I watched with glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the gods they made

The Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the devil”

If a train is traveling eastbound at 50 miles an hour, and another train is traveling westbound at 15 miles an hour…

On train 1, our conductor is Isaias Afwerki.   He’s got his fisherman hat, his dark shades, his Italian suits, his sandals, and he’s got an 80 year old engineer shoveling coal into the engine.  There are hundreds of thousands of manual laborers whose job are to lay down the tracks for the train—tracks which are disassembled from the path already taken by the train.  He’s long thrown out the operating manual of the train, which is seriously off-track: there is major shouting and gesturing by people whose limbs are being chopped off by the runaway train but the prez has got ear muffs that block all the cries and a young promoter who plays him non-stop chants of fans declaring the train is on track and ahead of schedule and special mirrors that confirm it.

On train 2…well actually trains 2, 3, 4, 5….12, we also have conductors.  The plan? It depends on the day of the week and whom you ask. One group says let’s build an even bigger microphone, one that exposes the falsehood of the promoter and maybe even drowns him out.  Another group says, nah, let’s just get sandbags and line them all up so that the train could have a softer crash.  Another group says let’s just target the laborers: no laborers, no tracks, no train, no conductor.  How about this, says another group, let’s build a bigger and faster train, get it on track and head straight for him: either he will jump out at the sheer size and speed of our train or he will be demolished. The discussions go on through the night.  Meanwhile, nobody seems to have noticed that they have miniature trains; that the trains are not moving, and that it is a bit premature to get tailored Italian suits.

[Incidentally, this Alnahda edition was drafted before the recent announcement of the EDA of its crack up.  Count me in the group that is less than horrified, actually thrilled, by this development, particularly if the ELF-RC, EDP and the Salvation now take steps to consolidate into a national, secular, moderate opposition.  Those who favor ethnic and religious autonomy can forge ahead together as well.  The long experiment of Squaring The Circle can now be officially declared exhausted and now both blocs should have fewer reasons for failing to produce results.]

Some of our compatriots have surveyed the scene, “our winter of discontent” and concluded that there is no Sun of York in the horizon to usher in a “glorious summer” and decided that it is best to wait for the next chapter in the play.  Where we see a dire problem that has to be solved, some of our compatriots just see a head-on collusion in a game of chicken that has to be avoided—that speaking only speeds up the trains on their collusion course.

Is contempt the only reaction we can muster to this?  Is it not possible to entirely and wholeheartedly disagree with people without caricaturing them? Is sympathy outside the bounds?   By calling them cowards, are we not insulting the country we love and saying that she gave birth to so many cowards?

Fear & Religion

The sum total of our counter accusations is that Eritrea is a nation of idiots, traitors and cowards. Those who oppose the government are traitors and those who support the government are idiots and those who refuse to participate are cowards.  But we all claim that we love this country and we do not want to make this direct accusation; so we try to minimize the insult by minimizing the number of our opponents.  To the PFDJ supporters, the opposition can be counted in one hand—and we are all aging to boot. To the opposition, the PFDJ has been left to a dwindling few, a ship with deserting rats.  And both look at the silent as if they are cowardly freaks of nature.

Some in the opposition have expressed frustration even with the ordinary captive Eritrean for not rising en masse against the PFDJ.  Again, this frustration is based on our inability or unwillingness to learn from history.

Let’s not forget that the totalitarian states that are still creaking under the heavy hand of their all-controlling regimes borrowed their templates of population control from Hitler and Stalin and Mao.  They designed the prototype that every tyrant is using.  For example, Hitler and his lieutenants believed that a bigger lie is easier to sell than a small lie. Witness how we are now told (and many believe it) that all who oppose the PFDJ regime are spies and traitors.   Hitler, Stalin, Mao and their disciples also understood the awesome power of fear: in the words of Nazi Herman Gorring, who fessed up this policy at the Nuremberg Trials: 

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

In other words, what glues the PFDJ together is also the same one that keeps the population passive: fear.  Not just fear of the obvious—a painful retaliation by the PFDJ—but fear of the enemy (real or imagined) that is always amassing at the city limits.  As long as people believe (or are frightened into believing) that anarchy is the only alternative to oppression, people will endure oppression.

If you want to behold the awesome power of fear, consider that my adopted country, America, has accepted now that eavesdropping, arrests without warrants, torture and a foreign policy based on the plot of every Charles Bronson movie, are consistent with its values of liberty. 

