A personal perspective of the Ethio-Eritrean war and the future of Eritrea
Comparing Eritrea’s current condition and call the colonizers’ era as “the good old time” is a paradox that puts the meaning and purpose of our struggle for decades and the sacrifices of our brothers and sisters into a big question mark. Did we pay so much not only to be short changed but to be more oppressed and abused by those whom we call our liberators and our own? It is unfathomable!
Fessahye Mebrahtu, Awate.com Nov. 8, 2004
Were the referendum for the fate of Eritrea to be held today, it would be of no surprise for observers to see a smashingly victorious Ethiopian Nationalism. A victory like no other victory ever, for Ethiopia in its entire history. To have Eritrea taken back to Ethiopia, on terms, this time, set by Ethiopia itself, is a no doubter victory, one that should be accredited by Ethiopia to its present rulers, even if, in fact, Eritrea is left,so far, independent but remorseful of its great and noble history of the years of revolution. The greatness of such a victory for Ethiopia lies in that, the present rulers of Ethiopia, the New Ethiopians, have achieved brilliantly what no other Ethiopian ruler dreamed to achieve: The breaking of the Eritrean spirit and the defeat of Eritrean Nationalism. Ostensibly, All what these new rulers, had to do, was to deal a heavy military blow to Eritrea and leave it alone, licking its wounds.
Chopping The Tree of Nationalism
But the story was not as simple as it appears, neither was it meant to conclude here, for it is a long term plan, a page from a stories' book of the cloak and the dagger type of stories. It is the story of the fox vs. the sheep, the cunning vs. the simpleton, the hypocrite vs. the haughty, the wicked vs. the weak-minded, the emotive vs. the calculative, the organized vs. the chaotic, the lone man vs. the collective. It is also the story of Ras Woldemikael of Hamasien vs. Yohannes IV of Tigray and Emperor of Ethiopia, and ....'Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it' says George Santyana, the Philosopher.
The story, like all other stories, hase a prelude and a beginning , and here, it all had squarely to do with Eritreans themselves, for at a point in time, during the struggle for independence, some of them chose to go to the roots of Eritrean Nationalism and strike at it viciously. It was with the help of the now rulers of Ethiopia, that those Eritreans went to the tree of Nationalism and severed it from its roots to re-plant it, though rootless, in an Ethiopian backyard. They swindled a wide sector of the Eritrean people into taking sectarianism for Nationalism, and the adversary for a friend. EPLF Fascism[i]took root instead of Eritrean Nationalism.
The Fascists themselves were as gullible and simple minded as to willingly walk into the belief that an Ethiopian can at the same time be a non-Ethiopian. They made themselves believe that the foe has , by necessity, to harbor the best interests of Eritrea in his heart. It is still a daunting task to make sense on how the Eritrean fascists gave in to the belief that Tigray, the nucleus of Ethiopia, could work and be against the interests of Ethiopia unless these fascists simplicity of mind and naivety is assumed. No one with a little knowledge of Ethiopia and Ethiopian history would even visualize and imagine Ethiopia apart of Tigray, for the one is, certainly, a pointer to the other.
Independence
Independence came, and with it came what Mr. H. Cohen, the famous facilitator of the London conference, uttered. He said that the independence of Eritrea would last no more than ten years by his reckoning. But no one at that time seemed to take notice or even pretend to be surprised.
Independence came, and with it came what Melles Zenawi uttered in an interview granted to The Ethiopian Review magazine. He said that the independence of Eritrea would not last more than five years. But,again, no one at that time seemed to take notice or even pretend to be surprised!
Independence came, and with it came the irrelevance and meaninglessness of the borders between Eritrea and Ethiopia, as if Eritreans didn't fight for over half a century to limit borders with Ethiopia. And who uttered that? It was the Dictator himself, who may have thought that Eritireans have fought and sacrificed their best and brightest to only enthrone him and give him a shelter at the GBBI palace, once occupied by the successive viceroys of the Emperor of Ethiopia. Yet no one seemed to take notice or even pretend to be surprised!
Independence came, and with it came the grooming and decorating of the Eritrean Dictator to look like the king maker of Ethiopian politics, and the weak-minded was deluded, believed in it and took it as a matter of course.
