One of the greatest problems that the Eritrean people face now is the romanticized image of ghedli that most are unwilling to give up. If romance does kill a nation, this will be it. This is not a case of how a nation has come to kill an idea (I wish it has been so), but of how an idea is literally killing a nation.

The idea of “ghedli” (and all the paraphernalia that goes with it) has become so disproportionally heavy that it has reached an unbearable stage for the masses who have been carrying it on their backs for such a long time. This Frankenstein of our creation has developed such a voracious appetite that an enduring culture of martyrdom has to be created just to sustain it. One generation of youth after another are being devoured by this monster just to keep an inarticulate, fuzzy and discordant dream alive. And now, in its last days, it is in the very process of devouring the whole nation; Shaebia has decided that if it is going to die, it might as well take the nation down the drain with it. Yet, enamored as they are with their revolution, many Eritreans would rather blame anything else than ghedli for all the ills that is currently afflicting the nation.

Ironically, the only thing that unites those who hold extreme positions in the current crisis, and wouldn't see eye to eye on any other issue, is this romantic obsession with the revolutionary past, magnifying whatever was good in it beyond proportion, while discounting anything else that mars that picture. You find Jebha supporters reminiscing about "mighty Abbay Jebha” and “ade ghedli,” while minimizing or totally discounting its authoritarian, sectarian, anarchic, corrupt and dysfunctional nature that finally doomed it to self-destruction. Then we have Shaebia supporters who never tire mentioning its "heroic past," while ignoring its totalitarian, isolationist, paranoid and barbaric past. But this romanticizing of the revolution requires a lot of denial for it to stay potent: mass amnesia when it comes to the past atrocities of ghedli, giving “make-overs” for many “heroes” with dubious past, remaking of history to fit one’s own purposes, creating myths of peace and harmony among the people that never was, claiming a national identity that has never coalesced into anything identifiable, coming up with endless excuses for endemic failures, finding scapegoats to play the enemy’s role, etc.

Similarly, nobody dares to fault the masses for the current mess in Eritrea. Given the Marxist overtones that still find echo in revolutionary Eritrea, the masses are never supposed to be on the wrong. Even Shaebia, an organization that has shown the greatest contempt for the masses, keeps verbally extolling their “virtues”: their resistance (“TsinAt”), their endless sacrifice (“tewefaynet”), their patience (“tetsewarinet”), their patriotism (“hagerawunet”), etc. And when it comes to the opposition, their favorite line is: “hizbna’do izi mreKebe?” (“Do our people deserve this?”) In both instances, what they find appealing about the masses is that they sustained the “sewra” for such a long time patiently, paying a huge sacrifice in the process. Nobody pays attention to the fact that it is that very unquestioning obedience that sustained ghedli that is now sustaining the Isaias regime; there is something wrong with a culture that doesn’t seem to care whom it serves. Notice how the supposed “virtue” of the masses is invoked circularly just to keep the image of ghedli well and alive; these two myths feed on each other’s misconceptions.

The abuser and the abused in collaboration

The great irony is that the two main causes for almost all the ills that beset modern-day Eritrea can be traced to: (a) the culture of abuse of ghedli perfected in “mieda”, and now applied ruthlessly and indiscriminately all over Eritrea, its cancer-like spread infecting every population group imaginable; and (b) the culture of acquiescence of the masses that has created a very conducive environment for the abusive culture of ghedli to tenaciously take hold all over Eritrea.

The collaborative task of keeping the image of ghedli pristine has been one of glues that has kept these two cultures in interactive mode for such a long time. For the first, the perpetuation of this myth has been the essence of its survival; and for the second, it has been a quasi-religious cause that has been synonymous to the notion of “ Eritrea” itself. But keeping this picture pure requires a lot of illusion, not unlike that of magic; only this time, it is willfully played upon oneself. Not only does it require a lot of willful forgetting of what happened in the past, it also requires that one not see a lot of what is taking place in the present. As in all romanticized constructs, the good parts are inflated and the bad parts deflated, all to the peril of the masses. It seems as if the sanity of the whole nation depends on keeping the legacy, and hence the image, of ghedli unblemished; they feel that if they let go of that image, there would be nothing left to hold onto. Hence the national amnesia to blot out the painful past, and the endless excuses to find scapegoats that would be made to play the role of the “enemy.”