But if fear is the glue, what is the material that is being glued? Why do many (most?) PFDJ supporters support PFDJ? In my view, most do so because they have general agreement with the principles of the Front.  It has been a long time since the Front lost its eloquence but its declared platform had long laid down the what, how, and why of its principles: equitable growth and social justice, via a self-reliant culture.  There is nothing remarkable or revolutionary about this; most self-isolated states (say, Guinea in West Africa, which is unraveling now) have bankrupted the state pursuing this Holy Grail.

Isn’t this, says the frustrated opposition member pointing to stacks of facts, evidence that their policy is not working?  They must know it is not working; it is self-evident.  We now have Eritreans panhandling at embassies—something that did not happen even in the Italian, English, Haile Selasse and Derg Era.  Thus, the reason for their support must be self-interest, opportunism, etc.  But this misses the psychology of the partisan: the way parties operate is a lot closer to a church than a chemistry lab. In fact, many PFDJ supporters proudly proclaim that that PFDJ and what it stands for is their religion.   This is not an inconsequential statement: In religion, truth is revealed by prophets and is eternal; in science, truth is discovered by anonymous scientists and is subject to review by additional evidence.  Piling on discovered evidence means nothing to the believer—his truth is revealed and not discovered. 

Fine, you say, assuming that they believe in the goal, are they not bothered by the means pursued to get there?  This takes us back to the value system of the PFDJ: pragmatism.  Pragmatism is the progeny of utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill lives in the PFDJ Charter.  And utilitarians do not agonize over the means; it is only the end that matters. It is the “would you assassinate Hitler if you had the chance to do so in 1932?” argument, multiplied and localized: would you arrest hundreds, torture a few more, disappear some more if it meant by doing so you would “safeguard the sovereignty of the nation, a nation made independent by the sacrifice of tens of thousands?”  Set this question to revolution era soundtrack and you have your instant answer. 

Opposition Norming

We cannot have a nation that is emptying itself out of its most productive and promising citizens, the youth, and replacing them with fear and anxiety.  An entire generation whose only experience with government is a negative one bodes ill for future governments for at least a generation.  The nation cannot wait for the inevitable clash of the trains and uncivil wars.  We have to find a way to overcome our fears and make opposition and dissent complementary and not destructive to nation-building.  If you are familiar with what sociologists call "social norming" you will understand my proposal, which would be based on what I'll call "opposition norming."

First and foremost, the regime has to lift the undeclared state of emergency.  We should deal with the issue of justice in its most elementary sense: bring the accused to an independent court of law; provide visitation rights to the accused; eliminate practices of torture.  And since there can be no justice without punishment, the perpetrators of the injustice should be brought to trial and, if found guilty, punished.

This step alone would vastly reduce the roster of opposition sympathizers and the politicized body and most of us would go back to doing whatever it is we were doing before we became amateur human rights advocates and politicians,  before the Mr. Hyde side of the PFDJ killed off Dr. Jekyll.

Which takes us to step two: bring back the Dr. Jekyll side of PFDJ and kill off Mr. Hyde.  The PFDJ prides itself on being a “pragmatic” front but the problem with pragmatism is that there is no underlying principle, only to follow what “works” or appears to work at any given time.  It is this pragmatism that took the PFDJ from embracing Maoism in 1971, to liberal democracy in 1987 and back to Maoism in 2002.  A fairly liberal macroeconomic policy, press law, constitution, party formation law were pragmatic solutions at one time and then, just as quickly, a command economy, a suspended constitution, a voided press law, and a killed-by-a-committee party formation law were also pragmatic.  Pragmatism and realism may be a good basis for foreign policy and conflict resolution but they are not good practices for governing a people, especially a politically conscious people who have been promised human rights and democracy for 30 long years.

Third, truly practice the maxim that Eritrea’s best asset is its human resource.   Eritreans do not migrate from the asset to the liability column of the balance sheet, nor do they go into accelerated depreciation just because they do not support the PFDJ and want to be given the opportunity to organize themselves, form association and parties that provide a different vision from the one advanced by the PFDJ.  They have earned this right by virtue of birth.  Whether they have forfeited this right or not should be determined by a court of law and whether their ideas should be accepted should be left to the court of public opinion.  A government should not seek legal solutions for political problems—particularly when the government enforcing the law is relying on brute force only to legitimize its rule.

Get the train on track, and give others the opportunity to propose to the people how they would captain it, and in which direction, if given a chance.

The alternative is to stay with our status quo and a people living with the preposterous belief that it shares a nation made up of opportunists, traitors, and cowards.  The devout PFDJ supporters will consider this move ill-advised because it will reward the “traitors”.  The “by all means necessary” revolutionaries will consider it a capitulation.  But then, in all great compromises everyone thinks they gave up more than they should have.  Are we willing to give up a little now so we can gain a lot later? It would be the pragmatic thing to do.

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