The Eritrean revolution: A
circular Or A Linear Journey?
Posted at awate.com on November 9, 2012
·
Written by: Dr. Mohammed
Kheir
I was in 1952, on the same year that Eritrea was
federated with Ethiopia; I am as old as federal arrangement that Haile
Sellassie unilaterally dismantled 12 years later. During my sixty years of life
I have experienced many things and Eritrea has also grown up with me and
affected me all my life. Born and raised in Agordat, I enjoyed a simple and
peaceful life. The vivid memories that I miss is the enjoyable scenery of the
Barka river, particularly during the rainy season. We adored nature and
we used to go to ‘Welet aberg’ with my friends to swim and chase
rabbits. We enjoyed life to the most.
It so happened that I was born into a Muslim family
and Islam defines part of my identity. I went to a Koranic school, a khalwa,
when a “madrassa” was not mistaken for “terrorism.” Arabic was the first
letters that I learned followed by Koran. Still, when I went to elementary
school, I studied all subjects in Arabic up to the 4th grade. That is
because Arabic existed in the region long before Eritrea and Ethiopia were
created as entities in modern times–nothing alien. Thus, I do not need any
Tigrinya intellectual (who relates Arabic to religion only and who denies the
historical roots to Arabia) to lecture me on what language I should use. I
decide for myself; and I do not impose on others what language they should
choose. The attachment of Eritreans to Arabic is not the creation of the Awate
Team, it is the desire of the overwhelming majority of Eritrean Muslims.
Period.
I was born to a Tigrait speaking family and I am
very proud of my mother language (a rich poetic language that I consider even
much richer than Tigrinya) and the Geez scripts; I do not consider myself an
Arab, but Arabic defines part of my identity.
When I was ten years old, my childhood was brutally
injured, it was taken away from me. Since then, neither me nor my Eritrea that
was growing up with me, have known peace or tranquility. When I was a child I
did not know that Idris Mohamed Adem, the federal era chairman of the Eritrean
parliament and whose house was close to the police station in Agordat, went to
exile along with Ibrahim Sultan and Woldeab Woldemariam. But more and more
strange soldiers, Tor Serawit, who did not speak our language came to
our town. Bars that entertain them flourished. New Amharic teachers appeared on
the scene. The calm town was disturbed by the ever increasing number of
military vehicles. The Ethiopian soldiers camped close to the only football
field in town. In the early years, we used to go the field and during recess, we
were freely drinking water from the tap, but gradually, that stopped. They took
over the field and they moved the football field to another place. At the same
time, before fully annexing Eritrea, Ethiopia waged a concerted campaign to win
Eritreans, and the government distributed pamphlets showing the schools,
mosques and churches that Haile Sellasie built.
On the 12th of July, 1962
when the representative of the King and several dignitaries were on a visit to
my home town; ELF Fedayeen threw grenades at the gathering. It was the first
daring military operation of its kind. Several people died, many were injured
and many others were imprisoned; since then, I never enjoyed peace as the town
was quickly militarized. The Tor Serawit dragging to town dead bodies of
civilians they killed. They hanged the dead bodies in town squares to scare
people from joining the revolution! This were the brutal acts and
savagery of “mother Ethiopia” (imagine a “mother” doing that to her children)
helped the ranks of the revolution to swell. Even the Eritrean Komandos who
were more brutal in other towns such as Keren, joined the revolution when they
knew their constituency was in it. Saleh Gadi’s
novel tells it all.
In 1967 the Ethiopian government pursued a scorched
earth policy which I experienced closely. People were arrested and killed in
groups, many from Agordat disappeared and many left the town. Villages like Ad
Ibrahim were burned to the ground and the first mass refugees entered the
Sudan. Herds of animals were bombarded from the air, and wells were poisoned.
Recently I asked Abdul Aziz, a close friend who
lives in Canada, “Would we have been happier today: if we did not leave
Agordat, if we did not know much about this world, if we did not migrate to the
West, if we simply looked after our farm animals and enjoyed our simple life?”
He emphatically replied, YES. I can not agree more. Even natural development
would have been very much welcome. But why am I taking you through my 50 year
personal journey?
