Saturday, November 13, 2010

My new Book by the title "SEBAH" meaning Tomorrow is out in November 2010

To make an order please email to khabdu@gmail.com
መቅድም
“ጽባሕ”
እዚ ኣብዛ መጽሓፍ’ዚኣ ሰፊሩ ዘሎ ግጥምታት፡ ነቲ ኣብ ሃገርና ዘሎ ውድዓዊ ኩነታት ናብ ቅድሚት ብምምጻእ፡ ነቶም ብፍላጥ ኮነ ብየዋህነት ዚድግፉዎን ዚሕለቑሉን ኣብ ወጻኢ ዚቕመጡ ኤርትራውያን ከኣ ብምልላይ፡ ነቓፊ ርእይቶን ተግሳጽን ምዕዶን ዚህብ ኮይኑ ብውሕሉል ቃላት እተነድቀ መልእኽቲ ኢዩ።

እዚ ግጥምታ’ዚ፡ እተፈላለየ ኣርእስቲ ዝሓዘ ኾይኑ፡ ገለ ብኣስተንትኖኣዊ፡ ገለ ድማ ብመዘናግዒ፡ ገለ ኸኣ ብምሁራዊ መገዲ ተጻሒፉ ኣሎ።

ፍቕሪ ኣደ፡ ፍቕሪ ማሕብራዊ ናብራን ዕርክነትን፡ ፍቕሪ ሃገርን ህዝብን፡ ከምኡ’ውን ወድሰብ ዚጓነፎ እተፈላለየ ሽግራትን ብድሆታትን ብመልክዕ ግጥሚ ቀሪቡ ኣሎ። ከምዚ ኪኸውን ከሎ፡ እቲ ዘንብብ መታን ከይስልችዎ ወይ ከየድክሞ ብማለት፡ ኣብ መንጎ ወይ መጠረስታ ነፍስወከፍ ግጥሚ፡ ምስቲ ኣርእስቲ ዚሳነ ይኹን ዘይሳነ ስእልታትን ቅርጽታትን ተወሲኹዎ ኣሎ። እቲ ዘንብብ ሰብ፡ ነቲ ኣሳእል ከም ድላዩ ገይሩ ክትርጉሞ መሰሉ ኢዩ።

ግጥሚ ወይ መዝሙር፡ ናይ ሙዚቃ መሳርያ ዘየድልዮ ነፍሱ ዝኸኣለ ሙዚቃ ኢዩ። ካብ ኩሉ ዝለዓለ ግን፡ እቲ ብተምሳላትን ምሳሌታትን ዚህቦ መልእኽታት ዓቢ ኢዩ።

ኣብዚ ዘለናዮ እዋን፡ ሃገርና ኤርትራ ኣብ ክንዲ ነጻነት፡ ባርነት ዚረኣየላ ሃገር ብምዃና፡ ኩሉ መንእሰይ ጠንጢኑዋ ንወጻኢ ይኸይድ ኣሎ። ገለን ዕድል ዝረኸበ ኣብ ቲ ዚደልዮ ሃገር ኪበጽሕ ከሎ፡ ገለን ድማ ኣብ ፈቐዶ ምድረበዳን ኣጻምእን ዱርን ባሕርታትን ኣኽራናትን ግዳይ ጥምየትን ዕርቃንን ጽምእን ሞትን ኮይኑ ይርከብ ኣሎ።

እዚ ኸምዚ ኢሉ ኸሎ ግን፡ ገለ ደም ዘይብሎም ኣብ ውሽጢ ሃገርን ኣብ ወጻእን ዚቕመጡ ኤርትራውያን መንእሰያትን ሽማግለታትን ኣዴታትን ነቲ ገፋዒ መንግስቲ ኪድግፉን ኪሕለቑሉን ይረኣዩ ኣለዉ። እምበኣር ሓደ ገጽታ ናይቲ ግጥሚ ድማ ነዞም ኣብ ‘መቓብር ደቆም’ ኪስዕስዑ ነውሪ ወይ ገበን ኮይኑ ዘይስምዖም ባእታታት ናብ ልቦም ዚምለሱሉ ምዕዶ ንምሃብ ዝዓለመ ኢዩ።

ህዝቢ ኤርትራ በዚ ዘሕልፎ ዘሎ መከራን ስቓይን ስደትን፡ ኪብከየሉ ዚግባእ ህዝቢ ኢዩ። ሓደ ናይ ጓሂኻን ኣስተንትኖኻን መግለጺ ድማ ግጥሚ ኢዩ። ኣብዚ እዋን’ዚ ብህዝቢ ኤርትራ ዘይሓዝን ሰብ እንተ ደኣ ኣሎ፡ ኤርትራውነቱ ኣጠራጣሪ ኢዩ።

