Quarter a Century of Eritrean Identity - By Biniam Yohannes

A popular joke in Asmara goes like this:

“A man and his children watch the state TV every night because they are too poor to afford a satellite receiver. The president is always on TV and the father, like every other Eritrean, cries ‘Thief!’ whenever he sees the image of the president on the screen. 

The father takes his youngest son to the yearly festival in Asmara. He walks around the exposition grounds carrying his son on his shoulders. The president is visiting the various attractions at the festival. The son sees him and cries, ‘Daddy, daddy! The thief is here, the thief is here'.

The father lifts the child from his shoulder and cries out, ‘Has anyone lost a boy? Has anyone lost a boy?!’

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 The rise of a megalomaniaca

 

Twenty-five years after Eritrea’s independence and the hero’s welcome received by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front(EPLF), people are now witnessing the worst disaster in the nation’s history in the form of the President Isaias Afwerki. He is now a symbol of everything that can go wrong with a nation. He has lost credibility, he has lost his health and now he has lost almost all of his loyal support. Nevertheless, he is still ready to stay in power at any cost. 

When the EPLF entered Asmara as victors in 1991, the hero’s welcome given to the EPLF was the Eritreans welcoming nationhood. If Eritreans had had their own independent government before that time, the welcome would have been very different, as the public would have been more critical of the EPLF’s history it would have a point of reference with which to measure the party. There were no questions asked, the EPLF was instantly and without thought forgiven for all its sins. Even the members of the then disbanded Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) were relieved to see freedom at last. All other political opinions became secondary to the idea of this improbable freedom.

President Isaias, by virtue of his leadership of the party, became the symbol of independent leadership. His speeches were gripping and moving and the public lapped it up. More than his individual presence, the idea that the nation had its own leader was a novelty that the nation couldnot get enough of. The president capitalized on this mood and strengthened his power base by sidelining or removing other influential personalities from the government. Even as people saw and understood that he was exceeding his power, the euphoria of freedom was too powerful and unbelievable to allow any meaningful public opposition in the first few years of independence.

When war broke out again with Ethiopia in 1998, President Isaias resurrected the idea of Eritrean invincibility under the leadership of the EPLF and promisedfreedom and the control of one’s destiny that comes from being independent. However, as the war went on, he started growing more and more authoritarian. His individual management of the war was a blunder; tens of thousands died in that unnecessary war, which was badly managed by a non-military Commander in Chief, and almost a third of the country was under Ethiopian control again.Many people started questioning if the Ethiopians were in fact the instigators of the war, and why the president was so eager for it. Many of the younger generation came to the conclusion President Isaias was using the war tofulfilhis own private ambitions for political domination in the Horn of Africa. His speeches during the war, which bordered on prophecies when he initially said them, lacked consistency and contained many unfulfilled predictions.

When his cabinet started questioning the decisions he had made and wanted accountability for the losses and defeat, he quickly manoeuvred to remove them from the picture. Even before he had completely lost popular support, he turned to his sycophants for validation. In a bid to keep control, he had gone ahead of the public debate, betrayed his ambitions, ignored the promises of the Eritrean revolution, and revealed his true personality. 

Within ten years of the saviour-like reception he had received in 1991, people started to question everything about Isaias and his clique. His ancestry and origins, personal history during the struggle, friendships and family became the subject of gossip. After 2001, it seemed that the president had given up trying to appear charismatic; most of his commentary was cynical, insulting, boastful and generally disrespectful to the public. 

For most of his trusted aides, who stick with him for their own personal ambitions,Isaias is an uncontrollable and unpredictable megalomaniac who seems to be less and less in touch with reality as time passes. For some, he is an insane dictator who seems totally convinced that he is doing the best that can be done for the country. For others, what is unfolding is something that he had been planning all along since the late 1960s. Nevertheless, there are still a few blind supporters who applaud him, even as he murders their children. He uses this small insane part of society to show an image of a respected and loved leader. By consorting with sycophants and blind worshippers, the president and his clique have managed to convince a portion of the population that he has real support among the people. 

