One leg at a time... 

Here we have a �government� that continuously and openly tortures and terrorizes people; yet, here also we have a substantial number of people still proudly telling us that they �stand with our government.�   The usual explanations�of people who are �opportunistic�, of people who are motivated by self-interest; of people who are driven by atavistic allegiance�don�t cover the gamut of the support.  There is more to it.  This is an effort to look at the bond between the government and its supporters and how the opposition can break this bond or, failing that, creating a new bond that challenges the existing bond. 

The relationship between the government and its supporters is a symbiotic one: the government gets what all governments want�an unquestionining and loyal constituency�and the supporters get a sense of belonging, a fundamental human need, according to the psychologist Abraham Maslow. But this relationship is based on deception�one that can be sustained for decades, true, but one that can fall apart if the controlling factors are changed.  The job of the opposition is to do exactly that but it cannot do it unless it adopts clear, unsentimental and effective strategies and unless it recognizes the PFDJ for what it is: the enemy of the Eritrean people. 

The PFDJ strategy is like a three-legged stool.  The three legs are Context, Means and End.  The good news is that for the PFDJ strategy to fail, all we have to do is to sufficiently degrade only one of these legs (because there is no such thing as a two-legged stool.) The bad news is that not only has the organized opposition been making no progress towards destroying the PFDJ Legs but it has been, on occasion, providing crutches to assist the monster regain its footing. Even worse, by providing false comfort, obstruction and obfuscation, it has been delaying the emergence of actors who have the clarity of vision to recognize the danger the PFDJ poses to Eritrea and want to do something about it.

(1) The Context  

Since 1991, (actually, since 1961), every act of cruelty against Eritreans has been explained by the �war is hell� mantra. Post-war rehabilitation (�dagme hnSa�) of 1991-1998 justified the killing of combatants and disabled veterans; it justified the abduction and disappearance of religious leaders, journalists and refusenik politicians. The war and the post-war with Ethiopia (1998-present), has justified cruelty on a scale that should not be tolerated in any society that considers itself civilized.  

The PFDJ has a clear strategy on who it is, who its constituency is and who its enemies are and how to treat its �enemies.�  Its defining identity is: �we are a war party and our president, Isaias Afwerki, is a war president.�   Its constituency is whoever will support it unconditionally�those who believe that the government of Eritrea is either entirely blameless or barely to blame for the war.  Its enemies are the TPLF and every organization that opposes the PFDJ, which makes it an automatic ally of TPLF and thus the enemy.

Contrast this with the confusing strategy of the opposition.  Instead of defining itself as the party of peace, some elements of the opposition try to outdo the PFDJ in their skepticism of Ethiopia.  It doesn�t know its constituency�Eritreans who believe that the PFDJ is even more blameworthy than the TPLF for our current dilemma and tries to win over the PFDJ constituency.  It doesn�t recognize the PFDJ or Isaias as enemies of democratic Eritrea; instead, some opposition leaders act as if Isaias is still popular, that he is a man they are going to have dinner with at the Officer�s Club late after the end of their shift and they better not say or do anything that he or his followers will frown upon.  In short, some within the opposition are still trying to play by the playbook of the PFDJ and then getting surprised when they lose.

If we are to learn from our lessons, we need to acknowledge that, contrary to what many of us preached, there is nothing remotely unpatriotic about staking out a position that states that the PFDJ is far worse for Eritrea than the TPLF is. Foreign does not equal foe and local does not equal friend. "My government, right or wrong" is hard to utter when it is not your government and it acts like a foreign, occupying force. Strategic planning should not entertain muddled thinking or sentimentality. If one believes that the PFDJ is to blame for what ails Eritrea, then one has a moral obligation to treat the PFDJ as the enemy of Eritrea and one should have no qualms about partnering with whomever, unapologetically and with eyes wide open, to strategize on ridding Eritrea of PFDJ. There is nothing remotely unpatriotic about helping your people rid themselves of a force whose administration is as vile and cruel as any occupation force. The objective should be to end the war and the war-footing with Ethiopia; i.e. to change the context. 

Delienation, which has already been established, codifies sovereignty. This is a good thing. Demarcation on the other hand, is like fencing, and it becomes a matter of life and death only when neighbors are at war. Dozens of nations with demarcated borders are war; dozens of nations with un-demarcated borders are at peace. Because PFDJ is a war party and Isaias Afwerki is a war president, they are at their element only in an environment of war. Demarcated or not, Eritrea will be in a state of war with its neighbors as long as PFDJ�s economic policy is based on war-profiteering. A demarcated border with an entrenched PFDJ is far more dangerous to Eritrea than an undemarcated border with a weakened PFDJ. This should be the strategy the opposition pursues and articulates without any qualms. It cannot compete with the PFDJ on how to manage war; it can compete convincingly by presenting itself as a force for peace.  

(2) The Means  

Most people are good and decent and would never condone or encourage cruelty to strangers, much less to their own brothers, sisters, and parents. There is, after all, what Gandhi called the �small, still voice�: that nagging conscience. Regardless of the concerted effort to kill one's conscience, war or no-war, most decent people will not condone cruelty and torture, regardless of justifications.

The government has a clear strategy on this and its explanation is: the years of 2000-2001 were an �anomaly�: there was a movement afoot to create chaos and instability, the movement was crushed, so now there is nothing going on that cannot be explained within the context of war. The tactic it used to advance this strategy is also clear: arresting all journalists and citizens who would be in a position to describe an alternative reality; spreading stories, rumors and innuendo about those it cannot arrest so that people will disbelieve the information they share.

