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[Mesob]

For a tiny nation like Eritrea, with a population of less than 4 million, this amounts to a demographic collapse in the making. And for Kebessa [Highland or Dega] Eritrea, whose entire youth population is on the move, it is nothing short of a holocaust.

(Part 1 )
Disowning Eritrea: Owning the Regal Disease

(II - Kebessa Eritrea’s Suicide Mission)

By Yosief Ghebrehiwet, April 30, 2014 (part 1)

How is it possible for an entire people – and I have Kebessa Eritreans, in particular, in mind – to fail to see that they are heading to the edge of existential disaster, as they die in their tens of thousands in one war after another; as they perish in their thousands in the Arab Passage, in the Sahara Desert, in the Sinai Peninsula and in the Mediterranean Sea; as their women are singularly targeted for fighters and fighter-incubators, with all kinds of demographic consequences that these two entail; as their villages, towns and cities are being emptied of their most productive population group in epic proportions; as their youth are made to flee their country in their hundreds of thousands; etc? How is it possible for an entire people to blissfully march for half a century towards mass suicide, even as the tell-tale signs were there from the very beginning, given the alien nature of the mission that their elite had embarked?

Lately, there have been five pull factors that have colluded to open the floodgates even wider than ever before for Eritrean refugees to flee their country and head north to Europe in mass exodus:

(a) The fact that tens of thousands of the youth have already made it to safe destinations in Europe, especially the Nordic nations, so quickly has been a huge incentive to those who have been stranded in refugee camps for years in despair and destitution and to those inside Eritrea planning such risky undertakings to escape the trappings of national service.

(b) The fact that almost all of those who have made it to Europe, unlike the Israeli case, are guaranteed asylum is another huge incentive. It has to be remembered that the Israeli option, where more than 35,000 Eritrean refugees find themselves in a legal limbo, became attractive to Eritreans only after the Libyan route became unpromising under Kaddafi and, in the aftermath of his fall, virtually impossible.

(c) In a land where utter destitution reigns everywhere, the little remittance money the new refugees quickly send back home is making an instant and visible difference in the lives of their families. This too has been a huge driving force for many who have been despairing about the “emergency” condition of their families to leave the country as soon as they could, and provide the vital lifeline.

(d) The extremely weakened, militia-controlled Libya so far has been unable to contain this huge flow of African and Middle Eastern refugees through its land; that is, unlike the Kaddafi government which was successful in clamping on such cross-migrations in a special agreement made with Italy. A relatively quicker, easier and safer route through Libya is causing many to stampede before anything happens to make it riskier or even to shut off.

(e) In addition, in the aftermath of the Lampedusa tragedy, the Italian navy and coastguards have been vigilantly supervising one rescue after another, making the Mediterranean passage safer than it used to be before, even for the most dingy and unreliable boats. This almost guaranteed safety of the Mediterranean corridor is also another great incentive for refugees to try it now, before any changes in this policy take place.
.... Part 2

https://asmarino.com/articles/2072-diso ... al-disease

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[Mesob]

(Part 2)

The result of all these “incentives”, added to all the internal factors that are pushing the youth outside the country (the biggest of which is the national service), is that the mass exodus from Eritrea has accelerated to an alarming level never witnessed before. In addition, two new factors have emerged in the region that are facilitating this mass exodus: the fact that the thoroughly hollowed out and utterly demoralized Eritrean army is no more capable of controlling the outflow has resulted into “virtually no border control in Eritrea” [1]; and the fact the refugee camps in Ethiopia and Sudan are serving as facilitating stopovers, rather than enduring camps, in emptying the land. At the receiving end, Italy has been sounding the alarm as its navy keeps rescuing thousands of African refugees within days, and is expecting more of the same soon to follow with the calming of the waters. Already tens of thousands have been rescued this year, and “up to 600,000 migrants from Africa and Middle East were ready to set off from Libyan shores” [2] On the other side, the picture is equally grim. In a news report from Addis Ababa on Eritreans who are headed north to Europe to take advantage of the calm waters, [3] some alarming numbers are provided: “’There are 13,000 Eritreans ready to cross the Mediterranean as soon as the waters calm down,’ says Tsegay, an Eritrean smuggler who allowed me to interview him.” “During 2013 and into 2014, refugee arrivals increased so rapidly – up to 1,000 people a week came during February 2014 – that Ethiopian authorities had to open a new camp, Hitsats, around 60 miles north of Adi Harush.” If this trend continues, we are looking at a 50,000 a year figure for refugees that cross to Ethiopia only. If we add a similar flow of refugees to Sudan, we have roughly a 100,000 refugees flow within the span of just one year. And this number takes account of only those who register with the UNHCR. Dan Connell comes up with more alarming numbers that takes account of the unregistered refugees too: given that the 300,000 refugees counted by the UNHCR make up only a portion of all that have left the country, he puts the figure around one million. [4] But even if we take the most conservative estimate and cut the number of the unregistered into half of that, the total would be about 650,000. For a tiny nation like Eritrea, with a population of less than 4 million, this amounts to a demographic collapse in the making. And for Kebessa Eritrea, whose entire youth population is on the move, it is nothing short of a holocaust.

