Drawing the Line

       Eritrea’s problem is ‘Woyane’.
        Hit the ‘wrong answer’ buzzer button!
      PFDJ’s problem might be ‘Woyane’ (or vice versa), but Eritrea’s problem is ‘PFDJ’.

 Some people ask why this writer continuously writes against the current Eritrean regime.  After all, my family is provided for nicely here – thanks to Canada.  As my friend like to say, the transportation business has afforded us to acquire all the worldly goods.  Above all, my Canada allows me to dream, to aspire – and to live without fear of looking over my shoulder, a priceless wealth.

But my Eritrea keeps pleading to my Canada.  My immediate and extended families, friends and their families in Eritrea, in Sudan, in South Africa and every country in-between want my help – to send them money they can’t earn on that Slavery Campaign or in foreign land, or to sponsor them to bring them to Canada.  They shout, they cry, and they beg me to take them out of their hellhole and bring them to Canada.  “If you can’t help us in our hour of need, what good is our relation?” 

One can ignore them and live a worldly life here.  But we know these people too well.  We have grown up with them, eaten with them, lived with them, played with them – how could we forget?  Probably the next generation that is born and grows up here won’t have that burden.  My children, probably in their blessing, don’t have that connection – that burden.

I can’t blame my blood-and-flesh, my fellow countrymen, who are asking for my help.  I know that these are proud people who are reduced to begging for my help.  I know that they are tormented to ask for my help, as I am tormented to hear them ask for help.   I can’t blame them for asking me for help at their darkest hour.

But there must be somebody to be blamed for our predicaments – the predicament of asking for help, even begging, and for feeling helpless.  I can only blame PFDJ for our predicaments.

Drawing the Line

We all reflect back at a time of adversity, rather than during prosperity, to assess what went wrong.  Without dwelling on the mistakes [and this isn’t Monday quarterbacking] of the conflict with Ethiopia, it is important to understand why we must draw the line against the PFDJ regime.

At a time of external threats and conflicts, people of any nation are asked to rally behind their leaders and governments.  Although the cry for unity is legitimate, the politics of ‘unity for sake of thwarting external threat’ introduces dangerous domestic politics into a nation.  Dictators (or wannabes) can be created or perpetuated by the simple of act of sparking conflict with their neighboring countries.  A dictator who doesn’t want to be bound by country’s constitution finds one million reasons to pursue destructive politics, and most conveniently a war with some illusionary-turned-real external enemy.

PIA’s war against Ethiopia could have been avoided.  A ‘learning nation’ would have learned from our political mistakes with Yemen.  First, it is important to define ‘political mistakes’.  For instance, Eritrea had legitimate claims over the Hanish Islands, and the Yemeni government may have engaged in act of aggression by settling its citizens on Eritrean islands.  But the Eritrean ‘political mistake’ wasn’t in claiming the Islands but the manner it pursued to settle the island issue.  Most important, the PFDJ regime overlooked international law in its decision making.  We were all still euphoric over our independent to notice this dangerous precedence. 

But PFDJ should have learned from the Hanish Island political mistake.     

When the conflict with Ethiopia was sprang on us, the questions were,

1.      Didn’t PFDJ learn from the Hanish Island political mistakes, i.e. especially on how to handle international laws and politics?

2.      Or, whether domestic political developments necessitated certain rogue elements within the PFDJ to exploit an easily resolvable border misunderstanding into full fledged conflict?

It is difficult to pin point on any one single issue as the cause of the conflict with Ethiopia.  The EPDRF government may also have needed the conflict with Eritrea to engage in its own internal ‘self-cleansing’.  But what happens on the other side of our international borders is outside our control.  Our question can and should only be, what should we have done on our side of the border to avoid such destructive acts?

During the earlier years of our conflict with Sudan, PIA told us that ‘it takes two to tango’ or as PIA put it, ‘it takes two hands to clap, and that we [Eritrea] aren’t interested in clapping with them [Sudan]’.  The same could have said about the friction with Ethiopia, and our question remains, ‘why was it necessary to clap with Ethiopia?’    

Why clap with Ethiopia?  Was the cause of this conflict the seven Eritrean officers killed, and that the situation simply went out of control from then on?  This is an opportune time to refresh our memory of the following certain salient facts,

  1. May 23, 1997 – the Eritrean Constitution was ratified.  It was hoped that the Eritrean ‘election laws’ and ‘multi-party laws’ were expected to be enacted within a year and for Eritrea to conduct its first ever election within 2 years from its ratification.  Under the constitution, a president can only serve ten years (two five-terms).  PIA, who never had any intention of relinquishing power, may have felt that his astute comrades-in-arms are putting a tight leash on his reign.  PIA needed a diversion from the 1997 Eritrean Constitution – the leash on dictators.  PIA didn’t have scratch too far from the surface to brew trouble.

