Ezana Sehay 6/5/2015

Few days ago, I watched a two part documentary prepared by and aired on EBC [Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation] on the situations of Eritreans as told by Eritreans themselves. It is an informative, educational and heart wrenching piece of work and I recommend everyone to check it out.

It is hardly a secret, but the documentary makes it plain that Eritrea has become an abomination. In fact some describe Isayas’s fiefdom as being without a parallel in contemporary Africa.

In the early 1990s, Eritrea was a nation ushered by the West in to the group of promising countries led by new generation of far sighted leaders. All which explained why hopes were high for the people of Eritrea.

But since then, the leader of the country, Isayas Afeworki, has turned his back on everyone including his people. The euphoria that greeted independence reflected the nation’s escape from a walled-in world. But Isayas has since built anew wall and Eritreans are on the wrong side of it.

What he has done is using carnage and tyranny, established and maintained despotism in the name “self reliance and nationalism”. Thus Eritrea rapidly slid from a promising proto-democracy in to despotism. And that despotism at home became adventurism abroad with catastrophic consequences: an economy that is failing at every level, the breakdown of basic social structures and a demographic decline.

As far as its external image is concerned; Eritrea is, cut off from the world of political and financial mainstream starved for investment and treated as a pariah, hardly a fitting source of pride.

The question on everyone’s mind is how in the heck does this guy [Isayas] get away with it? Or more appropriately how is that he managed to survive this long?

According to the theory political science, the main sources of power are: force, resource and information. In Eritrea all these are the domains of PFDJ [the ruling party]. Of the three Isayas’s most valuable tool of control is information. i.e., the art of Misinformation to be precise

The culture of disinformation of events which belies the culture of deception, agitprop and paranoia are upon which Isayas relies to secure his power.

To put it another way, Isayas Afeworki, the man who perfectly personifies the despotic, twisted psyche of the architect of tyranny, depends on the very absurdity of such conceits to manage his affaires.

Some say isayas’s war on truth didn’t start after independence, but years, if not decades earlier. It is just, now he has perfected it. Isayas’s information- war like those fought by demagogues before him is fought using Machiavellian tactics that erase truth, instill paranoia, exhaust population and eradicate hope.

Isayas understands that a population that is constantly force-fed radical propaganda and dizzying special effects that inform conspiracy narratives becomes a population that succumbs   – exhausted – to that avalanche of lies, mindlessly reiterating the state’s talking points, or one so cowed by the tyranny of that messaging and its reach that believes nothing at all, and becomes paralyzed with fear.

Either way Isayas or his Moonies, the authors of such political fiction, realize the results desired – silencing what few independent thinkers may exist by implied threat, or manufacturing consent in the enervated masses.

As such the challenge faced by the Eritrean people is to expose the villainess nature of the Isayas regime, confront and arrest the scourge it has wrought on them.

Only when Eritreans fight this war on its terms, and work to ensure that the people living under isayas’s heel are afforded unfettered access to truth, encouraged and empowered to act and participate in their polity and protected from harm should they choose to do so, will they begin to win that war.

To that end it is imperative that Eritrean political and civic societies in the Diaspora and friends of Eritrea work to undermine isayas’s grip on the population at home by increasing the avail of true and credible and information inside the country using all available means.