As another anniversary of the grim 2001 crackdown on the G-15 approaches, their protest deserves renewed scrutiny. I know this is a sensitive issue especially since most of them are presumed dead or in jail and have left grieving families and friends behind. Nonetheless, as prominent public figures whose actions remain intimately intertwined with the past and present conditions in Eritrea, we are duty bound to study their history with a clear-eyed historical perspective and a little more honesty.
The immediate catalyst for this article was a recent critique by Semere H who challenged my characterization of the G-15 as political elites striving to reconcile internal rifts within the PFDJ. In response, he cited the G-15’s own protest letter in which they asserted that establishing democracy was their ultimate goal. For Semere, this was decisive enough to prove their commitment to democracy.
In taking this stance, however, Semere inadvertently falls into a common error: reading democratic intent into their protest letters. Such misreading, shared by many G-15 defenders, stems from basing their assessment entirely on the rhetoric surrounding the events of 2001. If we limit our evaluation to that year, such a view indeed appears plausible but if we take a longer view of their political record and their longstanding position within the ruling establishment, that argument quickly falls apart.
The issue here is not simply whether they ever spoke about democracy. Of course they did. Almost everyone does nowadays, including dictators like Isayas himself. So by itself professing democracy and pluralism reveals little or nothing about a movement’s intentions. What we must examine instead is the G-15’s political trajectory and why their democracy rhetoric suddenly assumed urgency and became increasingly explicit at that historical juncture. In other words, we must assess whether their 2001 protest represented a long-held principled commitment to democracy or whether it was a calculated posture adopted to save their cherished organization and prevent their continued marginalization.
When we do so by looking closely at the timeline of their rebellion, we find little or no evidence that the G-15 were ever genuine advocates of democracy. On the contrary, we find that they were enablers of the regime who only mutinied after the dictator rebuffed them and began sidelining them from the semblance of power they had long enjoyed. Unlike the G-13, who were mostly intellectuals and academics, the G-15 were veteran fighters who served under Isayas for years before independence and went on to occupy some of the highest offices in the country after independence.
Their sudden change of heart, therefore, cannot be taken at face value or looked upon as a minor historical footnote. On the contrary, it should be regarded as central to the issue at hand. Its centrality becomes evident when we consider their public record with which most of us are familiar. Keeping that record in mind, what honest person would care to deny that these senior officials were in cahoots with the dictator as he ravaged the country for ten long years after independence? Who would dispute the fact that far from issuing concrete calls for democracy, they were content to go along with him without raising any objection to his smear campaign against dissenters and his brutal suppression of all efforts to change the status quo?
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Nor should we forget that in addition to suppression of dissent, the regime was carrying out various human rights violations across different parts of Eritrea. Yet again, the G-15 showed no eagerness to publicly protest against these gross injustices let alone mount anything remotely comparable to the organized challenge they would undertake in 2001. Their decade-long silence, therefore, is itself highly damning.
What moved them in the end, we can reasonably infer, was not the plight of ordinary Eritreans but their own declining position within the leadership compounded by the humiliation of losing the war with Ethiopia. We should recall that in the years leading up to the war, Isayas had been increasingly concentrating power in his own hands at the expense of the Central and National Councils, whose members made up the G-15. Yet even this marginalization was not enough to stir them into public action. It took the added shock of a crushing defeat in the 1998–2000 war with Ethiopia to finally launch a protest letter, and a mild one at that.
It is this catastrophe-induced protest that they then tried to frame as a principled call for democracy. In truth, it was simply an opportune moment for them to air their long-simmering grievances. Had that war never happened, or had it ended in a decisive victory for Eritrea, it is difficult to imagine that the G-15 phenomenon would ever materialize. It is important to bear in mind that the catastrophic loss was deeply distressing for all Eritreans, but it was particularly traumatic for the PFDJ and its supporters. And it is not unreasonable to presume that it sparked in them an agonizing self-rumination: how could the invincible Eritrean army lose to an army it had once trained and supported? Was their celebrated leader finally losing his grip? Will Eritreans blame their dismal post-war conditions on the PFDJ and rise against it?
