The Awate Team despairing for Gaza victims [Saturday, 01 December 2012 05:42 Yosief Ghebrehiwet ]

Excrept from (III) The Circular Journey in Search of Eritrea: “Hadnetna” from Sahel to the Sinai[http://asmarino.com/articles/1588-iii-the-circular-journey-in-search-of-eritrea-hadnetna-from-sahel-to-the-sinai2]


Think of a very liberal white American who never stops confronting people whenever he hears them use the word “nigger”. One day a neighbor comes running to him in alarm and says, “A n– is raping your daughter around the corner!” Now, why is it that we think this fellow liberal is either out of his mind or doesn’t give a damn about his daughter if he stops to lecture his neighbor about the immorality of using the n-word and how that word happens to stigmatize all of blacks? We would say, “Where in his inner self did he find this sense of outrage at a time when all the outrage he could muster ought to have been directed at saving his daughter?”  That picture fits well the Awate Team’s recent reaction to the Gaza-Isareli conflict.

 What made me mad about those people who came to the defense of Bedouin Arabs when the news about Eritreans suffering under their hands was fresh was not that there was anything wrong in their logic (after all, nobody should stigmatize a whole tribe for the work of a few, if that is all that there is to it), but that they came too quick to their defense, when all their sympathy ought to have been directed towards the victims. It is in the same vein that I look at Awate Team’s latest farce: Where does their sense of outrage come from, while countless Eritreans have been abducted, ransomed, tortured, raped, organ-harvested and murdered in the Sinai and about a thousand more are still held hostages by the Bedouin Arabs next door to Gaza? And to add insult to injury, that there is a connection between the Bedouin Arabs and the Palestinians in Gaza in this extortion business have been established more than once. [ Report: Hamas torturing 250 Eritreans in Egypt, Israelis arrested for Hamas Sinai kidnapping plot] In one of those news reports, in a case where four Israelis were arrested for helping a Hamas operative in extorting money from relatives of those Eritrean kidnapped by Bedouin Arabs, it says: “Amad Abu Arar, a Hamas operative who lives in Gaza, allegedly contacted Grad in late August and instructed him to go to Tel Aviv to collect $13,000 from an uncle of an Eritrean migrant captured by Bedouin smugglers on his way to Israel.” [Four Israelis arrested for extortion of Eritrean migrants | The Times of ...]

And given that the human trafficking and arms smuggling in the Sinai are in the same hands, there wouldn’t be a surprise if a Sinai-Gaza alliance exists in this gruesome business. If so, here then is the brutal truth that follows: some of the Eritrean organs are being sold to further a cause dear to all Arabs – the Palestinian Cause as spearheaded by Hamas. And what does the Awate Team do? They want us to sympathize with the tragedy of the very people that are victimizing us in Gaza. And this is not something that happened in the distant past; the rape, extortion, torture, organ harvest and murder is still going on as the Team is crying a river for the Gaza victims! The latest has been from BBC, from few days ago, where we hear a harrowing cry for help from a young Eritrean under torture. [BBC News - Today - 'Kidnapped' Eritrean man in plea for life]

But what makes it disgusting is that while they want us to forget what is going on right now in the Sinai so that we could economize our emotions to focus on the killings in Gaza, they want us to remember what happened to us by Ethiopians decades ago. The not-so-subtle connection between the two videos they want us to draw is obvious: by putting Israel and Ethiopia together on one camp and Gaza and Eritrea together on the opposite camp, a geopolitical line is to be drawn in our minds. And where do we put the Sinai tragedy in this geopolitical regrouping? Well, to them, as in the case of ghedli, this is a price that has to be paid for this Arab hadnet.

Let me ask this hypothetical question to underscore the farce of Eritrean sympathy as directed to those who don’t need or even want it: what would the Hamas operative from Gaza who was receiving money from human trafficking in Sinai say if he heard that in an Eritrean website Eritreans are crying in despair as they see Arabs children killed in Gaza? I am sure he would be bemused, and would probably say, “These Habesh must be awfully generous people. First, they donate their organs for our cause. Now, they are wailing with us for our children …” Imagine a black slave during slavery era lamenting the fact that white women were not allowed to vote, even as he/she knew such a transformation wouldn’t change an iota to his/her people’s condition. The question is, even though women’s suffrage is a noble cause, was a slave really in a position to lament the disenfranchisement of white women? Would the white women even care for the sympathy of a slave? The slave’s deplorable position would make such a gesture of sympathy farcical at best. So is it in our case. As in the case of identity, the issue is not whether we sympathize with them, but whether they care for our sympathy. Would they even give a damn about sympathy coming from abed? Ah, what a pathetic race we have turned out to be!

That fact is that neither in the Arab world nor in Israel are Eritreans treated humanely. I don’t think that Eritreans have ever been faced with the kind of rabid racism they have been met with in Israel anywhere in the world, including the Arab world. That is why I find it incomprehensible when Eritreans take sides on this issue. It is like asking a prisoner which of his torturers he likes best. The Gaza-Israel conflict is a non-issue to us, and this is why: we cannot afford it. We need all our emotions directed to our own victims, be they in the Arab hellhole called Sinai or in the detention camps in Israel designed only for African refugees.

Looking at the reactions of both the regime supporters and the opposition to the Sinai tragedy so as to preserve the kind of hadnet they think is necessary for their respective alien identities to prevail, the most critical question that needs to be seriously entertained is this: what kind of a monster is this “Eritrea” that it requires the kind of hadnet that demands endless sacrifice of its children, be it in death, slavery or rape, to sustain itself?