Reporters With No Borders

Julie Wheelwright, of the UK’s “The Independent” newspaper, in the context of reviewing the book by Michela Wrong’s I Didn’t Do It For You, wrote:

“When a gang of boys stole my wallet in Asmara while I was covering Eritrea’s Independence referendum, it made the national news. Residents were appalled that such a crime had taken place in the capital of their spanking new nation and assured me that thefts were rare. Such were the pride and idealism in Africa’s youngest state.”

This is the sort of literature that has been disseminated now for some time by many western reporters and scholars. Some fancied making invincible men of Eritreans; others would make angels and saints of them, and a third would see them as the Israelis of Africa, the modern Spartans and so on and so on. All this nonsense was not reported by novice, inexperienced, or amateur reporters only, but by the veteran, the professional and the sophisticated as well. And to many sober Eritreans it was insulting as it all looked and smelt like mocking and scoffing at them.

Reporters, ordinary mortals may believe, are the people who search, find, scrutinize, and report the truth. But in light of what we have so far seen in some circles, when the reporting pertains to Eritrea, the standard of reporting suddenly lowers its threshold as to allow for fabrications and fairy tales to be, not only tolerated, but also extended with the status of truth.

A reporter, most of us would believe, is the source of raw, not yet manipulated information. As it turns out, this is only a definition, and an ideal. Forget the indifferent, honest and objective reporter; he is not even in the transaction. He, like the definition itself, is a fiction. But this shouldn’t distress and deter us from preferring the truth to fiction, reality to the imaginary. Besides, there are still reporters who adhere to the ethics of the profession and seldom forget the responsibilities falling squarely upon their shoulders. The American reporters who brought the ‘Abu Ghraib’ scandal to the public’s notice are a shining example of those reporters who represent their nation’s conscience as they are expected to be.

How is it, then, that at this age, branded the information age, the age of the Internet, the age of information explosion, at this age, Ms. Julie Wheelwright, a journalist, a book critic, comes out to tell us this fantastic story about her wallet which was stolen in Asmara, and how it made residents appalled and how it made itself a national sensation? A little arrangement of the thought would make the point clearer. Here is an influential westerner, who lost her wallet to theft. She swallows the assurance that theft is rare with much ease and comfort. She takes this assurance for guaranteed truth and disseminates it for news. The fact that this assurance is coming from those who may benefit most by her broadcasting this as news, never trouble her and never does it raise any doubts in her mind. “I was assured”, as Ms. Julie Wheelwright stated, is not a good enough litmus test for a journalistic report. What other objective evidence for her report is there in her story? None. She didn’t mention any. So what merit does her claim to truth have? Did it not strike her mind that the story might have been a staged one and that she may have been fooled into dancing to the puppet-master’s tune. Ms. Wheelwright reported the incident in admiration and excitement; she has effectively, with no wink of the eye, told the world of a nation and its people, a new nation, a people unlike any of the nations of this world, a new cast of humanity. A society, where theft is unknown, though poverty is prevalent. She told of a society childishly optimistic, and haughtily proud. Those who don’t know about Eritrea would join Ms. Wheelwright her excitement and ecstasy in discovering, at last, the old romantic dream of the “NOBLE SAVAGE“.  As for us, Eritreans, we believe that we know what and how we are. We are not unique and out of the normal and we are, above all, part of humanity, its positive and negative associated images well included. We also know that we have, like all human societies, men among us who would stop at nothing - our president is here in evidence. We have also some, or even more than some, who would steal when they are hungry and kill when angry. We have all the other sides of humanity: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

We, Eritreans, are also reasonable and sensitive enough to understand that reporting on us in terms of the unfamiliar, the abnormal, and the odd, however benign and friendly it may seem, will, in the end, only help depict freaks, odd and eccentric of us. But, the important question begging here for an answer is, why is this kind of reporting about Eritrea and Eritreans going around, recurring and surfacing now and then? Beside the reporters who make it for the payments made to them by PR firms recruited for the purpose of image polishing and amelioration by the Dictator, there are others who go out of their way and compromise their professional integrity for reasons which are not completely in the dark. Ignorance combined with cultural and psychological aberrations are the great common factor between all members of this class. In fact, some of the reasons that make their sights myopic are clear all the time; one of these possible reasons could be what a guru and a sage of our age explained:[i]  