However, Isaias knows that none of his supporters would die for him and that, in fact, his clique and those who support him out of fear would be the first ones to push him over if he were to lose control of power for even a moment. He has seen them selling their friends over to him in return for his acceptance and to save their own necks. He lives by creating mistrust between his appointees and is extremely suspicious of everyone. 

When a coup was attempted in Asmara in early 2013, people quickly started talking excitedly about the possibility of a transformation. However, the hope instantly evaporated. The coup failed to occasion a meaningful change within the regime. The regime responded by incarcerating hundreds of people who were suspected of cooperating with the coup organizers.  All those who were taken worked in important government positions or in business. 

Since 2010, rumours of his death have circulated at least three times. For days and weeks after such reports, the only news people shared and talked about inside and outside the country was that he had died. When people believed that he was dead, even members of the security agency were happy that the nightmare might finally be over. All these rumours and the attempted coup have shown the president that he cannot rely on the support of anyone, including his supposed clique, and he has grown more and more paranoid.

Eritrean identity

The president and his closest associates have traditionally defined Eritrean identity to suit their current aims and to satisfy the public’s view of itself. Although defining identity and nationalism to fit the party’s agenda was the priority, giving back to the nation its own image of itself packaged as the party’s philosophical product helped keep the national identity in a controlled bracket. Ideas like unity and family were incorporated to appeal to the society’s values, while also being presented as the party’s invention. 

In a speech given at the 25^th Anniversary of Independence in 2016, the president defines what Eritrean values, heritage and culture are:

Where did we start from; where are we and where could we have been; what is the trajectory of our future progress? How do we conduct resistance and development? Why does that succeed? How did we achieve independence? How do we defend and build it?  All these questions/issues impinge and define the contours of our road-map.  In this perspective, I will give a bird’s eye view without going into minute details.

Resistance is a matter of both culture and heritage. And culture is nurtured by an intertwined value system. A value system takes time; it does not crystallize abruptly or by chance in a fleeting moment. It is accumulated, preserved and inherited in a complex process of formidable challenges over a long period of time. To resolutely defy colonial rule, capitulation and dehumanization; the cultivation of mutual respect and compassion; the nurturing of unity, harmony and cohesion; displaying courage, determination, patriotism and sacrifice; to foster ethos of hard work, productivity and creativity; to be steadfast in the face of trying challenges… these are the legacies and hallmarks of our values and the secret behind our victories. Our resilience and developmental progress are accordingly gauged and asserted by these innate attributes.

In this speech, the presidentuses terms like ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’, then goes on to define what culture is and what a value system is. He then connects colonial rulewith the ‘dehumanization’ of the Eritrean people. As a solution, he emphatically underlines that selfless sacrifice was how these external aggression were repulsed thereby bringing home the importance of continuing sacrifice to once again rebuff foreign enemies who are hell bent on dominating or destroying Eritrea. 

. He also mentions ‘hard work’ and ‘challenges’ and talks about Eritrean ‘resilience’ and ‘innate attributes’. He does not mention a reward for all this sacrifice in his 2016 speech, but he did mention it in 2015:

…We need to emulate the exemplary practices of the members of the Defense Forces, who are not only defending the independence and sovereignty of the country in conjunction with the vast majority of our people in spite of  many hardships and difficulties, but who are also engaged in implementing challenging developmental programmes without the requisite reward.

By drawing a teleological connection between historical legacy of resistance and the PFDJ’s supposedly unsullied daring of foreign powers and by making this continuum the basis of ultra-nationalist ideology, the PFDJ is passed as the guardian and rightful inheritor of traditional social values and historical heritage which many people held dear. Rejecting the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice’s (PFDJ’s)definition of identity would then mean rejecting all the basic traditional values of the society, which is tantamount to denying one’s own culture and even interpreted as treason, the worst of all political sins. 

[Victory] occurred essentially because the Eritrean people managed to progressively invigorate their culture and value system of resistance; to augment their political awareness and refine their organizational capabilities; to upgrade their armaments and refine their operational plans, and because the Eritrean people were able to draw appropriate lessons from subversive and treasonous activities of certain elements. The quarter century of resilience and development must thus be measured against the backdrop of these strong foundations.

