PFDJ’s Last Line Of Defence
What is left for the teetering HGDEF regime to cling on to? What keeps it going when for all intents and purposes it was stripped bare of almost all the structures that make up a functioning state – if one could ever call a consortium of shefatu (bandits) “a state” in the first place?
How do they still manage to wiggle their tails?
They are still gasping for air – so what could possibly be cited as HGDEF’s last lines of defence? Are they feeding of the army’s support? Perceived economic affluence? Or perhaps, perceived political clout?
Obviously HGDEF’s prolonged lingering couldn’t be pivoted on the army’s support for it because as we all know by now, the army itself is on life support. It never fully recovered from the last devastating border war. Besides, the army’s rank and file is made up of enslaved conscripts who were coerced to enlist under one dubious pretext or another. A day doesn’t pass by before we hear of the many attempts by these poor conscripts to flee their positions and mind you, they do so at a great peril to their lives.
HGDEF has lost sovereignty over huge chunks of the country for almost a decade and half now – and it knows all too well that there isn’t a hoot it can do about it. There is only one reason for this – it doesn’t have a functional army it can rely on. Not only can it not wage a war to regain sovereignty, but even more embarrassing is the fact that it can’t even stop further incursions from happening as we have seen its arch enemies do with absolute impunity. It is that bad.
In short, it goes without saying that there is no love lost between the conscript army and the HGDEF regime.
The regime’s military force – if you can even call it that is limited to a quartet of illiterate warlords, a rotten officer corps and a bunch of armed thugs who run the spy and enforcer network of the regime. They are only good at terrorizing a captive civilian population and keeping close tabs on the conscript army with the sole purpose of preventing a revolt against the regime.
It is also obvious that the HGDEF regime is not basking in economic affluence, so the economy couldn’t be cited as one of its pillars either. Devastating wars and punitive sanctions may have taken their toll, but even more devastating was the regime’s stupid policy of decimating the private sector; an instinctive shifta-mentality which has severely curtailed free enterprise in the country. The nation as a whole is at the rock bottom of almost every meaningful global economic indicator one can think of.
Even the mining sector could not provide enough of a reprieve because the bandits that HGDEFites are, they had to rush into getting their hands on the valuable minerals when they had no capital to invest (no seed money, in layman’s terms) – so they had to sign away the biggest chunk of the revenue pie to the mining companies. In other words, they had to settle for very little in return for quick bucks.
With dictators like Gaddaffi and Mubarak gone and with the Qataris having second thoughts on their entire approach in the Horn region, HGDEF has lost its main financiers. Its coffers have dried up and it has been reduced to running a crime syndicate which specializes among other trades in the following operations:-
- Running a piracy network in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean in conjunction with Somali pirates and al-shabab fanatics thereby sharing the looting and kidnapping-for-ransom proceeds of their joint venture.
- Running extortion schemes targeting Diaspora Eritreans specifically those helpless folks who don’t have the benefit of dual of citizenships, under various guises of illegal taxes, exorbitant fees and coercive requests for contributions.
- The illegal confiscation of fishing and other marine vessels from poor Yemeni fishermen in full contravention of international maritime laws and against all moral and ethical norms of good neighborliness. They do so with the sole purpose of re-selling the confiscated vessels for cash to unsuspecting fishermen along the coasts of South-Eastern Africa, South Asia and even all the way to the Far East along the coasts of Vietnam and Cambodia. Typical shifta style – but lucrative enough to keep them drooling.
- Running prostitution rings (old sick habits) in Eastern Sudan, Djibouti and the newly formed republic of South Sudan and living of the avails of prostitution like typical back alley pimps.
- Conducting grain thievery (their favorite seasonal vocation) by raiding farms in the Kassala and Gadararef regions of the Sudan.