“One of the persistent delusions of mankind is that some sections of the human race are morally better or worse than others. This belief has many different forms, none of which has any rational basis. It is natural to think well of ourselves, and thence, if our mental process are simple, of our sex, our class, our nation, and our age. But among writers, specially moralists, a less direct expression of self-esteem is common. They  tend to think ill of their neighbors and acquaintances, and therefore to think well of the section of mankind to which they themselves do not belong. Lao-Tze admired the ‘pure men of old’, who lived before the advent of Confucian sophistication. Tacitus and Madame de staël admired the Germans because they had no Emperor. Locke thought well of the ‘intelligent American’ because he is not led astray by Cartesian sophistries.

A rather curious form of this admiration for groups to which the admirer does not belong is the belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed: subject nations, the poor, women, and children. The eighteenth century, while conquering America from Indians, reducing the peasantry to the condition of pauper laborers, and introducing the cruelties of early industrialism, loved to sentimentalize about the ‘noble savage’ and the simple annals of the poor.” 

There could be another reason, which may seem far-fetched and imaginary. Yet we may have to consider it for its probability:

Virtual Pets

Pets and the rearing of pets have always occupied an ever-increasing area in the life of individuals in the west and elsewhere. Actually the rearing and acquiring of pets have developed and took astonishing turns in the last few years. Dogs, cats and birds were the common pets some time ago, but now even snakes, tigers and crocodiles are taken by people for companionship as pets. Even ordinary rocks have come to the view occupying their place in the matrix of pets and came to be called Pet rock. There is even a fad out there known as the Virtual Pet with a full web presence bearing all the information that makes your jaws fall. Is it then far fetched to allow for such a fact as that some seasoned and sophisticated people would consider a poor African Country and see it extra exotic and appropriate for petting and treat it as such? Ms. Michela Wrong writes the following in her new book “I Didn’t Do It For You”:

“My Survey done, I took the image of Eritrea away with me, a memory to be treasured and coddled, summoned when bleakness loomed.”

The image she is dwelling on here is the image of Eritrea of the time before May 1998, for many this should sound more like a pet talk than a talk of a veteran reporter entrusted to find and figure out of a thin and lean truth in a gigantic heap of lies.

If this explains and help understanding the well wishing (naïve) reporters, it will still fall short of explaining the other category, the sober, cold and calculative writers and journalists with rather ulterior motives and inconceivable ends. These, we don’t have to consider now, for this cannot be done just except in a separate topic exclusively dedicated to them. However, it is necessary that one has to remember the need of not to clutter the discussion more than it already is.

But, as it appears, Ms. Julie Wheelwright’s above-mentioned indulgence with Eritrea is not a passing momentary caprice. It has a trend with the rigor of a recurring pattern. In her review of the Wrong’s I Didn’t Do It For You, she said:

“Wrong has now written a lyrical, intensely intelligent and wonderfully readable History of Eritrea, offering a cogent explanation for its seeming failures.”

This is a total disregard, a massive failure of understanding of what the word History means, or an outright gross misrepresentation of the book and what it is about. Even if the book, as it does, classifies itself as a book of history, it cannot be a true history of Eritrea. Reading it will get us nothing of what one expects to get from reading a book: true information!  What one gets from reading this book of Ms. Michela Wrong is, in fact, what one would get from listening to a piece of soft instrumental music, mere satisfaction of something different than the satisfaction of one’s reasoning power. This means that the book may satisfy one’s poetic and artistic tastes, but it certainly will miserably fail to attend to your intellectual faculties and disappoint it. 

The reason for this is that the writer gives no consideration to truth as a value, desperately sought in reading and writing history.  A false history is not a history after all; it is a fairy tale. Saying this, however, is not saying that truth is attainable in history with certainty; that much is not even available to physical sciences. But definitely there are differences between history and fairy tales and there are criteria, which makes a work on history what it is. These criteria are not part of the book by Ms. wrong. And as such the book may not, with much certainty, be a book of history, much less a book on the history of Eritrea at any stage. That history has to wait for Eritreans with full understanding of the nature of their societies. Some already have made an opening and appearance.

So What Is Wrong’s Book About?

