COMMENTARY

A Response to my critic, Mr. Tseggai Mebrahtu
by Dr. Teodros Kiros
December 22, 2003
I must admit that it feels wonderful to be honored by such intelligent and long critique. Indeed, I am grateful that Mr. Tseggai attended to my work with such care and biting criticisms, to which I will attempt to respond as judiciously as I am able.

Summarizing the legal theorist’s otherwise complex arguments, I noted the following central ones. I am sure that the peripheral ones will occupy us in the future.

  1. The cessation of Eritrea is illegal, and that Ethiopia’s border reaches the confines of the Red Sea;
  2. External International forces have reinforced this illegality by recognizing Eritrea as a sovereign nation;
  3. Dr. Kiros follows the propaganda machine of the EPRDF by defending its failed foreign and domestic policies, its policies on Badme is an example of the first, and the question of ethnicity, language and nationalism is an example of the second;
  4. The reduction of poverty is used as an excuse to appease the superpowers and more mendaciously to compromise Ethiopia’s sovereignty and that Kiros too is a supporter of this thesis, which other Ethiopian sellouts such as Afework Gebreyesus have used during the heyday of Italian fascists (P, 3);
  5. No poverty reduction is a match of Ethiopian sovereignty, and that Ethiopian sovereignty cannot be negotiated, Kiros’thesis notwithstanding;
  6. Contemporary Eritreans are bad representations of the good Eritreans of the 1950’s and 1960’s (p, 12)
  7. EPRDF’s leaders should forgive those who oppose EPRDF’s Pro-Eritrean policies (p, 4).

I should now address the theses in the order of the summary.

(1). Ever since my writerly career began twenty years ago, I have maintained a singularly consistent view on the idea of Self-Determination on philosophical grounds. I have followed a long tradition in political theory which began with Zara Yacob and Descartes in the seventeenth century, and then was powerfully revisited by classical 19th century German philosophy Kant, Hegel, Marx, further bolstered by Gramsci, Lenin, and Stalin in the twentieth century, consummating in the uncompromising voice of freedom, Michel Foucault in our time.

I have devoted an article, Self-Determination, which appeared in The Journal of Social Philosophy (No1, Volume xx11, Spring 1991,pp, 52-68, 92-102) and Quest (Vol 1, 1987, pp,), and I revisited this theme as an argument that defends the sovereignty of the individual to construct values under conditions of freedom in my book Self-Construction and the Formation of Human values: Truth, Language and Desire (Greenwood Press, 1999,2001)

Eritrea’s right to determine its destiny was first defended in Self-Determination. I remain committed to that ideal. Nothing has changed in the contingent world in which I live to compromise that burning flame of human freedom. The ideal would be compromised only if Eritreans themselves want to join the modern sovereign nation of Ethiopia under changed conditions of a Pan-African vision. Otherwise Eritrean sovereignty is final in my mind and in the contingent order of the African world. Self-determination itself is part and parcel of the UN Charter, which our able legal theorist fully knows. In Self-Determination, I wrote,

The quest for self-determination in the Horn of Africa must be viewed as a necessary point of departure with a pragmatic intent. The intent is that granting the highly sought independence to those who are doggedly pursuing it has the strong potential to enable the combatants be delivered from the hatred, resentment and bitterness of the protracted experience of war has imposed on them. Independence then has the very important purpose of providing the fighters and the masses that follow them with a sense of identity, dignity, and the new attitude of readiness for reconciliation. (P, 100).

The psychological and ethical dimensions of self-determination still hold. Nothing has changed to convince me that cessation, the highest form of self-determination, is illegal. On the contrary both its legality and philosophical veracity still maintains its compelling presence in contemporary Ethiopian rhetorical and substantial legal arguments, notwithstanding Mr. Tseggai's’ intricate political arguments.

(2) International Forces have equally illegally reinforced the illegal idea of Ethiopian independence.

Volumes of compendious treatises have been devoted to the perennial topic of self-determination in some leading journals and book length commentaries. It would be out of character to enter the corridors of these impressive writers. However, there is always room for few comments. First, it is paranoiac, to think that just because the UN is threatening Ethiopia and Eritrea with sanctions, if they do not comply, with the boarder commission, it therefore readily follows that there is a conspiracy against Ethiopia. There may be. Anything is possible in this finite world. Reasonable people, however, need not be thinking this way so readily. Historic Ethiopia is precious to Ethiopians only. The rest of the world is too busy making money, building industries and securing the future of its citizens. We Ethiopians make much out of our heritage, which is intrinsically empowering. But we need to modernize our proud ways, when political reality demands it. We better spend our time building our non-existent future with creative entrepneurs, industries, and productive land, instead of wasting our imagination on hunting non-present enemies. Considerably simplifying, I would like to argue that external forces do not see much to be exacted from occupying Ethiopia. Ethiopia is economically too problematic to be of much use to Imperialism. We need to internalize this brutal fact of our existential condition quickly and thoroughly, or else there will no remedy for our condition.