- And worst of them all, running a human organ trafficking network spanning all the way from the Eritrean hinterland (the source) to the Sinai peninsula in full collaboration with Rashaida and Bedouin gangsters (the middlemen) and various other Sudanese, Egyptian, Israeli and other Middle eastern and Eastern European crime rackets (the syndicates). In the process, life is sucked out in the most hellish and agonizing of ways from the young and the innocent – and HGDEF thugs marvel at their windfall.
So as a pillar, the economy is totally ruled out. If the regime is still kicking, then it is because it had adopted these barbaric coping mechanisms to sustain itself and not because it has managed to create a booming economy.
HGDEF’s perceived political clout is also nothing but yet another big farce. The regime has no positive roles to play in the politics of the Horn region other than political prostitution of the worst kind. Long rejected by the Americans and the other Western countries as a player in the region, it has been reduced to nothing more than a player of subversive roles. Here are just a couple of examples of its day job – a sampler, if you will;
It acts as a go-between for the different factions in the Sudanese conflict – ironically for conflicts it had concocted by itself in the first place and then turns around and demands payoffs. Anything will do – cash, fuels like gasoline or kerosene and even staples like lentils, sesame or “wedi-akker”.
HGDEF also plays similar subversive roles in the Somali conflict and acts as a conduit through which various weaponry and ammunition are supplied to Al-Shabbab fanatics. It gets its cuts both ways – from the suppliers and the end-users, all the while conspiring to keep the Somalis mired in a perpetual state of strife.
The Nile waters conflict is also another fete for HGDEF where it plays the role of a little errand boy. It embarrassingly acts as though it has a major bone in the contention between the major players when the truth is, its role is nothing more than that of a bunch of irrelevant clowns trying to fish in dirty waters. They will always provide their “services” and mind you, they will do so to any side of the conflict, as long as there is money to be made.
So much so for the so-called political clout of a bunch of pimps which as indicated before, amounts to nothing but the provision of un-principled “services” to the highest bidder.
So HGDEF doesn’t have (1) a formal military it can rely on, except for a spy and enforcer network headed by a bunch of functionally illiterate bloody warlords (2) doesn’t have an economy it can live and thrive on – except for macabre coping mechanisms it had crafted for survival, and (3) has no political relevance, let alone clout in the entire region and even globally where it is shunned and hated by all – and yet amazingly most of us fail (by choice for some) to see where its last line of defense lies.
HGDEF has long been abandoned and rejected by the majority of the Eritrean people – Tigrignas and non-Tigrignas alike with the exception of the real hardcore chauvinist bigots – those ardent adherents of the N’hnan E’lamanan cult order.
It is these chauvinistic bigots in particular that HGDEF is relying on as its last line of defence. They help it incapacitate the conscript army, run its macabre underground economy and they try to give it an aura of invincibility – this for a regime that has long been worn out.
And they do this under dubious guises – skills they have learned through years of mentoring given to them by none other than the bloody dictator himself through his venomous circulars of “sentik”, “anbibka’ahlif” and so and so forth. It is amazing even forty odd years on; the hate parlance used by these bigots is a boilerplate rendition of the dictator’s familiar diatribes – verbatim. His thuggery, typical sidinetn b’elignan must have rubbed off to his minions so much so that you see them parroting him in their convoluted daily discourse in open public forums such as this one.
How do you deal with these thugs anyways?
Here is an excerpt from a previous posting on how I described these thugs who now represent HGDEF’s last line of defence and more importantly, how to deal with them.
When people are bad, inherently bad that is, no amount of pleading will ever dissuade them from their evil actions or deeds, no matter how abhorrent and how disgusting those actions or deeds may turn out to be. Such people are not driven by causes – any causes just or otherwise, but rather, by innate instincts which harbour nothing but debilitating and poisonous hate towards all those they consider to be different, based on the “us” versus “them” mentality.
The World’s history is replete with the constant emergence and eventual demise of such groups. The Nazis, the Fascists, the Khmer Rouge, Hutu extremists, Serb barbarians and religious fanatics and zealots of all faiths and denominations are just but a few examples to mention.
