An Oath of Allegiance to Tyranny 

Yezewdu mlkkt yagerachn grma…
…. inde matusalla, ende abraham’e
Edmew yarzmew amlak zelalem'e

As children in schools, they forced us to stand in line and sing the above to a flag that was never ours, a flag that symbolized injustice. Now, they are making us fight wars that are not ours under an unjust rule. In both cases, unfortunately, the perpetuators, the enforcers, were and are Eritreans collaborators. 

Name the autocrats who ruled Eritrea on behalf Haile Sellassie and Derg era, you will find many Eritrean Ethiophiles. They manned the barbaric army, the beaurocracy, the security and the spy network.  They still do. What changed? Not the lack of freedoms! Not the exiling! Certainly not the jailing! It is even worse: Haile Sellassie’s era, though it bruised our pride and dignity, and though Eritreans were killed and jailed, at least had a court system and people owned their properties. In PFDJ’s Eritrea, where the natural instinct for justice is absent, the jails are more, the imprisonments are more and the impoverishment is worse.

Injustices? Exiled villagers by Haile Sellasie are kept in exile by the PFDJ. Villages burned and razed to the ground by Haile Sellasie are now confiscated by the PFDJ. What has changed? We have Semere Reesom instead of Haraegot Abbay? We have Isaias Afwerki instead of Asarate Kassa? We had Amare Tekle and we still have Amare Tekle? The list is too long. We had Eritrean security terrorizing the people, and we still have Eritrean security terrorizing the people. All right, the Tor Serawit military institution is gone. But many ex-Tor Serawit Eritreans are comfortably within the ranks of the PFDJ doing what they did before- they protected the tyranny of the Ethiopian occupations before and now they are protecting the tyranny of the PFDJ.

What has changed? Nothing. That is why the spirit of defiance and struggle is still alive. When the nightmare called the PFDJ is uprooted, the criminals in it should be sifted before assuming another public office. No more jumping ship at the last minute to whitewash dirty history should be allowed.  Individuals wronging their people should take note.

“Neqefeta Nefsi-Neqefeta” 

“Criticism and self-criticism” is a practice now considered a relic of the struggle era. People were asked to criticize themselves for sneezing in a meeting. The practice of criticism has been developed to a tool of humiliating individuals and in many cases taken as a confession to justify political elimination and character assassination. I will use it here to further expose the Ethiophiles who are the curse of Eritrea. 

Whenever I write about this subject, the Ethiophiles among us, or their sympathizers, get enraged because they want the story to remain a taboo. Unopened. Hidden and not mentioned at all. Some naïve persons get offended for a complex of reasons. “Forget the past,” they say. I like history. And I learn from a two millennium-years-old saying by Cicero: “to be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”

‘Forget The Past’ is the motto of those who never want to grow up.

Look back at our history; corrupt feudal lords, and bandits, were always true to their feudal nature. They fought among themselves for petty titles. Rivals always solicited the support of an Axum king or a Gonder emperor. One Eritrean warlord heads to bow in Axum under the feet of Michael Sehul or Atzie Yohannes while his rival goes to Meqdela or Addis Ababa to bow under the feet of Tedros or Menelik. A shameful bunch of vassals. Maybe it is this psychological torment that infatuates our present warlords with the corrupted notion of post-independence self-reliance, oiled with a form of slavery, to replace an open market economy! But there is a more recent history.

The EPLF under the engineering of Isaias and his cohorts solicited the support of the TPLF of Tigray to annihilate its Eritrean rivals. After the alliance which was soldered to the detriment of both the Eritrean and Ethiopian people went sour, our always bowing PFDJ is now changing the direction of their support solicitation: from Axum to Gonder.  For Eritreans, who fought against the chauvinism and injustice of Haile Sellassie, and later the Derg and the joint EPLF-TPLF assault, it is playback of a too familiar tragedy. Eritreans are perpetually subjected to injustice and lack of freedoms because of the shifting-sand alliances of the warlords of the region. This time, the biggest, the most lethal, the worst sell-out, the worst treasonous organization of warlords ruling Eritrea is a band called PFDJ.

It becomes obvious by the day that Isaias has no respect for the people. He is driven by his personal ambition to secure a throne for himself beyond our borders at the sleepy Tekeze River. He is not even interested in Tigray anymore- he looks deeper South to the high plateaus of Shoa which he first aspired to rule through the Tigray surrogate and when that failed, he wants to rule it through the surrogate power of the KINIJIT, the “new darling” Ethiopian opposition. Now, as a precaution, a fall back plan, he is planing to rule it through the Oromo in case the KINIJIT fails to deliver. His ethnic politics at its worst, after over using the Tigray alliance, Isaias is now including a new group in his designs, the Oromo. He is bent on becoming a Neguse Negest. If his designs would bear fruit, just like he betrayed Eritreans at large, starting from the ELF, Sabbe’s PLF, the Reformers, and many others, he would discard the KINIJIT (CUD) and the Oromo, like the TPLF, without a blink of a single eye. And if that fails and Ethiopia disintegrates as he wishes it, well and good; he will become an unchallenged bully of the region.

