(I) TV Trials in Kafkaesque Eritrea: Grand-Staged Crimes

(I) TV Trials in Kafkaesque Eritrea: Grand-Staged Crimes

Yosief Ghebrehiwet

(I) Introduction

Now that the Grand Drama of the Massawa incident involving British seamen that the Eritrean government has so colorfully staged in its mass media [1] has come to a predictable end, it would only be proper to look back and take stock of all that has transpired so far and ask ourselves what indeed has been going on in Shaebia’s (the ruling and only party) head as the farce kept unfolding through three notable stages: the excuse the regime has given for its six months of silence regarding the detained Britons in its introduction to the drama; the content of the elaborate drama itself, with all the twists and turns deserving of a grand conspiracy; and the return to its infamous “silence” mode at the very climax of the drama, for as we speak the government has yet to utter a single word in its media regarding the release of the detainees it has made center of its entangled story. In doing this, we will need to look at three different “motives” that would help us explain why the regime acted the way it did:

• Motive for the grand drama: What motivated the grand spectacle enacted in EriTv by the regime? What is the real cause for this unusual flurry of activity after six months of total silence on the subject matter?
• Motive for the detention: What was the reason behind the detention of the four Britons for six moths? Why did the regime refuse to listen to the heeding of Britain and the pleadings of the company? What is it that the regime expected to gain out of this self-induced crisis?
• Motive for the crimes: What is the motive that the regime attributed to the accused for doing what they did? What is the nature of this reconstructed motive? And is there any reason as to why the regime came up with this particular motive, as opposed to any other?

In this article, it is only the third motive that will be discussed. We will see how the Ministry of Information, as part of its regular propagandistic task, reconstructs facts to fit the motive the regime wants to attribute to the accused. At times, this task goes bizarre because it requires constant tampering at both of the loose ends of the story. When the facts fail to fit the crime, either a brand new fact has to be fabricated to fill in the missing link, or the motive has to be left suspended in vague and indeterminate language without any tangible goal attached to it. At its most surreal moments, the victims are persuaded to help in that very reconstruction that is set to implicate them, thereby forcing them play the double role of innocent bystanders and guilty party. It even goes to “cut and paste” and “delete” in this reconstruction, with people and events entirely disappearing from the scene, sometimes in total disregard to the temporal order of the events. Welcome to the Kafkaesque world of Shaebia! But that doesn’t mean there is no method to Shaebia’s madness, and that is what we have to figure out.

This is not the first time for the Ministry of Information to stage such an elaborate drama on EriTv to hide the regime’s blunder or crime, to implicate victims or for purely propaganda purposes. One that comes easily to mind is the cinematic drama Ali Abdu staged on EriTv in 2007, thereby facilitating the massacre of 26 Kunama at Mai-Dima prison. [2] Then, as now, the storyline had to necessarily gravitate around few concepts that had been taken out of mieda experience (the experience of the guerrilla fighters): sabotage, treason, sovereignty, invasion, terrorism, external enemies, extracted confessions, etc. While all these crimes have to be attributed to the “enemy”, the same storyline has also to concurrently display Shaebea’s invincibility, halenghi sewra, (the revolutionary whip), perseverance, vigilance, patience, benevolence, etc. And this is not just a coincidence that happens to hold between these two events. Rather, there is no other story to tell, but this one. It is the same story told again and again ad nausea. So, for the Ministry of Information, the task has always been the same: how to impose an old script on a new event.  

Whenever there is a crisis that merits a grand explanation, we can imagine the likes of Ali Abdu (the head of the Ministry of information) rushing to the drawing table and sitting around it to the wee hours of the night weaving a grand plot on very flimsy or nonexistent evidence. That the plot, be it with the Kunama or the Britons or others, necessarily follows the same storyline is what gives the regime away. And it is in the process of following that storyline that we will be able to explore the Kafkaesque world of Shaebia’s making: silences that are too loud to ignore, absences that call attention to themselves, motives without any verifiable goals, crimes reconstructed after the fact, confessions extracted to redeem the storyteller, double roles of victim and victimizer played in a parallel world, victims helping their victimizers in their own implication, actors that double as spectators, etc. It is in revealing moments like this that the dark recesses of this totalitarian mind gets a mirror reflection in the grand plots it enacts through public media.