Eritrea’s unfortunate share of such groups is solely represented by none other than the notoriously wicked and repulsive thugs – the zer’ie shefatu. For over six decades now, these thugs have been committing untold bloody atrocities against their fellow citizens one way or another – atrocities, whose magnitudes and barbarity are a clear matter written and documented record.
And mind you, they do so not because of any political expediency dictated by their narrow chauvinist agenda, but rather because hate and bigotry are deeply ingrained in their blood. The “elamana” thing may have worked well to galvanize the innocent, the wicked bigots, the fools, the naïve and the un-witting – each with their little dreams, to coalesce around what they thought was a common purpose – a bigger dream, if you will.
But when the so-called dream turned out to be the worst nightmare one could ever imagine, all abandoned ship except for the wicked bigots – because true to their repulsive nature, theirs wasn’t a dream or even a cause to speak of. Theirs was just an ailment – a deep-rooted affliction with no known remedies.
Do you try to reason with such people? Do you plead with them to come to their senses?
No you don’t, you just don’t, period. Unless of course, you entertain the thought that you can live forever to see the day when you can somehow instil a sense of humanity in the hearts and minds of hopeless bigots, whose conscience has long been worn out by years upon years of negative conditioning.
This however doesn’t mean that the status quo is fait accompli, not at all. These bigots and thugs can only be contained by defeating and destroying the system they worship and idolize, the system they draw their strength and inspiration from – in this case, HGDEF.
Many of the notorious groups I mentioned above, like the Nazis, the Fascists and so on, were not contained because they were pleaded to or cajoled, but rather because the systems they worshiped were destroyed militarily. They were decimated by force.
These groups still exist to this day, in one form or another; thanks to the protection accorded to them by the very tools they spent a lifetime fighting to destroy – the tools of democracy and the rule of law.
But even if they exist though – even if they are given their spaces where they could practice their rituals of hate and prejudice, they couldn’t hurt anyone for one simple reason: They have been de-fanged and de-clawed by the rule of law. If they ever try to break the law, they get whacked.
Likewise, pleading to zer’ie shefatu is a non-starter. It is like talking to a dead ass (adgi). If people can’t learn from their mistakes of sixty years, then chances are, they will never learn, ever. The only solution for them is the same setting of containment I mentioned in the preceding paragraphs.
Decent Eritreans, Tigrignas and non-Tigrignas alike, can not usher peace and tranquility to the nation by winning over the zer’ie shefatu, simply because they will never be able to win them over. Not in material numbers anyways. It is just a futile attempt. They could however, as mentioned above, contain them by destroying HGDEF.
How to destroy HGDEF will be the subject of the next posting.
Miscellany:
HGDEF’s New Mouthpieces:
Their entire take – berate the opposition and blame the Ethiopians for every problem under the sky…..
It is a whole new genre of convoluted political discourse premised on doing nothing – because frankly speaking, it offers nothing (fittingly, all the dictator wants to complete his chauvinist ethnic agenda).
And then they sum up with their only one-liner – all they can afford to say about the regime….
“The regime will fall under its own wait” – in return, you are supposed to take that as a consolation and just sit tight and wait for it to happen.
It is amazing how they sweat so much in attempting to curb what little is available to push the teetering HGDEF regime over the cliff and offer nothing – absolutely nothing in lieu except for clichéd sloganeering – ki’kheid’yu (the regime will go) . Just don’t ask them how.
Well guess what – it is only natural that the regime will eventually go, but by then, so will you stupid. Nature doesn’t revolve just on your enemy and stand still for you. The only way you could win is by actually making your enemy go – by destroying your enemy that is, and not by wishing him away.
Simple Advice
Never suck up to bigots – you will just feed their sick egos.
Bait of the Month
“General Store” (another funny tweaker) – just throw it in without the quotes and voilà!
The skin-deep prejudice spills out in no time – just like the mentor’s.
Wa-Allah-ul-Muafiq
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