One may not deny that the book is highly readable, written with wit, skill and style not accessible to many others who wrote about matters pertaining to Eritrea. The beauty of the style of the book and its charm is that it pushes you forcefully from one page to the next, you may in the end, by sacrificing and relieving yourself of some of your daily obligations, decide to take on the book in one straight go. In this regard, the book is beautiful. But beauty can’t compensate for truth and stand in lieu, and certainly it should not sidetrack and distract us from trying to come as close to the truth as is humanly possible. We have to start from what clear facts we have at hand:  The book classifies itself as a book of history. There is, in addition to this, what Ms. Julie Wheelwright has written to the effect that the book is a readable history of Eritrea.

Romanticism?

Reading the book, one cannot see in its entirety except the highly charged subjectivity not usually used in writing books of history. The style of the book is an old and common style used by writers of the European Romantic movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth century: valid for speaking pompously, but vaguely, about things which one cannot objectify, define or quantify. It is a style of saying things almost poetically in the hope that the charm of the language may stand for truth or, in any case, may transfer feelings the author experiences but can’t intelligibly communicate. Perhaps hints and a small journey to the literary world on this important historical movement would make issues clearer and may even bring us a long way toward settling the question we have asked: “What kind of book is Michela Wrong’s book? “.

Here is a description of Romanticism as seen by an important British thinker of the twentieth century:[ii]

“From the latter part of the eighteenth century to the present day, art, literature  and philosophy, and even politics, have been influenced, positively or negatively, by a way of feeling which was characteristic of  what in a large sense, may be called the romantic movement.

And then

“Cultivated people in eighteenth-century France greatly admired what they called la sensibilité, which meant a proneness to emotion, and most particularly to the emotion of sympathy. To be thoroughly satisfactory the emotion has to and must be direct and violent and quite uninformed by thought.

Another authority in the subject, wrote this, characterizing Romanticism:

“Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism are the following: A deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over the intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general.”

The above quoted descriptions fit the book of Ms. Wrong one for one in every detail, but the style in which she wrote the book should not be the main reason for discrediting it. In 1838 Thomas Carlyle’s great book  “A History of the French Revolution” was published. The book was written on the tradition of the Romantics of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and is still good for reading and enjoying even now in our age and time, yet:[iii]

“as a work of history the French Revolution has clearly its limitations. But they should not be exaggerated. Carlyle’s reliance on recollections and memories, rather on what the modern historian would regard genuinely primary sources has in fact led the work to be regarded as more impressionistic than is really the case. For so determinedly rhetorical an account it is remarkably accurate in its basic information. More serious is Carlyle’s failure to consider his subject against the wider perspectives of European political history.”

Again, the above quoted assessment of Carlyle’s French Revolution fits Ms. Wrong’s book, one for one, with a little variation to accommodate for the times, personalities and events. However, no comparison between Carlyle and Wrong is here intended, especially when considering the cognitive values of the two books, for although it is difficult not to notice that like Carlyle’s book, “I Didn’t do It for You” is not based on a standard method of writing history. And while, like Carlyle’s book, it is based on memories and recollections, it also depends heavily on the credibility of interviewees of nebulous characters and writings of what Patrick Gilkes, the BBC veteran correspondent, would have called the “Guerilla Groupie”: it lacks entirely on primary sources.

Another similarity between the two is that, as Carlyle has failed to consider his subject against the wider world, so did Wrong fail to consider the larger international and geopolitical factors which played the biggest role in the collapse of the Ethiopian Army in Eritrea and Ethiopia. Is it really tenable to maintain that the Berlin wall came down under the chiseling hammers of the young Berliners? Is it not safer, reasonable and closer to truth to say that the chiseling and pulling down of the wall by the young Berliners was only an effect and consequence of the bigger picture, that of the crumbling Socialist world? 

If we are keen to see historical events in their true relations and keep away from rhetorical terms and imagery, we have to disregard such naïve reductionism and simplifications which Ms. Wrong is militantly broadcasting in her book.  She found it more comfortable for her purposes to play the broken record again and again and attributing the collapse of the Ethiopian Army in Eritrea and Ethiopia itself totally to the genius of the EPLF Generals and in the way watering down the fact that the EPLF was a client of the CIA as much as the Ethiopian regime was a client of the KGB. As an experienced reporter, Wrong can’t be excused unless she takes refuge in innocence and ignorance, a corner certainly uncomfortable for an experienced reporter. The case with Carlyle is different, he may be excused, for he was not a correspondent for Reuters, the BBC, and Financial Times for any length of time. But the greatest departure of Wrong’s book from Carlyle’s is that Ms. Wrong’s book, unlike that of Carlyle, is absolutely inaccurate in its basic information, a fatal deficiency to any book claiming account for history.

