I come to this discussion with humility. I am still a newcomer to the Awate forum, and I know that many conversations here have histories, references, and relationships that long-time participants understand better than I do. Still, after reading Younis Omer’s essay and the discussion around it, I felt compelled to engage it seriously, not through a passing comment, but through my own reflection. Part of what I appreciate about this forum is that it encourages people to bring their perspective into the conversation. So, I write not to dismiss Omer’s argument, but to think with it, appreciate what it clarifies, and then explain where I believe a deeper civic disagreement begins.
Younis Omer’s essay deserves to be taken seriously because it refuses the easiest language in Eritrean politics. He is not simply repeating the familiar call for unity. In fact, his central argument is that unity, as Eritreans often use the word, has become too sentimental, too moralistic, and too detached from the actual distribution of power. He argues that unity is not produced by good intentions, beautiful declarations, or the discipline of polite elites. Unity, for him, is a structural condition. It emerges when competing forces realize that domination is impossible, withdrawal is too costly, and negotiation becomes unavoidable.
That is a useful intervention. Eritrean politics has suffered from too much ceremonial unity and too little structural honesty. We often speak as if unity can be declared before the terms of coexistence are confronted. We ask people to stand together before asking what they fear, what they remember, what they have lost, and what kind of state they believe would protect them. In that sense, Omer is right to challenge the moral shortcut. A nation does not become coherent simply because its elites praise sacrifice, responsibility, humility, and national belonging. A nation becomes politically coherent when its institutions can hold difference without collapsing into domination or revenge.
So, my disagreement with Omer is not that he thinks structurally. My disagreement is with the unit of structure around which his argument begins to organize Eritrean politics.
He wants Eritrea to confront its real fractures: highland and lowland, Muslim and Christian, secular and Islamist, federalist and nationalist, diaspora and domestic, center and periphery. He argues that these are not imaginary divisions and that any serious politics must allow them to be articulated rather than suppressed. I agree that these fractures cannot be dismissed. Denial is not civic maturity. It is avoidance. But recognition is not the same as surrender. To recognize a category is one thing. To build the future political imagination around that category is another.
This is where my concern begins.
The deepest problem in Eritrean politics may not be only that our divisions have not reached equilibrium. The deeper problem may be that we have accepted the wrong entrances into politics. The Eritrean citizen rarely appears as a citizen. He appears as a highlander, lowlander, Muslim, Christian, Tigrinya, Tigre, Saho, Afar, Kunama, nationalist, Islamist, federalist, loyalist, oppositionist, refugee, diaspora activist, former fighter, or victim of a particular historical memory. These categories are not meaningless. They often carry real wounds. But they also become gates. Before a person can speak politically, he is asked to enter through one of them.
That is the civic injury I find missing from Omer’s framework. The problem is not simply that Eritrea has blocs that must negotiate. The problem is that the bloc has become the authorized form of political visibility. A citizen suffering from poverty is translated into a regional grievance. A citizen deprived of education is translated into a communal grievance. A citizen dispossessed of land is translated into a highland-lowland grievance. A citizen denied religious freedom is translated into a Muslim-Christian grievance. Again, these translations may sometimes reveal patterns. But they can also hide the original wound.
The wound comes first. The category comes later.
If land is the issue, let us talk about land. If poverty is the issue, let us talk about poverty. If education is the issue, let us talk about education. If religious discrimination is the issue, let us talk about religious discrimination. If the problem is militarized citizenship, indefinite service, disappearance, exile, political imprisonment, administrative cruelty, language exclusion, or unequal access to opportunity, let us name those problems directly. But when every concrete injury is forced to pass through communal language, the citizen disappears. The injury becomes a possession of the category. The category then produces its own spokespersons, its own brokers, its own entrepreneurs, and its own guardians.
This is why I worry about equilibrium politics. Equilibrium between whom? Between citizens and the state? Between institutions and rights? Between local autonomy and national belonging? Between accountability and reconciliation? If that is the meaning, then I welcome it. But if equilibrium means bargaining among communal blocs as the primary structure of the future state, then the cure may reproduce the disease. It may stabilize the very categories that have made civic politics so difficult.