  1. August 1997 – PIA writes to [comrade/betsay] PMMZ that Ethiopian troops are making incursions into Eritrea [Bada region].  But we can’t reach any conclusion based on one letter – none of us have seen any previous and subsequent correspondences.  We certainly can’t get into their heads to determine what they were thinking in their written communications.

  1. April 1998 – is probably the most telling month.  Eritrea mobilizes 1st to 4th round national servicemen for a month under ostensible reason of national development projects.  If it was for farming reasons, the season doesn’t begin until much later.  By this time, Ethiopia had already begun to buy fuel directly from international suppliers under the pretext of complaining that the Asseb refinery isn’t efficient.  Ethiopia instructs Ethiopian Shipping Lines to begin using the Port of Djibouti.

  1. The rest of us dummies are told that sometime in early May 1998 ‘Woyane’ killed seven Eritrean officers and that war has been sprung on us.         

We may never know what really happened.  But we only need to know that Eritrean dictatorship has sprung war on us – and eight years later we are still suffering as a nation, with no PFDJ solution in sight.  The events of May 1998 weren’t the beginning of the conflict between the two neighboring countries.  Rather it was the climax of either intentional bout or a game of playing with little sparks of fire that went out-of-control.  Regardless, we are fast approaching the English-French 100-year war.  But we have learned valuable lessons, and as the border must be demarcated, we should draw our political border with PFDJ. 

The message we send to PFDJ today will be the message we are sending to all aspiring future Eritrean dictators.  What we, both the regime and the opposition camp, do today will define Eritrea for generations to come. Some of my well-intentioned ‘government supporters’ squarely blame ‘Woyane’ for our predicament.  Although the unsettled border issue remains an irritant for restoring our friendly relations with Ethiopia, the root cause of Eritrean internal problems remain the total absence of basic human rights in Eritrea. When we blame Woyane for the imprisonment of Ms. Senait Debessai without due process of law, when in reality it is her corrupt husband that put her in jail over marital problems, we draw the line.

Where there is a breakdown in law, society ceases to exist.  The law of the jungle takes over.  There is only one person to blame for the utter breakdown [or rather total absence] of law in Eritrea – PIA.  Although Ms. Senait’s husband, Mr. Beyene Russom, will be directly held responsible for this act of injustice, PIA remains the one person, as self-imposed leader, responsible for Mr. Beyene’s irresponsible acts.  PIA’s governance enabled Mr. Beyene to act the way he did.  When Gen. Wuchu imprisons innocent people, it is because PIA enabled Gen. Wuchu to do it.  Yet many still continue to blame Woyane for this breakdown in law, or still other to deny that such injustices exist.

Why draw the line what we Eritreans can tolerate from our own government?

Many of my fellow Eritreans have the misconception that once the border with Ethiopia is demarcated that Eritrea will never have to get involved in war again – or at least that we will be on the right side of any international disputes. 

  1. First and foremost, for those of us capable of remembering the euphoria of May 24, 1991, we were absorbed into the world of utopia.  We said, ‘now that we are independent our and the next generation will never have to see any conflict again.’  It took only a couple of years to begin friction with Sudan, then another year for quick clash with Yemen, and then another year for the big one with Ethiopia.  We have lost the confidence to say that such misadventures don’t await us around the corner.  Instead of blind faith, we have replaced it with political vigilantism against those unaccountable leaders with hidden agenda who have the power to destroy but NOT to build a nation from ground up brick-by-brick. 

  1. It would be naïve to think that conflicts with neighboring countries and beyond only begin with border disputes.  If we examine man’s history, wars have been started over many other reasons. 

Just for illustration, let us say that the Eritrean people in their moment of political misjudgment elect one troublemaker Mr. Ibrahim Abraham (PIA) to be the president of Eritrea.  In their moment of even crazier act, President Ibrahim Abraham (PIA) gets re-elected in 2015.  The constitution of Eritrea states that a president can only serve two terms.  But PIA has such grandiose plan that two terms aren’t just enough.  Thus, PIA immediately begins to work on subverting the constitution on his second term.  The Ethio-Eritrea border was demarcated a couple years earlier.  What can he use?

  1. Suddenly on May 24, 2016 Haddas Eritrea announces that 15 Yemeni fishing boats were seized fishing in Eritrean territory.  PIA announces that Eritrea had been patient with Yemeni fishermen for years, and that he had personally written to the Yemeni president with this concern but hasn’t heeded to his concern.  Yemeni mobilizes its navy.  PIA announces state-of-emergency and dissolves Eritrean National Assembly (violating many provisions of the Constitution regarding invoking state-of-emergency).  The purpose here isn’t to escalate war with Yemen but to create the illusion of imminent conflict that PIA hopes will set him free from constitutional constraints.

