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A Memorable Conversation With Omar Jabir In Melbourne
By Woldeyesus Ammar (August
4, 2005)
 To my viewpoint, Omar Jabir
Omar, a veteran ELF freedom fighter now in Australia, represents, in
one go, a combination of many things in a contemporary Eritrean in
exile - contemporary here mainly meaning the generations that bore
the brunt of national awakening and struggle for Eritrea’s national
independence.
First: Omar Jabir is a
good representative of the passionately nationalist Eritrean youth
of the 1960s and the 1970s who studied in the Middle East and
played a vital role in building the Eritrean national liberation
struggle – but, alas, only to be betrayed wholesale in liberated
Eritrea.
Second: He suitably
symbolizes Eritrea’s leftist revolutionary generation that worked
under nascent (now defunct) Eritrean parties of the left: LP or the
Labour Party within the ELF, and EPRP or the Eritrean People’s
Revolutionary Party within the EPLF.
Third: Omar Jabir is a
good example of independent Eritrea’s self-inflicted brain drain
that unfolded as a result of a well designed social engineering of
Isayas Afeworki’s exclusionist and evil policies commencing with his
“Hashewiye Wudibat” of 20 June 1991 that eventually succeeded to
keep at bay literally all of Eritrea’s intellectuals, especially
those with advanced knowledge of and qualifications in the Arabic
language.
Fourth: He symbolizes
the failure of PFDJ’s Eritrea to reconcile even with those who were
willing to go an extra mile to make reconciliation happen after
1991. (The listing of such symbolisms of Omar and his generation
with the situation of contemporary Eritrea would prove
endless.)
During June 2005, I had the opportunity of meeting
several times with Omar Jabir in Melbourne where he took residence
with his family since 1995. He works for an employment agency while
providing voluntary services as president of the 30,000-strong Horn
of Africa Community in Australia (refer to a previous article in
Nharnet, Awna, Alnahda and Farajat about ‘Eritreans in Faraway
Australia’.)
In our chitchats, Omar and I talked on a variety of
topics and events of the past, the present and the future. In
particular, we enjoyed our exchange of ‘ancient’ notes about
Eritrean student militancy inside and outside the homeland. I noted
to Omar that I may write down for the benefit of other readers some
specified parts of our talk. And he, a trained journalist himself,
had no objection to whatever I wished to select for writing and
posting in Eritrean websites from the conversation that went on and
on - well spiced by his command of linguistic nuances in Arabic,
English, Tigre and Tigrinia.
As many readers may recall, Omar Jabir has been a
constant contributor of articles in Arabic and English to the
Eritrean websites. His present-day stance regarding the regime in
Asmara, his ideas on democratisation, national unity,
reconciliation, and the basic requirements for coexistence and
stable future in Eritrea are well known to many people. Therefore, I
will not bore readers by trying to repeat them here. Instead, I will
concentrate on a few historical events and experiences, some of them
told in the form of anecdotes. But, first a few notes about the man.
Omar Jabir: A short profile
Born
in 1945 in Ali Ghidir near Tessenei where he completed his
elementary and middle school grades, Omar Jabir pursued his
secondary school classes in a boarding school in Port Sudan, and one
year in Khartoum. He completed grade 12 by 1962. During the later
part of 1960s and early 1970s, he was a university student in
Baghdad but could not obtain all of his medical credentials mainly
because of his decision not to become a member of the Ba’ath Party
in Iraq. As indicated below, he was one of the key players in
the student movement in the Middle East. In later years, he served
as a senior cadre of the ELF during the entire 1970s in the fields
of student and youth affairs, information and diplomacy. In 1982, he
supported the ELF faction that staged a coup d’etat (for
others known as “an uprising”) within the organization. After
liberation in 1991, he took another controversial decision by going
back to Eritrea while it was under an exclusionist regime that
banned all patriotic forces that took part in the liberation
struggle.
***
Interview with Omar
Jabir
Question: Omar, I assume you started politics early in your
life. When was that and what particular events do you still
remember?
