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Negarit
Distracted by noise, and movement without a sense of direction—those are two of our problems. These problems attempt to divert us from our real focus, which is the insanity in Eritrea. But like all problems, they are problems with solutions, but we may have to dig deeper. Deeper into our childhood-- huh, and you thought there was no Keren story today! The Noisy
The mill that was located close to the grain market was probably the noisiest mill in town- ‘The Town’ that is! The workers, covered in flour, looked like ghosts. Conversation was a challenge - you could only see lips moving like a silent-movie because the engine noise swallowed up any voice around. People used sign language or walked a block away to talk. On days that I carried lunch for an uncle in the grain-market, I plugged my ears with my fingers when I passed through that mill. If Don Quixote lived in Keren, I am sure he would have fought the noisy diesel engine of that grain-mill instead of the silent windmills. The sight of a flour covered man sleeping on a mat by the noisy engine is vividly imprinted in my memory. He must have had some sort of immunity against noise. Amazing. He just slept through when the engine exercised its freedom of speech… however noisy it was. That lesson proved to be very handy: if you don’t learn to be calm and ignore the noises around, you are risking your sanity. In the current struggle, it is prudent to learn to leave the disturbing political noises in the background; just ignore it and go solve riddles and confusing questions instead. The Misdirected We need to ignore the noise because there is a bigger problem, a big Mushkila; we are missing the direction like Addis Ababa - not that city in Ethiopia, but Addis Ababa, the girl, whose nom de guerre was registered as a copyright decades ago in the Municipality of Keren. My friend Saleh Younis always makes fun of Keren. He argues that my hometown has the highest per-capita of insane people - a “knowable” wild assertion. Here is my counter argument: 1) Kerenites are too caring to send their beloved cuckoos to a fenced “sanitarium”; 2) half the lunatic population in Keren are imports from other places -Asmara being the major supplier- and the other half were driven to insanity because of what pretending Asmarinos do. I rest my case. (Asmarinos who are likely to be offended by this assertion will prove my case). Let me tell you the story of Addis Ababa, the girl, which will illustrate my point. The poor girl, who later came to be known as "Addis Abeba", left her village, apparently escaping from someone or something, to go to Addis. She must have just dreamed of improving her life somewhere else. Anything is possible. Truckers (like some of our current politicians) are cruel - at least most of them. The poor country girl was literally taken for a ride by a trucker who promised to take her to Addis Ababa where she would work and earn good money. Once in Keren, he dropped her at Gira Fiori and told her to walk a short distance and she would be in Addis Ababa. The poor girl walked and ended up in the vegetable market in the center of Keren (yes Keren has a center) and asked if she was in Addis yet. She was ridiculed. She would ask every passerby she met for the direction to Addis. More ridicule because people thought she was insane. With no money, and nobody to turn to, walking aimlessly, obviously she got tired, hungry, and … something must have happened to her. Though she was only a helpless soul, she was mistaken for a lunatic. And in no time, she became real insane after completely losing her mind. Children found one more entertainment “object” and she became famous as ‘The girl that is walking to Addis Ababa!’ Day and night, the poor girl would run from one end of town to the other singing and beating her chest as a substitution for a drum: addis abebaye qereba eyailoma ye qereba! Once, the late patriot Amm Suleman Merrir took it upon himself to help the girl. He embarked on a task to find her relatives by searching for people who might know the girl. He went to the market places, teashops and other locations where villagers visiting town would likely be found and asked. Some people, judging from her accent, believed she must have come from Humera through UmHajer to Keren. Others thought she must be from the nearby villages. No one found out. No one knew her; and Amm Suleman Merrir didn’t get anywhere. He kept buying her bread; and she became one of the monuments of Keren. For years, she criss-crossed the town heading for Addis Ababa. She never made it to Addis; and in the process she lost her brains. All because she had no sense of direction. “If you don’t know where you are going, any path will take you there”. I think this was said by someone who knew about the haphazard journey to Addis Ababa (the city) by Addis Ababa (the girl). I am afraid many might be pursuing the path of Addis Ababa without a compass! If they are not careful, they might end up in Tsetserat, and take us all along with them. Please have mercy! Now The Real Problem