I think our imaginations would be better served on raising a healthy sovereign population of able and productive citizens who can save Ethiopia from its own internal enemies, poverty, disease and illiteracy.

(3) On following the footsteps of a moribund regime as its unpaid propagandist

As a philosopher, I make it my dogged business to uncover truth, whenever I see the opportunity. As a journalist I report my findings. It does not matter who the mediator of truth is. I listen to the voices of intelligence, of pragmatism, of imagination, of vision with hard reality. I do not specialize in serving purveyors of lies, deceit, intolerance and dogmas. I have criticized the EPRDF in my Democracy project for one entire year, when I concluded that the regime was becoming intolerant, disrespectful of intellectuals and unimaginative in its foreign and domestic policies. These arguments are serialized in the Ethiopian Reporter. I advise Mr. Tseggai to consult those pieces and measure them by the yardstick of judiciousness and highmindedness.

If an argument is right, or if a vision is inspiring, I devote myself to it with all my heart. For me a given party must defend an argument, or propagate a vision, inorder for me to agree to it, or to articulate its content. Such a party must compellingly articulate a given argument, or a vision for Ethiopia. I do not wait for pointers from the EPRDF to begin thinking. That orientation is foreign to me on two grounds. The first is my commitment to the project of the enlightenment that first Zara Yacob and Descartes, and then Kant, announced to the thinking world.

Think for yourself is the motto of the enlightenment, and that is the motto that I have happily made my own. The second ground is simply the fact that individuals sometimes agree as reasonable beings, and reason is expected to bring two parties to stand on a common platform, when they are motivated by a sense of justice. My thoughts do not rock with the wind of regimes. I think for myself. If it happens that my vision and that of the EPRDF overlap, it is because truth sometimes is located at the meeting point of concentric circles. Thus EPRDF’s policies on Ethnicity - at least in the beginning - was the correct one, as is the recent highly pragmatic discussions of the Boarder issue, and I agreed with it. The vision passed one of the conditions of imaginative thinking, accommodating political reality, and thinking about the long-range national interests of Ethiopia, particularly its contemporary place in this fast changing world.

(4) Dr. Kiros blindly follows EPRDF’s policies on Badme and its politics of Ethnicity

I leave it to the legal theorists to establish the boundaries which belong to Ethiopia and those, which are rightly Eritrea’s. I continue to learn enormously from the rigorous and passionate writing of Mr. Tseggai on legal matters. I will make no pronouncements about an issue about which hair-splitting arguments continue to flood the pages of the Internet. I have nowhere challenged the legality of the boarder issue. My task is to engage the political and ethical dimensions of the idea of sovereignty. For me what is at issue is not the status of the sovereign territories, but the mood for war, in order to stretch Ethiopia’s boundaries to the Red Sea, is the only solution. What happened to dialogue, discussion free of domination, under the sovereignty of the imagination, as equally if not more necessary vehicles of addressing the boundary issues? Why are we Ethiopians so willing to flex our muscles only when we can just as impressively flex our imagination to serve our interests? And why do intellectuals resort to name calling when they are confronted with others who simply disagree with their views.

I too must apologize to Mr. Tseggai for making him feel slighted with the words, “unimaginative, and unintelligent.” He is right. I take full blame for the abortion of reason, in that heated moment of passion, except that I really did not specifically had him in mind when I used these unnecessary words against those who kept on picking the ethnicity of the PM., when all that was needed was to disagree with his visions of Ethiopia. Reasonable people could disagree without ethnicizing, genderizing and racialyzing discourse. Discourse came to be in order that we can agree and disagree, and move toward the preciousness of maturity at the golden age of modernity.

The second issue of contention that infuriated Mr. Tseggai is the issue of Ethnicity. In Two Concepts of Ethnicity, I had advanced the thesis that ethnicity requires an analytic specficity, and introduced positive Ethnicity and Negative Ethnicity to meet the condition. The distinctions were lost on the legal theorist; instead he extracted the poisonous elements of ethnicity and collapsed both into PE. This is a major mistake.