If there is any doubt that Kebessa Eritrea is on its way to a demographic collapse and, consequently, that Eritrea is at a looming risk of disintegration, the above numbers make it crystal clear. Yet, the delusional Eritrean elite that time and again have failed to read the writing on the wall keep obliviously discussing “nationalist” side issues that have little to do with their people’s existential predicament: democracy and constitutionality, the type of government they want to install post-Isaias (federalism or centralized), the alien national language they want to impose on the masses, the wishful revolution that never came to be (the Forto event), the disrespect shown to the shifta Awate, ghedli and all its paraphernalia, a wistful “unity” (hadnetna) that never existed, the proliferation of “political parties” in the middle of nowhere, etc – most of these subjects being the trademark of all the bayto meetings in Addis Ababa. They detachedly talk about establishing “civic society” in post-Isaias Eritrea, in a place where the entire middle class is being wiped out. They nonchalantly talk about the kind of democracy they want to see in the aftermath, while the entire educated section that could sustain such a culture is being irretrievably decimated. They passionately talk about quam, confusing life and death existential issues haunting the nation for democratic deprivations. It seems as if they are af
Part 3flicted with a “spatial dissonance”, always confusing diaspora Eritrea with mainland Eritrea in their task assignments; they act as if all the variables to bring change in Eritrea are still there. Characteristic of the Eritrean malady, confusing the land for the nation, they fail to see that with the mass exodus of the youth, it is “Eritrea” that is “moving out”, leaving the land empty. ... part 3

https://asmarino.com/articles/2072-diso ... al-disease

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[Right]

Yosief is right, and he is an Eritrean.

Unfortunately, we can’t think for the Eris, they have to figure it out. By the time they figure it out it will be too late. It is as if they leave in another universe.
No country, leave alone the tiny nation with no economy, can survive the kind of demography bleeding that Eritrea is experiencing.

The Eris can’t walk around with anger and resentment against Ethiopia for not using the stolen port and build a country at the same time.

Even if they succeeded conning the Weyannies and Abiye, the people will not allow it.

[Mesob]

(Part 3 )

But if we are to identify the most important side issue that never fails to galvanize the Eritrean elite, in general, and the Kebessa elite, in particular, it is identity. Any perceived threat to the “Eritrean identity” they want to preserve not only attracts an undivided attention, but is also met with vigorous resistance. In the last bayto meeting, with the questioning of Awate legacy, the Muslim elite felt such a threat to their version of “Eritrean identity” that they had to shelve off or suppress any talk about existential issues that the nation was facing. While they kept debating the Awate controversy for four days in a row, virtually nothing was said regarding the refugee crisis, the mass exodus, the Sinai atrocity, the totalitarian horror inside the country or regime change. Similarly, when the inconsequential Demhit incident took place in Asmara, it happened to cause a huge uproar among the Kebessa elite, even though the roundups for national service have been a staple in the Eritrean landscape for years. What riled them up were not the roundups themselves but who did those roundups. It is very telling of the urban elite that, even though it is the national service that is at the root of their people’s existential predicament, they felt more threatened when they perceived a foreign element in it; that is, death and destruction under the hands of their own kind always gets minimal attention. That is why even when few of them dare to address the mass exodus problem extensively, it is always by carefully factoring out the Kebessa component, lest it threatens the elusive “Eritrean identity” they want to preserve. If so, the elite’s motto seems to be: identity over existence!
It seems to me that if certain people have to go extinct, a necessary precondition is that they shouldn’t be aware that they are on their way to extinction. If so, blinkered with the identity malady, the Kebessa elite happen to fulfill that requirement par excellence. The trick is rather simple: having themselves attired in alien identity, they fail to recognize their real selves as they march to the edge of existential disaster. If so, it boils down to a trivial case of mistaken identity; it is only that the mistaken identity and the one who does the mistaking are one and the same: as one watches his real self go over the cliff, he mistakes it for someone else, simply because the alien self he has acquired doesn’t want to identify with it!

