“Eritrea at a Crossroads: a narrative of triumph, betrayal and hope”

 

(MoFA) Nov 15, 2014 - “Eritrea at a Crossroads: a narrative of triumph, betrayal and hope” the title of a book by Andebrhan Welde Giorghis is a rarity, a book on Eritrea by a genuine insider, and despite its title it is less an account of the “story of heroic triumph in struggle” and concentrates far more on the “betrayal”, the ‘dismal failure in victory.” It is very much a participant’s view of Eritrea and its recent history. It is also the account of someone deeply committed to Eritrea and to the original aims and ideas of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. Andebrhan was a veteran of the war of national liberation and a founding member of the central committee of the EPLF and of its successor as the ruling party of Eritrea, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ). After Eritrea’s independence he was at various times President of the University of Asmara; Governor of the Bank of Eritrea; Member of the National Assembly; Ambassador to the EU and other countries including the UK; Permanent Representative to the IMO and UNESCO; and Commissioner for Coordination with UNMEE. He only dissociated himself from the government in 2006.

 

His book is an account of how, despite the high ideals and hopes of the EPLF, an independent Eritrea, internationally welcomed in 1993, has today reached a position when it is widely regarded as a pariah state, at odds with most of its neighbors, with a collapsing economy and its youth haemorrhaging at more than 7,000 a month. And the author’s conclusion is very clear: responsibility lies largely and firmly with President Isaias. Essentially he claims President Isaias, in effect, subverted the aims and achievements of the EPLF and betrayed its ideals, ideals which Andebrhan still believes offer a way forward for the country. He details the way the EPLF came under the control of Isaias’ Marxist-Leninist Eritrean People’s Revolutionary Party, a party within the party, demanding “unquestioning obedience to authority among its members,” with clandestine cells, meeting at night, controlling the military and social apparatus of the wider movement. He underlines the way the last EPDF Congress dissolved itself into the PFDJ in 1984 emphasizing this was not, as the PFDJ likes to claim, the creation of a mass political movement. It was, in fact, the moment when Isaias was able to remove most of his potential rivals and bring the party fully under control.

 

He portrays a President surrounded “by mediocre and unscrupulous yes-men and self-seeking eager informants” and as a result gradually losing “touch of the real world around him and dipping into a make-believe world of personal grandeur,” adding “his demeanor of false modesty could no longer conceal his crass arrogance and insatiable hunger for power.” He describes the way the President responded to the criticisms of the G15 in 2001 and the way he acted as “the accuser, judge and executioner without evidence or reference to the law”. Long before he had suspended the PFDJ Central Committee and the Eritrean National Assembly and emasculated the High Court. He describes Isaias ‘dark side’ as thriving on “the pain of those he condemns to freezing, torture or death [giving him] free rein to trample on the basic rights and civil liberties of the people and condemn many Eritrean patriots to extinction.”  He notes the President uses state resources without restraint mixing public and private assets, regarding himself as the “rightful ruler of the country and behaving as its owner. He appoints, suspends, or dismisses senior government officials and civil servants at will with the only criteria being “personal loyalty measured by blind obedience, rather than service, competence or merit.” He operates through individuals who hold no formal position or function in the hierarchies of government, army or party.  

 

Andebrhan calls Isaias a “shrewd, street-smart tactician capable of manipulating people” but lacking a “sense of strategy and long-term vision”, a man driven by careerist ambition and an authoritarian disposition which has changed him from a once charismatic leader of the EPLF into a detested despot. He betrayed his former comrades and fellow-fighters in order to monopolize state power and “control the small world around him”. Once there, he displayed extraordinary cruelty: “the tyranny of the regime, the brutality of its suppression of dissent , and the severity of its repressive rule have few parallels, both in scope and intensity , in the annals of the turbulent history of modern Eritrea.” Isaias is described as “ever ungrateful and ungracious”, deeply distrustful and jealous of colleagues, constantly keeping them under surveillance, marginalizing or eliminating potential rivals. He has no compassion and possessed of a delusion of grandeur, he suffers from “a rejection complex verging on identity crisis that occasionally surfaces when under the influence of alcohol or seized of drunken brawls”. In sum, he is “selfish to the core, fixated on his grudges, and vindictive in the extreme”. It is a damning and deeply unpleasant portrait.

