Eritrean Independence:
Is It Worth All the Sacrifice? (1)
17 June, 2009 | by Yosief Ghebrehiwet
As Eritreans from both the opposition and Highdef camps have just
finished celebrating Independence Day for a “mission accomplished” and
are now readying themselves to commemorate Martyrs’ Day, I thought it
would only be appropriate to make a connection between these two days
and assess the worth of independence in terms of the sacrifices that have
been paid so far – something that neither of these two camps wants to do.
could be made between the two: is independence worth all the sacrifice
the Eritrean people have gone through the last five decades? They
desperately want to avoid this question because it raises uncomfortable
questions regarding ghedli’s beginning (why it started), middle (how it
was conducted) and end (what the end result is or will be); the fear being
that such a query might lead to the conclusion that at one end of the
connection, the deaths might have been futile; and at the other end, the
much vaunted victory might have been pyrrhic.
The three questions that they desperately want to avoid are:
beginning, middle and end that justifies whatever has happened during the
30 years of struggle as worth all the sacrifice the nation has gone through.
Such a strained justification has been attempted by Saleh Younis in his
article, “The Spark, The Fire and The Torch.” He looks at ghedli from an
insider’s point of view, and confuses the beginning, middle and end of the
means for all that there is to know. From where he stands, neither the
conceptual beginnings of the revolution nor where it is heading for now
fall into his field of vision. Let me provide an example:
All that you could see from your window is a man appearing around a
corner of a block, running very fast throughout the length of that block,
before he disappears around the corner at the end of the block. You may
admire his running skill, but as to whether what you have just seen is a
good or bad thing you cannot say. You need to know why he has been
running and whether he has achieved what he set out to do with his
running to reach that kind of judgment. If he happens to be a thief running
away from those he has just victimized, it is a bad thing, But if he has
been running fast to save a child from drowning that definitely would
count as a good thing.
Saleh’s analysis amounts to reaching a judgment about the “running” of
ghedli without having any clue as to its conceptual beginning and end-
purpose of that running. He confuses the “spark”, the “fire” and the
“torch” for the beginning, middle and end-goal of the revolution. He
confuses the “spark” for a conceptual beginning and the liberation of the
land for the creation of a viable nation, and thereby gets the middle totally
wrong. Below, I will use his article as a foil to address the most important
question that can be asked regarding the intimate connection between
Independence Day and Martyrs’ Day: is independence worth all the
sacrifice the Eritrean people have gone through the last five decades
if neither the Ethiopian occupation nor its future sustainability
justifies it?
The above raised questions though make sense only when we look at the
extent of sacrifice that has been paid so far. So let’s do that first.
Counting the absent
On this subject matter, I once wrote (Eritrea and Terrorism: the Muddled
Middle”):
“When people talk about the high price Eritrea has paid in its struggle for
independence, the highest index that they use is that of the number of
martyrs. This is, indeed, understandable; besides the emotional
connotation it carries, it is also very tangible. It is easy for people to count
real-life entities, dead or alive; all that one has to do then is extrapolate
from one’s loss of beloved ones. But to me, this is a poor way of
assessing our nation’s loss. What is missing is the much greater loss of
what could have been. To give one example, think of all the children
that could have been born. Not only will you have to include all the
number of martyrs (and the families they could have raised), but also the
number of all those who left the country (and the families they could have
raised), the number of all the women who were left behind condemned to
lead a life of spinsterhood (and the families they could have raised), and
the number of all those who waited until middle age to get married – all
consequences of the struggle.
“The result of this abstract addition is to be seen in non-abstract way in
modern-day Eritrea: certain areas in Ethiopia that had similar population
figures in the sixties have now two to three million more people. The loss
then is by that much comparatively high: 65 thousand that were ‘once
present’ as opposed to two million who have been rendered ‘always
absent.’ And this process of ‘counting the absent’ needn’t be confined to
population figures only. It could be applied to education, health, culture,
prosperity, nation-building and so forth.”
As a continuation of the legacy of ghedli, this loss in absence is now
continuing at a dizzying pace under the rule of the Isaias regime – to
provide just two examples, one demographic and the other in education:
Think of the demographic ramifications that the loss of twenty thousand
martyrs, hundreds of thousands of escapees, hundreds of thousands more
stranded in the national service, and hundreds of thousands of women left
behind (with little chance of marriage) will have on the country. And
when it comes to education, think of the fate of education under the
hands of the PFDJ, where the whole system has been systematically
dismantled and militarized. Given that this is the 21st century, where
nations are fiercely competing at a breakneck pace to find their places in
an increasingly globalized world, if we miss the boat now, we might never
be able to catch up. And so on for every other aspect in Eritrean lives
under PFDJ …
In an exquisite series under the title of “Analyze Asmara”, Gabriel Guangul
tells us that that the history of Asmara is the history of interruptions;
every generation has to be uprooted before it finishes whatever it is that it
has started. We can extend this metaphor to the whole of Eritrea, where
half a century of ghedli has been the greatest interruption of all.
And that interruption is still going on, with no end in sight. If we see this
interruption not only in terms of human loss, but also in terms of
demographic ramifications, educational regress, institutional destruction,
cultural deterioration, moral degradation, societal fragmentation and,
above all, family disintegration, it is easy to see that the nation has paid a
prohibitive sacrifice for independence. And that interruption doesn’t seem
to have ended yet. Now the question is: is it worth it?
Confusion and denial: do Eritreans know what they want?
It is clear why Eritreans want to avoid the hard questions mentioned
above because, among other things, they deal with the most sensitive
issue in the land: the Moslem-Christian divide. But one cannot keep
avoiding it because the problem has been the most recalcitrant of all other
problems; not only has it out-survived the Ethiopian problem, it will also
out-survive the Isaias problem.
Of course, both camps – the Moslems and Christians – pretend they don’t
have that deep divide. In fact, they have always blamed outsiders for their
division: the British, the Ethiopians and, now, the Isaias regime. But the
facts say otherwise; all that we have to do is look at how the EDA is
evolving (or devolving) into two opposing camps to see the recalcitrant
nature of this divide. And for those who claim that this is so at the
leadership level only, all that we have to do is look at this problem at
community level in places where no “enemies” are in position to divide us:
at Diaspora. Where I live (in Southern California) these two communities
don’t even want to live near each other (in a city of ten million!) let alone
talk to one another; they remain as strangers to one another as Eskimos
and Tuaregs are to one another. Given a choice then, they seem to
prefer to have nothing to do with one another. Now the question is:
where the land forces them to live with one another, would they be able to
create and sustain a nation? And if not, why did the people have to go
through so much sacrifice without conclusively figuring out if they can
ever live together to create a viable nation?
Many say that the goal of the Eritrean revolution was attained when the
land was liberated, as Saleh vehemently asserts. The closest that he
comes to say anything about the objective is when he writes, “’From
1961 to 1991, you could pick any Eritrean from any corner and ask:
‘what are you fighting for?’ and the answer would be the same: ‘to
liberate the land and the people from Ethiopian occupation.’” But this is a
mid-objective (if it ever has been), for it says nothing about why they
wanted to have a different nation in the first place. One of the non-
answers given to justify the horrendous sacrifice is that we now have the
country – the land – and now all that we need to make it complete is “’
harnet”. That dubious distinction between netsanet and ‘harnet is invoked
to justify this explanation. To those who are obsessed with the “land”,
didn’t Eritreans have their land when they were with Ethiopia? I didn’t see
any Amhara landlord making serfs out of the Eritrean peasants the way
Shaebia is doing now. So if we are to strictly remain true to the definition
of “land ownership”, Eritreans used to own their land better during
“Ethiopian occupation” than they are now. And if “land” is being invoked
to justify the creation of a nation, who had indeed denied Eritreans to
make a nation out of Ethiopia? But if it was the case that they wanted to
have a nation all for themselves – one that they don’t want to share with
the rest of Ethiopians – then we are back to square one: why?
Others tell us that the dream of martyrs was a free democratic nation.
Even if we are to believe such implausible claim, that too doesn’t say
much, for one can argue if that is all they wanted they could have
struggled for a free democratic Ethiopia. Or to put it more bluntly, the
question that ghedli never asked was: what are the chances of building a
functioning democratic nation out of the two population groups in Eritrea
(as opposed with Ethiopia)?