In this collaborative task to keep the image and legacy of ghedli intact and pristine, the first step is to misdiagnose what ails the nation. If one is set out to save the legacy of ghedli at whatever cost, the first thing to do is to place all the blame for what is going on in Eritrea right now on anything else but ghedli. The culprit, depending on who is doing the finger-pointing, can be the old generation, Isayas and his few henchmen at the top, those who have “agame” blood, the PFDJ, the Woyanies, the US and UN, etc. The consensus among all of these disparate groups is that “ghedli” – whatever each one of them takes it to be – is not to be blamed for what is happening now in the nation; and if ever, very little.

And then, of course, there is this willful collaboration to forget the past. But this task of romanticizing and glamorizing ghedli by willfully ignoring the atrocities of the past is not an easy one. All that it requires is a little bit of digging up for all the skeletons of both movements to come up to the surface for anyone to see. So the legacy-keepers of both Jebha and Shaebia in the opposition camp are in as much involvement as the Highdefites in actively erasing certain damning events in the past and glamorizing their respective heroes (most of them with dubious, criminal past). But, as they say, a history that remains untold is apt to be repeated. If so, those in the opposition who are actively revising history for their own petty purposes are equally to blame as those who are currently in power.

Excuses and finding scapegoats

Let me now go briefly over some of the common excuses used by many in the opposition to exculpate ghedli and the masses by making others culpable for all the ills that currently haunt Eritrea:

(1) A few at the top

It has now become fashionable to attribute all the ills of Eritrea to a few at the top: the dictator, a few corrupt generals, some policy makers at the President’s Office and some few criminal colonels at the middle. This lets-make-everybody-happy diagnosis carries the solution in its sleeve: take out these few at the top and everything else will be returned to normal. They forget that taking out the few at the top has been very difficult precisely because nobody could make his way to the top as a result of countless entanglements at the bottom. So what one has to equally look at is the national malady entrenched at the bottom that has created a conducive environment for the dictatorship to thrive.

An enforcer at the bottom – an informer, a torturer, a cadre, a foot soldier, a fund raiser, a technocrat, a propagandist, a cheer leader, etc. – is as much to blame as the ones at the top. The fact that his reach is more constrained is simply offset by the fact that the likes of him, unlike those at the top, come in large numbers (and that, given the opportunity, he would act exactly like the ones at the top). But more importantly, this kind of minimalist attribution leaves out the multitude of true believers that really enable the very survival of the totalitarian regime. One needn’t go further than the Diaspora community to see how this particular group of population is not only willingly supporting the regime morally but also financially. The “hizbawi meKete” that is going on right now is a good example of how those at the top work very closely with those at the bottom to pursue their repressive agendas. And then there are the resigned masses, who for one reason or another, do not want to take any stand against the government.

When this minimalist approach is carried to its extreme, the whole nation’s ills are attributed to one man only, Isaias. The minimalists totally miss the fact that even the making of a hero out of Isayas has been a result of a decades-old collaborative work between teghadelti and the masses. The making of the Monster of Asmara didn’t come overnight on its own.

But what is sad about this minimalist diagnosis is that it demands an equally minimalist solution. That is why we see most of the opposition preoccupied at tinkering along the periphery. Some want to talk to Isaias, imploring him to change, as if he has been in a listening mood for the last ten years. Some want to write a letter of protest to him, as if this hardened criminal is a first-time offender that needs a little bit of prodding to come to his senses. Some are still allergic to the phrase “regime change,” as if there is room for this unrepentant regime to get rehabilitated. Some want to “soft land regime change,” without having any clue as to how that could be achieved. Some are involved in petty projects of “sanctioning” Isaias only, hoping that their “precision surgery” will take out the top while sparing the rest the pain of protracted medication. Some are in the business of rehabilitating old criminals in the opposition, all under the name of diversity. And still others are in the business of endlessly reshuffling organizations and changing their names, as if semantic tinkering will do the trick. That all of these stances the opposition have taken so far have been epiphenomenal to the task of bringing about change in Eritrea doesn’t seem to bother them at all; they are just happy in the noise they make, even if it finds no resonance anywhere else except in their ears.

