(II) TV Trials in Kafkaesque Eritrea: Clementis’ Fur Hat on Isaias' Head

Shaebia (the ruling party in Eritrea) is an organization that is famous for its use of silences and absences that attract negative attention to themselves, thereby accomplishing the exact opposite of what they are meant to achieve. In a totalitarian entity that believes in disappearing anything that is on its way, it is of paramount importance that nobody remembers or notices what has been rendered absent or silent. This is also true of disagreeable events; what historical revisionism of the totalitarian type does is keep correcting history as it occurs by making entire episodes disappear from certain events, or even entire events from a certain era – as if by a magic wand! Shaebia’s revisionist history, even of the most recent one, is full of such gaping holes where personalities, episodes and events have been swallowed, never to be mentioned again.

Proud of conducting a mute revolution that lasted decades, this organization also revels in its uncalled-for silences. A good example of that would be the six of months of silence that it relished as it condemned four British seamen to detention. It required a serious threat from the British government for it to break its vow of silence. And more recently, this phenomenon has been observed in its week-long silence before it reported on such important news event as the Nabro volcanic eruption in Dankalia; it is only after the world media reported a lot on it, seismologists analyzed it, satellites took pictures of it and its volcanic ashes reached many nations that it came out mumbling something about it. Even such a politically neutral event has to be politicized through its hesitant silence; it is impossible for it to report on such an objective fact without putting itself in the middle of it. It has to prepare itself for a whole week, so as to be seen in the action of helping the affected locals, before it allows any kind reporting.

If the above makes sense, what would be intriguing to know is wherein lays the regime’s morbid affinity to such “negative occurrences”.

In its utilization of negative occurrences – silences, absences, eliminations, disappearances, etc – appropriate to a Kafkaesque world, the regime uses the Ministry of Information as its vanguard. The Grand Magician that makes things, personalities, episodes and entire events disappear through the cracks of Time is none other than Ali Abdu, the head of the Ministry of Information. This is a Ministry that prides itself for “Serving the Truth”, ironically an appropriate Orwellian motto that fits its Orwellian tasks. When scores of innocent Kunama were disappeared in 2007, the Grand Magician not only helped in giving the massacre the necessary sanitary facade, but actively facilitated their disappearance. ( GENOCIDE 2008 written on Oct 20, 2008 in awate.com) This magical art of rendering unwanted entities and slices of events instantly disappear has been practiced by the Ministry for long, a habit the ruling party acquired from its mieda (struggle) years.

In Part I of this article ((I) TV Trials in Kafkaesque Eritrea: Grand-Staged Crimes ), we have noted how the Ministry of Information staged elaborate dramas to implicate its victims and demonize its “enemies”, all with the intention of legitimizing the regime’s deed in the public eye (Part I - The Conveyor Belt of Death in Eritrea). We have seen how the Ministry of Information reconstructs facts to fit its totalitarian end in two cases: the massacre of Kunama in 2007 and the PVI incident in Massawa. And these two cases are not the exception, but the norm. Soon after the border war, Shaebia went back to its old proven ways of mieda to secure its political survival. And it is soon after that that The Ministry of Information was given the primary task not only of rewriting history, but also of manipulating facts as they were being made. In this posting, I will revisit one particular case that occurred in 2003 that gives us a glimpse of this Orwellian organization’s revisionist task – a prelude to the recent ones. Then, as now, the grand conman was Ali Abdu, the acting Minister of Information, who tired to pull off a brazen reconstruction of events that were already part of public memory. That is, this time around, he was attempting nothing less than tampering with our easily retrievable recent memory. I wrote an article on June 03 2003 based on this event, Kalaat bwerKi Kelem (Words in Golden Ink) in asmarino.com; and below, on section II, appears an abridged version of it. After that, in section III, I will look at the source wherein this culture of erasure originated.


