Bravo Deru’e,
Agena’e Seyoum
Part IV
By
Woldeyesus Ammar
To: Haile
Woldetensae (Deru’e),
Prisoner No.: -
Location: Unknown
Eritrea, East Africa
Cc. Seyoum
Ogbamichael (Harestay)
Dear
Haile,
18
September 2005: it is already four years since you have been unlawfully and
unjustly jailed together with many other compatriots. Please convey words of
encouragement and solidarity to all of them - men and women, young and old: all
put behind bars under framed-up charges. And I trust you will not forget
to pass the same message to Wedi Bashay (Tekleberhan Ghebresadiq) and
Woldemariam Bahlbi who are languishing in the prisons of ‘new Eritrea’
since they were kidnapped from Kassala on 26 April 1992.
It
is of course a sacred duty of genuine Eritrean patriots to express profound
solidarity with you prisoners at occasions like the one at hand. However, the
economic, social, political, humanitarian and human condition in the country has
degenerated to such a distressing level that the difference between your
situation and the situation of the rest of the population is hard to
distinguish. In fact it may end up being one and the same – if it is not already
there. It may also be news to you that the nation is being emptied of its
population at a fast rate. You know the old caseloads of refugees did not return
home. Now, the entire youth is on the move to flee the country in order to
escape death in prisons and detention camps, death in the trenches or forced
labour camps, death of hunger, death of curable diseases in a land that is now
without sufficient foodstuffs and medicines. Even many of those trying to
escape untimely death are not succeeding: some are killed by frontier security,
others die in the deserts and the high seas. To tell you the tragedy in a
nutshell, Eritrea and Eritreans are under a very bad serious that
must come to an end very soon; otherwise the consequence will be
indescribable.
Old Friend Haile,
You might have
read Part I of the writing under this heading when it was posted on 7
August 2001 in Awate.com because you were still a free person in
Asmara. But it is evident that you had no possibility of reading Part II
in September 2002 or Part III in September 2003 that intended to mark, with
sadness, your first and second years in prison. Other than observing your
4th year in prison, today’s Part IV aims:-
1)
To bring to mind what you, Haile, stood for,
at least between July 2000 and September 2001.
2)
Tries to remind how much you and your generation
members were involved in the task of liberation struggle.
Theme: Reconciliation
When it was posted
only six weeks before your arrest for years ago, the optimistic Part I wanted to
inform that the much needed reconciliation in Eritrea was on its way. Taking
note of your and Seyoum Harestay’s contributions for reconciliation during the
first half of 2001, I tried to record what I thought was a historic trend, and
had to put in these terms: “Whatever the past had them do and think in
separate [ELF-EPLF] camps, Seyoum and Haile are today speaking the same language
[of reconciliation] and seeking the same destiny for the nation. And as it was
the case in the long past [when they were student activists], they are again at
the forefront agitating for change of mind among Eritreans urging them to wake
up to receive a new Eritrea, different from the one of the
yesteryears.”
Unfortunately, Haile,
the progress has been intolerably slow. In fact little has been done in the
field of reconciliation since you left the scene. You might or you might
not have heard that many of your old comrades distanced themselves, as you did,
from the club of criminals - the PFDJ. Some of them joined the opposition camp
and some went hiding. Also since September 2001, the old opposition has been
joined by others, among them the perennial Hawileitos (to borrow the right word
from Awate editorials) and fence-sitters. And unfortunately for the struggle to
change and democratize Eritrea, all of the above chose to improvise their
own nebulous movements, ‘third-waves’ and associations. In the end, all failed
to help the opposition move any inch forward except increasing our chatter by a
few more decibels.
Haile, your old
comrades are still co-habiting in the opposition camp. But, frankly speaking,
you will not be proud of their steps. I say this because, first, it took them
nearly three years to start talking in your language of reconciliation of August
2001. That was sad. Secondly, they let themselves be infected – and
willingly so - by an incapacitating virus that was endemic in our arena. I need
not dwell much on the slowness of their metamorphosis from G-15 reformism
to EPLF-DP and then to DP. Worse than that tortoise pace, they, like the
rest of us, failed to work together. They already count several factions
(DP, EPMx, EPMy, EPP) or may be more – a situation that pained the entire
nation opposed to the dictatorship. (I hope your sojourn where you are today
will not be that long to oblige me to tell you this depressing story in another
installment.)
Aside from that, I
have a piece of good news for you related to the subject of reconciliation:
people have forgiven you and your old comrades for the sins you committed or are
perceived to have committed while serving the diabolic compatriot that misled
you all throughout the years. In our camp, we have been trying to convince each
other that there is no point to keep accusing others of past misdeeds and
miscalculations once they decide to renounce the arrogant dictator and his
exclusionist policies. To give you an example, no one in the past four
years raised or commented about the foul language that you, Haile, used against
the rest of us during the third congress of your organization after liberation.
