Author: Semere T Habtemariam
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Eritrea’s Opposition Has Run Out of Excuses
For more than three decades, Eritrea’s diaspora opposition has lived in a political waiting room—issuing statements, forming committees, dissolving committees, and then repeating the cycle with new names and old habits. The pattern has become so predictable that it no longer shocks anyone. Meanwhile, the regime in Asmera has ruled with total impunity: no constitution,…
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Unity or Irrelevance: The Eritrean Opposition’s Moment of Truth
Eritrea is no longer governed; it is controlled. The state has collapsed into one man. Eritrea is Isaias Afwerki. After more than thirty years in power, the ruling system has not only failed—it has stopped changing. Its thinking is stuck in the Cold War. Its actions are shaped by a past that no longer exists.…
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The Echoes of Stagnation: Reclaiming Eritrea’s Future
Through Internal Reckoning and Diaspora Strategy Unity has long eluded Eritreans. The word is invoked so frequently—and so casually—that it has lost much of its moral and political gravity. Yet its overuse does not diminish its necessity. Our repeated failure to achieve unity does not render it obsolete; it simply reveals that our methods have…
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Why the PFDJ Is Afraid of Us: The Strategic Threat of Nationalist Unity
The ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) has not endured through popular consent. It has survived through an engineered system of fear, fragmentation, and narrative domination. Its silence toward nationalist movements is not indifference—it is apprehension. Unified, principled nationalists threaten the regime on every front: politically, strategically, philosophically, and historically. Unity as Memory—and…
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Somaliland, Somalia, and the Ethics of Non‑Alignment
Recognition, Reality, and Responsibility in the Horn of Africa The recognition of Somaliland would mark a historic moment—akin to Eritrea or South Sudan—not a geopolitical earthquake, but a shift whose ripple effects could extend far beyond its borders. Global politics has a way of humbling our certainties: the developments we dismiss as peripheral often become…
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Eritrea at Year’s End: Between Endurance and Exhaustion
As another year closes—the thirty‑fourth since independence—Eritrea stands as a nation defined by contradiction. It is a country that endured colonial rule, international machinations, a short‑lived annexation disguised as a “UN‑supervised federation,” Cold War rivalries, a brutal thirty‑year liberation struggle, a devastating border war, and repeated regional upheavals, yet still struggles to define peace on…
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When Liberation Becomes a Cage: Eritrea’s Unlearned Lessons
Eritrea’s tragic trajectory—after one of the most heroic and costly struggles for independence in modern African history—remains one of the continent’s most heartbreaking stories. By 1991, when Eritrea finally achieved freedom, the lessons of post‑colonial governance were no longer abstract. They had unfolded across Africa and the Global South in full view. Yet, despite these…
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Eritrea Does Not Need Isolation to Survive
For more than three decades, Eritrea’s foreign policy has been shaped by fear—fear of betrayal, fear of encirclement, and fear that engagement is merely a prelude to domination. That fear was forged in war, and at one time it served a purpose. Today, however, it has calcified into a governing doctrine that no longer protects…
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Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival (7)
Giants and Lilliputians of the HOA: Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival Part Seven Introduction The central argument of this essay is simple: the Horn of Africa’s instability has never been caused by its diversity, but by leaders who repeatedly manipulate that diversity for political survival. Across Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Djibouti, rulers have taken…
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Emperor Haile Selassie and President Isaias Afwerki – Part Six
Giants and Lilliputians: Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival Emperor Haile Selassie and President Isaias Afwerki – Part Six 1 — Introduction The Two Propaganda Campaigns The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) became the target of a sustained campaign of political defamation—first from Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, and later, far more powerfully, from the Isaias-led People’s Liberation…
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A Reckoning with Rhetoric: Responding to FM Gedion Timothewos on Ethiopia–Eritrea Relations
Introduction Dr. Gedion Timothewos, Ethiopia’s Foreign Minister, delivered a carefully curated address at AAU Ras Mekonnen Hall on November 13th, 2025, outlining Ethiopia’s policy toward the Horn of Africa, or more specifically, towards Eritrea. His tone was measured, his language diplomatic, and his framing deliberate crafted to cast Ethiopia as a stabilizing force amid regional…
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Giants and Lilliputians: Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival (Part V)
Giants and Lilliputians: Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival Beyond Emperor Haile Selassie and President Isaias AfwerkiThe centralizing dogma of empire, religion and revolutions Eritrea and Ethiopia are lands where mosque and monastery, Qur’an and Psalter, have long breathed the same air. At their deepest currents, the histories of these nations are not tales of division,…
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Giants and Lilliputians: Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival (IV)
Giants and Lilliputians: Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival Emperor Haile Selassie and President Isaias Afwerki (Part IV) The Seeds of Division within the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) Imperial Mythology and the Weaponization of Religion To understand the fragmentation of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), the eventual triumph of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), and…
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Giants and Lilliputians Part 3: Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival
Emperor Haile Selassie and President Isaias Afwerki The Formation of Isaias Afwerki’s Political Character Isaias Afwerki’s rule embodies an ancient warning: the freed slave who, once unshackled, becomes a harsher master than the one who bound him. Before the revolution, the only model of leadership he had known was Emperor Haile Selassie—a sovereign whose imperial…
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Giants and Lilliputians: Haile Selassie and President Isaias Afwerki (Part 2)
Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival: The Body as a Mirror of Power To understand Isaias Afwerki’s psychology, one must first confront the contradiction written across his body. His appearance—spare, stiff, and strangely careless—betrayed none of the humility expected of a revolutionary. Nor did it reflect the ethos of the Tegadelti, whose plainness was once a…
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Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival: Emperor Haile Selassie and President Isaias Afwerki
Two Towering Figures–Giants and Lilliputians (Part 1) Across the sorrowful and entangled histories of Ethiopia and Eritrea, two figures loom with spectral intensity: Emperor Haile Selassie I and President Isaias Afwerki. Their shadows stretch across generations, ideologies, and geopolitical fault lines—each a master of power, each a paradox incarnate. At the outset of their reigns,…
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The Tenth Anniversary of the ELF Reunion and Reflection
Honoring the Past, Inspiring the Future Dallas, Texas | October 3–5, 2025 In a hall radiant with camaraderie, sibling affection, and the joy of long-awaited embraces, the tenth anniversary of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) Reunion and Reflection unfolded under the theme “Honoring the Past and Inspiring the Future.” Held in Dallas, Texas, the gathering…
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The Refugee Act of 1980 and the Quiet Burial of the ELF
The U.S. Refugee Act of 1980 is occasionally invoked—most notably by Eritreans, and rarely in writing, and, at least, once in an Amharic-language book by Ethiopian politician and author Gebru Asrat (a page of which was translated for me)—as evidence of a deliberate American strategy to dismantle the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). These claims, though…
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Ts’əmdi and Ts’imdo: Joined for Utility, Not Unity
In the semi-fertile soil of Tigrinya, the words ጽምዲ (Ts’əmdi) and ጽምዶ (Ts’imdo) bloom with layered meaning—practical, poetic, and political. Both conjure the image of two entities alloyed together, yet their applications diverge across the rhythms of life. ጽምዲ, as in ጽምዲ ብዕራይ, refers to two oxen yoked to plough a field—a necessity for poor…
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Downfall of an Emperor: Haile Selassie of Ethiopia
Book Review By Semere T Habtemariam Downfall of an Emperor: Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and the Derg’s Creeping Coup By Michael Ghebrenegus Haile (Shambel) Published by AWP | 2024 | 353 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 978-1569024966 First Impressions On a quiet Friday night, I reached for a book that had been waiting on my…