Selam Saleh,

Some ten months ago, you posted a piece on my work. I did not respond. This time, however, I want to comment on your piece 'Warping History, Ethiopian Style: A futile attempt to desecrate Eritrean heroes' (June 26 visafric) which was a critique of my 'A truly tragic and fratricidal war' (June 20, Dagmawi's web site).

You are right I was 'no where to be found' during the last two difficult years. Your folks from Stanford, California, and Amsterdam, Holland, invited me to participate in their conferences on the conflict. I declined their invitations because the conferences, like the cyberspace warfare, were not going to produce any thing substantive. They are forums where individuals merely show off their combative and biting tongues.

What kind of constructive and productive discussions can be carried out with Eritreans of intellectual substance, like yourself, who have opted to support blindly a regime that mobilized its resources -material and human- for destructive purposes? What kind of communication can one have with those who canonize leaders like General Sebhat who, after defeat, would go to his people and 'warp' the truth with a bold face? The Eritrean intellectuals know that he lied to his own people when he said that Ethiopia failed 'in achieving its objectives of capturing Assab, overthrowing the Eritrean government and subjugating the Eritrean people'. They know these were not the objectives of Ethiopia. And yet, they applaud him. They pat him on the back. If the Eritrean scholars parrot what the regime claims are the causes of the war, how on earth can one discuss about solutions with them?

I concluded my previous piece with '... Walde-Ab Walde-Mariam all along said that Eritrea is Ethiopia...'. I should have indicated that he held this position during the 1940s and early 1950s, i.e. prior to his self-exile. You were absolutely right to pick on this innocuous mistake which you 'charitably' called 'intellectual dishonesty' (thank you for the charity). I stand corrected. However, nowhere did I say or insinuate that unity was the position that Wal Wal (as he preferred to abbreviate his name) held in 1991.

I also take issue with your attempt to draw an analogy between the dynamics of Malcolm X's political consciousness and the changing political positions of Wal Wal. The former blossomed from a young white-worshiper and street gangster to a white-hating nationalist, and finally, to the post-Mecca matured revolutionary. I do not see such dynamics in the case of the political consciousness of Wal Wal. By the 1940s, he had already a solid political maturity. Yet, in my opinion, both the African-American nationalist and the Eritrean icon had the kind of personal integrity that Nelson Mandela has had. Only in that sense would your analogy make some sense.

Wal Wal concurred with the Italian and British evaluation of the Eritrean economy. I do not think he had any reason to change his mind and claim Eritrea was bountiful. However, by changing his political position to an unqualified independence, he must have preferred Eritrea to go it alone, notwithstanding the economic exigencies. Until his self-exile in 1953, the position that he held most and the longest was merger of Eritrea with a federal and decentralized Ethiopia where Eritrea would enjoy autonomy [wushtawi harnet]. By 1951, as it became apparent that Haile Selassie was going to kill the federation, Wal Wal was getting very frustrated. According to the American Consul, Edward Mulcahy, Wal Wal ... launched upon the value of the Federation plan as a model for the future political development of the Ethiopian Empire, as the beginning of a trend which would counteract the unfortunate tendency by the Amhara to centralize the imperial power at Addis Ababa, especially since the time of Menelik II. The historic tendency among the people of the Ethiopian Plateau has always been toward decentralization, he said, a principle already existing which should make the modern concept of the federal state an easy one to expand in this part of the world. Worse still, the attempts on his life were endless. He survived seven and the eighth attempt could have come any time and he may not have survived it.

Incidentally, you were less than truthful to hold 'Ethiopian Unionists' responsible for those attempts. Eritrean Unionists, such as Tadla Bairu and Tadla Oqbit and their Eritrean agents, planned and executed the attempts. And you know that!

Abroad, the Muslim leaders of the nascent nationalist movement-- Ibrahim Sultan, Idris Mohammed Adem and Osman Saleh Sabe-- alienated Wal Wal. They quietly and nicely ignored his 'begging' (his own word) to participate in the struggle. The gap between their pan-Arab ideology and his idea of wushtawi harnet could not have been more unbridgeable. So could it have been the fact that he was less of an 'Arab Eritrean' that they avoided him? Maybe. But Tadla Bairu, who handed over Eritrea on a silver plate to Haile Selassie and who used to chide his nemesis, Wal Wal, for being a Tigrayan who had no place in the Eritrean political landscape, was no more an 'Arab Eritrean' and he was welcomed to the nationalist leadership.