The "New Ethiopians"
Spot lights were cast from behind the Dictator, the shadow projected and falling in front of him on the walls of his narrow dark universe. Mistaking the giant shadow on the wall for himself, the dictator, like Narcissus of the ancient Greek Myth, fell in love with the shadow. He started to muse with establishing an Empire for himself, one which extends to the lake regions of central Africa. He sent the sons of Eritrea to die for his doltishness and insanity, in the swamps and bushes of the Congo. The new Ethiopian rulers had only to cheer, praise, glorify and whistle at his insane deeds. They had to show false admiration at his mental genius and military prowess, while deep in their hearts smiling and congratulating themselves for placing the weak minded into the road of peril and with him Eritrea and Eritreans to drowning.
The Dictator was tacitly encouraged by these new-Ethiopians to ignite and wage wars all around him and he, gleefully, complied. No one was spared his impertinence except them. Their plan was dictating exactly. In the right time, they would be the last to be.....on demand!.
He and his generals were bought into the Ethiopian rulers' manipulation and trickery of depicting his Army as a state of the art 'war machine'. He swallowed the bait, and much enjoyed it, and with great elegance he sleep-walked head and tail into the center of the trap set for him. The new rulers of Ethiopia have now done half the job, and, so far, no loss of even a drop of their blood, all by remote control and their invisible noose was slowly but certainly closing. The only casualties of these secret, quiet, and single sided war, were the reputation and good name of struggling Eritrea and its youth which were sent to die outside its borders and in foreign lands.
Eritrea acquired the name and was perceived and recognized as a war addicted nation and a trouble maker. All the compassion and friendships built over the years with neighbors and other nations in the the period of the struggle for independence, were now squandered and gone with the wind. Eritrea was now alone. That was what the New-Ethiopians wished most. A stepping stone for their next move in the plan designed to cause the suicide of Eritrean NATIONALISM.
The New-Ethiopians came closer to their objective when they successfully tricked the dictator to pull the trigger and ignite the border war between the two countries. Looking back to those times reveals, clearly, how the Dictator was degraded into a hopeless Megalomaniac, deeply entrenched in an illusory world of the making of the New-Ethiopians. He was led to believe in the invincibility of his Army, religiously believing that he is in control of the flow, sequence and time line of that war. Didn't he say to his unsuspecting Eritrean audience : "we are going to make it short!" ?
War & Postwar
The military engagement of the war came to pass, and one fifth of Eritrea was occupied. Eritrea was humiliated. The truth is, had the New-Ethiopians wanted it, their invading Army would have marched to the heart of Asmara and unseat the Dictator and his regime. But that would put them face to face with a rejuvenated and mighty Eritrean Nationalism and the thirty year war would be repeated, deja vu. This was not their plan! Besides, they knew too well that Eritrean Nationalism can be defeated if it only happens at the psychological level, and by Eritreans themselves. The plan, to be successful, had to keep the occupation in place but not by Ethiopians. An occupation by proxy would be the ideal. A multinational peace keeping force was introduced, authorized and deployed on the Eritrean side only, to deepen the humiliation. The force should not be deployed along the border only, but deep into Eritrea, almost to the entire chunk that was occupied by the invading force. New-Ethiopians, as a direct translation of the balance of power, kept the lands they were claiming, off limits to the multinational force, considering it to be part of Ethiopia.
Consider this scenario of Analogy: suppose that one aggressive vagabond forcefully occupied your house. What are your options to be?
You have a choice between two: go to the law or fight for it. The wisdom would be to go to the law, but if you are one of those who see that what is taken by force can only be restored likewise, you would invest yourself in a fight. If you were, after the fight, to come out securing the upper hand and restore your property, would you go to the laws and the court, for arbitration on what you faithfully believe is yours, readily between your hands? The wisdom is not to do that, because, if you do, you will be casting the doubt on your claims that the property may not belong to you, since you yourself are demonstrating that by the mere fact of seeking a third opinion represented in the court of arbitration. It is your adversary, in this case who would have the interest in going to such an arbitration, and it is he who have the interest of casting doubt on your rights. If you, knowing all that, and still go for arbitration then you must be having some ulterior motives for doing that.