The PFDJ’s ruling ideology has made the notion of sacrifice as the ultimate expression of patriotic and moral purity and greatness. This obsession with sacrifice sometimes takes a religious proportion. People do for the ‘nation’ without reciprocation, and for this sacrifice they are assured of the nobility of the cause. The fervent veneration of sacrifice makes a critical examination of the causes citizens are called for to make sacrifices and the manner they are executed very difficult if not impossible. 

As the source of the ‘word’ on everything to do with identity and nationhood, the president is beyond scrutiny. By always brining up new concepts and presenting old values in exciting new packaging, the leader is the source of the ideological continuity of the country. Members of the leadership and the cadre have to continually adapt and readapt their narrations of reality to fit his random ramblings. The president can never be wrong, and entertaining the idea that he could wrong is a sign of sub-nationalist tendencies.

The media presents a carefully polished image of the president. Although he regularly escapes into his usual rambling mode, the whole arrangement, which is produced by his adviser, YemaneGebreab, and other personalities in the media, does a good job of presenting him as the sanest Eritrean. The whole act of seasonal sermons is carefully choreographed to appeal to as many people as possible. The questions have been written and studied weeks earlier. The answers are rehearsed. Sessionsare spiced up and interspersed with personal questions and crude answers and humour, which draw forced laughter from listeners only because of the teller’s authority. The president’s media appearances are designed to present him as the overseer of every activity, big or small, the political and social philosopher, the preserver of freedom, and the visionary whose wisdom is beyond question. His benefit to the nation is supposedly beyond what an electoral democracy could bring, beyond a constitutional society could ever hope to achieve. The president is presented as vital to the survival of the nation.

In his interviews, President Isaias regularly derides Western thinkers, institutions and international bodies. He comments on how India is the least democratic nation in the world because of its oppressive caste system. He extorts that America has more prisoners per capita than Eritrea and that the Arab monarchies are backward feudalists who are destroying the futures of their nations.

However, the view of nationalism that the PFDJ propagates cannot stand on its own. As a clear definition would allow the citizen freedom for imagination, the definition is the monopoly of a narrow group and one has to regularly check for updates. The definition has to be able to contain the fear and anger the party feeds on. It is always the world against Eritrea, and Eritreans must struggle to defend their freedom and their land. Neighbours and international powers are the cause of all of the country’s problems. If it wasn’t for its leaders, Eritrea would have ceased to exist a few years after independence, and that is why the party, in its infinite wisdom, decided to have unlimited power for an unlimited period of time. Also, supposedly, according to the media, the people are ever so thankful for the forward thinking of the few people in the leadership who are still sacrificing their lives for the sake of the masses. As in any fanatic religion, anything can be rationalized by appealing to ignorance, wielding a sword, and generating sufficient fear of hell or detention. The story is that Eritrea has been wronged, first by the Turks, then the Italians, followed by the British and the Americans, who gave Eritrea to Ethiopia, then the Russians, who stood with the Ethiopian Dergue, and, finally, the world, which stood with the Ethiopians. The identity is always framed as ‘us versus them’and Eritrea is always the victim of outside forces. Attaching identity to this definition means that the people need a vigilant defender with unlimited powers to take action. Whether real or imagined, enemies are needed to strengthen the PFDJ’s claim to power and to justify that the fact the people are not allowed to be free. At the 25^th Anniversary of Independence speech the president recounted: 

The quarter century of independence, marked by resilience and development, is rooted on a robust foundation of a heroic fifty-year history. The fifty previous years represent the consummation of a process that was pivotal in our transformation and being as one people. As such, we need to delve deeper into the chapters of our history that we know in order to properly gauge the significance of the quarter century of independence that has elapsed as well as what will unfold in the period ahead. In this context, we may not need to go back to ancient history. But we should not ignore the exemplary feats of resistance and heroism of prominent Eritreans in different times and places against Italian colonialism and other predatory powers that preceded them. 