So if neither the liberation of the land nor the aspiration for democracy
explains the goal of the revolution, what could it have possibly been? After
three decades of armed struggle and two decades of independence, that
we are still at dark figuring out the purpose of ghedli (the revolution) is a
testimony to its mute nature. Rudderless, without any vision to guide it,
ghedli had been making up its goal as it marched along through years of
trial and error without ever conclusively figuring out what it was that it
actually wanted.
One clear sign that one has no clue as what he is doing is if he keeps
doing what he has been doing even after he has supposedly achieved his
goal. If someone keeps running after he has reached the finishing line, it is
either because he has no idea what a finishing line is or because he has
had altogether a different end-goal in mind. Lately there has been an
amusing phenomenon taking place among EDA member parties: after
having been gravitating towards two opposing camps for some time, now
they are clearly consolidating into two diametrically opposed groups, with
nothing in between to hold them together. For lack of better words, let me
call them “religion-based” and “secular-based” parties. The consolidation
of the secular-based parties has been slowly evolving for some time. And
recently, with the formation of Eritrean Solidarity Front, four Muslim
parties came to be united into one, with two more hoped to join them
soon – with none other than a fundamentalist Sheikh at the helm of
leadership. Neither camp is aware that they are repeating the same
cycle that started 60 years ago when the political topography of
Eritrea was neatly divided into two opposing camps between Muslims
and Christians. That fits the definition of insanity attributed to Albert
Einstein, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting different results.” There is something amiss in Eritrean
revolution if the main players want to do it all over again by going all the
way back to the starting point of 60 years ago. The case now is even
worse since in between two events has caused the divide to go deeper
than before: (a) the landscape of Islam in the neighborhood has been
radically altered and there is no way Eritrea could escape that influence.
(b) The brutal rule of Shaebia has radicalized many population groups and,
deservedly or not, Shaebia is closely associated with Tigrignas with these
groups.
To fight for liberating the land without having any clue as to what to do
with that land would indeed be a form of insanity. That is why liberating
the land can never be the end objective of the revolution. To me the
measure of success of the Eritrean revolution is whether its people are
capable of creating a viable state within that land that they couldn’t
have built within larger Ethiopia. So not only should they convince us that
whatever they set out to do couldn’t have been done within Ethiopia
proper, but also that it can be achieved within Eritrea. Not only do they
have to point out what is it that holds in common between them, but also
that that commonality could not be had within Ethiopia; or, again, it
wouldn’t be worth all the sacrifice.
If the different factions mentioned above manage to pass this litmus test,
it could only be because there is a huge overlap in their respective visions
of what kind of nation they want to build. But so far, the verdict points to
the opposite direction: Not only do they remain inarticulate in the kind of
vision they have for the nation, but also whatever can be gleaned from
their acts tells us that they have diametrically opposed visions of Eritrea in
their minds with little or no overlap at all; the one looks to Islam and the
Arab world while the other looks to secularism and the West/Habesha for
inspiration. Given their discordant visions, it makes one wonder why they
even want to live under one roof. After all, if this marriage of convenience
hasn’t worked for the last 60 years, why do they expect it to work now –
especially since they are restarting the process “all over again” – as
Gabriel Guangul would have put it – all the way at the starting point?
The amusing part is that they still pretend to be concerned about each
other’s welfare, while always plotting to overwhelm one another. As
pointed above, they have always claimed it is outsiders that divide us,
while the reality has always been that they have never figured out how
or if they could live together. The British who saw through them more
than they saw through themselves, thought they will never make it
together and decided that the Pakistani/Indian solution would be better.
Both groups would have none of it because each group thought it
would eventually prevail against the other. The whole ghedli
experience is a failure in the experimentation of “living together”. Jebha,
after traumatic trials and errors that lasted two decades, was the first to
give up its hands and accept the inevitable by disbanding altogether in
1981. After that, all the splinter groups unabashedly went back to their
ethnic or religious comfort zones, at last relieved to shed off the
nationalist baggage they had been forced to carry for such a long time.
Shaebia, which suppressed the problem rather than resolve it, is still
pretending such a problem doesn’t exist. And now the ghosts of the past
are back again with vengeance.
This confusion at the leadership level is also to be seen at the followers’
level. Many have been lauding this consolidation of the EDA parties into
two camps either because they share their dubious aspirations or because
they naively see it as a step forward in the workings of democracy (“The
fewer parties we have, the better off we are”). I call the latter the politics
of numerology, for all the merit they see is in the numbers; nothing else
seems to matter to them.
In the rest of this article, I want to focus on Saleh’s article, “The Spark,
the Fire and the Torch”, as a foil to elaborate on the state of confusion
and denial that has been afflicting the nation for the last six decades.
What struck me most about the structure of his argument is that it closely
follows the structure of the course of ghedli itself – all emphasis on the
means of how to achieve the objective without ever bothering to find out
the nature of that objective. But even if we believe that ghedli had a noble
cause (without bothering to find out what it is), many of the qualities that
he mentions happen to be outright false. Below, first, I will try to show
that the positive attributes that he mentions, taken on their own, say
nothing – that is, they are devoid of content; and, second, that even when
taken at their face value, most of them don’t hold true.
Ghedli: form without content
Saleh mentions seven virtues that make the Eritrean revolution a success
story. The odd thing about his criteria is that, left to stand on their own,
they say nothing on whether they are desirable qualities or not. It is like
someone asking you whether hot water is desirable or not. Absent the
particular use the questioner has in mind, no one can provide a definite
answer to such a question. If it is for drinking purposes, the answer
might be no. If it is for washing purposes, the answer might be yes. All
Saleh’s virtues have this indeterminate nature in them [in the following, all
within quotation marks are Saleh’s]:
The problem with Saleh’s criteria is they are secondary qualities; they are
not qualities that could be made to stand on their own. That is why one
can come up with a revolution that fulfills all these criteria and yet end up
with one of the lousiest revolutions in history; all these criteria added up
do not necessarily make a revolution just, worthy of its sacrifice or its
results sustainable. And so it goes with every other criterion he mentions.
It is not that some of the characterizations of the revolution are not
undesirable, but that their desirability is parasitic on the nature of the
cause itself. It is only if the cause is justified independent of these qualities
that it would be considered the right thing to do for the revolution to seek
out some of the qualities that he mentions. So lets assume that, for the
sake of argument, the Eritrean cause was just and achievable, and see if
the evidence supports his claims.
[There is an excellent article written by Yebio Woldemariam (“Unfettered
Romanticizing of Ghedli”) that addresses the seven qualities of ghedli that
Saleh mentions. Below, I will deal with four of them. And as best as I can
I will try to avoid repetition, but at certain junctures overlap cannot be
avoided.]
“It was not a proxy war for any other power”:
First, let’s assume – for argument’s sake – that to conduct a proxy war is
an undesirable quality for a revolution to have, as Saleh wants us to
believe. Given the absolutist belief that all proxy wars are intrinsically evil
that he adheres to, I am sure that he believes that not only should Eritrea
not fight others’ wars but also it shouldn’t let others fight for its war. But
the Eritrean case fails on both counts.
Saleh wants us to believe that Arab help was minimal. Well, let me stick to
one case only to cast doubt on this assertion: the case of decades of
Sudan’s role in Eritrea’s revolution. Let me put it bluntly: without Sudan’
s help, the Eritrean revolution would have never existed in the scope
and duration it did; and, consequently, Eritrean independence would
have never materialized without that critical help. This is especially
true in the last two decades of the revolution (the 70’s and 80’s) where a
movement that had tens of thousands of armed guerrillas wouldn’t have
made it for a single month, let alone for years, without the logistical
support of Sudan.
And Sudan’s action was not simply altruistic. Besides serving the cause of
pan-Arabism, this was part of the tit-for-tat game that Sudan was playing
with Ethiopia in its war with the South. What might have confused Saleh
is the fact that the Eritrean fighters considered themselves to be so
independent that they might have never thought that at times they were
involved in proxy wars. But for a war to be identified as proxy, such
identification doesn’t necessarily have to come from those who are
fighting it. It is the facts themselves that determine the nature of the war
that one is involved in.