Omer is aware of this danger when he criticizes entrepreneurial politics. He knows that many actors who claim to represent communities are not necessarily accountable to those communities. They borrow grievances, amplify fear, and perform representation. That part of his argument is strong. But the problem goes deeper. Even when the representatives are sincere, even when the grievances are real, a politics organized primarily around communal negotiation can still trap the citizen inside inherited identities. It can make the category permanent in the name of protecting the person.
That is where the examples of South Africa and Lebanon need to be handled carefully.
South Africa is often invoked as a story of negotiated transition, and rightly so. Apartheid did not end because enemies suddenly loved each other. It ended through pressure, struggle, exhaustion, calculation, negotiation, and institutional redesign. But the moral and constitutional horizon of post-apartheid South Africa was not the permanent bargaining of racial blocs. Its deeper aspiration was to build a civic order where human dignity, equality, non-racialism, common citizenship, and constitutional supremacy would become the foundation of the state. Whether South Africa has fully achieved that promise is another question. But the direction matters. The negotiation recognized race because apartheid had made race the machinery of domination. But the constitutional ambition was not to make race the eternal doorway into citizenship. It was to create a political order in which the person could stand before the law with dignity beyond racial hierarchy.
Lebanon teaches an even sharper lesson. Its power-sharing arrangement may have prevented total collapse at certain moments. It may have allowed communities to survive within a fragile state. But it also shows the danger of turning communal balance into political architecture. Once sectarian representation becomes the organizing grammar of the state, elites have every incentive to keep speaking the language of sects. Communities become political markets. Public goods become sectarian services. Citizenship becomes mediated through communal leadership. The state does not disappear all at once. It becomes weak, negotiated, distributed, and captured. The citizen remains dependent on the gatekeeper.
That is exactly the trap Eritrea must avoid.
The lesson from Lebanon is not simply that divided societies need equilibrium. The lesson is that equilibrium built around fixed communal categories can become a prison. It can freeze the very identities it claims to manage. It can make the future hostage to the fears of the past. It can reduce politics to the distribution of guarantees among blocs while leaving the individual citizen unliberated.
The South African example, at its best, points toward civic transformation. The Lebanese example, at its worst, warns us against permanent communalization. Eritrea must learn from both.
This does not mean we should deny Eritrea’s historical fractures. I am not calling for abstract citizenship that floats above history. That would be another form of dishonesty. Communities have memories. Regions have grievances. Religions have anxieties. Some groups have experienced exclusion, displacement, erasure, or cultural contempt. A civic politics that refuses to hear those wounds would not be civic at all. It would merely be majoritarian comfort dressed as national unity.
But there is a difference between hearing a wound and making the wound’s category the foundation of the state. There is a difference between protecting communities and imprisoning citizens inside communal representation. There is a difference between acknowledging historical injury and allowing political elites to convert injury into permanent authority.
My alternative is not moral unity. It is civic reconstruction.
By civic reconstruction, I mean a political order that begins with the citizen as the primary unit of justice, while still recognizing that citizens live in communities, languages, regions, religions, and histories. The citizen must come first, not because communities do not matter, but because without citizenship every community becomes vulnerable to its own gatekeepers. Equal citizenship is what allows a Muslim citizen to be protected without reducing him to “the Muslim question.” It allows a lowland citizen to be protected without reducing him to “the lowland question.” It allows a highland citizen to be accountable without making him the author of every wound. It allows an Eritrean to say, “I am injured,” before someone else translates the injury into a category convenient for political mobilization.
This is why unity must be understood functionally. Unity is not one emotional condition. Eritreans can be united for different purposes without pretending that all disputes have disappeared. We can be united to end dictatorship. We can be united to defend due process. We can be united to demilitarize national life. We can be united to protect land rights. We can be united to guarantee religious freedom. We can be united to build schools, clinics, courts, municipalities, and accountable administration. We can be united around the principle that no Eritrean should disappear into prison, exile, hunger, or silence without the protection of law.