  1. To ensure people accept usurpation of power, November 11, 2016 edition of ‘Haddas Eritrea’ announces that Eritrea has just killed 6 members of ‘fifth column’ nurtured by the Sudanese government.  On the same edition, we are told that the Eritrean government foiled an assassination attempt against the Ertirean President by dissident groups trained and armed by the Sudanese and Ethiopian governments.

None of the above has to do with a border issue, and yet can be propagated to the public to rouse nationalist feelings and the defense of motherland.  The Eritrea-Yemen settlement over the disputed islands and water territories leaves much for future disputes.  The two nations continue to share an overlapping water territory that allows small [artisan] fishermen to fish in both water territories.  This international decision leaves both countries ripe with excuses to jab at each other whenever their domestic political situation warrants it.   

What emboldened President Ibrahim Abraham to attempt this destructive political game [above] is the complacency and even acquiescence of many Eritreans who should know better but allowed the previous dictator of Eritrea to play the same destructive politics to the detriment of our country for the sole purpose of maintaining power.

It is to avoid such misfortunes from happening again that we must draw the line today – to put our foot down today – to say to current and future dictators that we can’t accept such behaviors.  We can’t accept such poor excuses!  Instead of blaming God for bestowing us with such bad lucks by sending us a dictator (and future dictators), we should toil our own politics as we are made to toil our own land to survive. 

Eritreans have the responsibility to ensure that dictators don’t usurp power in Eritrea.  We do this not only for our own benefit, but for the benefit of our neighboring countries (and we expect the same from our neighboring people).  When we allow our dictators to make the excuse of external threat to consolidate their powers, we put our neighbors in danger due to our lack of understanding of the dirty business of politics.  Good neighborliness begins with our own stable rule-of-law within our own borders – it begins with our own clean house.   

Matter of months!

During the commemorations of the 29th anniversary of the start of our struggle for independence in September 1990, PIA told us that the independence of Eritrea is ‘only a matter of few months’.  Indeed, Eritrea gained its independence some 9 months later.  This wasn’t a prophecy, but an assessment of a number of factors that gives one confidence in predicting such outcomes within a perceivable future. 

One can probably make the same predictions on the future of PFDJ – it is only a matter of few months to its downfall.  All the factors are in place that will ensure PFDJ become a historical dark spot in independent Eritrea’s brief but turbulent history.

King Solomon said, ‘Nothing under the sun is new’.  The decline and destruction of dictators are as predictable as the laws of physics.  Even the once ‘Mighty Soviet Union’, with all its satellite nations, with its technological advances and even world superiority in certain areas, simply crumbled under its unsustainable domestic socio-economic conditions.  PFDJ doesn’t nearly have the same stamina to withstand even the slightest adverse socio-economic conditions.

The latest drama with North Korea has brought out the same issues as for many others dictators,

1.      The Korean War ended over 50 years ago.  While South Korea has used these years to become a world economic powerhouse, North Korea is still trapped in the politics of half-century ago.  This sounds like PFDJ’s 8-year war over the border, which, God forbid, may last 50 years if PFDJ has its way.

2.      Apparently, one of North Korea’s complaints against the US is that the US has cut illicit funds that flowed into North Korea, causing major hard currency shortage for the dictatorial regime in North Korea.  Sounds very familiar!  US’s action to close down Himbol’s money laundering operations in the US must have put the same squeeze against the PFDJ regime.

3.      Only unaccountable leaders seek confrontational approach with the most powerful nation in the world.  Some brave souls may advocate for firm stand against the US in the comfort of their home in the US, but the general Eritrean public in Eritrea want their leaders to pursue prudent policies that will attempt to negotiate some middle-ground.  The Eritrean and Korean leaders believe that they have the strength against the US and others on their, real or imagined, sheer ability to create chaos to their neighbors.

The PFDJ regime is near its end for the following reasons,

First and foremost, PFDJ has declared war on its own people.  EPLF gained Eritrean independence through massive Eritrean public support.  PFDJ forgot that the nation creators, the nation builders, the nation protectors and Eritrea’s kingmakers remain the Eritrean people.

Second, PFDJ is pursuing destructive international politics.  Whereas Europe tends to pursue policies of appeasement, the US wont’ have such patience.   Especially, at such critical time for American foreign policy, regimes such as the PFDJ represent ‘clear and present danger’ to American interests.  In fact, if the US needs to resolve the entire ‘Horn of Africa’ issues in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia and beyond in one swoop, it needs to ante up its firm stance against destabilizing factors in the region, which remains PFDJ.