Take now what these New-Ethiopians have done, for their resort to arbitration after the fact, is the tale-tell and the footprint. They have between their hands what they claimed to be theirs, yet they volunteered and signed for an arbitration. These are not simpletons or idiots who would gamble the blood of their kind for territories they didn't believe to be an object of contest in the first place. The whole arbitration play was only a ploy they used for buying time and maximizing their gains. A no peace no war state of affairs is only favorable to the Ethiopian side. Eritrea humiliated,wounded, bankrupt and controlled by a dictator, whose mental health is questionable, for a fairly long time, promises a disaster for Eritrea. The outcome would be a sudden collapse of the regime, with its inevitable, ensuing chaos. This, in the absence of strong opposition, would create a vacuum which would quickly filled by warlords. In such a situation, an intervention by Ethiopia is not only a requirement for the international community but also a wish for Eritreans: thus the demise of Eritrea.
No one except the blind and the obstinate denies that ordinary Eritreans are now looking back at the derg era with Nostalgia, an ominous sign for us and a state of affairs which should send all warning signals off.
What can we do now?
At the height of the great French Revolution,Madame Roland, an influential figure of that revolution, exclaimed while at the scaffold: "O, liberty what crimes have been committed in your name”, Might we with equal truth have said “O, Eritrea Nationalism, what crimes have been committed in your name.”
Whatever the case would be, the responsibility of all earthly woes and ills have to be ascribed to nature or to man. But then, Edward Gibbon , the sage who tried to make sense of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in a voluminous book by the same name, says “Man has much more to dread from his fellow creatures than to convulsions of the elements”.
Mark now, General Mesfin Hagos coming down to us, like a bolt from the blue, with a scepter in one hand and a sword in the other, shrieking KTET!– KTET!, exposing in the way his insensitivity and hardness of the soul. In the middle of a yet unrelieved post-war trauma, suffered by all sectors of the Eritrean people, the General lacked the sensitivity but found the audacity to go as far as promising us, a yet one more fine war. Gibbon must have been prophetically truthful, we have to dread the monsters amongst us, for Eritrea has a supply of them, more than its fair share.
KTET! is the call of the great General- what a healing balm is here offered us. This man, seems to be forgetful that he, only recently, deserted the command center and the theater of operations back in Eritrea, yet he is telling us to fight it again. Why didn't he live it instead of leaving it to safety? I didn't agree to the dictators philosophy, he would tell.
Please, serve us no hair splitting General, we can't discern a difference! And what are we offered here. A little whitewash ? "A little water,” Lady Macbeth remarked on the murder of Dunkan, "a little water clears us of this deed”† . Like the exorcist scatter the legions of devils with a sprinkle of holy water and a formula, so our general puts to flight the agonies, the inhumanities, the cruelties and the sorrows of Eritreans with a single expression: “it was not me, it was the dictator, now forget everything and let us play the game again.” Are you deaf or blind, or are you a rock, General ? Have you lost a son or a daughter in the border war, Sir?
If we Eritreans, are true to ourselves, if we are looking for a way out of our predicament, if we really are seeking salvation, we have, then, to give the cold shoulder to the monsters amongst us, we should purge our ranks and clear it from the self appointed leaders and opportunists amongst us. We should look for fresh thoughts and new ways. The old ways are not working any more and have proved deadly, a fresh look and a soul search is the only way available.
How can this be done? We, Eritreans, have to look and learn to do with what we have at hand. And what do we have? We have only weakness. We have a weak Eritrea and we should start with that. Many times strength is hidden and embedded in the folds of weakness. Indeed Eritrea's strength is in its weakness, if we can open our minds. New-Ethiopians would have us put our faith on Militarism and Military Hardware. Their plot is based exactly on that. They know that whatever we militarily may put up, they can endure it and absorb, they have the geographic strategic depth, they have the economic upper hand they have the numeric population weight. They know that they can be on top of us militarily at the end of the day, regardless of what we do by way of acquiring Military hardware and transforming of our societies in the model of ancient Sparta.
