REMARK: We have the right to express subjective or group opinion on any subject matter but no one has the right to dictate national issues except the CONSTITUTION. I have no major problem with OUR VOICE’s view of identity and history as long as they respect my view as equally valid as theirs for no science or mathematics can solve our philosophical issues except open discussion and interactive communication. Every broken piece will be fixed in time as long as we fight together to diffuse the dictatorship with clean heart and determination. The fight is not to agree on issues or to convince each other but only to agree disagreeing on, improving our potency to crash the dictatorship and replacing it with a functional government as urgent as possible. I don’t care how you define identity and understand the common history as long as you don’t dictate my views and we agree on SECULAR DEMOCRACY as the only solution for our diversified society’s decent coexistence.

Clearly, the appearance of OUR VOICE was a great surprise that created this environment of constructive communication on very serious matters affecting our extra-pressed society, shifting our state of intelligence from discussing events and indefinitely searching for solutions to entertaining something concrete about our future. It has certainly transformed the dull and bluesy state of ambiance we suffered after the departure of Brother Vacarro to that of the creative and excited. Our people are ready to do it now under assertive and visionary leadership appearing to have elevated their consciousness of democracy by being inquisitive, careful, transparent, suspicious, and expressive and of course demanding instead of unconditionally following others. You have the absolute right to grill your leaders and they have the right to express their subjective opinions in the process. In civilized relationship they call our situation opinion oriented difference of human activity, again as long as ideas remain private unless democratically ratified to be enforced in society by law. That may be why some commentators in different articles concerning OUR VOICE still don’t feel comfortable about the group’s self-mystification issue with the people. OUR VOICE has done excellent responding to comments promising to expose themselves fully at the right time, yet, the environment stays fishy although we are willing to give them a chance to impact the society democratically.

Why would the dependable brother Araya Debessay support the group from within or the periphery had they been non-Eritreans and do you think a professor of his caliber and determination to the cause would blindly accept them without that clearance? Do you think the eloquent and physically fit Tegadalai Aishel would allow his BOTTOM-UP philosophy entertained by non-Eritrean individuals whether he is part of the group or not? Do you really think I would support them conditionally knowing how confrontational I am concerning the fundamental concept of freedom without my confidence about the fact that there is no RAT to sneak any more for the sake of MOGGGOGO?

You must be kidding me unless I have deteriorated upstairs because of the many challenges I personally faced in this life as an Eritrean. Yet, you know they should come out as a matter of transparency and they know it! Their approach to self-exposure may not be the smartest thing doing but they deserve support from us for their effort without gravitating on their identity for now despite the unavoidable breaching of transparency encapsulated within. Life is after all taking a risk to accomplish what you want until the moment of the truth comes to move on together or ride the highway separately leaving the rest for time and the truth to resolve the bug. Do what you want to do but I have decided to take the risk!

I feel optimistic by the reaction of the commentators in favor of self exposure for it is a positive development in terms of checking and balancing our situation that we suffered too much as a consequence of absence in our bitter history of survival but we have no other choice to supporting them in the condition they introduce themselves apparently; which is the case in this situation. They may have made mistakes here and there, may be a little too hasty talking about their position on few important matters facing challenges from the public’s cultural orientation to some extent as you all can see in the forums. But that is okay as long as the people stay alert about the whole situation on the ground and they stay transparent with us. We will trash them, otherwise like we are forced to surpass our veteran brothers in EDA in dire search of freedom. There is no SKIFTA any more like in our past taboo affiliated self-destruction for us to be herded by opportunistic and ineffective politicians that caused us this amount of pain without provocation. We Eritreans may be a desperate society but as I said it so many times in writing we will not accept anything less than SECULAR DEMOCRACY at minimum in the next socio-political touchdown after this surprising failure because of the regime and the undemocratic opposition forces.

Let us please be realistic! I think any new organization staggers to survive in view of the public making mistakes and correcting them down the road from experience. You know how many problems Brother Vacarro had in the beginning although I don’t know what he would have done today had he been alive, needless saying that they seem a little excited about this mission because they know they have taken the responsibility to help out as the intellectual backbone of the struggle at hand. It is natural for a new beginning to swim left and right until it figures out the right direction like a toddler must fall before firmly standing on the ground. It takes a lot of failure, miscalculation and confrontation to succeed, reconfigure and harmonize. It is not easy, it takes time to figure it out and remember that they are in the experimentation stage at this point in reality working harder than they should on things that can wait. It is the excitement, sense of responsibility and the urge to swiftly resolve the Eritrean issue of freedom that agitates them to involve in things they don’t have too. Our job should be to understand this and help them see the light through direct engagement and enhancing their confidence as much as we can like we are doing right now. They are trying to serve us freely by the way and we should welcome the generous and considerate offer with love and appreciation.