Tseserat is an institution that doubles as a detention center for prisoners of conscience and as an insane asylum, which pretty much sums up the state of the State of Eritrea, under PFDJ’s rule. Sherrilbeliyeti ma Yudhik – Yes, the worst of calamities and it forces a laughter. I beg you to read the following story vicariously and imagine yourself to be the mother and live her agonies. Also, remember the fact that for every reported story of a suffering, there are tens of unreported stories. Furthermore, please question the wisdom of helping the PFDJ in disseminating its propaganda that portrays forced/slave labor as a voluntary “reconstruction” activity. A couple of years ago, there was an old woman who always visited her son behind a fence in Tsetserat where he was supposedly being cured. On her frequent visits, she carried food and clothing for him. But one day, upon returning to her home from visiting her son, the poor woman fell ill and didn’t visit him for a few days and missed him a lot. When she felt better, she decided to walk to Tsetserat to visit. She cooked plenty of food for her son and his friends. Accompanied by her daughter, she carried the food hoping her son would enjoy the lunch. At the gate of the “sanitarium”, a clearing guard asked the mother what the name of the “Tslul” (insane person as opposed to patient) she wanted to visit was. After hearing the name of the patient, the soldier run his fingers through an old crumpled greasy record book and told her “he is not here anymore”. She insisted he was there. The guard firmly replied, “don’t deafen me, he is not here, now go away”. The woman kept asking and talking and the guard kept telling her to go away. A supervisor who watched the two argue approached and asked what the problem was. The guard explained that he couldn’t find the name of the woman’s son in the list of names in the record. The supervisor knew what happened with the missing patient. “Aha, that Tslul”, he remembered. He looked at the mother in a casual matter-of-fact-way, and said: “that one died a few days ago!” The mother and the sister were shocked. Like a cruel stab, the news, delivered in the most demeaning manner, must have pierced through their hearts. They were just stunned and tears started to accumulate and flow from their eyes. But that is not all; it gets worse! The mother and the sister started to cry and wail so sadly that they made a few on-lookers join them in the wailing. Many onlookers were forcing their tears in. But then, maybe they considered this an opportunity to let out some hidden steam and cry; everyone’s heart is bruised and wrapped in sadness. Everyone owes years worth of crying that is still subdued. The whole crowd of visitors and onlookers joined in the crying frenzy and there gathered a big mourning crowd. Sobbing like a helpless child, the mother asked, “Can I see his body?” No. The bereaved couldn’t even see her beloved son who was now simply knows as ‘the corpse’. She repeatedly asked ‘why’. Sternly the supervisor explained: “the commander told us to bury him and we buried him soon after he died”. Apparently, the patient had died just after his mother’s last visit. The soldiers who run everything in Eritrea carried the body and buried it without bothering to inform relatives- that is the usual mode of operation in PFDJ’s Eritrea. The commander of the hospital didn’t have a tiny bit of sensitivity or decency to hand over the dead body to the next of kin. Why the rush to bury the body? Are they now cremating bodies In Tsetserat? In normal situations, this would be a reason to suspect foul play; enough reason to suspect the patient didn’t die a natural death. But in PFDJ’s Eritrea, laws and justice simply are not an everyday concern- the whole conscience of the government is dead. The oppressors have perfected cruelty and inhumanity to an art. By now, any conscious Eritrean knows that we don’t need to tell such stories to expose the PFDJ anymore for they are already exposed to the bone. I write them as a means of recording the situations for posterity and as a means of supplying leads for legal actions against the perpetrators when the day of reckoning finally arrives. And to focus us on what really matters. For years now, Eritreans have been literally owned as slaves by a few heartless thugs who pass as leaders and military officers of a “sovereign” state. The perpetrators are a few perpetual hirelings who served past oppressors; they are led by a few monsters whom the Capo and his followers call “Yekaalo”. In realty, they are “Veteran-Slaves” as Adhanom Gebremariam has rightly identified them. It is amazing to know that such cruelty and injustice finds support from a few selfish opportunists with a dead conscience - the dwindling “ms mengstna” mobs. Those of us who are facing the mobs, the mobs ruling Eritrea with impunity, and their boss who incidentally has started wearing bullet-proof vest, need to learn to ignore the noise and the deliberate misdirections and focus, like a laser, on the sadistic regime in Eritrea.
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