Eritrea, Anorexia Nervosa and Other Maladies

The first decade of the 21st century is about to expire and the Eritrea we thought we were familiar with and its distorted and ever persistent self-image is following suite.  Forced to shoulder its fare share of responsibility for its own internal and silent turmoil, it is becoming increasingly clear that it only has itself to blame now.  

The abnormal has finally achieved normality in Eritrea – in other words, there seems to be no urge or sense of outrage to make a difference any more.  People have sort of accepted their fate.  It has reached a level where words are not enough to describe or project an image of what is going on.  They [the words used] are either in their superlatives or just go mute and are left for the imagination to work it out. 

Metaphors can be employed to give a series of mental images to portray a collage of fragmented and shattered Eritrean hopes, dreams and events.  But, like some precious metals, they are in short supply.  One is pushed to be more creative and dig deeper so as to catch the essence or the spirit that is gradually killing the hope or the power to recover. 

It [the metaphor] has to encapsulate a state of mind that frames or governs the individual and the collective psyche spread across economic, social and political spaces.  It is quite interesting at the same time, that a medical term came to the rescue and yet sad to use Anorexia Nervosa as one of the crucial strings that sheds some light into Eritrea’s almost hopeless and nervous state of affairs. 

But let’s leave that for later and deal with other maladies first. 

Words like ‘dictatorial and tyrannical’ have become common verbal currencies to describe the Eritrean political system.  When a system elevates itself to such heights of control, it must have cultivated and promoted an unfair, corrupt and suicidal culture of governance infested with injustice.  

Some Eritreans, sunk in some ocean bed of sadness, console themselves by bits and pieces of news about Eritrea’s sports achievements in running and cycling; some asylum seeker rescued from deportation; another from certain death trying to cross a border or a desert here and there; a few more sailing across the Mediterranean Sea or succeeding in being resettled in some other country where issues and policies on immigration can make or break an election or consign a political group to history.  They [some Eritreans] forget that although achievements in sports by a few young Eritrean is indeed good news, the performance of the nation as a whole cannot simply be framed against that exclusive and distorting background. 

These well-meaning but blind Eritreans seem to forget that all the current maladies being suffered by Eritreans have their origins in Eritrea itself.  The Pandora’s box is somehow infused somewhere in the mentality of being Eritrean.  It doesn’t have a physical location as such but it is tied up by so many strings and to so many factors that the push-pull forces from all sides renders the integrative property of an identity element dysfunctional.  Its impact on ‘heavily fortified’ Eritrean identities makes it increasingly difficult to find an Eritrean at peace with their self-worth.  Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that denial and unwillingness to face reality disables one to say what they see and becomes a way of life that safeguards their ‘sanity’.  

An identity that is incessantly framed against enemies and unable to stand on its own two feet is not mature or confident enough to identify its worth.   Eritrea’s life-long struggle to be free and fair has been reduced to just that. 

In memory of those ‘good old days’ however, words like ‘resilient, fiercely independent, tough, patient, forgiving’ have been and are still being employed by a government that is so dead, rotten and well beyond its govern-by-date limit. 

Meanwhile, the majority of the people – in whose name the Government of Eritrea and its apologists invoke the above adjectives – are literally being treated or hunted like slaves in their own country.  Strangely enough, except for the ‘fiercely independent,’ those descriptions do qualify the character of an uncritical and obedient person.  Maybe that is why they have been used, abused and manipulated in all sorts of wars and conflicts.  They have finally become war-torn, war-worn and still prone to more. 

It should come as no surprise that, over the years, the Government of Eritrea has shown no desire or the slightest intention to listen to the people and, needless to say, is blind to their plight.  Simply put, it is not in its interest to lose face.  To use some more sensory terms, it wouldn’t be inappropriate to describe the Eritrean people (at least those in Eritrea) as mute but, hopefully, they haven’t lost their ability to smell a rat from a distance.   

Then you have a variety of Eritreans whom one would describe as tasteless and overloaded with what borders to mental health issues – as in lacking the ability to reason and engage in a simple and sensible conversation.  They float around and swim in panic and in a behaviour that befits a paranoid person desperately trying to avoid what might be perceived as ‘threatening’ their very existence. 

Taken to its limit, such behaviour would probably amount to a condition called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – a kind of mental mechanism that restores order by manufacturing more conflict or a state of perpetual chaos generator.  What is scary is: what if a significant number of the Eritrean population is suffering from such condition?  What if it is cutting across the whole section of society?  It is an invisible and cancerous social disease. 

