When we were C.I.A spies …… Memories of a dreadful time

Almost all the independent news papers were labeled as spies and agents of foreign governments and intelligence organizations outright. I was lucky to get the honorary title of a CIA agent. “Setit” news paper of Aarom Berhane was labled as a Danish agent and “NAY DENMARK” ( can you believe Denmark spying on Eritrea????). Admas news paper of Khaled Abdu and company was marked as a Libyan agent. Khaled used to print large photos of the Libyan Leader in his paper and tried to interview the Libyan ambassador at one time and this was enough evidence to get the title of a Libyan agent (Eritrea’s AL megrahi!). Yusuf Mohammed Ali and his Tsigenay newspaper were Saudi stooges. They used to have a column in their paper during the holy month of Ramadan, a kind of religious question and answer. This plus the editors name were enough to bestow the designation of a Saudi agent! In a land of special courts and scary Gulags, where one can be sentenced at a whim of a military judge and where one can languish indefinitely in prison, in a law less system where there is no recourse of appeal or justice, titles and honorific designation were plenty and some have no choice except to believe in whatever they were told.

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Sealing off Eritrea: Domestic Terrorism

Totalitarian leaders are like scientists in that they are always in search of the perfect controlled laboratory environment, devoid of any interfering variables. And they are unlike scientists in that they never accept the results of their experimentation, given the fact that those results never match the ones they have already made up in their minds. All the horrors that take place in a totalitarian society are the result of endless attempts to close this impossible gap between attained and preferred results. At every such failed attempt, the experimental setting has to be drastically overhauled to meet impossible conditions, always at a horrendous price to the masses – as the Eritrean case amply testifies.

The first thing that a totalitarian leader does to make a perfect laboratory out of his nation (and perfect guinea pigs out of his subjects) is to seal off the nation from the outside world, not only to prevent outside variables that might compromise his experimentation from coming in but also to prevent inside variables essential for the success of his experimentation from escaping out. It is not surprising then that the most crucial question that a totalitarian leader or party asks is: how do I keep out those variables that potentially infringe on my independence to experiment as I simultaneously keep in those variables essential to the success of my experiment? The “independence” mentioned here is that of the leader’s (or the party’s) unfettered independence to do whatever he wants to do within the confines of his laboratory (the nation) to bring about the kind of results he wants to achieve – often, a utopian society made in his or the party’s own image. But since no such satisfactory result is ever achieved, the experimentation ends up being all about weeding out “interfering variables”, a process that ends only with the demise of the totalitarian system itself.

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How Many Colors Does A Rainbow Have?

This brings us to the main topic of this article. How many colors does a rainbow have? A rainbow is believed to be made up of seven colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet by the casual observer. Scientifically, however, the rainbow is a whole continuum of colors from red to violet and even beyond the colors that the eye can see. I am not a mind reader but from what I read, Ahmed Raj seems to see only two colors in a rainbow. The rest of the colors he leaves for sheer speculation. Since his vision seems to be limited to seeing only two colors in a rainbow he also is in the habit of first making his preconceived conclusions and then working down from there to find data to validate them. And what an assortment of tainted and "convenient" data he has!!!!

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More from Eritrea seek life of peace in Maryland

At first, the police only beat her.

They had come to the two-room stone house where Abeba Hagos Enday lived with her four children to conscript her husband into the Eritrean army. When she told them - truthfully, she says - that she didn't know where he was, they gave her an ultimatum: Find him before we come back, or we will kill you. 

"I had to leave," Enday says through an interpreter.

Enday, 39, is one of about four dozen Eritreans who have arrived in Baltimore since July, the first members of a group that resettlement officials expect to rival the current big three - Iraqis, Bhutanese and Burmese - in admissions during the next year.

"This population is coming," says Robert Warwick, director of the Baltimore office of the International Rescue Committee, which is resettling the Eritreans locally. "For years, resettlement was stagnant, but now the U.S. government has identified numbers, and they're being processed."

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The Language Question Revisited

Second, some claim that they use Arabic in their religious schools and religious institution thus Arabic should qualify as one of the working languages of Eritrea. Similarly, the Tewahdos use Geez in their religious schools and churches. They use Geez in such important occasions as religious holidays, prayers, baptism, marriage ceremonies, funereal services and all the attendant ceremonies that follow. Here, I do not see that much difference in the way the Tewahdos use Geez from that our Muslim compatriots use Arabic during comparable occasions. I can attest to the fact that the Tewahdo masses have no clue of the Geez language. I conjecture that may be the case with the Eritrean Muslim masses regarding Arabic. Still no matter how one cuts it, a language does not become a working language of a nation just because a religious institution uses it. To examine this issue in more detail, it becomes important to examine how non Arab Muslims handle the Arabic language. The question is do Muslim nations who are not Arabs accept Arabic as one of their official languages?