The part of the book on the Italian era may have been looked at favorably if it was not selective in its material and deliberately designed to arrive at pre-determined conclusions as we shall see in the course of this discussion.

The Quest For Shangri-La

It is clear from the beginning that Ms. Wrong did not come looking for Eritrea, the Eritrea we know. She came pursuing her Romantic obsession, that of James Hilton’s Shangrila . Speaking of the EPLF, she writes:

“The very isolation of the Nacfa experience, the absence of worldly distractions, encouraged a clarity of thought of the mediating monks of Shangri-La would have recognized.

Just imagine: what Ms. Wrong is trying to say in the above quoted section of her book, as well as in a previous chapter: the monks of Shangri-La would have recognized Naizgi Kflu, Mahmoud Sherifo and all those crude and blunt EPLF henchmen as their spiritual sons with the Dictator as the grand Lama. Just imagine! One can only say that Ms. Wrong must have got it all wrong!

It is, moreover, not a unique incident in our part of the world that Europeans come pursuing their romantic dreams and imaginations. Is it not true that many of them came to Abyssinia, searching for Prester John and his legendary kingdom, throughout a period of almost three hundred years, long after it had been proven that there existed no such a kingdom?

Italy In Eritrea

The book of Ms. Wrong is in fact an impressionist work and is subjective in all its traits. The part of the book on the Italian Eritrea is even more so than any other part, perhaps partly because of her Italian background. Her judgment on that part of the history of Italy in Eritrea is very much influenced by this fact as it appears in the context of communicating the story, as we shall see hereunder.

The story of Italy in Eritrea, as told by Ms. Wrong, is crystallized mostly by focusing on two personalities. Ferdinando Martini, a colonial intellectual and man of letters, a monster and a sworn racist. The other is Cicorini, a mulatto, a handyman living in a scrap yard, in Massawa at present. Curiously the two personalities fit perfectly the symbolic representation of the fortunes of Italy then, and now, in Eritrea.

Her visit to Cecoria the melancholic, in a junkyard in Massawa is an admission and confirmation to this feeling of affinity: what importance does Cecoria have to play in the history of Eritrea, more than the hundreds of thousands of stranded refugees in the Sudan which the author seems to know nothing about. We also don’t know what to do with the story which she told about her self and the Eritrean who told her that since she was half Italian she belongs to here (meaning Eritrea). If this really happened, then, shame on that Eritrean who told her that.

Wrong stresses that Martini was a man with a living conscience, a man fiercely against the enslavement of other nations. But she also tells us, not entirely aware of the contradiction, that, since the enslavement of the Negro has already started and since it cannot be stopped by him (Martini), the immediate next best thing in his capacity was to join the mob and lynch the savage.  It is mind twisting to find out which Martini is Ms. Wrong wanting us to see, is he the split personality schizophrenic depicted by his writings or the refined humanist she sees him to be, regardless of what she says about him? Perhaps this has to do more with her Italian background and her strong feeling of affinity to our oppressor of yesteryear.

The Triangular Circle

Yet after telling all these about the schizophrenic flip flops of the great man of letters who conquered the rocks and mountains of Eritrea, the man who built the Eritrean Massawa-Asmara railway, the author seems to lend great honors to that monster. Notwithstanding all that, the author wants her readers to accommodate and exonerate the monster through using rhetoric and methods of indirect access to emotions of the reader and by creating colorful and contradicting images designed to bypass reason and create a sort of logical validity to her otherwise inconceivable and reason defying assertions. This contradiction is “solved” by Wrong by describing Martini as someone who is a product of colonialism because a "strange kind of benevolent ruthlessness has always been the hallmark of the colonial conqueror."