As senior members of the leadership, the G-15 desperately wanted to salvage both the party’s image and their own diminishing role within it. In their eyes, saving the PFDJ and reclaiming whatever little influence they still had within it were one and the same thing.
As the discussion above makes clear, the democracy chant was more of an afterthought than an outcome of real conviction. But if we still have lingering doubts about their true intentions, all we need to do is look at what the G-15 themselves explicitly say in their letter of May 27, 2001, sent to members of the PFDJ. In the introduction, they write: “In the Eritrean reality, guaranteeing and consolidating internal democracy within the PFDJ is essential to ensure a democratic process of transition and the establishment of a democratic constitutional government; and our aim and message is this, and only this” [emphasis added].
Paradoxically, this is the very line Semere quoted to argue the opposite! A more careful reading, however, reveals that his favorite quote actually undermines his position by laying bare the G-15’s deeply anti-democratic mindset. By positing that a national democratic transition was possible only after first fixing the internal mechanics of the ruling party, the G-15 were arrogating to themselves the authority to determine the terms of Eritrea’s democratization. In other words, they were telling the Eritrean public that true democracy could not emerge organically from the public itself but must be handed down as a top-down gift from above.
What this means in practice is that the PFDJ would control and dictate the transition process giving it the ability to prolong the transition indefinitely just as the current “transitional government” under Isayas has done. It also means that if pluralism ever arrives, it will be under a highly engineered process in which the PFDJ still sets the rules and retains its political monopoly.
A genuinely democratic process cannot begin until the political arena is fully open to grassroots actors including political parties, trade unions and other independent associations. What the G-15 wanted, however, based on their own words, was to make sure that their own privileged positions and elite status would remain securely locked in before extending democratic rights to the rest of the population and at their own chosen schedule. That schedule, of course, may never arrive.
It is worth acknowledging, however, that their August letter to the Eritrean public went further than the May letter to members of the PFDJ alone, as it raised an expanded list of demands, including demobilizing national service, reforming land policy, protecting minority language rights, ending the PFDJ’s dominance over the economy and establishing an independent judiciary.
Taken at face value, these demands are weighty and deserve to be taken seriously, but again, we must remember that this shift in tone came after, not before, they were cruelly rebuffed and condemned as sellouts by the president. This seriously undercuts their claim that democratic reform had been their longstanding political priority.
The quest for democratic reform should begin with a firm belief that fundamental human rights, freedom of expression and judicial independence are non-negotiable. The G-15, by their own account in the letter to members of the PFDJ, treated internal party democracy as the necessary prerequisite before any rights are given to the Eritrean people. This makes it clear that genuine democracy was never their main concern and it is within the larger context we have outlined above that we must understand their grand slogans of democracy.
Here, a distinction needs to be made between the G-15’s original political objectives and the course the confrontation eventually took. What transpired after the protest was not inevitable. Even after the war-induced trigger we alluded to earlier, it is entirely possible that the confrontation would have remained an internal struggle within the ruling establishment had Isayas Afewerki shown greater flexibility or feigned to work on their demands for internal administrative reform.
In sum, we must never allow rhetoric to obscure reality. Otherwise, we will continue to be hoodwinked by future would-be Isayases. It is profoundly lamentable that Eritreans continue to be duped by political rhetoric. After spending decades exposing the deception, false promises and abuses of Isayas Afewerki’s dictatorship, are we to fall now into another pitfall of romanticizing everyone who eventually opposes the dictator? No, opposition to Isayas should never be treated as induction into the ranks of democracy’s champions. Similarly, the G-15’s tragic fate should not and cannot transform their political record into a story of democratic activism.
None of what we have said so far, however, should be construed as trivializing their severe persecution or their shock at Isayas’s savage retribution against them despite their faithful service for many years. Nor are we belittling the historical importance of their 2001 letters of protest. Whatever we think of their motives, their protest had the welcome effect of dramatically increasing the number of former regime supporters who turned into opponents. What we are cautioning against is the romanticizing and sanitizing of their record to cast them as democracy’s champions. They most certainly are not!
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