ኣማኑኤል ሳህለ (ሓምለ 2010)

Thursday, September 02, 2010

The Anatomy of a Tyrant

Eripost
By Amanuel Sahle
September 02, 2010

How long do tyrants live provided they are not struck by a lightening rod from the blue or a clogged vein near the heart? Why is it that the gods seem to be always siding with them? The more the masses pray and implore the All-mighty for their sudden death, the more these rascals stay alive to celebrate their successive birthdays. The harder the sharpshooter trains abroad to cut their lives short and deliver the people from serfdom, the more he misses.



Some become so decrepit that they have to finally be dragged away forcefully by the feet from the office. Others continue to rule from their terminal-case wards in foreign hospitals. Many cling to power until they get blind and paralyzed, unable to sign papers for more military aid including declaration of wars on unsuspecting neighbors. And still others keep on ruling after death, haunting long freed prisoners and dispirited old rivals.



They would build pyramids, if they could, to be buried inside along with their minions and sycophants for an everlasting dictatorship in other planets. By the way, are there tyrants in outer space? Why not, why do you think they invented the Star Wars?



How do tyrants come to this unlucky world of ours? Are they preordained to appear from time to time in order to punish us for our sins? Saddam recited from the Koran before he went down the shaft to his death. Portugal's Salazar must have struggled with his Ave Maria Ora pro nobis……before he breathed his last (he thought he was still in power long before they had deposed him). Mussolini believed he was a reincarnation of Augustus Caesar even when he was con il culo per terra (had kissed his a.. goodbye). Mao had himself portrayed as a savior with a flowing gown (although during his dictatorship millions perished following a famine of biblical proportion). There is no doubt that the Ayatollah Khomeini is now in heaven. Wasn’t he, after all, fighting all his life against the American Sheitan!



All tyrants, when they die, think they will go to heaven because deep inside they are persuaded that they come to fulfill a divine mission on earth. That’s the scariest thing about them. They leave you down in hell which they created for you, and rise to heaven themselves. That's unfair. And you know what? Some people believe it and erect monuments for them, a case of masochism in which you get lashed and flailed alive by your master and still ask for more, because it feels so good. Well, this shouldn’t surprise us unduly, for people have been worshiping bloodthirsty gods from time immemorial, such as Dagon (by the Philistines) and Kali (by the Hindus). Could our tyrants be incarnations of these gods of darkness?



It is said that a child is born in this world every second. Among these, a tyrant passes unnoticed and undetected, for nobody knows what the DNA of child tyrants looks like. But one thing is for sure, their DNA contains a substance that boosts the survival instinct. For how is it then possible that they are always on the car next to the one that, just two seconds ago, has been blown up into smithereens; or are sleeping in a room next to the one where the assassin has just arrived with his dagger shimmering in the dark?



Yet, they are born like any other child, after nine months. They cry to get their first gulp of oxygen (they will make many cry for lack of justice), they smile, they giggle, they bawl for milk (probably louder than others). And then they grow up (most of the time dissatisfied and angry), look for loopholes in the written and unwritten laws of society, search for holes in the social fabric, sniff for power and might everywhere, kill their rivals, provide political and social justifications for their arbitrary actions, and create minions around them. Viva il Duce!!



Now to come to the nine-life metaphor. They say that cats have nine chances to come back from the dead. Feline resurrection, if you will. When you bash a cat with a baseball bat (because it ate up your birthday pizza) and it is lying lifeless on the ground with some of the pizza sauce oozing from its snout, you just toss it into the garbage can and go to the nearest pizza house to order for more. On your way back home, you get curious and you want to check if the beast has really given up the ghost. You lift the lid…What? It is not there! Where the hell did it go? Well, my dear friend, have you forgotten that it has eight more lives to go? So brace yourself for eight more disappearing pizzas followed by eight more lightening blows with your baseball bat before you can call it a day. Good riddance! And by the way, happy birthday! (and RIP for the cat).



Getting rid of tyrants is however not that much easy, for their nine lives are infused and configured into them in such a way as to remain elusive and enigmatic in front of the actions and machinations of ordinary mortals.



How many coups and putsches have been aborted and averted before they could unseat the monster. How many plotters have been unmasked and betrayed before they could poison or ambush the ogre. Every plot discovered made the tyrant more monstrous. Every attempt at his life made him more beastly. These legitimate measures of doing away with him were however, according to the mass media under his supervision, nothing else but acts of treachery and treason. Mind you, not directed against him, but against the nation! Against the people! Against the state!