In this article, I will limit myself to the TV trials of the Kunama and the Britons, with this goal in mind: that if such two disparate events having little in common end up following the same storyline, not only will it show that the fault squarely lays with Shaebia, it will also reveal the inner workings of its dark mind.


(II) EriTv and the massacre of Kunama

Three years ago, Menghisteab Ghirmay, a trusted member of the regime’s security apparatus who later managed to escape to Ethiopia, recounted the horror story of the massacre of 28 Kunama (26 of them mass buried at Mai-Dima prison compound) and the elaborate drama that was shown in EriTv at that time, and how the two were intricately related to one another in a Kafkaesque manner. [3] He witnessed it first hand; in that not only did he follow the details of the massacre from the plot to the mass burial place, he also witnessed how all the work for the grand staging in EriTv was done behind the camera.

Below, under the three subheadings, The background, The mask of death at EriTv and The deleting machine: wiping out incriminating evidence, is my account and analysis of that drama that victimized the Kunama, as it came out in the article The Conveyor Belt of Death in Eritrea in 2009. [4] After that, the analysis on the case of the detained Britons will follow. The article will conclude by looking at the similarity between two cases.

The background

… The all-out assault on the Kunama people follows this course of the well-oiled conveyor belt of death. It starts in the most fertile corridor of Gash, where the most populated Kunama villages are to be found. According to Shaebia, this corridor has to be “pacified” by any means necessary, not only because its rear end touches Tigray but also because its opposite end touches the land of the Baria ethnic group, where the Bisha mining area is found. We know that thousands of Kunama have crossed to Tigray since the war to escape Shaebia’s wrath. Ever since, there has been a festering armed resistance in that area. Shaebia’s fear is that this corridor will serve as a conduit of armed sabotage that could potentially derail the mining prospects at Bisha. For Shaebia, an organization that cannot live with any uncertainty, it is essential that it drains the sea to catch the fish; hence its collective punishment that doesn’t discriminate between men, women and children or between the guilty and innocent. In this particular round-up (one of many), many families that had a member that had joined the Kunama movement was targeted indiscriminately. Hundreds of them were rounded up and detained.

Menghisteab Girmay’s account provides us with a synopsis of the all out assault against the Kunama: Children as young as 9 to 13 years were separated from their families and sentenced to six-months in a rehabilitation camp far away from their villages where it is impossible for family members to visit them. And those “adult” enough to deserve Adi-Quala prison included: 13 to 18 years olds sentenced 1 to 4 years of life in prison; mothers with children as young as one year olds and hundreds of adults sentenced 1 to 20 years of life in prison. And among the adult men that were imprisoned in Adi-Quala, 28 were killed, 26 of whom were mass-buried in one hole that they were made to dig in the Mai Dima prison compound after being poisoned to death. And all this is just one incident as told by one man. We also happen to know many more have been taken away from their villages before and since the massacre, and their whereabouts is unknown; no one knows whether they are alive or dead. It is with justification then that the Kunama feel their very survival as a people is at stake.

The mask of death at EriTv

In early 2007, in EriTv, 12 Kunamas were shown confessing the crimes they committed against the nation: as part of their subversive job as “Woyanie agents”, that they were the ones who had been planting landmines in the Gash-Barka region. And as an incontrovertible proof to that, they led the authorities, with pin-pointed precision, to those locations where they had those mines planted. And not to leave the slightest bit of doubt in the minds of the public, the land mines planted by these “terrorists” were dug up for everyone to see. What the Eritrean public didn’t know then was that this was an elaborate drama staged by the Ministry of Information for propaganda purposes: to demonize the Ethiopian Government in the eyes of the Eritrean public. As the unsuspecting public watched this drama unfold in EriTv, Shaebia officials were concurrently plotting of how to eliminate the very actors involved in the drama. But first, let’s see how this drama came to be, for the meticulous and elaborate way it was staged is by itself nothing short of amazing; it shows the extent to which this organization is willing to go to get what it wants.