Answer: I
started involvement in politics from my early teenage years. In fact
I was born in politics. My family and the small Ali Ghidir community
in general were among the strong cells of the Independence Bloc and
later on of the Eritrean Liberation Movement (Haraka/ELM) and the
Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). I was with the Haraka cells by
1959-60 in Port Sudan where the movement was founded. I then
switched to the ELF when it became operational. At the age of 20, I
already was a member of the Revolutionary Command in Kassala when it
was formed and took charge of security matters. In fact I was one of
the ELF people in Kassala who arranged the fateful trip to Asmara
for your classmates Seyoum Ogbamichael and Woldedawit Temesghen in
August 1965. They were assigned to re-organize ELF cells in the
Eritrean capital but, unfortunately, they were betrayed by Mulugeta
Gherghis, one of us in Kassala who deserted soon after their
departure and had them apprehended by the Ethiopian
authorities. By the end of that year [1965], I went to Baghdad
for higher studies. I was there throughout the latter part of the
1960s and early 1970s as a student leader.
Question: We
know that the student union in Baghdad that you chaired was
instrumental in the formation in December 1968 of the General Union
of Eritrean Students (GUES). Who else was with you in the leadership
of GUES in the Middle East?
Answer: The
student union in Baghdad was among the most dynamic groups in the
Middle East. Among my colleagues in the leadership of the student
movement from Baghdad Osman Humed, Mohammed Ali Idris,
Mohammed Sheikh Abdu Jelil and Hassan Debesai. Union leaders from
Cairo were Abdalla Omar Nasser, Siraj Mussa Abdu, Omar M. Suleiman
and others. From Europe were Beshir Saeed, Woldu Kahsai, Idris Nur
Hussein and others. It was with the student unions in Damascus,
Cairo and in Europe that we formed the GUES.
Question:
What roles did GUES play in the nationalist struggle?
Answer: GUES
became a full-fledged member of the International Union of Students
(IUS) in Prague and helped introduce the Eritrean cause to
international organizations of the day. That was a very important
achievement. The other role effectively played by us in GUES was the
national service. We all were committed to spend one year serving in
the field with the ELF before completing our studies. Besides
learning more for themselves, the young service students carried
with them knowledge, enlightenment and many modern ideas to the
fighters and to the rural people inside Eritrea. It was
through that well thought national service that more and more new
blood was injected in the liberation struggle. GUES’s national
service programme was continued till 1977.
Question: And naturally GUES had its share of student
martyrs.
Answer: Yes, the first GUES martyr was my elder brother Yahya
Jabir, a medical student from Europe who was martyred on 31 August
1973. That date was being annually marked as the Eritrean Student
Martyrs’ Day by GUES. Other students from Europe who were martyred
while on service included Fitsum Ghebreselassie, Aregai
Habtu, and Abdulgader Idris from Khartoum University.
Question: Did
the Arab regimes of the day create interferences in Eritrean student
affairs during those years?
Answer:
There were many interferences. For example, I was barred for two
years from entering Cairo by the authorities who listened to framed
up ELF-PLF allegations against the mainstream GUES of the ELF
(Revolutionary Council). The ELF-PLF headed by Osman Saleh Sabbe
created their own GUES and gave us hard time although their union
did not have any international dimension or weight. In later
years, the Baathists also formed their own Eritrean student union in
Baghdad and planted many hurdles against our organization.
Question: Can
you recall any memorable event(s) that you experienced during those
student days?
Answer: Oh!
yes, many interesting happenings, some of them shocking. One
experience was an extremely embarrassing and shameful Munich meeting
of Eritrean students and workers in Europe in the summer of 1970. I
was on a visit to Germany that time and attended the meeting as
observer. I vividly remember the poisoned atmosphere at the meeting
in which a recorded speech of Woldeab Woldemariam was played. In it,
Woldeab spoke against the General Command of the ELF (Kiyada Ama). I
was forced to present my speech in English because Arabic as
language was banned at the meeting. Idris Badume [presently residing
in Sweden] begged to speak in Arabic because his mother tongue,
Kunama, had no single listener at the meeting and that he did not
have strong command of any other language except Arabic. The
majority of the meeting participants said no Arabic should be
allowed at the meeting. He thus chose to walkout of the
meeting.
Another
more embarrassing and quite incredible incident at the same Munich
meeting was the threat to kill. Some meeting participants
looked decided to kill Petros Kidane of Halhal!! The blunt
language used was, “You are from Halhal who are with Kiyada Ama.
Your people killed Kidane Kiflu and Woldai Ghidey in Kassala. We
will kill you today, and there will not be any mercy!” We were
afraid that he was in danger; his friends helped him escape back to
Berlin within hours of the threat. I believed that they meant
to kill him. It was shameful. GUES members like Fitsum
Ghebreselassie, who was chairing the meeting, Aregai Habtu, Habte
Tesfamariam, Embaye ..... and a few others were insulted and
attacked for being “stooges of Kiyada Ama”. Herui Tedla Bairu
also attended the Munich meeting that can still be a measure of show
how low national awareness was among many Eritreans 30+ years ago.