PE is the need of the human self to develop ways of seeing, of speaking, of expressing love, of dancing, of building, of settling disputes, and cementing ones place in this world. PE is marked by difference.

NE is a subtle and sometimes blatant way of privileging certain ways of doing things as superior to others. NE is marked by the domination of the powerful who privilege their values as superior to everybody else’s. In spite of these differences that I articulated in the article, I am unjustly treated as the articulator of Apartheid Ethiopian style. Infact, PE does exactly what Mr. Tseggay demands, when he wrote, “If he were consistent with himself, he could have said: let Ethiopians be organized territorially not according to the language they speak but according to their free choice” He is right, and nothing that I have said about PE fails to embrace that choice. It is ultimately individuals who should choose what they want and not the regimes, which claim to represent them. Regimes can represent their members only if the members are consulted about what they should want. This insight is the centerpiece of Self-Determination, which I briefly summarized in (1) above. I need not rehearse that again and again. Whereas NE privileges values through the instrumentalities of domination, PE allows the individual to freely live by the facts of being different, and liking and disliking different ways of seeing, of hearing, of thinking, in short of being human.

I will under no circumstance lend my consent to any party that “ …imposed territorialization of ethnics” without the consent of the governed. In a long interview that I gave to the Ethiopian Reporter (Amharic) a few years ago, I celebrated the dimensions of PE which made it possible for the different ethnicities in Ethiopia to take pride in their dialects, their names, their dances, their songs, their poetry, and their philosophic proverbs, without apologizing to the ways of those whose values were unjustly empowered by NE. Again, there is a serious misreading of ethnicity here. I am sure that Mr. Tseggay simply misread the arguments, which I might have articulated imprecisely and incompletely.

(5) The reduction of poverty is used as an excuse to compromise the sovereignty of Ethiopia

Sovereignty is a concrete matter, and not merely a linguistic abstraction. It is human bodies that give sovereignty a concrete meaning, flesh and blood. Surely, sovereign bodies require land in which to live, in dignity and freedom, in which to flourish when possible, and realize their dreams for themselves and generations to come. Badme and Irob, to mention only these two places, might be “ godforsaken places”, but that is not the point. These are places in which Ethiopians were once born and died, in which dreams took place but were not realized, where lands were cultivated by any means necessary for the future of the Ethiopian nation. Wars were fought, blood spilled, heroic resistances were exacted. Many people were born there, died there. Diseases came and left with lives, which could have been spared. The pride and dignity of the Ethiopians who lived there continues to be a source of pride for us all. That is why when they demand not to be moved from their ancestral homes, our leaders better be sensitive to their cries, as they do now, when some people are in the mood for war. War has never been a panacea for anything, least of all for African matters. Whether we like it or not, the continent’s pillars are its sovereign resources. The mighty rivers, the lush and the green, the fertile lands, but above all, its sovereign people, are the backbone of the continent’s future. We cannot compromise their lives by engaging them in wars they do not want, by speaking for them, when they have not spoken, by claiming to represent their interests, when we do not really know what they want, and what they stand for. What is true for the continent is almost always true for its individual nations. Ethiopia and Eritrea are part of this ongoing drama, this unnecessary mood for war.

I advise our leaders to be in a mood for peace and articulate a mood for community, for brotherhood and sisterhood, for solidarity and reconciliation. Where there is no mood for peace, I challenge them to create it. The central part of that project ought to be the elimination of poverty by good policy, a policy that links the fight for sovereignty to the fight against poverty, and against AIDS. Our immediate domestic policy, if we have none, should be educating our people that fighting for our territories requires peace as a condition, and that the elimination of poverty presupposes the presence of sovereign Ethiopian bodies, freed from envy, resentment, the savagery of hunger and AIDS- so that they can fight for their lands when they have to, as they did the first time Eritrea was the aggressor. When they were provoked they responded heroically.

Now we have a changed condition, and we must construct a new theory to address a new condition. Thinking from the standpoint of contingency demands that we explore the interiors of our imagination to come up with visions of new Ethiopia dealing with a new Eritrea.

That these are internally necessary needs that require no Imperial powers to produce. Famines, hunger, poverty and diseases have been part and parcel of Ethiopian realities for centuries, and we have not been able to eliminate them. If this is what the existing regime is fighting for, one need not be a propagandist to jump on the bandwagon of reason and smart thinking. Infact the reduction of poverty is a necessary and sufficient condition for the possibility of preserving Ethiopia’s sovereignty. Only poor nations are intimidated, threatened, overlooked and undermined when superpowers assert themselves for world domination. Genuine sovereignty is not an attribute of poor, disorganized, mismanaged, and corrupt states. The modern Ethiopian state will be dared again and again, if it squanders its scarce resources on equally poor, disorganized, mismanaged and corrupt Eritrea. These two states would be better off if they rationally maximize their interests by harnessing their resource for the reasonable goal of development with prosperity and not underdevelopment with poverty. Again poverty reduction only makes sense.

