The Scars of Sept 18, 2001

The Scars of Sept 18, 2001

Do you ever wonder what would have happened if Petros Solomon, Haile Derue or any other one of the G15 had not been in Era Ero right now? If they had somehow escaped and joined the Resistance?

Or do you ever imagine life:  if Joshua or Medhane had made it out of Eritrea on time?

I don’t! I know the exact drill! I have seen it many times… and the pattern is the same and it breaks my heart as it is a classic double jeopardy…

…August 2009…

It was a dark and dreary afternoon in Addis and Eritrean opposition meetings have got a way of happening outside the meeting halls (as people chat and smoke) rather than in the meeting halls and that is some mighty dynamics to manage for those running the meetings (but it is an immense fun to observe for human behaviour junkies like yours truly)… but this time there was one person who was the same inside a meeting and outside in the smoking dens too… Adhanom Gebremariam’s philosophy seemed to be… speak your mind… make your bed… lie in it!  A living example of… ‘megedi babur deqis!’… that old Eritrean uprightedness bordering on stubborn unyieldingness… It really does take courage to stand upright like that… not squirm before your critiques and state your mind regardless of the personal consequences and in my brief encounter that was the person I saw. That is why how he gets treated by many who have contributed much less and the disregard with which adjectives are thrown, willy-nilly, at his personhood is an indication of what would have happened to the others we so fervently accord the accolade of ‘heroes’…

…it is interesting how all our heroes are either dead or in prison…

I don’t remember much else about the conversations I had with Ambassador Adhanom but this I remember vividly ‘what is being alive selam? What is being free? Am I really better off than those we buried in the fields? Or those behind bars? I am not… atleast they can consider their mission accomplished… I am literally suspended above the dead but below the imprisoned…’

That same week I also had the honour of meeting Mesfin Hagos, for the first time,… He wasn’t at the meeting I was at, but I was pleasantly surprised and humbled when he came to where I was staying and we had a long  chat at the dingy foyer… and I don’t agree with the inconsiderate remarks that many people make about his mission for pfdj…I can sense that his life has been consumed by the EPLF/PFDJ  and giving up on the organisation that had been his life since his teenage years is tough tantamount to that of giving up on your own family. … but I suspect that would have been the case for every last one of the heroes we commemorate every September 18… I guess we would have done the same for Mesfin Hagos had he fallen a victim in Eraero… for his family’s sake I am glad he survived…

…Now I follow our discussions well enough to understand that people want him to disclose things and act a certain way and the fact that her continues to pursue justice in his own way against the background of constant abuse from people who transfer their disappointment onto him, is a testament to the substance that the guy is made of!

He asked me: ‘if we create the just and democratic system we are fighting for how does anyone anticipate I would escape accounting for my deeds or otherwise? In the absence of such a system how does one account for anything… what mechanism and which platform?’…

…It was still pouring with rain in Addis, throughout my stay in Addis that year… and I was shivering both with cold and with the realisation of what we do, do to people who paid so much for the principles we say we believe in… I was surrounded by men in their sixties who were barely out of their teenage years,  when they embarked on this journey that we call the ‘Eritrea struggle’ …buried their friends along the way, sacrificed their own limbs and any hope of a ‘normal’ life… If they had died we would have called them Martyrs and heroes… if they had disappeared we would have called them Prisoners and heroes… but because they survived (just about) and because they were unfortunate to be in our midst we call them cheats and liars…we go out of our way to dig up people who are willing to grab the opportunity to dish the dirt… possible…probable… unconfirmed…imagined… it all gets thrown into the pot to make a poisonous mix that harms their personhood and kills our movement that little bit more every time… DIA doesn’t need Era Ero to kill their spirit… we do it for him right here!

So what would have happened to Joshwa or Medhane, had they escaped like Semere Kesete did? The same bloody thing that is happening to Semere right now! Others would have written books about his taking his career, even his life and perhaps that of his family too… and placing it on the alter as a sacrifice for: freedom of speech, rights of association, and all the other ‘rights’ we claim we are fighting for… but we his compatriots now write gaudy statements about some alleged misdemeanour he ‘committed’ as he was attempting to organise a resistance where ten years later many are still failing to do so…

Remembering heroes that can no longer challenge us or try to influence this struggle in a direction that we have not yet grasped is easy… no actually it is cheap… it bears the same insignia of pfdj’s Martyr’s Day Commemorations…

… if September 18, is about Issias Afwerki’s unadulterated betrayal, it is also an indictment of the lacklustre resistance we put up in response… Let us remember the hope of change in Sept 2001, let us remember the betrayal of that day and let us remember the silence that followed…finally let us take responsibility for our treatment of those who authored the change that would have been a better Eritrea had it not been for September 18,2001!

Let us remember the wound of that day by all means… but let us also remember that such a deep stab to the heart of a nation, leaves an ugly scar… and scared we all!

That September in 2009, on the 8^th anniversary of our Black September,   I wrote this as a tribute to not just the Ministers and Journalists who became victims of Era Ero… but a tribute to the principles that they were sacrificed for and yes as a tribute to those who escaped the clutches and lived to tale the tale… and once again, on the 14^th anniversary of that dark day I salute them all: Mesfin and Adhanom… Semere and all my friends the journalists of Eritrea’s brief summer of freedom… may we be found worthy of the scars you bear…

May I live this moment for you?

Can I pick that flower you so tenderly grew?
Name it ‘freedom’ and replant it by your grave?
May I borrow your ink and pen a verse or two?
And narrate that unfinished story for you?

That child out there with vacant eyes…can I pick her up?
And tell her all the things you wanted to…
Can I shower her with love so tender?
And instil in her your convictions unshakable…
May I tell her that this was not meant to be?

Can I borrow your voice for a moment?
And tell the world what the promise was…
That which nineteen-year-old boys grew old holding on to
May I grab hold of a compatriot’s shoulders with your hands?
And shake them until they wake up and remember…what the dream was

May I pat the shoulders of that comrade you left behind?
And encourage him that it is not over yet…?
May I call him by the nicknames you came up with?
May I resuscitate his jovial smile?
And make this valley echo with laughter… once more

Can I wipe the tears off your mother’s eyes?
And tell your children that you don’t regret your life a bit?
May I gather your siblings and tell them it was well worth it?
Can I trumpet your deeds? Shall I tell the world all that you achieved?

Can I finish that poem you were writing?
Could I perhaps sing the song you were humming?
I will soon retrace the route and start where you left off
…But right now all I want to do is live this moment for you…

Selam Kidane
Aug 2009

Aug 20 The stanza starting with Can I wipe the tears off of your mother’s eyes, was inspired by an article from Daniel Rezene ages ago about Medhane Haile… it made me cry then and still makes me cry to think of the mothers who paid the ultimate price…

The one that starts ‘May I pat the shoulders of that comrade you left behind…’ was the sense I made of my conversation with Ambassador Adhanom … and the one before that was inspired by, Mesfin hagos:  the boy, that became a fighter at 19… been there seen it all and continues to fight the fight regardless of what we think of him... I thank them all for the inspiration.

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