A few days from now, Eritreans the world over will be celebrating Independence Day—a holiday marking the culmination of Eritrea’s 30 year armed struggle (plus 10 years of peaceful resistance) for the right to self-determination.  This most sacred day was achieved through the sacrifice of tens of thousands of Eritrea’s youth snuffed at the prime of their life, thousands more disabled and hundreds of thousands more exiled to strange lands and foreign tongues.

Between 1991 and 1997, Eritreans swore off war and annihilation and redirected our efforts to building a nation and along the way, like a child learning to crawl, stumbled here and hit furniture there.  The yearning of the people was to live in peace and security and to build a nation that its sacrificed children would be proud of.

In May 1998, we came to learn that the pounding and insatiable heart of the Ethiopian Empire, the beast we swore we had tamed, was camouflaged and mute but still sinister and still shrill.  For two years we were told Give it what it wants, and it will leave you alone.  When we gave, it asked for more.  Just a little bit more, give a little and it will leave you alone.  And if it doesn’t, surely the world will see through its camouflage and come to your rescue.  So we gave, and gave, and gave, and the wise men donned their special glasses and said, “what monster?”

There is no sugarcoating it: the events of the last six days have seen the Empire march on, hamlet to village to town, seemingly overwhelming the Eritrean Defense Forces. The Empire is back and unabashedly showing its ugliness and with it, everything we hated about the Empire: the looting, the lying, the arrogance, and the aggression, the violence and the violation.  The Evil Empire may explain its occupation of Barentu in all means of military sophistry but the grabbing of a land deep inside Eritrean territory is vengeance and vindictiveness.

The Empire is eastbound towards Zalambesa and if it continues to overwhelm the EDF, it has two choices.  It can declare victory, go home and tell the world that it has “reversed aggression”, taught Eritreans a lesson they will never forget, and resume where the negotiations left off, in good faith.  It can go on denying that it ever employed human wave attacks even when the world has condemned it for doing so.  Or it can posture as a winner, give in to its superpower pretension and dictate new terms of surrender.  The history of the Empire is that of lost opportunities and one cannot discount the likelihood that the Empire will opt for the latter.

Given the above, Eritrea’s primary goal is and should be to maintain the EDF intact.  In a war of attrition with an enemy that outnumbers you by 15:1, the idea is to deploy and redploy, to secure an area where you can inflict the most damage and redeploy again.  This means withdrawing from Barentu or Zalambesa.  (Eritreans who visited Eritrea recently tell me that Barentu is not the quaint dusty little town we knew but a vibrant city. Watch what the vindictive Empire does to Barentu.)

If the Empire cannot give up its ambitious habits and the international community, even in the face of naked aggression, is committed to studied indifference interrupted by rotten resolutions, Eritrea has only itself to rely on.  The only salvation is Eritrean unity and Eritrean Defense Forces.  Armed with the truth and the uncontested moral high ground of having to win back our stolen land, we shall turn the Empire’s celebration platform into a quagmire.  The answer to the question of "why are you fighting?" will no longer be "it is because we want to ensure that we have the right to make our case to keep our land that used to be administered by Ethiopia."  It will be a simple: "to get our land back.  Period"

As the old revolutionary song had it, “aga wegaHta dqdq iyu tSelmat” (it is pitch dark just before dawn).  It may get darker before dawn but there will be many, many Operation Sunrises until the Empire is uprooted and discarded.  This will take time so we should stop treating the war as a stock market and checking for an update every 5 minutes.  We are in for a long time.

Happy Independence Day

Saleh