Third, the PFDJ can’t get hard currency assistance from such regimes as in Libya.  After years of isolation from the international community, Libya finally agreed to pay over $ 3 Billion to rejoin it.  Despite all its oil money, it still succumbed to international pressure.  But more importantly, the US told Libya that it must cease assistance to rogue regimes as pre-condition of normalizing relations.  The fact that the two countries have now normalized relations can only mean that Libya has quietly agreed to such pre-condition.  One can rest assured that Libya won’t be able to help the PFDJ regime.

Fourth, oil prices keep hitting new highs.  Some predict oil prices to hit as high as $100 US per barrel by 2007.  This is devastating for economically comatose nation such as Eritrea.  PFDJ will be forced to cut down on its activities – less electricity, less movement of goods and people in Eritrea will deal the last death blow.  PIA’s pride projects, especially roads, will come to halt – unable to pay for ever increasing price of oil tar [asphalt].  Unable to undertake ‘look busy’ projects will mean that Warsai-Yekealo will become increasing idle – thus exacerbating the problems of idle mind.     

Fifth, PFDJ and Eritrea will face severe food shortages by mid-2007.

PIA hopes to score his pyrrhic victory, or for some political tsunami to occur in the regime that will turn him from today’s pariah to tomorrow’s President Musharef.   PIA’s only remaining game is a psychological one – to gather enough stamina to survive few weeks more than what his opponents/enemies predict will be PFDJ’s demise.  PIA will strive to entice his enemies into exerting all their efforts to knocking off PFDJ within the shortest period possible and thus draining their resources (including patience).  In the meantime, PFDJ will attempt to hide all its bruises and wounds – and when the opponents/enemies find that PFDJ is still standing within the timeframe that they had predicted PFDJ will fall, the opponents/enemies may become resigned to the fact that PFDJ is too strong to knock off and may turn around 180 Degrees and pursue a softer approach that may breath back life into PFDJ.  The only thing the opponents couldn’t see will be that PFDJ’s bruises and wounds were so severe that it was only one blow away from its demise.   

There is no illusion that PIA’s fall from grace is Eritrea’s tragedy.  In the end, and ironically, the punishment he meted out against his own colleagues has now reached him.  G-11 are in prison physically but free in spirit and mind, whereas PIA is free physically but in prison in spirit and mind.  PIA has now barricaded himself in Massawa Security Zone – looking over his shoulder whenever he wondered outside his compound – or self-constructed prison, and that is mental punishment.

It is also tragic that such brilliant minds as Mr. Alamin M. Saed and Mr. Zemhret Yohannes allow such Eritrean tragedy to unfold in their names. One just wonders how they can justify in their minds the slaughter of Eritrean ‘manjuses’ – those little kids that were barely able to walk when they brought independence, and who have since grown up to be mentally and physically tortured in the name of Mr. Alamin and Mr. Zemhret.  How does their conscious allow them to live with themselves?  This is our tragedy!  Then there are some with doctoral designations whose blind ambitions prove that intellect alone doesn’t emancipate us from our stone-age human flaws.      

For Eritrean democrats, we should remain cognizant of the fact that we are struggling not just against PIA – but the many PIAs in general.  These are people who are consumed with hatred, spite and ego, and who would rather see the whole nation go up in flames than become gracious in their losses [or defeats], and thus failing to teach us that we learn about ourselves during the times of our failures.  They forget that when the euphoria of victory passes, those who leave behind the most enduring legacy are those who accept defeat graciously than the victors who soon find out that their victory was only short-lived. Their names won’t be enshrined in history books, and thus forsaking vanity, but their gracious deeds will have sown the seeds of the future. Unfortunately, there are as many within our opposition camp who have fallen victim to human vanity.

We can’t allow our nation to be consumed by hatred, spite and vengeance.  PFDJ’s fall is near.  We must send clear and unequivocal message to those in the opposition camp and those aspiring to attain power in post-PFDJ Eritrea that we expect them to act in exemplary manner.              

One final thought is to give my own definition of ‘armed struggle’ vs. ‘non-violent struggle’.  ‘Non-violent struggle’ is where leaders of a movement put themselves in front of their followers and sacrifice themselves.  ‘Non-violent struggle’ is about leading by example – going to prison, walking out of prison and then returning to it.  ‘Armed struggle’ is about putting others on the frontline.  In ‘armed struggle’, the ‘leaders’ perceive themselves as too important to put their lives in danger – and thus others are sacrificed.  The only lesson learned in armed struggle is to be part of the leadership than to be ‘agar’. 

Best of luck for those opposition parties holding their organizational meetings – EDP, ELF-RC, ELF-NC, EDRF, EPM - (ENSF) - and Al Islah. 

Berhan Hagos

July 10, 2006