THE FINAL CUT

What does ‘Eritrea’ signify or mean to you?

The range of replies would obviously range from nothing to everything. In other words, it could mean anything but to stick to or identify with one single signifier would be like walking along the borders of stupidity.

A couple of weeks ago, I was introduced to an English gentleman. He is an architect and in his seventies. He asked where I came from and before I could declare the country of origin, he confidently asserted that I was from India.

I didn’t mind and wasn’t even bothered to declare... hence the hesitation.

Somehow, the conversation turned to African affairs. The architect was of the opinion that Britain’s immense contribution to the development of Africa during the colonial times is being lost or wasted due to maladministration and mismanagement of resources on a continental scale.

I agreed.

“The Chinese are going for it now – the resources I mean,” he said.

I begged to differ simply because I wasn’t sure what he meant by ‘resources’.

On the well-trodden road of ‘gold rush’, why does the concept of human resource come last? After all the loss and gain, charity and nationalism fight for control in equal measure only to lose the heart of the matter and, in one form or another, more of the same takes over... call it seasons of human resources that creep up or creep in with timely ideologies, like a nation state in an African context, only to look after and accommodate their own interest and forget to figure a way out simply because it’s not in their own interest. It sounds stupid and nauseating but that is the way it is.

When Eritrea became an internationally recognised nation state, it was celebrated as one of a bunch of hopeful African states that might indeed make it. This is an article why it couldn’t or probably won’t make it.

The year Eritrea became an independent nation actually marked the beginning of the end of the concept of the nation state. It was too late for Eritrea to adjust to the emerging global phenomenon. Ironically, it still boasts about its human resource that is either in forced military conscription or fleeing the country in thousands at the risk of being shot dead or imprisoned without hope or due process of legal backup.

So much for human resources! If Eritrea’s history could be redrafted by taking successive occupations or stratified colonisation (as any die-hard Eritrean or anyone bent on sentimental values of bygone days would like to put it) and investigate the relationship between the territorial and human resource within that confined narrative, it would put the current government of Eritrea to shame. But that is another long story.

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Since there are too many cuts to account for, it is probably the initial big cut that always makes all the difference. That, in a nutshell, is probably why we go back and examine history. I am not sure how this tiny crack will evolve but I hope it will make some sense along the way.

Bear with me!

THE FIRST CUT - GUZI

A long time ago, some well-to-do families in Asmara used to get a cow or an ox (some member of the cattle family anyway) and share the spoils among themselves. There could be, shall we say, about ten of them... shareholders I mean. They would pay a master-butcher to do the dirty job and join in cutting bits, pieces and portions as if they were out in the field on a harvest... a Saturday show they used to call guzi in those days but not many can afford that nowadays. That was long before McDonald.

The body parts would be allotted to each in accordance to their financial contribution.

That was how Eritrea was created and, at the end of the day and if we can still entertain that kind of local practice, what Eritrea has become may have nothing to do with Italy, Britain, Ethiopia, China or Canadian/Australian mining companies. It is all about acquiring resources – human or otherwise.

That should put the very idea of an Eritrean national identity in question. Is it worth being identifying by it or with it?

What is it, really?

THE MAP

Lost in the labyrinth of Hyde Park (London), a couple couldn’t find their way out. The wife suggested it wouldn’t be a bad idea if they search in for a map. The husband agreed. He was the one who put them in that unpleasant position in the first place. He was against the idea of asking a passerby for some guide.

They found a map – one of those maps that are etched on a vertically standing metal plate fixed to the good old ground. She put her glasses on, zoomed in to a sign written in yellow on a green and circular background and read: you are here.

A bit bewildered and without even thinking, she asked, “How did they know that?” It was as if the map was planted there for the two of them only. She probably assumed someone was, after all, looking after them – as in taking care – all the time.

The husband smiled – just relieved they finally found the exit strategy.

And they lived happily ever after... so ends the story.

THE OTHER MAP

This is a map with a distinct collection of meaningful and weird names but no way out signs while every spot has, over time, become a potential fire hazard. The map below is the first cut of Eritrea in 1880 – ten years before it ‘officially’ became an Italian colony. It is so different to what Eritrea looks like at present. Over a period of 130 years, it’s almost impossible to imagine the number of lives or human resources lost to secure these imaginary lines drawn on dry soil. It’s much more plausible to conclude that they (the lines) were etched in the minds of Eritreans to the extent of identifying themselves with it. Now it looks like a closed shop with no goods to sell and countless security cameras (in human form) to control the ins and outs of the same old lines with no fire exit in place.

More can be said about this map. It’s another ghost of history.

