I sometimes surf the pages of asmarino and meskerem web sites when, like I always say, I have nothing better to do. I don’t read asmarino, not because I find the news ninety days stale, but because I cannot tolerate the editor’s reluctance to control his contributors —bloggers is the word they ascribe to themselves.  The editor believes in free speech. The editor does not believe that free expression also comes with a price called responsibility. 

I don’t read meskerem.net because this is one web site that has no clue that it is unlawful to wholly copy, reproduce and print articles from external sources. (There are what are called copyright laws!!) You can provide links. You can present edited versions of news. But you can’t cut and paste whole articles.

Meskerem boasts it is there to level the playing field. Nobody knows what this playing field is; who the combatants and gladiators who are in desperate need of a playing field are; what kind of games and under what rules they are allowed to play and  who determines what kind of space and latitude each is given.

But to come back to my main theme, recently in asmarino.com holy of holies! I came across a gem of a series of articles titled “Romanticizing Ghedli” and “Identity by Subtraction” by one Yosief G. Hiwot. He may have at times overstated his case but it is an extraordinary analysis. Poignant, powerful, convincing and an insight highly bracing.

To the utter consternation of many of us, these articles have recently come under an extensive barrage of criticism from some artifacts of the identity culture.  The criticisms per se are mostly insipid, poorly written and highly pretentious. They are not analytically challenging to say the least, and by and large mostly harmless because they encompass no intellectual context or perspective. Below is a sampling of the menu. Leading the charge of the Light Brigade is a certain Mr. Habtom Yohannes.

The Hagerawi Defense

The basis of his critique (I doubt if he actually understood the articles) focuses on a theme he has titled ‘Defending Ghedli’.  The critique looks more designed to boost his patriotic calling and his credentials as a nationalist (Hagerawi) than to disprove Mr. Yosiefs’ articles.

His counter argument, in a nutshell, states that contrary to what the author, Mr. Yosief, has written, the Ghedli was an exemplary movement that was able to inspire, energize and mobilize the Eritrean people against all odds and was populated with a leadership more in tune with the popular sentiment than any ever seen before.

Sustaining this myth requires extraordinary combinations of omissions and contortions on his part. To legitimate this fraud and to wrap Ghedli exploits in a manner of moral superiority, he had to repackage and recycle the old Shabiaspeak and present his readers, with a highly flattered sense of ourselves as the heirs of a narrative of national greatness.

This is to be expected from the likes of Mr. Habtom (with due regard to his scholarship): they are the ones you find in every corner in the so called ‘Eritrean Martyrs Day Festivals’, shouting warmed-over bromides such as ‘they died so we can be free’ at every passer by who would lend an ear. One of handful opportunists who believe his life is so worthy that some Gebar had to go and die so he can live free.

The run of the mill types like the Sammy’s and the Lulus (our cute little Sophie) come in all sizes and in all shapes and you find them spewing venom masquerading as analysis all over their luttas. Their forte is castigating the Woyanes (much as I find their role in Somalia repulsive) for every ache and cough in their beloved Eritrea and every nuanced stumble in its imagined path to glory... They never actually mention the fact that the Woyanes were dying in the foothills of Nakfa when they were living ‘La Dolce Vita’ thousands of miles away in some foreign land.

Such patriotism serves a dual purpose. First, it inures the writer form allegations of being a traitor by his peers. Second, it is a hedge against future confrontations with the powers that be. From those who were or allegedly were in the Mieda and are now in position of power to dispense or not to dispense favors.

Using Michela Wrong For Validation

Another of these critical articles is one written by a Mr. Simon W. Haymanot. Mr. Simon did not actually write his article in asmarino. He regurgitated his swill in awate.  His article is titled “Eritrean Identity my Amicus Curie”

To establish his credentials as a widely-read and well informed critique this one endlessly and boringly bombards his readers with his cut, copy and paste quotations of selected paragraphs from writers as diverse as Robert Kaplan and  Dorman (who ever it is) to Akinola and Noronha and from Redie to Gaim.

His article is impressive in its range of references but is also dispiriting. To convince us of his narrative he attempts to slot each of the narrators into a prefabricated historical scheme and indirectly assures us not to be discouraged by Mr. Yosief.  He concludes his crocodile tears of the article and the admiration he has for the author by assuring as that we after all are a Nation and have an identity because Michela Wrong has said so.

Michela Wrong of all names? Wasn’t it Nyerere the great Malimu who described “experts” such as Michela Wrong as “those who come to find out and leave before they are found out”? Well, this is what you get from a person who is not convinced of his own insignificance.