 

Andebrhan notes the regime’s excesses against its own people, using force to suppress internal dissent, subdue domestic opposition or “enforce submission to its political hegemony”. These included the May 1993 veterans protest in Asmara; the killings and imprisonment of disabled fighters at Mai Harbur in 1994; the internment of 2,000 students in the desert camp at Wai in 200q1; the arrests and indefinite detention of the G15 members in 2001; and the detention and killings of national service conscripts evaders at Abi Abeto in 2004. He also makes reference, without details, to numerous other cases of disappearance, detention or death of suspected critics.  He provides an account of the way the Government operates normally as well. There is the “scourge of indefinite national service” since 1998 which the author notes was adapted from the EPLF’s practice of “forced recruitment” adopted during the liberation struggle after 1979 and lasting until 1991. In effect, this has placed virtually the whole population under military discipline, allowing the army and PFDJ companies the use of ‘forced labor’ or what many call ‘slave labor’. He notes the way the PFDJ companies have presided over the destruction or takeover of almost all private enterprise. He goes into detail of the “coupon economy” which covers most basic products, describing it as “designed to serve an obnoxious control function; the blight of indignity it inflicts on the people is a daily curse that is deliberate.”

 

Andebrhan says he wrote his book “from a desire to contribute to the existing body of knowledge about Eritrea and the Eritrean people, both historical and contemporary.” He certainly does this with his portrayal of Isaias which is both devastating and convincing, This, however, makes it all the more disappointing that he felt obliged to repeat so many of the myths whose “exaggeration and deception expose the fragility and weakness of the construct [the myth of Eritrea], and indeed threaten the survival of the state.”  The account of Eritrea’s history, which fills the first 150 pages, is a disappointing regurgitation of the usual Eritrean version of its pre-colonial history and suffers from very considerable inaccuracies.  The attempt to provide a pre-colonial autonomous Eritrean history, an indigenous historic Eritrean culture and a distinct psychological makeup, is neither credible nor convincing, nor is it a necessary contribution to Eritrean nationalism. That was firmly founded in the Italian colonial era.

 

Similarly, the disappointingly brief account of the struggle for independence suffers from its EPLF bias. He largely ignores the way the EPLF treated other liberation movements and its internal activities, though he does note that “the officially declared numbers of martyrs [65,000] does not include hundreds of freedom fighters, who were executed or made to disappear under various pretexts or missing in action throughout the duration of the wear.” This, however, is almost the only reference to those who died in the internal conflicts and disputes within the EPLF and the conflicts between the liberation movements. It is confined to a footnote. 

 

More detail would have been welcome in many places. The EPLF has always maintained that it never received outside help during the liberation war, that its struggle was one of self-reliance. Indeed, this is now a central element in the Eritrean myth and has become an article of faith. Andebrhan, however, notes: “self-reliance did not preclude the search for external assistance, adding that “the EPLF actively solicited outside material support and military assistance.” Regrettably, he gives no details, merely concluding “international; solidarity, support, and assistance, prudently used as an extension of  the self-reliant effort, were instrumental in the successful management of the internal conduct and external politics of the war of national liberation.” He describes Isaias’ efforts to ingratiate himself with the Bush administration while refusing to release detained Eritrean employees of the US Embassy in Asmara, and his subsequent anti-US diatribes after the US refused to take the base he offered. He notes the strains in Eritrea’s relations with other countries, caused by his “often impulsive and irrational decisions that impeded the implementation of agreed deals”.