(2) The ubiquitous “Agame” card

And then there is, of course, the ubiquitous “agame” card happily used on both sides of the isle. In both camps, one observes this futile but diligent search for the “true,” “real” or “genuine” Eritrean going on unabated. Blaming all the ills of the nation on those who are not “dekebat” has become the “patriotic link” that joins many in the opposition with the Highdefites. You can see this ugly, fascistic search for the “pure Eritrean” going all over the Eritrean-based websites. There is even one opposition website that, unashamedly, calls itself “dekebat.”

When the accusation comes from the PFDJ supporters’ side, this witch-hunting has a sweeping applicability: anyone who opposes the Isayas regime is not a “genuine Eritrean” and most probably of Agame or Ethiopian origin. For them, anyone who challenges the Isayas regime becomes, by definition, someone who is not “a genuine Eritrean.” Since this is done by definition, no further scrutiny is needed to confirm their allegation. And as to those in the opposition who are tirelessly guarding the “purity” of Eritrea, one of their main tasks is to obsessively trace the ancestry of every PFDJ higher official. Measuring how many pints of Tigrean or Amhara blood is to be found in these officials’ veins has become their favorite pastime. To them, Isayas does what he does simply because of his “agame” blood. The rationale for this form of denial is obvious; it says, “No true Eritrean would harm his country the way these individuals are doing. So it must be their ‘agame’ heritage that is causing havoc in the nation.” Once this idiotic line of thinking has been taken, it is easy to see how both ghedli and the Eritrean masses would be exculpated from all the ills that afflict the nation. They would rather bury their heads in the sand than courageously face their demons as a people once and for all.

Sadly, this kind of misguided reasoning is what we have been witnessing in the debate on “Awrajawunet and Eritrean identity” in TV zete. Leaving aside the dubious premise that Eritrean identity is built on awraja identity – a premise on which the whole discussion was based – the panelists seem to agree on one ill-conceived conclusion: that it is those who “feel insecure in their identity” that are to be mainly blamed for the ills of the nation. Their implicit rationale for such an irresponsible statement goes as follows: those who are “insecure in their identity” can only feel secure of their belonging to Eritrea if everybody else is deprived of his or her awraja identity, and by extension, his or her national identity. And their equally misguided recommendation is to put the “origin” of PFDJ collaborators into special scrutiny! If this sounds like witch-hunting, it is because it is. To them, the tens of thousands of “genuine Eritreans” that actively sustain this evil government through their collaboration is something secondary. The primary culprits are supposedly those few with Tigrean or Ethiopian blood in their veins. The fact that the ethnic cleansing done on the Eritrean side has been so thorough that it has left almost no one with Tigrean or Ethiopian blood in the land doesn’t faze them at all. Such kind of willful blindness is the stuff out of which romanticized constructs are made.

It is clear from the above that many in the opposition are collaborating with the Highdefites in sustaining the culture of exclusion brought all the way from mieda, all to the detriment of the nation; for no nation on this earth would be able to survive the global world that is now in the making with this kind of claustrophobic state of mind. The isolationist culture that Shaebia wallows in finds its echo in the “uniqueness” of Eritrea that many in the opposition keep touting. The fact that the two camps are constantly feeding this ugly culture in the very attempt to achieve opposing objectives is of a minor point.

(3) In the name of martyrs

And then there is this most sensitive of all categorizations: that of martyrs. Almost all Eritreans – be it from Highdef or opposition camp – believe that our martyrs died for a “better” Eritrea. There is a double fallacy embedded in such a statement. First, it attributes wisdom to the dead that the living don’t possess. It claims the following statement to be true: if those who survived it all had been dead, they would have been wiser (more patriotic, better democrats, better citizens, etc.) than they are now. Or, to put it conversely: if the dead have been living, they would have known better what to do and Eritrea wouldn’t have been in the mess it finds itself now. But this claim is so arbitrary that it has no underlying logic to support it. Second, nobody can put his hands on what that “better Eritrea” that the martyrs died for would have looked like to them then. Many now want to attribute that a democratic Eritrea must have been the dream of our martyrs. But this belies all the evidence. There was not a trace of democracy in ghedli of Eritrea. The majority of the martyred, being peasants (and mostly forcibly taken through “giffa”), had absolutely no inkling as to what democracy looked like. The rest, the student body, was totally preoccupied with Marxism and its variants, and were in fact antagonistic to liberal democracy as we know it now. And if we push this search all the way back to the time of the “founding fathers,” like Idris Awate, where neither communism nor liberalism were yet in vogue, we find an archaic, feudal world where ethnicity, religion and the cult of the leader were the main inspirations. These feudal characters would not recognize democracy even if it hit them in their faces. If anything, throughout ghedli, what has remained consistent is the disdain that both Jebha and Shaebia have shown for the democratic process.