The government�s strategy has worked, to the extent that it has managed to keep many people in the dark. How many people would support this government if they knew, for example, that it has jailed Eritrean prisoners of war that were returned to Eritrea via the ICRC? How many would support the government if they knew that these same prisoners of war, whose only crime was that they fought for their country and, through a fluke, did not die but were captured, are now held in Nakura, one of the hottest places on Earth? How many people would support this government if they knew Eritreans are held in �containers� for infractions as petty as voicing dissent and how many know that those who die in these containers are discarded like animals?

The opposition, on the other hand, has neither clear strategy nor a tactic to expose the means that are being used to pursue some noble-sounding end. Instead of exposing these acts of cruelty and many more, some in the opposition voice mock-sophisticated claims about how �the people are tired of hearing about Isaias�, trivilializing the crimes of Isaias, as if they were a tune on the radio. Some in the opposition have joined in PFDJ�s campaign to spread rumors and innuendo about their fellow Eritreans simply because they disagree with them.  The absence of any sense of urgency and the muffled tools the opposition is using strongly suggest that the opposition doesn't completely comprehend the totality of the people's suffering. A key strategy of the opposition ought to be to propagate the �means�, i.e., the suffering of the Eritrean people.  One cannot find solutions to a problem unless one has the stomach to chronicle the problems.    

(3) The End

The Soviet Union survived for seventy years by hiding the severity of its �means��the Gulags and by painting ever-rosy pictures of the progress its government was allegedly making.  Even people who have qualms about the means used are likely to tolerate it if they believe that the �end justify the means.�  

The government has articulated a clear strategy of what the end that is being pursued is: �safeguarding Eritrea�s sovereignty� and �accelerating development.� In pursuit of this strategy, the government employs two tactics: an exaggerated list of the enemies of Eritrean sovereignty and a distorted picture of �Eritrea�s development.� Against all these enemies, the fact that the Eritrean government is bad is considered strength: I have to be bad, just to protect you from something even worse. The smoke-and-mirrors on the accelerated development is managed by employing all the government media and its agents to selectively highlighting a few of Eritrea�s leading economic indicators including housing and infrastructures such as roads.  

The opposition doesn�t have a clear strategy on this one, either. The quickest way to demonstrate that Eritrea has no long list of enemies to its sovereignty is to befriend the so-called enemies and get them to commit to provide assistance to the Eritrean people. The opposition cannot be expected to have influence over the EU or the United States but it should be able to establish a bond with Sudan and Ethiopia so they can help in providing relief to the people, at least to those Eritreans who are seeking refuge by the multitudes in these countries.  As for the economic developments, it should not be hard for the opposition to provide evidence of the cost of this development, which includes a spiraling hyperinflation and an economy entirely sustained by remittances.  

Putting It All Together 

Those who support the PFDJ do so because they allow excesses due to the war (context); they are uninformed or unbelieving of the cruelty the PFDJ is using to enforce its rules (means); they are willing to justify the means given that the stakes of sovereignty and accelerated development are so high (end.)   The opposition must develop its own strategy so that it is not playing by the rules of the PFDJ by presenting the choice not as one between sovereignty-keepers and sovereignty-compromisers, but a choice between the forces of war and forces of peace.  It must work harder, in a co-ordinated way to make the people more aware of the means the PFDJ is using and the petty return they are getting�and going to get�for this investment. 

The same strategic thinking should also be employed in conducting self-assessment of the different opposition organizations.   The Eritrean opposition is not divided between those who are �soft� on Weyane and those who are �hardliners� with Weyane.  This is a shallow interpretation of Eritrea�s political reality, one that mistakes the symptom for the ailment.  The real divide is between those who want a loose and decentralized power structure that empowers local governments and creates a relatively weaker central government and those who see Eritrea as a unitary system and want a relatively strong central government.    The proliferation of the former is due to the weakness of the latter.  It should be noted that those who believe that the Eritrean people are best served by having strong semi-autonomous local governments and a weak central government believe so for religious, cultural, historical and ideological reasons and would have believed so no matter what kind of arrangement the TPLF was advocating for Eritrea.   It so happens that that is precisely what TPLF is advocating for Eritrea.  But this should not be seen as an evil, conspiratorial strategy by an organization hell-bent on destroying Eritrea; it should be viewed simply as a political expression (a misguided expression, in my opinion) of a government that believes its nation's interest is best served by having a weak Eritrean government.      

Those who believe that Eritrea is best served by having a strong central government that devolves some power to the local governments; those who believe that the nation must remain fundamentally secular and that membership and leadership of political organizations must reflect the diversity of the nation should not withdraw and disengage from Ethiopia.  Instead, they should form a united bloc of the secular, nationalist organizations, engage Ethiopia and either reform and re-create the Alliance so that it truly reflects the viewpoints of all Eritrean, (regardless of the bias of the Ethiopian government) or, failing that, one that presents an alternative alliance of broad-based organizations.   

Some may argue that this is being done. The problem is that it is not being done in a time frame that recognizes the urgency of the people's suffering.  Some may argue that this is easier said than done. Then, there is no harm and no shame for the political organizations to admit their failure and create an opening for a new generation to give it a try. It won't be pleasant; but at least it will be final.

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