Instead, everyone in the opposition has been focused on your positive
contributions, including the following:
·
Eritreans in the opposition camp did not want to
forget that you, Haile Deru’e, won for yourself the honour of being
the first insider to publicly challenge the dictatorship by your 15 July 2000
address at the PFDJ festival in Frankfurt when you told your submissive audience
in a language similar to this: “We have been lying to you. You should have
stopped us from lying to you all the time!!” (BTW, I was pleased
to have had the opportunity of reporting your bold statement
then, ironically in Dehai, when news of your new position came out through
secondary sources.)
·
People still recall your position in the
autumn 2000 meetings of the PFDJ leadership. Others give you credit for
encouraging some of our perennially timid intellectuals to protest and come out
with a rare statement like the ‘Berlin Manifesto’ of G-13
.
·
Webmasters have not stopped inviting Eritreans to
continue tuning to video records of your 2000-2001 utterances.
·
Myself, I have not stopped re-reading the press
interviews you gave during the short-lived ‘spring of free press’ in Asmara. In
particular, I feel good while re-reading the monumental early August 2001
statement you released saying almost all what we the ‘old’ opposition had been
saying and stand for. In that historic document, issued only five weeks
before your incarceration, you said as follows, even though in slightly
different words that had to suit your presence in an repressive
environment:
1.
Those of us
in power have no right and no justification and no right to deny credit to all
those who deserved it in the 50-year struggle, and Eritreans of all political
colours must as of now have equal share in the fruits of victory and the
burden of building our common future.
2.
It is high
time for those of us in temporary state control to accept Arabic and Tigrinia as
the two official languages [as our compatriots in the several ELF offshoots have
been calling for without fail].
3.
It is time
to be prepared to revisit the constitution in order to fill major missing issues
and rectify faulty conclusions, including the issue of land
ownership.
4.
It is time
to stop accusing Eritreans in the opposition of being “traitors” and “fifth
columnists” before they are brought to a court of
law....
5.
In short, it is time to
stop being exclusionist and instead give room to reconciliation, full
participation and mutual respect in order to deliver freedom, justice and
equality to all citizens and segments of our diverse
society
Brother
Haile,
People saw logic,
truth, sincerity and hope in that language in mid-2001. It was the right
language and the right position, and it is still crying for action in Eritrea
which is bedeviled at all levels by the chauvinist politics of Isayas and his
unrepentant disciples. The winds of polarization have been blowing with added
strength from all corners in our land and communities. Today, it is becoming
almost hard to say which group is more exclusionist and more chauvinist than the
other. I see polarization everywhere. The only thing sensible Eritreans know
for sure is that the one who is keeping you in prison is the ONLY source of all
miseries in our land and that his exit will usher in an environment in
which we will be able to work out the best solution suitable for our common
destiny.
We Shall Reverse
Polarization
I am sorry to
repeat telling you that the process of polarization - instigated by the
old exclusionist and chauvinist policies that you could not stop on time – has
gone much deeper than expected in our body politic and the only worry one
can have is that it may take quite a while complete the reverse process -
depolarization. The encouraging news today is that we are all getting conscious
of the need of starting that reverse process now. And it will be only a
matter of time before it is done successfully.
By
the way, while discussing about these matters, I never fail to remember what you
told newspaper people in the late 1980s. For instance, in one of his writings
published in 1989, Lionel Cliff, a good friend of your organization at
that time,, quoted that your (Haile Deru’e’s) biggest worry after liberation
was how to contain “Tigrigna chauvinism [prevalent] in the EPLF”. And I
assume that what you meant was this: ‘it is not the fault of any membership of
an organization to go wrong but the fault of the leadership that oriented its
members in that direction and to that attitude’. I could also trust the
writer to have quoted you correctly because I knew many instances of same
language from you in the old good days, as I have tried to point out some in an
earlier writing (see a few paragraphs of Part III of ‘Agena’e Seyoum, Brave
Deru’e, annexed at the end of this article for ease of reference).
And You Are Not Allowed to
Die, Haile!