The Isaias regime needs a sanitary image most at a time when it involves itself in horrendous crimes against its own people. Ali Abdu, the Minister of Information, is the hit man of Isaias Afewerki that comes up with all kinds of propaganda to cover such crimes. In the Kunama massacre, the elaborate fictional drama that he staged in EriTv has all the making of a movie (all the quoted parts are from the testimonies of Menghisteab as translated in Genocide 2008 in awate.com):

First, you have those at the top who cold-bloodedly planned this drama to its minutest details: “… To accomplish the project, the regime (PFDJ) has come up with a new dramatized fiction. The authors (writers of the fiction) were first, major General Omer Tewil, the commander of the third operational zone, Major Tekleberhan Hagos (weddi ayney) and the Minister of information, Mr. Ali Abdu.”

Then the “actors” had to be selected, using these criteria: they have to be Kunamas, adult males, already in detention and fluent in the Tigrigna language, the determining criterion being the last one: “The prime motive was to look for Kunama individuals who are well articulated in Tigrinya language so that they can easily deceive Eritreans through mass media or propaganda.”

As in all cases of acting, the actors had to be pampered (if you will, “well-paid”) so that they remain well-motivated throughout the staging: “In order to make the mission successful, those prisoners were treated well in all conditions by stuffing them with food, clothing, cigarettes etc.” “They were told by the mission organizers that they will be free once they accomplished the given task.”

There were also the mundane rehearsals that every actor has to go through: “Hereafter, they were taken to the sites where mines were blasted to rehearse and took lessons on how to plant a mine...” “… The prisoners were well advised, taught and trained to say they were stooges sponsored by the government of Ethiopia and planted mines, etc. On the other hand, they were also told to praise and thank the PFDJ regime for the good handlings, albeit to their wrong doings.”

And last, of course, the setting, the equipment, the cameraman and all the rest of cinematic arsenal had to be provided to bring the task to final fruition: “Later, completing the first phase of the fictitious operation, Ali Abdu sent Girmay Debesay as a journalist, Mohamed as a cameraman and Alem as a driver with all the needed media equipments to report and record the drama in Boshoka.” Ali Abdu made sure to send his best cameraman for this mission. And as for the role of the journalist: “Amazingly enough, the contribution of Girmay Debessay – the journalist – in organizing that drama was marvelous. What else can he do if ordered from Ali Abdu?”

Once edited and finalized, the drama was shown to the Eritrean people in EriTv, with many goals in mind. First, Shaebia wanted to demonize the Ethiopian government in the eyes of the masses that have been swallowing anything that the government utters in the name of “sovereignty of the nation”. Second, it hoped to showcase the vigilance of its security apparatus, a fact it has been hard-pressed to prove since the day the Ethiopian army entered deep into Eritrean territory. And, third, it wanted to convey how magnanimous and merciful it was to its prisoners, a legend it had fostered since its days in the field.

The deleting machine: wiping out incriminating evidence

Why were the 12 Kunama, who did everything that they were told to do and were promised immediate release for their roles, so brutally massacred? For an answer, one need to look at the two ends of the perverted logic that necessitated this massacre: at its recruiting and incriminating ends, both of which have nothing to do with the “crime” they had supposedly committed against the nation. There were two incidental reasons for the massacre of these Kunama: that they were able to speak fluent Tigrigna and that they were eye-witnesses to this theatrical façade they were made to participate.

It is of utmost importance to note that this was not a case of criminals made to play roles of their crimes in public, even though that alone would have been enough to render it a horrendous act. The 12 Kunama were selected to play this role not because of their involvement in the Kunama uprising as sympathizers, collaborators or active members of the Kunama movement – be it real or perceived – but because they fulfilled a single essential requirement without which this drama would have never been conducted: their fluency in the Tigrigna language! The whole theatrics was staged solely for public consumption; and hence the need for it to be conducted in Tigrigna. One can easily imagine many other “equally guilty” Kunama in detention spared of execution simply because they didn’t speak Tigrigna and hence were bypassed in the selection. That is to say, the 12 Kunama’s incidental knowledge of the Tigrigna language turned out to be their sure ticket to death! When such an incidental attribute – at the recruiting end of this tragedy – becomes the reason for execution, the depravity level of the executioners has reached the lowest possible, one that could only be perfected under a totalitarian system that believes the end justifies the means.

