The Exclusionary List: Hizbawi Me’kete and the Abuse of Language

[Except for the introduction at the beginning and the addendum at the end, the middle part is a version of my article, Terminal # 98, posted in awate.com on 09/04/07. Now, it appears under the title of The Exclusionary List to because it makes a direct link with the way language is used (or abused) by the totalitarian regime’s supporters in Diaspora for exclusionary purposes. I find this especially relevant in light of what has transpired in the Al Jezeera interview and in its aftermath.]

Introduction (03/09/2010)

What we have noted in the Al Jezeera interview is the totalitarian leader of Eritrea incapable of using language to communicate, be it with his people or the outside world. He uses it either as a monologue to instruct the world in a one-way conversation or to humiliate and terrorize others. When language is used for confrontational purposes only, it loses its dialogic aspect. And once dialog is rendered dead, one communicates through violence only – a true feature of every totalitarian system. In such a world, language is used vertically to command or obey, insult or praise and terrorize instead of laterally (or dialogically) to communicate with, learn from, enrich, inform, inhibit and correct one another. The latter, unlike the former, requires equals at both ends of the conversation.

Most Eritreans from the opposition would love to confine this insanity to the tyrant only and exculpate the rest, for the solution that they have in mind demands that there be such a clear cut diagnosis. But this breakdown of language is a pervasive phenomenon to be witnessed among the tyrant’s supporters in Diaspora, his subordinates in the PFDJ government, the teghadelti population group and the nation in general. You see it in the likes of Ali Abdu, where sycophancy has been perfected into a form of art. You see it in a generation of teghadelti who have lost the art of listening in the process of liberating the nation. You see it in the nation itself, one that has been looking inward for guidance and inspiration for so long – that is, one that has been preoccupied in monologue for 50 years – it is now incapable of communicating with the rest of the world other than though violence. That is to say, the problem of Eritrea goes way beyond Nsu; a more appropriate term would be Nsatom, as one foot soldier in Dehai aptly put it, “Nsu N’hna, N’hna Nsu”.

If one uses a book as a doorstop, the content of the book has nothing to do with the task of stopping the door; that task can be explained simply by the bulkiness or weight of the book. Similarly, what we will see below is how the regime’s supporters use language not for its meaningful content but for its exclusionary purposes – to protect, as in a fence, the totalitarian regime in Eritrea. What do I mean by “exclusionary purposes”? Here is an example that elucidates it:

A wife hates her in-laws so much that she doesn’t want them to come to her party. But she cannot openly say so for fear of offending her husband. So, instead, she invites a lady that the in-laws could not stand. Showing them the list of the invitees is all that is needed for them to stay home. The point is this: the lady is not invited because of her “party qualities” but solely for her “exclusionary quality”. Had there not been enemies to exclude, she wouldn’t have been invited. She is there simply because her presence is needed to exclude others – that is, for exclusionary purposes. Similarly, the hizbawi me’kete types use language not for its “linguistic quality” but for its “exclusionary quality”. Here is how it goes:

The Exclusionary List (09/04/2007)

There is something homogeneously neat about Highdefite literature, be it open letters of protest, memos to foot soldiers, “analysis” of urgent issues or “news” on events. This unusual hygienic cleanliness is notable not for what it includes but for what it excludes, as all sanitary jobs are supposed to do. Whatever is kept in has no other purpose than to keep out the undesirables, having no other value in and of itself.

In an article that I wrote in 2002, “The Internal Bleeding of Eritrea”, I drew attention to the exclusionary phenomenon that is unique to all totalitarian systems, as exemplified by the “hizbawi mekete” mambo jumbo that was going on then. In an effort to drawn out all the negative developments that was going on then in Eritrea, a guideline that emphasized “constructive issues” only was made to circulate among the foot soldiers. The whole list focused on two topical issues: rebuilding and defending the nation. This set the trend for years to come; up to now, the whole Highdefite literature falls into either of these two categories. Any piece of literature you pick from their websites either brags about a road built here and a bridge built there or about all sorts of enemies of the nation, both internal and external, that have to be diligently warded off. This has rendered the whole Highdefite literature produced since then devoid of content. How?