The Culture Of War

The whole problem of our region emanates from the ever power-hungry warlords of our region. With the exception of a few incidents that inspire pride, the demise of the Derg and the independence of both Ethiopia and Eritrea and the battle of Adwa, the rest was savagery at worse and medieval ignorance at best. The region’s history is nothing but wars of warlord rivalry. It is shameful, and humbling, to see that much of what we have today was made possible by the colonizers (despite their dehumanization of the people) who built roads and towns and importantly, for the English who pressured the Ethiopian Empire to abolish slavery. Yet, the political elite, specially the opportunistic segment of the Diaspora elite, Ethiopian and Eritreans alike, are so much in love with the violent past that they never think of breaking the savage cycle of violence; and in the process, the fates of the people are held hostage to the empty egos of those who has always lived as parasites.

Save the early ages of the Axumites when some rays of civilization beamed on the region, the rest has been tales of violence, treason, betrayal, poverty and slavery. Nothing worthwhile was produced in the wretched region. Nothing to show but a slogan of “Three thousands years of civilization”. The rest are nothing but stories of inter-tribal aggression, betrayals, wars and warriors.

One of the major dreams of some members of KINIJIT (besides assuming power simply because they see themselves as “God Chosen”) is to reverse the Eritrean independence and rebuild Haile Sellasie statute in Massawa- he rides on a white horse pointing his index finger to the Red Sea. The sooner the KINIJIT and their likes drop the anti Eritrean rhetoric, the better for the stability of the region. Eritreans are appalled by the unnecessary wars that Haile Sellasie and the Derg subjected us to. We are appalled by the recent wars the oppressive PFDJ and its leader subjected us to. We do not wish to spill even one more drop of blood. It is time for peace and prosperity.

The feud between the some Tigraian and some Eritrean agitators is nauseating. Tell-tale insulting and hate mongering that is raging between those extremists is mind-boggling. It seems they have made up their mind: the region cannot accommodate them together, one has to be annihilated! Their propaganda and counter-propaganda messages are nothing short of an incite to genocide. And they employ different outlets to do their bidding. If left unchecked, they are not stopping at anything short of repeating the Rwanda’s experience. I hope the region, and the world, takes note of what is brewing. It is not the border; it is the ancient blind prejudice, hypocrisy and rivalry at work. It is an ancient, generations-old hate resurrected. And what a better hate-monger can one hope for at the helm but the champion of hate mongering, the Eritrean dictator.

The Culture of Isolation

If the Ethiophile Eritreans, the imperial Ethiopians and the feuding warlords are all about endless entanglements, there is another group, a group of isolationists and supernationalists on both sides of the border, who are equally worse.  These are the Eritreans and Ethiopians who think that their nation is the greatest, that the only thing interrupting its greatness are the people who live on the other side of the border.  Ask them to define greatness and they will rattle off war stories.  These are the isolationists and supremacists whose engine is fueled by hate: hate of Tigray, hate of Amhara, hate of “Tigre”, hate of “Banda”, hate of “Agame.”  They pretend that there is no inter-marriage between Eritreans and Ethiopians; that there are no shared cultures, no shared history. They just want to erect walls, turn off the lights of civilization and curse their neighbors. The ones that live on our side of the border are the Ethiophobes, but the Ethiopians also have their share of Eritreaphobes.

The Ethiophiles and the Ethiophobes are ruled by their emotions, always to the detriment of the nation.

But there is a third way.  It is a way of mutual respect, of non-intervention in each other’s affairs, of good neighborliness, of cleaning our houses first, of identifying and forming solidarity with people whose lives are similar, of cross-border trade, of free movement of people.

But this ideal, this third way, cannot happen as long as we have Eritreans who bleed more for the oppressed Ethiopian than they do for their own Eritrean brothers and sisters.  It cannot happen with the Ethiophiles in charge of Eritrea because they are more interested, more obsessed with what goes on in Ethiopia than what happens in Eritrea.  And it cannot happen with the haters in charge because they have to constantly find justifications for their hate. We have seen what the Ethiophiles and Ethiophobes have wrought on Eritrea. The players may change but it is the same play, and it is always a tragedy.  Isn’t it time to retire them permanently and give the two nations a new leadership of nationalists driven by the highest ideal of human rights?