We have seen how this deceptive game didn’t simply end in the show of theatrics in EriTv, that by itself horrible as it might have been; the logic that necessitated this show also demanded, as a “sacrifice” to be paid, the massacre of those 12 Kunama involved in the theatrics. For the “fact” staged in EriTv to remain a fact long after that in the people’s memories, this perverse logic demanded that the witnesses who had seen the inner workings of Shaebia’s propaganda machine at its best should never be let to see another daylight to tell about it; any evidence that would mar the image of Shaebia in the future should be wiped off meticulously, with no trace left behind. The only way Shaebia could do that was by quickly eliminating those “actors” that doubled as witnesses to their very own acts. Consequently, as soon as their acting days were over, the Kunamas were mass poisoned to death and buried in holes that they were made to dig at a prison compound in Mai-Dima. Call it the logic at the incriminating end.

To reiterate the main point: the Kunamas were killed not for the roles they supposedly played in the Kunama uprising but for the roles they played in the script that Shaebia provided them! Shaebia was simply playing it safe, but this playing-it-safe phenomenon is unusual in its human depravity, where human beings are rendered dispensable items that could be manipulated to serve Shaebia’s perverse goal. For the tyrant, nothing in his domain is beyond manipulation; all of his subjects are simply dispensable variables that he could freely manipulate in the equation to get the desired result in his overall scheme of political survival. Isaias is not interested whether the massacred Kunama were guilty of the crimes that they were made to publicly confess, or whether they deserve the kind of death they were met with even if they were to be found guilty. To him, this kind of reasoning misses the whole point, that being whether their death has served the desired propagandistic goal. After all, it was Ali Abdu himself that provides us with the only plausible rationale for this macabre act: he thought this was a great opportunity to demonize the Ethiopian government in the eyes of Eritreans! In Shaebia’s perverted logic, if 28 innocent Kunamas are sacrificed for this higher purpose, it is well deserved! It is as simple as that!

Below, I will first go over the Massawa incident, before concluding by comparing and contrasting the two events.

(III) The Massawa incident

It is to be remembered that the Eritrean regime came up with a litany of accusations against the four British citizens it held incommunicado in detention for six months, without consular or any other access: acts of aggression, espionage, terrorism, acts of invasion, organizing sabotage, infiltration into sovereign Eritrean territorial waters and islands, using the Eritrean island as military base and depot, acts of deception and violation of the nation’s immigration laws, concealing evidence and the criminal act of escaping from Massawa without fulfilling the necessary clearance obligations in violation of the nation’s maritime law [5]. The accused included the four apprehended (Adrian Troy, Christopher Collison, Alun Sims and Alan Collison), 22 others that allegedly escaped and none other than the British government itself. The latter was accused of issuing a legal permit to the company fully knowing that it set out to accomplish all the criminal acts leveled against it by the regime. That would make the British government an accomplice to these acts, at minimum, and a full sponsor of these heinous acts, at maximum.

In any event of this magnitude, one’s interpretation depends on two vital pieces of information: What was the motive for such an act? And did the data gathered provide support to such a charge? So let’s look at both the motive and the data of this incident, with this in mind: that it was at these two loose ends that the regime keeps egregiously tampering to come up with its own version of the story that it wanted to sell to the public.

The glaringly missing motive

There was one glaring omission in all of the accusations that the regime had piled up against the detained Britons: even though big words such as “espionage,” “sabotage”, “invasion” and “terrorism” were used generously, not a single word was given as to the aim or target of these crimes. Take, for instance, the charge of terrorism, which happened to be the most serious one of the crimes. Terrorism doesn’t occur in vacuum; when terrorists risk their lives in the missions they undertake, they do it for a particular reason or cause. If so, what could possibly be the target of these “British terrorists”? Well, if the government was unwilling to say it, maybe its PR man, Thomas C. Mountain, would enlighten us on the mysterious nature of this terrorism [6]:

“These professional killers were discovered almost by accident by a woman taking a shortcut home through an adjacent out-of-service salt flat. The woman noticed, as all good Eritreans should, that sa’ada, white people, were taking photos (with telephoto lenses) somewhere they were not allowed.  These Brit ‘diplomats’ took their sweet time scoping out their firing points and parameters of their potential killing field for their discoverer had to walk almost a mile to the nearest police station to report this and then the police had to drive the roundabout route to the spot in question.