Hizbawi me’kete

In the early days of the crisis, when the despot unleashed all his repressive methods to stem a budding resistance, “hizbawi me’kete” was consciously created to be the antidote to all the negativity that the regime’s actions were attracting then. The Highdef cadres came up with a “constructive list” that focused on the sovereignty of the nation, demarcation of the border, reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure, demobilization of the army, rehabilitation of the internally displaced, repatriation of refugees and care of families of martyrs. This is a typical case where even when the Highdefites are “right”, they are condemned to be wrong.

The main problem with this list of priorities set for Eritrea was the conspicuous absence of equally important and equally urgent priorities. If one looks carefully at the listed priorities, I don't think that any concerned Eritrean would find any of them disagreeable. The problem with the list was not with what was included but with what was deliberately excluded. So much so, that one is left with the impression that it was with the latter in mind that the list was compiled. If so, these seven “noble” priorities would simply end up being used as some form of fences or territory markers that were deliberately set up in a defensive position to ward off any other legitimate priorities; those being the ones that were considered a threat to the GoE.

Suppose you want to fence your plot of land, with the primary intention of marking your property, so that nobody would be able to claim anything past those markers. It doesn't matter to you whether the fence is made up of stone, iron, wood or even planted bushes, so far as they equally serve the exclusionary purpose you have in mind. That is, there is nothing essential or intrinsic invested in each of those materials that would make them indispensable on their own; one can easily replace one with another without losing anything substantial in the process. One can dispense with any one of them, so far as there is another left that would equally do the exclusionary job. The same holds true of those priorities mentioned in the “constructive” list. In and of themselves, they hold no value for the Highdefites. To those who compiled the list, there is nothing indispensable in each of those priorities; they are willing to drop or replace any one of them so far as the revised list is able to deflect attention away from the regime’s atrocities. That is, the value of each priority exhausts itself so far as it is made to serve the exclusionary purpose.

Once the PFDJ cadres decided to come up with a “constructive list” for exclusionary purpose only, each member in that list is rendered devoid of the content it would have had had it been made to stand on its own merit. That is to say, there is no way for each priority to serve the evasive purpose it is set to accomplish without divesting the meaning out of it. Notice how language is abused to serve a non-linguistic purpose.

The enemy list

In the same 2002 article, I drew attention to the same exclusionary phenomenon through a different example, a black list compiled in hizbawi me’kete:

“... The GoE zealots, having keenly sensed this, have developed an evasive strategy that successfully diverts their gullible followers' attention away firm this unfolding tragedy. They have been tirelessly coming up with never-ending public orgies - the latest one being ‘hizbawi mekete’ - where they keep hoarsely repeating the innumerable ‘subversive deeds’ committed against the Eritrean people by various ‘enemies of the people’, in the desperate hope that the longer the black list they come up with, the less conspicuous PIA's crimes will get.

“The list of the enemies that these zealots have come up with is quite impressive; it ranges from the quite insignificant to the who is who in Eritrea and in the world at large: elderly mediators, embassy employees, university students, veteran teghadelti, military officials, journalists, ‘ethnicists’, religious fundamentalists, Jehovah Witnesses, Evangelical Christians, NGOs, Red Cross, Amnesty International, Journalists Without Borders, EU, Italy, Denmark, USA, UNO, OAU, the CIA, the Danish parliament, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen, Al Qaeda, Anthony Lake, Susan Rice, the Clinton Administration, Jimmy Carter, Asmarino.com, Awate.com, foreign diplomats, Ambassador Bandini, etc. One who has given up on finding the slightest bit of family resemblance among these disparate groups, that could have only been brought together as ‘enemies’ by a schizophrenic mind, is puzzled not by what are included by what are excluded. For one can understand how a paranoid mind keeps seeing enemies everywhere in the world, but finds it incomprehensible how it simultaneously discriminates its friends from its enemies. What kind of a filtering mechanism could this schizophrenic mind has possibly developed to filter others from making it to this venerable list? Why not include the Eskimos, the Pygmies, the Pope, Mother Theresa, the Pointer sisters, Mohammed Ali, Michael Tyson, the Washington snipers, Don King, Maradona and all the inhabitants of that distant and obscure Timbuktu? … What are the criteria that helped the former, but not the latter, to making it to this list? ...”