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Student Activism: The Powerhouse of Eritrean Liberation Struggle; the Biggest Threat to the PFDJ

I recognize three major phases during when Eritrean Student Activism has taken distinctive forms: early 1940s- early 1960s, mid 1960s-Independence, 2001-present. Student activism in Eritrea traces its origin back to the early 1940s. In 1941 the first generation of anti-colonial Eritreans -Mahber Fikri Hager Eritra (MFHE) formed a coalition demanding Eritrean freedom, mainly from the Italian fascist rule⁴. The masterminds of the MFHE consisted of young intellectuals and self made individuals notable among them Woldeab Woldemariam, Gebremeskel Woldu and Ibrahim Sultan⁴. Although limited to clandestine activities, the MFHE was successful in sending a shock wave to the British Administration prior to which organized parties were not allowed in Eritrea. The Italian colonial rule was particularly indifferent to Eritrean identity. After sensing the growing political consciousness of Eritreans, in 1946, the British Administration allowed the formation of political parties to which the subsequent fates of Eritrea owes a lot.

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Eritrea: Spoiler Exacerbates Crisis in the Horn of Africa and Beyond

To recall, it has been more than two years since I warned in this column space about the danger posed by “the rogue regime in Asmara which, for its own reasons, is fomenting a growing cycle of violence phenomenon that not only threatens the stability of its neighbors, but, because of its support of an al-Qaeda-linked Islamist insurgency, risks opening a broad terrorist front across the entire Horn of Africa.” Earlier this year, after a May emergency summit in Addis Ababa, the Council of Ministers of the subregional Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) issued a statement asserting that “the government of Eritrea and its financiers continue to instigate, finance, recruit, train, fund and supply the criminal elements in and/or to Somalia” and calling on the United Nations Security Council to “impose sanctions on the government of Eritrea without any further delay.” The Peace and Security Council of the African Union concurred, issuing a communiqué expressing its “deep concern at the reports regarding the support provided to these armed groups [in Somalia], through training, provision of weapons and ammunitions and funding, by external actors, including Eritrea, in flagrant violation of the United Nations arms embargo” and likewise asking the Security Council to “impose sanctions against all those foreign actors, both within and outside the region, specially Eritrea, providing support to the armed groups engaged in destabilization activities in Somalia, attacks against the TFG, the civilian population and AMISOM, as well as against all the Somali individuals and entities working towards undermining the peace and reconciliation efforts and regional stability.”

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THE FRIEND OF ISAIAS

The reference of Berlusconi to the closing of the colonial question "not only with Libya" is the first official indication to the new course. And this is despite the uncomfortable and frequent visits by the men of Isaias Afewerki (the President of Eritrea) who are in search of dollars through commercial corruption of every kind. The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has accused the Eritrean regime for providing aid to the Islamic extremists with links to Al Qaeda in Somalia. But the connections with Italy are now on a monthly basis. On Friday 18^th of September, Franco Frattini, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, received his counterpart Osman Saleh and Yemane Ghebreab, the political advisor of the dictator and the craftsman behind the terror. During the talks on border issues, the delegation of Eritrea expressed its appreciation for the rejection of Eritrean exiles back to Libya that was decided by Interior Minister Roberto Maroni. Operations accompanied by the reduction of an action team of paramedics from Italy and Malta: an order that in August contributed to the death of 73 Eritrean fugitives from 78 left adrift on a barge.

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(I) Eritrea’s Pragmatic Terrorism: the Relevance Factor

The only good thing about Isaias is that he has never been a nationalist, but armed with his super-size ego this quality turns into a disaster for its ambition recognizes no borders. The problem with Isaias is that once he put himself in the nationalist straight jacket called “Eritrea”, he never managed to disentangle himself from it. He (and ghedli) needed to instill ultra-nationalism in his followers to be where he is now. Once he reached the goal of independence, that very ultra-nationalism became a hindrance to his insatiable ambition to be the most relevant leader in the neighborhood. There was no way that his army would be willing to march to Addis-Ababa and put him on the Abyssinian throne. Instead, he had to look enviously as Melles’ army did exactly what he wanted to do. At that particular moment, he must have cursed the “narrow nationalism” of the Eritrean people for denying him what he considered was within his reach.

But that doesn’t mean that Isaias totally gave up on his ambition. In fact, the trauma the young nation has been undergoing can be explained as a result of seismic efforts of its leader to come out of the nationalist straight jacket that his people have put him in. First, he was flirting with the idea of confederation with the belief that that would give him a noncontroversial and “peaceful” means to escape this straightjacket. And then there was that wild hope that TPLF won’t ever make it in Ethiopia without his support, a condition that he thought he could exploit permanently. After the border war, all such hopes were dashed. Since then, his various misadventures in the neighborhood can be explained as a desperate attempt to get out of that straightjacket. So it goes both ways: not only do his people think that they are victimized by him, he also thinks that he is victimized by them. Both created their own monsters: Isaias (and ghedli) created one of the most nationalist people on earth, and the people created a monster too big to be tethered within the confines of the nation.

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Who is the enemy?

Who is the enemy? The enemies of Eritrea are those who came up with a system that enslaves Eritreans instead of assuring freedom in their own country. The enemies of Eritrea are those who have created a discouraging environment, where Eritreans long to flee their own country and become refugees of other countries, instead of encouraging and creating and environment where Diaspora Eritreans would want to go back and help build their own country. The enemies are those few Eritrean leaders who have rebelled from their own people and are ruling using their military might. The enemies of Eritrea are those traitors who reside in Diaspora (many live in a civilized democratic countries), and have the audacity, to advocate and justify for an atrocious totalitarian military government of Eritrea. In Eritrea we have two classes of people, the totalitarian dictatorship and followers (minority), and the masses who live under constant harassment (majority).

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