In (I) Kebessa Eritrea’s Suicide Mission from Sahel to Lampedusa: The Other War, I tried to describe how the Tigrigna ethnic group has put itself in the eye of the storm of the Ghedli Cyclone, despite the fact that each and every time it left nothing but death and destruction behind it. What is surprising is the consistency with which the Kebessa elite have been responding every time such cataclysmic disaster strikes their society: they have come to cherish and glamorize the pain of their ethnic group in a way that perpetuates that very pain indefinitely. Even though ghedli, in general, and Shaebia, in particular, has been stocking the Tigrigna ethnic group for decades like a pest that never goes away, the more victimized the Tigrignas get, the more their elite want to own the ghedli legacy and its gruesome culture of martyrdom. But since there is no way that one could glamorize the pain of one’s own people without at the same time disowning those very people, what explains this strange correlation?

Let me invoke a metaphor to help me explain this disconcerting correlation. In my article of a few years back, The Regal Disease: a Tigrigna Malady, I gave a shorter version of the following metaphor to describe how Eritreans, in general, and the Tigrignas, in particular, have come to fall in love with an epidemic that has brought nothing but havoc to their society for the last 50 years, simply because the virus that caused the epidemic comes with a nationalist name attached to it – let’s call it then the Eritreanism Virus. And here is how the extended version of that story goes: ...
... to Part 4

https://asmarino.com/articles/2072-diso ... al-disease

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[sesame]

Mesob,

Do you know if any of these Agames are alive today? Do you care? You don't seem to. Of course, you were on your trip somewhere when an Arab did smoothing unspeakable to you, rather, your backbottom!

[Mesob]

For a tiny nation like Eritrea, with a population of less than 4 million, this amounts to a demographic collapse in the making. And for Kebessa [Highland or Dega] Eritrea, whose entire youth population is on the move, it is nothing short of a holocaust.

Yosief Gebrehiwet, 2013

[sesame]

Mesob Agame,

What do you think of all these Agames in Yemen and Saudi Arabian prisons! You don't give a damn I know!

https://www.facebook.com/freweyni.fetye ... 453798803/

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=sav ... 2066790981

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[Fiyameta]

[Mesob]

Part 4

Let me invoke a metaphor to help me explain this disconcerting correlation. In my article of a few years back, The Regal Disease: a Tigrigna Malady, I gave a shorter version of the following metaphor to describe how Eritreans, in general, and the Tigrignas, in particular, have come to fall in love with an epidemic that has brought nothing but havoc to their society for the last 50 years, simply because the virus that caused the epidemic comes with a nationalist name attached to it – let’s call it then the Eritreanism Virus. And here is how the extended version of that story goes:

The Regal Disease

Rahta and Mahta, the twin sisters that had been gone for five long years, working as chambermaids to the Queen (by the way, the highest honor that any woman could ever hope for in that land), were now back in their hometown for good. Understandably, the townspeople were excited to have their two most famous citizens back in their humble town. They felt proud and honored by their presence, even though there was a certain ambivalence that went with it all. This was because there was something about the way the twin sisters carried themselves, something aloof and distant and somewhat puzzling, that many of the down-to-earth townspeople found disconcerting, to say the least.