A
few weeks before your imprisonment, you said you were ready to pay even your
life to change Eritrea’s unbearable situation under a homegrown dictator. While
knowing that it is within the possibilities that they may kill you, I still
refuse to accept the rumour that you might be already dead or you may die
before the sun shines over the land again. I say you are not allowed to die
before you take part in repairing the damage done to the very soul of this
nation: to its once unshakeable confidence in itself, its old resolve to build a
just and prosperous nation and the determination to work in unison and remain in
one piece. Do not also forget that will need sometime together to revisit the
small events of the old days. And although we did not meet for over three
decades, still we will not lack topics for lively old age chats that I am
proposing. For example:
Haile: This photo of June 1965 is a gift
for you. Can you see yourself between two persons wearing eye-classes at
center-right? Abdurahman Mehri is immediately above you, keeping away from you
in the dark Isayas and his current agricultgure minister, Arefaine. Hope you
recognize the rest of us. (About 10 of that year's 12th graders are
missing, including Woldedawit Temesgen and Seyoum (who left to the field three
months earlier); Mussie Tesfamichael, Michael Ghaber and others.) More photos
when we meet. And make sure you stay alive!
-
We must have time to talk about what we can, after 44
years, still remember and comment on the degree of our nascent nationalist
awareness when we first met in grade 9 in September 1961 at Prince
Makonnen Secondary School in Asmara while, coincidentally, the Giant
Hamid Idris Awate was also doing a related thing at Mount Adal during
that very September of 1961!
-
We will talk of all the small things we did together in
Asmara between September 1961 and June 1965, including all the demos that
we, young boys and girls in that school, arranged for the rest of
Asmara.
-
For initiating a chat about our Addis days, I have
photos of our Entoto meeting of November 1965 at which we created a
quasi-association of ‘former Prince Makonnen students in Ethiopia’ as a cover
for our ELF cells in the University.
-
And I am sure you will remember the Gurage teashop in
front of Berhanena Selam Printing Press in Addis where our cell met at 8
pm of every Tuesday.
-
Do you still remember, as I do, the event and the name
of the Gambian from the Brussels-based World Assembly of Youth who came to
Addis for OAU meeting in 1966 at which, to the embarrassment of the Ethiopian
officials and security, he distributed our 60 envelopes containing ELF statement
to all OAU Heads of State and delegations? You are not allowed to forget that
because it was a matter kept secret from the rest of the cell and handled
only by two cell members: you and I.
-
I need not say much about the “things” that Ghilai
Ghirmai promised to bring for two of us for a serious action that did not,
anyhow, take place. Instead, let me mention your last day in Addis. It was
Sunday, 4 December 1966 when you and Mussie Tesfamichael left to Asmara by bus
on your way to ELF in the field after five or six of us spent the previous night
in a hotel in Markato (I think the same Start Hotel where we spent with Isayas
before seeing him off at the bus station six week earlier - on 17 October 1966.)
I recall you were in charge of our cell’s research group and when departure hour
came, you handed the documents to me, including a very important book taken out
that night from the reserve shelf of the Haile Selassie I University library.
After 39 years, Spencer Trimingham’s book, Islam in Ethiopia, with
valuable information on Eritrea, is still with me - and on it is written your
and Mussie Tesfamichael’s departure day. I can give it back to you –
nHalalka, or for returning it, with our compliments, to its rightful owner, the
Addis Ababa University Library at the Sidist kilo campus.
Therefore, there is
more than one reason for you stay alive, Haile. And if the expected unity of
internal and external opposition takes too much time to happen and rescue the
nation, including you the prisoners, then it is up to you to think of other ways
of escaping death, which you must. How about thinking of the heroic
exploits of your old schoolmate Abdallah Hassan who conquered the high walls of
prison in Asmara 35+ years ago? Or what about what heroic Saeed Saleh and Seyoum
Ogbamichael planned from inside and outside the Adi Quala prison 30 years back
to free 1,000 inmates, including you and Seyoum? Or what about doing what Semere
Tekeste did very recently? Think about staying alive: you are not allowed to
die.
***
(Excerpted below
are few sections of Part III in which stress was made on the
efforts and contributions Haile Deru’e and Seyoum Ogbamichael made to promote
tolerance and reconciliation among Eritreans since early years.)
Agena’e Seyoum!Bravo Deru’e !(Part
III)
By Woldeyesus Ammar
Sep 15, 2003, 08:56
(Awate.com)
.....
First,
Why Interested in Seyoum and Deru’e?
.....There was
another quality that I highly valued and for which I thought Seyoum always
deserved the word Agena’e, and Haile Deru’e the appellation Bravo. It was not
mentioned in my parts one/two under this title. I will say it today: it is about
the value that Eritrean patriots usually give to friends who share their
concerns on the fearsome divisions in our society and then try to do
something to narrow them down. I will try to compare what they thought 40 years
back and what they think today. Let me start with Haile Deru’e because he is
away from us all in a gloomy dungeon - or he may no more be alive, we
cannot tell.