More Ancient Than Ancient

And then there is Merhawi Misghina! I like this one. This one presents us with an uplifting version of history. Here every family, every tribe, every clan, every social grouping that now lives within the confines of our present day geographical entity has a precisely documented ancestral history. A sociological organism moving calendarically through empty time back to the Stone Age.

That we actually originated in the Stone Age is proved through archeological digs, inscribed paintings in long lost caves and historical legends and fables told through generations that the author has convincingly researched.  I found the article very flattering. ‘Move over Ethiopia! Your mere three thousand histories is just a blip in the March of History when compared to your Northern neighbor!’  

When it comes to the fundamental divide in politics between Eritreans, I have this eerie feeling that it is not between those who support tyranny and those who oppose it or between those who are for democracy (whatever it is) and those who are against it. But between those who subscribe to the myth of an imagined narrative of national greatness and those who live in real time.

To sustain this myth those who live in the world of amnesia had to invent an uplifting version of history thus forcing each and every single one of us to abandon what is left of our little sense of self, written in  the hope that such simplistic arguments will be perceived as authentic, thus preempting any further discussion.

Fetishizing Ghedli

But what is most disturbing is the notion that we, all of us, are expected to fetishize Ghedli. Like these self-invented patriots we have to become just a mirror image of Shabia else we become the great Eritrean pariah.

As I noted at the beginning, Mr. Yosief may have overstated his case. No one will deny that the centrality of the struggle in its own way had its positive signifiers as well as its negative ones. There was essentially something good and something pure (at least in the initial period) because the struggle was an expression of defiance against inherent tyranny and a fight for justice and equality against an oppressive mentality.  There is of course nothing unique in this. Struggles have occurred time and again, against actual or imagined repression through out history whether in the form of class, religious or ethnic movements or the pursuit of naked power.

The glory of war has been celebrated through out history both by the winners and by the losers. In its telling and retelling war is always narrated as a just war— which incidentally came from the catholic church of yore which contrary to the teaching of their messiahs they felt compelled to wage on the unbelievers of the day.  Jihadists in reverse.

It is true, during such times civilians and the politicians of a country have an elevated and idealized notion of the cult of the warrior. As we all know, such attitudes are even manifested in the cemetery of the ‘Tomb of the Unknown Soldier’, with its ceremonial reverence accorded the monuments when in reality nobody even knows the identity of the absent occupants. It is in essence a monument of a reminder that one has to be in perpetual indebtedness to those who have died regardless of ones’ belief for there is always eternity in death. Remember we don’t have the Tomb of the Unknown Peacenik’ or the ‘Tomb of the Unknown Priest’, assuming peaceniks and priests are averse to war and against death.

The concept of a nation and identity politics was born in an age in which the Enlightenment and Revolution was destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained hierarchical dynastic realm. The dissolution of the anciens regimes gave the framework for a new consciousness. The change from the old order was that States were no more defined by centers but by borders which became a harbinger for a condition of nationhood.

But  for any collection of people to transform themselves into a nation and to acquire an identity, those living under the entity have to first be transformed from a collection of subjects to one of citizens. Citizens are by definition those who are constitutionally mandated to and do exercise their right at self governance, are the beneficiaries of a free discourse and are accorded the benefits of a free and just trail.

With the establishment of nations also came the ascendancy of nationalism. Nationalism is a well honed sword at the hands of the ruling class. Nascent nationalism is always further reinforced by a systematic nationalistic ideology propagated by the State media, the educational system, the army and the administrative regulations. The constant is the haranguing to be vigilant from threats coming from the outside as opposed to its more virulent form from the inside. ‘Yikaalo’, ‘Warsay’ or ‘Hizbawi Mekete’ are but variations of this age-old scam designed not only to divide and rule but to sustain and preserve the status quo.

Today Eritrea’s ruling class is in no mortal danger of losing its power than it ever has been before. The so called ‘opposition’ is no improvement on the current dictators. They all have a tainted history. The same old faces from the same old places. These power hungry aggregations are all members of the old gangs that couldn’t shoot straight.

Ideally what Eritrea needs today is not a fossilized power hungry opposition. What the country needs is a peoples’ insurrection. An October revolution if you will. A storming of the Winter Palace.

A thousand Kenyans died because they opposed a stolen election. A thousand Zimbabweans died because they opposed a stolen election. The question for us is why Eritreans are complicit in their own repression.

Why can’t a thousand Eritreans die for a ‘grand theft country’? Why can’t we Eritreans stand for our beliefs? Why can’t we die for our ideals for our principles? As I tried to explain above, the answer is simple. We don’t have any!!

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