But what is worse, in this ill-defined revolution, the martyrs have become the final cause for perpetuating further martyrdom. If you ask many Eritreans why do the masses have to undergo so much more sacrifice, they will tell you “because so many have died for it” – that is, in order to keep the legacy of ghedli alive. In other words, the means – the martyrdom of many – has morphed into a primary cause. They don’t realize how circular their reasoning is. A cause doesn’t become a justification because you die for it; its justification should be established prior to the sacrifice. If all the reason we could muster as to why we should keep this nation of ours intact is because so many died for it, we are in deep trouble.

(4) An untenable distinction between Shaebia and PFDJ

There are those who use a semantic sleight of hand to exculpate Shaebia from the horrendous crimes it has been committing against the Eritrean masses. They say, “It is the PFDJ that is committing all the crimes, and not Shaebia.” But Shaebia under any other name remains Shaebia. I am not sure what these apologists would have done if the EPLF had opted to keep its old name rather than its new one, PFDJ. Anyways, it is easy to see that it is the old leadership and its repressive apparatus and the whole nihilist culture brought from mieda that are now to blame for almost all the ills that currently afflict the nation. The fact that there have been few dissenters among Shaebia does nothing to change its identity; in its history, there have been many dissenters, and in all instances what has remained constant is Shaebia’s ability to wipe them out. And, more importantly, almost every policy that it is following now has its roots in mieda.

What we are witnessing now is the exact replica of what had been going on in the fields, down to its minutest details: the ruthless “giffa” (especially of the poor peasants that had nowhere to hide), the proliferation of prisons (Shaebia's underground chambers of horrors), the draconian security apparatus that left nothing to doubt (“Halewa sewra” being its best embodiment), the killing fields of Sahel (the massacres and endless purges: Menkae, Yemin, “jasus,” etc), its confrontational stance with any faction (Jebha, TPLF, EPRP, etc.), the bogus philosophy of self-reliance (“btsfrna,” “bKlstmna”) , its religious policy, with its untenable distinction between “old” and “new” religions (enshrined in its mieda-constitution), the paranoid glass through which it perceives the rest of the world – a philosophy that informs its foreign policy (the encirclement mentality of us versus the world), the ghedli experience that is now being replicated in the national service (with all its nihilist underpinnings), the totalitarian grip under which the teghadelti lived (now imposed all over Eritrea), the culture of martyrdom that sustained ghedli (now invoked to sustain the PFDJ), etc. All of these are now being replicated to their minutest details from the blueprints kept in the murderous heads of Isayas and his henchmen. That is to say, there is nothing new in what is taking place right now; we only failed (willingly) to register the lessons of history - all to our detriment. In the after-independence euphoria, anybody who would dare point at these ugly blots of history was considered a spoiler set out to mar that romantic picture of ghedli that everybody wanted to have and hold.

On all of these counts, the almost unanimous silence of former teghadelti is also amazing. Even those former Shaebia officials who are now openly working to bring down the Isayas regime have yet to admit any of these past atrocities; they are in as much denial as the Highdefites. In fact, their constant invoking of the distinction between Shaebia and PFDJ is mainly motivated by this effort to keep the image of ghedli (and hence, their legacy) pristine.

(5) Exculpating Jebha

For many in the opposition of the Jebha mold, the crisis in Shaebia is all they needed to make a full time job out of rehabilitating Jebha and some of its dubious heroes. But this sounds more hypocritical than the Highdefites’ task of defending Shaebia because, while the Jebha defenders do want us to remember all the atrocities committed by Shaebia, they do not want us to remember even a single event that seems to mar the image of Jebha. All this despite the fact that this organization, throughout its history, has inhabited the worst of two worlds: although it emulated Shaebia in almost all its failings, it lacked the focus the latter displayed in fighting the enemy.

