The Abnormal Nature of the Eritrean Regime (The Democracy Project)

With the “Democracy Project” thread, I am trying to convince fellow Eritreans that undue focus on democracy and democratization as practiced now by most of the opposition is not only superfluous to the task of regime change, but also obstructive in that it is preventing us from searching other effective ways of facilitating regime change in Eritrea. Besides the project having little causal effect, if any, in facilitating regime change, for many (not all) it has become the excuse they need to divert attention from the issue of regime change to preparations for the takeover. If you look at some websites, almost all the articles you see reflect the concern they have of what would happen once Isaias is gone: what kind of constitution should we have; what kind of government should we install; what languages should we have for a national language; how do we resolve the land issue; what should be the role of religion in future Eritrea; etc. Obsessed as they are with promoting their agendas that have entirely to do with the hereafter, they pay little attention to the horrors of the here and now. For them, it is not Isaias who is their primary enemy, but whoever they think will be competing against them in the hereafter for the seat of power. And the democracy project has provided them with excellent camouflage to do what they are doing in politically correct ways.

I mentioned thirteen fallacies of the “democracy project” of the opposition that easily fall under the “superfluous and obstructive” description. In this posting I will deal only with the first one.

The “absence of democracy” fallacy

The first fallacy that many in the opposition deploy to justify their democracy project goes as follows:

• “It is the lack of democracy (or the non-implementation of the constitution) that has brought the current humanitarian crisis in Eritrea.”

This is like arguing that if someone died of starvation, he died because of lack of gourmet food. Even though it is true that had he been able to get gourmet food he wouldn’t have died, it is wrong to conclude that he died of lack thereof. He died because he didn’t have anything to eat; and by “anything”, we mean the barest minimum that could have kept him hanging onto his life. We can imagine him surviving in a world devoid of gourmet food, but we cannot imagine him surviving in a world devoid of any kind of food. Similarly, even if we assume that the presence of democracy would have avoided the horrors under which the Eritrean masses are currently living, it doesn’t mean that its absence is the cause for these horrors. We need to look at the “barest minimum” denied to our people to see the cause for all the horrors we witness in Eritrea. As in the example, we can imagine these horrors disappearing in a world without democracy. All that we have to do is look at many nondemocratic nations – even dictatorships – that have successfully avoided the existential predicament that Eritrea finds itself in today. And closer to home, we can look at Asmara during Haile Selassie era; by no means democratic, yet without the existential crisis that it is facing now. Without exaggeration, we can say that people in Asmara used to live a normal life during that era. Even independent Eritrea of the post-war was gaining some normalcy, although the potential that would turn it into the abnormal world of ghedli was all along there waiting to happen.

To reiterate the main point: if a realistic non-democratic ruler could have easily avoided all the trappings that the Isaias regime has fallen into to take the nation into such an existential disaster, it couldn’t be the lack of democracy or the non-implementation of the constitution that has brought us to this point. Focusing on the undemocratic nature of Shaebia won’t do the job, for that is something that it shares with all nondemocratic entities. Instead, what we have to examine is the nature of that irrational extra that Shaebia deploys in whatever it does to get what it wants.

It is very important to realize that the essential subtraction we do to find out the real culprit for all the existential crisis in Eritrea is not to be found in the difference between the current tragic state of the nation under the Isaias regime and what a democratic system would have ushered instead, but at the difference between what the present regime does and what other typical dictatorships or nondemocratic states would do under similar circumstances. So what we ought to ask is: what is it that Shaebia does above and over what other typical dictatorships or non-democratic states do to bring a myriad of draconian disasters upon its people and itself? Or, to put it in the language of “normalization versus democratization” expounded in my last posting: what is it abnormal about the nature of the Isaias regime – that is, abnormal among nondemocratic governments – that prevents the Eritrean people from leading a normal life?

When I criticized the opposition for giving undue focus on democracy and democratization, I meant that they are misdiagnosing Eritrea’s ailment by tracing it to lack of democracy rather than to the abnormal nature of the regime. The democracy project as promoted by most of the opposition says nothing about the unique or exceptional or abnormal nature (again, unique among nondemocratic regimes) of the Isaias regime that puts it in the same exclusive club with the North Korean regime, Khmer Rouge, Tamil Tigers and Taliban. In all of them, there is a persistent irrational streak that cannot be explained even under their own interests, let alone under the interests of the respective peoples they claim to represent.

