Liberation: The Long Path to Insanity

Weeks have now elapsed since the report of the Monitoring Group to the UN Security Council, which virtually left President Issias’ fiasco naked, has become public. As cold and sinister as it is, the shock at what his government had been plotting all along is chilling.  The world is disgusted. “Insane or not, Afwerki remains in charge and as long as he is, the Eritrean regime is likely to remain the North Korea of Africa; an international pariah state pursuing a lunatic foreign policy and a disastrous domestic one,” [1] South Africa’s Daily Maverick underline. The East African, syndicate of Kenya’s influential Newspaper, The Nation, called President Issias  “The bad boy of the Horn of Africa.” [2]

The Report has indeed chilling revelations in details. With no overstatement, the devil has died in the detail. The modus operandi detailed in the report is of a mafia, not of a state- as exactly the report has put it. In the eye of the world, notoriety has now superseded the newly discovered gold as Eritrea’s signature. Unfortunately, the stigma is here to live with us for some time to come.
As far as President Issias is concerned, his credibility, if there were little some people doubt he had, as both a person and a leader, has completely evaporated. Nothing kills second chance like disgust and the West never repossesses what it had dispossessed. Neither Saddam Hussein nor Gaddafi rebounded even after years of sanctions mellowed them down.  

With all fairness, the revulsion that the world is feeling is well justified. Michaela Wrong wrote on Financial Times that “The individual examples are bad enough. Confirmation that Eritrean president Isaias Afewerki’s regime last January dispatched a commando unit with orders to explode bombs in neighboring Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa to coincide with an African Union summit is particularly shocking. Were the attacks to have succeeded the death toll would have been horrendous.” [3]  How did Eritrea get into keep sliding into such a mess?

Perhaps, other than the Eritrean regimes supporters, nobody in the aftermath of the UN recent debacle with Eritrea and Somalia got it more wrong than Michaela Wrong. According to her, double-dealing by the international community, mainly the West, in failing to force Ethiopia to the Border Commission’s ruling, has created a reclusive state that forced President Issias to behave the way he does. She said,

“Like most states that declare they do not give a fig for world opinion, Eritrea craves external validation. For Eritreans, who have never forgotten that the UN turned a blind eye to Emperor Haile Selassie’s illegal annexation of their nation, it fits all too neatly into a historic pattern of western double-dealing.” [4]

If this was the case, why did Isaias fought with Yemen when there were no any double-dealing and border conflict with Ethiopia? Why was he involved in the internal affairs of Sudan by arming this and that faction which he can put his hands on? Soon after Eritrea’s flag was independently hoisted, why did Isaias want to chase all Western powers out of the Great Lakes region? What could justify all that?  
Instead, the problem is rooted both in the leader’s individual mind, the dynamism that brought him to power, the authority he has wielded. Now, let us make it simple for our own sake. If you are lucky enough to be a citizen of a nation which is properly run and managed, you have layers of institutions. At the center of the institution, there are rules, regulations and procedures. Through these blankets, decisions are filtered; balance is kept; checks are made and; conflicts are placated. At the head of these institutions lie people - at whose core are nature, nurture, knowledge and experience. Even so, countries like these can be locked in a political gridlock to resolve issues of great consequence.

Still some countries, with no or nominal institutions, are governed by a group of men who are prudent and with little margin of however less sensitivity. Obvious it may not be, they yield a government like, let us say, Syria. They give you a livable state minus democracy in a better year, and “tender” killing when time is rough. Rarely, you have where historical situation of a nation, probably creates, and help an emotionally challenged man drift his way to power.

They say what you do is what you know and how you act is how you behave. There is a simple observable facts that are true to human behavior  -we are obsessed with not only what we love to do but also what we are skilled to do. In other words, what we are able to do govern how we view and explain the world. As such, the world is an allegory of our skills and experiences, whichever is stronger in us. As toddlers, the world is explained and understood as a fun game. As gown ups and professionals, teachers imagine the world as a school, and nations as classes; CEOs explain the world as a corporate entity and want to mirror government after their management style, team and hierarchy. Mitt Romney, Republican Presidential hopeful and former Massachusetts Governor, for instance, loves to tout to voters  his credential as CEO of Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Bain & Company more than anything he did and know. He recently argued that “it would be helpful if at least one of the people who’s running in the Republican field had extensive experience in the private sector, in small business, in big business, working with the economy. Because frankly, not just solving the near term problems of unemployment, people not getting checks, is going to require someone with that experience, but also long term.” [5]