How about letting others fight Eritrea’s war? Again, let me stick to one
case to make my point: the case of TPLF. Let me also put it bluntly:
without each others’ help, there is no way that either of them (TPLF or
EPLF) could have achieved their respective goals. Let me mention three
cases where the help of TPLF was critical to the very existence of
Shaebia: (a) Without the help of TPLF, it wouldn’t have been able to push
ELF all the way to Sudan. (b) In the early 80’s, the thinning out of
Shaebia’s army in the trenches of Sahel had put its sustainability to
serious doubt. This thinning out occurred for three reasons: First, the
relentless assaults from Ethiopia’s army (from late 70s and early 80s) led
to tens of thousands of casualties and thousands of defections (to
Ethiopia, Jebha and Sudan). Second, the civil war with Jebha also took a
huge toll. And third, after the retreat of the late 70s, the influx of new
recruits turned into a trickle. With rapid depletion of its army and with no
new recruits to fill the gap, Shaebia was in existential crisis. It was at this
critical time that thousands of TPLF guerrillas came to help Shaebia
defend its base, without which the survival of both EPLF and TPLF
would have been put into serious doubt. (c) After the demolishment of
Nadow, neither of these two movements would have made it to their
respective capitals had they not closely collaborated with one another.
This point can be made poignant if we realize that the margin of error that
Shaebia was working with at this critical time was very slim. Given the
above, we could easily say that these two fronts succeeded because they
were willing to make proxy out of one another.
Given that the proxy-ness of Eritrean revolution is to be found at both
ends of its pragmatic approach, it beats me where Saleh got this purist
idea that intends to take the “proxy war” variable out of the revolution.
“It prevailed”:
Did the Taliban prevail in Afghanistan? Well yes, for just few years after
the Soviets left in defeat. But their fundamentalist views, with the
absolutist conviction that certain “truths” have to be relentlessly pursued
irrespective of the context, led them to their demise. The Taliban are
known for their fighting skill and bravery, but so are they for their
immense stupidity. The idea that somehow they could prevail after 9/11
simply because they had the “truth” on their side could only originate
from a worldview so isolated that it has become totally incapable of
factoring in outside variables in its survival strategy. So has been the case
of Eritrea, where the “truth” is supposed to prevail irrespective of outside
forces closing in.
It seems to me it is too early for Eritrea to claim a victory in its
independence, as Saleh is obviously doing. Eritrea’s days of peaceful
independence lasted just seven years. Since then, the whole nation has
been living behind the trenches. All that is different from the days of
ghedli is that the trenches of Sahel have been moved further out to the
borders. Aside from that, the nation is still fighting for its “territorial
integrity”. Here is an example I provided at one time to elucidate on this
precarious condition: A football player who catches the ball for a blip of a
second before it slips through his hands to touch the ground cannot be
said to have “prevailed”; no referee would give the team a point for its
player “almost catching the ball”; one either catches or doesn’t catch a
ball. Similarly, seven years in a nation’s history is a blip of a second. The
judgment of whether Eritrea has prevailed requires a historical
distance in timing which is not available to us now. It is too early to
tell whether the ball is conclusively in Eritrea’s hands or is slipping, on its
way to touch the ground. And I am not even talking of internal variables
set to tear it apart, religious and ethnic strife being the most prominent
ones. So I would advise Saleh not to be so sanguine on this point.
The Isaias regime, like its Taliban counterpart, is known not only for its
immense brutality but also for its immense stupidity. Given that it has
always been working with the slightest margin of error, the history of
Shaebia is a history of bouncing back from the edges of disaster.
Unfortunately, this has instilled a sense of invincibility in it – one that has
been driving it from one misadventure to another. But those adventurous
ones who make a habit of returning from the edges of disaster often
perish in a single disaster.
“It had genuine popular participation”:
This probably is the most misstated part of the revolution that one can put
in the form of paradox to point at its fallacy: ghedli was most popular
with those who least paid for it, mainly the urban population (and
now among Diaspora Eritreans), and remained least popular among
those who paid the most, mainly the peasants. If so, it is precisely
because ghedli had been primarily looked through the eyes of urban
Eritrea that it seemed to have been a result of genuine popular
participation. In fact, one can come up with a rough formula how this
perception worked: the more distanced one is from the day-to-day reality
of ghedli, the more glamour it had for him – as all kinds of romanticizing
go. So far as the urbanites looked at ghedli from a safe distance, they
were all for it. As urban Eritrea came under the rule of ghedli with
independence, all the romance went out through the window. But for the
peasants, who had been living with ghedli for years before independence,
the romance was dead long before it showed up in urban Eritrea. And as
for Diaspora Eritreans, who are the most distanced of all, the romance
still remains as potent as ever.
But the best measurement of “popular participation” would be joining the
Fronts. So let us look at the so-called voluntary nature of the struggle:
those who were forced to join the struggle; those who changed their
minds after joining the struggle; and those who decided to oppose the
struggle.
Let me first raise the issue of forced conscription which, by definition,
happens to be just the opposite of popular participation. As a matter of
statistics, the 60’s input in popular participation is almost negligible. When
both Fronts showed up in force in Kebessa in the early 70s, Jebha had a
few thousands and Shaebia didn’t even muster one thousand. The first
massive flow of recruits came soon after that, when students and other
urbanites flocked to the Fronts in their thousands. And the heavy battles in
densely populated areas, and the abuse of Ethiopian soldiers that followed
them, were excellent recruiting means of peasants – a fact that was not
lost on Shaebia, that skillfully exploited it by choosing the place of
conflicts. This flow continued to the late 70s, until the retreat of 78, when
it abruptly came to a screeching halt. People don’t realize that the
popular participation that they often talk about lasted for only about
5 years! After the retreat, not only did the voluntary conscription from
both the urban and rural areas come to a dead halt, many of those who
had already joined were defecting in thousands. There were two main
reasons for this: first, with the retreat, the revolution was losing its luster;
and, second, more importantly, those who had met ghedli first hand were
disillusioned by what they had seen.
But the Ethiopian wereras were going on relentlessly, incrementally taking
their toll to an unsustainable level. As the number of combatants kept
dwindling without any hope of replenishing them with voluntary recruits,
the Fronts saw no other option but to resort to forced conscription. In
fact Jebha, where the disillusionment factor came to materialize earlier to
make it less appealing, had already started giffa by the mid-70s. Shaebia,
which used to deride Jebha for resorting to giffa, followed soon. For
about fifteen years, the peasants of Eritrea were subjected to this ruthless
giffa in its most inhumane form. In Shaebia’s case, it was pure horror; it
didn’t spare underage, women and old. It was these peasants that were
used as fodder in the consecutive onslaughts of Sahel by the Ethiopian
army that lasted for more than a decade. Each of these wereras involved
tens of thousands of soldiers and hence exacted huge losses. If we are to
look at the table of the martyred, I have no doubt that the overwhelming
majority are peasants. This fact alone would put serious doubt to the
voluntary (“popular participation”) nature of ghedli.
It is said that by the mid-80s, not even 10 precent of Shaebia’s army was
voluntary [in comparison, the TPLF’s army was almost made up of
voluntary army from the beginning to the end]. But even with the
“voluntary” component, it might have not been that voluntary. There is
that wrong perception that if you join ghedli voluntarily, your act will be
counted as “popular participation”. As thousands of defections,
desertions, imprisonments and killings attest, it didn’t take long for many
of those who joined ghedli to change their minds. It is not for nothing that
Shaebia was diligently guarding its combatants as it is doing today, if not
more so. At one time, those who defected to Ethiopia were in thousands;
and thousands more escaped to Sudan. Shaebia’s underground prisons
were as full then as they are today. The shoot-at-sight policy at border
crossings that is a cause of outrage now is only a pale imitation of the
horrors of the past.
Then there are those who were so disappointed by the nature of the
Fronts that they rose up in rebellion against them. For instance, the Falul
uprising consisted of at least 5,000 teghadelti – almost a fifth of what
used to constitute Jebha – of which about half were killed and the rest
escaped to Sudan and Ethiopia. There were also others like Menkae,
Yemin and individual dissenters that perished in similar fashion.