Eritrea should have been independent in 1941 after the defeat of Italian colonial rule at the end of the Second World War as it was indeed the case with virtually all African countries whose political boundaries were established by colonial powers towards the end of the 19th century. But as it was deemed that ‘Eritrea’s independence would not serve US strategic interests’, its inalienable national rights were compromised and the country was put under British Military Administration for over ten years from 1941 until 1952. Its economy and physical infrastructure were deliberately ransacked. Divisive campaigns were unleashed to drive a wedge between the people and thereby fragment and weaken their resistance. From 1952 until 1962, new machinations were devised to ensnare Eritrea and its people in a bogus federal relationship. This was a prelude for outright annexation and colonial rule by proxy. [...] From 1962 until 1974, various military offensives were unleashed by the United States and its regional allies through the provision of military support to the Haile Sellasie regime in order to suppress the resistance of the Eritrean people and thereby secure colonial rule by proxy. From 1974 until 1991, the former Soviet Union and its allies were engaged in futile attempts to suppress the legitimate liberation struggle of the Eritrean people through a huge military machine. Thus, all the events of the preceding fifty years constitute the bedrock of our 25 years of independence.

Rethinking identity

During the early years of independence, the EPLF looked far into the future. Everything was discussed in terms of coming generations. The EPLF promised that Eritrea was going jump into the future like the ‘Asian Tigers’; they promised the country would be Africa’s Singapore. In the late 1990s, Eritreans would be horrified as they saw images of malnourished North Korean children on the news. “How can agovernment let their own people suffer this way?” they asked. They were saddened by the realities of war in the Balkan region, in Somalia and in Palestine. In the early 1990s people seemed to believe that the country would be totally transformed into an affluent society before the year 2000. Now that their seemingly impossible freedom had been won, any other miracle could happen. 

The closing statement of the president’s 24^th Anniversary speech in May 2015 highlights the contrast between the party’s promise and reality:

There are no short cuts or sudden leaps in the development drive or in accumulating wealth and prosperity. One may entertain aspirations and wishes and this is not, of course, a vice. But the malpractices manifested this year by a few deluded and corrupt individuals and government functionaries who sought to amass wealth by any means without toiling and working hard can only lead to a perilous path. Such deplorable practices of corruption and theft must be combated vigorously. In this respect, and in order to successfully implement the major development programmes that have been charted out, we must work hard with patience and diligence, to give precedence to development through resilience. Indeed, we need to emulate the exemplary practices of the members of the Defense Forces, who are not only defending the independence and sovereignty of the country in conjunction with the vast majority of our people in spite of  many hardships and difficulties, butwho are also engaged in implementing challenging developmental programmes without the requisite reward.

After independence, the EPLF promised anything it fancied, and nobody felt that it would be the least bit difficult to achieve these promises. The people assumed that the country, unlike other poor African nations, would transform quickly. Nobody understood why other poor African nations could not achieve what Eritrea was going to achieve in a few years. The president and his ministers derided African nations for not delivering on the promises made to their people after independence. Eritrean politicians said that African leaders were selfish and corrupt and that they never regarded the needs of their people above their own individual whims. 

The Eritreanmedia of the early 1990s parroted in colourful detail what the ‘enlightened’ political elites were preaching to the world. The media promised that nobody would be left behind in the development process. Programmes were aired on how rich countries had mismanaged their resources and slumped into economic backwardness. ‘Other countries are not as united as Eritrea’, ‘their independence was given to them on a platter –they do not know how to fight for anything’, ‘they let Western nations meddle in their domestic affairs’, ‘their leaders were not original thinkers’, ‘there is no hope for Africa unless it follows Eritrea’s example’ – these were the ideas that took hold. 

The early media of independence did not like to look back. Within five or six years, images from the struggle era looked like distant memories that made everyone nostalgic. Everyone started to see a very different future. 

After the war with Ethiopia  was over in 2000, the government had lost credibilityWhen the dream of freedom and national transformation was lost, people started questioning everything. Anger and disappointment made many people choose to oppose even the founding ideals of the EPLF. For many people, the initial stages of rethinking the foundations of Eritrea’s modern identity meant wanting to break the bond with the country itself.People started wondering if not only the PFDJ, but if even the EPLF, had been wrong. For some who wanted to revise everything, if the EPLF was wrong, then even the idea of independence must be wrong. The national disappointment was so huge that people reached very drastic conclusions about everything political. The images of the struggle, the EPLF, the leadership, the country and the people were so heavily mixed up with party propaganda that, for some people, hating President Isaias automatically meant hating the country. This lackof distinction between the nation and its leadership grants the president theunequivocal power to decide who is and is not a true Eritrean. With this power, the leadership can decide the fate of any citizen, whether they belong to the party or a group viewed as subversive bythe PFDJ. The president can decree whether someone (or some group) is a true nationalist or not, depending on the desired end. 