If the above is true, it is the nature of this overkill measure that marks every major policy that Shaebia has adopted that ought to be put under scrutiny: insisting on self-reliance at a midst of a raging famine; enforcing indefinite national service at a time when mass exodus is taking the military to imminent meltdown; closing down the only university in the country at a time when education is everything for a nation to forge ahead in the 21^st century, etc. All the ills that currently afflict the nation can be traced to this irrationality phenomenon.

[I tried to grapple with the nature of this irrationality phenomenon in an article that I wrote in 2002, The Irrational Extra, even though my understanding of the totalitarian nature of Shaebia was poor. I am reposting this article, as it was written in 2002, because I believe that the underlying argument I used then to describe the abnormal nature of the Isaias regime is still potent, even though I admit that I did put it in a very tempered way – that is, a watered down version of what I am trying to describe now.]

Negative return: eating up the context

Eritrea’s existential predicament doesn’t come simply from its dictatorial nature, let alone from lack of democracy. One can easily mention many dictators skillfully avoiding the trappings that Shaebia has been easily falling into to preserve their nation. In an article that I wrote in 2002, The Internal Bleeding of Eritrea, I talk about this phenomenon:

“Able dictators are very much known for their shrewd calculations. They never resort to force where persuasion or a simple threat will do, and they never resort to excessive force where a minor force will do. It is that keen sense of proportion where their reaction is always measured to fit the action of their antagonists that has been vital to their survival. This way they are able to avoid creating enemies unnecessarily. When it comes to PIA, just the opposite is true. Many of his blunders have the stamp of an overkill measure written all over them … There is no rational basis for them, for they serve no purpose at all even for his survival – that is, divorced from the interests of the nation.”

The central question that needs to be asked then is not why totalitarian regimes work against the interests of the masses; but why, in the process of doing so, they actively work against their self-interest. Able dictators know where to stop; it might take them some time to detect when the critical line has been crossed, but eventually they do. And whenever they realize their return getting negative at an unsustainable level, they usually act in identifiably corrective ways to redress it. On the other hand, totalitarian leaders never know where to stop, even if it means eating up the very context on which they stand; the perverted “truth” that they hold to be incontrovertible prevents them from seeing. Their blindness is like that of a tree cutter cutting a branch of a tree while sitting on that very branch and is incapable of realizing what he is doing even as he falls down with the branch to the ground. This blindness doesn’t mean that totalitarian leaders don’t “notice” when things get out of hand, but that they don’t attribute the mistake to themselves and always seek the correction at the wrong end of the tree. Once I described this phenomenon as the following:

“Shaebia is not only emptying the land of its new generation, it is also hollowing out all the rest of insides of the nation. Like a voracious parasite, it is devouring its youth, its economy, its security, its institutions, its humanity, its religion, its culture, etc. – anything and everything that makes the nation. In the meantime, in its quest for self-preservation, it is living off the nation as any other parasite that lives off its host does. All that it knows is that it has to voraciously eat its host (Eritrea) from inside. The fact that the very body on which it is living off is eventually going to die as a result of the hollowing out done from inside is something that the parasite cannot bring itself to contemplate, for there is no other alternative to its means of survival. So Shaebia is doing what it does because there is no other way for it to exist else than through what it is doing right now, even as this will eventually lead it to suicide …” (Romanticizing Ghedli)

Thus, the abnormality of Shaebia amounts to this: its total inability to see when negative returns of its own acts have reached such a toxic level that it keeps devouring the very ground upon which its very survival depends. Notice that this irrationality or abnormality has nothing to do with the fact that Shaebia actively works against the interests of the masses, but against its self-interest. It is this abnormality that is to be accounted for all the horrors in Eritrea. This irrationality phenomenon is to be observed in everything Shaebia does. Three examples will do:

National service: It has been years since the negative return – all in terms of Shaebia’s self-interest – of the national service has been registering in huge negative numbers nobody could miss. Almost every ill that has been afflicting the nation since the border war can be traced to the national service. But let me focus on one single aspect of it – the mass exodus – to highlight this phenomenon. Hundreds of thousands are fleeing the country, most of whom are either army deserters or draft dodgers. So much so that now the number of those graduating from Sawa and other training centers every year is getting proportionally smaller when compared to the number of those deserting and evading it. In simple mathematical terms, this “negative return” can be described as: the numbers at the exit level are getting larger than the numbers at the entry level every passing year. If this continues for few more years, the eventual meltdown of the army is unavoidable. Yet, oblivious of its suicidal act, Shaebia goes on making up its loss at the very end where it is getting increasingly depleted and hence makes it unsustainable. To make up for the mass exodus loss, it recruits underage, overage, priests, women, etc, thereby forcing even these population groups to flee the nation. And more critically, it extends the years of service to make up for the loss in numbers, oblivious that it is the indefinite nature of the national service that is driving the youth to mass exodus. Ignoring that it is depleting the very pool from which it used to draw its recruits for about two decades, it blindly forges ahead in this road of self-destruction. This suicidal process goes on until it reaches a point of no return and the regime collapses; a phenomenon that every totalitarian system undergoes.