(II) Kalaat bwerKi Kelem:  The Collaborative Effort to Forget It All (written on 06/03/2003)

A mother, who refuses to show up in her daughter's wedding because she is afraid of what people might say about the questionable character of the groom, might be doing just the opposite of her intention: her conspicuous absence in the wedding might attract much more attention to the subject matter that she desperately wants to avoid than her presence might have possibly done. The moral of the story is this: certain absences, in their conspicuousness, command much more presence than some actual presences do.

The same goes with our memories. We have a tendency to remember certain events for having NOT taking place rather than for having taking place. If a certain famous athlete makes history by refusing to participate in a famous tournament given by a certain prestigious club because the club happens to discriminate against women and minorities, then his conspicuous absence in that event would be more memorable than what his attendance would have ever engendered.

In the first example, the mother wrongly concludes that her physical absence would directly translate into an absence of attention to the subject matter she desperately wants to avoid. Such crudeness has also been the hallmark of the GoE, for it has always confused elimination for solution. And when the problem doesn't seem to go away and, in fact, keeps attracting more attention both nationally and internationally, it accelerates its eliminative process, in the wild hope that this time around it will do the job right.  

The GoE PR guys are very much known for crudely identifying “absences” and “silences” for inconspicuousness and the desirable effect that they attach to it.  Their infamous philosophy of “tim mibal meritsna” (“we prefer to remain silent”) could get irritatingly loud at a time when all that is needed is talk, and talk as much as it could. We all remember how the GoE's belated (and too little) responses during the war kept infuriating us. They seem to have taken to heart that misguided Eritrean advice that confuses silence for wisdom, not realizing that silence could be as stupid and as counterproductive as anything else imaginable when the context doesn't call for it.

A conspicuous absence

In this posting, I would like to confine myself to one interesting incident where the notorious GoE PR guys, in their effort to rewrite history around PIA, have inadvertently created an “absence” that loudly calls attention to itself – i.e., to the very reasons that motivated the creation of that void of “absence” (as in the mother’s case related above).  In Another classic case of Orwellian revisionism (awate.com – May 28, 2003), the writer (by the penname of “Events Monitor” from Asmara) relates the following Orwellian incident that took place in Eri TV:

“Another favorite scene that is repeatedly shown on Eri TV is that of Isaias dancing with young performers in the Asmara stadium to the rhythm of ‘shamaye shama’ by Elsa Kidane and Abdu Yousuf – I gather on the occasion of the 1988 Independence celebrations. Now what really struck me this time was the fresh editing that has recently been done to this clip. At the end of the original video, as Isaias and his bodyguards return to the podium, while the music is doing the customary ‘de'rrb’ beat, there are images of other dignitaries, including some that are now behind bars. Particularly notable was the scene of Haile Durrue enthusiastically moving his shoulders and clapping to the tune. This clip was frequently being shown on Eritrean TV even after the jailing of the G-11, surely an irritating reminder of those comrades-in-arms of DIA now in jail.

“But not anymore!  ... The record has now been set straight – and this historical mistake is rectified! In the ‘corrected’ video clip, the picture briefly fades into total darkness, and then cuts back to the same dancing ‘Wedi Afom’. In a skillful application of the ‘surgical approach to history’ certain unwanted episodes have been expertly sliced out. A few problematic personalities wiped off the archives. There were no Sherifos or Durrues in the 1988 celebrations...”  (emphasis mine)

An uncanny similarity

As I was reading these paragraphs, I was particularly struck by the uncanny similarity that this incident has with an event that Milan Kundera, the great Czech writer, repeatedly mentions in his novels. This particular event took place in one of those darkest hours of Czechoslovakian history, as the author reminds us. In his novel, The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, Kundera writes:

“In February, 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in the Old Town Square. That was a great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium.

“Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close to him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald's head.  

“The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photography, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.

“Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on that balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald's head.”  (emphasis mine)

Not a surprising resemblance

An uncanny resemblance it may be, but not a surprising one; for there are underlying structural underpinnings that both of these regimes share that easily take away what could have been the surprising element. Both happen to be totalitarian governments that have fallen from grace. Both had the good will of their respective populations at the beginning; a good will that they recklessly squandered at a fast rate. And both had no stomach for reforming themselves; hence the resort to unconventional means to conduct a battle in our collective memories.

But what strikes us most is the crudeness of their strategies; the fact that they thought they could get away with such gross manipulations is nothing short of amazing. Their respective worlds have not been insulated enough as to allow for such manipulated “absences” to bring about the desired effects that they expect of them; they are so brazenly conspicuous that they keep loudly calling to their attention. Only the willingly self-deluded would be able to ignore them.  Kundera, in his novel, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, writes:

“All previous crimes of the Russian Empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tartars remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed as fabrications. Not so the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, of which both stills and motion pictures are stored in archives throughout the world.” (emphasis mine)

In the case of Czechoslovakia, the iron-curtain had at least created a semi-insulated environment where such crude strategies could have been met with semi-success. Not so in the case of Eritrea, where no such insulation is any more to be had. First, about one hundred thousand Eritreans come in and out of the country every year, taking information in and out with them. Second, the “national” and international watchdogs are constantly keeping an eye on all kinds of human abuses that are going on in the nation. And last, unfortunately for the GoE PR guys, the age of Internet has caught up with them. Yet, these irrepressible revolutionaries do not seem to be fazed at all by all of this; they have stuck to their old crude and brutal methods that go all the way to the years of struggle.  Why?

An old habit

It would be instructive to remember that these kinds of gross manipulations would be made to work with a fair degree of success in highly insulated societies. Back in the old days of struggle, the EPLF had been able to attain a degree of insulation that allowed it to commit horrendous crimes with impunity, the most notorious of which is the liquidation of the students' movement (Menqai), where numerous students – to say the least – perished under the notorious hands of Halewa Sewra. In one form or another, the witch hunt had been going on until the advent of independence. The EPLF cadres were diligently wiping out any traces of that tragic era from our collective memory. In this, they have almost succeeded; hence their renewed hope that they could pull off another miracle this time around.     

This hope is not totally unfounded. If the Eritrean population was more than happy to shrug off the horrendous crimes committed in the killing fields of Sahel, then why can't they be expected to do the same thing for the crimes that are being committed right now?  Indeed, this warns us that, after all, “forgetting” comes to fruition through a collaborative effort only.

Kundera writes on such a willful collaboration in “collective forgetting (The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting):

“And because not even the shadow of a bad memory should distract the country from its restored idyll, both the Prague Spring and the arrival of the Russian tanks, that stain on a beautiful history, had to be reduced to nothing. That is why today in Bohemia the August 21 anniversary goes by silently and the names of those who rose up against their own youth are carefully erased from the country's memory, like mistakes in a school children's homework.”  (emphasis mine)

The collaborative effort

Similarly, young Eritrea, euphoric over its newly found independence, had been irresponsibly trying very hard to forget whatever crimes that took place in the past – to its detriment, as it was soon to find out. Soon after independence, the EPLF, to its delight, found the population so thankfully docile, giving in to whatever it demanded of them, that it thought that the domestication process of the masses that it has been vainly aiming for in the fields was now being met with resounding success in the cities, towns and villages across Eritrea. It never thought that circumstances would change so drastically that would force it to fall back to its old proven ways: pure brutal force and crude coercive strategies.

It is the convergence of two critical factors that forced the GoE to resort to its crude and brutal ways: an unexpected crisis – the war and its aftermath – that laid bare its fault lines and the coming of age of a generation that doesn't share the guilt of the old generation, a guilt that is partially to be blamed for the unproductive passivity the population exhibited after independence. The genesis of the Warsai-Yikealo divide is to be found in the dynamics of these two factors. Unexpectedly – during and after the war -, the GoE found itself in confrontation with a new generation that could actually dare say, "No!"

