Mend the Gap Arbi Harnet Style!

Mend the Gap Arbi Harnet Style!

...some discussions make me laugh, sometimes a very bitter laugh too, I had one such discussion in Tel Aviv recently (by the way if anyone is thinking of going there here is a tip...if people offer to buy you tea ask for plain tea otherwise you will get sick of the sight of mint floating over an otherwise nice cup of tea...next time I am taking my own stash of proper English tea bags... four days without proper tea and I ended up nursing a really bad flu!)... anyway this conversation emerged out of my discussions with some young people about the objectives of my visit... to see if there is anything that a tiny UK based charity can do to support women refugees as they rebuild their lives... a gentleman asked if he could have an urgent chat with me and our conversation reminded me a bit of the tower of Babel story... when I was asking for bricks and he was passing straws and  when the poor man asked for concrete I dished out more straw.... he was sent by his colleagues to explain to me why ‘the peaceful means of struggle was futile...’ and I thought he was offering to help with ‘supporting the community’... about four cups of mint teas later, I decided to take the risk of sounding a bit rude to drive my point home... the trigger was the guy telling me how me and my ‘associates’ (now... now don’t be shy identify yourselves... you should know who you are... you better, for I sure didn’t know you existed until someone mentioned you in a tea shop in Tel Aviv with Eritv blaring in the background!)...weren’t interested in ‘fundamental’ change in Eritrea... I decided to list the things I have done, the steps I have taken, the people I have challenged the briefings and letters and petitions I have delivered in the last ten years every last one of them demanding justice in Eritrea... every last one of them echoing the plight of my people! I then turned (sipped on the mint tea! For effect) and asked:  ‘tell me how differently you fought to get the ‘fundamental’ change you are talking about?’ and when the answer was more waffle akin to the ones that the Eritrean resistance has taken to recite off by heart I switched off finished the rest of the mint tea and made my exit! Furious about the fact that one can sit and lecture about ‘mode of struggle’ whilst living amongst people who out of desperation fled a country and swapped their lot for a different type of desperation!

This for me is the essence of what has gone wrong for our nation... PFDJ go to the youth call them YPFDJ teach them few meaningless slogans and tell them they are a cut above the rest of the world and make them live in an endless merry go round of gwaila and make monkeys of them and now people in the opposition are doing the same... getting a bunch of desperate youth who have crossed an unforgiving desert and ransomed their very lives having borrowed every last penny that their friends and relatives could afford them... and gotten their lives away from the life of a gun totting slave... that the only way forward is to trek back across that desert and offer to tote another gun for another master!  We all know that none of that is going to happen ... but what is happening is that similar to YPFDJ’s rhetoric of bxifrina... the resistance is breeding a bunch of young men who retort bqilximna... both shout it from a distance safe enough that no one would take them too seriously... but with the devastating impact of dispelling the gathering clouds of change for Eritrea.

What we need... what we really really need is a movement that mends the gap across the Eritrean society at every level and particularly the gap between resistance to PFDJ inside the country and outside it... yes there is resistance to PFDJ inside Eritrea and I know this because with my colleagues at the Arbi Harnet  initiative I made many random calls and only a handful of these were negative responses and to my surprise people in Eritrea are not afraid of discussing politics (even with a random woman with strange Tigrigna accent!) are not as paranoid about external assistance to bring forth change in Eritrea and more importantly they have great expectations and immense respect for the ‘opposition’ (more so than we deserve!)... we really need to build on this if we are going to make any thing we have done so far count for anything in the long run...otherwise we may as well forget the whole thing and start a nice social club... name it ‘Free Eritrea’ and fight over who is going to lead the club for the rest of our lives... we can have as many laws, bylaws and internal rules as we like we can set up as many committees, assistant  committees and regional committees to enable each one of us to have a fancy title and we can certainly have as many conferences and congresses as we have time for... and we can do it all without damaging any country on earth and without letting anyone down or without making ourselves the laughingstock of the most laughable dictatorship on earth!

Back to Arbi Harnet.... every time I made those phone calls I kept asking myself...’why has no one done this before?’... how many times and for how long have we in the Resistance been talking about ‘stronger links with our people back home’? and yet all it took was about 20 people leading a group of volunteers who were willing to pick up a set of random numbers, from the phone book (painstakingly  tabulated onto an excel spreadsheet, by people who have dedication and patience that astounded me! to say the least) ... since February every minute of every hour  I can guarantee someone somewhere on the Arbi Harnet Team was doing something somewhere to make it easy for the rest of us to just pick up the phone and make our calls.... every morning I would get up to several messages in the inbox a testament to the work of the team that never sleeps... someone just obtained the numbers for dekemhare... someone else took the PDF and put them on the excel spread sheet... the next person divided them to batches of 20 for distribution across the teams and respective team leaders just picked their lot and spread them to their team of volunteers... meanwhile others were pulling together press releases, drafting and translating letters, putting together publicity videos and graphics stuff... all of this popping up in the inbox right around the clock from right around the globe! no meetings, no elections... no fundraising paraphernalia no false hope of an organisation that might fund it and most definitely no sophisticated political lectures on ‘modes of struggle!’... pick the phone up... introduce yourself... tell the people of Eritrea we are part of them and with them every step of the way and ask if people would like to take part in the campaign to empty the streets to show our protest against the plight of our youth...

The result 12,000 calls and 10,000 of them going through in one afternoon (thank goodness for modern technology!). The response... a great sense of anticipation... and Asmara sure is buzzing with news of Arbi Harnet... if you think I am exaggerating go on pick the phone up and inquire... if you want a set of random numbers get in touch with the team that never sleeps and ask for a set or two (maybe if enough of you get in touch with them they will let me sleep without asking for updates on where I am at with something or another!)

Awet N’Arbi Harnet!

selam

PS: My more sensible colleagues would like you to join a team or form one of your own and assist in the forth coming calls for bolder actions inside Asmara ... please visit the EYSC facebook page or contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for more information (you don’t have to be a facebook user, you don’t even have to be a young person but you do have to have a phone and you need to have the commitment to stay the course)

{jcomments off}