Dan Connell
6 November 2003
opinion
Boston — Dan Connell has been a 'participant-observer' of the Eritrean scene for nearly three decades, starting in the 1970s during the liberation struggle. He followed events in the country closely as a journalist and analyst and eventually as an academic, writing hundreds of articles and papers about the country's successful rejection of Ethiopian rule and its adoption of bold and creative approaches to the challenges of development and nation building. Having marched and sheltered under fire alongside the liberation fighters, he came to know the leaders of the country intimately. But in recent years, increasingly troubled by the repressive stance of the Isaias Afwerki government towards the press and political opposition, he has found himself shifting from being a longstanding supporter to a critic. He chose to make that shift public at the just-ended African Studies Association meeting in Boston. We reproduce his paper below, setting out the road he has travelled to arrive at his current views. That Connell has undergone such a change of heart will be seen by all who know Eritrea - not least, the leaders themselves - as a tipping point.
In April 1976, I slipped into Eritrea's besieged capital, Asmara, where I witnessed the assassination of a high-ranking Ethiopian official and its bloody aftermath - the summary execution of dozens of innocent civilians. My eyewitness account of the massacre appeared on the front page of The Washington Post, breaking Ethiopia's long-standing blockade of information on the war for Eritrea's independence, then in its fifteenth year. Soon afterward, I flew to Sudan, contacted the two liberation fronts through their offices in Khartoum, and traveled into guerrilla-held Eritrea to see the conflict from the other side. What I found, particularly with the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), moved me deeply: not just their military strength, though it was certainly impressive, but rather their wide-ranging efforts to unify and transform Eritrea's diverse society as they were liberating it. This was far more than a war of national liberation. It was a revolution: thoroughly restructuring the power relations of a complex society onto a far more inclusive, egalitarian basis. This was nation-building in its most profoundly democratic sense: tackling the great social divides of clan, ethnicity, religion, gender and class and knitting together a common identity as Eritreans.
Over the next twenty-seven years, I wrote hundreds of articles on the Eritrean Revolution - on the bold experiments with radical social transformation underway in 1976, on the near defeat of Ethiopia's American-backed army in 1977, on the intervention of the Soviet Union and the liberation movement's strategic retreat in 1978, on the famine that swept the region in the mid-1980s, on the final Eritrean victory in 1991, on the effort to reconstruct and develop the war-ravaged new state later in that decade, on the renewal of war with Ethiopia in 1998-2000, and on the economic and political reverses that followed and flowed out of this latest conflict.
There is much to be learned from the Eritrean experience. The EPLF united its diverse society - half Christian, half Muslim, from nine distinct ethnic groups - into a highly-motivated, well-disciplined national movement that was able, with almost no outside support, to bring successive U.S.- and Soviet-backed Ethiopian governments to their knees. This was in itself a remarkable achievement - the more so when contrasted with the dismal experience of nation-building among Eritrea's neighbors. At the same time, the front worked to liberate women, workers and peasant farmers from centuries of grinding poverty, chronic hunger and unspeakable oppression. In fact, it was experiments with land and marriage reform and the provision of services like agricultural extension, primary education, adult literacy and village-level public health in the liberated areas, implemented in a highly participatory manner, that motivated such large numbers of peasant farmers, workers, women and youth to join the struggle. The synergy between these two projects - national liberation and social transformation - is the most important lesson to take from the Eritrean experience.
However, dramatic and far-reaching changes in the postwar political situation in Eritrea have undermined the very popular democracy project that drew me into Eritrea so tightly and for so long. Prominent among them have been the closing of public political space, the shutdown of the private press, the arrest and indefinite detention of key figures from the liberation struggle, and the imposition of a coercive regime on the population at large. These changes transformed me from a stalwart supporter of more than a quarter century to a reluctant but determined critic.
As unique as Eritrea's accomplishments have been up to this point - the integration of ethnic and religious minorities, the elevation of women's status, the suppression of crime and economic corruption - the country's current trajectory follows a familiar path, what is often termed the "crisis of the postcolonial African state:" the concentration of power within the executive branch of government, the marginalization of nominally independent parliaments and judiciaries, the imprisonment or exile of vocal critics, the sharp restriction of independent media and autonomous civil society institutions, the outlawing of rival political parties, and, through this, the consolidation of power under a single leader who justifies his extended stay in office by the fragility of the nation over which he presides. In short, the corruption of the political process and, with it, faith in the institutional foundation of the society itself.
This pattern, unfolding within Eritrea more than a decade after it was discredited elsewhere on the continent, represents a giant step backward for the objectives, the values, and the vision that I chronicled in my news articles throughout the liberation struggle and that I so strongly argued for in my analytic writing in the post-independence period. It is precisely this rich legacy that makes complacency about the current situation untenable.
Like many of those involved in this movement over the past several decades, I held off as long as I could from such a decision, with all its implications and consequences. But it has become impossible to stand apart from these events. Why it took so long to get to this is another matter - partly political, partly personal, and all the more difficult because the two were so thoroughly intertwined.
I can only echo what many EPLF veterans have said when they, too, became public critics of the movement they helped to build: that the promise was so great, the achievements so impressive, the possibilities so humbling that it took an enormous act of will to face the fact that the Revolution was in jeopardy, that silence in the face of this was complicity, and that open criticism was the only option. But it was also deeply personal.
I have been in the trenches under withering enemy fire with people on both sides of this divide - remarkable, courageous individuals who risked everything to free their nation and whom I loved and respected as my own family, whatever they did or said to each other. Breaking with any of them was like cutting off a part of myself. The tangle traces back to three political activists who met in Kassala, Sudan, in 1965 to share their disillusionment with the parochial, deeply corrupt liberation army they found there - the Eritrean Liberation Front - and to dedicate themselves to the creation of a truly revolutionary nationalist movement, whatever the cost. To cement their commitment, each carved an "E" in his upper arm and took a blood oath. Today, Mussie Tesfamikael is dead, Isaias Afwerki is Eritrea's president, and Haile "DruE" Woldetensae languishes in prison.
I never knew Mussie; he was killed in questionable circumstances before I became involved in Eritrea. But Isaias was a friend and mentor to me through much of the liberation struggle. He danced at my wedding. Haile, who ran the EPLF's political program, sat with me for hours upon hours to explicate the front's political evolution during and after the liberation struggle. We always laughed about the morning we careened out of Keren together, hours ahead of Ethiopia's reoccupation of the city - Eritrea's second largest - in 1978. I last saw him three weeks before he was arrested in September 2001. The same is true with others now in detention and with the PFDJ officials who prepared the ground for their arrest - foes now but heroes of the Revolution and personal friends to me only yesterday. Nor does it stop there.
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