Eritrea, like other nation states that recently went through long years of armed liberation struggles, is yet another new candidate unable to address its past and restore order in the present by developing sustainable social institutions.  The only thing it [Government of Eritrea] knows is to shut down or stop anything that ‘moves’ and claim ‘peace’ while the butterfly effect of chaos is always brewing underneath for more.  No wonder Eritrea never fails to cause or rise to the occasion for another conflict.  This, incidentally, is the way of post-traumatic stress disorder – a repetitive attempt to restore that original state of havoc. 

As Yosief Ghebrehiwet writes in his recent article (Eritrea: Forced Peasant Conscripts that Sustained the Eritrean Revolution):

Given the striking similarities of the two giffas [forced conscription] respectively conducted in ghedli [armed struggle] and present day times – in their scope, duration and implementation – one would expect similar consequences as of today’s to have affected the rural areas that were subjected to it during the liberation era. If so, what explains the deafening silence of the nation, or the total lack of outrage, when this very phenomenon took place in ghedli era? And what explains the total blackout on this subject matter in all the literature of the revolution up to this very day? How do we account for these muted reactions as contrasted to the anger and sadness of the public over present day giffa?  There is a simple answer to all these questions: then, the horror was confined to rural Eritrea only; now, it has come to include the urban area. So far as the cost of the revolution came at the expense of the peasants, so far as giffa was enforced among a dispensable population only, the urbanites didn’t mind it. 

Well, the urbanites are in it now!  His article is full of such comparisons and it was just a matter of time.  Under the disguise of national survival, anything can be re-enacted to bring back that traumatic disorder back to life.  What is slightly different now is that the urbanites are relocated to the countryside while the old guard of the revolution is having the time of their in life in the capital and other smaller towns.  

Isn’t that why the condition of ‘no-war and no-peace’ is so desirable state of affairs that it will stay that way simply because it serves the not so obvious prerequisite to maintain unsustainable living conditions? 

What is not so obvious is that some Eritreans, blinded by their patriotic zeal and unable to assess and evaluate the reality in front their eyes that they have to employ all shades of denials and justifications to prolong such an inhumane and unjust system.  They have no idea that it they are suffering from a mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder.  Incidentally, it takes a lot of courage for someone suffering from PTSD to come forward and ask for help.  Otherwise, it has to be played out in all kinds of social settings and regenerate another cycle of chaos.  Masked behind some grand scheme of national or social development, it is the only thing it is capable of doing. 

Such a mental condition is re-created or staged in real life to the extent that returning to a ‘normal’ state of affairs becomes impossible or even an undesirable objective simply because whoever was going through that process wouldn’t have the social skills to survive in a ‘normal’ society.  That, in a nutshell, probably explains why Eritrea is at odds with itself, its next door neighbours and the outside world in general. 

Should we then wonder why Eritrea is always searching for new enemies or digging for old ones?  Or, to jump to another parallel, why the myriad of Eritrean opposition groups, while claiming to be working in the interest of Eritrea’s future and working under umbrellas and alliances, never surprise followers or observers from splintering to smaller groups only to merge later and to ‘diversify’ to yet another level of organization? 

Not that there is anything bad or sinister about all that.  But such a set of a never-ending cycle of incessant attempts to bring about ‘change’ for the better, is a reflection of a consistent refusal or just plain inability to address and acknowledge the original set of conflicts that keep on feeding fuel to a fire that, in turn, sustains a traumatic re-creation or an adrenalin rush that enables one to feel really alive at the expense of others who are really dying. 

For as long as the origins of these traumas are not dealt with, the storm will always come back to haunt and stretch wretched time itself for yet another traumatized generation to make life that little bit harder. 

Then you have the issue of languages.  Sometimes one wonders if Eritrea – a nation with 9 languages and an estimated population of 5 million (no one knows for sure) and dwindling – could be suffering from the Tower of Babel Syndrome.  Without the need to go to any detail, language seems to be used more for generating misunderstanding rather than enhancing communication to address and resolve problems.  Instead, there are those who reconfigure a new set of problems with language itself – a self-defeating and futile exercise.  Could that be another symptom of PTSD – a condition that reflects a disability of being at peace with oneself?  

Then there are those who, totally disabled to figure out how to survive in such a stifling social condition, choose to adopt ‘a life after death’ belief system.  “It is a conviction!” they would say.  Would that make them ‘a convict’?  

According to the Government of Eritrea, it is a resounding “Yes, and a threat to national security as well!” All one needs to ask is: shouldn’t an over-zealous patriot be baptized as an idiot as well?  

It all adds up to a life that is neither here nor there. 