Variable enemies and dispensable friends

The above is not as funny as it seems. For an independent observer, the only thing that those in the list have in common, one that separates them from those kept out, is that at one time or another they have had some “contact” with the GoE. Based on this finding, our social scientist would come into this conclusion: “If the Pygmies and the Pointer sisters have had a sustained relationship with this regime, the likelihood that they would have eventually ended up in the enemy list is very high.” The arbitrary nature of the list, of course, lends itself to a further generalized observation: that there is no necessity invested in any one member of the list; that, in and of themselves, the members have no attribute that identifies them as “enemies”. If so, any one of them could be dropped from the list without making any difference to the purpose of having such a list. By the same token, any new members could be added to the list, so far as they meet the minimum condition of having been previously in contact with the regime.

But to be “in previous contact with the regime” is, in most cases, to have had a friendly relation with the regime. If our social scientist is pursuing the case this far, he will observe: “The overwhelming majority in the enemy list comes from a ‘friends list’.” His final conclusion would be: “In most instances, one cannot be rendered an enemy of the PFDJ unless one has counted as its friend sometime in its past.” For instance, at one time or another, Eritrea had a close friendship with Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, EU and US. And the more intense the relationship happened to be, the more likely those “friends” would end up in the enemy list. That is to say, the friends list is as arbitrary as the enemies list. In fact, the freezing, demoting, reshuffling, and demonizing of old “friends” is meant to make dispensable entities out of them, out of which the despot builds his enemy list. And if he is in a mood of recycling them, or defrosting them, then they are upgraded to the friends list.

But the arbitrary nature of the members of the list doesn’t mean that the list too is dispensable. As in the case of the fence example given above, one can do away with any members of the list, but not with the list itself. Totalitarian states cannot exist without invoking “enemies of the people”, be they internal or external ones. To them, it is secondary as to who ends up in the enemy list so far as some entities make it to the list. What is indispensable to them is the fact that there is such an enemy list. It is in the nature of totalitarian states that they crumble when they can no more sell these “enemies” to the masses. Without the encirclement mentality that they instill in their populations, the masses will identify the regime as their primary enemy. The culture of sacrifice, upon which all totalitarian societies thrive, needs all sorts of enemies to sustain itself.

Again, notice how the enemy list lacks any linguistic content; looking at each case in the list would take you nowhere. That is, language is no more used for informative purpose. It is only when you divest the meaning out of each case that you will come to understand the purpose of the list: to attribute all the ills of the nation to “enemies”, thus vindicating the regime of any wrongdoing. Language is used in a non-dialogic way for evasive or deflective purposes.

The Indispensable One

It would make no sense for a foot soldier to undertake a case by case study of each member in the enemy or friends list or of any other separate claim made in any other Highdef literature. If he would do that, he would end up as puzzled as the rest of us. So where does his certitude, one that belies the evidence out there, come from?

The true believers are always faced with a world of chaos. If the true believers are to make any sense of what took place in the last decade or so by looking at them case by case, they would literally go crazy; they would live in a permanent state of contradiction. Instead, they have developed a unique defense mechanism that magically turns this contradictory world of chaos into an orderly one. They have found a Magic Looking Glass through which they see only an orderly world. This is not a looking glass that helps them to see the world as it is; no, not all. This is a wonder looking glass that imposes its own order on the world. The totalitarian leader, Isaias Afwerki, is the paranoid glass through which they see the world. In the same article, I identified one method (the “whole sale method”) that defers all kind of judgments to the despot:

“And what do the GoE zealots have to say regarding all this? Looking at the long list of blunders of their hero, they have long ago given up making any sense of them. As most of us, they have been scratching their heads every time a new misadventure takes place. So in order to keep their sanity intact, they have developed a ‘whole sale’ approach, where all of PIA's actions – past, present and future – are ‘assessed’ once and for all. This would spare them the headache that accompanies the assessment of every one of his blunders. In other words, they have relinquished any assessment on their own; they have decided to let PIA be the measure of all things that is good for the interests of Eritrea. That means, they have no independent criteria that they could resort to evaluate PIA's decisions, for it is those very actions that are taken to be the ultimate tribunal for all actions, including his own (figure that out, if you can!).

