeller heads of People’s Front for Democracy & Justice flunkies. All that can be said, in favor and against the Citizen Ambassador has been said. For those of us who have been around the block, he is a highly polished version of two previous spokespersons–Sophia Tesfamariam and Thomas Mountain–only more engaging. I don’t remember his rules of engagement: they have something to do with a socket.
II. The Thesis
11. This Nationalism Born of War, this Neo Nationalism, has a problem. It is born with its own seed of destruction, its antithesis. For, at some point, it will bother more and more people that the Neo Nationalism has ugly traces of ultranationalism, of mocking The Other. To be sure, war, in all its ugliness, also brings out ugly songs. In the 98-00 war, there was also Us and Them–Tareke’s Hilmi Abay Tigray is an example–but back then the “them” was understood to be Tigray People’s Liberation Front founders and not Tigray people. Because it was the TPLF that had deported him. But now, with the multiplying social media and exponential growth of communication, the line between TPLF and Tigray people keeps getting blurred. The tone is angrier, preparing the People for the Final Confrontation. There are words and videos that appear to demean a people not a political organization. I say “appear” because it is not consistent with the history of EPLF/PFDJ literature to be this transparent on that subject. Then there is the stress of cognitive dissonance: how long can you hear ክዛርቡና እንድዮም ደልዮም (they are forcing us to speak) voiced by a 90-year old sounding man, with his metaphors of dough and baking, lamenting that we have been forced to speak, when our real problem is ክንዛረብ ኣይከኣልናን (we have no freedom of speech)!
12. In all this, there is a large group of a People (not a Front) which is asking, “oh, so you are the victim in this story?” They are Tegaru, our immediate neighbors, and whatever you say about their Tigray People’s Liberation Front, they are as committed to it as the Eritrean version. So, what is our end game with them? Eternal war? A strategy of hope that the TPLF will meet the fate many political organizations, many at its hands: disintegration? And how long will this take: will yet another generation go through what 3 generation of Eritreans have gone through? Will we, at long last, try peace?
13. What has this “Create Enemy, Fight Enemy, Claim & Celebrate Victory; Create Enemy, Fight Enemy, Claim & Celebrate Victory” governance brought Eritrea except militarization, mass exile, stagnation, and decay in the last 30 years? How can one claim “victory” after losing the lives and limbs and mental health of so many to war, or exile, or uncountable prisons? Is Victory simply defined as “not lost its sovereignty?” No reasonable government, anywhere in the world, would claim that its primary achievement in the last 30 years is that it wasn’t reoccupied but, in Eritrea, that is still the case–helped now and then by Ethiopian rulers. Is this violence part of the so-called “Habesha Culture?” The same culture that, you know, is late to everything, except airports? Why are we so late again to pursue peace with the same intensity we pursue war…?
14. …Because the Government of Isaias Afwerki can only exist in times of war. This is not unique to Eritrea: war against an enemy makes all people everywhere focus their attention to the new threat. But few countries would pursue that as a policy, year after year, because all except the very wealthy nations know it is not economically sustainable. The rulers of Eritrea have found a new way to showcase what they hope to be a Best-Practice adopted by Africa: Sawa! This is where the rulers forcefully take the very-likely-to-be underemployed and agitated youth, to a high school, a feeder to Indoctrination And War-Readiness, Inc. (Free labor included.) The reason there is such sense of triumphalism in the Eritrean festivals is because they believe that the Future Best Practice of Africa, of which they were part-and-parcel, is not something to be ashamed of (as if you were enslaved or human trafficked: the definition of forced labor) but something to be proud of, because Best Practice of Africa has been repeatedly tested domestically (against internal enemies) and foreign (Weyane) and been “proven wildly successful.” ኩራዕ ኤርትራዊ. The Festival of Triumphalism is celebrating the end of a war, even as it readies itself for another. It knows that its unity is glued by war, because in peace time, all the disparities (gender, ethnicity, religion, war veteran status) will be made clear, and eventually a subject for debate.
III. Three Generations & Counting
15. Consider this: “We must pass on to our children a country that is free from war and conflict, a country of which they can be proud, a country in which independence, peace, and prosperity prevail.” It is from PFDJ’s National Charter of February 1994 revealed at the PFDJ’s First (and last) Congress. Whatever the Eritrean equivalent its name may be, Eritrea, too, has its: boomers (58-67 years old), Gen X’ers (42-57 years old), Millenials (26 – 41 years old) and Gen Z (10-25 years old). In the end, all it means is in the time (30 years) Eritrea has been maladministered by PFDJ, people have aged from one bracket to another, without seeing peace, never mind pride or prosperity. There is no reason to expect anything else from the Party of War.
16. On top of all that, Eritrea is now a land of tiered citizenship. Eritreans who can travel; Eritreans who can’t; Eritrean Diaspora who can go home; Eritrean Diaspora who can’t; Eritreans who can be visited in prison; and Eritreans who can’t. Eritreans who can elect and be elected (hey, hey only in local governments!); Eritreans who can’t. Eritreans with light military service (you know, like Isaias Afwerki’s kids); Eritreans in indefinite hard labor. There is no worse corruption than abuse of power, and the Eritrean rulers are so abusive of their power they will go to the extent of denying burial in Eritrea, to an Eritrean corpse. In the end, all the PFDJ Citizen Ambassadors have failed this test: have you contributed to the polarization of Eritreans or have you contributed to their coming-together for civil discussions?
17. If the PFDJ and its NNNN cult think they have won, well, in “winning”, they have lost. While Eritrea has never been more in agreement about a foreign threat, it has never been more in disagreement on the type of governance Eritrea needs, and the the nature of the Supreme Law, constitution, that must bind its citizens together. The Neo Nationalism fanned by the PFDJ can only thrive in the vapors of wars, and this is why the Isaias Afwerki regime has stumbled Eritrea from one war to another (Yemen, Ethiopia, Djibouti, East Sudan) for 30 years, and will continue to do so. The alternative, Paleo Nationalism, the traditional culture of dialogue, order, limited power has been rejected by the Neo Nationalist party. Or maybe it can’t hear the invitation to do so over the sound of angry guns and celebratory drums it orchestrates.
18. Whether it is a Primal Scream of a long-delayed response, or a political realignment to expand the base, something significant has happened in the Eritrean Diaspora. To recognize it is to define it and present Eritreans a real choice – one that asks them: do you want to be in eternal wars or do you want to pursue peace fiercely? Do you want to be sovereign, or a subject of the State. That is the true meaning of “independent choice” – because independent choice can only be made by independent persons. Independent not just from dependence on foreign power, but independence from tyrannical governments. This can only come from people’s (humans) sovereignty, popular sovereignty, which doesn’t exist in Eritrea.
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