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I cant remember who translated it, but as a kid I read the Tigrigna version of Alexander Dumas classic book [The Count of] Monte Cristo. It is a story of Dantes who was wrongly and deliberately jailed for fourteen yearsfalsely accused of treason. It is a story of courage, a story of digging a tunnel from a cell only to end up in another cell, a story of patience, concealed identity and one-man justice totally motivated by vengeance. The book (the English version) was made to a movie and is available on Tape and DVD. I highly recommended it for parents to watch it with their children. The movie is not about politics; it is about putting people in jail wrongly; learning patience and perseverance and Justice.
A good number of Eritreans dont like politicsI mean they pretend not to like politics. And I dont want to annoy anyone. Today I will refrain from politics and instead try politics I know, politics is confusing.
I will begin with a joke I heard under an Acacia tree, somewhere in Kuluntenbai, some twenty-five years ago. Remember Tesfai Tekhle, one of the most respected ELF military leaders of the time? This is his joke:
After a brain surgery, a general sprung from the bed, put on his uniform, hopped to his Jeep and rode away as he waved to his military doctor. The doctor saluted the general and went back to the surgery room to find a frightened nurse looking at a small brain lying on the operation table. She yelled, Oh God, doctor, you forgot to put the generals brains back in before stitching his head! The doctor didnt seem concerned and in a casual manner he said, never mind, he is a general, and doesnt need brains.
I wonder what Tesfai Tekhle thinks of the dictators chair that stands on four generals, I mean on four legs.
Imagine your school director was a chair leg that doubles as a general! No doubt you forgot what you learned the whole day as soon as the sun hits the horizon.
Educators And educators
A voice from the past echoes: I was born in Chaeda Kurakh. It is the voice of one of the most animated school directors Eritrea ever had: Mahmoud Mohammed Ali. A man who expected nothing less than excellence from his students. This is a man who tried to introduce hypnotism and psychology to seventh graders. He was a motivator. In lecturing a class about evolution, he would tell Kidisti, the famous high school sprinter, gaE wed abuki tu - the lizard is your cousin. God bless you my teacher, a man with an unforgettable sense of humor.
Ustaz Mahmoud was a school director who would inspire teachers to the extent that a biology teacher like Weldebruk would carry a goat on his back to school and kill it in front of his students to explain what a spleen is and what a liver is. Then you had teachers like Michael Gabir. Teachers who would not stop at anything to prematurely transform teenage children into mature patriotic men in a civil atmosphere. These were men who knew how to motivate and educatethat was then; just compare that to the present state of education in Eritrea!
The whole school system in Eritrea has become a daycare for adults.
People go to school for two reasons: an idealist would say to acquire knowledge and a pragmatist would say to be marketable in their working life. But for Eritrean students, school has become a transit period between childhood and a journey to Sawa, which embodies trenches and slave labor. The ill-fated violence factory, Sawa, is a symbol of human rights violations, the ruination of education and the cause of exilewhy bother going to school if one is going to die young anyway?
Sawa and what it stands for has become the menace to the educational attainment of todays Eritrean youth. Students purposely fail exams to remain in school thus get the time to figure out what they would do to avoid the wretched life that awaits them. Girls get married without passion (if a husband outside conscription life is found) to avoid enlistment, become pregnant or, just like men, head for the bordersany border, even if that means risking your life trying to cross the Red Sea, outside PFDJs Eritrea, to anywhere in Gods unknown world. The vile regime in Eritrea has changed Eritreans into a modern day Monte Cristos, each trying hard to break out of the big jail called Eritrea. Some, like those who risked all to cross the Sahara desert, were jailed by the authorities in Malta; deported back to Eritrea, to yet another jailthis one without lawyers or judges. Digging a tunnel from one cell to end up in another cell.
Until a few months ago, there was the gloom reality. Now it is gloomier. Yes, the regime has a bizarre way of doing that: when you think there is nothing worse than a situation, it inexplicably comes up with something worse. By the time you are reading what I am writing, Eritreans will be worse off than they were when I started writing it. In PFDJs Eritrea education has become tantamount with ignorance. It has become an evil process deliberately designed to produce a dispensable military and slave labor energy for an authoritarian regime.
Few months ago, the Education Minister who was entrusted with the application of the notorious mother tongue education policy, acknowledged that the level of education has deteriorated. As if work awaits graduating students, he pretentiously mentioned the weak attainment of students' efficiency to work after completing school". Really? Could that have something to do with the mother tongue education, a lifeless project thrust to life by the PFDJ? Maybe something to do with wars without end? With graduation from high school being equated induction into slavery? Isnt the declaration of failure twelve years late? And what does accountability mean if the engineers of failure are left free to engineer some more? Now the ministerwho signs every single high school graduation certificate (I will leave the efficiency of that to time and motion experts) stated, we have a solution. The solution is to introduce a new policy: all high school students will have to do their senior year, 12th grade class, in Sawa, a slave camp veiled as a military camp -- and parents will pay for The Boarding School. Imagine your teacher is a sergeant and your school a boot camp! The whole nation goes through this boot camp! This might be the last step in militarizing the society.
The last twelve years, they experimented with the mother tongue education; they created more ignorance than we inherited from the Dergue. The literacy level of women, that the regime erroneously celebrates, remained the same, negligible. Half a generation later, the PFDJ admitted that the level of education has deteriorated. The old experiment didnt work; now they are pushing Eritrea into yet another experiment: Boot Camp Education.
