Awate.com’s recent interview with the Prime Minister of Ethiopia was very commendable. Quite of a few were possibly disappointed for some questions left out, and it is understandable. On my part, I found the comment made on the public, and implicitly on the youth of Eritrea noteworthy. The PM said the urge to flee manifested among the Eritrean people is “strange" and out of character. An architect of the late Weyane rebellion, and familiar with the politics of the region for many years, he has grounds for his opinion. By far the strangest thing is, when you find that this observation of his about the youth converge with both the ruling regime‘s, and the traditional opposition organizations’ of our country.

Many years before the PFDJ came up with the endearing label of the Warsay for the youth, it held it mostly in utter contempt. The evidence is too strong for us to contemplate. During a television address to the nation in 1994, the defense minister (since then) Sebhat Ephrem  went into a tirade to justify the rationale for a compulsory military service. Quite arrogantly the defense minister called the youth of Eritrea as a haguaf generation, a term that has an extreme negative connotation. According to him, the Sawa military service would serve the purpose of instilling work habits and other values into the youth.

One might say, the EPLF/PFDJ group is a strange breed. The notoriety of people in this organization is that not long ago the older generation, that is their fathers, were also defined as weaklings and sellouts. I am not sure there is a generation as this in the entire world, which glorifies itself, and defames other generations before and after it in the extreme way. It bodes our future ill.

When it comes to the youth of Eritrea the traditional opposition does not have a high regard for the youth of Eritrea too. It laments that our contemporary youth has become spineless, and as having lost the spirit to fight the oppression. It unintentionally shares the regime’s stance, when it also lauds the generation of the ghedli. It goes into a tantrum, when thousands of the youth cross into either Ethiopia or the Sudan and either avoid or pay scant attention to its political and recruiting activities in the same countries. And worst of all, it hits the roof, when the same youth flock to the government orchestrated festivals.

What one gathers from opinion of all the  political actors in Eritrea is a simple lesson. The large majority of the youth, embittered with the fate of their older tegadelti brothers, sisters, and parents under the regime, brutalized and suffocated with the serfdom life imposed on themsleves, the only instinct left for them is to run for their life. Whoever counsels them to fight, and sacrifice their few remaining years will surely be considered in the words of old Asmarinos, a typical fara. Any notion of ghedli is out.

Subterfuge and deceit have remained a well-honed talent for left oriented movements across history.  In the rugged mountains of Asimba, in the Tigray region, several platoons had a meeting attended by a senior leader of a guerrilla organization. This was the late 70s, and the region of Adi Irob had the presence of many guerrilla units affiliated with both the TPLF, and the EPRP from Ethiopia. Rumors of the approach of Degeat Sebagadis of the EDU was also frequent. The ELF and the EPLF from Eritrea were also often there, to escalate the war in what they call the enemy area. Mengistu had launched a massive campaign to annihilate the EPRP’s urban networks all over Ethiopia, which  caused a huge exodus towards the small army units that had been safely ensconced in Asimba for a few years.

When Somalia invaded the Ogaden region, and other parts of the Ethiopian Empire, the Derg obtained the help of Cuba, which sent thousands of its troops with revolutionary fervor. The majority of the fighters were former high school and university students, who worshiped the charismatic Che Guevara, and a few others. It was too soon for them to have forgotten the protest song that went partly like this:

Fano Tesemara, fano tesemara
         Ende Ho chi minh ende Che Guvera…

The sudden intervention of the Cuban army on the side of the Derg, the nemesis of the radical students were  pole axed . Utterly confused by the circumstance, one of the fighters asked the fore mentioned party figure for an explanation.

Leaders of the left type are not the type who hesitate and harbor doubt. The Cuban revolution said,  the senior cadre was after all, an armed struggle of the foco type that only lasted a few years. Like their counter parts in the rest of the left oriented movements of the Third World, nearly all the left armed groups endorsed a long and protracted armed struggle.

The EDU, the small armed group of former nobles and aristocrats, which led a rebellion mainly in the Begemder area and some parts of western Tigray was the only the exception. I had the opportunity to read one of their party program in the late 70s. The emphasis on the armed struggle was for a quick and brief rebellion. A war lasting many years was averred  by the EDU for the destruction it would cause to the livelihood of the people and the economy. It seems the feudal lords had a better appreciation of the rural economy and the peasants than all the “peasant” loving left armed groups, who while students spent their time sloganeering  the “land to the tiller.”