“But for the vigilance of one Eritrean woman, Eritrea might have experienced an unthinkable disaster, the loss of Eritrea’s President and only god knows how many of Eritrea’s top leaders.”

Bizarre, it may be; but as for providing us with a grand motive proportionate to the piled up crimes, it only seems to be sensible. So, at least, Mountain is consistent with the report he provides us; not only did he tell us what the Britons did, but what their goal as assassins was. And if you think this is a report of a loony journalist, acting on his own, think again. For parts of his report sound exactly like the repot given in the press release of the Foreign Ministry, even though his account happens to precede that of the Ministry by about three weeks. Here is one quotation that seems to be taken right from the press release pages [7]:

“A search of the vessel they arrived on uncovered a cache of tools of the assassin’s trade. Included was a small arsenal of automatic weapons, a sophisticated satellite communications system, state of the art electronic target range finders, and most damning, several sniper rifles.”

That is to say, Thomas C. Mountain was writing from his second hometown Massawa not only with the full blessing of the Isaias regime, but also as verbatim instructed. Nobody from inside Eritrea would be able to write this kind of report on a subject matter that the government considers to be very sensitive and get away with it. That doesn’t mean the regime believes in Mountain’s account; it believes neither in Mountain’s nor in its own account. For Shaebia though, this is beside the point. All that it matters to it is whether such an interpretation of the incident could be made of any use, be it for internal or external consumption. Mountain’s account is good for internal consumption (Eritrean supporters of the regime at home and abroad), for the foot soldiers are ready to believe anything they are told to so far as it is done in the name of nationalism. And that is why the regime never bothered to prevent him, correct him or deny what he wrote. How about the regime’s official account? That too doesn’t fare better.

In its official statements, the government restrained from going all the way alla Mountain to give purpose to the crimes; they did realize that stretching it that far would take them to a point of no return. Thus, the regime was faced with the following dilemma: If it gave the mission of this “terrorist act” a specific goal, it was afraid that nobody would believe it (given the farfetched nature of the goal) or that it would put itself in a difficult position from which it would find it very hard to extricate itself. And if it kept invoking heavy words such as “sabotage”, “espionage”, “invasion” and “terrorism” to describe the alleged crimes without any specific motive to back them up, it was afraid these charges might lose their plausibility. In the end, it had no choice but to settle for the latter one, but not without doing some preemptive damage control. It is precisely because it was afraid that it would lose its credibility in the eyes of the public that the regime assigned Mountain to do its dirty job. For the public then, the government did provide a tangible goal to the alleged terrorists’ motive.

The regime’s penchant for attributing crimes to events in retrospect is rather well documented; it being an entrenched habit it has brought all the way from its mieda days, where a suspect was always rendered guilty until proven otherwise. Even when a certain event or incident fails to fit into any of existing crime categories in the legal world, a new crime has to be invented to accommodate it. This often happens when there is no specific intent that the regime could publicly attribute to the suspect’s action. The classical case would be the fabrication of a brand new crime called “defeatism” it accused the G-15 of harboring, a crime that occurs only in thought; of course, all said and done in retrospect. In this totalitarian world of its own making, the government doesn’t have to know what the “criminal” has been doing in order to detain him; it will take its sweet time to find just one that will fit his past action. The surprise this time is that it tried this old trick with foreign nationals, and actually thought it could get away with it.

But it is not only the lack of any motive that explains the crime that makes a mockery out of this farce; the haphazardly gathered data provided by the regime also fails to add up to the serious crimes it wants to attribute to the seamen. Let’s us now look at the incident itself, since information is slowly coming out that would make it easy to reconstruct what has actually taken place.