We have to re-invent ourselves, evolve and find the most suitable way to responding to the challenge thrown to our faces by the New-Ethiopians through the dictator. It is not through military and KTET mentality that we can do that, this would never deliver any promise and achieve nothing except bitter harvest. When we chose Eritrea we were aware that it is not a super power Eritrea that we were fighting for, it was the weak and poor Eritrea, an Eritrea that we can later enrich through hard work and smartness, and indeed during the fight for independence we were the weaker side, and that is exactly why we won that war. William S. Lind, an American military war expert and a journalist, wrote an article under the title of The power of weakness in which he talked about a paper written by professor Martin Van Creveld, another war expert. In that paper the professor wrote the following:
“In private life, an adult who keeps beating down on a five-year old – even such a one as originally attacked him with a knife – will be perceived as committing a crime; therefore, he will lose the support of bystanders and end up being arrested, tried and convicted. In international life, an armed force that keeps beating down on a weaker opponent will be seen as committing a series of crimes; therefore it will end up losing the support of its allies, its own people and its troops. Depending on the quality of the forces…things may happen quickly or take a long time to mature. However, the outcome is always the same. He (or she) who does not understand this does not understand anything about war; or, indeed, human nature.”
Hasn't the time arrived to choose our weapon of choice. It is now the time to choose, time is a powerful ally and it is allied with the New Ethiopians now. It is of utmost urgency that Eriteans take their fate in their hands before it is too late.
One would wish to see the opposition parties wake up and understand that time is running out. It is of utmost importance for Eritrea that a Government in exile thought of, seriously and quickly. A Government in exile around which Eritreans can rally. Opposition parties should not be discouraged by those who are distracting the struggle to beat dictatorship by raising trivial and irrelevant side considerations. One would like to see A government in Exile composed of Eritrean Elders, community leaders, representatives of refugees, honest intellectuals, women. One wishes to see such a government headed by women as the symbol and real face of Eritea and to stress the recognition of the sacrifices of the Eritean woman. The role of the opposition parties would, in this stage, be limited to the establishment of such a government after which its role would be restricted to consultation and advice. Such a government should start its tasks by renunciation of militarism and war. The government to be should, as a first declaration, renunciate Militarism and make it clear to the world that it is committed to peace with Ethiopia and all neighors, that the problem of the border with Ethiopia is for now frozen until after the downfall of dictatorship when it could be adressed by peaceful and brotherly means. This is in my humble opinion the only way out. Diaspora Eritreans also have a great role to play, contrary to what the followers of General Mesfin Hagos are trying to paint them as useless and disabled, but this is a topic for another day.
[i]Aldous Huxley, the famous author of the novel “Brave New World”, wrote about fascism in his book “Means and ends. This is what he said in definition of Fascism:
“A fascist , then, is one who rejects the teaching of the prophets and believes that the best society is a national society living in a state of chronic hostility towards other national societies and preoccupied with ideas of rapine and slaughter. He is one who despises the non-attached individual and holds up for admiration the person who, in obedience to the boss who happened at the moment to have grabbed political power, systematically cultivates all the passions (pride, anger, envy, hatred) which the philosophers and the founders of religions have unanimously condemned as the most malefacent , the least worthy of human beings. All Fascist planning has one ultimate aim: to make the national society more efficient as a war machine. Industry, commerce and finance are controlled for this purpose. The manufacture of substitutes is encouraged in order that the country may be self-sufficient in time of war. Tarrifs and quotas are imposed , export bounties distributed, exchange depreciated for the sake of gaining a momentary advantage or inflicting loss upon some rival. Foreign policy is conducted on avowdly Machiavellian principles; solemn engagements are entered into with the knowledge that they will be broken the moment it seems advantageous to do so; international law is invoked when it happenes to be convinient, repudiated when it imposes the least restraint on the nations designs. Meanwhile the Dictator's subjects are systematically educated to be good citizens of the fascist state. Children are subjected to authoritarian discipline that they may grow up to be simultaneously obedient to superiors and brutal to those below them. On leaving the kindergarten, they begin that military training which culminates in the years of conscription and continues until the individual is too decrepit to be an efficient soldier. In school they are taught extravagant lies about the achievements of their ancestors, while the truth of other peoples is either distorted or completely suppressed. The press is controlled, so that adults learn only what it suits the dictator that they should learn. Anyone expressing unorthodox opinions is ruthlessly persecuted. Elaborte systems of police espionage are organized to invistigate the private life and opinions of even the humblest individual. Delation is encouraged, tale-telling is rewarded. Terrorism is legalized. Justice is administared in secret; the procedure is unfair, the penalties barbarously. Brutality and torture are regularly employed."
†From an Arabic translation of Shaekspeare's “Macbeth”.
