Welcome to Asmarino Independent.

Afshin Rattansi: Please don’t talk about us without us!

Indeed if you had asked the people of Asmara where the best place to visit to give an idea of what is going on n Eritrea was; we are sure they would have pointed you to the various official and unofficial prisons dotted around the city, the most notorious of these known as Kersheli was within walking distance from where you were filming, it is unfortunate that your free access and unannounced visits turned a blind eye to this reality that didn’t require much digging.

Have you noticed that there really weren’t any young people on the streets of Asmara? We did, it is stark a reality even your rosy depiction couldn’t gloss over, if you had enquired Asmarinos would have told you that the city was between raids (giffa as we know it), the hunt down of young people, to forcibly send them to the military camps that we are surprised your camera missed.

Long live Areopagitica!

You see apparently even Goebbels was in favour of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin (so says Noam Chomsky) …our commitment to freedom of expression will not be measured by our ability to tolerate the views we approve of but those we actually despise…

To my friends at EYSC who felt put out by my criticism of the work that we are doing… to those who thought I shouldn’t have gone public with my views to those who thought my criticism wasn’t ‘constructive’ (when we are done here we can write a new dictionary)… and finally to those who feel that people who are working as hard as we are (voluntarily) shouldn’t be criticised…I say watch it or you might end up in the company of : the good men of Vatican who banned Copernicus and punished Galileo for expressing a thought… and those who declared fatwa on Salmon Rushdie… and I am sure that isn’t where you want to be!

(II) The Circular Journey in Search of Eritrea: A “World Distance” that Never Was

Think of a whole cake that someone holds on a tray, and asks you to taste it. You dip in your forefinger into the cake and put it in your mouth. You wince – obviously you don’t like the taste. Then, surprisingly, you say, “Please cut a piece for me, that might do the trick.” If the cake doesn’t taste good while it was whole, to expect that its taste will change for the better by cutting it would be attributing the taste not to its ingredients and the baking (the deeper qualities) but to the cutting (the separation). Such was the Eritrean case. The ghedli generation, given their misguided modernist misgivings, didn’t like the taste of the Habesha world in its totality. So they thought that if they could get a cut of it, its taste would change for the better. That Eritrea would remain a piece of that Habesha world they were attempting to escape from, with all the additional problems such a “smallness” entails, was totally lost on them. And worse, they were unable to see that the cutting logic would, in time, be easily driven to its logical conclusion by some population groups from inside the new nation, that may not like the taste of the whole Eritrea and predictably decide all their problems would go away only if they could get their cut from that piece of cake, and so on ...

Eritrea’s Masses: Armed But Docile

Throughout the rest of the following years, however, the front’s authorities have been in the habit of drafting the large majority of the working age population in perpetuity. Now, there is no trace of the “fearsome” looking peasant warriors that often posed for photographers in the nineteenth century. While their counterparts in Yemen are still formidable, feared and uncaptured, the Eritrean peasant is only left with his ubiquitous stick. His last weapon of defense has now diminished to a small and thin size. In other words, the peasant is now only a caricature of the nineteenth century peasant of the frontiers. This grim political landscape is the aftereffect of the historical experience that began with colonial Italy and ended with the “liberators”. Thus, the pathetic situation of the Eritrean peasants was, among many factors, the result of the secretive, terrorist organization in the hands of its own children that even surpassed the ones practiced in the past.

Eritrean Refugees and POWs in Djibouti

A lack of compassion from the UNHCR has been observed by HRCE. Leaving detainees who suffer from tuberculosis without medication is beyond imagination and shocking. In some cases, medication was withdrawn before completion of the course (6 months) and, as a result, some have suffered lapses. Leaving TB patients without medication amongst other detainees is like condemning all to be infected, and this is also a serious act of negligence.

Haemorrhoids, ear/nose/throat/chest  and skin infections, heart disease, kidney disease, high  blood pressure, asthma and tonsillitis are just a few of the illnesses that go routinely untreated in the Centre.

(Photo: Elizabeth Chyrum, of Human Rights Concern Eritrea and Mr Hassan Darar Houffaneh, Djibouti’s Minister of the Interior.)

In Search of the Eritrean Bouazizi

It was as I contemplated this quandary that the story of Mohammed Bouazizi came into my mind and that is why I am arguing in this article that only Bouazizi-like spontaneities will rescue us. I am suggesting that we all are or can be Mohamed Bouazizi and change can come only if the Bouazizis inside us wake up by spontaneity. In short, I am predicting that spontaneity and not conscious sacrifice will bring about good breeze in Eritrea…

We could now be left with our instinctive actions only. Consciously organizing and preparing ourselves for sacrifice to see change may not be on our personal menus; trust amongst us seems to be in short supply; generation upon generation of barbarism has crowned hopelessness on our heads and hearts, especially those of us who have never seen a free country except on the news media; subconsciously most of us are on the receiving end of the Eritrea project not on the giving end…

Awate was a trigger happy ordinary outlaw (shifta): A hero of Fascist Benito Mussolini !!!

He was a trigger happy fascist loyalist who worked against the interests of the Eritrean people in particular and colonized Africans in general, who continued to fight the British forces, alongside Amedeo Guillet, to bring back fascist Italian rule to Eritrea even after Mussolini’s army had surrendered in East Africa to the allied forces.

He was a fascist loyalist who conducted a guerrilla war for 5 whole years for “a king, country and a people whom he never saw or knew”.  He was loyal Carabinieri who diligently worked to keep Eritreans under the yoke of Italian colonialism.  As a right hand man of the Italian administration he approved and enforced the racist and oppressive policy of Italy which confiscated around half of the land of Eritrea under the principles of state land “Terreno Demaniale”, particularly around western lowlands of Eritrea during his tenure as administrator.  ...

Lawless enforcing Law

The Eritrean regime’s latest complaints on its propaganda machines pertaining to land can only be interpreted as a lawless regime attempting to divert the public’s attention away from its daily miseries.  Lawless regimes are the biggest sources of socio-economic, political and legal upheavals in a nation. ...

Here is a regime whose legitimacy emanates NOT from any legitimate laws of the land but from the end of the barrel of the gun.  Before the regime complains that others are lawless, it should examine itself and lead by example, as the late PM Meles Zenawi and his regime are doing.