All the evidence that there is

If, for a moment, we ignore the numerous accusations the Isaias regime has leveled against the company, then what has occurred has a simple structure and storyline to it. The Sea Scorpion, a boat that belongs to the security firm Protection Vessels International (PVI), as it was passing through the Red Sea corridor doing its routine work of accompanying ships through the pirate-ridden area – the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean – was faced with rough weather that forced it to make an unscheduled stop in Massawa to refuel and undergo some repair. [8] But because its crew realized they would be dealing with a paranoid regime that sees enemies everywhere, they preferred to leave behind their weapons arsenal and most of their personnel in an uninhabited island rather than approach the port fully armed and, for that matter, unscheduled. This is what the company has to say on this matter: “Some of their equipment was offloaded on an uninhabited island before docking in Massawa, with the intention of ‘de-escalating a situation which could have appeared threatening.’” [9] Even though the plan didn’t work, it was the right judgment under the circumstances; faced with two risky choices, they settled for what they thought to be the less risky one.

Of course, the regime had to make an altogether different interpretation out of the Romia island incident, the most serious being invasion, sabotage and terrorism. In this grand conspiracy, the island was supposed to serve both as a “military station and depot”. When one talks about a place turned into military station and depot, the time range has to be an extended one. No one has ever heard of creating a military station that lasts three days only. From the regime’s account, what we get are the three days the 11 seamen were stranded in the island – from 19/12/2010 to 23/12/2010 – waiting with their weapons for their boat to return from Massawa. When, instead, only one speed boat (the Red Rib) arrived, either because they were in a hurry, with the Eritrean navy in hot pursuit, or because it was too much for the speed boat to carry, they had to leave behind much of the weapon arsenal they had offloaded from the boat three days ago. As for a plan for making a base out of it in the future, only an immensely stupid company would ever attempt to a make a base out of an island anywhere in the world without the full consent of the owner nation. That does not mean that the island has not been visited by the seamen before, but that a lesser motive has to be found for such an illegal act.

There are only few pieces left out of this saga as related by Shaebia that we need to accommodate to reach a less intimidating conclusion: the repeated territorial violation by the seamen and their attempt to leave Massawa earlier than told. If this happens to be true, it seems appropriate that the only thing the seamen confessed was that they “have committed a crime in having illegally and repeatedly entering sovereign Eritrean Island as well as violating the country’s territorial waters bearing armaments, in addition to attempting to escape from Massawa”. [10] None of that counts as invasion, making Romia island “military station and depot”, organizing sabotage, conducting espionage, attempting terrorism or outright invasion. Even the pictures of the “arsenal of weapons” are unconvincing as motives would go, given that these men have to be armed to the teeth if they are to provide ships that have to pass through this dangerous area the needed protection from the pirates. Even the “poison-tipped” bullets have turned out to be a joke appropriate to the farcical show: the regime’s experts have confused the red tips of tracer bullets for poison. [11]

The need to leave early from Massawa is also understandable, given that they were in a hurry to provide protection to their client ships. As for the payment for the fuel, blame it to the antiquated transaction system that the Massawa port uses. The concerned authorities couldn’t even call the bank in England to confirm the payment, but had to wait till morning for the Eritrean banking system to open to confirm they have received it. The irony is, this is a port that aspires to be a commercial hub of Red Sea, with the ever-extended plan of turning it into a duty-free port like Dubai, and yet the nation remains one of the least connected to the information age of the 21st century.

Another piece in this grand conspiracy is the story of the mysterious spy from Djibouti (Alan Collison) entering the nation, as all spies are supposed to do, posing as a tourist. Well, that too seems to have a mundane explanation. Mr. Gibbins, PVI’s spokesman, “said the company was in a rush to provide help for the unscheduled stop in Massawa and had dispatched an employee from Djibouti.” He then added, “A standard method of moving in and out of any country for business is a tourist visa.” [12]

But the most vindicating evidence is provided by none other than the regime itself, when it added to all its accusations, “the criminal act of escaping from Massawa without fulfilling the necessary clearance obligations in violation of the nation’s maritime law.” What this accusation does is trivialize all the other serious accusations. Any sensible person would realize that no terrorist group worth its name would ever make a raw over payment in the midst of a dangerous and important operation, and thereby attract unnecessary attention that may lead to derailing its grand mission. [13] So the idiocy is not that of the “British terrorists” who bungled their mission, but of the regime that simply kept piling up all the “evidence” it could possibly get without ever considering if there were any conflicting data in this haphazardly gathered pile.

