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...continuation hostilities, of those earlier gains have been set back and the movement towards popular democracy reversed. The nature of Eritrea's post-independence state, the earlier struggle for gender equality and the current crackdown on dissent are here illuminated.
Keywords: border conflict, EPLF, EPRP, Ethiopia, Isaias, PFDJ, NUEW, women
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The struggle for freedom and democracy waged by the people of Eritrea has been a long and complicated one. It has spanned more than a century of rule by a dizzying array of European and African powers (the Ottoman Turks, Egypt, Italy, Britain, Ethiopia). It has thrust them into battle with successive superpowers, as first the US and then the Soviet Union threw their weight behind Ethiopia. It challenged them to construct a new state just as the major world powers were disengaging from Africa at the end of the cold war. It tested their survival capacity through more war with neighbouring states (Yemen, Sudan, Djibouti and Ethiopia). It drew them into the deadly vortex of religious and ethnic politics that infects the region on both sides of the Red Sea. And it now suffers corrosion from within through a power grab that seeks to reverse the nation's otherwise impressive strides toward openness, inclusion and equality.
That said, I do not intend to focus on the many threats this young nation has endured up to now but, rather, to examine how Eritrea's leaders have responded to them and where they are taking the nation today; for it is in the crucible of such experience that a political movement's character is revealed--certainly in terms of the depth and quality of its commitment to democratic development. This I see as fundamentally a political process, carried out in the context of both social and economic democratisation. And there is no separating these dimensions--efforts to sequence them, on the basis that popular political participation must await the achievement of social integration or increased productive capacity, for example, are ruses designed to avoid sharing power. And I would argue that the failure of political democracy in Eritrea will eventually and inevitably undermine the early strides the nation has made toward social and economic equality.
In these most basic respects, I am convinced that Eritrea is moving backwards.
Many Eritreans and long-time friends of Eritrea are grappling with or have also come to this conclusion. But it is not an easy one to arrive at, both because of the promise of multi-ethnic, largely crime- and corruption-free, secular democracy that Eritrea once represented and because of the existential threat it now faces in the form of renewed war with Ethiopia.
The early promise
I first encountered Eritrea in April 1976, when I slipped into Asmara and witnessed the assassination of a high-ranking Ethiopian official and its bloody aftermath--the execution of dozens of innocent civilians. My report on this massacre and the conditions of those living under siege in Asmara appeared on the front page of The Washington Post. Next, I flew to Sudan, where I contacted the two nationalist movements headquartered there--the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF). I then travelled into guerrilla-held Eritrea for five weeks to see the conflict from their side, during which I came to within a few miles of the very places I had just visited with Ethiopian forces in and around Asmara. I went on to write about this not only for The Washington Post, but for the New York-based Guardian, the BBC, Reuters and more than a dozen other print and broadcast media in Europe and North America.
What I found moved me deeply: not just the military strength of these highly developed liberation armies, though it was impressive, but the efforts they were making to transform Eritrea's diverse and deeply impoverished society as they were liberating it. Over the next three decades, travelling mainly with the EPLF, I chronicled the experiments with radical social transformation under way in 1976; the near defeat of Ethiopia's American-backed army...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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