Add to all this, all of those who served quietly because they saw no way
out of their predicament, many of whom thought it was the least evil of
the choices available to them then, then you will see how the coercive part
played a great role in ghedli. A good example would be to see how Jebha
teghadelti acted when they were pushed into Sudan. Given their high
disappointment with the state of ghedli, most of them preferred to disband
rather than return to mieda.
“It was fought using conventions of war”:
If Saleh was referring to the Geneva Conventions of War on how ghedli
treated its enemy combatants, there is an ambiguous record on that. If
you take Jebha, for instance, during the retreat of the late 70s, in an
uncalled for barbaric move it killed all its Ethiopian prisoners – hundreds
of them. But the fact that it had by then only hundreds of them (Shaebia
had thousands by that time), after many years of large scale battles and
capturing of towns, attests to the fact that it was killing most of its
captured prisoners all along. Regarding the handling of captured soldiers,
Shaebia had a better record but not as rosy as it makes it seem.
But Saleh might be referring only to the way they treated the civilian
population when he said this: “This is truly what distinguishes the Eritrean
revolution from all the rest. You will be hard pressed to find a single case
where the ELF or EPLF actually targeted civilians.” When I read this, I
thought it was some kind of a joke. Was he, like Rip Van Winkle, sleeping
throughout the ghedli era of three decades? How about the thousands of
civilians that perished starting with Awate himself when he brutally
assaulted the Kunamas to just after the independence when Shaebia
massacred hundreds of Kohayin militias that had already surrendered,
with a long trail of civilian blood in between? Not a single case! Can’t he
even remember what has happened in Keren when many retired policemen
(“Police Abbay”), respected citizens of the town, were taken on suspicion
simply because they used to go to Asmara to collect their monthly
retirement salary (as everyone else did) and summarily executed, never to
be heard of again.
Shaebia’s principle had been, “When in doubt, kill.” They always
preferred to err on the killing side; to them, it would be unforgivable to
find out that someone who had slipped through their justice system turned
out to be a spy. But it is forgivable to find out that someone that they had
executed turned out to be innocent. According to their “conventions of
war”, the revolution can afford the latter but not the former. In the
eighties, when almost all the recruits were results of giffa, the atmosphere
of suspicion was so high that the death squads of Shaebia were working
overtime in killing peasants suspected of spying or planning to flee. That
was especially the case if the peasants happened to be former militias.
And many peasants that managed to escape and join their families were
relentlessly pursued to their villages and killed.
And whenever the Fronts felt that certain population groups were resisting
their incursions, bloodbaths followed (Kunama, Kohayin, Dembelas, etc).
Pitched battles were conducted that over time took thousands of lives.
When Jebha finally overwhelmed Kohayin, after two years of resistance,
and pushed the militias across Mereb to Tigray, the first thing it did was
to confiscate the cattle of the militias’ families and feed its army
[“reconciliation” Jebha style]. If now we are wondering why Shaebia
penalizes parents of deserters, you can easily find precedence in the past.
And a few years later when Kohayin militias successfully rebuffed
Shaebia’s incursions to their stronghold in the hills of Kohayin, the Front’
s frustrated response was to burn their harvest (‘kumitto) in the
unprotected bere’ka.
Even the response to refusal of collaboration, such as refusing to pay a
fee, was met brutally with executions (mafia style) – as the numerous
assassinations in the urban areas attest. For instance, when Shaebia
returned to kebessa Hamassien in the eighties, the land was under total
control of Derghi, and many of those who were forced to work in
‘kebelies refused to collaborate with the Front for fear of their lives
(under the hands of Derghi) and as a result paid dearly with their lives
(under the hands of ghedli). There were hundreds of such assassinations
all over Eritrea. And then there were many others who were killed
because they were suspected of having sympathies with Ethiopia, even
though they were in no way involved in violent acts.
Saleh believes that compared with other fronts, the Eritrean movements
were saints. Well, I will do him a favor and instead compare the crimes of
ghedli against their own people with the crimes of the much dreaded
enemy – Ethiopia! How many of those who were imprisoned by Ethiopia
suspected for collaborating with ghedli or subversion ended up dead? Few
of them! And how many of those imprisoned by ghedli suspected of
collaborating with Ethiopia ended up dead? Almost all of them! And how
many of those suspected of subversion in ghedli ended up dead?
Thousands of them! Shaebia alone is supposed to have killed 5,000 of
them, and that number doesn’t include those that it killed indirectly as in
the case of Falul. And all of this is among its combatants. It doesn’t
include the thousands that perished in clashes with militias and the random
assassinations the guerrillas conducted. Often, when the atrocities of the
Ethiopian army are remembered it is the massacres like Shiib, ‘Una, Mul’
ki and Wekidiba that are mentioned. But, despite their monstrosity, if you
add the numbers, they won’t even be a fraction of what ghedli killed.
Not a single case! Is this guy for real? I am beginning to believe he
actually believes what he says. Talk about romanticizing ghedli! If such a
bright fellow remains a prisoner to a fantasy of his own making, it doesn’t
bode well for Eritrea.
Conclusion
As I mentioned above, Saleh’s analysis has been dead wrong not only on
the seven “virtues” of ghedli, but also on its conceptual beginnings and
end-goal. He rather settles for their technical counterparts. Since to talk
about the end-goal of ghedli is to talk about its conceptual beginnings and
whether they have been realized or not, the two cannot be separated from
one another. In a posting on this issue, I will argue that the two
conceptual beginnings of ghedli - one from the Moslem and the other
from the Christian side – had nothing to do with nationalism and that they
could only be carried out by adopting defensive identities alien to the
people. The sensitive issue of the Muslim-Christian divide will have to
explored extensively and honestly if we are to make any headway on this
subject matter – and this is what I intend to do.
If I can put the aim of the posting that will deal with the conceptual
beginnings of ghedli and its end-goal in one question, it would be: what is
the nature of Moslem-Christian divide and is there a way of bridging it
within proper Eritrea?
Yosief Ghebrehiwet
Ghyo71@hotmail.com
Is It Worth All the Sacrifice? (1)
17 June, 2009 | by Yosief Ghebrehiwet
As Eritreans from both the opposition and Highdef camps have just
finished celebrating Independence Day for a “mission accomplished” and
are now readying themselves to commemorate Martyrs’ Day, I thought it
would only be appropriate to make a connection between these two days
and assess the worth of independence in terms of the sacrifices that have
been paid so far – something that neither of these two camps wants to do.
- The only connection that
they want to emphasize
is that Independence
Day is the day the
martyrs’ dream has
come true, without
having any clue as to
what that dream is all
about. Regarding the
nature of that dream
they are all in deep
denial and utter
confusion.
could be made between the two: is independence worth all the sacrifice
the Eritrean people have gone through the last five decades? They
desperately want to avoid this question because it raises uncomfortable
questions regarding ghedli’s beginning (why it started), middle (how it
was conducted) and end (what the end result is or will be); the fear being
that such a query might lead to the conclusion that at one end of the
connection, the deaths might have been futile; and at the other end, the
much vaunted victory might have been pyrrhic.
The three questions that they desperately want to avoid are:
- 1. The beginning: Was the oppression on the Ethiopian side so
brutal that it justified the kind of horrendous sacrifice that has been
paid in the last five decades? Indeed, with all honesty, can we say
it was it a case of colonialism? And if not, what are the real non-
nationalist aspirations on the two camps – the Moslems and
Christians – that motivated this revolution?
2 The middle: How was ghedli conducted? Was it conducted
commensurate to the nationalist aspiration it professed to have
motivated it? Or did it follow different strands that betray its
religious, ethnic, regional and “urbanite” roots – all of which have
to do with questions of questionable identities, none of which are
nationalist by nature?
3. The end: Is the nation created out of this movement
sustainable? Has nationalism come to Eritrea too late to make any
difference in its people’s quality of life, especially since
globalization and post-modernism have rendered it a poor imitation
of its old robust self, if not totally obsolete? Could the divergent,
and sometimes outright conflicting, aspirations of Moslem Eritrea
and Christian Eritrea be accommodated to create one viable nation
that could make it through the 21st century?
beginning, middle and end that justifies whatever has happened during the
30 years of struggle as worth all the sacrifice the nation has gone through.