Education: To begin with, let’s ask ourselves: which dictatorship or nondemocratic government has ever done away with its higher learning system just to eliminate the remotest possibility of threat to its survival? It is to be remembered that the students at Haile Selassie University were a pain on the neck to Haile Selassie. Yet, the emperor never entertained closing it for good, for the simple reason that his nation would have never had the chance of surviving the modern era if he had done that. It takes a truly abnormal mind to entertain such a drastic measure. The relevance of higher education is more so now, in the Iternet era, than ever before. Whatever would be left of the nation after regime change will have a hard time of catching up, if ever. But for Shaebia, all that matters to it is that it eliminates any real or perceived threat however inconsequential it happens to be, even as that very act requires killing the very nation upon which it depends for its survival.

It is easy to see the family resemblance of Shaebia’s anti-intellectualism with those of retarded organizations like Taliban and Khmer Rouge. While the former burns down girls’ schools in the name Allah, the latter takes anyone who speaks French to the gallows in the name of its agrarian revolution. Shaebia too was taking university students to the gallows while in mieda, all in the name of “Eritrea”; it is just that now it has found a more effective way of killing the whole intellectual environment.

Self reliance: The totalitarian regime’s often invoked self-reliance policy is also to be accounted for much of the misery in Eritrea, the latest of which has been the famine it has ushered to the land. Rampant land expropriation that has deprived peasants of their fertile farmlands, market monopolization that has bankrupted the merchant class, a national service policy that has tied up the most productive labor force in the military and the aid policy (NGOs policy) that has denied the starving masses from getting food aid have been the four main factors that have made famine a fixture in the Eritrean landscape. Instead of instilling caution on Shaebia, the spectacular failure of its self-reliance policy has lead it to further drain all the coping mechanisms that used to be available in traditional Eritrea in times of famine like sidet, with its movement restrictions; seasonal manual labor, with its rampant use of slave labor; market availability, with its restriction on market accessibility; and food aid, with its insistence on “cash for work” from donors. By denying peasants and pastoralists survival strategies of the last resort that they used to fall back to in hard times, the regime keeps destroying the very base upon which it depends for its survival. Again notice how every correction it makes comes at the wrong end – at the expense of the masses (what I have called before “correction at the bottom”). As pointed above, this “self-reliant” entity keeps devouring one leg after another upon which it stands until its imminent collapse arrives, all the time oblivious that it is chewing on its own legs.

As you can see from above, every abnormality that can be attributed to the Isaias regime goes back to the ghedli era. The national service is not only the exact replica of Shaebia in mieda, it is also created with the main purpose of making teghadelti out of the adult population. It is with the goal of acculturating the youth with ghedli values that the national service was created – that horror culture of martyrdom for martyrdom’s sake. Its anti-intellectualism too goes all the way back to mieda. It begins with the witch hunt of Menkae, most of whose members were university students, and culminates in the draining of every aspect of intellectualism from ghedli. Let alone for any kind of intellectual climate to flourish in that dreary environment of Sahel, the barest minimum of what we call dialog was rendered absent. And its self reliance policy comes from the blueprint of the archaic bitsifrina, the very anti-thesis of the openness that a cosmopolitan mind strives for. It is no surprise then that it is the ghedli abnormality that has given birth to the abnormality that we are witnessing now.

As in all the three examples mentioned above, in almost everything that it does, Shaebia has no internal mechanism that tells it when to stop. What indeed accounts for such a suicidal behavior?

A limit to human endurance

One writer notices a similar phenomenon with the Khmer Rouge [I cannot find the name of the writer in the article, the Unique Revolution, but here is the link: www.mekong.net/cambodia/uniq_rev.htm]

“The extremism of the Khmer Rouge was not merely rooted in evil. It is doubtful that the Khmer Rouge were morally any worse than, for example, the right-wing death squads in El Salvador or Guatemala. A government which accepts state-sponsored terror as a legitimate method of enforcing order has already forfeited any claim to being just. Differences between such governments are merely differences of degree; the scale of the abuses does not change the essential nature of those abuses.

