The Eritrean Spirit in Full Colour! Our Brand New Reality

… If there is one single question that everyone in NYC failed to ask those who were wearing t-shirts depicting IA’s picture and it should have been ’what do you stand for?’… what made you travel all them miles and take up queue to enter a hall that you know full well was already filled to capacity with the chosen few?  What it is in what IA is doing or is going to say that you felt required or indeed deserved your total and unremitting support… you see the slogans the ‘supporters’ carried… what they were chanting when they were chanting anything… what was written in their t-shirts (next to the photo shopped images of a dashing young man who used to be something important) was bereft of any political meaning… they stood for nothing or against nothing… they simply stood there… they could have been trees or cardboard cut outs or garden gnomes… for they represented nothing including their own aspirations and dreams. I am really saddened to say they were all but shadows of the Eritreans of yesteryears who were so organised, well mobilised and extremely motivated rallying behind a real cause. In its well perfected art of taking everything that is meaningful, everything that represents the essence of Eritreaness and everything that made Eritreans stand out, and ripping the heart out of it to turn it into an empty shell of its own self, PFDJ has well and truly succeeded in turning a section of our diaspora community into a hoard of Empty Children and are only ever designed to clap their hands raw…

Just like in the Dr Who series somewhere along the lines PFDJ has produced us a bunch of Empty Children wired to EriTV, now under armed guard in Asmara, each with a colorful t-shirt (if you are young and/or refusing to grow old gracefully), or a koboro (if you have spent your life running away from books), and each responding identically and simultaneously to a loud noise (well last weekend it wasn’t that loud but the effect was the same…. The empty children rose up and responded to the loud noise just as they were designed to do). And what we failed to do was ask them…’what do you stand for? What do you support?’…. A friend was telling me how his friend told him that IA’s speech on Friday was far superior than all the other speeches at the UN last week… my question…. Which ones did he listen to? … the answer none… my response pardon me if I don’t touch you because the Empty Child syndrome might be contagious just like in the Dr Who series…

When they saw IA sneak out of his temporary temple at the Manhatan centre amidst the only chanting from that side of the Eritrean divide… the gutless Empty Children were not saying ‘awet nhafash’, hell they weren’t even saying ‘viva eritrea’… all they could manage was an incoherent scream and chant ‘wedi afom…’ … that was not just revolting it was simply pathetic… these bunch of gutless Empty Children were better when they were worse… they really were better back when they were opposing the sanctions… back then they had a slogan… they stood for something they opposed something… whatever I thought of it then reflecting back from this-our new reality, I can’t help but concede that it was infinitely better then. There was a semblance of a political divide then, and I was even able to go on a BBC radio discussion against someone who was out there opposing the proposed sanctions…last weekend they, in effect, buried the freedom fighter, who once left the comfort of his university accommodation and joined an armed struggle that sought to define the nation right across the generation… in his place they resurrected a low rate celebrity with a very weak current image that even they resorted to digging out old images to make into their posters…and befittingly they hired a concert hall for his smoke and mirror show… (I guess I wasn’t helped much by the fact I was following the Michael Jackson trial and the Manhattan events in parallel). The sole purpose of that event was the promotion of an extremely weak personality cult… devoid of any substance… devoid of any new ideas or even any political impetuses IA allowed himself to be humiliated and sank to an all-time low before the very eyes of the world and especially before the eyes of the young people who filed before him in their military uniform ready to do anything that their country demanded of them not that long ago.

So it was only a question of time (and opportunity) before like any low grade celebrities, him and his entourage were heckled out of bars and restaurants by the very young people who IA said were ‘out picnicking’… the leaders of yesteryears who were supposed to lead this country into the potential of its vitality are chased out of bars by young people armed with cell phones and a single question…’be a man and say something to us now!’… and true to form they scuttled off into the darkness like rats!

Everything that PFDJ does is centred around their diaspora Eritreans policy… if they have tried to win anyone or anything it is the hearts and minds of the Eritrean diaspora… if they have invested any of their resources it is in ensuring that the diaspora remained sweet. If they have been challenged by anything it is by the number of young people joining the diaspora and if they expended any meaningful strategy development energy… it was in ensuring that there be an insurmountable gap between the resistance movement and the young refugees (the culture and structures within the resistance contributed immensely to the PFDJ strategy)…. and that is precisely the battle that PFDJ lost last weekend.

The young people (my little brothers and sisters at the Eritrean Globlal Solidarity for Change) on the other side of the PFDJ divide had the nerve to stand up to the dictator and his goons and had the guts to stun the Empty Children into utter silence, had the organisation to get themselves there and heard, had the moral fiber to rally the young and the old in the resistance movement and had the impudence to actually have their questions all lined up and ready off the top of their heads… be it on the pickets or the bars… they want justice ….so if IA was contemplating ‘picnicking’ along side them at Pain Le Quotidien, if Yemane Monkey was intending to humor them to join his Empty Children, they were forced to think again….     

My younger brothers and sisters looked more like the Eritreans that the world came to know… the Eritrean of yesteryears who made everyone stop and listen to their cause… the Eritreans who were a familiar sight at the UN headquarters despite the fact that legally so far as the world was concern there was no Eritrea… the Eritreans that made friends with influential people despite the then prevailing policy supposedly set in stones! … the Eritreans who made headlines all the way from bombed out caves…the Eritreans who simply refused to let the Eritrean dream be forgotten…

And this is the new reality that IA and Yemane Monkey thought they eradicated from the face of the earth…. That was what the Maihabar Massacre Project was about… that was what Sept 18, 2001 was intended to do… this was why they felt they had to silence Moslem teachers and this was why my parent’s church was shut and their leaders were thrown into jail… this was why Abune Antonios was made to ‘disappear’  and this is why young people are put through hell on earth in Sawa… TO KILL THE ERITREAN SPIRIT! Imagine their surprise when they came face to face with the Eritrean spirit on the streets of NYC… in a mirror image of those they buried alive in EraEro!

New reality check….Eritrean spirit is alive and well… if we thought we imagined it in Leeds… if we thought it was a figment in Stockholm, if we thought it was simply a passing phase on the streets of London and Washington DC… if anyone thought it was a pocket of something insignificant in Switzerland, Germany, Australia and Canada… if anyone mistook it for a fast extinguishing nuisance in the refugee camps of Ethiopia and Sudan… if anyone dares to think that the Eritrean spirit in Milan and Rome was relegated to history… I say think again! We are here and if we are going anywhere it is ahead… and the only promise to our people: WE WILL WIN… we will wipe every tear… we will restore every brokenness and we will reclaim every promise for a better tomorrow in Eritrea… so help us God!

selam

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