National Conference will fix it! Won’t it?

… you know you are being lied to when a politician looks you straight in the eye and having listed a whole host of problems, difficulties and ailments goes on to prescribe one and only ONE solution that will cure, rectify and amend the entire assortment of beastly malady. But that is politicians and all you have to do is listen to them, roll your eyes at their barefaced audacity and consider whether a fraction of what they are telling you could be true and hence worth backing… the nature of the beast really… in the case of PIA these days it is easy! You know that you know, none of it is true and all of what he says is drawn from a barrel of untruths that has gone so sour that no amount of sweetener could rectify the really bad after test it leaves. But another set of Eritrean politicians seem to have also taken to prescribing the ‘one pill to fix it all’ recently.

The latest tune in our resistance rhymes to the tune of: yes the opposition is fragmented and very weak, yes Eritrea is haemorrhaging from its very core with every able bodied young blood escaping… yes the economy is in such a state that dough is a contraband item… yes the prisons are bulging with inmates who are never counted or accounted for… yes the country’s diplomatic ties with the international community is depleted to levels where top level government officials are fighting off serious charges of terrorism with rallies where Eritrean refugee mothers fend off bad omen with Himabsah bread! But all this would be rectified with the upcoming national conference… just come there and ask all your questions and the good old uncles over at EDA will sort it all out in the conference… and if they fail to tackle any of the above (and the ones not mentioned here) then they will have another one soon after that!... and another one if need be…

If one dares to ask…’but?’... one immediately becomes the enemy… public enemy no less!… and when it comes to constructing enmity fellow members of the resistance camp are as adept as their PFDJ counterpart (yes I have now experienced both set and have lived to tell the tale!)… but all this makes EDA politicians just that… politicians! And that is not necessarily bad…I wish they could pick their enemies better and polish their propaganda a bit more…but that is a less serious problem…

The more worrying trend is that of the collusion of ‘civic organisations’ with the above ‘one pill for all’ rhetoric… I expect civic organisations to keep politicians and their organisations in check on behalf of the people. I expect us to constantly push for higher standards, hankering for better organisation, more transparency and keeping politicians, on their toes and to task on promises made and objectives set (with the hope of getting them to deliver at least on a few of their lofty promises) anything short of that makes any civic organisation a rubber stamp that is not worthy of the ideals it purports. Hence in the latest dissonance of Eritrean politics in the resistance, I am more disappointed at fellow human rights activists, than the politicians themselves! Folks I am afraid you have sold out… you have sold out to broken promises of initiating real dialogue across the Eritrean resistance based on a genuine desire to identify sore points and seek to heal them…. This was to be the objective of the upcoming conference… at least it was when it was discussed at a week long workshop last summer….The idea was to widen the pool of people fighting for democracy and justice in Eritrea. By narrowing the selection pool of entities invited to the planning meeting EDA has actually managed to constrict the pool narrowing the national dialogue to a conversation between like minded people and organisations… and by doing this EDA has undermined its own objectives of becoming an alternative with wide enough following and support to challenge the incumbent in Asmara…EDA failed to rise up to the challenge and hence PFDJ has once again managed to walk off scoff free…

It beggars belief that EDA thought it was ok to sideline the refugee communities at its doorsteps in favour of a cyber community that has no definite format to enable it to be considered ‘an organisation’… and the reason was…because it was too inconvenient to organise the young refugees across the refugee camps in Northern Ethiopia… the political organisations have wreaked havoc in these communities in their unsuccessful clamour to recruit them into their respective organisations, there are even allegations of serious human rights abuses perpetrated by some of the organisations within EDA itself (which incidentally the Network of Eritrean Civic Societies in Europe, turned a deaf ear to, even when one of the whistle blowers to the alleged abuse was a member organisation.. another example of complicity). The situation at Shimelba and the other refugee camp, in Ethiopia was too complex and the engagement of these young people was too complicated… so what did EDA do to facilitate the meaningful engagement of communities right at their door step? They excluded them from the planning meeting… shouldn’t these young people be the drivers of the change we seek to see? Shouldn’t they be the ones best positioned to comment on how to best engage and communicate with their counterparts in the trenches across the border? Aren’t these young people the best vehicle EDA would have had to reach an entire generation of youth who have been left to wallow in despaired across forlorn deserts and angry tides and into hostile foreign lands? And if EDA has failed to meaningfully engage them what does it say about its ability to galvanise the rest of us to fight PFDJ? And what does the complicity of the civic organisations say about their independence from EDA?

But there is something even more alarming than the ‘one pill fixes all’ prescription… and that is the venom that is prescribed for those who protest the one pill solution…people seem to have sharpened pencils and gone right to the drawing board to sketch a scary monster of an enemy for everyone to abhor, notwithstanding the fact that these are colleagues and comrades still under the same umbrella…and that is what I meant by EDA politicians not practicing prudence in their making of enmities… poems… cartoon…animations…. articles in all available languages were written from supporters of EDA about members of EDA… demonising them and belittling them all the time getting ready to hack them off… obliterate them… if it wasn’t serious it would be quiet comical really… but it isn’t … at the point when the Eritrean opposition to PFDJ needs to be at its sharpest and most coherent, with the entire world looking for alternatives to PFDJ the last thing the very people who could be the alternative want to do is appear as though their objective is to obliterate each other in successive elimination rounds, and succeed at the one destruction fete that IA failed to attain in nearly half a century of rampage… their own annihilation .

…That we need a dialogue to begin to unpack the tightly crammed baggage of all things untold, is a point of agreement that we have all reached… but dialogues do not begin in conferences… they may finish in conferences (carefully organised and managed)… and such dialogues should certainly need to be planned by all stakeholders and not only by those who are conveniently placed in respect to each other and could just about bare to see eye to eye… the start of a successful national dialogue is a planning group with enough clout to gain the confidence of the entire spectrum of the resistance…the consensus over the need for a national dialogue for change in Eritrea should translate into a genuine invitation for a true dialogue… and as a wise Vietnamese once said; ‘in a true dialogue, both sides are willing to change’

Here is an excerpt from Sam Keen’s book faces of the enemy:

Start with an empty canvas
Sketch in broad outline the forms of
men, women, and children.

Dip into the unconsciousness well of your own
disowned darkness
with a wide brush and
strain the strangers with the sinister hue
of the shadow.

Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed,
hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as
your own.

Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.

Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes,
fears that play through the kaleidoscope of
every infinite heart.

Twist the smile until it forms the downward
arc of cruelty.

Strip flesh from bone until only the
abstract skeleton of death remains.

Exaggerate each feature until man is
metamorphasized into beast, vermin, insect.

Fill in the background with malignant
figures from ancient nightmares – devils,
demons, myrmidons of evil.

When your icon of the enemy is complete
you will be able to kill without guilt,
slaughter without shame.

The thing you destroy will have become
merely an enemy of God, an impediment
to the sacred dialectic of history.