The Blame Loop Has Expired
History, if told honestly, is not an accusation. It is a form of witnessing.” (Alemseged Tesfai, An African People’s Quest for Freedom and Justice)
Nearly a quarter-century after the ministers of Eritrea were made to disappear into silence on September 18, 2001, a date that split a nation’s hopes, the diagnosis of betrayal has calcified into ritual. In a recent article, Dawit Mesfin revisits this now-familiar script: that President Isaias Afwerki duped not only the Eritrean people but the very generation that fought to liberate them. The vanguard combatants of our revolution are once again framed as accomplices to tyranny, either through passive loyalty or deliberate blindness.
But what once rang as revelation now reads as recursion. We must ask: Has this argument become too easy? Too stale? Too reliant on hindsight’s moral comforts?
To hold Isaias Afwerki accountable is essential. But to reduce an entire generation, one that faced napalm, famine, Soviet-backed offensives, and exile, as either naive or complicit is both analytically hollow and historically unjust. If we are to move forward as a people, we must break out of the blame loop.
Instead of rehashing betrayal, let us return to history and not the caricatured kind. Let us begin, as Alemseged Tesfai has urged us in his monumental work An African People’s Quest for Freedom and Justice, by retrieving the buried facts and moral fractures that shaped Eritrea long before 2001.
Fractured Memory and Historical Amnesia
What Dawit and others overlook is that Eritrea’s tragedy did not begin in 1991, nor even in 2001. It began in 1941, when the colonial chains were replaced, not broken. It was sealed in 1952, when the United Nations, under pressure from Cold War powers, federated Eritrea with Ethiopia against its will. And it was cemented throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, as Alemseged documents, when the Ethiopian state quietly eroded federal guarantees, silenced Eritrean voices, and absorbed the country piece by piece.
Alemseged’s work shows that Eritrean resistance did not arise from romantic nationalism or external provocation. It was a constitutional cry, born of betrayal. The Eritrean Assembly, far from passive, voiced dissent, appealed to legality, and organized protest. The press, students, and civic leaders stood firm. But when the law was turned against them, when voices were jailed, and collaborators rewarded, resistance migrated to the mountains.
This is where fractured memory begins: some remember constitutionalism, others remember the field; some remember Haraka’s pluralist vision, others remember the divisions that followed; some recall civic betrayal, others military sacrifice. All are true. None are complete.
To blame the combatants without remembering the generations of injury that preceded them is to ask victims of one regime to become saviors in another without reckoning with the scars they carried.
Combatants: Burdened by Myth, Abandoned by Memory
It is easy to say they should have known. That they should have seen Isaias coming. But Alemseged reminds us: many combatants joined in their teens. They were not trained politicians. They were children-turned-commanders, poets-turned-partisans, and students-turned-sacrifices. They held the line against some of the most brutal offensives modern Africa has witnessed, eight major campaigns backed by the Soviet Union’s full arsenal.
Yes, mistakes were made. Yes, silence followed. But when the revolution ended in 1991, many believed peace had finally come. That the exiles could return. That the land would be plowed again.
What followed instead was a consolidation of power so swift, so deliberate, that by the time dissent was voiced, it had disappeared. September 18, 2001, did not expose complicity; it criminalized conscience.
Let us not ask those who survived one fire to relight the flame, only to burn again.
Exile and the Memory That Froze
Among the diaspora, especially those who left in the 1980s or early 1990s, the year 2001 has become a kind of moral calendar: the year hope was buried. And rightly so, it marked the death of pluralism, the outlawing of the independent press, and the mass imprisonment of former comrades. But it is a common occurrence, isn’t it, that comrades don’t make good friends? They drop you at the border or the grave, whichever comes first.
But we must ask: What happens when memory freezes? When 2001 becomes the only reference point for critique? When every analysis begins and ends with Isaias Afwerki and forgets the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that made him possible?
Eritrea’s history is not a single betrayal. It is a series of betrayals, foreign and internal, legal and violent. From the broken promise of federation to the co-optation of civic institutions, from the exile of Haraka to the eclipse of constitutional memory by militarized discipline, each stage left its scar.
As Alemseged’s book makes clear, the armed struggle did not start in 1961 as a reaction to the end of federalism. It began because the federation itself was already a farce, an imposed compromise between Ethiopian ambition and international cowardice. Eritrean resistance was not rebellion. It was a refusal. The ballot never came. The rifle did.
To ignore this prehistory is to make our critique shallow and our blame incomplete.
Still Standing: A Complicated Survival
Let us also acknowledge something uncomfortable: Eritrea still stands. While Sudan collapses, Tigray bleeds, and Ethiopia teeters toward fragmentation, Eritrea, despite its isolation and despite its repression, has not disintegrated.
This is not praise. It is not an endorsement. It is an invitation to ask harder questions.
How has the so-called pariah state outlasted its more celebrated neighbors? Perhaps, as Alemseged implies, because Eritrea was not built by colonial fiat or donor aid, it was built by sacrifice. Its legitimacy, for better or worse, was forged not in diplomatic halls but in trenches and tunnels. That foundation, even when cracked, still holds weight.
The tragedy is that the very people who bled for its independence now flee its bureaucracy. That the revolution that once made exiles into returnees now makes returnees into exiles again.
But survival is not nothing. It is proof that something endures. And that something, if remembered rightly, can still be reclaimed.
What Alemseged Tesfai Offers: Memory as Moral Archive
What distinguishes Alemseged’s An African People’s Quest for Freedom and Justice is not just its archival depth; it is its moral clarity. The book does not glorify. It does not propagandize. It resurrects. It reconstructs a forgotten architecture of pluralist resistance and civic defiance that predates the battlefield.
It gives voice to Haraka, not as a footnote, but as a foundation. It recovers the Eritrean Assembly, not as a rubber stamp, but as a fragile experiment in African constitutionalism. It shows how the dream of independence was not born in slogans, but in press editorials, labor strikes, and legal debates.
And it warns subtly but unmistakably that when nations forget their civic memory, they become vulnerable to militarized ones.
We must now heed that warning. Not just to critique the present, but to excavate the past. To reclaim the dignity that was buried not in 2001, but in 1952, in 1981, and in 1994.
What Eritrea Needs Now: Truth with Teeth
It is time, Chief. Time to stop asking who betrayed us? and begin asking, how do we heal?
We do not need more tribunals of opinion. We need a truth and reconciliation process, Eritrean in name and in form.
Let it begin not with slogans, but with testimony. Let it include:
- The elders who remember the betrayal of federation
- The civic leaders of Haraka.
- The fighters who saw comrades fall to Soviet bombs.
- The students who were imprisoned for writing one wrong line.
- The mothers who have not heard from their sons since 2001.
- The youth who walked through Libya and floated on Mediterranean waves.
Let us tell the truth. All of it. Without fear. Without faction.
As Alemseged’s book affirms, Eritrea’s history is not simple. But its pain is shared. And only in that shared pain can we begin again.
Concluding Remarks: The End of the Blame Era
To quote Alemseged again: “History, if told honestly, is not an accusation. It is a form of witnessing.”
Let this be our witness.
The shelf life of blame has expired. We cannot build a future on accusations reheated from 2001/2002. We cannot liberate the people with the same slogans that now imprison our imagination. We must trade the politics of vendetta for the politics of repair.
Let Eritrea remember. Let it weep. Let it name. And then, let it rise again.
Awate Forum