ERITREA  TODAY

TO FIGHT EVIL,

 WE USE ALL MEANS & WAYS

By Sami Mehari

Alien invader or homegrown monster, evil is evil. Any authority of one person or of a group that brings to our people humiliation, disunity, poverty, displacement, suffering, death and exile is evil. Most of us now agree that there is evil in today’s Eritrea. The point is how to get rid of it.

Yes, Eritrea of today is again looking for an exit strategy, as Eritrea’s paragons of learning, the like of Seyoum Tesfaye, do kindly volunteer to tell us. But should that strategy not combine all ways and means possible? Peaceful political efforts, media campaigns, public and international diplomacy are part of the package in the strategy. But if we find these ways and means alone not working unless the threat of force is also there, should we not include it? And for how long can the most affected people patiently wait under untold pain and suffering? For two years? 11 years? 30 years? For always?

I see it is not a simple question, nor is it anyone who can answer it. And we liked it or not, the correct response would most probably come from the very people and organizations that have been most affected, and for relatively a long period of time, by the adverse consequences caused by the evil system.  The basic force behind this action will eventually be, not the condescendingly referred to “aging revolutionaries”, but the Eritrean youth from across the political and social spectrum of the nation, who had tested all the bitterness of the wretched life under PFDJ’s 11-year long misrule.

First, a glimpse of the past

Let us go back half a century in our modern history. By January 1951, all Eritreans, who until the issuance of UN General Assembly Resolution 390 A (V) of 2 December 1950 were holding divergent viewpoints on the destiny of Eritrea, had reached a tacit understanding (after their Guba’e Selam at Cinema Impero on 31 December 1950) to have mutual respect and acceptance and build an autonomous and democratic Eritrea where everyone would play his part. The former member parties of the Independence Block accepted the Federation as a compromise solution, renamed their alignment as the Democratic Party, and expected that the new structure would work. Even the former “Ethiopia or death” unionists gradually came to terms with the autonomy and wanted to promote it. But the hopes were frustrated when the structure failed to work as envisioned.

Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie eroded the federal arrangement and exposed the people to persecution, imprisonment, torture, death and forced exile. The 10 years between 1951 and 1961 were very difficulty to many Eritrean patriots. Those indomitable patriots conducted peaceful struggle but it took them nowhere. There was no space then, as it is the case today, for legal and peaceful struggle. After 10 years of patient waiting under suffering and humiliation, our patriots found out that ‘enough was enough’. Time had come that arms be raised against the evil imposed by annexationist Ethiopia. 

Again, it was not all Eritreans that favoured the armed struggle; in particular, many intellectuals were not for it.

Initial years in liberated Eritrea

Come May 1991, the Eritrean soil was fully liberated after the Eritrean People’s Liberation Army (EPLA) triumphantly marched into Asmara, the capital. All Eritrean political organizations of the day celebrated victory alongside the rest of their people. Earnest appeals were made by all those fronts to be allowed to return home in a welcoming political atmosphere.

As most of us should know, the response from the new ‘provisional government’ was negative. The head of the new government, Isayas Afeworki, came out with is “Hashewiye wdibat” speech on 20 June 1991. The opposition fronts could not believe this to happen. They simply ignored this pronouncement and continued demanding their legitimate participation in building a new Eritrea in all spheres – political, social and economic. The opposition organizations did not despair because they genuinely trusted that the Eritrean people, including the intellectuals, would eventually make pressure bear on Isayas Afeworki and his party to accommodate the rest of Eritrea for the sake of peace, harmony, justice and democratic participation. The people did not make pressure bear on the arrogant and inherently autocratic Isayas. Members of the EPLF, who should have known Isayas better than others, did not act properly. Worst of all, the Eritrean intelligentsia also failed to play a wise role. And all the disasters that visited Eritrea during the past 11 years had to happen because of our failure as a nation to stop the evil on time.

After repeated calls on the provisional government for participatory politics in new Eritrea, the opposition fronts issued their “September Declaration” in 1992 and formed a coalition with a national charter, and continued calling on the new government in Asmara to be rationale and responsible in regard to the unity of the people and the democratic future of its citizens. Nothing happened.

The ELF-RC declared that it was adopting a peaceful democratic struggle. Other fronts took a wait-and-see attitude but finally started on-and-off armed operations against the regime. The arrogant language of the regime and its attitude towards the opposition  encouraged the growth of extremist factions, which until that time were contained to a satisfactory degree.

Legitimacy of self-defense

When all venues for dialogue and understanding were closed, and the PFDJ regime continued harassing and kidnapping political cadres from the Sudan-Eritrea border towns, the 4^th Congress of the ELF-RC in October 1995 underlined that, although the option at that stage was still for peaceful democratic mode of struggle against the dictatorial regime, yet, it added, “if the situation in the future deemed it necessary to change or to advance to a higher level the mode of struggle against the regime, the Executive Committee is authorized to take the necessary measures to that effect”.

In mid-1997, a regular session of the Revolutionary Council (the ELF-RC legislature) instructed the Chairman of the organization and his executive team to establish “self-defending political mobilization units” inside Eritrea so that direct contact with the people could be maintained and the organization could reach the people with its written and audio-visual material prepared for that purpose. Since that time, the ELF-RC established those political mobilization units with light weapons that can guarantee their self-defense. However, if further exigencies appear in the ground and on the Eritrean political landscape in general, there cannot be any doubt that the units could grow into a large army. And why not, if that becomes to be the only choice left!