Making mistakes is inherent to us human beings and that is the only way we learn and develop our ways unless we insist on ours as being the only way. Expressing opinions without imposing them on people may be procedurally untimely but is not a fundamental mistake that should cause irreparable disconnection between us.

Something is apparent, however! They are talking to us responding to the commentators and probably picking good ideas as well without destructive and competitive interference or dictatorship unlike our past opaque experience with many politicians in the resistance that never cared responding or talking to us. We must admit that we are for the first time witnessing the highest form of transparency between the people and OUR VOICE in the entire experience of our struggle and this resistance, for us to be motivated backing them up with clear understanding that their mission is impossible without contacting us face to face at a point in the journey. The temporary impedance as a result of their temporary veil is of course visible from the people’s temporary reactions at least based on related forums of communication in this encounter. But they have decided to take that rout for now clearly indicating they will reverse it one day soon. And our full confidence on our current checking and balancing capacity will take care of everything about this obscurity for us not to shy away from developing this wonderful opportunity without hesitation.

In so diffusing my opinion, I have had quite a few callers across the world to discuss this matter and my position on. Few of them had a problem accepting my open support of the group that “wants to lead in veil” not necessarily on the question of their identity alone but that of transparency and practicality. I have a problem with this too though I have no answer other than saying that we should wait a bit and walk on temporarily accepting their RATIONALITY knowing it cannot go like this for a long time because of its OBVIOUS repercussions. There is no doubt they will have to expose themselves, when the time to reduce their theory in practice arrives sooner or later to attract as many Eritreans as possible to this cause with the language they understand in the reorganizational stage of the process after this initial introduction phase of their vitality is exhausted.

May then be the right time for their self-revelation? Is it possible for Eritreans to support the group in its veiled outfit beyond initial solidarity (the current stage)? Will this stalemate give the spoilers within the resistance a chance to obstruct the group’s progressive projection if it doesn’t dissolve rationally in the near future? I seriously don’t know the answer/s! We shall see but my choice at this point is again to continue hiking the challenge together knowing the wall in between will soon collapse as a matter of our collective request, necessity and survival! Let them experience the transition period within their circle for now and let us continue doing what we are doing together without being worried about their identity

In the mean time, I appreciate and thank OUR VOICE for academically disclosing their concept of the Eritrean Identity. Their broad codification of the subject matter in “Who is an Eritrean?” is intellectually rational and capable of evidently unifying the diversified population severely fragmented on the lines of the identity, religion and ethnicity specialy since independence. We have been tearing each other apart on these subjects naively serving the dictatorship we are trying to get rid of. The proof: the over-flooding political parties beyond the saturation point of extreme division that a society as small as our can sustain; the uncountable members of the civic society that keep on scratching the regime separately, the isolated individual activists like me that cannot do anything substantial by themselves, the total lack of transparency in-between, and of course the lack of clear direction such as the one that stopped our hard working activists who exposed the regime’s crimes against humanity with extraordinary dedication and admirable stamina from taking the matter to the next level of internationally based confrontation with the dictatorship.

This is not how we gained our independence Folks; and it will never bring tangible solution in this fight for the freedom of the Eritrean people. We need to respect the constitution on the subject matter keeping on amending the clause if necessary according to our experience like what civilized countries do to their immigration laws. We Eritreans must respect our society by respecting every Eritrean that deserves the citizenship by virtue of fulfilling one or more specifications hitherto brought by OUR VOICE. They did not create anything new here for we knew our DIVERSIFIED and CONTAMINATED society with other societies practically belong to any one of the specifications with the exception of numbers 6-8 in my opinion. Neither did they impose their codification on us beyond suggesting their view of IDENTITY only for discussion. They may have done number 6 as a result of their immigration experience in the west and the broadly defined 7 and 8 may be stretching it to the limit based on their extra liberal democratic mind without thinking of its sensitive nature. Performance and consistency are what matter here with one of the requirements for citizenship my dear people needless to say unity is impossible without accepting this reality. I just took it as something they released for dialogue and that is good for us because we want to openly and fearlessly discuss about anything pertaining our society.