Such a strained justification has been attempted by Saleh Younis in his
article, “The Spark, The Fire and The Torch.” He looks at ghedli from an
insider’s point of view, and confuses the beginning, middle and end of the
means for all that there is to know. From where he stands, neither the
conceptual beginnings of the revolution nor where it is heading for now
fall into his field of vision. Let me provide an example:
All that you could see from your window is a man appearing around a
corner of a block, running very fast throughout the length of that block,
before he disappears around the corner at the end of the block. You may
admire his running skill, but as to whether what you have just seen is a
good or bad thing you cannot say. You need to know why he has been
running and whether he has achieved what he set out to do with his
running to reach that kind of judgment. If he happens to be a thief running
away from those he has just victimized, it is a bad thing, But if he has
been running fast to save a child from drowning that definitely would
count as a good thing.
Saleh’s analysis amounts to reaching a judgment about the “running” of
ghedli without having any clue as to its conceptual beginning and end-
purpose of that running. He confuses the “spark”, the “fire” and the
“torch” for the beginning, middle and end-goal of the revolution. He
confuses the “spark” for a conceptual beginning and the liberation of the
land for the creation of a viable nation, and thereby gets the middle totally
wrong. Below, I will use his article as a foil to address the most important
question that can be asked regarding the intimate connection between
Independence Day and Martyrs’ Day: is independence worth all the
sacrifice the Eritrean people have gone through the last five decades
if neither the Ethiopian occupation nor its future sustainability
justifies it?
The above raised questions though make sense only when we look at the
extent of sacrifice that has been paid so far. So let’s do that first.
Counting the absent
On this subject matter, I once wrote (Eritrea and Terrorism: the Muddled
Middle”):
“When people talk about the high price Eritrea has paid in its struggle for
independence, the highest index that they use is that of the number of
martyrs. This is, indeed, understandable; besides the emotional
connotation it carries, it is also very tangible. It is easy for people to count
real-life entities, dead or alive; all that one has to do then is extrapolate
from one’s loss of beloved ones. But to me, this is a poor way of
assessing our nation’s loss. What is missing is the much greater loss of
what could have been. To give one example, think of all the children
that could have been born. Not only will you have to include all the
number of martyrs (and the families they could have raised), but also the
number of all those who left the country (and the families they could have
raised), the number of all the women who were left behind condemned to
lead a life of spinsterhood (and the families they could have raised), and
the number of all those who waited until middle age to get married – all
consequences of the struggle.
“The result of this abstract addition is to be seen in non-abstract way in
modern-day Eritrea: certain areas in Ethiopia that had similar population
figures in the sixties have now two to three million more people. The loss
then is by that much comparatively high: 65 thousand that were ‘once
present’ as opposed to two million who have been rendered ‘always
absent.’ And this process of ‘counting the absent’ needn’t be confined to
population figures only. It could be applied to education, health, culture,
prosperity, nation-building and so forth.”
As a continuation of the legacy of ghedli, this loss in absence is now
continuing at a dizzying pace under the rule of the Isaias regime – to
provide just two examples, one demographic and the other in education:
Think of the demographic ramifications that the loss of twenty thousand
martyrs, hundreds of thousands of escapees, hundreds of thousands more
stranded in the national service, and hundreds of thousands of women left
behind (with little chance of marriage) will have on the country. And
when it comes to education, think of the fate of education under the
hands of the PFDJ, where the whole system has been systematically
dismantled and militarized. Given that this is the 21st century, where
nations are fiercely competing at a breakneck pace to find their places in
an increasingly globalized world, if we miss the boat now, we might never
be able to catch up. And so on for every other aspect in Eritrean lives
under PFDJ …
In an exquisite series under the title of “Analyze Asmara”, Gabriel Guangul
tells us that that the history of Asmara is the history of interruptions;
every generation has to be uprooted before it finishes whatever it is that it
has started. We can extend this metaphor to the whole of Eritrea, where
half a century of ghedli has been the greatest interruption of all.
And that interruption is still going on, with no end in sight. If we see this
interruption not only in terms of human loss, but also in terms of
demographic ramifications, educational regress, institutional destruction,
cultural deterioration, moral degradation, societal fragmentation and,
above all, family disintegration, it is easy to see that the nation has paid a
prohibitive sacrifice for independence. And that interruption doesn’t seem
to have ended yet. Now the question is: is it worth it?
Confusion and denial: do Eritreans know what they want?
It is clear why Eritreans want to avoid the hard questions mentioned
above because, among other things, they deal with the most sensitive
issue in the land: the Moslem-Christian divide. But one cannot keep
avoiding it because the problem has been the most recalcitrant of all other
problems; not only has it out-survived the Ethiopian problem, it will also
out-survive the Isaias problem.
Of course, both camps – the Moslems and Christians – pretend they don’t
have that deep divide. In fact, they have always blamed outsiders for their
division: the British, the Ethiopians and, now, the Isaias regime. But the
facts say otherwise; all that we have to do is look at how the EDA is
evolving (or devolving) into two opposing camps to see the recalcitrant
nature of this divide. And for those who claim that this is so at the
leadership level only, all that we have to do is look at this problem at
community level in places where no “enemies” are in position to divide us:
at Diaspora. Where I live (in Southern California) these two communities
don’t even want to live near each other (in a city of ten million!) let alone
talk to one another; they remain as strangers to one another as Eskimos
and Tuaregs are to one another. Given a choice then, they seem to
prefer to have nothing to do with one another. Now the question is:
where the land forces them to live with one another, would they be able to
create and sustain a nation? And if not, why did the people have to go
through so much sacrifice without conclusively figuring out if they can
ever live together to create a viable nation?
Many say that the goal of the Eritrean revolution was attained when the
land was liberated, as Saleh vehemently asserts. The closest that he
comes to say anything about the objective is when he writes, “’From
1961 to 1991, you could pick any Eritrean from any corner and ask:
‘what are you fighting for?’ and the answer would be the same: ‘to
liberate the land and the people from Ethiopian occupation.’” But this is a
mid-objective (if it ever has been), for it says nothing about why they
wanted to have a different nation in the first place. One of the non-
answers given to justify the horrendous sacrifice is that we now have the
country – the land – and now all that we need to make it complete is “’
harnet”. That dubious distinction between netsanet and ‘harnet is invoked
to justify this explanation. To those who are obsessed with the “land”,
didn’t Eritreans have their land when they were with Ethiopia? I didn’t see
any Amhara landlord making serfs out of the Eritrean peasants the way
Shaebia is doing now. So if we are to strictly remain true to the definition
of “land ownership”, Eritreans used to own their land better during
“Ethiopian occupation” than they are now. And if “land” is being invoked
to justify the creation of a nation, who had indeed denied Eritreans to
make a nation out of Ethiopia? But if it was the case that they wanted to
have a nation all for themselves – one that they don’t want to share with
the rest of Ethiopians – then we are back to square one: why?
Others tell us that the dream of martyrs was a free democratic nation.
Even if we are to believe such implausible claim, that too doesn’t say
much, for one can argue if that is all they wanted they could have
struggled for a free democratic Ethiopia. Or to put it more bluntly, the
question that ghedli never asked was: what are the chances of building a
functioning democratic nation out of the two population groups in Eritrea
(as opposed with Ethiopia)?
So if neither the liberation of the land nor the aspiration for democracy
explains the goal of the revolution, what could it have possibly been? After
three decades of armed struggle and two decades of independence, that
we are still at dark figuring out the purpose of ghedli (the revolution) is a
testimony to its mute nature. Rudderless, without any vision to guide it,
ghedli had been making up its goal as it marched along through years of
trial and error without ever conclusively figuring out what it was that it
actually wanted.
