Category: Articles
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Compulsory Service in Eritrea: The President’s Psychological Shadows and Major National Tasks
Authored by: Abdu Fagir posted by awatestaff On July 12, 2025, the graduation ceremony for the 37th batch of national service was held at the famous Sawa military camp. As usual, the ceremony was attended by Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, who has attended all previous graduations, senior government officials, leaders of the People’s Front for
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Open Letter to the Organizers of the August 30, 2025 meeting.
A meeting is planned for August 30, 2025, to form a Registration and Election Commission with the objective of electing a legitimate global representative body to represent justice-seeking Eritreans in the Diaspora. Dear Members of the August 30, 2025 Organizing Committee: I understand you have planned a meeting on August 30, 2025, whose primary objective
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Epilogue: History on Custodial Leash
There are moments in literary and historical critique when one feels the sharp tension between reverence and reckoning. To read Alemseged Tesfai’s five-page epilogue to his 490-page historical volume and offer a pointed critique is an undertaking that requires courage, clarity, and context. It is also an undertaking that, if not approached with the utmost
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Alemseged Tesfai: Is that all what you are?
Debunking Ethiopia’s memos of late 1940s claiming ‘the return of Eritrea to its motherland,’ Margery Perham, a British historian, wrote in 1948 that every sentence in those memos “cried for comment and correction.” That expression came to my mind this week while reading Almseged Tesfai’s five-page Epilogue for the translation of his worthy three volumes
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A Voice Between the Banks: A Letter from Sumaya
Narrator of I & Eye: The Mirror, Exile & the Nile Editor’s Note: The following letter comes from Sumaya, the narrator of Beyan Negash’s forthcoming novel I & Eye: The Mirror, Exile & the Nile. As “The River Remembers” continues its literary meditation, she steps forward, not only in fiction but also in conversation with
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The Unspoken Debt: Sacrifice, Power, and Consent in Eritrea
Author’s Note: This short essay is written as a reflection on Eritrea’s independence narrative and the moral contradictions embedded in many armed liberation movements. Having grown up in Eritrea and internalized these national stories, I later came to examine them through a more critical lens. With Eritrean Martyrs’ Day approaching, I hope this piece invites
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The Debt-Free Illusion: Rethinking Eritrea’s Economic Self-Reliance
“The myth of Eritrean self-reliance… has helped justify authoritarianism, isolation, and indefinite national service.”
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Eritrea: How President Isaias Afwerki took everyone, including the Veteran Freedom Fighters, for a Ride
I aim to demonstrate not only how the former freedom fighters were misled, lied to, and exploited by the regime after independence, but also how their non-interventionist approach betrayed the very people they fought so hard to liberate from Ethiopian rule. One of the most fascinating but confusing stories that ever unfolded in Eritrea is
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The Fiddle and the Fiddler:
The Fiddle and the Fiddler: How the Arabs and TPLF Undermined the Eritrean Revolution The story goes: when Haile Selassie dissolved the federation and annexed Eritrea, the Eritrean people erupted in rebellion, and thus the revolution was born. The war lasted thirty years, and ultimately, the Eritreans triumphed. A compelling story. Many Eritreans dismiss the
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Review:To challenge the writing of Eritrean history is neither to rubbish nor to denigrate
A reflective piece on personal memories of imprisonment and exile, exploring the resilience of identity under barbed boundaries. Through one man’s eyes, we revisit a time where fences divided more than land—they divided Eritrean souls.
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Schooling and Social Capital Among Eritrean Refugees
Revolutionary Schooling and Social Capital Among Eritrean Refugees in Sudan A remarkable educational experiment took root in the arid borderlands of Kassala, Sudan, in the shadow of Eritrea’s long and bitter struggle for independence. In 1977, the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), in collaboration with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Sudanese
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Memory, Martyrdom, and the Eritrean Struggle
In Echoes of Bravery: Martyr Mahmoud Ibrahim’s Enduring Legacy, Amer Hagos (2025) constructs an impassioned, meticulously researched biography that is as much a personal tribute as it is a national archive. The text is a powerful act of recovery, of memory, of dignity, and of justice, situating Mahmoud Ibrahim, affectionately known as Cicchini, within the
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The Last Matriarch Passing the Torch of Family Tradition
Life is just a pilgrimage from the womb to the tomb.— Cornel West In the cycle of life, we move from one milestone to the next seemingly purposefully. How life might select and favor some for longevity over others is one of the mysteries of our existence in this world. The average life expectancy
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Reviewing Negarit 320: A Letter of Truth and Reconciliation
In Negarit 320 published April the 10th, 2025, Saleh Gadi Johar, henceforth referred to as The Writer. The latter because this article relied solely on the written text that was published at awate.on-forge.com on April the 11th, 2025. The Speakers starts the speech with a noble wish how he would’ve loved to feel pride and approbation
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Between Approbation and Anathema Justice Suffers
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” Faulkner, W. (1955), “Requiem for a Nun” This is a reflection on the insightful conversation between Daniel Teklai and Saleh “Gadi”
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Weaponizing Silence, Vulgarizing Languages
(Editor’s note: this article was first published on July 26, 2023; it’s being republished as a reference.) When one’s faith in humanity was beginning to wane with the seemingly endless streams of vitriols from social media, intelligently thought-out discussion in a podcast restores that faith quite a bit*. Prior to the podcast, too, Negarit 28,29,
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Thanks to Dr. MK Omar, Inputs Enriching the Eritrean Library
Many Eritreans are for sure not well aware of how much poor the Eritrean library still is. Records of the colonial period were themselves scanty on top of being mostly distorted or written by less informed authors. But nothing can be done about that except regretting that it was so. Eritreans of the first two
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Azien Yasin, the Famous Freedom Fighter I never knew
Azien Yasin was a brilliant freedom fighter who had great influence on the Eritrean Liberation Front. He was present on the battlefields of Eritrea when the armed struggle called for incredible feats of bravery. He was there among the distinguished fighters who went above and beyond the call of duty during that intense period of
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History is Watching us
[This article is dedicated to a group of Eritrea’s Prisoners of Conscience who were arrested in 2001 after criticising President Isaias Afwerki’s rule, and have never been seen or heard from since. The prisoners, rather selflessly, led the way to meet the challenges head-on while their fellow ex-freedom-fighters failed to follow suit .] This piece
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The myth of the “pure Eritrean.”
Eritrea, given its strategic location on the Red Sea, has been a gate to Africa and a destination for various migrants and seekers of better opportunities. Eritrea’s association with migration goes deep in history and the Eritrean ethnic composition was formulated over centuries of migrations, intermarriages, and resettlements. Beginning with the indigenous communities who mingled