Besides gratitude (and its concomitant, guilt), there is another potent reason as to why Eritreans opted to keep a blind eye to the atrocities of the past. Most Eritreans have always had such a romanticized picture of the ghedli era that they were willing to do almost anything to keep that pristine picture from being marred; if it required some tinkering in their brains to erase uncomfortable memories that wouldn't fit to that idyllic picture, so be it, seemed to be their nonchalant approaches.

After independence, that romanticized image of ghedli was soon transposed into an equally romanticized image of Eritrea. It is astounding to see how many have tenaciously kept on holding to that unrealistic image, even as they have been witnessing overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The level of denial is so high that one could explain this phenomenon only by falling back to their psychological aspects. Could it be that it is because their very sanity depends on keeping that deluded image that they have to remain so willingly and blissfully forgetful?

Compartmentalized minds

[Here, I have cut out about two pages on how the so called moderates (that since 2003 have been dwindling in numbers) joined in this collaborative effort to forget: “How is it possible for these ‘moderates’ to keep on criticizing the GoE while tenaciously holding on to certain beliefs that outright contradict those very criticisms?  This is how:  they have found an ingenious way of compartmentalizing their minds, where they would be able to keep two diametrically opposed opinions of the GoE without finding themselves in conflict in the process of doing so.”]

Erasure to the rescue

Even though the picture of a “compartmentalized mind” is meant to be a metaphoric way of getting a grip to this problem, in actuality no such permanent walls could be built inside the mind.

In fact, contrary to what the metaphor alludes, in most instances, they need to align both of these contradictory beliefs side by side for their “willful forgetfulness” to do its erasing job. For instance, whenever the issue of the Woyanies is being raised, instantly all the sins of the GoE happen to shrink at such a rapid rate to an inconsequential or innocuous size. Or, another example: whenever the image of Eritrea seems to be “tarnished”, all of the GoE's crimes instantly attain secondary status. So whenever these self-imposed thresholds seem to be threatened, the “moderates” keep resorting to the process of minimizing, suppressing or even erasing the GoE's crimes.

Let me stick to one example to point out how this suppression phenomenon works. When these “moderates” keep dancing into the wee hours of the morning in the GoE sponsored independence day (or other) festivals, what they keep totally suppressed is this fact: that there are hundreds of political prisoners – to put it mildly – on that very night sitting in their inhospitably cold and dark dungeons, a fact that would make a mockery to the whole cause of independence that they have been celebrating for. Indeed, that metaphor of “compartmentalized minds” is apt, for they have to put that little annoying fact that would keep pricking theirs conscience behind lock and bars for one festive night.

Kalaat bwerKi Kelem

Ali Abdu might have elevated sycophancy into a form of art when he came up with these infamous terms, “Kalaat bwerKi Kelem” to refer to the “video clips of Isaias speaking on various occasions” (Another case of Orwellian revisionism), but that doesn't prevent us from wanting to throw up on hearing these saccharine words; words that are totally untrue and self-demeaning. Untrue because, if anything, the uncircumcised tongue of Isaias is very much known either for mumbling incoherent ideas or for heaping insults on one population group after another, rather than for uttering words of wisdom, let alone golden ones. Self-demeaning because, after knowing the prevailing circumstances no human being could utter those words without emasculating oneself in the very process of doing so – almost to a point of diminishing oneself to a non-entity.

Ali Abdu does not only snuff the lights out of himself, but he is also hell bent to snuff the lights out of every individual in Eritrea, so that PIA could shine without any interference from those annoying little lights – i.e., in total and complete darkness.  In this effort, Ali Abdu is being helped from two sources. First, there are the die-hard supporters who are emulating him in that masochistic art of self-effacing. And second, there are the “moderates” who are more than willing to lower their lights whenever they perceive a threat to the “sovereignty” or image of “Eritrea”. The “surgical approach” that is being applied to video clips and some few nagging facts in our memories has a slippery slope effect: once started, it has a tendency to careen out of control until the very self that happens to be involved in the act of erasing erases itself. So every act of erasure in one’s historical memory comes at the cost of the self itself. Thus, what we are witnessing in this Orwellian revisionism is nothing less than the inversion of the whole logic of sacrifice: individuals are not being asked to make sacrifices for the common good of society; rather, it is society itself that is being asked to sacrifice for the sole "good' of one individual!