One clear sign that one has no clue as what he is doing is if he keeps
doing what he has been doing even after he has supposedly achieved his
goal. If someone keeps running after he has reached the finishing line, it is
either because he has no idea what a finishing line is or because he has
had altogether a different end-goal in mind. Lately there has been an
amusing phenomenon taking place among EDA member parties: after
having been gravitating towards two opposing camps for some time, now
they are clearly consolidating into two diametrically opposed groups, with
nothing in between to hold them together. For lack of better words, let me
call them “religion-based” and “secular-based” parties. The consolidation
of the secular-based parties has been slowly evolving for some time. And
recently, with the formation of Eritrean Solidarity Front, four Muslim
parties came to be united into one, with two more hoped to join them
soon – with none other than a fundamentalist Sheikh at the helm of
leadership. Neither camp is aware that they are repeating the same
cycle that started 60 years ago when the political topography of
Eritrea was neatly divided into two opposing camps between Muslims
and Christians. That fits the definition of insanity attributed to Albert
Einstein, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting different results.” There is something amiss in Eritrean
revolution if the main players want to do it all over again by going all the
way back to the starting point of 60 years ago. The case now is even
worse since in between two events has caused the divide to go deeper
than before: (a) the landscape of Islam in the neighborhood has been
radically altered and there is no way Eritrea could escape that influence.
(b) The brutal rule of Shaebia has radicalized many population groups and,
deservedly or not, Shaebia is closely associated with Tigrignas with these
groups.
To fight for liberating the land without having any clue as to what to do
with that land would indeed be a form of insanity. That is why liberating
the land can never be the end objective of the revolution. To me the
measure of success of the Eritrean revolution is whether its people are
capable of creating a viable state within that land that they couldn’t
have built within larger Ethiopia. So not only should they convince us that
whatever they set out to do couldn’t have been done within Ethiopia
proper, but also that it can be achieved within Eritrea. Not only do they
have to point out what is it that holds in common between them, but also
that that commonality could not be had within Ethiopia; or, again, it
wouldn’t be worth all the sacrifice.
If the different factions mentioned above manage to pass this litmus test,
it could only be because there is a huge overlap in their respective visions
of what kind of nation they want to build. But so far, the verdict points to
the opposite direction: Not only do they remain inarticulate in the kind of
vision they have for the nation, but also whatever can be gleaned from
their acts tells us that they have diametrically opposed visions of Eritrea in
their minds with little or no overlap at all; the one looks to Islam and the
Arab world while the other looks to secularism and the West/Habesha for
inspiration. Given their discordant visions, it makes one wonder why they
even want to live under one roof. After all, if this marriage of convenience
hasn’t worked for the last 60 years, why do they expect it to work now –
especially since they are restarting the process “all over again” – as
Gabriel Guangul would have put it – all the way at the starting point?
The amusing part is that they still pretend to be concerned about each
other’s welfare, while always plotting to overwhelm one another. As
pointed above, they have always claimed it is outsiders that divide us,
while the reality has always been that they have never figured out how
or if they could live together. The British who saw through them more
than they saw through themselves, thought they will never make it
together and decided that the Pakistani/Indian solution would be better.
Both groups would have none of it because each group thought it
would eventually prevail against the other. The whole ghedli
experience is a failure in the experimentation of “living together”. Jebha,
after traumatic trials and errors that lasted two decades, was the first to
give up its hands and accept the inevitable by disbanding altogether in
1981. After that, all the splinter groups unabashedly went back to their
ethnic or religious comfort zones, at last relieved to shed off the
nationalist baggage they had been forced to carry for such a long time.
Shaebia, which suppressed the problem rather than resolve it, is still
pretending such a problem doesn’t exist. And now the ghosts of the past
are back again with vengeance.
This confusion at the leadership level is also to be seen at the followers’
level. Many have been lauding this consolidation of the EDA parties into
two camps either because they share their dubious aspirations or because
they naively see it as a step forward in the workings of democracy (“The
fewer parties we have, the better off we are”). I call the latter the politics
of numerology, for all the merit they see is in the numbers; nothing else
seems to matter to them.
In the rest of this article, I want to focus on Saleh’s article, “The Spark,
the Fire and the Torch”, as a foil to elaborate on the state of confusion
and denial that has been afflicting the nation for the last six decades.
What struck me most about the structure of his argument is that it closely
follows the structure of the course of ghedli itself – all emphasis on the
means of how to achieve the objective without ever bothering to find out
the nature of that objective. But even if we believe that ghedli had a noble
cause (without bothering to find out what it is), many of the qualities that
he mentions happen to be outright false. Below, first, I will try to show
that the positive attributes that he mentions, taken on their own, say
nothing – that is, they are devoid of content; and, second, that even when
taken at their face value, most of them don’t hold true.
Ghedli: form without content
Saleh mentions seven virtues that make the Eritrean revolution a success
story. The odd thing about his criteria is that, left to stand on their own,
they say nothing on whether they are desirable qualities or not. It is like
someone asking you whether hot water is desirable or not. Absent the
particular use the questioner has in mind, no one can provide a definite
answer to such a question. If it is for drinking purposes, the answer
might be no. If it is for washing purposes, the answer might be yes. All
Saleh’s virtues have this indeterminate nature in them [in the following, all
within quotation marks are Saleh’s]:
- 1. “[Ghedli] was purpose-driven”: A criminal too could be
purpose-driven, but that doesn’t make the purpose right. What one
needs to show first is whether the purpose is worthy of the
sacrifice it demands. And to say that the purpose for the struggle
for independence was “to liberate the land and the people from
Ethiopian occupation” doesn’t say anything at all. The true criteria
ought to be: Why did they want independence from Ethiopia? And
if they did really know what they wanted, was it desirable? And if
so, did they ever achieve it; and if not, will they ever achieve it?
2. “It had organic leadership”: That probably is the most absurd
one. 2The Isaiases and Abdella Idrisis are indeed as organic as
could be, but I would rather have an Italian company (let alone an
Eritrean from Diaspora) run the nation than these two monsters. I
would even go further than that: I would rather have Haile Selassie
(dead or alive) rule Eritrea than our home-grown toxic criminals.
All that I have to do is compare the Asmara of today with the
Asmara of 60’s to see the stark difference that makes me prefer
the latter.
3. “It was not a proxy war for any other power”: Again, if a war
is proxy or not doesn’t say anything about its justness or viability.
One can have a proxy war that happens to be just or a war that is
not proxy and yet remains unjust. Behind Saleh’s rationale is that
naïve search for a “genuine” Eritrean revolution, unadulterated with
foreign influence – as only the romantics would insist. To the
contrary, I wouldn’t have minded the war in Eritrea being a proxy
one if that could have shortened the cycle of violence that lasted
decades.
4. “It prevailed”: Again, “success” is no substitute for a just
cause. Many a just cause in history has failed, and many dubious
causes have triumphed. The history of the world is full of
carcasses of people gone extinct through no fault of theirs (ex: Red
Indians, Australian aborigines, etc.). The Taliban did prevail against
the Soviets, but they took the nation back into the Stone Age.
Success is mute when it comes to justification. And if “success” is
to be given the wait Saleh wants it to have, neither Jebha nor its
founder would fare well under this criterion.
5. “It had genuine popular participation”: Behind this criterion is
that absolutist view that popular participation makes a cause right.
A whole people can share a cause and that cause could be dead
wrong. Nazism was a popular movement in Germany, but no one
in his right mind would now say it was a just cause. Besides, there
is a reason why popular participation should be confined to a
democratic context: though the popular participation remains
constant, the cause keeps changing. No such evolving cause is
possible under the barrel of the gun.
6. “It was swimming against the tides of history”: Again, this says
nothing at all about the justness or viability of the cause. A criminal
movement could swim against the tides of history and triumph.
That is to say there are many instances in history where a disaster
could have easily been prevented if this or that had been done. So
swimming against the tide of history is something that both just
and unjust causes have accomplished at one time or another.
7. “It was fought using conventions of war”: It is also easy to
imagine a war conducted flawlessly – that is, according to the
conventions of war – but nevertheless an aimless one. One can
imagine the US conducting a flawless war in Iraq so as to disarm
Saddam Hussein of its weapons of mass destruction. If there were
no such weapons to be found, that war would remain unjust even
if it was fought according to conventions of war. That is to say,
the way the war is fought, by itself, would tell us nothing about its
justification.
The problem with Saleh’s criteria is they are secondary qualities; they are
not qualities that could be made to stand on their own. That is why one
can come up with a revolution that fulfills all these criteria and yet end up
with one of the lousiest revolutions in history; all these criteria added up
do not necessarily make a revolution just, worthy of its sacrifice or its
results sustainable. And so it goes with every other criterion he mentions.