The shock that followed the late 1990s border war with Ethiopia disillusioned many people and significantly damaged the enthusiasm Eritrean independence had generated. Some fringe elements even go too far  express regret at independence and publicly stated that remaining with Ethiopia would have been better. This disillusionment seems to have been experienced most deeply by the younger generation. In contrast to the sentiments and thinking of the 1990s, the thinking of the late 2000s can be characterized as the rethinking of national identity. Most youth want to understand the origins of the modern Eritrean nation state. While some seem to be reactionary thinkers, many others have undergone sober national soul searching while trying to find out where it all went wrong and how it can be fixed. This national disillusionment has ledsociety to try and divorce itself from the party and understand its own identity from a wider perspective. However destructive the present situation in the country might be, the identity vacuum and the need for the revision of history is an opportunity for Eritrean society to realign itself with a reality that would not have been possible had the PFDJ still been the undisputed patron of Eritrean history.

The stagnant image of the PFDJ, the disillusionment of the youth with the regime and the rethinking of national identity are all hangovers from before independence. The party’s predecessor, the ELF, had tried many models that did not work. Following the ELF, the EPLF did not have any model that could truly attract the masses in the long term. During the struggle era it had relied on force or on the people’s need for freedom to exist. After independence, the PFDJ found it difficult to operate as a government and to create a convincing and consistent image. To move past thisproblem, the party reverted to its old tactics of fear and punishment. 

The EPLF built its image on many outdated ideas anddid not know how to get rid of them after they became embedded in its cadre and military system. Its stated aims from the 1970s included anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism. Nobody quite understood why the EPLF needed to be anti-Zionist as the party struggled to grow in the predominantly Christian highlands. It is quite curious that the EPLF thought that anti-Zionism would be accepted, consideringthe fact that Orthodox Christian Eritreans uphold the ancient idea of Israel as the land of God’s people. Many of the fighters who came from the highlands even had the suffix Zion in their first or second names. The EPLF never really created an image that fit with the vision of the people it professed to fight for. It seemed that most of its image originated from what the people wanted it to be, rather than what it actually was. After independence, used to taking the loyalty of the masses for granted, it concentrated on media campaigns, rather than reimagining its image. 

After the end of the war with Ethiopia, the PFDJ found it difficult to maintain itsearlier shining image, which had been damaged beyond repair. Instead of reimagining a new look, the PFDJ decided to go back to the ideas of the EPLF. The state TV introduced many programmes that worked to remind everyone how much the PFDJ, especially President Isaias and whoever was currently in favour, had done for the thankless masses. Other programmes praised the nation building that the government, in its infinite pity for the masses and through its unmatched ability to cause miracles to happen, was doing for the country. What the media meant by ‘the government’ was ‘the party’ and the people were supposed to thank the party for allowing the nation to go on. The government and the people are said to be one and the same, their aims and principles identical. The government does all that it does because it is the will of the people. However, nobody knows how the people make their will known.The government talks to the people like a monarch to its subjects or a colonizer to the colonized. In trying to use the media to convince the people to love it, the praise the government gets for doing nothing for the country has alienated the PFDJ as an outsider that the people want to avoid.

At present, the image of the PFDJ is damaged beyond repair. This damaged image, by virtue of having carried with it some of the nation’s aspirations, has also damaged the country itself. After the high hopes of the 1990s to the despair of the present day, the disillusioned Eritrean society might not find it easy to rise again, even if the present clique is removed from power at some point in the future. The modern Eritrean identity, which had heavily relied on the struggle for independence and freedom, now has to let go of the EPLF as the basis for its identity. It has to try to grasp a wider view of its own past if it is to find a way to move ahead: by widening the circle of its basis in both the temporal and spatial senses to accommodate excised and deliberately neglected historical details that go back to the medieval and ancient periods.