OUR VOICE: “There are, in fact, some groups and identifiable persons who have tried to implicitly narrow the definition in such a way that it refers only to their own group or perhaps even to themselves personally – suggesting that they have the exclusive right and authority to decide on what happens to the country and people of Eritrea. We say that this should never be allowed to happen because it is divisive, grossly unfair and extremely dangerous.

Comment: I agree and I warn our people to be careful approaching this issue without complicating it beyond the mark into hurting our struggle with fragile unity. I believe our weakness in approaching this issue with extra-narrow nationalism and closed frame of mind was the main reason that damaged our trust for each other and the solid unity that brought us the independence. It was the relatively correct understanding of the Eritrean Identity of the era that allowed all of us to sacrifice for our independence under the struggle’s successful SELF-RELIANCE guideline while today’s convoluted understanding of it in this fight for freedom is what spaced us apart from each other rendering us divided sufferers of Afwerkism by intentional design of the evil dictator and our recklessness on the issue in discussion. Remember that Afwerki took advantage of our diversified unity to gain the independence through effective SELF-RELIANCE strategy but has been using the opposite method of breaking us apart by disturbing our fundamental concept of actuality for his power in this SELF-DESTRUCTIVE episode We need to take away this card from him by genuinely accepting our people as defined by our constitution. There is no justification for me rejecting Eritreans on very narrow definition of identification when I am living here in the States as full-fledged American after staying the first 5 years respecting the society and its constitution as a law abiding resident of the country. I am not saying we should follow their sociological arrangement but I found it relevant to this topic though America decided to do it because it is a nation of immigrants compared to Eritrea, the land of indigenous people. Simply, any person that fought in the struggle for independence directly or otherwise and suffered the consequence of Eritrawinet one way or another is equally Eritrean to a person claiming 100% citizenship by blood-line like me despite the claimers’ material composition.

To this effect, I want to conclude quoting something from my article FROM THE FORUM; June 2014;  where I dedicated the following portion to Brother Brhe saying that ‘There is a valid reason for our people contemplating identification outside their [circumstantial, psychological and/or physiological] roots. It is because we Eritreans have the tendency to make them feel foreigners: we call them Agame, Tegaru and whatever without considering the [destructive] consequence of this misplaced approach [on our unity, survival and freedom]. We inculcate doubts on their identity by [profiling] them as Ethiopians instead of embracing them as Eritreans. Check out this forum and see what I am talking about. We are too filthy and reckless to create unity between us. Ideas are not entertained as ideas in this bizarre experience but rather stigmatized with ethnicity and religion outside our inherent sociological circumference.

You see, “great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events and small minds discuss people”. To extend this relationship, minute minds personalize ideas and ridicule each other emotionally. The reason the dictator still has many followers, says Berhe, was because we hurt our unity through the tendency to [re]identify our people as foreigners, severely injuring their nationalistic confidence [even after they proved their Eritrawinet through direct participation in the struggle for independence]. They get insecure about their future to the point of remaining silent or supporting the regime for survival. We chase them away when they don’t agree with our views and accept them when they do. We insult, abuse and attack people that differ in ideas from us and marginalize them to entertain another identity because of fear. The terms WEYANE and AGAME have been used to divide Eritreans more than anything else and yet we still use them to [stigmatize] people with different ideas. Berhe thinks this was the fundamental problem to why many Eritreans look at the situation from distance or even contemplate siding with the regime as a sole alternate choice. We cannot do it unless we accept all citizens full heartedly and develop each other’s confidence through constructive engagement my dear Eritreans. You are destined to live together forever and this will not cut it for you. Please cool down and try to feel other views without bias if you may! Please stop calling each other divisive names that hurt your society and elongate the dictatorship. Don’t hurt your cause by personalizing ideas and abusing each other. Unity is only achievable by listening to each other and accommodating our differences and we should do this for our people. “

It is time to unify the fist through solid brotherhood and deliver the knockout punch as soon as possible. It is time to lift the confidence of our people marginalized by the concept of blood-line after they proved their identity in practice. Let us serve our interest instead of dictatorship by embracing each other. Thank you OUR VOICE and our brilliant commentators for spending your precious time on the cause of our freedom and democracy! Keep coming because it smells delicious!