(III) Conclusion: erasing the eraser

The art of erasure was perfected in ghedli (the revolution) era, even as we find it too crude to go unnoticed in postmodern era. But the worst part of the ghedli eraser is that it is the only way it knows when it comes to writing its own history. Here is a stanza that I wrote regarding this (Martyrs and Martyrdom):

50 years of interruption

He erases the past
as soon as it occurs.
Now, the only memento he has
is the eraser called ghedli
that he confuses for his heritage

This stanza was written with those Eritreans who, having witnessed ghedli in its 50 years attempt to wipe out all their past heritage (history, culture, religion, etc), have come to paradoxically identify all their heritage with ghedli – that is, with the eraser itself – in mind. Now, whenever asked about their history or their identity, all they do is proudly point at this notorious eraser.

If an eraser would be asked to write its own history, it would have no other story to tell than the fact of its erasing this and that; erasing happens to be just one and the same task, whatever the content of what it erases happens to be. The ghedli eraser erased the past and culture of the people as much as it could while it was confined to mieda. Following this glorious tradition of struggle years, it has been doing the same thing since independence; only this time, the scope of the material subject to erasure has been enlarged to include education, religion, history, culture, tradition, language, etc. Even the nuclear family is not spared; it has to give to way to the bigger Shaebia family. Since there is no lasting replacement to the institutions it keeps destroying, in the final end all it does is just erase. And, understandably, all it wants to talk is about that erasing experience, under various grandiose names: National Service, Wefri Warsai-Yikealo, Self-Reliance, etc. It has no other experience to tell – it is as simple as that.

In Part I, I said that Shaebia has only one and only one story to tell: the subversive acts of its “enemies” and its eventual triumph over them. Since it considers much of the people’s past history and culture and much of what the West has to offer as obstacle to its triumph, the only way it knows of dealing with them is by erasure. It doesn’t matter whether it fails or succeeds in this huge task; it simply cannot stop erasing until it comes to its final demise. Now that the information age has arrived, it has made it difficult for active rewriting of history to take place without being noticed, thereby facilitating Shaebia’ day of reckoning.

During the revolutionary years, the total control the organization had over the teghadelti population (the guerrilla fighters) in a totally insulated Sahel environment and the willingness of the larger society to believe it in whatever it concocted made it possible for all kinds of erasures to take place without much finesse in this art of erasure on its side. Thousands were made to disappear in the crudest way possible, yet Eritreans were too enamored with their revolution to give heed to the few voices of dissent. When the history of the land was rewritten with too obvious omissions and revisions, Eritreans gulped it all with relish; the elite were the worst ones in that they not only believed it but facilitated this myth. No wonder then Shaebia is trying its crude ways of erasure again and again in the mass media, even as its attempts to get away with it in this information age have been proven to fail time and again.

There is one consolation in all of this: Shaebia, with its irrepressible habit of erasure, is a dinosaur that cannot survive in the global world of the 21st century. Its totalitarian system needs a completely insulated world for its crude ways to work. Both its extremely porous borders and the modern amenities of the information age – television, radio, internet, phones, satellite, etc – has made such insulation impossible to materialize. The only problem with this consolation is: will this dinosaur go extinct before its erasure task does irreparable damage to the nation? As usual then, the lesson is obvious: if the nation is to be saved before it is too late, Shaebia should be given a helping hand in the process of its eventual extinction.

Yosief Ghebrehiwet
06/25/2011