If the above makes sense, then here is the problem for the regime regarding its data gathering and its interpretation of that data: While any sensible person would reach to a conclusion of a lesser charge reading the same data provided by none other than the regime itself, the regime has come to a totally different and radical conclusion: espionage, sabotage, terrorism, invasion, etc. Even its diaspora elite writers have refrained from going this far to defend the regime's interpretation of the event. A staunch supporter, Amanuel Biedemariam, despite his lashing out against anyone that criticizes the regime, only goes as far as charging the British seamen for "violating Eritrean sovereign waters" only [14], a lesser charge than given to Yemeni fishermen, who not only routinely violate sovereign Eritrean waters but also get a lot of fish out of those waters. If so, the critical question that would follow up would be: why would this regime go to such length to weave this strange story that is supported neither by data nor by motive, and, for that matter, nor by its supporters? I will respond to this question in another article. Below though, as the similarities between the two cases are briefly explored, it is the insistence of telling one story, and only one story that provides us with a partial explanation.

(IV) Only one story to tell

As pointed out before, in all of Shaebia’s accusations, be it against the Kunama, the British seamen, the G-15, the journalists, the Evangelical Christians or other “enemies of the state”, there is only one story to tell: it invariably deals with the sovereignty of the nation, with the villains in the story violating that sovereignty, and with Shaebia vigilantly protecting it. Any variations within that story, made necessary by the variations in the events, have to leave this major storyline intact.

In both the Kunama and British detainee cases, we see that the plotline remains the same. The overall charge against both is that they have been caught red-handed violating the sovereignty of the nation: the cache of arms that they have been caught with demonstrates that they were in the midst of acts of terrorism; both happen to be mercenaries working for dreaded foreign enemies – Ethiopia and the West, respectively; both have fully confessed their crimes; etc. At the same time, the unfolding of the events would have to display Shaebia’s virtuous characteristics: it has brilliantly foiled their sabotage; it has treated both criminal groups magnanimously while in detention; it has shown all the patience that one would require of such a crisis, etc. And on and on it goes, with the story invariably displaying to the public the villainy of the detained and, concurrently, the goodness of the regime.

But it is the variations that are interesting, for they tend to show Shaebia’s vulgar pragmatism at work. If there is any principle that guides Shaebia in the variations it comes up with that ever same storyline, it would be: the tampering at the two loose ends of the storyline – the evidence and the motive – depends on the vulnerability of the victim; the more vulnerable the victim is, the more tampering is allowed. Or, to put it in terms of control: the more control the regime has over the situation, the more exact or precise the evidence and motive become. It is easy to see how this goes in the two events mentioned above.

In the Kunama case, the regime was in complete control of the event that it was about to stage in EriTv. The evidence couldn’t be more tangible than someone digging out the mines he had previously planted, with the camera following him all the way to the exact spot of the scene of crime. The crimes of sabotage or terrorism, with the intention of killing and maiming innocents at random, couldn’t get more precise than that. Add to this the fact that the same detainees had also publicly confessed that they got all their training, firearms and mission from the archenemy Ethiopia, then you will have a full proof case. Had it not been for an insider who defected to Ethiopia and spilled it all, this case would have easily been one of the “success stories” Shaebia has ever staged. It must have had quite a success with the gullible Eritrean public in selling this entirely fabricated story; all said and done in the name of “Eritrean sovereignty”.

In contrast, the regime didn’t have that much room to manipulate events in the case of the detained Britons. All it was left with was the wild interpretations it had to make out of the flimsy data that it was unable to tamper to the extent it wanted to. For instance, if the detainees admitted that they entered the Eritrean waters fully armed, then that would be interpreted not only as violation of the territorial waters of the nation, but also as full blown “invasion”. Firearms that are the trade mark of all protection vessels that pass through the Gulf of Aden were interpreted as “a cache of tools of the assassin’s trade” – to quote Thomas C. Mountain again. Getting into Eritrea through tourist visa is interpreted as an act of espionage, even as there is no other way to get into the land. But even with all this exaggeration, the regime wouldn’t dare to go far enough to provide tangible motive to their acts. Neither on the data side nor on the motive side was there enough room for manipulative maneuvering. Given these constraints, the wilder the interpretation, the more farfetched gets the story. But the regime knew what it was doing: the evidence-gathering ritual was enacted in TV for public consumption only; a trial in a court of law was the last thing in its mind. After all, it was with setting the British prisoners free in mind that that the entire drama was staged – which, by itself, says a lot (more on that, in Part II).