Some hastily concluded that living in the royal court for so long had turned the twins into snobs. What is it that has made them forget their humble upbringing, they kept wondering. Do they have to be so standoffish and arrogant, they complained in whispers – of course, all said and done with a tinge of jealousy. Others, on the other hand, openly displayed their envy; they even tried to imitate the way they carried themselves “regally” – as they loved to put it. There were also those who kept a mysterious silence, often accompanied with an all-knowing smile, whenever the subject matter came up, as if they were in the know about the whole matter but didn’t want to say. And then there were those who honestly professed they couldn’t understand it at all but who nevertheless vehemently asserted that the sisters must have a good reason for what they were doing (We have to have faith in them, they kept doggedly reiterating).

But there was one thing that all the supporters and detractors held in common: that this object of speculation – this object of wonder, hatred, derision, envy, praise, emulation or pure puzzlement – was to be located in none other than the twin sisters’ slender arms. It is the unique and strange way the twins carried their arms that kept the town fascinated and buzzing in speculation: the way they kept their arms akimbo most of the time when they walked around or stood still, as if in perpetual self-defiance to, and never-ending quarrel with, everybody around in sight; the way they sometimes kept projecting – or should we say, floating – their arms forward as if they were carrying something fragile; the way they waved their hands woodenly, as if they could not manipulate the hand independent of the arm, and the fingers independent of the hand; the way they used their index finger to summon someone by moving the whole arm back and forth, as if they were pulling an invisible string … An observant clown, who doubled as a ventriloquist, noted that whatever it was that they kept doing with their arms, they seemed to hardly touch their bodies, as if they had set out to prove that the arms had their own lives, independent of the body. And in a clever imitation, as the clown moved in slow motion with his arms suspended in the air, he would make his arms cry “Ouch!” every time the arms came in contact with the body – to the onlookers’ hooting delight. Whatever it is, the citizens of the town whispered among themselves in unusual concurrence, the object of the twins’ pride must be in none other than their arms. But that was as far as their claim would go, for the enigma was that the twins were never seen in the town without their long fashionable white gloves that covered them all the way to their upper arms.

Given the above facts, that the brain-racking question that was in every citizen’s lip should be the following is only understandable: what indeed lies behind those mysterious gloves? Obviously, various speculations were made, many tailor-made to fit the various opinions they had already made up about the sisters. Some said that some noblemen in the royal court must have proposed to them, and what were beneath those enigmatic gloves must be exotic diamond rings of engagement. No, others disagreed vehemently, they must be the famous diamond-studded bracelets that the Queen awarded to few of its most trusted subjects, no doubt as tokens of appreciation for their years of excellent service in the court. But then there were the skeptics (“the spoilers,” as most of the townspeople called them) who devastatingly argued that if this was the case, the twins would have absolutely no reason to hide them (The show-offs that they are, some of the malicious ones added in private, they would have made sure that everybody takes notice of them). Rather, they mysteriously added, those must be some kind of esoteric insignia or emblem indelibly tattooed in their skins, one that identifies them as members of some mystic organization that had a lot of influence in the royal court (That explains the mysterious covering up, they added self-satisfactorily, or an imposter with a good eye would be able to copy it. Some even dared to go so far as to claim the Queen herself must be a member of such an organization). And some others with fundamentalist streak, who obviously wanted to claim the influential sisters as their own, emphatically claimed that, by covering up their arms, they were setting a prudent example to “our hedonist society.” Others uproariously laughed at this suggestion, hilariously pointing to one fact that nobody could deny: the sisters were often seen in miniskirts, often without any stockings to cover up their slender legs (After that, they even mockingly referred to the members of this group as “upper-body fundamentalists”). And so the speculations and counter-speculations went on until …

.... Part 5

https://asmarino.com/articles/2072-diso ... al-disease
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[Mesob]

Part 5

… Well, until two gentlemen, who were head over heels in love with Rahta and Mahta, decided to bring matters to an end. For obvious reasons, the suspense was killing them more than anybody else in the town. What they found most unbearable was the rumors of their engagement to some “pretentious noblemen” – as they frequently put it – in the royal court. This cannot be, they kept lamenting … that was, until they finally decided to do something about it, come what may …