So what is the skill and experience of President Issias? It is simply manipulation. Obviously and without any intent of disparaging, he has no any professional experience outside leading a guerilla movement. Again, this is not by any means to belittle such an experience and tasting roles, as the most important issue lies in the very causes and achievements of the movements themselves. But there is this nasty, naked fact about all movements -  99.9 percent of such movements have failed to deliver either initial result, which is liberation, or final and cumulative results – liberation and transformation to independent democratic and prosperous state. In Africa alone, to mention few, Mau Mau in Kenya, National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) in Angola, Zimbabwe African People's Union, Mozambican Liberation Front ( FRELIMO), Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO), South-West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) in Namibia Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, helped liberate their respective nations or previous dictatorial regimes only to replace them with an autocracy.  Which African  movement that is not mentioned here do you envy?

In Asia, what all, Northern Alliance  and Taliban in Afghanistan, Khmer Rouge in Cambodia,  Kurdistan Workers Party in Turkey,  Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor in East-Timor, Pathet Lao in Laos, Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in Philippines,  Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers)  in Sri Lanka, Lashkar-e-Toiba  in Pakistan, United Liberation Front of Asom in Bangladesh, brought is misery and total failure.

Neither were those movements in Latin America any better or different by any standard. Most liberation movements are ironies. The cruel irony in Eritrea’s case is that the leader who embarked early in his tender years to liberate his people is its last mental causality who is devouring his people like a work of pesticide.

This being the case, one should note that, Eritrea’s Liberation Movement, by any measure is admirable. It was able to survive the pressure from successive Ethiopian regimes, built a strong battle-hardened selfless volunteer army, waged a three-decade war of attrition, and built a mini economy, to finally achieve independence+. Parallel to this, it survived internal strife that shaped the man we now call President. By many account, President Issias came to power with two conflicting faces.

On one hand, he was portraying himself, to both those who were close to him and the entire combatants as a selfless revolutionary who was dedicated more to the cause than power. This was intended to harness the love, sympathy, support and protection of the majority while at the same time he was checking potential opponents within the EPLF by organizing clandestine network. While this has helped him to generate and propagate legend, which is a powerful propeller to dictatorship, as it has been demonstrated in other nation’s instances, his clandestine network was key in allowing him to exercise and use manipulations as a powerful weapon.

On the other hand, as the face of the militarily ever strengthening movement, Issias was presenting himself, to the external world near and far, as a powerful commander with huge talent and vision. While most of his comrades in the leadership were formulating and executing the strategy and plans of the organization risking their lives, he was selling the achievements as primarily his and secondary as that of the organization’s. Citing the work of three researchers led by Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley, which was published in the journal Psychological Review, John Cloud wrote in Time Magazine that the researchers “found that Powerful people become more willing to take credit for accomplishments they didn't achieve. They also begin to see the world around them in ‘more automatic, simplistic ways’."6 And as this resonated, the legend, charisma and ego were also in full interplay,  positioning the Man for a long haul to abyss – Madness. According to the psychologists John Cloud quoted in his Time Magazine article, The Psychology of Dictatorship: Why Gaddafi Clings to Power, there are interesting physiological and hormonal changes that occur in the brain and body when one usurps absolute power. Figure the rest for yourself here: http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/26/the-psychology-of-dictatorship-why-gaddafi-clings-to-power/

Footnotes

[1] SIMON ALLISON, Eritrea: Africa's North Korea, complete with unhinged president, http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2011-08-01-eritrea-africas-north-korea-complete-with-unhinged-president (August 2011)
[2] CHRISTINE MUNGAI, The bad boy of the Horn of Africa: How Eritrea’s strongman uses Kenya as a terror finance hub, http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/How+Eritrea+strongman+uses+Kenya+as+a+terror+finance+hub/-/2558/1214848/-/ushybvz/-/August 7 2011)
[3] MICHELA WRONG, How double-dealing built a pariah state, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/063c10ce-be1b-11e0-bee9-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1Uac8Nk6e (August 3, 2011)
[4] ibid.
[5] FREDERICK E. ALLEN, Should Government Be Run Like a Business?, Forbes.com, http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/03/01/should-government-be-run-like-a-business/  (March 2011)
[6] John Cloud, The Psychology of Dictatorship: Why Gaddafi Clings to Power, http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/26/the-psychology-of-dictatorship-why-gaddafi-clings-to-power/ (Thursday, May 26, 2011)

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