But frankly speaking some of the participants could have done better
than what they actually did at that meeting of shame in Munich .The
anti-ELF elements held their second meeting in Nuremberg in August
1971 and supported the split of PLF from the ELF.
Question: And
what about left politics of students of that age? Weren’t you part
of the leftist movement?
Answer:
Of course we were espousing leftist slogans of the day. Many of us
were co-opted into the Labour Party of the ELF. The LP gradually
took upper hand in Kiyada Ama and it was the party that organized
the First ELF Congress in 1971 and formulated a national democratic
programme. It is my conviction that everything good that had been
done in the ELF was done by the LP. In its initial stage, the LP
recruited and trained the best cadres for the liberation struggle.
However, problems were created later on when the ELF leadership took
power both in the front and in the party; power struggle between two
ambitious politicians, Ibrahim Toteel and Abdalla Idris, flared up.
This was disastrous. Azien Yassin, who was the LP Secretary
General in 1976 was replaced because of the power struggle in the
front and this power struggle finally weakened the ELF and
contributed to its demise as a military force.
Question:
Many thanks, Omar, for your comments about the roles of GUES and LP
in the growth of the ELF. Let me now ask you about two issues that
pop up in discussions among old ELF comrades. These concern what we
call the coup d’etat within the ELF in 1982 that you supported and
then your return to Eritrea after liberation. What are your
comments?
Answer: First
about the event at Rasai. Was that event in 1982 a coup d’etat? I
say ‘YES’, it was a coup d’etat. In fact, I wrote this opinion
in the ELF’ magazine, ‘The Revolution’,immediately after that event
took place. But was that coup d’etat anti-democratic and was it
conducted against a democratically elected leadership? My response
was and is ‘NO’ for the following contextual reasons that connect it
with the facts on the ground at that period. In fact the coup d’etat
was the last resort taken to curb a series of wrongdoings and
accumulation of leadership errors that gradually suffocated the
organization to its deathbed. The Executive Committee (EC) that was
elected after the 1975 Second Congress of the ELF became an
absolutely autocratic power that froze the roles of other
institutions and bodies in the organization. This particular
EC refused [for three years] the holding of regular meetings of the
Revolutionary Council. The EC controlled the mass organizations;
created its own GUES and ignored the joint historic memorandum
of mass organizations that told everything. Then came
the collapse [in the hands of the EPLF/TPLF armies] and we
crossed the border to the Sudan – leadership divided and cadres
pushing for change in the EC. But how? Leading cadres were
advocating the holding of an emergency military conference that
would exclude civilians and ELF branches in the Middle East.
The final blow was the Sudanese action of confiscation of arms and
then the threat of taking everybody from Tahdai and Korokon to
refugee camps. The bottle was already broken – pieces left
were just remainders of a legendary ELF that was targeted not only
by EPLF and the Sudan but also betrayed by its leadership. I am not
saying that the 25 March [1982 event] was a saving step for the
whole organization but it was an initiative by one of those
scattered pieces.
Question: And
the second issue - do you regret having returned to Eritrea after
1991?
Answer: I
never regret having gone to Asmara [after liberation]. To start
with, I am an Eritrean citizen and going back home is a natural
step. Secondly, I went with a vision, principles and values and came
back with them all without any change! Thirdly, I learned new
experience, new facts and tangible evidences about the theoretical
concept I used to have about EPLF. The fourth reason that I do not
regret having gone to Asmara is that I did not go to serve the
regime but I went with the idea of living as an ordinary Eritrean.
My real dream was to settle in my village of origin and work in the
family farm or to have a library for the new generation.
Question:
Now, let us envision about a future viable governing party in
Eritrea in the post-PFDJ period that can give Eritrea last peace and
stability. What forces can realize this hope?
Answer: I can
say that the present opposition groups can play a role in shaping
such a party. In addition, the outcome of the governing party (PFDJ)
after the expected change will tell what sort of a political formula
we might have for Eritrea. To sum, future developments and
interaction between different forces will decide the shape and
content of such a party.
Thanks a lot.
End
(PS: At the last meeting with Omar, we encouraged each
other to put in record the activities of the Eritrean student
movement: he for what took place in the Middle East and I for
what was done inside Eritrea. Each one of us said he would
try.)
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