I have to say this: I was outraged when I read Part I of Yosief
Ghebrehiwet’s article where he claims that the Eritrean revolution
has never been about ideals, freedom and emancipation. For someone like me who
grew up in Agordat, and who bore the brunt since the annexation, the armed
struggle was a revolution against injustice, against the imposing of the Amhara
language and culture on the whole of Eritrea–as was done on the whole of
Ethiopia earlier. It was a revolution against injutice, similar to Tigrai’s
Weyane uprising in 1940s and the TPLF revolution in the mid 70s. It was similar
to the Mahdi rebellion in Sudan and similar to others uprising against
injustice in various forms. The Eritrean revolution can never be regarded as “50
years of madness“, “about creating a new belonging alien to themselves”
nor as Habesha and non-habesha issue, as portrayed by Yosief who
claims, “their fallacious understanding was: if it was part of Ethiopia,
then there was no “Eritrea” to be had; they wanted an “Eritrea” that they, and
only they, could own.” The term Habesha, whether he chose it purposely or
not, is an improper choice as it excludes chunks of Eritreans.
There are three linguistic groups in Eritrea:
Semetic (Tigre and Tigrinya), Kushetic (Affer, Saho, Bilen, Hidareb) and
Nilotic (Kunama and Nara). The oldest groups in Eritrea are the Kushetic such
as the Affer on whose region was found the fossils of the first human settlers.
All those linguistic groups have their extensions in neighboring countries
including Ethiopia, where taken together, the Kushetic groups are the majority
in both countries.
Hamid Idris Awate who fired the first shots at
mount Adal in 1961 against the Ethiopian government to fight injustice
cannot be but a great hero, irrespective of how some want to denigrate him. He
was simply a historical necessity; he could have been any one. And that is why
the first bullets he fired spread like fire not only in Eritrea but also in
Ethiopia where it gradually contributed to end the feudal mono-cultural rule of
the Amhara elite in Ethiopia (though the Amhara commoners were oppressed) and
paved the way for the modern multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural Ethiopia.
However, Hamid Awate was human and his actions is not above assessment; and it
is rather the freedom of expression that has to be sacred. But no amount of
vilification can tarnish the image of Awate. As far as there is injustice,
there will always be a revolt as a reaction whether Eritrea is independent
Eritrea or not. There can never be peace without justice.
Yosief’s plea to go back to the starting point is
not something new, it was actually tried and failed. The late PM of Ethiopia Meles Zenawi,
articulated why Eritreans revolted against the rule of Haile
Sellasie and Ustaz Mahmoud has summarized
Meles’s statements in English. When the majority of Christian Highlanders came
to realize that the panacea that was promised actually deprived them of their
own language and culture, they gradually started to join the revolution. It was
not long before those whose slogan was ‘Ethiopia or Death’, tasted both and so
joined the revolution. It did not take long for Tella Ogbit and Tella Bairu to
rebel against the Ethiopian rule which they fought hard to enforce on Eritrea.
For the record, the majority of Muslims, did not opt to be part of Sudan. They
stood fast for independence with the minority of Christians. Things became
worse in the highlands when Mengistu took power. The brutal methods of
strangulating youth in Asmara with wires drove many youth to the revolution.
EPLF’s ‘Nehnan Elamnan’
became more appealing to many Christian Highlanders. It is a pity that many of
our human rights organizations are very keen to document crimes committed
during the struggle era but seem uninterested in documenting the crimes
committed by Ethiopian occupation that we have almost forgotten.
I admire Yosief’s courage for expressing his
non-conforming views which provoke us and shake our views; everyone should
express their views without any intimidation. Even if there are some who would
advocate unity with Ethiopia, it is within their own right, but they should not
do it by undermining our revolution–they can simply air their views without
provoking others. One cannot dismiss Yosief’s article as ‘Andnet’, etc. I think
he makes good points regarding ‘the switching case, which reflects the strong
sense of attachment that both members of ELF and EPLF have to their respective
organizations and the geographical factors that determined who joined which
organization and the fact that most of us are born in the religion we have
strong attachment to. Yes, some of us have attachment to the ELF, others to the
EPLF, but all of us have attachment to our locality or ethnic group and our
religion, but our main political attachment is to the unfinished project we
call Eritrea–a free and democratic country that is at peace with itself and
with its neighbors.
Following Yosief’s circular journey, I ask: is the
Agordat and the Eritrea I knew 60 years ago going to go back to the starting
point? Am I or my town and my surrounding and my country better or worse than
it was 60 years ago? It is definitely much worse. For example, my town Agordat
has changed forever. The demography has changed, most of the old inhabitants
still live as refugees in neighboring Sudan. Thanks to the social engineering
by the EPLF/PFDJ the new rulers, the haves (not all of them) are Eritreans but
they are not from the locality, they come from the Highlands. Most of the
have-nots are some of the original inhabitants that have not migrated. The
original inhabitants feel like they are alien in their own land. What does a
revolution mean to me if I feel I have lost everything: my language, my
identity, my land?