“The question, then, is this: if the Khmer Rouge were morally no worse than many other governments, why were the consequences in Cambodia so much worse than in other countries?

“What made the Cambodian revolution unique was not merely that the Khmer Rouge were brutal. The Cambodia revolution stands apart from other upheavals because the Khmer Rouge combined astonishing brutality with astonishing stupidity. For the most part, dictatorial regimes in other nations have moderated their policies for the simple reason that most understand that there are limits to human endurance. When conditions reach a certain level of severity, societies cease to function. There is a limit to how many ‘enemies’ one can kill before the entire population begins to understand that everyone is at risk. Fear becomes palpable, and paralyzing. Moreover, the human infrastructure needed to enact change is decimated twice: first by the loss of life, then by the destruction of the spirit.” (emphasis mine)

So what makes the case of Khmer Rouge and Shaebia unique or abnormal is not that they are undemocratic, or even that they are dictatorial, but that there is no limit to what they can possibly do in their endless experimentations with their subjects because they have no clue when they reach or surpass the limit to human endurance. As insightfully articulated by the writer of The Unique Revolution, it is their immense stupidity that makes it impossible for them to see this limit.

Again, the national service in Eritrea can be invoked to highlight what the writer means by “limit to human endurance”. Any person with a few brain cells left in his head would realize that no people on earth, be it in Eritrea or anywhere else, would have the endurance to tolerate indefinite military service that condemns the whole adult population of a nation for years on end (some for more than a decade) in the trenches; and for that, with no justifiable cause at all. If one adds all the horrors that go with it – endless regimentation, indoctrination, slave labor, sexual abuse (for women), imprisonment, torture, disease, hunger, executions, war, etc – then it becomes clear why hundreds of thousands are fleeing the nation. But to the quixotic Shaebia, instead of the mass exodus instilling caution in its ways, it has become a further reason to tighten its totalitarian grip on this population group so as to get its experimentation right. Notice again where the “correction” is taking place: at the bottom.

True to its vulgar pragmatism, the only question that Shaebia asks in all its draconian experimentations is, “Can I get away with it?” And when your subjects are cowed to silence through sheer terror of the totalitarian kind, you can get away with almost anything. The lack of protest among the people makes it even harder for the immensely stupid Shaebia to see the limit to human endurance among its people. The fact that the masses prefer to display their limit through passive resistance – mass exodus – rather than active one – protest – is what makes the Eritrean story tragic.

And what kind of experimentation are we talking about? What else than that perennial quest of totalitarian systems to create the “New Man” that would be made to easily fit into their totalitarian machine. In the Khmer Rouge case, entire towns and cities across Cambodia were emptied and driven to the wilderness to create the “Khmer Man”, an immensely foolish experimentation that tragically ended up in two million dead. Similarly, Shaebia has emptied villages, towns and cities across Eritrea of their adult population to mold a new generation in the image of teghadalay. The only reason why this experimentation hasn’t so far ended up in Khmer Rouge like tragedy is that the regime has found it impossible to seal off this nation-turned-into-laboratory; those who have reached beyond their limit of endurance have been successfully escaping this laboratory in their hundreds of thousands. Besides, for Eritrea, those who have left it are as good as dead; most of them won’t ever make it back to the land.

Besides the experimentation itself, what makes the national service beyond the limit of human endurance are: First, this demand for sacrifice is done in total absence of a justifiable cause; the positive correlation that exists between cause and endurance can be lost only on a quixotic organization like Shaebia. And second, the romantic image of teghadaly that can endure anything that the new generation is being asked to emulate didn’t exist then in the years of armed struggle and doesn’t exist now among the former teghadelti in present day Eritrea. Then, as now, there was no cause that justified the huge sacrifice. Then, as now, the teghadelti population was kept in line through sheer totalitarian terror; imprisonment, torture and executions were as normal as in today’s Eritrea. Then, as now, thousands of teghadelti escaped to Sudan and surrendered to Ethiopia; thousands more perished in dissent. Then, as now, tens of thousands were forced to join the movement through the barrel of the gun. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the guerrilla army, especially in the 80’s, was made up of forced recruits. [Those who still argue that the murderous ghedli had a mandate to force Eritreans to carry arms shouldn’t utter a word against the Isaias regime doing the same thing. (look at Zekre Lebona’s latest article, Sanctioning the Anti-Fortress, on such unwarranted “mandate from heaven”.)]

