The Re-birth Of Eritrea’s Kebessa and The Necessity Of Strategic Depth For Tigray.

Paulos Irgau.

1-30-22

The resurgence of “going back” to the roots particularly among Eritreans who hail from the Highlands has become one of the tectonic shifts the war has wrought where one cannot afford to see it as a benign symptom on the side when it is the real deal in its own right. Unexamined history is not worth knowing is the new motto if I can paraphrase Socrates which is firing up the new Eritrean generation. A generation that has been cheated and robbed of its history during the last thousands of daylights.

To be more precise, in the late 40s through the late 50s, most Kebessians elected unity with Ethiopia when the fate of Eritrea was hanging in the balance. On the other hand, most of the Lowlands opted for independence and it is safe to say that the two opposing trajectories morphed onto EPLF and ELF respectively in the later years when the abrogation of the agreed upon Federation was not only a serious breach of trust laced with perfidy but a continuation of the Amhara elite to systematically weaken the ethnic Tigrinya that was hatched when Menilik reined on the mantle of power.

In his mind, he was convinced that, the Italians or the Egyptians were not the real threat to his reign but the ethnic Tigrinya and threw all his resources at his own disposal including a conniving scheme to weaken them through division when he disposed of the latter-day Eritrea to the Italians. Menilik’s elite pedigree further accentuated the scheme when they appeased Eritrean elites with perks and punished the remaining Tigreans in Tigray-proper with abject destitution that had lasted for almost a century. Get this: Tigray at some point was the poorest province not in Ethiopia, not in East Africa, not in the African continent but in the entire world. I repeat, Tigray was the poorest province in the entire world.

Prior to the endemic siege of Tigray by the inheritors of Menilik’s legacy, out of spite to Tigreans, the sore loser Italians who were defeated during the battle of Adwa, injected a sense of superiority onto their Eritrean subjects when the latter cherished the smokescreen of owning the “white mask” and looked down on Tigreans when they were expected to emphasize with the historic dejection of their blood brothers. Instead, the mind-set took a life of its own when it was internalized within the next generation, a generation that had fought for Eritrean independence for three decades.

Moreover, the prejudice became too evident when EPLF evinced contempt towards the nascent TPLF when the latter sought a tactical alliance with the former including a support in logistical supplies in a bid to fight the common enemy—the Dergue. In the meantime, history was reinvented, and a new identity was tailored to fit in Eritrea is what Tigray is not—-identity by subtraction if you will.

The victim of the grotesque and a caricature of one’s true essence is the third generation of Eritreans who have come of age after independence. It is this generation that is digging deep into the panoramic archeology of its own History. The findings are of a mix bag so to speak. Proud, precisely because they belong to a great civilization—Axumite Civilization—in the meantime, they resigned into indignation because they had been denied of their pride when history was rendered a substitution to a history.

The sense of urgency that the new discovery carries is abutted by the new development in Ethiopia in general and in Tigray in particular. It is also impacted by and large by the choke hold on the people where every fabric of the society is choreographed by the whim of one man when the fate of the younger generation is condemned to a perpetuated military service.

When the new generation lacked the courage to stand up to tyranny, they had to look for an answer to their perennial predicament. And they converged with Tigreans when Tigreans as well searched for an answer to come to terms with the extraordinary virulent hate the Menilikites poured on them in the last darkest fourteen month or so.

What’s more, they both have met at a critical juncture—Eritreans in search of their true identity looking into the past and Tigreans gazing onto the future when parting ways at long last with the Menilikites who had been giving off a false pretense when Tigrean leaders gave them almost everything during the last twenty-seven years at the expense of Tigray.

The symmetry and conjunction have serious significance, nevertheless—not only in abstract terms but in real time and space as well. Let’s be clear: Henceforth, Tigray is destined to live with a hostile neighbor to its South and South-West and it is imperative for Tigray to have a strategic depth in the North in an event when its survival is at stake. It was precisely lack of it that Tigrean leaders retreated to Tembien and Abi-Adi when a full-scale invasion was declared on them in the early days of November 2019. As such, Eritrea is not only the conduit to the sea and the wider world but a strategic fall-back when all the gates are locked from without.

Furthermore, one can manipulate and distort history but not geography. The new Eritrean generation is putting History back to its right track when they affirm to—one people in two nations and logically one people cannot and do not go to war against each other but most importantly, democracies do not go to war against each other. The challenge is to transition Eritrea to a democracy.

Certainly, Tigray can play a vital role to that effect. Maybe it already has when most of the younger generation Eritreans passed through Tigray to get to the West, got influenced by the civic culture in Tigray and inspired by the democratic institutions albeit nascent. Subsequently, they have become a powerful voice in the diaspora and reaching out to Tigreans in the last darkest months. The strong solidarity exuded by Eritreans with Tigreans will be translated into a political meaning when Eritrea transitions to democracy. And after years of divisions laced with acrimonies, the Eritrean diaspora opposition seems to have come to convergence after the inversion of Tigray.

To be more precise, Tigray also possesses a wealth of a political capital including a politically conscious and robust society where the bulk is a younger generation, a generation so keen about the acute necessity of Eritrea’s not only of its blood ties but ultimately Tigray’s continuity cannot be examined in isolation to Eritrea’s political future.

That said however, there has to be clarity where emotions are raw when the atrocities in Tigray are perpetrated by the Eritrean soldiers and ought to be seen for what it is. The perpetrators are the savage soldiers not the Eritrean people. As such, Tigray’s future relations with Eritrea or any political arrangements to that effect has to reflect not revanchism but common vision and mutual respect instead.