Category: Articles
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“I Want To Be A Sailor…”
This short essay was written sometime in 2004. If what we knew were the only guideposts for reality, the innocent knowledge before knowing the ugly truths and other side of the coin would be it. That other side hosts the grotesque, the depressing, the confusing, the deleterious… “In Middle Ages—‘MaEkelay Zemen’—people used to believe
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The Cruellest Decade: in Ten
The decade 2000-2010 hosted milestone events in Eritrea’s recent past; yet mostly disappointing. Coming on the heels of the optimism, pride and peace of 1990s, the decade 2000s, without question, has been a turbulent time for Eritrea and Eritreans. It is more reminiscent of our bloody past than the neighbourly decade. From ‘Salsay Werar’ in
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A Forest Without A Tree
The ongoing mind to mind fight has to land somewhere with a fruit. The issue of land, as some writers used to depict, is neither complex nor a tricky. Land to the legitimate owner, empirically, is a just step that should be fulfilled accordingly. In Eritrea, the one time dignified and respectful citizens, endowed with
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Whom does Eritrea love? Amanuel Asrat or Yohannes Tiquabo
Generals and tyrants love to dance to the loud tunes of cowardice, oozing betrayal, in that circular formation of followers, until their heads loudly spin with inequity, with madness while wail, yes primal wail of utter silence descends and falls on the hills of ‘Eira-Iro.’ This installment is not so much about ‘romanticizing Amanuel Asrat’
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The Kind Citizen and ‘Zemen’
I am launching a column in this venerable website, Awate.com. The column’s name is ‘the kind citizen.’ I choose this name because that is my vision for Eritrea, a nation of kind citizens. Citizens who pride in their histories and identities, who know and exercise their rights and duties (mainly rights in these times) and
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EFLNA/ENASA(Mengisteab Yisaq, Petros Yohannes) & EPLF
In part one I provided the list of who was who in the EFLNA/ENASA/EPLF that would eventually lead to who is who in PFDJ of today. But, a friend gently reminded me that a great deal had occurred since 2005, when Ms. Hapener’s article was published in Eritrean Studies Review and kindly offered the following
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Tribute to A Fallen Hero that No One Wishes to Remember
The prompting of today’s article emanates from two disparate elements. An article written by Tricia Redeker Hepner in Eritrean Studies Review, Special Issue , 2005, and Selam Kidane’s article in Asmarino on remembering the martyrs this past June 20th. The latter’s notion of choosing to include the fallen heroes of Eritrea along with those that
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Freedom of Expression
It is common knowledge that the source of expression is thinking, and therefore any musing on freedom of expression begins with freedom of thought. Bertrand Russell is often quoted for stating: “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin and even than death… A thought is subversive and revolutionary,
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If Hamid Idris Awate Were Alive!
In this cyber age where information is disseminated at a nneck-breakingspeed to a point – leaving one, sometimes, to feel – as if one’s brain cells were about to get hay wired from the information overload, yet comes another website impetuously galloping, literally and figuratively, (see this new website) in its high horse with a
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Post-War Survival
This article was contributed on the launching day of awate.on-forge.com by Beverly Frogge, a friend from the days of Dehai. Years ago, after the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two cities became rubble, as were the lives of those that survived the initial blast that in minutes transformed the world forever. I have
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Reconciliation and Unity: Vital Terms In Eritrean Politics
By Menhot Woldemariam (Woldeyesus Ammar) Reconciliation and unity are two live terms in the dictionary of Eritrean politics, past and present. In recent years, I came to associate the two with some people and their thinking who volunteered to share their viewpoints through the Internet websites. In the old days, however, and not without reason,