Category: Articles
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Reviewing Negarit 320: A Letter of Truth and Reconciliation
In Negarit 320 published April the 10th, 2025, Saleh Gadi Johar, henceforth referred to as The Writer. The latter because this article relied solely on the written text that was published at awate.com on April the 11th, 2025. The Speakers starts the speech with a noble wish how he would’ve loved to feel pride and approbation…
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Between Approbation and Anathema Justice Suffers
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” Faulkner, W. (1955), “Requiem for a Nun” This is a reflection on the insightful conversation between Daniel Teklai and Saleh “Gadi”…
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Weaponizing Silence, Vulgarizing Languages
(Editor’s note: this article was first published on July 26, 2023; it’s being republished as a reference.) When one’s faith in humanity was beginning to wane with the seemingly endless streams of vitriols from social media, intelligently thought-out discussion in a podcast restores that faith quite a bit*. Prior to the podcast, too, Negarit 28,29,…
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Thanks to Dr. MK Omar, Inputs Enriching the Eritrean Library
Many Eritreans are for sure not well aware of how much poor the Eritrean library still is. Records of the colonial period were themselves scanty on top of being mostly distorted or written by less informed authors. But nothing can be done about that except regretting that it was so. Eritreans of the first two…
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Azien Yasin, the Famous Freedom Fighter I never knew
Azien Yasin was a brilliant freedom fighter who had great influence on the Eritrean Liberation Front. He was present on the battlefields of Eritrea when the armed struggle called for incredible feats of bravery. He was there among the distinguished fighters who went above and beyond the call of duty during that intense period of…
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History is Watching us
[This article is dedicated to a group of Eritrea’s Prisoners of Conscience who were arrested in 2001 after criticising President Isaias Afwerki’s rule, and have never been seen or heard from since. The prisoners, rather selflessly, led the way to meet the challenges head-on while their fellow ex-freedom-fighters failed to follow suit .] This piece…
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The myth of the “pure Eritrean.”
Eritrea, given its strategic location on the Red Sea, has been a gate to Africa and a destination for various migrants and seekers of better opportunities. Eritrea’s association with migration goes deep in history and the Eritrean ethnic composition was formulated over centuries of migrations, intermarriages, and resettlements. Beginning with the indigenous communities who mingled…
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Is Ethiopia Doomed?
For an Eritrean, pretending to wear a 20/20 lens, you dwell on snooping around Ethiopian critiques, regardless of their successes and failures. I for example, wouldn’t expect anything neutral/good to come out of people like Monsieur Hidrat or other ELF offspring about Isaias’ government. Because I know that they have bones to pick with him.…
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The Dilemma of Eritrean Diaspora Movements – Article review
“The Eritrean Diaspora Opposition Movements: Obstacles and Challenges”, A Master thesis, Linné University, Sweden, by Berhane Kidane, spring term, 2022. “Eritrea Diaspora pro-democracy Blue Revolution movement: From where to Where”, by Aron Hagos Tesfai, published by Martin Plaut, March 21, 2024. Defining the issue The Master thesis by Berhane Kidane (2022) and the short history…
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The Horn of Africa States Ethiopia’s Undiplomatic Faux Pas
It was always clear that Ethiopia’s false historical narrative would one day catch up with it. The country that was Abyssinia adopted Africa’s historical Greek name, Ethiopia, in 1932. It currently proves every sunrise and every sunset that it cannot hold the many nations it had held together by force in the past. The war…
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The Horn of Africa States The Need Beyond the Narrow Mindset
Favoritism is a disease that causes immense damage to any organization, country, or region. It takes competency out of the equation, and if one goes back to history, one will note that any leader who used favoritism as a guide to his/her leadership by appointing friends, loyal people, and family members in key positions in…
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Revelations of a Former Eritrean Freedom Fighter
To learn how a nation can spiral into a self-destructive vortex of paranoia, one should read Semere Solomon’s new book “Eritrea’s Hard-won Independence and Unmet Expectations,” which presents factual accounts based on his personal experiences in the battlefields of Eritrea as well as post-independence Eritrea. This informative account is an attestation to readers not only…
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Unsolicited Advice to Brighed N’Hamedu (BNH)
Introduction. The birth of Brighed N’Hamedu (BNH), in Cologne, Germany, in 2022, has greatly energized justice-seeking Eritrean youth in the Diaspora. It has been one of the current encouraging developments. The BNH slogan from” Diaspora to Asmara” has given a renewed hope and breath of fresh air to all those who aspire to see regime…
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Book Review: A Memoir of Eritrean Freedom Fighter Mesfin Hagos
Book Review An African Revolution Reclaimed: A Memoir of Eritrean Freedom Fighter Mesfin Hagos. By Mesfin Hagos with Awet Tewelde Weldemichael, 2023, Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press. I-x, pp. 434 plus appendices and index. This is a worthwhile read that provides much-needed information on the Eritrean armed struggle (named as African revolution) and on the…
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PM Abiy & Co, bullying, belaboring, and big lies
“What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive” (Sir. Walter Scott, 1808) Towards the end of his talk to his parliament (November 14, 2023) on the Red Sea controversy of his own creation, PM Abiy made a clarion call for the media outlets to sound the drums of “war” in a…
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Omissions & Biases: Mesfin Hagos’s Book
Mesfin Hagos’s English Book on Eritrea: Useful Facts Tainted by Omissions & Biases This article about the book in English by compatriot Mesfin Hagos cannot claim to be a standard book review but is, primarily, a write-up to sincerely commend the author tohave published something, even belatedly. Secondly, the article aims to flag out…
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A Tribute to Saleh “Gadi” Johar
By Dr. Daniel Araya From the onset, it’s imperative for me to state the two reasons that made me undertake this write-up. Firstly, and for transparency, I have to disclose a soft spot and admiration I have for Saleh Johar .Secondly, the constant demonization and abuse to his person, understandably makes sympathy with him .…
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Critical Reading: a reply
Introductory notes :For all the reductionist talk that try to depict the current crisis in narrow, simplistic, static, dichotomized views, the turn of events are much more fluid, characterized by inconsistencies, unpredictability, indeterminacies, ambiguities and ambivalences as actors keep on aligning and realigning themselves to gain political favorsmotivated by tactical rather than strategic interests. It…
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Can Eritreans have A Genuine Dialogue?
If “epistemology deals with systems of knowing” as Delgado Bernal (2002) stipulates, to which it is not that difficult to readily concur and its “interconnected[ness] to critical discourse can’t be that far off either. It would then stand to reason that intersectionality from one methodological practice used in a field of endeavor will find an…
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Eritrea: From NHnana Elamanan to Liberation to Ber Al-Aman
Eritrea: From NHnana Elamanan (1971) to Liberation (1991) to Bar Al Aman (2021) The men of philosophy and of literature from centuries past encapsulate history as an “essential struggle between two sets of forces, the forces of liberty and the forces of despotism” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 1977) but weren’t as quick to draw cause…