This kind of unity is not sentimental. It is practical. It is not a slogan. It is an agreement on rules, protections, and responsibilities.
The question, then, is not whether Eritrea needs negotiation. Of course it does. The question is what negotiation should be about. If negotiation is mainly about balancing highland against lowland, Muslim against Christian, secular against religious, and one historical bloc against another, then we may create a political settlement without creating civic freedom. But if negotiation is about building enforceable guarantees for every citizen, including those whose injuries follow regional, religious, or historical patterns, then negotiation can become transformative.
The difference is subtle but decisive.
A citizen-centered politics would not say to neglected communities, “Forget your history and join the nation.” That would be cruel. It would say, “Your injury is real, and the state must answer it through rights, institutions, resources, and accountability.” It would not say to others, “You are collectively guilty by identity.” That would be another injustice. It would say, “No citizen may benefit from domination, and no institution may protect inherited privilege.” It would not erase difference. It would prevent difference from becoming the only language through which justice can be imagined.
This is also why the word “structure” must be used carefully. Structure is not only the balance among groups. Structure is also the school that does not exist, the road that was never built, the clinic without medicine, the court without independence, the soldier without an end date, the prisoner without a charge, the village without voice, the family without information, the citizen without remedy. If our structural analysis jumps too quickly to communal equilibrium, we may miss the administrative and material forms of injustice that cut across categories while also affecting some communities more severely than others.
The state must be redesigned, yes. But redesigned toward what? Toward a civic order where domination is impossible because power is constrained by law, because rights are enforceable, because local governance is meaningful, because resources are distributed transparently, because religious freedom is guaranteed, because land policy is just, because language and culture are respected, because public office is not captured, and because no citizen needs a communal patron to access justice.
That is the equilibrium I can defend: not equilibrium among gatekeepers, but equilibrium between power and accountability, between diversity and citizenship, between memory and law, between community protection and individual dignity.
Omer’s great contribution is that he forces Eritreans to stop lying about unity. He is right that unity cannot be declared into existence. He is right that hope without structure is weak. He is right that the opposition’s repeated failures are not only failures of personality but symptoms of unresolved contradictions. He is right that moral language can become a shield against accountability.
But his framework still leaves us with a dangerous question: after we recognize the fractures, who gets to speak for them? If the answer is “real constituencies,” we must ask how those constituencies become real, who verifies their mandate, how dissent inside them is protected, and how the individual citizen escapes the category when the category no longer speaks for him.
That is not a minor problem. It is the whole problem.
Eritrean politics has been poisoned not only by dictatorship, but also by the grammar through which we oppose dictatorship. Too often, even our alternatives reproduce the same captivity. We say we want freedom, but we ask people to appear first as representatives of inherited blocs. We say we want justice, but we translate suffering into categories before we investigate the injury. We say we want unity, but we make unity impossible by accepting the political gates that prevent citizens from meeting each other as citizens.
The task is therefore more difficult than reaching equilibrium among existing realities. Some realities must be negotiated. Others must be dismantled. Some categories must be heard because they contain histories of pain. Others must be weakened because they have become instruments of political captivity. Wisdom is knowing the difference.
Eritrea does not need a unity that denies fractures. But neither does it need a settlement that sanctifies them. It needs a civic imagination strong enough to hear communal pain without surrendering the citizen to communal politics. It needs institutions that protect groups without allowing group brokers to own the future. It needs a political language in which an Eritrean can enter public life not only as Muslim or Christian, highlander or lowlander, nationalist or federalist, but first as a citizen whose dignity is not negotiable.
That is where I depart from Omer. He wants equilibrium among Eritrea’s political realities. I want to interrogate the realities themselves. I want to ask which realities describe wounds, which realities hide wounds, and which realities reproduce wounds. The future cannot be built by pretending the categories do not exist. But neither can it be built by making them the permanent architecture of our politics.
The citizen must come before the bloc. Otherwise, even our equilibrium will become another name for captivity.
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