Issias Afworki’s Interview: You don’t have to be mad to do this but it helps!

the one and only thing I got out of IA’s recent ‘interview’ (the only bit where I didn’t drift off… fell asleep or fast forwarded over) was his take on the predicament of  young people fleeing Eritrea…there is too many of them to be a figment of anyone’s imagination…. Their plight, far from being a fleeting picnic excursion, is so visible these days… etched onto caves in the Sinai and from there onto the conscience of all who watched those highlights… and hence an acknowledgement of their existence (well a sort of an acknowledgement)….

An Amharic saying goes ‘ebd ena sekaram yelibun yinageral’ and then an Asmarino joke goes a bit like… (Maybe it is not a joke at all)…wedi gebeya (is a renowned… outspoken… person with the inbuilt  immunity of being meltally ill hence able to express his unadulterated views)…anyways Wedi Gebeya is said to have said: ‘me and the President are identical in many ways… he was a freedom fighter… and so I was… he became a victim of cerebral malaria as did I…he was treated for his illness and so did I… but he went to Israel for the said treatment and I was treated right here in Asmara… and today he is the presidential offices in Asmara while I roam the streets of Asmara and everyone thinks me mad!… and that, right there is the only difference between the two of us!’

I think he was spot on! If you stop any Eritrean ask them what the way forward for the ‘Eritrean youth refugee crisis is’ and they told you that: they should simply turn back and comeback to the home they left dodging bullets and escaping imprisonment and torture at worst and endless slave labour at best… many having paid unfathomable sums of money to get as far as the other side of the boarder…you would wonder at the planet that, that person inhabits…(or indeed the hospital that botched that treatment for whatever illness that has so incapacitated that mind!)

If the same person then told you that, Eritreans outside Eritrea can never have a future outside Eritrea…can never have fulfilling careers… would never be part of communities with mutually beneficial interrelationships would never be able to start and bring up families and hence their only option is to return back to Eritrea… you would wonder what messed up this person’s head in such a way…(especially if you are a member of a relatively successful diaspora community…)

If he then goes on to tell you that the prison guards who were tormenting and torturing the young people will not so much as cast a menacing glance at them on their return… and that all that would happen is a reorientation programme and that only for the benefit of the young returnees, you would begin to worry if someone dispensed far too many ‘happy pills’ to the speaker…(I laughed at the mention of fly swatting… as another dictator from another era also mentioned fly swatting to describe gentleness… do they share the same phrasebook?)… the prisons in Eritrea are full of young people who were forcefully returned to Eritrea… were caught crossing the border or were caught contemplating to cross the border… 

But when the person goes on to tell you that before their return, he recommends that the young people get a trade and something in the region of $15-20 K … when everyone knows that the people he is talking about have been snatched from the jaws of a very brutal death at the hands of greedy traffickers (best case scenario) who also demanded that they somehow magically raise around the same amount or their bodies will become ‘spare parts’ for people better endowed to grace this earth than them…or that they had to choose between a spouse or a child surviving a rickety boat that disintegrated in the midst of a tide on the Mediterranean… and there he is asking them to not be wastrel?

It was at that point I stopped listening to President Issias Afwerki’s most recent ‘interviews’ and said to myself… ‘if your name isn’t Wedi Gebeya… I really do not want to listen to what you have to say on this matter anymore!’… for if someone said all this about the crisis that we have in our hands and that person isn’t mad… then we would call them foolish… out of touch or even stupid…but when that same person tells you that they are a president of your country then the full extent of our tragedy becomes apparent to the naked eye…

Please try this at home… transcribe what IA said about this issue… translate it to a language of your choice… and reread it… and if for one second you were able to forget that this was said by a president of the country that these young people are fleeing from… you would wonder which lunatic uttered this much nonsense on state television?

I am not going to wish anyone Happy New Year… I will instead wish us all… A year with a difference!

Selam

PS
BTW If anyone no longer wants their scarf from Awasa… I want one… cummon… there was 600+ of you out there and there is bound to be one with a different sense of fashion!!

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