The National Conference: Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy

…but it was last Saturday’s wedding at church that brought the reality of what I love about weddings… everyone going out of their way to make the occasion a special one for the family in question… There were a lot of flaws to the wedding I was at last Saturday… but at the end of the evening when all us old friends were standing outside the banqueting hall, catching up on the news of our children and parents…  reflecting on how far and wide we have spread from the close knit groupie we used to be just a few years ago… as we reminisced on the wedding ceremonies we used to have back when we were getting married… all that was all too apparent was, the fact that this indeed was a nice wiray  an opportunity to see and catch up with each other…an opportunity for the community to come together and affirm each other… an opportunity for us to see (and in the case of last Saturday it was to physically see… as the couple were Sunday School children not that long ago!) how far we have come from the days when we were planning our own weddings and an opportunity to look into the future and realise that it indeed wouldn’t be that long before we would be planning the wedding of the children we were pushing around in buggies at the weddings of few years back…a wedding does bring a community together and it does strand it tighter… 

This is precisely why I get disappointed when people talk about the National Conference, in exactly the same terms that my friends and I talked about the wedding last Saturday… it was a good occasion for people to get together and meet each other… people were impressed by how cordial they were with each other… and some were even surprised (pleasantly) that there were no walk outs (once we got over Benyam)…, fist fights or, God forbid, flying chairs! 

 … I think that is a credit to the culture that the Democratic Alliance cultivated over the years... and now I fear that it may have become a victim of its own success… the acronym (the letters that embody the ‘unity’) have taken a life all of its own and require a carefully choreographed series of moves to maintain it in shape and in place… the main casualty is progress… we can’t progress anything and maintain the clumsily cobbled alliance…and so all we are reduced to accomplish is the recreation of the warm, fuzzy feeling that one can get from an Eritrean wedding at a community hall in almost any capital (or major city) the world over! 

In 2008 the Alliance agreed that there needs to be a wide national conference that brings all Eritrean democratic forces to work together to bring about the change that continues to elude us. In 2009 the Alliance worked hard and confirmed the need to do so imminently… in 2010 the Alliance convened a large conference and confirmed the exact same thing… now even the titles of the press statements are sounding strange (the ever so articulate assenna was reduced to saying something like;  ‘ … sefiH hagerawi waela dhri Amet Sefih waela kigeber wesinu…. The national conference agreed to convene a national conference) … 

Few months ago when some of us were arguing that the conference needs to work on ensuring alliances within the Alliance and its immediate circles and that this could be achieved with a lot of good will from all sides and some hard work from the Alliance… people were telling me that this was a view that didn’t take into account the gravity of the urgent situation in Eritrea… the fact that an entire generation of young people is being driven into exile at a rate that is unprecedented, and the conference will have to be convened to put a stop to all that, I didn’t see how…but there is little you can say in those situations… and now 10 days and over three  hundred committed people later I am told… we will have to do the rescuing in a year’s time? …. It really was better when it was worse! 

…and it was worse at points… there wasn’t much said about the conference whilst it was proceeding… my paltalk friends were doing their level best trying to tell us how well things were progressing (all the way from Addis!)… without telling us which direction things were progressing to…. And then there was the Asenna interview with someone who was clearly not happy with that direction…all the time the official statement kept telling us to ‘watch this space!’ … (I won’t mention the ‘spot the missing flag’ quest at meskerem.net) … 

But personally the most worrying moment was when RSADO’s head of communication, Yasin Mohamed Abdela, told Sudan Tribune that since …all but one of the opposition parties at the conference were signatories to the military front;  “The conference is expected to pass common stance on when, how to collectively launch military attacks to depose the current dictatorial rule…” I just couldn’t help but imagine my friends at paltalk, who are all too used to bazookaing each other across chat rooms; hammering a military strategy to topple PFDJ…enough to give me nightmares, had I managed any sleep last week (but the same pals kept me up all night with their endless ‘reportage’ that told us that everyone is fine and discussions were ongoing, whilst, carefully avoiding the actual items of discussion…) still deep down I was rather hoping that these discussions would nudge the Alliance to take a concrete  step somewhere… when the declarations came out yesterday and the most topical item was the holding of a conference identical to what the current  conference was supposed to have been…the absurdities were such that … much like asenna, Gedab were also finding it difficult to report on the event…and ended up saying; … 330 participants representing all Eritrean social segments from all over the world attended the conference…resolved to hold an all inclusive national conference within a year. 

As I was reflecting on these issues… I read somewhere that the conference should be commended for drawing attention to the ‘existence’ of the Eritrean resistance… but that attention we drew to ourselves comes at an excruciating price of the damage we did to each other in the process… much like the sufferers of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (a relatively uncommon illness that involves the inducing, exaggeration or fabrication of illnesses in a child by a parent/caregiver; where typically, the perpetrator feels satisfied by gaining the attention and sympathy)  the Eritrean Democratic Alliance, the organisations and individuals in its immediate circle inflicted incalculable damage to the resistance in a bid to draw some attention to the resistance…In August 2009… the Alliance had a year to galvanise support… hammer out stronger alliances… iron out differences… reconcile disputes and emerge into a conference that could have made a difference to the Eritrean resistance... in August 2010 the Alliance has the same length of time to heal the self inflicted damage and then do all of the above to emerge at the National Conference 2011… I wish the 53 brave men and women all the best in accomplishing this frighteningly tall order they have committed to undertaking.