When it appeared from practically nowhere in 1880, the map of Eritrea was much smaller in size than it is now. It was bound by straight lines on the western side of its border, cutting across a river or two to the east before it curves down a smooth line along the Danakil Desert that terminates above the northern edge of the Gulf of Aden. The boundaries along the borderlines between Ethiopia and Sudan were not even that clear (and probably non-existent) while present-day Djibouti has expanded way up to seal Ethiopia’s access to the Red Sea. The whole tragedy of demarcation and national identity in the Horn of Africa could probably be traced to the year 1880. And yet, for the last 60 years (at least) modern states in the Horn of Africa have been quite busy digging physical and mental trenches to further entrench the importance of fabricated identities along those imaginary borders... kind of lines on sand. So much young blood has been shed and precious time, energy and resources have been and are still being wasted to perpetuate the sanctity of these obsolete ‘landmarks’ or sand-marks.

Here is the old map for now.

It is from 1880... almost 10 years before Eritrea was officially recognised as an Italian colony (and most probably drawn by a by a group of cartographers on a mission from the Italian government, in anticipation of the area it wanted occupy).

Have a look!

IDENTITIES, MEMORIES AND SENTIMENTS

Why people assume an identity element is constant and not subject to change is beyond comprehension. Does it not defy common sense? There is this adage: change is the only constant. There you have it in 5 words and nothing can change that.

For better or worse, memories do play tricks on us. We humans are so selective in what we want to remember. Are we not? We enhance some and dump some others. Sometimes, it winds us up to an extent that we breathe, eat and drink to serve our own untimely extinction.

Sentiments do have stories to tell. They are emotionally loaded pillows where the ability to reason is at its lowest.

Sentiments are the basic threads of the national fabric by which the Eritrean blanket has been interlaced. So much selective memory has pinned down the Eritrean identity to a map of a nation state that is almost of no significance in the global climate other than its troublesome influence in its local setting which, by the way, works against its own survival.

Who would want to adopt or hype up those types of layers of identities, memories and sentiments... and for a map that wasn’t there in the first place and was always changing due to forces beyond its control?

Probably those who are incapable of handling their past or adapt to a fast changing future... or still, those who are crafty enough to use the map of Eritrea as a ground force to gravitate its importance as a cover up for their own personal benefit?

Most Eritreans have been reduced to taking care of themselves or their families. Preserving their nation state ranks last. The nation state is on free fall.

So much for nationalism!

THE COVER UP

Like a motorway under extensive repair, diversion is always the only way out. ‘Apologies for the inconvenience caused’ reads a signpost and takes you to destination unknown.

The sacrosanct boundary of a nation state is gradually dissolving. It is not what it used to signify anymore. It is becoming more like a zonal administration. Eritrea, being one of the last to achieve statehood, is unfortunately the first to lose out simply because it failed to adapt to the times.

Most Eritreans have been indoctrinated to exaggerate the injustices they suffered from what they call ‘outsiders’ while not paying enough attention on the injustices they themselves commit on their own kind and fighting to restore that same cycle ad infinitum. That, in short, is the history of Eritrea and the evidence is out there.

Since bad memories do really die hard, let’s stretch it a little bit further and make it more painful. Who are the insiders and the outsiders in that confined boundary called Eritrea?

How can a country, with a population of around 5 million, claim to be united when it has at least 10 languages and 9 ethnic groups? They must have been scattered all over the place (like they are now in the diaspora) desperately searching for some sort of unity that has never been there.

That is why the rotten idea of Eritrea has to vegetate and die to accommodate new shoots. But the current government of Eritrea has been doing it the other way round for the last 18 years and probably long before Eritrea became an independent nation. It promoted the dead idea of nationalism and sent the new generation to the slaughter house... all in the name of the nation state. Some Eritreans are not yet wiser after the event.

BEYOND REASON?

If there is anything that is missing worth in this madhouse state of affairs in Eritrea, reason would be the one. It is probably the only faculty worth being passionate for. It has to be given some space, be allowed to spice up our common sense and drench us with a cold shower in an otherwise bland and so outdated fever of nationalism.

Some may assume that reason is a natural by-product of education. Not that education is a bad idea but only the devil knows where a few educated Eritreans got the grotesque sense of equating nationalism with an overloaded value that ignores the right to be educated. They even go as far as blindly supporting the endless years in national military service while they enjoy their lives in faraway lands.

Reason, not unlike the seasons, is a climate or an atmosphere where sense and sensibility thrive. In Eritrea however, the winter of discontent has been in the air for far too long. Those Eritreans who still have the liberty and the environment to embrace reason have not yet felt the heat inside.

May be they do and don’t know what to make of it. It probably feels like the imaginary Eritrean border lines have evolved to become a permanent boundary to their limited imagination.

Hypothermic Eritrea

It would be understandable if Eritrea, being part of the Sahel Belt of Sub-Saharan Africa, suffers from hyperthermia – and not hypothermia. It is quite hot down there. One would suffer from hypothermia in Siberia. The cool highlands of the Rift Valley might look impressive but the climate up there is not immune to the hazard of heat capable of swinging any inhabitant from one extreme mental or thermal state to another.