I admire Wal Wal immensely. His integrity was unparalleled. For instance, in the 1940s, he used to canonize Emperor Yohannes and Ras Alula as heroes who did a lot of good things in Eritrea. The EPLF interviewers in 1988 tried to lure him to the glorification of Walde-Mikael and vilification of Alula. This was somewhat offensive to him since he regarded Alula highly so much so that he named his third child and first son after him. Alula, as you know, is not a name that is common north of the Mareb (Now Alula Walde-Ab lives out there with you in San Francisco. But you may not know him because he is an Ethiopian, not Eritrean.)

By raising his voice in protest, Wal Wal declined to participate in the Alula-bashing mania that has suffused and poisoned the Eritrean political climate. The man was honorable and, in my opinion, he was too honest for a politician.

Admiring him does not mean I am trying to steal your hero. Why would I need an icon? To the best of my knowledge, the Ethiopian leaders have a favorable image about him. They, too, do not try to steal your icon. They have plenty. In his ancestral home of Axum, though, he is chastised for converting to Protestantism. In short, no one wants to 'steal', 'desecrate' or 'destroy' your hero. You keep him. You need him. Why should you share heroes such as Alula with others?

You need your own icons. You need your own history. I completely agree with you that the tragedy of Una and She'eb, among others, will play crucial roles in the construction of Eritrean history and identity. In passing, I would like to ask you, in what mysterious way is Isaias's cluster bombing of primary school children in Makalle less savage than Mengistu's mass murder in She'eb? The two crimes are of equal gravity.

If the history you want to have is not there, you invent it. If what is there can not uplift your ego, you consciously forget it. That is exactly what your history chapters do in their silence regarding the role of the TPLF in clearing the ELF out of Eritrea or in defeating the Dergue in Naqfa during the Sixth Offensive (Operation 'Red Star'). Is it a lapse of memory? Not quite! You have merely chosen to bury it beneath your official discourse. It is a strategic amnesia! You frontally assault, with all your might, the unforgettable and dangerous popular memory of Yohannes and Alula, along with Gundet, Gura and Dogali. Wal Wal's icons, Yohannes and Alula, become foreign conquerors and enemies. Gundet, Gura and Dogali are transformed into historic sites where Eritrean heroic forefathers won major victories against the Egyptians and the Italians.

Such effective assault on factual and popular memory, active forgetfulness and the invention of a brand new history is necessary for the current, emergent and blossoming Eritrea. It gives her a timeless presence. Otherwise, the memory and myth of the 30-year-war is not old enough and seductive enough to make Eritreans feel good about themselves. Such political ethos is necessary for building your nation.

Inventing 'history' is easy. Inventing a Singapore out of the thin air, though, is an uphill battle. The pragmatic and visionary Wal Wal understood in the 1940s and early 1950s that Eritrea did not have the economic means to go it alone; and he resorted to the strategy of unity with a decentralized Ethiopia. For the EPLF, though, the 30-year-struggle deserved more than Wushtawi Harnet - independence. They pursued an unusual strategy of creating a viable economy based on an 'invincible' army that could force neighboring countries to accept Eritrea's economic terms.

When the Eritreans realized that the generous subsidies they were receiving from Ethiopia during the first seven years was not enough to keep their independent state going it alone, they decided to get a total free access to the Ethiopian economy by using their 'invincible' army. However, the defeat of their 'invincible' army has shattered that strategy, exonerating the Wal Wal of the 1940s and early 1950s.

In my opinion, concerned Eritreans need to reevaluate the whole meaning of independence and hark back to the 1940s and summon and revisit the Wal Wal strategy. This is not, and was not in my previous piece, an invitation for merger with Ethiopia, extended to Eritrea by Ethiopia and the Ethiopians. No. It was, and is, an opinion (not an invitation) of an individual who speaks his mind. Otherwise, Ethiopians in general do not long to see Eritrea's return; but for a decade, they have earnestly wished to see her stand on its own economic feet.

If Eritrea decides to stick it alone and cling to her dream of the Horn of Africa's Singapore, then all power to her! I sincerely wish Eritreans all the best because I do not cherish the suffering of my siblings across the Mareb. Furthermore, it is only when my Eritrean neighbors fill their bellies that the people of all the neighboring countries can live in peace. I do not giggle if a Niger or a Chad wants to be a Singapore. However, what is tickling about the Singaporization of Eritrea is that it required Ethiopia to be the dumping ground for its would-be finished products. That was why President Isaias was furious and hysterical when he learned that a handful of industries-- leather, cotton and cement- were built in Tigray. He unabashedly wailed that these industries were going to compete with those in Eritrea for the LIMITED MARKET IN NORTHERN ETHIOPIA!