Now this expression looks perfectly correct semantically and an unsuspecting reader would pass easily over it believing it indeed communicates a meaning, since it is semantically correct. But the truth would be gazing at you when you ponder on it and find that it is devoid of any meaning because benevolent and ruthlessness related, are the same as relating the circle and the triangle in the expression triangular circle . No matter how hard you may try to find a meaning and purpose for this strange expression in a book claiming to be a book of history, you will come to nothing more than the conclusion that the author’s only purpose was to associate the word ruthless with benevolence. Association of words gives rise to associations of ideas, a fact known since the time of Pavlov, a method used heavily in designing advertisement commercials. What the author, aware or otherwise, wanted is to associate the ruthlessness of the colonial official with the idea of Benevolence, thus exonerating him. Ms. Wrong, confident of her magic’s effect, laments later in the book of the absence of a single monument in memory of the current monster in Asmara.

The author, however, didn’t stop there. She still had more tricks in her hat. After all she had more to tell her readers, and would like that those same readers consider accommodating and rehabilitating Martini’s memory by appealing to his elegance of expression.  She even went farther when she explicitly tried to explain away Martini’s extravagance of bluntness by attributing it to the prevailing mood of the age, that of the age of the principles of Social Darwinism. So, Eritreans should feel thankful that Martini didn’t do what the Belgians, Germans and the British have done to others. He could have massacred you even pushed you to extinction and obliteration. This is the implication and that is the message!

Sparta and the Spartans

Ms. Wrong’s book is in a way, an old merchandise in fresh wraps. Reporters of her caliber have exhausted much of what she says about the EPLF and its military prowess. The assertion and false admiration of the EPLF martial superiority, which was inculcated into the mind of the dictator, came at an expense of 19000 souls to Eritrean parents. Yet Ms. Wrong seems to have a fixation, like the many western reporters, with the idea of equating Eritrea with ancient Sparta. The author, seems to be infatuated by, and have a yearning to Sparta too in addition to that hang on for Shangri-La. The evidence is in her dedication of a full page on the history of Sparta and its virtues. What she and those who praised Sparta in the ancient times really seem not to know about is that:

“They could afford to praise Sparta, since they did not have to live in it. They did not feel at close range the selfishness, coldness, and cruelty of the Spartan character; they could not see from the select gentlemen whom they met, or the heroes whom they commemorated from afar, the Spartan code produced good soldiers and nothing more; that it made vigor of the body a graceless brutality because it killed nearly all capacity for the things of the mind.”[iv]  

The British in Eritrea and Kagnew Station:

In the section that deals with the British in Eritrea, the author concentrated on the plunder of Eritrean assets, undertaken by the British during World War II.  She crystallized that by concentrating on the struggle of Sylvia Pankhurst, a communist who ended up in the service of the feudal arrangement of Ethiopia. Sylvia Pankhurst was an enemy of the independence of Eritrea. Yet Ms. Wrong wants Eritreans to feel indebted to Sylvia for her fierce fight against the plunder in Eritrea. Eritrean’s should not follow Ms. Wrong’s proposal, for Sylvia Pankhurst was not doing her fight for the good of Eritrea, it was for Eritrea annexed to Ethiopia. It is really curious to see her assessment for Sylvia and her shortcomings, un-aware, that she herself has fallen into the same pit. In page 130, she wrote:

“Perhaps her biggest mistake was the failure to recognize the ethnic loyalties and historical experiences that differentiated Moslem Lowlander from Christian Highlander, Eritrean from Ethiopian, Amhara from Somali.”

Ms. Wrong tried also to treat the American connection of Eritrea through the existence of Kagnew station as a military base in Eritrea. She could have done better had she tried to tackle the subject in a way different than following and detailing the lives and mischief of soldiers of no consequence to the subject matter. Had she been not finished already with the conclusions in pre-determination she might have stumbled into some real, more significant history of Eritrea in connection to the presence of Kagnew station in Asmara.

Islamophobia?

There are some striking similarities between the Wrong’s  I didn’t do it for you and Keanally’s novel  To Asmara.  In Keanally's novel, the protagonist tells of a Sudanese Nubian soldier who stopped him, and a French girl by the name of Christene, to scrutinize their documents and punishes the girl with his lustful stare. He was not of course expressing the Sudanese policeman’s feelings; it was only the protagonist projecting his fantasies and pretending they were those of the Sudanese policeman.

