Welcome to Asmarino Independent.

Birmingham Hilton Hosts an Expensive Wake for PFDJ

….Ambassador wedigerahtu had a tall order in his hands this year! To fill a large hotel complex with 600 young energetic, resourceful and committed young pfdjites and to do all this without the rest of us finding out where this pfdj dream world is going to be!   That is how he ended up spending a whole year fending off a growing crowd of rough young men who just wouldn’t stop yelling at him shouting their annoying slogans everywhere he went… in Leeds they point blank refused him a word in edgeways… in Manchester they had him confined to a room for hours on end … In Birmingham he had to use fire exits for his grand entry and exit… in London they wouldn’t even let him out of his car and in West London he was reduced to gathering his faithful in a poxy café where the activists there had declared a ‘pfdj no go zone’, with lines only visible to those who dared to cross them! The UK has never been a more treacherous spot for a goon…

Refugees, Ransoms and Revolt

Refugees have been fleeing Eritrea since the mid-1960s, often in spasms that reflected the ebb and flow of war with Ethiopia -- first over Eritrea’s independence and then over its boundaries. For the past decade, however, the primary driver has been the new nation’s own government, cobbled together out of the liberation front and led by the guerrilla army’s commander, Isaias Afwerki.

What began as a trickle in 2001 after a bloody two-year border war and a crackdown on internal dissent quickly turned into a flood as the regime brandished the threat of renewed conflict with Ethiopia -- or even reconquest -- as a rationale for turning Eritrea into a police state and forcing its youth to remain in open-ended and largely unpaid “national service.” Questioning this policy led to detention and, often, to beatings and torture. Political prisons proliferated and thousands of suspected dissenters disappeared. By the middle of the 2000s, Eritrea, whose population is 4 or 5 million, was hemorrhaging young people. [2] At the start of 2013, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated the number of refugees from Eritrea at more than a quarter million.

Eritrea: Scenarios for Future Transition

Africa Report N°200, 28 March 2013

Events in the last twelve months indicate growing discontent inside Eritrea’s tightly controlled regime, as well as deepening political and social divisions. While the mounting number of incidents suggests that President Isaias Afwerki’s regime is vulnerable, with increasing concerns over its ability to stay in power, the country would face numerous institutional, socio-economic and geopolitical obstacles during and after any transition. A careful assessment of these, as well as the role neighbours and the wider international community could play, is urgently needed to help avoid a violent power struggle that could prove dangerous for the Horn of Africa and potentially – as Eritrea is a littoral state – for the Red Sea region.

(II) Discontent at the Top: How Indispensable Is the Prison System to the Eritrean Defense Forces?

To grasp the extent of how much the army depends on the prison system in Eritrea, one need to see its elaborate, multi-layered nature meant not only to prevent desertion and evasion, but also to feed the army with new recruits and rehabilitated ones. Like the Russian doll, one has to open one prison system to discover anther one embedded in it, and further open the exposed one to find yet another one inside it. Once, I described this prison system as a “prison within a prison within a prison”, made up of three concentric circles, one embedded into the other. In the outermost circle, we find the whole population trapped within the sealed borders of the nation; in the middle circle, we find the hundreds of thousands of army conscripts trapped in the national service; and, in the innermost circle, we find the thousands of “political” prisoners trapped in officially recognized prisons. In such a layered world, the misery index of an army conscript (actual or potential) is measured by how deep into this system of concentric circles he/she finds himself ... What this pervasive prison system shows us is that the army would not survive a day without it, for the prison system is structured in such a way as to maximize both the army’s recruiting and retaining capabilities ...

Introducing the demon that works for me!

If I know anything about my fellow activists, it is the fact that they are at their most animated, most organised and most furious…. When they are dealing with each other and their endless squabbles… articles are written then… meetings on-line…. Off-line and informal discussions on the phone take up most of the waking and not so waking hours… and leaderships are formed, deformed and misformed during these crisis moments…

But where it really matters, we are not angry! At least we are not angry enough…. Well not angry enough at the right entity… Last weekend when the tragedy in Sinai was coming to life in the voice of Ahlam… many were desperate to do something for her… some were anxious to do something about the whole refugee crisis but no one was angry enough to create the kind of momentum that results in change! The hurricane like vigour we so effectively use to deal with each other is never there when dealing with the real things than need changing… no urgency, no passion and certainly no abject indignation!

Powerful authentic voice: “Women’s Right is Human Right"

The Organizing Committee of the Eritrean women in the United Kingdom held a vigil protest in front of the Eritrean Embassy in London on Friday March 8, 2013 in commemoration of the international women's day.  It was a rainy day most of the posters got wet and they have to be thrown away but the protesters held on bravely.

The demonstrators made visible to all the passers by not only to see and learn the suffering and pain of the Eritrean Women prisoners of conscience but also to share and pray for them and condemn the Eritrean Government.

The main powerful slogan “Women’s right is a human right “was able to connect the aim of International women’s day with the reality of oppression of women in Eritrea. Their authentic voice was the voice of real women rotting in the dungeons of PFDJ.

My observations on ‘Muslims protest’ in Ethiopia

The government decided to tackle the issue head-on at a national level, hence, began to organize different inter-religious understanding forums. The Mejlis under pressure from the government began to tightly control the Islamic centers and the self-appointed preachers. The youth leaders in the Mejlis began to openly challenge their peers and other senior Imams accusing them they are succumbing to government pressures in introducing a new form of Islamic teaching called ‘Al’ahbash.’ After Friday prayers from the Awelia mosque they began organizing a massive sit-in protest calling for the resignation of the Mejlis and for a new election to take place. Legally the Mejlis ‘Islamic council’ can’t be dissolved before their term is over. The issue became very delicate for the government, in one way the constitution guarantees freedom of worship and forbade the government from interfering in their internal affairs. On the other hand the government feared the Mejlis to be over-taken by Islamic extremists. Taking this advantage a number of Salafist Muslim scholars and Christian missionaries for that matter have been pouring into the country in proselytizing locals. Hence, they have got a perfect opportunity to spread their own version of Islam on the mostly moderate Muslims, who have been living in peaceful co-existence for hundreds of years.

(I) Discontent at the Top: Mismatching Disjointed Eritrea

If a band made up of a mute and a cripple advertizes a show that involves singing and dancing, it would be easy for a prospective audience to picture how that division of labor would go. Even though it would be easy to imagine either of the duo or both playing musical instruments, the only way to imagine them in the act of singing and dancing would be for the cripple to sing (for he has no legs to dance with) and for the mute to dance (for he has no voice to sing with). But if, on the real stage, it is actually the mute who tries to sing and the cripple who tries to dance, one can claim that the audience has been a victim of its “normalized” imagination. ... So is it with the Eritrean opposition in diaspora: only by normalizing the abnormal state of Eritrea would they keep on mismatching agents of change and the roles they are supposed to play in the division of labor they imagine that turns every contemplated action to usher regime change into a not-doable one. And given the numerous possible agents of change in regard to Eritrea, the mismatch could turn out to be quite dizzying and intangibly bizarre. ...