Let’s Not Give Room To ‘Warlordism’ in Eritrea.

Taking the opportunity of the 43^rd anniversary of the commencement of the Eritrean armed struggle for national liberation, Nharnet.com has been posting articles on the experiences of the Eritrean Liberation Army (ELA) as of 1961. In those writings, our readers could have noted the hard experiences of the period between August 1965 and August 1969 that is commonly referred to as ‘ayam menatiQ’ in Tigre/Arabic or zemene-kiflitat in Tigrinia.

During that period, the liberation army was divided into five regional divisions, based mainly on geographic/ethnic categories. Its designers were great Eritrean patriots – may their souls live in peace - who did not mean ill to Eritrea and its cause for national liberation that they championed with great devotion. What they did was to innocently copy an organizational model that worked well for a different society and setting. It was a model from Algeria. What they thought was this: that the liberation army would grow fast and cover the entire country within a short period of time when region and ethnicity, supposed to be strong appeals for mass mobilization, are used in the reorganization of the army.

As intended, the liberation army grew fast and covered many parts of Eritrea with Mahmoud Dinai’s 1^st Division in Barka, Omar Hamid Izaz’s 2^nd Division in the Keren-Sahel region, Abdulkerim Ahmed’s 3^rd Division in the Akele-Guzai/Seraye region, Mohammed Ali Omaro’s 4^th Division in the Semhar/Red Sea region, and Woldai Kahsai’s 5^th Division intended to gradually cover most parts of the highlands.

The regional division of the army in Eritrea proved to be a disaster when put to practice. Every division cared for itself; each Regional Commander literally became a Warlord in his specific region where no other unit of the liberation army was supposed to tread. Intense rivalry built up between neighbouring divisions, which eventually saw each other as undeclared enemies. That development was harmful to the people and to the very cause of the liberation struggle. It had to be replaced.

But once introduced, any system entrenches itself and becomes difficult to replace it by another system or organization. It took blood and sweat to stop that wrong path. During a period of four years, many committees, movements and meetings sweated day and night until a partial success was scored at Adobaha on 25 August 1969. That unsuitable and divisive model of regional/ethnic army divisions was dissolved and the liberation army became under one unified command. Eritrea’s mini-warlordism of the late 1960s was put to an end after the Eritrean revolution and revolutionaries paid a very heavy price.

It was partly fear of that bitter experience with ayam menatiQ that led to the call in the first ELF congress of 1971 for the continuation of the struggle with only one organization, one program and one liberation army until the land is freed from foreign occupation. But it was not possible to stop the factionalism that started with the regionalist model mentioned above. The eventual creation of more than one army in the field resulted in fratricidal clashes; and in later years our common failure to develop mutual tolerance among fronts espousing the same cause led to major reverses in the struggle and in our national unity.

But why is Nharnet Team coming to its esteemed readers with this ‘old’ story: to prick old wounds? For a ‘Got fight’? To unnecessarily rouse forgotten passions? Of course not.

As a society with so many languages, religions, distinct geographic regions, and ethnic formations with their own venerated cultures and traditions, we cannot expect our political formations and activities to remain free and without the influenced of those factors. Add to them the existing low level of education and lack of exposure to democratic environment. In fact, the adverse influence of those factors was there throughout our struggle for self-determination. It can be admitted in hindsight that we, collectively, had shown severe shortcomings in our management of those differences. We in the opposition today agree that the dictator in control of our country contributed the biggest and worst share in cultivating and deepening those differences. Yet, no one of us is to be absolved of his/her share in past and present wrongdoings and failures.

It is obvious that we cannot manage our local differences properly by utilizing the wrong tools – i.e. by basing our political mobilization on our regions, on our religions or on our ethnic divisions. The history of ELF’s ayam menatiQ/zemene kiflitat is a lasting lesson that need not be ignored. The message of this editorial is, therefore, just to remind us of the duty of learning correct lessons from our past.

It has been quite sometime now since many of us started expressing our deep concern about the resurgence of narrow appeals as easy ways in mobilizing ‘political’ followers. We have said that in a setting like ours – and as witnessed in the above noted zemene-kiflitat story– it is relatively easy to win more members to one’s side by making those kind of appeals. But is that what we need? Is that the only or the best way for Eritrea and Eritreans to pursue? The answer of Nharnet Team is ‘No’.

Inviting each one of us to primarily think of one’s region, one’s ‘ethnie’, one’s religion or one’s language etc will take us nowhere. This six-decade long political struggle of ours has produced enough people who are convinced and committed to work together and determined to see to it that each and every Eritrean, without distinction of region, religion and gender, is treated justly, equally and with full human and national dignity. The only thing we need is to let and to encourage this kind of people (and organizations) to come together and work out the best model that suits a new Eritrea in the post-PFDJ/Isayas period.

We know that colonizers and occupation authorities that ruled over Eritrea never treated our people with equality and justice. There were many ugly realities and perceptions that left behind them a haunting shadow of mistrust and a trail of bitterness.

It is true that regional, religious or ethnic groups in any country that are denied any role in their state resort to less favourable organizational models desperately looking for a way out from a bad situation. Someone who studied the problem put it in the following telling words: ‘Just as [cornered traders] turn to black markets and to smuggling as alternative parallel markets, [neglected ‘ethnies’] retreat to sub-state communal units which could give them basic identity, protection and moral significance that they could not obtain from the state.’ At the same time, recorded lessons of other peoples have shown that organizing one’s politics on the basis of region, or religion or ethnic belonging always ends up leading to the formation of armed militias which usually bring about only bad tidings.

The misguided ‘strategies’ and policies of the incumbent PFDJ with Isayas Afeworki fell on Eritrea 13 years ago as worsening agents to old concerns and unhealed old wounds in Eritrea. But we also know that the PFDJ regime represents no region, no religion, no ‘ethnie’, no anything in Eritrea. It represents only itself. And it will be gone when its ideologue, Isayas Afeworki, is gone together with his cronies and their diabolic PFDJ infrastructure.

But Eritreans need not wait the removal of Isayas and his PFDJ before they begin trusting each other, irrespective of one’s region or origin. We need to restore in everyone of us that firm confidence, that unshakable trust on one another that was shared in the long years of the armed struggle and finish designing tomorrow’s Eritrea on a credible and trustworthy footing. The very day and the very night we do that, the criminal regime will crumble under the pressure of its own victims: the Eritrean people, the vast majority of them still inhabiting the bruised homeland.

In a word, Eritreans can have better and more suitable organizational models than mobilizing and organizing their politics on the bases of region, religion or ethnicity. The Eritrea that the existing generations create now and bestow to future generations shall be a State that promotes and protects everybody’s rights without distinction of region, religion, ethnicity and gender.

The struggle for establishing a united, peaceful and democratic Eritrea shall triumph! Nharnet Team.