But if there is anything that defines Jebha aptly, it is its sectarianism. This is an organization that was born out of sectarian motives, with ethnic and religious overtones; lived throughout its existence in sectarian squabbles (religious, regional, ethnic, linguistic and ideological); and understandably died as a result of its sectarian malaise. Its only half-hearted effort to reform itself in the 70’s soon floundered because it was never able to distance itself from its sectarian past, all along having been unwilling to let go the sectarian leaders of its past. No wonder that in its ashes, the Jebha factions that have survived it have now neatly aligned themselves along the very fault lines that doomed it to self-destruction. Only now, having come out of their respective closet, they openly wear their religious and ethnic hats all the way to their EDA meetings.

The contradictions that Jebha supporters display could be seen everywhere: They have been diligently digging up all the skeletons they can find in Shaebia’s past (as it should be). But if you point to similar cases in Jebha – Falul, Suriyet Addis, Menfere, Rasai, and all other pre- and post-Adboha massacres. – they throw tantrums. They love to criticize Isaias for every blunder that he makes and for every crime that he commits (again, as it should be). But not only do they not want to hear any negative attribution about their leaders, however inept, undemocratic, sectarian or murderous they were, they also are in the active business of giving them a post-mortem “make over.” They never tire of reminding us of the marginalization of Kunamas under Shaebia (again, as it should be). But if you tell them that in this marginalization, which has a long history behind it, Jebha played a major role, with many of their villages burned down to the ground, many Kunamas killed and their cattle pillaged, they go nuts in anger. Day and night, they never tire of pointing out the inhumane treatment of prisoners under the hands of Shaebia/PFDJ (again, as it should be). But it is in one of the most shameful history of ghedli in Eritrea that Jebha summarily executed its Ethiopian prisoners at a time of its retreat in the late seventies. In this regard, even Shaebia didn’t match this atrocity. I could go on and on: the horrors of giffa (which actually started with Jebha), sexual abuse of women (especially by corrupt cadres and military leaders), endemic corruption of the leadership, etc – all areas that Jebha had excelled well before Shaebia came to be fully identified with them.

Myths and lies

In order to justify this revolution, Eritreans have been accepting all kinds of myths concocted by ghedli without putting them under scrutiny. First and foremost, Eritreans must be made to believe that they have a separate national identity from that of Ethiopia. But this is not as easy task as it seems, for not only has one to establish what is it that differentiates Eritreans from Ethiopians, but also what is it that unites the disparate population groups within Eritrea into one identity. Hence the need for “sewra” to revise history and concoct myths that would show just that. Some of those concoctions are:

(a) That we, Eritreans of different backgrounds (religious, ethnic, regional, linguistic, etc.), have been living in peace and harmony throughout history, especially when left alone by foreign forces. This is totally unsupported with historical evidence. In fact, just the opposite happens to be true: the only peace the land came to know was when law and order was imposed from outside (ex: under the Italians).

(b) That there is such a thing as an “Eritrean identity,” the preservation of which has been the main task of ghedli. But what has transpired from past experience – the pre-Italian history, the Italian era, the pre- and post-federation upheavals and the whole sectarian era of ghedli – is that, in fact, no such univocal identity has ever emerged. Jebha failed precisely because it was unable to craft such an identity, and Shaebia simply repressed the fissures of such an identity.

(c) That the revolution in Eritrea is a case of the oppressed masses rising up against their colonizers. A closer look would show that the truth is much more complicated. The internal trauma that ghedli experienced from its inception until now can be traced to two wrong beginnings that could never meld with one another: the sectarian roots of Jebha with no unitary, progressive vision for the nation and the naïve high school student’s movement (“sheboro”) – something that should have been confined to the school campus – turned lethal with firearms in their hands.

(d) That the history of Kebessa Eritrea is separate from that of the rest of Ethiopia. This probably is the greatest lie concocted in ghedli. To the contrary, the history of Kebessa is closely intertwined with that of Tigray, in particular, and with that of Ethiopia, in general. The revisionist history concocted to prove “ Eritrea’s unique history” by ghedli (and many Eritrean historians) is stunning in the scope of distortions that it undergoes.

It is obvious that this mass denial – the excuses, revisions, myths, lies, “make-overs,” etc. – we saw above is meant for us to escape the hard questions that we ought to ask: What is about us Eritreans, as a people, that has gone awfully wrong? What is about ghedli, in general, and Shaebia, in particular, that is fundamentally flawed? In a follow-up posting, I will try to deal with the latter question first.