“Once the GoE zealots have decided that PIA is beyond criticism, then it makes perfect sense to assign him the task of the Grand Counter, who is entitled to list all the subversive acts leveled against Eritrea, without his acts ever coming under that list.”

No wonder then that they are afraid to let go of their hero. The foot soldiers’ often made assertion that if the despot is gone, chaos will ensue has a rationale behind it. The fear is that, if they are forced to give up their Magic Looking Glass, the chaos that they are desperately trying to avoid would come back with vengeance to blur their vision of the world. They don’t realize that the chaos they are afraid of is not in the nature of things, but in the paranoid mind of their leader. They fail to realize the most therapeutic result – both for themselves as individuals and for the nation – would come only if they throw away that distorting glass.

Again, notice that the true believers are not concerned about the contents that each case carries. Once they have delegated the responsibility for doing that to the Supreme Leader, they are perfectly happy to live in a world devoid of content. The only thing that they hold constant, one whose value doesn’t vary at all, is the Supreme Leader himself, one that solidly anchors their world view. As any other Deity, he is the one who gives content to whatever they say and write.

Terminal # 98

In the same article, I also provided the following example to point out the regressive nature of the Highdefites’ task, one that can be stopped only by giving the final word to the Grand Counter, the tyrant himself:

“Suppose your boss asks you to come up with a list of all the subversive deeds committed against the company you are working for. After working diligently, you are about to close the list at # 98, when it suddenly strikes you that the very order your boss has given you is itself a sabotage against the company. The scrupulous fellow that you are, you immediately include that in your list as subversive deed # 99. As you are about to finally close the list, it again occurs to you that if your boss is on the enemies' side, so must be you for following his orders. So you sum up your list by adding the very act that you are currently being involved with as subversive act # 100. Well, if all that you are interested in is to come up with an exhaustive list, then you have done an admirable job. But if it has been in the interest of the company that you have been making the list, then you ought to simply quit what you have been doing, disobeying your boss in the process. The hizbawi me’kete shenanigans have this farce written all over them, having made # 98 as their terminal point.”

Five years later, they are still hanging on to their terminal point. The fear is that if they ever make the critical slide to #99, the whole edifice they have built through the eyes of #99 [the tyrant] will crumble; and as #100, they will be left with nothing in their hands. They don’t realize how liberating it would be to let all the burden fall at one go.

Addendum: no threshold of tolerance (03/09/2010)

It is no surprise that eight years later, the supporters still remain fixated on Terminal # 98, even though the behavior of #99 – the tyrant himself – has been getting worse by the day. Throughout these years, the only person who has been outperforming the disgraceful behavior of the president of Eritrea has been the president himself. And that fact is getting more and more inescapable with every interview he conducts. In light of this, it is only appropriate to ask of his supporters: When will they say enough is enough? What is the barest minimum of ethical or political standard they require of their leader? Do they have any threshold of tolerance where they draw the line? Could they imagine any hypothetical scenario where they would be forced to give up on him? Do they have any independent criteria by which they assess his performance? These questions are as relevant today as they were in 2003, when I raised them in my article, The Elusive Threshold of Tolerance:

“… their [the supporters’] threshold of tolerance are constructed always in retrospect. In a strange reversal of moral and temporal order, instead of the deed complying with the ethical standard, the standard looks up to DIA's deed for guidance.