Many of the member organizations in the Alliance of Eritrean National Forces (AENF) have small units of semi-armed men that they call armies. But the whole truth is that, so far, they do not have big ‘armies’. What they have are small units, some of them created mainly for agitation and mobilization purposes, as the ELF-RC has rightly described the purpose of establishing its own units in 1997. Some of the member organizations may wish to have a few more men under uniform but they do not, in principle, aim to confront the PFDJ army and “liberate” the country.  That is not their first option. The strategy is to tell whoever is concerned that all means and ways can be used to remove the evil in today’s Eritrea.

War and the sufferings that come out of it is so well known to all Eritreans. Therefore, no Eritrean political organization or individual can so easily go for violence in order to change the political system in Eritrea. After all those wars, necessary and unnecessary, there is war fatigue in Eritrea. This partly explains why the opposition forces do not have big armies. Only to stress: our people and their political organizations do indeed hate wars and would wish to avoid them, if they can. But will the war fatigue last for long? In any country where peaceful and legal ways and means of struggle to change a system are not available, the people subjected to prolonged suffering find little choice to avoid violence forever. And whether we liked it or not violence will become a priority choice when all other means and ways fail to change an intolerable situation. That is why we say we are at the brink of a worse disaster. That is why we call for national salvation before we are engulfed by a national catastrophe.

Our intellectuals fail to play a positive role

The frustrating situation faced by the Eritrean opposition in 1991 and after has been very easy to discern. But, aside from the writings of the traditional opposition, the only comment in the 1990s about the failure of Isayas Afeworki from emerging as a national leader after independence came not from our secular intelligentsia but from a couple of Eritrean Catholic priests. Unfortunately, Eritrea’s ‘secular’ intelligentsia had kept dead silence on the matter and indirectly contributed in the strengthening of the Isayas dictatorship. Why did they fail? Was it because they did not know what was right and wrong? No, they did know that an ugly authoritarianism was in the making. But they wanted to conform. They did not want to displease peers and families and they kept quiet.

Today, most of those peers, friends and relatives of our small group of intellectuals are distancing themselves from PFDJ, but not quite. The umbilical cord is not severed. Therefore, EPLF-DP and the rest of the disoriented former members of PFDJ are still wallowing in fluid ‘civic movements’, and are not ready to use all practical means possible to dislodge PFDJ. Again, our good intellectuals are not ready to displease peers and friends.  Therefore, to them an exit strategy should not combine all means possible. This reminds one of the sharp-penned American-Arab Edward Said who stated in his well quoted 1993 Reith Lecture that the duty of the intellectual is not to make his/her audience feel good. On the contrary, Said said: “the whole point of being intellectual is to be embarrassing, contrary and even unpleasant”. Today, it still unpleasant and embarrassing to most former EPLF/PFDJ members to be talking of a threat of force, even as a last resort, against their erstwhile ‘comrade’ Isayas and clique. Some of our intellectuals still tend to be conforming under the spell of an unfinished peer/family pressure, as it was in the 1990s. Take Dr. Bereket Habte Selassie and most members of G-13 that took 10 solid years to see that there was “a lost opportunity” for national reconciliation, unity and democracy due to the very deeds and misdeeds of Isayas and clique.

Exit strategy

Many of our prolific website writers are nowadays challenging those opposition fronts (whom they did not, sometime ago, want to call ‘the opposition’ lest they ‘dignify’ them by a name!) to stop calling for “an armed showdown”, as if that is the only means of struggle the opposition has been advocating and pursuing in the past 11+ years.

Many of our good writing intellectuals are the ones who started to ponder about the political problems in today’s Eritrea only after the letter of G-13 was issued in Berlin or when G-15’s call for change was made public. They would thus say that it is only two years or less since ‘the real’ peaceful struggle against PFDJ was started and that more years would be needed to consolidate the joint efforts to arm-twist the regime to accept people’s demands.  But that is not what it is. Nor is Isayas Afeworki’s authoritarianism only a few years old. It was there, and it could stay much longer unless it is done away with by using all the ways and means possible and within the capabilities of all Eritrean opposition forces, new and old. But if the new discourse against the inclusion of the threat of force to remove the dictatorship is not accepted not only to our mentor intellectuals but also borrowed by EPLF-DP and its sympathizers, then there will not be unity of purpose no exit strategy and PFDJ rest assured of no effective opposition to its unwanted existence. This argument may also finally boil down to be another disservice from Eritrea’s intelligentsia to our people’s unfulfilled aspirations for freedom, unity and harmony in a prosperous Eritrea.

Our Expectations

This point must be clear: no Eritrean with his/her right mind would wish an armed conflict to resume in war-fatigued Eritrea of today. No one is wishing it now. However, the use of all ways and means possible, including the use of force as a last resort, would have to be pronounced in an exit strategy. The prospect of a good part of the Eritrean Defense Forces deserting the PFDJ regime and joining the ranks of a unified opposition is not a far-fetched dream; it can in fact herald a quick end to the dark Isayas era.

There should be no room for party militias in the opposition. The opposition, old and new, agreeing to create a unified force that can evolve into the nucleus of tomorrow’s national army would equip our nation with tremendous force, and may finish the PFDJ through a united stand, and that without even having to shoot one bullet!! That is within the possible.

Regards.

Samimehari@hotmail.com