 

When it comes to the 1998-200 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, Andebrhan explains how, after the first clash, President Isaias ordered retaliation and then left for Saudi Arabia. As a result Prime Minister Meles was unable to reach him to suggest ways to “cool tempers down and contain the crisis.” The war, as presumably Isaias intended, escalated out of control resulting in tens of thousands of deaths over the next two years and a stalemate that has lasted. Andebrhan fails to make clear the 1998 war was instigated by Eritrea, as the UN Claims Commission firmly stated, but he does give the lie to any suggestion that the catastrophic situation of Eritrea today is no more than a legacy of the 1998- 2000. At the same time, his account of the war is one-sided and he refuses to acknowledge Ethiopia’s victory. Nor is there any indication of the way Eritrea later deliberately forced the UN Mission (UNMEE) out of the Temporary Security Zone and so effectively tore up the Algiers Peace Agreement. Indeed, he takes a purely Eritrean Government view of all subsequent events despite all the evidence to the contrary.

 

Andebrhan agrees that leading members of the EPLF/PFDJ, including himself, failed in their duty to the country, and he admits he bears his “share of the blame, responsibility and pain for Eritrea’s present predicament.” Although he says there was a time he trusted Isaias, he also notes the regime retained key features of the Derg’s administration and the repressive features inherited from the colonial state. At times, he also seems to excuse many of the President’s excesses as a necessity even though he also makes it clear that Isaias’ moves towards autocracy date back to the earliest days of the liberation struggle. It is symptomatic that the only foreigner who looked closely at all three liberation fronts, the EPLF, the ELF and the ELF/PLF in the late 1970s, came to the clear conclusion that the least democratic and most autocratic of the three was the EPLF. Andebrhan, himself, took a long time to see the light. His own problems begin to appear after 1993 but it wasn’t until 2006 that he felt it necessary to stop working for the Isaias government. He doesn’t explain why he stayed so long, five years after many of his closest friends and colleagues (the G15) were arrested. They, of course, remain detained to this day without charge or trial after criticizing the President. Many are believed to be dead Andebrhan makes it clear he retains his belief in Eritrea and its future. He still sees the future for Eritrea in the EPLF and its principles of national unity, popular participation, social justice, self-reliance, and a strong relationship between people and leadership. He describes the unimplemented Constitution of 1997 as consistent with the objectives of the National Democratic Program of the EPLF, and argues that it is still possible to implement these if the few “rotten apples” in the Front are removed. He appears that it needs no more than a reform of the EPLF to reconstruct the state in line with the ethos and goals of the armed struggle. This will allow a return to the “promises of freedom, democracy, justice and prosperity, for which the armed struggle was fought and great sacrifices made.”

 

A worthy aim, perhaps, but not many will share his view that this must be the task of a revitalized EPLF. The idea may resonate with his former EPLF/PFDJ colleagues, in or out of government, who have seen the steady dismantling of all their hopes, but not with the very many others who have never been convinced by EPLF/PFDJ propaganda. It is true that it has been the regime of Isaias which has betrayed the principles which inspired and animated the Eritrean struggle, but it is also clear the EPLF/PFDJ carried within itself the seeds of subsequent problems. Andebrhan has a habit of ignoring or bypassing facts that he does not want to consider, notably in his account of the liberation struggle. He largely ignores the fundamental fault lines in Eritrean society, all apparent in the liberation struggle: the divisions between highland and lowland; Christian and Muslim; Tigrean and non-Tigrean. The EPLF/PFDJ government has made little or no effort to resolve these and they have indeed intensified since 1993, especially in the Diaspora. Indeed, critics of the EPLF/PFDJ have long pointed out that it has never made any serious effort to deal with any of the major religious, social , ethnic or political problems of Eritrean society.

 

Many now see the party as irreparably contaminated with the President’s single minded authoritarianism; and indeed, Andebrhan appears to admit this himself: “Regrettably, the malignant practice that bedeviled the evolution of the armed struggle has given rise to a political culture of extreme intolerance of pluralism that disparages independent thought, criminalizes divergent opinion and equates dissent with treason and treachery in post-independence Eritrea.” Perhaps the most conclusive comment comes from an Eritrean elder, born under Italian colonialism, addressing a PFDJ official: “Your government, which we considered our own and expected to serve us well, is the worst one that has ruled Eritrea during my long life.”