(6) No reduction of poverty is a match for Ethiopian sovereignty

For me, as I already argued in (4) the reduction of poverty and sovereignty are not mutually opposed. They work in tandem in the following way. I do not readily concede the argument that not opposing the boundary commissions refusal to award Badme to Ethiopia means that one is consequently calculating that receiving handouts from the West is more beneficial than fighting for “Godforsaken places”. I do not see how one follows from the other. These are two separate but ultimately interrelated issues. If Ethiopia was to be attacked again, those who live in the contested areas will have to fight to preserve their sovereignty. No reasonable person would advise the residents to comply with a condition that would worsen their plight. The regime of which they are citizens would make sure that that their lives, property and freedom are preserved by any means necessary. If on the other hand, there is no provocation but only an imprecise legal argument, then the “ rule of law” would have to come up with more adequate ways of satisfying their hunger for justice. Where there is no court of Justice, which is not willing to rectify the illegal and unethical situation, Mr. Tseggai, is right to shout fire, and the civilized rescuers would have to arrive on the scene and call spades, spades.

The argument for sovereignty can be resolved through peaceful means. All the options are there. What is lacking is the willingness to give reason a chance, and dialogue a venerable place in modern Ethiopian politics. We are so used to resorting to war to settle disputes of territoriality that we are not willing to mend our ways. For the sake of the motherland, we must learn how to calculate our national interests by linking available resources with resources that we can obtain from our neighbors. Eritrea too is our neighbor. Her resources, her ports, her people could also learn to live with our people. Their natural endowments could easily be used by us to advance our national interests and they will advance theirs. Together we can articulate a new regional unity.

Under the sovereignty of the imagination, there is nothing, which cannot be negotiated. The war over Badme has the appearance of permanence now. Only an appearance. The reality can always be changed. Thinking from the standpoint of contingency can alter our perspectives.

(7) Contemporary Eritreans are bad representations of the Eritreans of the 1960’s and 1970’s

This may be so. But what is the point of essentializing people. The Eritreans of the sixty's and seventy's had two different agendas. The older Eritreans were comfortable with unity. Not all of them of course, and this is an empirical question. Contemporary Eritreans were motivated by the hunger for independence, and they fought for it, with a sympathetic Ethiopian regime. One cannot argue against any one who feels unfree, who feels that she is part of Ethiopia, that she is a colonial subject. Not everybody agrees with this view of course. But this is a reality that cannot be changed. So the issue is not bad and good Eritreans, but Eritreans who fought for their sovereignty and those who might have felt it secretly, but did not avow it openly, but voiced support when independence was obtained.

Finally, the discussion of forgiveness was completely lost on Mr. Tseggai. Here there was a complete misunderstanding. I was not asking the Regime to forgive or forget. I was appealing to ordinary Ethiopians and Eritreans who may be ready for reconciliation, after they tired themselves with war. Perhaps, they want to move on with their lives, and turn their backs on the past. The past is not always sweet. It is bitter-sweet. Sometimes, we must forget the past inorder to live the present, inorder not to be stuck with the bitterness of memory, the depth of disappointment, the burning fire of memory, of sorrow. That is why we must learn to forget without forgiving. The best of course is to do both. So my appeal is to the conscience of all of us, who have either lived the war directly, or lost some of their dearest, to cool off and put ourselves in the mood for connection, reconciliation, and moral love.

So in this long essay, I have tried to argue that the sovereignty of Eritrea like that of Ethiopia cannot be compromised, that the border dispute need not be saved by war but by dialogue, by compromises and not rigidities, and that Ethnicity is not a disease. We need not fear it, once we know its ways. That differences are good. They are the spice of life. Differences are dangerous only when we privilege some values and devalue others, or outrightly silence those values we think are inferior to our very own.

That finally we must learn how to heal the wounds of war by forgiving without forgetting.

* * * * * *
NB: I must thank Mr. Haimanot of Boston and Dr. Dagnachew Desta of Suffolk University for their penertrating and wise remarks on the first draft of the paper. I am grateful to their unfailing encouragement and friendship.
The author, Dr. Teodros Kiros, could be reached via email at kiros@fas.harvard.edu.
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