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Reintroducing Diversity In Eritrean Politics
On Saturday, August 29, 2015, I attended an event hosted by Bologna Forum in Oakland. I had prepared a speech in English but then I decided to deliver it in Tigrinya; it was not a word for word translation, hence, I am not sure if it was in an expanded or condensed form, but I am…
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Eritrean Democratic Alliance Invited To The EPRDF Congress
August 28, 2015: the tenth conference of the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) opened today in Mekele, the capital city of the state of Tigray. The four major parties that form the EPRDF coalition had earlier held their respective congresses and the Mekele congress will chart strategies at the federal level. According to…
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A Glance To The Past, A Focus On The Future
Eritreans have a myriad of unresolved internal issues to worry about external ones. However, all of the problems and crisis hindering the creation of an effective opposition force to unseat the tyrant is not totally their fault. Frustration has been building among Eritreans who feel like they are adding water to a barrel with a…
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Charting Healthy Future For Eritrea Today
Everything the regime in Eritrea does blatantly undermines what Eritreans stood for when they embarked on the struggle for independence that took 30 years and over sixty thousand brave souls who paid the ultimate price to accomplish their sovereignty. PFDJ relentlessly aims to destroy the very historical fabric that made Eritrea a country of mosaic…
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Qatar: Planned Meeting Between Eritrean And Yemeni Presidents Fail
On Wednesday, August 19, President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea visited Doha, Qatar, for “bilateral talks” with the Emir of Qatar. President Abdu Rabbu Mensour of Yemen who had arrived earlier in Doha, left a couple of hours after the arrival of Isaias Afwerki. According to Qatari media, on Wednesday Isaias met the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad…
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Language and Religion In Eritrean Politics (Archive)
(The following was presented at a panel discussion under the theme “Eritrea’s Path towards Democracy: Dialogue on Constitutional Issues”. The event was held at the Universities at Shady Grove, Rockville, Maryland, on June 25, 2011; the organizers of the event assigned the topic to the presenter. It’s being republished to shed light on the topic as…
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Professor Asmerom Legesse Gets It Wrong
In an article entitled “Critique of the Human Rights Commission [sic] on Eritrea”, Professor Asmerom Legesse attempts to take to task the Commission of Inquiry on Eritrea (CoI-E) as well as Ms. Sheila Keetharuth, the UN-appointed Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in Eritrea.” Unfortunately, even very able and committed advocate of a…
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Ali Baabe, Adolescent At Seventy
Sometime ago I discovered Banyan is a name of a tree, but I don’t know why the Indian community that lived in Eritrea was called Banyan. As a child, I was a client of a Banyan barber until he left town. Then I shifted to Aya Estifanos, who also moved to Tessenei. My next barber…
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Another Boat Capsizes In The Mediterranean Sea
Many are feared to have died after a rickety ship that was carrying them from Libya to Italy across the Mediterranean Sea capsized on Wednesday, August 5. The International Organization for Migration estimates there were about 700 passengers on the ship when it capsized roughly 25 kilometers off the Libyan shores in Tripoli. According to latest…
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Eritreans In Sweden Demonstrate Against Tyranny
Eritreans in many parts of the world are demonstrating against the government sponsored festivals. Every summer, the Eritrean embassies hold festivals to empower their ever dwindling Dispora support base. Usually, such festivals are attended by senior government officials, but in previous years many of them have been arrested or exiled. Abdella Jabir, one of the…
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Yemane Gebreab’s Transcribed And Translated Interview
The following is the text of the interview that Hassen Zeytuni of RT television conducted with Yemena Gebreab in the London studios; it was transcribed and translated by the Awate Team. The video clip of the interview can be found Here. Welcome. Eritrea is a state located in the Horn of Africa and these days it’s…
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Eritrea: The 2000 Border War Is Not Over Yet
[The video clip is embedded below] In an interview with Russia Today (RT) in London, Yemane Gebreab, the political adviser to the president of Eritrea said that the border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea that ended in the year 2000 has not stopped yet. The border war that was waged between Ethiopia and Eritrea started…
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Ustaz Saleh Hamde: A Patriot Passes Away
“Indeed we belong to Allah , and indeed to Him we will return.” That’s a total submission to the will of God and to the authority of death that doesn’t exclude anyone. On Monday morning, July 27, 2015, the much respected Ustaz Saleh Hamde passed away. The deceased has been wrestling with illness in the last…
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Scent of Lemon: An Example Of Refined Eritrean Song
My taste in music is unusual, not many songs please me. My aversion to saxophones is unmatched, but I love wooden instruments, the traditional flute, the Andean reed zambona, fisarmonica, Congo drums, rebaba, and the violin. The saxophone, however, scares me more than the sight of a Black Mamba snake. I wish Eritrean musicians introduce…
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PFDJ’s Quotable Quotes From Ten Years Ago
The following quotes were first published on September 1, 2005. They were collected between Sept. 2004 and Sept. 2005 EXISTENTIALISM & OTHER UNSOLVED MYSTERIES “Netom Halewa emmo men yu kHlwom? (And who is going to watch over the watchdog?). As you can see, we have reached a stage where those entrusted with patrolling the border…
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Dogs And Donkeys
[We welcome Yohannes Abraham to the family of awate.com writers. We are excited to have a talented writer, in both Tigrinya and English, and we are sure he will have many satisfied readers] After he gobbled up a plateful of processed beef and licked empty a bowl full of milk, he once again realized how lovely his…
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Ethiopia-Eritrea: The Two Victimized Farmers
The following was posted on the Awate Forum by Hayat Adem. We are bringing it to the frontpage.(AwateStaff) ________________ I don’t know how to relate with the Greece and European crisis, but I reflected on the Eritrean Nakfa and Ethiopian Birr currencies and the issue of the village of Badume. Let me tell you why…
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A Testimony On Eritrea To The U.S. Congress
I wanted to inform you that I was, on behalf of the America Team, invited to testify at a Congressional hearing last Thursday, July 9th, by the US House Foreign Relations Committee, conducted by the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations, Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), chair. My part of…
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The Churning
There were two demonstrations in Geneva in June 2015 on the occasion of the Human Right Council’s 29th session (HRC 29): one was in opposition to the damning report issued to the HRC by a body it mandated, the Commission of Inquiry on Eritrea (CoIE), and the other was in support. There was, as usual,…
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Badme: Woyane’s Fraudulent Casus Belli To Wage War Of Aggression- P2
On part one of this article, we said – ok the Woyanes were constantly provoking Eritreans (the EPLF government and prior to it) for war. We got that. But that doesn’t prove the 1998 Ethio-Eritrean war was started by the Woyanes. How could you prove beyond reasonable doubt that the 1998 Ethio-Eritrean war was instigated…