The tyrant incarnates the nation and its spirit every time his life is put in danger or his power begins to slip away from his hands. But in the event that the country loses a war that he had himself instigated and he is therefore forced to run for dear life, he never hesitates to dissociate himself from the nation, the state and the people (who 'betrayed' him), and remembers an old thug like him, across the border, who would welcome him and protect him in his hours of need. Most tyrants are smart enough to make friends with rogue leaders while in power.



Well, in such a hectic situation, a tyrant never forgets to take with him that famous bag of money filled to the brim with US dollars and gold slabs (on top of the millions of dollars he had already socked in foreign banks)! Good bye my beloved country, I will miss you so much!



Horror of horrors, some people begin to miss him! Don’t blame them. They have been tossed out of the frying pan into the fire. For a tyrant always makes sure that the country collapsed after him. He leaves it to greedy and ravenous politicians and bloodthirsty warlords who had been already in the making under his conniving eyes. That's another strategy he uses to ensure his survival to fight yet another day if he can.



A country that has been ruled with the motto of après moi le déluge will hardly find the energy or the political will to have the tyrant arrested and indicted for trial. Thus, he is left to live happily ever after in exile. And to add insult to injury he embarks on writing his memoire! Why not, he can sell it to some Hollywood film makers and make more money.



Now, let us see how a tyrant keeps his nine lives in order. Here are some of the rules to follow (always keep Eritrea in mind):

1. Ruthlessness (he shows no mercy even to his own mother, hoping she is still alive)

2. Decisiveness (if he is not quick, he is dead or in Ira-Iro)

3. Ability to lie (he sublimates it into a national art with the minister of information as curator)

4. Ability to make a volt-face in moments of stress or panic (confusing the UN in the process)

5. Divide and rule (he uses everything to divide, including his family or even himself)

6. Always find an enemy or invent one (he tries America, and it always works)

7. Invest heavily on security (he lets everybody spy on everybody else as a national pastime)

8. Be always suspicious (he doesn’t trust even his own shadow, how much more that of his wife)

9. Invest on propaganda (he makes sure to convince the masses that the sun rises in the west, and that it will stop rising altogether when he dies)



The tyrant, having all these in his repertoire, sits back and begins to rule. But just take these off one by one and he, to your astonishment, will still survive as long as the last one, which is Propaganda, is in his hands. Have you heard about the Minister of Information during the Iraq war? In fact, the propaganda card is so vital that if it somehow loses its function, it can cause the cat to take its final trip to heaven. Anyway, be always cautious, for sometimes the tyrant may play dead and go for attack when you least expect him.



But how did the tyrant get there in the first place? Are tyrants born or made? Many are born but few are chosen (or made). They are chosen by the very people that eventually become their victims. The tyrant hears the collective subconscious distress of the people calling him to save them from their own selves, and he gets the message and runs for the rescue, and what's more, he feels he is doing what the All-mighty has bidden him to do.



There is a saying which goes like this: a man is made when a man is needed. Take a household whose breadwinner, the husband, has failed to fulfill his duties. What do you think will happen next? Since a man is needed, the woman becomes a man and takes his position. What happened? A vacuum has been created in the household, a vacuum to be filled only by a man. Is there a man in the house? The woman comes and takes the responsibility upon herself. In the absence of a man, she becomes a man. So the woman 'wears the pants' as it were, and the household, contrary to social norms, is now led by a female.



What if she is not ready? Then someone from the children (a boy or a girl) comes forward to fill the vacuum. In the absence of a man, the child becomes a man. And the family continues to lead a normal life. It will not break down just because a vacuum is created.



In a similar way, there must be something wrong with a people of a given country (don’t exclude ours) for the tyrant to come to roost. Some can be enumerated thus:

a. Malaise following successive colonial rule which creates lack of confidence in the people in managing their affairs.

b. Ethnic and regional estrangement encouraged by colonial rulers to spread suspicion and mistrust.

c. Opportunism, a result of too much contact with successive colonial masters in order to get to the top at the cost of your brothers

d. Destruction of homegrown democratic culture (and social fabric) by successive colonial masters which results in bringing the people's unruly nature to the fore, etc…..

e. Some kind of historical DNA that makes certain people unmanageable (for example, the temperamental Latin race as compared with the more cool-headed Nordic or Anglo-Saxon race)

f. Some unforeseen variables, including new developments in the neighboring countries.

g. And finally, for the immediate cause, a war, an economic depression or a social upheaval of sorts



The above can provide a very promising hunting ground for any tyrant on the making. What more could a misfit with a dissatisfied family background and with a smoldering grudge in his heart ask to embark on his mission to make the lives of so many so miserable for so long a time. The seed (or tare) has already fallen onto a propitious terrain! The seed of destruction and chaos!



