Summary

Some will say that 2001 began with a bang and ended with a whimper. In January, the Eritrean people had reason to hope that the so-called Eritrean National Assembly�s decision in September 2000 to schedule elections for December 2001 was serious: after all, two committees had been tasked to draft electoral and party-formation laws.   That this was accomplished over the objection of the Custodians of the Central Office gave the optimists reason to believe that power was finally, if not shifting to the people�s representatives, at least being diffused from a tiny clique to a larger body.

Was that a short-lived hope?  The ominous signs first surfaced with the shabby treatment the G-13 (the PFDJ reformists composed of professional and scholars) received when they honored the president�s invitation to meet in Asmara.  The group was harangued and told that their claims as outlined in the �Berlin Manifesto� were without any merit.   When they attempted to substantiate their claims, the President told them that he had no intention to enter into circuitous discussions.  (Later, the president would tell a reporter that the group, which was predominantly made up of EPLF loyalists and frequent travelers to Eritrea, was a detached group who �they know it, I know it, they had never been here before.�)  By January, the Central Office (the Presidential Office plus the hand-picked PFDJ loyalists) had begun a serious witch hunt to uproot any sign of critical appraisal: dissenters were accused of being agents of the enemy, defeatists, and traitors who had to be weeded out.   Ministers, ambassadors, governors, and other government officials whose loyalty to the president was suspect were �frozen� or �fired.�   This is how things were handled in the past and there was no reason to believe, according to the Central Office, that this tried-and-true method would not work. 

There was a difference.  The private Eritrean press, which since 1997 had been happily reporting happy and/or trivial news, took up the cause of reform. Beginning in April 2001, the papers (particularly Keste Debena and Meqaleh) began interviewing government officials who had been frozen, demoted or fired or were on the verge of being frozen, demoted or fired.  The President�s Office, which, for ten years, never shied away from showcasing the President in countless myth-building interviews with state/para-statal media, accused the reformers of self-aggrandizement and exaggerations.   The press was accused of being sensational.   Nonetheless, the private papers outsold the stale state papers by huge margins.  The president decided to join the fray and subject himself to an interview with the �tabloidy and sensational� at which time he indicated that he occasionally reads the private press.

Between April and July 2001, the private papers had interviewed seven out of the fifteen dissidents who later came to be known as G-15/PFDJ Reformers (Mahmoud Sherifo, Mesfun Hagos, General Berhane Gerezgheir,  Petros Solomon,  General Uqbe Abaha,  Haile �DeruE� Weldensaie,  and Saleh Kekia..)   One of the most commonly repeated assertions made by government officials (and repeated by its supporters) is that the government had patiently looked on waiting for things to cool off.  In reality, the government had either provoked or severely retaliated every move by the Reformers.   Those whom it identified as leaders of the movement (Sherifo, Petros Solomon, Haile DeruE) were fired or demoted or frozen and then subjected to prosecution by innuendo: of harboring sub-national sentiments, of corruption, of cowardice without a shred of evidence.  Those whom it identified as mere followers were asked to recant their association with the leaders.    As recently as mid-August 2001, the  PFDJ �Youth and Students� newspaper Trgta was alleging that the G-15 are actually G-3. When they wouldn�t recant (excepting for Mohammed Berhan Blatta, who, as an ELF veteran and as an individual who joined the government after the liberation of Eritrea had no sense of camaraderie with the balance of the Reformers), they too were fired or demoted or frozen.

By July 2001, the government began testing the waters.  The first move was to generate loyalty oaths from the supposedly non-political military, an effort that had been underway since January 2001.  The blunt �whose side are you on?� question was satisfactorily answered by the 30 important generals via threats, intimidations and promises of relatively luxurious life.   The rank-and-file in the military were prohibited from reading the �sensational� private press.  Then came the intimidation of the young journalists with threats of arrests or �national service.�  The next step was to paralyze the judiciary; that was accomplished with the firing of Justice TeAme, who had hinted at exercising his duties and challenging the authority of the presidential office.  Then came the arrest and harassment of those deemed to have too little to lose and thus capable of taking more risks in challenging authority: the very old and the very young, the mediators and the university students.   Then came the testing-the-waters frequent arrest of the most junior member of the Reformists, Hamed Hmed. 

By August, the government felt reasonably confident that it could arrest the Reformists en-masse without serious political or economic repercussions.  The party�s secretary, Alamin Mohammed Seid, was the designated prosecutor accusing the Reformers of endangering national security.  Incredibly, the government presented itself as a reluctant prosecutor who was being forced to take measures due to the provocation of the Reformers and the pleas of �the people.�   On September 18 and 19^th, the government arrested eleven of its comrades.  They are in jail, without charge, ex-communicated.  Their wives, their children, their parents, who paid so much to see a free and just Eritrea, are not allowed to communicate with them.  They don�t know whether they are alive or dead; whether or of what they will be charged.   A week later, the journalists were arrested and the private papers shut down.  A week later, some of the elderly mediators were arrested.   Foreign governments and agencies who attempted to speak on their behalf were either ignored (Human Rights Watch, Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Sans Frontiers) or retaliated against (EU, USA.)

Eritrea has mounted the slippery slope towards a police state.  If you doubt this, ask yourself: �why is it that every time someone is interviewed by the foreign press, s/he refuses to give his/her name if s/he is critical of the government but is quoted if s/he is favorable of the government?�  Ask yourself: �why is it that people you attempt to reach by phone act as if their phone is bugged?�  Ask yourself: �why do the citizens act as if every other citizen is a government spy?�  Ask yourself, �is it rational to believe that every human rights organization in the world is wrong and my government is right?�  

There is, as always, a light at the end of the dark tunnel.  The year 2001 saw the spontaneous formation of no fewer than a dozen organizations with names like �Bana Harenet�, �Eritrean Action Committee for Peace and Democracy in the Netherlands (EACPDN)�, � Concerned Eritreans for Democracy and Reconciliation, Metro-Atlanta�,  �Committee of the Dallas and Fort Worth Metropolis� and the � Eritrean Public Forum.�  All these groups have one thing in common: refusal to give a blind eye to injustice.  More heart-warming was the effort of a young Eritrean, Mussie Ephrem, an Eritrean in Sweden, who has filed a habeas corpus against the government.  It is very easy to dismiss all these groups as �desperate� or �futile� attempts and indeed, they may all amount to nothing.  But history suggests and the indomitable Eritrean spirit affirms, that somebody�most likely a 20-something Eritrean�somewhere�most likely inside Eritrea-- is even now, as we write this, being molded and forged by PFDJ�s injustice into being Eritrea�s Deliverer, a leader to truly unify the nation and to live up to the promise of justice and democracy.  More than anyone else, the PFDJ know this and that explains why they have turned Eritrean into a police state.  Their action is, thus, a cause to shudder and a cause to celebrate.  2001 was a spark; only time will tell whether it was a bang or a whimper.  In any event, we believe that 2001 was the year of the reform movement which  has conclusively exposed the bankruptcy and immorality of the Isaias government which is why we have stated in previous issue of the Pencil that the Isaias Era Is Over.   Read the chronicle of events in 2001 and make up your own mind.