And there are those who were either born or bred outside Eritrea.  Some (difficult to put figures here) have absolutely no clue about what is going on inside their so-called homeland.  They are blinkered teens or in their twenties who (with all their education) cannot even ask simple questions other than absorb Eritrea through their parents’ selective vision.  For most, Asmara is a holiday resort.  The more it looks like a ‘western’ city, the more at home they feel.  The countryside and the peasants, as Yosief Ghebrehiwot would put it, are invisible.  

They seem PTSD-free material but, like God, PTSD and Anorexia Nervosa work in mysterious ways.  No parent wishes bad things to happen to their own children.  When it happens to some others’ child however, it is another story.  

We are talking about adults who travel to Eritrea to have a good time in summer time.  Having failed to ask critical questions, they come back to their adopted and safe homeland to masticate memories and dare to declare that the whole world is against Eritrea.  Are they not the embodiment of yet another generation that is germinating to defend the motherland without even raising a gun – all over again?  For those new happy-go-lucky (and good luck to them) ‘Eritrean’ visitors, Eritrea is a summer camp.  For the locals, it is more like a concentration camp and they are fleeing Eritrea in their thousands and those buried in slave labour and being wasted in prison have to endure and go through another trauma which, inevitably, will show its face in the not so far future.

Then you have Eritrean martyrs who reduce most Eritreans to tears and remind them of the price paid for their miserable existence.  Just because they are not alive to speak for themselves, they are venerated and portrayed as not so easily achievable role models or icons to reach – an impossible dream, in other words. 

Your country needs you! Give blood! So they shout - those officials and self-serving zealots.  “If you can’t go that far,” they declare, “Feel free to pay 2% of your income.”  Most do feel obliged to pay up. 

Their guilt – for not being a martyr or for just being alive – hangs like a massive debt tied to everything they own and, having managed to pay and gone patriotic about it all, the guilt is somehow wiped out.  They feel cleansed and assured to claim back a sort of ‘lost’ identity with pride – an identity that can’t stand on its own two feet other than ‘in not being the other’.  No wonder Eritrea’s identity is always hinged on borderlines that reproduce borderline mental states.  In the meantime, Eritrean children are suffering from malnutrition and the very same people insist on asking: where is the evidence? 

For obvious reasons, the government won’t allow any such evidence to come out.  How is one supposed to get them other than by word of mouth or some reports produced by eye-witnesses?  How is it possible to come out with a proper assessment when there is no access and all independent media is shut down and foreign NGOs have been expelled?  

Given the current Eritrean situation, it is more realistic to assume young children, if not a majority of the population, are suffering from malnutrition and work it from there.  If it is not happening, there is nothing to lose anyway.  But with the young and adult population rotting in an endless cycle of national service or fleeing the country in their thousands and inflation rising, it is very likely that all sorts of social ills are sprouting across the landscape. 

Malnutrition, if not addressed early, is a well known cause for a slower body and mental development while it progressively disables the body to fight disease.  It is one of the major indicators of social well-being and this is exactly where Anorexia Nervosa (AN) can serve as an appropriate metaphor.  It is a kind of malnutrition framed in a different context.  It sprouts in a culture where body-look is elevated to a height that affects one’s self image in ways that demands serious medical and psychiatric attention.  It is a mental illness with, it is claimed, the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. 

If these sad and serious attributes of AN could be applied (and no pleasure in doing this) to draw a parallel to a nation state with children suffering from malnutrition and a self-image that doesn’t match its true self, it goes without saying that there is a distorted sense of perceiving reality and a diminished ability to successfully manage or to at least deal with ever evolving events that require careful attention. 

Refusal to eat in an adult suffering from Anorexia Nervosa is equivalent to a leadership of a nation state that has become unable to think (that being their ‘expected’ job) and whose failure in doing so is manifested in children suffering from malnutrition.  It has to be pointed out that no healthy child would reject food.  But whether the child can have it or not becomes the affair of the state and a bargaining chip at that – a way of holding the population to ransom while ‘the leadership’ metamorphoses to a bunch of fat cats. 

It is not necessarily confined to the top brass.  A system of social network is established in which such a social disease is sustained to breed smaller fat cats who stand before a mirror and  ‘meow’ every other day in the name of ‘fiercely independent’ Eritrean people and eat more every time they see a case of malnutrition.  It is actually Anorexia Nervosa in reverse – every time they encounter or see an image of a person suffering from hunger or malnutrition, they feel the urge to eat more.  

Those Eritreans who suffer from such nervous disposition are highly unlikely to take this article as ‘food for thought’ but will scan it as some junk material not worthy to sustain their unrealistic, distorted and good for nothing  self-image. Eritrea has produced a collection of societies and identities that are increasingly becoming dysfunctional and an administration that is politically inept and not any self-interest in restoring cohesion and co-existence.