Almost the same incident occurs in Wrong’s book.  While en route to Eritrea and awaiting for her plane connection in Cairo Airport’s transit lounge, the author claims that she was a witness to this:

“it was well past midnight, and in Cairo airport’s transit lounge it was clear most passengers had already entered the trance-like state of passivity that accompanies long-distance travel. Outside, in the fluorescent glare of the hallway, a trio of stranded Sengalese woman traders, majestic in their colourful boubos, where shouting with operatic volume, at the Egyptian airport staff behind the counter, who had decided to meet the challenge with an icy silence that said more about Arab attitudes towards black Africa than direct insults ever could.”

Now, how did the author come to such a sweeping judgment made to a sharp precision? The Egyptian official didn’t tell her about his feelings towards black Africa. Nor did the women explain to her that the official was treating them as described, because they are black Africans.  The same wizardry as that applied in To Asmara: that the protagonist can go under the skin of others and read their thoughts, especially if they are not snow-white Europeans.  Ms. Wrong has proved as skilled in this as him. Unfortunately for her, this can be read as a case of projected racism. What she thought as the Egyptian officer’s expression, were in reality her very private projected thoughts with pretension that it belongs to the other; a trick the mind plays on itself sometimes.

Reading this and other hints in her book, leaves little room for excluding the possibility that the writer may be suffering of Islamophobia, and the incident described above is only one of a larger set of biased and phobic judgments.

Eritrea is a nation of Muslims and Christians, actually 1 of every 2 Eritreans is a Muslim, a reality which, it seemed, to have failed to register consideration in the mind of Ms. Wrong. How else can we explain that the author in her scores of interviews, failed to consider even one Muslim Eritrean for such an honor? All her interviewees are like-minded Christian Tigrinya speaking highlanders with past or running affiliations to EPLF/PFDJ. Is allergy of some kind here a factor?

Muslims and Christians, Lowlanders and Highlanders both fought in the ELF and EPLF. ELF was not a Muslim organization; Muslims and Christians fought and died under its banner. The same is true of the EPLF. But for Ms. Wrong, the ELF seems a no-good, Muslim Arab backed organization. The EPLF, according to her, is a sometime communist, now Christian organization. Ms. Wrong seems also to believe that Eritrea is only the Tigrinya speaking part. The rest of Eritrea doesn’t exist as far as she is concerned. The border war, according to her, was a war between two Tigrinya speaking Christian peoples. Here is what she says in the context of explaining the reasons, which gave way to the Ethio-Eritrean war:

“At the heart of this new war lay a falling out between the EPLF and TPLF: former rebel allies, comrades-in-arms from adjacent territories. The two leaderships spoke the same Tigrinya language, shared the same ethnic origins and had survived the same ordeals of famine and military occupation. Their forefathers had worshiped the same Christian god, their woman braided their hair in similar ways, they had attended each others’ weddings.” 

Ms. Wrong has provided her book with a chronology, which spans across three pages at the end of the book. She listed in it many important events starting from 1869 where she registers the opening of the Suez Canal, the death of Yohannes IV of Ethiopia in 1889, the rise of Mussolini in 1922, the crushing of the Libyan resistance movement in 1931, the arrival of the first US combat troops in Vietnam in 1963, and up to the year 2002 boundary commission announcement of ruling on the border, allotting Badme to Eritrea.

What was missing conspicuously was the greatest event in the Eritrean history that of 1961. That year is not even listed in her chronology; her  clock comes to 1960 and suddenly jumps to 1962. But every Eritrean knows that without putting that fateful date of September 1^st 1961 into account even the existence of EPLF can not be explained unless by endorsing lies and falsifications which can’t stand the slightest scrutiny. 1961 was the year the Eritrean Revolution under the leadership of Hamed Idris Awate started, for whom this very website is named. What Ms. Wrong is ignoring or doesn’t know is that the ELF experience is a fundamental and universal Eritrean Experience. Missing it in an historical account of Eritrea is a fault in the account not in the history.

Ms. Wrong’s intention of the book couldn’t have been history.  If that is not true, how is she to explain her crossing of the Atlantic to interview few GI’s with no weight in the history of Eritrea and ignore a recognized authority on Eritrea and the Horn in General at a shorter distance than America is to her: how can she ignore interviewing Dr. Tesfatsion Medhanie if she was after truth? How can she ignore interviewing Sium Ogbamichael (Harestay) and waste her chance of coming up with more than a partisan book. She could have preserved the single sided interviews she preferred and yet have more different point of view. But that would have proven destructive to her Shangri-La hang on.    

