Throw a small party and find out!

There is an old Eritrean adage about finding out who your true friends are by throwing a small party isn’t there? (the parable of Neshtey wiray!)… well there wasn’t a small party as such but I did find out quiet a bit about quiet a lot last week!

Political Correctness has never been easy to attain in the Eritrosphere and has just become an impossibility over the week since Ethiopia attacked ‘Ethiopian opposition camps in Eritrea’ last week… within hours… no within minuets of the announcements of the said occurrences social media networks were abuzz with announcements (so much so that my friends at the EYSC FB page had to appeal ‘no duplicates please!!’ at one point)… knee jerk reaction of a people whose life has been blighted several times over, by war and its aftermath, should have been (I would have thought!) oh no not another war…! Not here!! Not now!! Not ever!! But no in our perverted world of Eritrean political correctness we had not one but two stances that were politically correct in their respective camps… the result a surreal afternoon of, the rest of the world going…’ are you guys for real?!!’….

One group of Eritreans was shouting ‘hiji doh Hayish Hgdef?’ it serves you right PFDJ (although strictly speaking it wasn’t PFDJ that was being attacked!)… and the another group of Eritreans was shouting ‘lomi kem qedemna Eritrawiya endina!’ we will retaliate in the tried and tested Eritrean manner (although there clearly was no retaliation this time!)… the resounding noise for a couple of hours really was ‘we are going to war!’ all from laptops, and smart phones across the globe!

But soon things twisted at a funny angle, when that poor guy that Eri TV wheel out when they have a very unlikely tale to tell…came forth looking painfully strained… and this time he was saying something that wouldn’t have been out of place in a children’s cartoon… what he was saying conjured up an image of tom v jerry reportage! The PFDJ gang was silentish for a bit and then when the information minister repeated the same litany of Harimunis qedimuni Bekyou… they fell totally silent and the only noise was coming from the lot that were beating the war drums from the other end of the pole… as the PFDJites were uncharacteristically quiet the headache would have been averted and we would have had some ‘peace’ (sad irony!) and quiet to analyse what was happening in our horn of plenty misery… no such luck!!…

Soon press releases of ‘condemnation’ started to pop everywhere (on Meskerem.net… where poor  Naizghi corpse was silently ticking the time!)… and Eritrrosphere got really really noisy again! EYGM were accused of being PFDJ stooges (they were tebAAt deleyti fthi five minuets ago!) for their condemnation of war, because as a civic organisation this had nothing to do with them!! (if anyone can figure that out please send me an email!)… EPDP were accused because they should have omitted Ethiopia from their otherwise passable condemnation and CDRiE were accused because… well because it has been quite a while since we accused them over something and surely they are due for an accusation! Still there was no Eritrean analysis of what on earth was taking place in Eritrea… no one bothered to ask what would happen if this escalated to ‘full scale war’? … no one bothered about the tens of thousands Eritrean refugees in the refugee camps along the border or the internally displaced people from the last time no one bothered!

Lunacy in the Eritrean opposition was only prepared to see this as an opportunity to hit at PFDJ and lunacy over at the PFDJ corner was only going to see this as opportunity to show PFDJ might… neither of these people are prepared to go and live out their rhetoric… they have only got their mouths to shoot! And mostly from the anonymity of their nicknames and pen names… there is no acknowledgement of the fact that the last time people attempted this 70K young people paid their lives and all we have to show for it is a peace deal that is probably not worth the paper it was written on…

But this really was not my disappointment… my disappointment was the little discussed rumours of peace in the shape of a Qatar-Israel brokered peace deal between Ethiopia and Eritrea…. With negotiation points that addressed: Asab, Badme and normalisation of relations… but no one was really interested in these in Eritrosphere! After all you can neither hit PFDJ nor show its might with a peace deal… so the best thing to do for now (at least for the politically correct) was to ignore the rumours of peace and focus on beating the war drum to ones chosen beat…

…There you have it… that was Eritrosphere last week… and next week is a brand new week where we will either go back to counting up the clock with meskerem… or counting down with Dehai or simply trying to piece our reality together! Unless of course the people who have taken to using us as pawns decide to toss a coin and declare war or peace as the case maybe!