Mischief Or Misconception
A system that produced the Boot Camp Education is also responsible for Revisionist History. Eritrean history, according to them, goes something like this: in the 1940s-1950, there were no Eritrean patriots or traitors: just a whole group of people victimized by the Brits and the Italians. In the 1960s, there was armed strugglebut it was led by the wrong people. In the 1970s, the EPLF was born and saved the Revolution from the ELF. In the process, it was victimized by the ELF. In 1980-81, the ELF disintegrated, solely due to its internal contradictions. In 1991, Eritrea became independent, declared statehood in 1993, ratified its constitution in 1997, defended itself against the Weyane 1998-2000. Then came the PFDJ reform movement (in 2000) and thats where we are now.
With some individuals, I am not sure if it is, mischief, misconception or both with ignorance added to it -but I feel the mischief is more than misconception. It is beyond the scope of this article to talk about the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or even the 1990s. Lets talk about one question and lets talk about it before the Revisionists revise that one too: When did the opposition to the PFDJ start? The mischievous would think it was when they decided to turn their back on the PFDJ. Ignoring all the agonies that people went through before they had the inspiring moment to discover the truth. Arrogance. Mischief. Ignorance. All in a bundle.
These are the individuals who think they were born with feathers in their heads. These are individuals who believe it is their birth right to rule over the rest of Eritreans. These are individuals who somehow find a way to align with the system, any prevailing system and just as the regime starts to exhale its last breathes, they jump. Then they want to own the camp to which they jumped. How convenient.
First, obviously, the foundation of the authoritarian regime is just like a wooden structure where the termites have fed for some time. It will fall of its own load. It will crumble. It will be history. There are individuals who master walking the thin rope leaving windows of redemption, if, and only hopefully, if, the regimes pastures somehow turn greener so they can jump across in a short time. Dont wait for the pastures to turn green; they are ashen-black. The PFDJ regime is of Locust; it devastates anything it passes through. It is bad luck. Bad Karma. Bad news. Qursus. So, give up.
The sculptor is not an artist. You cant have a sculptor by wishing for one. Dont look for sculptors and artists in there; instead look for emotionless, tasteless and senseless brutes. Then learn that justice is not a soda vending machine that dispenses to able clients only. Justice cannot be offered to one party and denied to the other. Importantly, the Eritrean universe doesnt rotate around one individual or one segment alone. How could one who was totally supportive of the brutal regime and now wants to inherit the exclusionist nature of the regime claim to be a member of the pro-justice camp? This is a camp that paid dearly for what it stands for; it is not in need of wushumatat, it is happily married to the cause of the people. This camp was struggling long before adoring dictatorship became as outmoded and ancient as the Elvis songs to the young of today. You can dance in this gwayla but you can never dictate how those who are already in it should conduct their songs unless you give them due respect and affirm that they are your partners. Of all the things that bug me, none does more than belittling whole generations of combatants, who taught many what patriotism was, as mere mewSe af ELFites. Yes. They would say, netom swuat aykonan. How is it possible for someone who pretends to believe in justice to incriminate a whole generation of Elfites? Has Eritrea reached a stage where ELFites should be ashamed for wasting their life and ex-Dergue officials extolled? No. A million NOs. ELFites were not playing hide & seek as some insinuate. They were dying and killing for their country. Lets put an end to Revisionism Part II, before it has a chance to take root. First, if one cannot protect his own right, he cannot protect the rights of others. Therefore, those who have made ELFers bashing (mind you, not ELF policies or actions, but ELFers, the individuals who happened or happen to be members of the ELF since its inception when it created a patriotic vehicle for those who are insulting what it stood for), should refrain from sullying the history of noble men and women who fell under the banner of the ELF and served its noble cause. Second, it was the Elfers who were tirelessly advocating justice, inclusion, reconciliation, yes reconciliation and democracy when such struggle was beyond considerations for those who are hammering the ELFers today. They are the humble individuals who welcomed their brethren with kisses and embracing without any bad feeling or animosity or bitterness, happy that finally Eritreans are coming to one fold and it is time to act as equal partners and save our nation that has become the playground of an irresponsible authoritarian regime. They deserve more. One can have differences of any degree with individuals, leaders and the rest. But to indiscriminately pass a general incriminating verdict is irresponsible, immature, mischievous and ugly. Today, Eritrea is not suffering of ELFers but the PFDJ. ELFers are national and they have the right to exist. If anyone has a difference with the ELFers then keep your votes in election time when Eritrea will be free. All citizens should struggle to establish a court of law and a fair justice system in Eritrea so that those individuals can have a field day suing those they accuse. If I live long enough, I too can have a field day suing many. We cannot pretend to be advocating for justice when we use our footsteps to trample on justice more than we use it for walking. Lets learn a little humility: consider the arrogance of saying the hundreds of thousands of Eritreans who saw the PFDJ as an unjust force that should be resisted and have been doing so for decades are ALL (ALL!) blinded by hatred and driven by vengeance. It is dishonest to say, I (and only I and people who think like I do, those who discovered the evil of PFDJ in 2002) are the only ones who are right and thus should not only lead the resistance but should now dictate the terms by which we will accept and reject who is a legitimate struggler and who isnt. What an arrogance! Eritreans are in a cell: if we dont all work together and co-ordinate our efforts and respect each other as equal partners, the tunnels we dig to get us out of the cell may just end up landing us in another cell.
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NB. Apologies for the mistake in a name: Weldebruk was wrongly mentioned as Gebresadik before the correction (6/8/03) |