A humorous friend from Stockholm once reflected:
“Mohamed every revolution is meant to make situations better, this is a strange
revolution–we have almost lost everything”. A joke from Haikota goes as
follows: a local pastoralist saw the statue of a man and asked whom it
represented. His friend replied, “Don’t you know him, this is Awate”. The
pastoralist replied, “God gracious, this is the man who started a revolution
and brought us all those Habesh to take our land, we would have been much
better without him.” To a common person in the lowlands, the term Habesh (be it
with Big or small H) represents Christian highlanders. Of course, every
Eritrean has the right to live wherever he chooses in Eritrea, but that has to
be a natural process, not be promoted or engineered selectively and
systematically by the government. There are also some regions in the highlands
that feel discriminated against. One can argue that, since Eritreans have
sacrificed themselves in all parts of Eritrea, then they have the right to live
anywhere. A colleague who is a veteran of the EPLF to went to Eritrea to see
development ‘m’ebaletat’ recalls that a camel came to graze in a
camouflaged shade used by the fighters. An angry Highlander shouted at the
owner telling him to take the camel to hell. The pastoralist murmured, ”You
came to the camel, it did not come to you.”
Since 2001, the injustice of the current regime has
gradually reached the highlands. Though the regime clandestinely preaches that
the Tigrinya have never achieved so much as they did under Isaias and that if
he goes it will be the Muslims (as if they are from Mars) who will rule, and
though there has not been so much social engineering there, but the reality is
that many of the victims of human trafficking and organ theft are young
Christian Highlanders. This shows that things has never been this bad there
compared to 50 years ago. This is the reality today.
When the EPLF allied with the TPLF and drove the ELF
out of the Eritrean field, the ELF (which by the mid-70s was a full-fledged
national organization composed of Muslims and Christians) disintegrated into
various factions. Far reaching consequences that were not foreseen either by
the EPLF and TPLF ensued. As the result of the exclusionist policies of the
EPLF, religious and ethnic organizations were formed. Due to that, the
Lowlanders still harbor deep suspicions about the TPLF. The late PM of Ethiopia
has explained to the participants of the Intellectual seminar in Addis in 2011
that the measure was not a Tigrinya coalition against the ELF, but it was a
necessary measure for the existence of the TPLF as the ELF threatened the
existence of TPLF by forming an alliance with EDU and EPRP, but he regretted the
use of force. Aregawi Berhe in
his PhD thesis clarifies the reasons behind this attack and the
former ELF-RC’s version of what followed after that is described here.
According to Yosief, we are in a circular journey
because we have abandoned our indigenous culture (not very clear if he means
Ethiopian culture) and adopted an alien culture (Arabic and the Ghedli’s
culture). I believe our indigenous culture as well as the Ghedli culture have
good and bad aspects, we have to adopt the best from those cultures. Things
have changed so much that there is no original starting point, even Ethiopia
has changed. I wish our problems were that simple. I think our biggest problem
has always been (and remains) on how we accept and manage our diversity. Many
African countries have failed to mange their diversity and are in deep trouble,
Sudan is a vivid example. Some other African countries that have achieved
independence through armed struggle have also failed to return to democratic
civilian rule without the need to go to the starting point. Though homogenous,
Somalia could have avoided failure if it had accepted, recognized and managed
its tribal and regional diversity. If we fail to manage our diversity, we will
continue to have problems and the existence of Eritrea as an entity will be at
stake.
I believe we have come a long way in addressing our
problems, we have narrowed the gap, we have agreed on basic principles on how
to rule the future democratic Eritrea. The ENCDC is a big step in the right
direction. The youth movement is another optimistic sign as the youth, though
they are not totally free, they carry less old baggage of our ethnic, regional
and religious divisions. The mainstream Tigrinya speakers do not support the
views of the circular journey. The journey for an independent, free and
democratic Eritrea can not be reversed. When the current project is completed,
it is up to the Eritrean people to decide whether to live as a separate state
or form a confederation– perhaps in a bigger perspective, with both Ethiopia
and Sudan.
On part II I will comment on part II of Yosief’s
circular journey and on the way forward
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