Haile
Deru’e:
In
the summer and autumn of 1966 in Addis Ababa, Haile Wolde-Tinsae (we did not
know him as Deru’e that time) and Martyr Mussie Tesfamichael started taking
tobacco and finally spitting the ‘safa’ the way it is done in the
Eritrean lowlands. Both were not yet smokers. One day, I asked Haile why he was
taking ‘safa’ (tobacco). His innocent answer was something like this:
“With this nationalist feelings we have we will one day find ourselves with the
fighters in the Eritrean lowlands. I think I will have some problem there at
least in the initial period. Taking ‘safa’ and spitting it the way
the other fighters do will make me look like everybody, and that should
help.”
It
was a simple gesture, yes, and today many could say ‘so what?’ but in reality
the act reflected positive consciousness in him; it meant that Haile at that
tender age already started to care about social sensitivities and divisions. It
was also sometime in 1965-66 that Haile asked me to write for him a poem of
sorts in Tigre about the Asmara Theatrical Association (Mat’ a) which was on a
visit to Addis Ababa. Haile read that poem for a large audience at what was
called the Christmas Hall of Haile Selassie University where the Eritrean
musicians sung highly patriotic songs of the day. His simple reasoning was:
“We should not start and end such big Eritrean events only in Tigrinia. At
least Tigre should come up in our social gatherings”.
Two
decades later, this time [round] speaking with some authority, Haile Deru’e
started voicing the old concerns he was reflecting in his youth. In an interview
with the Christian Science Monitor of Canada in the late 1980’s, I read an
article in which Haile expressed his fears about an existing ethnic chauvinism
in his organization, EPLF. Lionel Cliff, a French writer and friend of the EPLF
also wrote in the Third World Quarterly magazine of October 1989 (page 17) that
Haile was much worried about “Tigrigna chauvinism in the EPLF”. According to the
French writer, Haile considered the chauvinism promoted in and by his
organization as a serious obstacle to nation-building in Eritrea after its
liberation.
Seyoum
Ogbamichael:
After
all the demonization campaign unleashed against Seyoum Harestai during
[2002-2003], one would assume that there are some innocent readers whose opinion
towards him had been adversely affected. Well, that is the aim of all campaigns:
to distort truth to a large extent possible and create a new negative image for
the targeted object. Based on the language of the campaign, I am sure the
mention of the name ‘Seyoum’ could nowadays ring in the ears of some as ‘a
sectarian person’, a ‘Kebessan chauvnism’ not different from Isayas, anti-unity,
anti-Islam, anti-Arabic…. name it. And all these is said against someone who,
to my knowledge, had a clear record in fighting chauvinism, and contributed more
than a single person’s share in trying to play down forces of polarization in
the society.
It
is amazing how we forget or ignore important developments in the life of our
struggle, say for instance the polarizing Falul phenomenon of the latter
part of the 1970’s. But first, let me tell you something that Isayas and Seyoum
do know and only the two could still remember. The time was in late August 1965
in a hideout inside Asmara where Seyoum and Woldedawit Temesghen (upon arrival
from the field) were engaged in explaining issues to their visitors and
recruiting cell members for the ELF in the city. In one of those sessions,
Isayas Afeworki asked the two ELF envoys this question: “How possible is it
going to be for us Christians to struggle and live among so many Moslems in this
ELF? Did you find it possible?” The response was given by Seyoum who used many
words to assuage the fears expressed in the question. Seyoum added something
like this: “In the final analysis, we are not going to count how many Moslems
or Christians are fighting for the just cause. Whoever feels fighting will fight
and that is fine. No Christian or Moslem will be discriminated of his/her
religious or regional identity as long as the national cause remains our common
goal”. Isayas at that time appeared to have received the full message and
officially became part of an ELF cell.
Now
back to our Falul phenomenon of 1975-77 and Seyoum’s lasting lessons to the
young generation through various means including through his messages
broadcast over ELF’s radio programme from Omdurman in 1977. Those
comments of sword-like sharpness against ethnic chauvinism and lawlessness
within one’s organization were contained in the form of poems one of which was
entitled: ‘Hahu bel Falulai, Nab Sri’etna Na’anai’ [with clear message to
‘Isayas-and-followers’ as well as to elements of similar attitude in the ELF of
the day]. The poem underlined the importance of the following:
·
The supremacy of law;
·
The allegiance and commitment that had to be given
to commonly agreed programmes and structures;
·
The need for the new generation of fighters (mainly
Kebessans) to avoid the wrong path trodden by Isayas and instead try to
understand the nature of the struggle and give due respect to the achievements
of the ELF for the common good of a united Eritrean nation.......
And
Isayas Afeworki?
(...
It can be read in the full text of Part III).
Regards
W.
Ammar