It is also worthwhile to mention here that Ms. Wrong has tried her hand in re-writing the Eritrean history. In her notes of chapter 5 page 103 she wrote:

“Christian highlanders, determined to break the link with Rome and fearful of Arab encroachment, looked to Addis Ababa for salvation. In contrast Arabic speaking Moslems from the lowlands, worried about religious persecution if Eritrea became part of Christian Ethiopia, leaned towards Independence. “

This looks like an unwarranted statement of Apologia, not satisfied even with that she placed an addendum to this statement in her notes at the end of the book she wrote enlightening the reader lest he places ideas in his mind:

“The political scene was always more complicated than this summary suggests. Woldeab Woldemariam, regarded as the founding father of the Eritrean Independence movement, was a Christian Highlander who started his political career with the Unionist party. Moslems where not the only citizens suspicious of Ethiopia, and not all those who believed in Union were Christians.”

It is notable her to see that under the pressure of her blind faith, she failed to note that her above quoted statement is self defeating, because if Welwel started his career with the unionist party, it logically implies that since he was a unionist there were parties for independence and these parties must have had leaders. If Woldeab Woldemariam was the father of Eritrean Independence as Ms. wrong is claiming, what are the other leaders, those of the independence parties, supposed to be: grandfathers of the Eritrean independence movement? We suppose that Ms. Wrong has no clue who Martyr Sheikh Abdulkadir Kebire is; we also suppose that she doesn’t know who Sheikh Ibrahaim Sultan is and we suppose too that we may suggest one of these names as the father of the Eritrean Independence. But we will disappoint her and tell her that the one rightly considered as such, is Hamid Idris Awate.

No one should consider that there is extravagance in what is said here above and no one is suggesting here that the Muslims or the Christian is privileged over the other on who started the independence movement or the revolution, for that matter. It is all a matter of historical and social inevitabilities. How true then, what Dr.Habte Tesfamariam has stated in his interview on Awate.com on September 2003, regarding a similar issue:

“It is true the ELF started with a predominantly Moslem membership.  And that is owing to social and historical reasons.” 

Conclusion

If, by writing I Didn’t Do It For You, Ms. Michela Wrong was intending to write a book of history on Eritrea, then one may not escape the conclusion that she has miserably failed. Eritrea is not the homogenous country she tried to portray. Eritrea is not only the Christian Tigrinya speaking Highlands; it is more than that and more complex.

In writing history one is not to have the theory and then arrange evidences, which only conform to it. One is also not to be selective and dependent only on references and hearsay description of events which favor predetermined persuasions. To arrive closer to the truth on historical facts, it is mandatory for the historian to enjoy a critical eye and indifference to what the multitude of indicators may lead. And even then, one may not boast of arriving at the absolute truth. In history, as much as in other human endeavors, absolute truth is beyond reach and is only resident in the realms of the ideal. But, for Ms. Wrong, everything is crystal clear and things are as easy as writing about them.

In her project of writing a history of Eritrea, Ms Wrong has traveled to America for the investigation of the effects of Kagnew Station; an effect much less important than the effect of a story told by the presence of hundreds of thousands of Eritrean refugees stranded in Eastern Sudan being barred from going back home after independence. These refugee camps tell a story much more important than what Tom, Dick and Harry have done in the whorehouses of Asmara of the 60s and the 70s. It is not possible to believe that Ms. Wrong, given her career as an experienced reporter of the BBC, didn’t know about these refugees.

In her scores of interviews she was careful and anxious to arrive at a conclusion she prefers. This is clear from the Eritreans she interviewed. All are Christian highlanders with past or running affiliations to the EPLF/PFDJ. There is not a single Muslim Eritrean interviewed by her, giving the impression that she is totally blind to half the population of Eritrea. This not only violates the standards of writing history, but also colludes with her career’s standards of honest journalism.  The books she refers to are either irrelevant to the Eritrean Struggle or they are written by the familiar EPLF groupie (Dan connel, Yohannes Okbazgi …etc) and her book will be as forgettable as their increasingly discredited odes.