But where exactly, metaphysically speaking, does the tyrant come from? What are the quintessential causes for his appearance?



According to the theory of ideas, the abstract precedes the tangible. In this case, tyranny precedes the creation of a tyrant. I think Plato's philosophy of ideas and forms could explain it better if I have understood it correctly:



Tyranny is a concept which exists in the world of ideas, the abstract or metaphysical world. The tyrant, however, is a form of that idea and lives in the contingent world. To give some more examples: dog-ness is from the abstract world, while dog is from the material world. The reality of man was created long before man was formed in this world, i.e., man-ness preceded man. Cat-ness preceded the domestic cat. Cow-ness preceded the farm cow.



From the above we can deduce that tyranny exists even without tyrants. What the tyrants do is simply to incarnate tyranny and give it form. If the universe were to be destroyed one day, all things would keep on existing in the world of ideas (not in the world of forms). The world of ideas is therefore eternal, while the world of forms is temporal. Tyranny is eternal, while tyrants (thank God) are ephemeral.



When, therefore, the collective consciousness of a given people is configured in such a way that there appears a slot or a gap for a tyrant to fit in, then the tyrant-on-the-making simply fills the vacuum. In other words, the people had the tyrant coming all the time. For they have paved the way for his appearance.



Who are then the minions, the sycophants and bootlickers who cater to his every whim? These are also in their turn incarnations of ignominy that go to fill the slots of shame and degradation created by the appearance of the tyrant. Any bootlicker is therefore a palpable form of the idea of disgrace and abjectness.



You may kill the tyrant, but tyranny continues to exist in the world of ideas to come back in flesh and blood in its own good time. You may kill the minions, but the ideas of disgrace and shame will continue in the metaphysical world.



The right way to kill tyrants is therefore to kill the idea of tyranny. But since ideas are immortal, the only way to get rid of negative ideas is to fight them with yet stronger positive ideas. Can these be destroyed? Nay, they simply go into hiding. For ideas are neither created nor destroyed, but simply change forms (just like energy).



Anyway, this is too much to ask of a people who are running out of tears from injustices perpetrated by a tyrant, and therefore, to stop the misery and enable the people to breathe once more, the tyrant has to be removed along with his minions!



But the people should always keep in mind that unless they fight the idea of tyranny with a stronger idea of democracy, simply killing the rogue can never be a solution. Would-be tyrants along with their minions will always be waiting in queue to fill unattended vacuums created by the imperfections and folly of humankind.



eripost@awate.com

public invitation for a seminar in Göteborg

Eritrean -Swedish organization for democracy and justice in Goteborg is inviting the public to attend a seminar with invited guests Amanuel Sahle and Khaled Abdu.
The invited guest will brief us about their journey to the Eritrean refugee camps in Ethiopia and about the national conference.

when: Saturday 4th of September 2010 at 15:00

where: Beväringsgatan no. 9

wellcome all!!!


ህዝባዊ መጸዋዕታ ንተቀማጢ የቶቦርን ከባቢኣን


ንዕለት 4 መስከረም 2010፣ አብ ከተማ የቶቦሪ አቶ አማኒኢል ሳህለን አቶ ካልድ ዓብዱን፣ ብዛዕባ ኣብ ዝሓለፈ ወርሒ አብ ኢትዮጵያ ብምብጻሕን ናብ ዝተፈላለዩ መዓከር ስደተኛታት ኤርትራውያን ዑደት ብምግባር ዝተዓዘብዎን፣ ብዛዕባ ሃገራዊ ዋዕላ ከመይ ከምዝመስል፣ ሓፈሻዊ ስእሊ ክህቡና ስለዝኾኑ ኩሉ ኤርትራዊ ኣብቲ ተዳልዩ ዘሎ ቦታ ብምምጻእ፣ ነጻ ናይ ሓሳባት ምልውዋጥን ዘለኩም ሕቶታት ከተቅርቡ ኤርትራዊ ጥርናፈ ንፍትሕን ዲሞክራስን አብ የቶቦሪ ብኽብሪ ይዕድም::


ግዜ: ዕለተ ቀዳም 4 መስከረም 2010 ሰዓት 15:00 (4 september 2010)
ኣድራሻ: አብ Beväringsgatan ቁጽሪ 9