It has been a long, long time since I last wrote in this space, yet throughout my extended absence, Saleh has graciously kept my column alive. It is indeed a generous gesture to preserve a columnist’s place when the writer himself has been silent for so long. I deeply appreciate that he kept my place, allowing me to return when I was ready to write again.
I come back, however, without pretending to have followed every development in our country during my absence and without the illusion that I have found ready answers to the problems that have been plaguing our people for so long. I return simply as someone who has spent much of his adult life thinking and writing about Eritrea.
The September 1 anniversary seemed an appropriate time for my return given its significance as both a milestone and a reminder of the pioneers who took the first step. One of the most encouraging features of human societies is their capacity to produce individuals of extraordinary vision and courage. Virtually every society has given rise to trailblazers whose deeds reverberate across generations. For Eritreans, that mantle squarely belongs to Hamid Idris Awate and his small band of companions.
Looking back, we might imagine that Awate and his companions knew exactly how the struggle would unfold. No, they did not. They had no idea how many lives would be lost, how many families would be torn apart, or whether they themselves would survive to see its end. Yet, despite all the uncertainty, they boldly took the first step. Just as Armstrong’s foot on the moon was “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” the first shot by Awate and his companions was one small step for them but a giant leap for the Eritrean people.
The step was momentous but the human toll was staggering. Thirty years is a very long time: an entire generation of Eritreans grew up with war. Many died before independence; others spent the best years of their lives in the field, in refugee camps, in jail, or in exile. A child born on September 1, 1961, would have been thirty years old when the armed struggle finally ended in 1991.
When I last wrote about the anniversary many years ago, I was deeply concerned about the direction our country was heading. Looking back, however, I am struck more by what has stubbornly remained unchanged than by what has changed. Back then, I believed that the political crisis confronting the dictatorship was so serious and so widespread that an internal implosion seemed all but inevitable. I further assumed that the rift within the ruling establishment that culminated in the G-15 protest had reached a point of no return. Alas, history proved me wrong. The government survived, consolidated its power, and extended its grip throughout the country, teaching us a hard lesson: never underestimate the resilience and durability of a dictatorship.
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The efforts of the G-15 ultimately failed. But whatever we think of their political views, it was a tyrannical act to deprive them of their liberty for decades without trial and without charge. While I never regarded the G-15 as champions of democracy, there is no denying that their challenge played a valuable role in exposing the deep fissures within the ruling elite. Their tragic fate demonstrated the regime’s absolute intolerance of dissent even within its own ranks. We should not be so naive, however, as to think their goal was the establishment of a democratic government for Eritrea as a whole. It was not. Their primary concern was to reform the existing system from within and to improve how power was exercised inside the PFDJ.
But even if they had succeeded, the dictatorship would have remained, albeit with some procedural changes within the PFDJ. This distinction is crucial because a genuine democratic transformation is not just about replacing one group of insiders with another or rearranging power among those who already possess it, but about establishing a political order where power is subject to law and where no organization or leader has permanent control of the state.
In Eritrea, where the dictator has become the law, the young have paid the heaviest price. The so-called national service, originally touted as a limited period of national reconstruction and defense, quickly degenerated into virtual slavery. Instead of pursuing education, employment, and other aspirations like their peers elsewhere, Eritrean youth were made to endure open-ended conscription.
This is particularly lamentable because when Eritrea became independent, it held an extraordinary reservoir of human and political capital. Eritreans had demonstrated remarkable willingness to sacrifice for the nation. The diaspora was eager to contribute generously, and international goodwill toward the new state was considerable. Thus, the country had a rare opportunity to devote the post-independence era to reconstruction and institution-building, but it wantonly squandered it all.
There is a recurring tendency among Eritrean intellectuals, including some who once served under Isayas’s government, to blame all these failures on him. This is sometimes a deliberate ploy by those who were his accomplices to exonerate themselves but Eritrea’s political predicament cannot be explained entirely by one individual or even by one political organization.
Isayas, no doubt, bears enormous responsibility for the repressive apparatus he engineered, but modern dictatorships cannot survive for long without the active support of a large number of followers or sycophants. In other words, however clever or diabolically cunning the dictator may have been, he could never have done it without the complicity and tacit approval of our educated elite, who fanned his megalomaniac tendencies, cheering him along, and lying for him throughout his many escapades.
But it is not only the regime’s enablers who bear the blame. The opposition’s weakness and fragmentation have been another reason the quest for freedom has taken so long. We should remember, however, that there is nothing inherently threatening about political diversity. A future democratic Eritrea will necessarily contain parties, religious and regional associations, and independent media. The danger arises only when these differences deteriorate into mutually exclusive political identities and when every Eritrean faction begins to regard the success of another as a threat to the entire nation.
Just as unity must never be used to suppress ethnic, regional, and religious identities, diversity must also never become a pretext for chaos and disintegration. Eritrea cannot afford to replace authoritarian uniformity with democratic fragmentation or chaos. What we need is a system in which citizens can freely articulate their distinct grievances and retain their cultural heritage while coexisting within a larger, shared framework of equal citizenship.
Such a framework, however, requires a political maturity that has been in short supply in Eritrean political discourse. We have learned how to advocate for a cause, particularly on social media, but we have not learned how to plan for sharing power once the rivalry is over. We have learned how to mobilize but not how to compromise. Of course, not every compromise is worth making, but we need to differentiate between principled refusal to compromise on core issues and ego-driven failure to negotiate.
This brings us to the most important question before Eritrea today: what will replace the present system? After decades of life under a totalitarian dictatorship, an orderly transition will not be easy. The challenge lies not merely in who will leave and who will govern next, but in what becomes to the key institutions, the rampant corruption, and the habits of conformity the system leaves behind. How will political prisoners be treated and refugees reintegrated? How will power be transferred peacefully from one government to another? These are questions that all serious political movements should already be wrestling with.
After so long away, I revisit these questions with a deeper appreciation of the unpredictability of history. We have seen political systems endure much longer than we expect, and opposition movements fail despite the weaknesses of the governments they oppose. And so the proper attitude towards September 1 should be neither self-congratulation nor despair, but the shouldering of responsibility. The generation that fought for independence had a clear goal: the end of foreign rule and the establishment of an independent Eritrea. That was accomplished. The generations that followed inherited a different goal: the removal of the dictatorial system and the establishment of an all-inclusive democratic government. That mission remains unfulfilled.
When that mission is accomplished, and history gives no timetable, we must be prepared to do more than celebrate the demise of the dictatorship. That will take patience, not mere passion. It will take principled compromise among Eritreans, not the lockstep conformity the old system once demanded. It will also mean trusting institutions rather than individual personalities. Only then will the freedom we have long sought become a reality for every Eritrean.
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