In one pitch dark night, the love-stricken gentlemen stealthily made their way to the twin’s compound, and courageously climbed up two balconies before they reached the front window of the twins’ bedroom. There, crouching beneath a table left in the balcony, hiding themselves behind the tablecloth, they waited patiently until the two sisters came into the bedroom. They held their breath in suspense as the twins began to take off their gloves. The suspense though was soon to turn into a nightmare of horror, for what they were about to discover was totally unexpected: the twins’ arms, all the way from their fingertips to their upper arms, were covered with some kind of a horrible disease! The sight was totally revolting; purple, swollen rushes of some kind had taken all over the skin. And as the sisters began to scratch their arms ferociously, blood began to trickle here and there and puss began to ooze all over … until the pain and suffering twisted the twins’ faces into ugly contortions that scared the hell out of the gentlemen …

Despite all this though, the two gentlemen could still detect a tone of unmistakable pride, tinged with envy and frustration, as Rahta exclaimed, “Oh, my dear and adorable Mahta, how I envy you! Your Regal Disease leaves no skin uncovered all the way to the very tip of your fingers. Look at mine. It is so patchy; you could still detect some healthy skin here and there. I can hardly wait for those beautiful purple rushes to take all over. Oh, how wretched I am!”

Mahta, although beaming with pride that she cannot hide, made a feeble attempt to comfort her sister, “Patience! Patience, my dear sister! You know perfectly well how mine used to look exactly like yours at the beginning. Remember that it was me who first contracted the disease from the Queen. No wonder there, for it was me who spent most of the time taking care of Her Highness. Besides, it took a lot of hard work, a lot of squeezing and scratching, however painful it was … Sister dear, we have to suffer, don’t we, to see the fruits of our struggle? But in time, look how it has handsomely paid off; it has blossomed beautifully!” Then she couldn’t resist adding maliciously, “It is as if spring has arrived too early to my arms! Don’t you think that now it more or less looks like our beloved Queen’s?”

Upon which note Rahta burst into tears; she could no more control herself, as her bosom heaved up and down in anger and frustration. “Oh, to have a disease just like the Queen’s!” she kept lamenting loudly, rocking her body back and forth in despair. But soon she collected herself, stopped her gyrations and put a determined face, and said, “I am off to work, off to work …” and started scratching her arms with such ferocity that our gentlemen could take it no more. They left as quietly and as stealthily as they had come, although totally shaken and devastated by the horrors they had just witnessed.

Soon the word got out. The whole town was abuzz about the infectious Regal Disease that the twins got from none other than the Queen herself. The reason why Rahta and Mahta had been covering their arms in the first place – even as they were terribly proud of their Regal Disease – was because they had been afraid that the ignorant townspeople would misunderstand the nature of their disease and stigmatize them. But their fear was totally unfounded, as they were soon to find out to their pleasant surprise; they had underestimated how the masses could get enlightened so quickly under the proper inspiration. And inspiration, they were willing to give in abundance.

After the initial shock subsided, it soon dawned to the townspeople that they had hit upon a treasure throve. Soon, everyone was devising impossible ways to contract this prestigious disease. In anticipation of good days to come, everyone was imitating the twins in every gesture and movement. As if the whole town was in some kind of a ghost movie rehearsal, the townspeople walked strangely as in a dream, with their arms positioned in the oddest ways that one could possibly imagine. The “arms akimbo” became the favorite among women, some of whom perfected it to a point of spontaneity. Some of the men tried it too, even as they resembled huge awkward birds flapping with broken wings. The more adventurous ones came up with improvised “manly” ones, one of which was named the “march,” with arms energetically swinging up and down, but without touching the body. And those with Christian religious bent, not to be outdone by the “secularists”, quickly invented the “cross,” moving with their arms outstretched sideways in imitation of the cross. Their Muslim counterparts instantly came up with the “crescent”, with one hand bent in crescent-ish way, as if they were holding a child with it, while the other arm kept moving in unpredictable ways as if in attendance to the need of that child. Hilarious as all this may seem, this was no laughing matter for the townspeople; they were taking it all with utmost seriousness. And the fashionable glove soon found its way in every household, with some going as far as falsely insinuating they had already got it (the disease was soon mysteriously dubbed as “it” - Nsa)....
... part 6