The thing got so absurd, when even the embattled regime of the Derg did not shy away from adopting the term. When Chairman Mao died, its media did an extensive coverage on his death and his alleged heroic Long March.

The peasants, who mostly live a precarious life, were not consulted when the place for the long protracted war was chosen. When the countryside was designated as a theater of war, and for that matter for a long time, the peasants had nothing to do with the deliberations made by the secretive former students from the distant cities. Like wine, the left seemed to assert that the longer an armed struggle lasts the better the certainty of achieving the goals of the revolution.

In Eritrea the Fronts were also enamored with the notion of a protracted struggle. In its indoctrination attempt similar to what Yosief Ghebrehiwet termed the “ever-deferred promises”, the EPLF was in particular very insistent and methodical. The political commissars constantly fed the foot soldiers with the “heaven like” differences between the then two Vietnams and the current two Koreas. The political and economic models of North Vietnam, and North Korea were often admired. Their “success” was attributed to the scores of years they spent fighting successive enemies. The propaganda got so suffocating to the foot soldiers that one fighter made a mockery of the lessons. In a dark humor, the fighter allegedly said, “selementay kelte Dekemhare, selementay kelte Shema Negus.”

The Fronts habitually dismissed the nominal independence of the scores of African countries after the decolonization, and espoused the gradual liberation of first the countryside, and then encircling the towns, until the final onslaught on the stronghold of the enemy. In the process, the Fronts stated the rural folk will attain political and economic power, and the institutions needed for the post war period will already be in place. There were not many detractors to the claims made.

Ato. Woldeab Woldemariam,  during one of his town meetings with people in the Diaspora, assured the audience that a remarkable progress has been made in the superstructures of the liberated areas in the EPLF. I often remember the portrait of this veteran politician plastered all over the main avenues of Asmera and its main buildings. Like the Maya paintings of their gods, the portrait was unusual and showed only one of his eyes. When the veteran nationalist lauded or exaggerated the deceptive façade of the EPLF, and failed to see their true nature, I felt he had examined them, like his portrait described before, only with his single eye.

Recently I read a couple of articles with almost a similar theme. Daniel G.Michael”s “Eritrea’s Next Revolution”, and Saleh Johar’s “Unfinished Job” that dwelt on the need for another revolution. What Ato. Woldeab Woldemariam and a few others claimed at the end of the 90s seems now to have been debunked. The political charade and economic misery witnessed by many, since our nominal independence did the rest of the job. After having introspected the political efforts of the opposition for the last decade and more, the same writers have asked for a fresh approach.

Unlike the fads in the west, who have a short cycle, the long belief held in the potent weapon of armed struggle seem now to be out. Waging an armed struggle seems not to be cool anymore. Long before the memorable 9/11 incident the option of armed struggle to redress political grievance was received with getting received with raised eye brows in international politics. Likewise, the resort to armed struggle is getting a battering among Diaspora political circles. “Muachu bale, gedayu wendme,” said the tragic woman of the Mesafint Zemen, who decried her peculiar circumstances of the war endemic Ethiopia. Like the lady, Saleh Younis  argued against military resistance in one instance. The conscription in our ratio has remained so high, he stated that almost everybody’s cousin or nephew may be a casualty in the event of launching a military resistance. In a paper he presented to an Eritrean audience in Atlanta, Georgia, Saleh Johar asked, who after all is a revolutionary amongst us.

If I have to choose between the type of tyrant regimes, I prefer the rightist type. I am sure, it is an ugly position to contemplate. Dictatorships of this kind usually have small armies, and are by far more benign than the ones of the totalitarian types, for their reach is not all encompassing and deep as the communist ones. Our circumstance is not an enviable one. The rogues at home do not only allow any individual space for any sort of disobedience, but they have also held the whole country hostage to a degree that armed struggle is now getting frowned upon. We are thus in mired now in an acute political conundrum.

It is time for a paradigm shift argued, the author of “Eritrea’s Next Revolution” article, and used the Afro hair style as a metaphor. Trim your Afro hair-dos said Daniel to all the old political actors. I say we are bald, and are left with no hair to trim. We are in a coma. If the youth appear to the old nationalists to be cynical and self centered, who can blame them.

In law abiding countries, even the most dishonest business person would honor, what he advertised. In the event there is a breach, the customer may either boycott the store, or go for the law. Who is to blame the youth,  raised in a house of deceit, where the popular marketing “Buy one and get one free” of the left political species, and many other objectives have remained an absolute farce.