It is not that some of the characterizations of the revolution are not
undesirable, but that their desirability is parasitic on the nature of the
cause itself. It is only if the cause is justified independent of these qualities
that it would be considered the right thing to do for the revolution to seek
out some of the qualities that he mentions. So lets assume that, for the
sake of argument, the Eritrean cause was just and achievable, and see if
the evidence supports his claims.
[There is an excellent article written by Yebio Woldemariam (“Unfettered
Romanticizing of Ghedli”) that addresses the seven qualities of ghedli that
Saleh mentions. Below, I will deal with four of them. And as best as I can
I will try to avoid repetition, but at certain junctures overlap cannot be
avoided.]
“It was not a proxy war for any other power”:
First, let’s assume – for argument’s sake – that to conduct a proxy war is
an undesirable quality for a revolution to have, as Saleh wants us to
believe. Given the absolutist belief that all proxy wars are intrinsically evil
that he adheres to, I am sure that he believes that not only should Eritrea
not fight others’ wars but also it shouldn’t let others fight for its war. But
the Eritrean case fails on both counts.
Saleh wants us to believe that Arab help was minimal. Well, let me stick to
one case only to cast doubt on this assertion: the case of decades of
Sudan’s role in Eritrea’s revolution. Let me put it bluntly: without Sudan’
s help, the Eritrean revolution would have never existed in the scope
and duration it did; and, consequently, Eritrean independence would
have never materialized without that critical help. This is especially
true in the last two decades of the revolution (the 70’s and 80’s) where a
movement that had tens of thousands of armed guerrillas wouldn’t have
made it for a single month, let alone for years, without the logistical
support of Sudan.
And Sudan’s action was not simply altruistic. Besides serving the cause of
pan-Arabism, this was part of the tit-for-tat game that Sudan was playing
with Ethiopia in its war with the South. What might have confused Saleh
is the fact that the Eritrean fighters considered themselves to be so
independent that they might have never thought that at times they were
involved in proxy wars. But for a war to be identified as proxy, such
identification doesn’t necessarily have to come from those who are
fighting it. It is the facts themselves that determine the nature of the war
that one is involved in.
How about letting others fight Eritrea’s war? Again, let me stick to one
case to make my point: the case of TPLF. Let me also put it bluntly:
without each others’ help, there is no way that either of them (TPLF or
EPLF) could have achieved their respective goals. Let me mention three
cases where the help of TPLF was critical to the very existence of
Shaebia: (a) Without the help of TPLF, it wouldn’t have been able to push
ELF all the way to Sudan. (b) In the early 80’s, the thinning out of
Shaebia’s army in the trenches of Sahel had put its sustainability to
serious doubt. This thinning out occurred for three reasons: First, the
relentless assaults from Ethiopia’s army (from late 70s and early 80s) led
to tens of thousands of casualties and thousands of defections (to
Ethiopia, Jebha and Sudan). Second, the civil war with Jebha also took a
huge toll. And third, after the retreat of the late 70s, the influx of new
recruits turned into a trickle. With rapid depletion of its army and with no
new recruits to fill the gap, Shaebia was in existential crisis. It was at this
critical time that thousands of TPLF guerrillas came to help Shaebia
defend its base, without which the survival of both EPLF and TPLF
would have been put into serious doubt. (c) After the demolishment of
Nadow, neither of these two movements would have made it to their
respective capitals had they not closely collaborated with one another.
This point can be made poignant if we realize that the margin of error that
Shaebia was working with at this critical time was very slim. Given the
above, we could easily say that these two fronts succeeded because they
were willing to make proxy out of one another.
Given that the proxy-ness of Eritrean revolution is to be found at both
ends of its pragmatic approach, it beats me where Saleh got this purist
idea that intends to take the “proxy war” variable out of the revolution.
“It prevailed”:
Did the Taliban prevail in Afghanistan? Well yes, for just few years after
the Soviets left in defeat. But their fundamentalist views, with the
absolutist conviction that certain “truths” have to be relentlessly pursued
irrespective of the context, led them to their demise. The Taliban are
known for their fighting skill and bravery, but so are they for their
immense stupidity. The idea that somehow they could prevail after 9/11
simply because they had the “truth” on their side could only originate
from a worldview so isolated that it has become totally incapable of
factoring in outside variables in its survival strategy. So has been the case
of Eritrea, where the “truth” is supposed to prevail irrespective of outside
forces closing in.
It seems to me it is too early for Eritrea to claim a victory in its
independence, as Saleh is obviously doing. Eritrea’s days of peaceful
independence lasted just seven years. Since then, the whole nation has
been living behind the trenches. All that is different from the days of
ghedli is that the trenches of Sahel have been moved further out to the
borders. Aside from that, the nation is still fighting for its “territorial
integrity”. Here is an example I provided at one time to elucidate on this
precarious condition: A football player who catches the ball for a blip of a
second before it slips through his hands to touch the ground cannot be
said to have “prevailed”; no referee would give the team a point for its
player “almost catching the ball”; one either catches or doesn’t catch a
ball. Similarly, seven years in a nation’s history is a blip of a second. The
judgment of whether Eritrea has prevailed requires a historical
distance in timing which is not available to us now. It is too early to
tell whether the ball is conclusively in Eritrea’s hands or is slipping, on its
way to touch the ground. And I am not even talking of internal variables
set to tear it apart, religious and ethnic strife being the most prominent
ones. So I would advise Saleh not to be so sanguine on this point.
The Isaias regime, like its Taliban counterpart, is known not only for its
immense brutality but also for its immense stupidity. Given that it has
always been working with the slightest margin of error, the history of
Shaebia is a history of bouncing back from the edges of disaster.
Unfortunately, this has instilled a sense of invincibility in it – one that has
been driving it from one misadventure to another. But those adventurous
ones who make a habit of returning from the edges of disaster often
perish in a single disaster.
“It had genuine popular participation”:
This probably is the most misstated part of the revolution that one can put
in the form of paradox to point at its fallacy: ghedli was most popular
with those who least paid for it, mainly the urban population (and
now among Diaspora Eritreans), and remained least popular among
those who paid the most, mainly the peasants. If so, it is precisely
because ghedli had been primarily looked through the eyes of urban
Eritrea that it seemed to have been a result of genuine popular
participation. In fact, one can come up with a rough formula how this
perception worked: the more distanced one is from the day-to-day reality
of ghedli, the more glamour it had for him – as all kinds of romanticizing
go. So far as the urbanites looked at ghedli from a safe distance, they
were all for it. As urban Eritrea came under the rule of ghedli with
independence, all the romance went out through the window. But for the
peasants, who had been living with ghedli for years before independence,
the romance was dead long before it showed up in urban Eritrea. And as
for Diaspora Eritreans, who are the most distanced of all, the romance
still remains as potent as ever.
But the best measurement of “popular participation” would be joining the
Fronts. So let us look at the so-called voluntary nature of the struggle:
those who were forced to join the struggle; those who changed their
minds after joining the struggle; and those who decided to oppose the
struggle.
Let me first raise the issue of forced conscription which, by definition,
happens to be just the opposite of popular participation. As a matter of
statistics, the 60’s input in popular participation is almost negligible. When
both Fronts showed up in force in Kebessa in the early 70s, Jebha had a
few thousands and Shaebia didn’t even muster one thousand. The first
massive flow of recruits came soon after that, when students and other
urbanites flocked to the Fronts in their thousands. And the heavy battles in
densely populated areas, and the abuse of Ethiopian soldiers that followed
them, were excellent recruiting means of peasants – a fact that was not
lost on Shaebia, that skillfully exploited it by choosing the place of
conflicts. This flow continued to the late 70s, until the retreat of 78, when
it abruptly came to a screeching halt. People don’t realize that the
popular participation that they often talk about lasted for only about
5 years! After the retreat, not only did the voluntary conscription from
both the urban and rural areas come to a dead halt, many of those who
had already joined were defecting in thousands. There were two main
reasons for this: first, with the retreat, the revolution was losing its luster;
and, second, more importantly, those who had met ghedli first hand were
disillusioned by what they had seen.