“No wonder, this strange reversal of moral order depends on an equally bizarre reversal of temporal order. The president's deeds have to be consumed first before any codes of conduct that would accommodate them could be crafted; or else, the supporters would be at loss as to how to make a tailor-made ethical standard that would fit those deeds. No wonder that their thresholds of tolerance are always in a state of flux as they have to be constantly demolished and reconstructed, which would - if taken to its logical conclusion - lead into a nightmarish infinite regress. In such a bleak ethical and political desert landscape, comparative terms of assessment - such as ‘lower’ and ‘higher’, [as applied to the threshold of tolerance] - lose their import for lack of a reference point. It is the emergence of this scary, nihilist and free-floating world without any gravity or constraint that we have been witnessing in horror.”

And in this free-floating world, language is the first victim; it has to be mauled beyond recognition if it is to catch up with the constant demolishing and reconstructing of these thresholds. And this is what we have been witnessing among his supporters regarding the latest Al Jezeera fiasco. They know that the tyrant has again outperformed himself in stupidity, but their immediate reaction is how to protect him from himself. If you want to see the absurdity as displayed by the tyrant replicated by his supporters, all that you have to do is visit the DMB section of Dehai, where dialog as we know it has been rendered dead for a long time. Here is one that I like for its absurdity, for there is intelligence behind it (by someone under penname of “The interview fiasco—what do we do now?”):

“I think we should redirect our anger toward those people who are responsible for scheduling the interview. I was told that people in the Ministry of Information and the President office are to blame. These people are not doing their job, or worse, could it be we have is a Mole? I am guessing that someone is deliberately inviting these devious journalists to humiliate PIA and the Eritrean people. It is time we held these traitors accountable or may be we need a house cleaning. What makes me angry is that these deceitful journalists are allowed to attack PIA and our people in our own home. These kinds of interviews happened too many times, and it must stop now.

“May 24th is around the corner, and I am hoping the president office do their jobs, and protect the PIA and our people. Better yet, how about PIA takes break and no more interviews?”

Deep down, this person realizes that the president is an idiot, and he is asking nothing less than muzzling him to avoid further embarrassment. If he cannot criticize the president from a safe distance, how are the poor guys in the President’s Office supposed to tell the president that he shouldn’t make an interview? Since such a suggestion would mean nothing short of pointing at his incompetence, nobody could do that and survive his wrath. This is a classical case of neta dumu men ‘katchil yi’serela.

When Isaias conducts such interviews on critical timings it is precisely because he has a very high opinion of himself, and of his oratorical skill in particular, and believes that he can make a huge difference in those critical events. To many of his supporters that are claiming that Al Jezeera intentionally held the interview on a date too close to the 22 February to dampen the spirit of the protest, it is funny that it didn’t occur to them that it could be Isaias himself who insisted that it be done on that date because he believed he has something insightful to say that would make the protest even more potent.

The problem for the supporters is how to accommodate their president’s bizarre behavior without looking ridiculous themselves, as can be seen from the above quotation. Even if the president had taken off his clothes one by one and got stark naked in front of the camera, they would have gone to absurd lengths to find a rational explanation for such an irrational behavior, as one character by the penname “mw” in Dehai (DMB) actually did, “With all due respect, I urge you to watch the interview again. Pay attention to the editing. I am not videographer, however there seems to be something funny going on.” He believes that all that has gone wrong in the interview can be explained as a con job by the editing section of the Al Jezeera. Who could bit that in its neat categorical denial? With such a categorical excuse, even a president going naked in front of a camera could be blamed to editing.

Isaias has always been Isaias for more than four decades. This kind of abusive performance we have been seeing in a series of interviews would have hardly made a ripple in the insulated world of Sahel. Who among his subordinates hasn’t experienced the heavy handed treatment of Isaias, be it verbal humiliation, freezing, imprisonment or physical abuse (remember those whose heads were smashed with whisky bottles?) It is only that, now, the Internet Age has caught up with him, and he doesn’t realize it. So are his supporters, who cannot comprehend how the Lion of Nakfa gets licked by a journalist; these are the very people who were invoking shadishay werar in the demonstrations to tell the world how they will prevail during the sanctions. So is the nation that has remained fixated in the archaic and insular ghedli era, and failed miserably to adopt to the postmodern era. And therein lies the tragedy of Eritrea.

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