And for those who stayed put in Shaebia – forced or otherwise – many didn’t live long enough to be tested on it. If one takes a careful look at the population group that has survived long years in mieda, it is the rudimentary educated ones that, for the most part, escaped the grueling life of the trenches (that doesn’t include the university students who were quickly identified as enemies of ghedli). These are the ones who were deployed in various kiflitat – kifli tseta, kifli hikimina, kifli timhirti, kifli bahli, kifli politica, kifli ziena, kifli sinqi, etc – and made the bulk of the bureaucracy that run the Shaebia totalitarian machine. If statistics were to be taken, I have no doubt that the lifespan of a peasant in mieda was much shorter than that of his educated counterpart for the simple reason that he/she was totally confined to the trenches; that the overwhelming majority of the martyred come from the peasant demographic group attests to this fact. In fact, Shaebia was saved from rebellion at the rank and file level because it used to kill most of them off through endless battles before they reach the limit of their human endurance. It is doing the same thing right now; it is only that now mass exodus has taken the role that mass deaths used to do in the trenches of mieda to provide the necessary relief to Shaebia before things implode. Nowadays, when the Warsai reach the limit to their human endurance, they just flee from the killing fields.

And of those who lived long enough but didn’t make it all the way to independence, we don’t know how the “limit to human endurance” had affected them. Did they lose their humanity along the way? Did they lose their idealism? Did they end up defeated as individuals? Did they end up simply being a tool of the Shaebia totalitarian machine? If we are to go by those who have lived long enough to make it all the way to Asmara, the verdict is not that encouraging; it rather comes out in odd, abnormal ways that refutes the success of that endurance test. Their mere existence doesn’t mean that they necessarily have passed the human endurance test, as their abnormal behavior amply testifies. Besides the myriad psychological problems that they have brought with them, we shouldn’t forget that these are the Yikealo that have recreated the temekro mieda and all the abuse that goes with it; the national service is their effort to initiate the new generation into the nihilist culture of ghedli. If so, the fact that one has endured physically doesn’t count much if in the process of doing so one loses one’s humanity.

The bottom line is this: it is the very people who have spectacularly failed on the human endurance test that are demanding unimaginable level of sacrifice that no people on earth could take. But stupid as this endeavor is, there is a reason why Shaebia is doing this: its survival is at stake. During ghedli era, Shaebia didn’t give a damn as to what happened at the entry level, at the population base from which its recruiting was done, and at the exit end, where tens of thousands escaped, surrendered and died, so far as it kept its army at a viable level. That is to say, it was not concerned about the human cost so far as it had enough of them to keep the organization going. And if we look at ghedli in general, in between Jebha and Shaebia, more than a million were lost at the exit end – the refugees and the dead. The Eritrean case is one of those few cases where we can for surely say, “So much was lost for so little.” This phenomenon is true today as it was in the time of ghedli. Shaebia gives a damn if half of Eritrea’s population flees the nation, so far as it believes it has enough remaining to defend itself from external enemies. What we are witnessing now then is the culmination of a 50-years long ghedli abnormality.

Conclusion

In the first part of this “Democracy Project” series, I invoked the distinction between normalization and democratization to highlight the inadequacy of the democracy project as practiced by the opposition in facilitating regime change in Eritrea. I tried to describe what I meant by “normalization” as it is applied to the masses; that is, what it means to lead a normal life. In this posting, I have been trying to describe the other side of the equation: the abnormal aspect of the regime that is denying the masses from leading a normal life. But description doesn’t necessarily amount to explanation.

The same goes with the anonymous author of The Unique Revolution mentioned above. Putting the whole problem simply as a result of “immense stupidity” doesn’t help that much when it comes to explaining it because this stupidity is different in kind: like intelligence, it is an acquired skill. In fact, totalitarian leaders, and their followers, work very hard to earn it.

If every totalitarian leader ends up in being stupid, it couldn’t be that it is only the stupidest make it all the way to the top. That means that the stupidity that we are talking about is inbuilt in the totalitarian system itself. If so, it cannot remain confined to the leadership; Nsatom have acquired this stupidity as much as Nsu, immaterial of who contributed how much to the overall stupidity of Shaebia. So what is further needed is explicating this “stupidity” in a way that throws light on how the totalitarian mind works.

I will attempt to explain the abnormality phenomenon in coming articles. It is very important that we understand the nature of this abnormality, for the other fallacies presuppose it to make any sense.

02/09/10

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