So what is wrong with the Ethiopian Card then?

…Come back AS all is forgiven!

I do feel sorry for people whose real jobs it is trying to work out Eritrean politics… (unlike me) they have to understand and be able to explain the relationship between EPDP and EPDP1 and then try and explain the difference between the EPM that was expelled from EPDP1 and the EPM that never joined EPDP and refuses to join either EPDPs now! and then, if the poor person  still has some breath left, they may chuck in about the DP that is in the EPDP and EPDP1 and the DP that is not… and once they have done so they will have to explain ENSF and ENSF1 and the various elements that made ENSF and the elements that eliminated themselves from ENSF and the elements that looked like they were joining ENSF but never quite got there…without forgetting the group that keeps entertaining visiting dignitaries with poems and jokes in every creed and language Eritrean whenever they go to visit the armed forces (etuq serawit!... shshshs don’t mention the fact that their existence or numbers has never been verified independently yet! But what ever you do don’t make estimates based on the assessments of the Etuq menesey folks that gather for Paltalk every evening!).  Once they have done all this,  our Eritrean analyst,  will then have to go through tedamun and explain fully how this was a coalition of our Islamic organisations…but in it has a party that was so secular it is the mother of secularism in Eritrea - ELF… and then there is the Federalist party too the only thing Moslem about this party (at least on paper) is my friend Issac Beshir!… the naïve observer (like yours truly), will be forgiven for thinking that the criteria might  not be Islam after all…) I guess that leaves my friends (and they really are my friends…) over at Alnahda…who are also Moslems by creed but not in tedamun and are in EDA but are not trying to deceive us by telling us they have a mythical armed forces stationed somewhere along the Ethio-Eritrean boarder… oh and that brings me neatly to the people who have the some armed forces and who are proposing (concertedly) the armed struggle option- the Kunama and Afar Fronts…( I still am not versed on the various other ethnic based groups that have emerged since the new ideology... that Ethnic based organisations are the most successful organisations, has begun to take root in the minds of our few and thinly spread activists… all I know is the Network of Eritrean Civic Societies has lost one civic activist to a political party advocating for the rights of the Blein people)

Paracetamol anyone?

And this in a nut shell is why I so vehemently and totally oppose the ‘Ethiopia Card’ as YG called it… the reason for ‘inviting’ the Ethiopians to kill and die for us (isn’t that invasion by a different name?) isn’t because we are convinced that is the best option out of all the options we have… it is simply because we have taken a long hard look at out stock of ‘liberators’ and decided that there is a better chance of us setting foot on the moon than on Asmara!

And therein lies the answer to Why not the ET card? Why would a group of people who have a wealth of political experience to draw from, who are not responsible for administering a single village yet; and do not have the responsibility for feeding a single hungry mouth (save those who carry their genes, that is!) and yet fail to work together for a period longer than one football season, be trusted to run anything after we have used the ET card to get us out of the PFDJ jail? …unless of course YG is thinking that the folk over in Asmara (who he also thinks, are simply unable to effect our version of jasmine revolution…) are expected to take up that role. Alternatively when we arrive at the moon we could send the guy from Krypton to rescue us… and IA would be left wondering… is it a bird? …is it a plane… no… its superman!

So you see YG… the ET card is a no go and especially whilst the ER card is in such a disarray…but that aside even without the ET card I think importing democracy from the barrels of a gun is something that has not been done successfully in recent history (even where the gun was followed with ample resources thrown behind it… Afghanistan? Iraq? Somalia? (didn’t they use their ET card there?)… in our context I see at least three reasons for why not from the barrel of guns (with or without the ET card that is)

Firstly our lack of knowledge and working understanding of the internal context… there is no doubt that the brutality of the regime has made an enemy out of every Eritrean (minus the bandera clad diaspora people who I am leaving out of these discussions for now… no offence folks but I have enough confusion to deal with… and it hasn’t been four hours sense my last Paracetamol...). One word that defines the Eritrean public’s reaction to PFDJ aptly is ‘silence’ or is it quietude (as DM calls it SAAY oft repeats it)…It is important to really understand the meaning of the quietude and not impose our own interpretations of it… is it fatigue? Is it the apathy? Is it fear of the unknown? Or is it the knowledge of the absence a competent alternative? Whatever it is one thing is crystal clear the will of the people has to be ascertained and then asserted. We need to satisfy ourselves that we have the will of the people and work to empower the same… without strong internal desire and commitment to the kind of change we are talking about we run the risk of imposing our own agenda… and that isn’t democracy is it?

Secondly there is my firm conviction that aggression is counterproductive in the long run… this is not just from the perspectives of a proponent of the  ‘peaceful means’ … it is from the stand point of the unpredictable nature of the emotions that war can ignite in people; even if I agreed aggression was the only way and even if I was able to swallow the ET pill… I would still worry about PFDJ turning this on its head and convincing people that they are yet again being victimised… that so tried and tested song and dance routine… remember Dulles?… remember the UN? Remember the OAU? Remember the UN again? Remember Hague? Remember res 1907? If there is a litany that the PFDJ has perfected it is this one where every one starting with IA and every minister that is allowed to talk (all two of them) and every minister that is not a minister and then every PFDJ official, all of them residing outside Eritrea proper and every YPFDJ (provided it is near beles season) can recite this perfectly and without a clear visible war looming against them… point a gun in their direction and few tanks… we run the risk of making a victim out of PFDJ the perpetrator…
    
Thirdly there is the issue of the… alternatives… or the ‘transitional arrangements’ as my politico friends have taken to calling it…how integrated into the social systems locally can it be when there is little communication across the change seekers on either side of the divide… how many people in Eritrea would know (much less understand) the alphabet soup of organisations that we have fashioned, over the years we have stayed away? How sure are we about our proposal’s ability to stand the intense scrutiny of the population? Especially if we come flashing our shiny ET cards… after all the Eritrean public has been bitten more than once by arrangements which were allegedly transitional… which panned out to be nothing but!

…so for various reasons (other than my complete and my utter loathing of war as solving anything… without creating more havoc in its wake…) and because of the Eritrean context including the headache inducing situation of the ‘resistance’ camp… I oppose the use of any Ethiopia guns… I mean cards! Incidentally what makes anyone think that Ethiopians will be willing to die bringing democratic change to Eritrea? Especially when Eritreans claiming to be committed to democracy can’t even commit to its tenets beyond grafting it into their acronyms? i.e. who says there is an Ethiopian card anyway?