Do you not think the deadly political environments that have successively engulfed Eritrea for such a long period have nothing to do with the weather? Its inability to settle, even in peace time so to speak, can be mapped on what the rise and fall of inside or outside temperature can do to a warm-blooded animal.

The Eritrean state of affairs has always been subject or prone to all sorts of geo-political fluctuations. It wouldn’t be lost on anyone if it can be viewed from a thermal angle which, in a way, could open other avenues to a psychological or medical insight. Some might argue that it is a nation state we are dealing with and it would not be appropriate.

We are dealing with a militarised nation here for heaven’s sake. It is suffering from a political culture that tends to shed off its vital organs (or resources) every time it is given the opportunity to recover.

Eritrea has succeeded in becoming a nation state layered with successive generations that are immersed in armed and rebellious history. It so happens to be the only history worth indulging in across the whole spectrum of its social set-up. It has been given high status which, eventually, breeds more of the same political or social culture. It has condensed the nation to a hypothermic state while the weather is hot outside – an absolutely inappropriate response to recovery. Only a suicidal organism (or that selected for extinction) or a person/culture that has lost the ability to adapt to its surrounding environment or anything worth living for would opt for that kind of exit... in other words, a progressively disabled system or living organism.

One way or the other, the State of Eritrea has again achieved the impossible. It has adopted a hypothermic policy – a policy to preserve its core at the expense of losing its marignalised fringes - but only to drive along the painful road to extinction.

Hypothermia is a sudden and critical decline in body heat and, as you well know, is triggered by freezing temperatures from outside. Is it not ironic when the Eritrean government officials are put down or deadened out of office, they are literally (and sometimes officially) referred to as the ‘frozen’? It’s been going on for some time and it does serve as an apt indicator (of the thermal kind) that the heat was on but, unlike in natural phenomenon, it was imposed from within.

How the body reacts to freezing temperatures, given its limitations, is quite simple and logical. It switches to energy saving mode and attempts to maintain the vital body organs like the heart, lungs and the brain. The centre hides behind some sort of air-conditioning for some time while the tip ends of the body, like the toes and fingers are left to the elements. One wouldn’t even feel any pain if the hands or feet were to be chopped. The outermost nerve endings are the first to be abandoned and die.

Eritrean officials were and still are being frozen or regenerated like a lost limb in reaction to degrees of threat or heat from inside just like the young generation is out there to be subjected to stress or conscripted whenever the need arises and, ultimately, left to cater for itself or flee the country.

A mosquito bite or a flu virus of some kind would have done a better job to trigger the ‘national’ body to react appropriately to survive the heat for a bit longer. It would have induced hyperthermia. It is the kind of perspective that has, until recently, been delayed. It could have been applied earlier to offset the internal furnace that drove Eritrea on the road to hell.

Why?

Romanticising, moralising, euphoric and die-hard nationalism and attitudes that bordered to arrogance and stupid pride where sensibility was banished from the scene have, over the years, established a mass culture of hysteria, ignorance and resignation that effectively left the Eritrean oven to add more heat to an artificial hyperthermic (and not hypothermic) state of affairs.

It literally scorched its daily bread to ashes.

In short, the Eritrean sickness demands a diagnosis of some other kind. It is like a forest fire with no trees on sight. The Government of Eritrea has perfected the skill of social control to a level that it so comfy for the few and so bad for bad for the majority. It is a home-grown and victim-oriented national culture. Some Eritreans do feel really proud about this achievement... all in the name of the armed struggle for independence and the newly acquired language of national security.

But historical time operates by a different clock. We now know that the idea of the nation state is just another tool of control. If it is unable to adapt to internal and external stress, just like the human body in hypothermal or hyperthermic state, Eritrea will begin to sound like a nation that froze or got buried in some bygone time. We are dealing with skeletons that can breathe here.

These days, young Eritreans are saying: if you want to live, LEAVE! They cannot see their future in that confined or restricted space under a government that has no concern about the well-being of the next generation.

It lost its head a long time ago. Years later, there come all sorts of butchers to own another chunk of the slaughtered cow and have a slice of sun-dried beef.

DEAD-ENDS, DIE-HARDS AND DELIRIUM

The Government of Eritrea has used all its power to arrive at the dead-end in which it finds itself. Its supporters, the die-hards in the diaspora, do not know exactly how they happen to share that confined corner while most Eritreans are in a state of delirium – a mental condition whereby one is incapable of figuring out one’s surroundings and the state one is in.

What is there to expect from a terrorised and traumatised population anyway? For Eritrea, it has gone well beyond a crossroad.