But the Ethiopian wereras were going on relentlessly, incrementally taking
their toll to an unsustainable level. As the number of combatants kept
dwindling without any hope of replenishing them with voluntary recruits,
the Fronts saw no other option but to resort to forced conscription. In
fact Jebha, where the disillusionment factor came to materialize earlier to
make it less appealing, had already started giffa by the mid-70s. Shaebia,
which used to deride Jebha for resorting to giffa, followed soon. For
about fifteen years, the peasants of Eritrea were subjected to this ruthless
giffa in its most inhumane form. In Shaebia’s case, it was pure horror; it
didn’t spare underage, women and old. It was these peasants that were
used as fodder in the consecutive onslaughts of Sahel by the Ethiopian
army that lasted for more than a decade. Each of these wereras involved
tens of thousands of soldiers and hence exacted huge losses. If we are to
look at the table of the martyred, I have no doubt that the overwhelming
majority are peasants. This fact alone would put serious doubt to the
voluntary (“popular participation”) nature of ghedli.
It is said that by the mid-80s, not even 10 precent of Shaebia’s army was
voluntary [in comparison, the TPLF’s army was almost made up of
voluntary army from the beginning to the end]. But even with the
“voluntary” component, it might have not been that voluntary. There is
that wrong perception that if you join ghedli voluntarily, your act will be
counted as “popular participation”. As thousands of defections,
desertions, imprisonments and killings attest, it didn’t take long for many
of those who joined ghedli to change their minds. It is not for nothing that
Shaebia was diligently guarding its combatants as it is doing today, if not
more so. At one time, those who defected to Ethiopia were in thousands;
and thousands more escaped to Sudan. Shaebia’s underground prisons
were as full then as they are today. The shoot-at-sight policy at border
crossings that is a cause of outrage now is only a pale imitation of the
horrors of the past.
Then there are those who were so disappointed by the nature of the
Fronts that they rose up in rebellion against them. For instance, the Falul
uprising consisted of at least 5,000 teghadelti – almost a fifth of what
used to constitute Jebha – of which about half were killed and the rest
escaped to Sudan and Ethiopia. There were also others like Menkae,
Yemin and individual dissenters that perished in similar fashion.
Add to all this, all of those who served quietly because they saw no way
out of their predicament, many of whom thought it was the least evil of
the choices available to them then, then you will see how the coercive part
played a great role in ghedli. A good example would be to see how Jebha
teghadelti acted when they were pushed into Sudan. Given their high
disappointment with the state of ghedli, most of them preferred to disband
rather than return to mieda.
“It was fought using conventions of war”:
If Saleh was referring to the Geneva Conventions of War on how ghedli
treated its enemy combatants, there is an ambiguous record on that. If
you take Jebha, for instance, during the retreat of the late 70s, in an
uncalled for barbaric move it killed all its Ethiopian prisoners – hundreds
of them. But the fact that it had by then only hundreds of them (Shaebia
had thousands by that time), after many years of large scale battles and
capturing of towns, attests to the fact that it was killing most of its
captured prisoners all along. Regarding the handling of captured soldiers,
Shaebia had a better record but not as rosy as it makes it seem.
But Saleh might be referring only to the way they treated the civilian
population when he said this: “This is truly what distinguishes the Eritrean
revolution from all the rest. You will be hard pressed to find a single case
where the ELF or EPLF actually targeted civilians.” When I read this, I
thought it was some kind of a joke. Was he, like Rip Van Winkle, sleeping
throughout the ghedli era of three decades? How about the thousands of
civilians that perished starting with Awate himself when he brutally
assaulted the Kunamas to just after the independence when Shaebia
massacred hundreds of Kohayin militias that had already surrendered,
with a long trail of civilian blood in between? Not a single case! Can’t he
even remember what has happened in Keren when many retired policemen
(“Police Abbay”), respected citizens of the town, were taken on suspicion
simply because they used to go to Asmara to collect their monthly
retirement salary (as everyone else did) and summarily executed, never to
be heard of again.
Shaebia’s principle had been, “When in doubt, kill.” They always
preferred to err on the killing side; to them, it would be unforgivable to
find out that someone who had slipped through their justice system turned
out to be a spy. But it is forgivable to find out that someone that they had
executed turned out to be innocent. According to their “conventions of
war”, the revolution can afford the latter but not the former. In the
eighties, when almost all the recruits were results of giffa, the atmosphere
of suspicion was so high that the death squads of Shaebia were working
overtime in killing peasants suspected of spying or planning to flee. That
was especially the case if the peasants happened to be former militias.
And many peasants that managed to escape and join their families were
relentlessly pursued to their villages and killed.
And whenever the Fronts felt that certain population groups were resisting
their incursions, bloodbaths followed (Kunama, Kohayin, Dembelas, etc).
Pitched battles were conducted that over time took thousands of lives.
When Jebha finally overwhelmed Kohayin, after two years of resistance,
and pushed the militias across Mereb to Tigray, the first thing it did was
to confiscate the cattle of the militias’ families and feed its army
[“reconciliation” Jebha style]. If now we are wondering why Shaebia
penalizes parents of deserters, you can easily find precedence in the past.
And a few years later when Kohayin militias successfully rebuffed
Shaebia’s incursions to their stronghold in the hills of Kohayin, the Front’
s frustrated response was to burn their harvest (‘kumitto) in the
unprotected bere’ka.
Even the response to refusal of collaboration, such as refusing to pay a
fee, was met brutally with executions (mafia style) – as the numerous
assassinations in the urban areas attest. For instance, when Shaebia
returned to kebessa Hamassien in the eighties, the land was under total
control of Derghi, and many of those who were forced to work in
‘kebelies refused to collaborate with the Front for fear of their lives
(under the hands of Derghi) and as a result paid dearly with their lives
(under the hands of ghedli). There were hundreds of such assassinations
all over Eritrea. And then there were many others who were killed
because they were suspected of having sympathies with Ethiopia, even
though they were in no way involved in violent acts.
Saleh believes that compared with other fronts, the Eritrean movements
were saints. Well, I will do him a favor and instead compare the crimes of
ghedli against their own people with the crimes of the much dreaded
enemy – Ethiopia! How many of those who were imprisoned by Ethiopia
suspected for collaborating with ghedli or subversion ended up dead? Few
of them! And how many of those imprisoned by ghedli suspected of
collaborating with Ethiopia ended up dead? Almost all of them! And how
many of those suspected of subversion in ghedli ended up dead?
Thousands of them! Shaebia alone is supposed to have killed 5,000 of
them, and that number doesn’t include those that it killed indirectly as in
the case of Falul. And all of this is among its combatants. It doesn’t
include the thousands that perished in clashes with militias and the random
assassinations the guerrillas conducted. Often, when the atrocities of the
Ethiopian army are remembered it is the massacres like Shiib, ‘Una, Mul’
ki and Wekidiba that are mentioned. But, despite their monstrosity, if you
add the numbers, they won’t even be a fraction of what ghedli killed.
Not a single case! Is this guy for real? I am beginning to believe he
actually believes what he says. Talk about romanticizing ghedli! If such a
bright fellow remains a prisoner to a fantasy of his own making, it doesn’t
bode well for Eritrea.
Conclusion
As I mentioned above, Saleh’s analysis has been dead wrong not only on
the seven “virtues” of ghedli, but also on its conceptual beginnings and
end-goal. He rather settles for their technical counterparts. Since to talk
about the end-goal of ghedli is to talk about its conceptual beginnings and
whether they have been realized or not, the two cannot be separated from
one another. In a posting on this issue, I will argue that the two
conceptual beginnings of ghedli - one from the Moslem and the other
from the Christian side – had nothing to do with nationalism and that they
could only be carried out by adopting defensive identities alien to the
people. The sensitive issue of the Muslim-Christian divide will have to
explored extensively and honestly if we are to make any headway on this
subject matter – and this is what I intend to do.
If I can put the aim of the posting that will deal with the conceptual
beginnings of ghedli and its end-goal in one question, it would be: what is
the nature of Moslem-Christian divide and is there a way of bridging it
within proper Eritrea?
Yosief Ghebrehiwet
Ghyo71@hotmail.com
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