In the end, reflective of their vulnerability status, while the poor Kunama ended up massacred, the Britons were safely released. But even this stark difference shouldn’t distract us from the striking similarity in the logical structure that the two cases are based on, for in the Kafkaesque world of Shaebia the idea of execution and pardon are to be found in the same logical plane. To understand how this works, let’s us see how “confession” is used within its court system.

In totalitarian states, people go to court to confirm an already foregone decision. That is why confessions are extracted in whatever manner from the accused prior to bringing him/her to court. The idea of a third-party witness is a nuisance to this system. Why waste precious time and resources while one can go directly to the source – the guilty party – and get a confession out of him/her? Courts are just the end point of “due process” and not the beginning; they are there to sentence the guilty. At times, they could even afford to issue pardons. But be it sentencing or pardoning, the point is that the accused has already been found guilty of the crimes charged against him/her long before he/she sets foot in the courtroom.

One has to keep the picture of this bizarre, inverse world in mind for the regime’s extracted confessions to make sense. This regime has the audacity to talk publicly about extracted confessions from  detainees without providing any legal means to defend themselves because “extracting confessions” out of the “guilty party” has been the modus operandi of this organization since its days as a guerrilla movement in mieda. In a revolutionary culture that prides itself for its “self-criticism”, public confessions were a precondition for being accepted for many. Given that confession was a precondition for rehabilitation, it was advisable for a comrade to confess even if he/she had done nothing wrong; at its extreme form, one might even feel it is his duty to do just that. Such a concept of confession has no counterpart in the legal world.

As pointed above, the more the regime feels in control, the more tampering of the evidence it allows itself. In mieda, where it felt in total control, the tampering was rampant. The fiction world it created for Eritreans was so successful that there are still some ghedli (the revolution) romantics wallowing in it, even though it is slowly getting deconstructed. The only difference now is that every time it comes up with such reconstruction, the story that it keeps yarning keeps unraveling in the very making of it. To the detriment of Shaebia, the information age has arrived! For its reconstruction of events to work, it needs nothing short of the insulated world of Sahel. Such an attempt in independent Eritrea is doomed to fail simply because of its extremely porous borders and the amenities of the information age.

Footnotes:

[1] Press Release. Shabait.com; June 08, 2011: PRESS RELEASE

[2] Genocide 2008. Oct 20,2008; awate.com: GENOCIDE 2008

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ghebrehiwet, Yosief. “The Conveyor Belt of Death in Eritrea”; July 30, 2009: Part I - The Conveyor Belt of Death in Eritrea

[5] Press Release. Shabait.com; June 08, 2011

[6] Mountain, Thomas C. “Caught Red Handed, British Assassins in the Horn of Africa”. Foreign Policy Journal; May 17, 2011: Caught Red Handed - Foreign Policy Journal

[7] Ibid.

[6] “Eritrea accuses four detained Britons of ‘espionage’ and ‘terrorism’”. The Telegraph; June 10, 2011: Eritrea accuses four detained Britons of 'espionage' and 'terrorism'‎

[7] Ibid.

[8] Eritrea Detains Four Antipiracy Contractors. New York Times; June 11, 2011: Eritrea Detains Four Antipiracy Contractors

[9] Ibid.

[10] Press Release. Shabait.com; June 08, 2011.

[11] Eritrea Detains Four Antipiracy Contractors. New York Times; June 11, 2011.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Paulos Misghina mentions this point in his brilliant essay, “TV Trial: Preview to Pardon” in assenna.com. June 11, 2011: TV Trial: Preview to Pardon – by Paulos Misgena

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[14] Biedemariam, Amanuel. Eritrea, UK and PVI incident; Americam Chronicle. June20, 2011: Eritrea, UK and PVI Incident

Yosief Ghebrehiwet

06/21/2011