If you bother to look at the very latest internal map of Eritrea – a recently manufactured provincial lines that have absolutely no relevance to its ethnic or traditional make-up or association – it does exhibit a form of disability that fails to relate to what is happening on the ground. It is a sure sign that the government has no interest or experience of how to share resources other than appropriating what it had no right to ownership in the first place.

Under the cover of the nation state, almost anything is up for grabs now... and why not? It’s the sign of the times. It’s not the scramble for Africa anymore. It is about having your cut wherever you can get it.

If Eritrea is to be analysed to chart a way out of this miserable existence, one area of expertise that could open up that road would be a branch of psychopathology that deals with some kind of a collective and popular dysfunction. It has to come up with methods capable of working on or sanitizing the after-effects of a traumatic deluge that has matured or developed to a degree of a distorted identification with a nation state that has literally gone politically, financially, historically, culturally and morally bankrupt.

In our era of complex interactions beyond borders, Eritrea is a defunct nation. It has already gone through the early symptoms of a failed nation state. For those who are in denial or have not seen the daylight yet, it is obviously much less taxing to accept the status quo than see through this veil of blindness and draw the courage to witness further breakdown down the road.

There is still hope for a break dawn without the awe but not in the strict sense of the phrase. A dawn will eventually break due to systemic failure... whether it’s the kind of dawn to everyone’s liking is another question. Unless those emotional attachments and obsessions overloaded with the relics of nationalism and their almost irrelevant borders or frontiers are trimmed to manageable sizes, transition to some sort of social or political recovery will, unfortunately, breed more of the same misguided mentalities and policies that may have no relevance to the more pressing issues of basic human needs.

There has been more than enough cutting and slicing across the whole board of the Eritrean landscape. What is probably required here is mending and opening up to adapt to new realities and put those painful memories in perspective. The so-labeled next generation has already paid for it dearly and another one is brewing in the barrel to become the new-next. Eritrean nationalism has been blown up out of proportion and magnified to a grotesque level only to serve a select few who are only bent in taking a ride in an encapsulated ego trip while playing games with the trust bestowed on them by an unsuspecting, silent or subjugated majority.

Eritrea is a failed state but it doesn’t even know it. The problem with the state of Eritrea, as a good friend put it the other day, “We are running out of metaphors to describe the horror that is going on”. And a metaphor does help (if one takes the hint or makes the effort) to relate to that ‘condition’ and figure out what to do.

Denial and refusal to acknowledge or deal with what was or still is going on inside or outside Eritrea has been the key factor. This is not only true for the Government of Eritrea – the inner circle and its tentacles – but includes those who, however much they oppose the Government, exhibit the same symptoms or pathological reactions.

It has been said that ‘the map is not the territory’. It has also been pointed out that ‘colonial powers’ were only after resources. And what do we have in Eritrea now? A so-called independent nation that is hell-bent and desperate to equate the map to the territory and erase the human resource it claims to care for.

How delirious can it get?

No wonder the issue or plight of human rights is so high on the Eritrean agenda – outweighing the language, ethnic and religious composition or the over dramatised and vacuous claptrap of national sovereignty.

The problematic, overvalued and traumatic attributes of the Eritrean nation state has produced and sustained a fragile and dilapidated social organisation against a backdrop of a protracted war of liberation with almost nothing to show for it except its incessant reference to martyrdom and the sacrifice paid. Not many raise the issue of wasted lives.

Why Eritrea cannot chill out as a nation state seems beyond comprehension. For starters however, it would be better to stop blaming the outside world for all its ills, develop its ability to respond to its endless and self-induced internal strife and take responsibility to chart its way out of its hopeless and fruitless obsession with border lines simply because the nation in front is not only about borders anymore.

Eritrea is increasingly becoming an archaic and outdated entity. It is being outperformed by far more powerful and subtle forces that are beyond its adaptive or coping capacity. It has become a dysfunctional state and if there is anything left to be done. It needs to focus on how to provide and its well-being and stop hyperventilating under a cosmetic camouflage of territorial integrity or sovereignty. The future is about developing skills or response-abilities to resolve existing conflicts and prevent potential ones.

Eritrea has to face its demons and outgrow its fixation with its troubled history.

It has to forge a totally different mental map.

There is that Japanese metaphor – the horrific harakiri ritual – that would perfectly describe the state of the current Eritrean condition. It’s a ritual in which a Japanese warrior or soldier would do if they have failed to perform what was expected of them. They would go down on their knees, take their time to meditate, pick a special kind of blade and, when ready, hold it with both hands, slice open their own stomach and internal organs while waiting for a swordsman standing beside to swiftly cut their head off at that precise moment.

That looks like a place where Eritrea finds itself. But there is nothing swift about Eritrea at all. It is a nation state that marched on the slogan to ‘never kneel down,’ and is finally but slowly going down on its knees to face its own political suicide and have its head cut off for the sake of saving whatever is left worth sustaining.

Gabriel Guangul

24 February 2010