By Dawit Mesfin
To me, the liberation of Eritrea was meant to constitute the final stanza of a long, sorrow-stitched epic – an ending shaped by sacrifices carried across generations, by a resilience seemingly inscribed into the landscape itself, and by a belief in freedom that persisted despite repeated attempts to extinguish it. I imagined independence as the first breath after prolonged submersion; the moment when a people long pressed to the earth might finally rise and feel the sun without fear.
Yet, when the echoes of celebration faded and the flags no longer fluttered with the urgency of victory, a different reality began to emerge – quiet at first, then unmistakable. It crept in like a shadow at dusk, subtle yet persistent, revealing a truth that diverged sharply from the future I had envisioned.
Rather than alleviating the burdens of ordinary life, independence seemed instead to press down more heavily, occupying the very spaces where hope had once taken root. In the years that followed, I found myself returning repeatedly to a single, haunting question – a question that lingered like a whisper I could not escape:
How could a dream so luminous give way to a reality so unbearably heavy?
And so, with a kind of sorrowful clarity, I can now say what once felt unspeakable: the end of the armed struggle brought a Dickensian twist – a freedom etched into paper and anthem, but a daily life still held captive by hardship, fear, and unending uncertainty.
Let me borrow a well-worn cliché to help underline my point. You’ve probably heard the line, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” I know I have – more times than I can remember. That famous opening from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities never stops resonating with me.
The book matters to me because it captures the quiet, enduring consequences of oppression and social inequality – realities that echoed through the revolutionary world I grew up in, a landscape marked by footprints that eventually faded into dust. In its pages, I recognise the same systemic injustices that took root in post-independence Eritrea – the very forces that shaped my life and held me in a long, uneasy limbo.
Each time I return to it, I’m taken back to that first surge of nationalist euphoria that swept across Eritreans at independence, and to the hollow silence that followed when the celebrations faded. I still remember the liberators’ triumphant march into Asmara, a moment so full of promise. But the hope of those days soon dimmed, eclipsed by the slow, painful realisation that the promises of shared ownership – a country meant to belong to all of us – were beginning to slip away.
Issayas Aferworki getting liberation lessons in China
Age of Broken Oaths
The central argument of this article is that the original goals of the long and costly war for independence (1961-1991), which included establishing peace, democracy, and justice, have been betrayed by the very leaders who led the country to ‘victory’.
When Eritrea formalised its independence in the April 1993 referendum – its ballots watched over by the United Nations – the country stepped into what was called a ‘transitional’ dawn. Yet the new government that emerged, of course unelected, was shaped almost entirely by the victorious fighters of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF).
I remember a quiet stirring within me – like a thin fissure spreading beneath still water. It was subtle, almost invisible, yet impossible to ignore. Doubt brushed against me softly, the way a fleeting shadow glides across a wall. And still, who was I to call it doubt, to claim the right to name it aloud? I had not marched on the front lines. I had never carried a rifle. I was no freedom fighter. In the eyes of the so-called liberators, I did not count as a citizen in any true or human sense.
This sense of unworthiness has endured – not only on a personal level, but across the broader Eritrean socio-political landscape. Eritreans who did not take part in the EPLF’s armed struggle were largely side-lined within the dominant national narrative that took shape before and after independence, as though their absence from the battlefield diminished their legitimacy as contributors to the liberation project.
The marginalization extended further: former ELF combatants, despite having devoted their formative years and life possibilities to the liberation of Eritrea, were systematically side-lined. Many were left without institutional support, social recognition, or pathways to reintegration, effectively rendered invisible within the new national order.
Moreover, even the so-called “masses” – the ordinary citizens and diaspora communities whose financial, logistical, and political contributions were indispensable to sustaining the struggle – found themselves abandoned in their host countries, their efforts acknowledged only instrumentally. Once independence was secured, their sacrifices were treated as historically concluded rather than as part of an on-going national obligation.
Naming the EPLF’s exclusionary practices aloud felt almost dangerous, as if uttering them might disturb a fragile silence. Yet the truth had become impossible to ignore: Eritrea had begun to resemble the personal domain of the EPLF. The country had quietly hardened into a one-party state – ruled not by foreign occupiers, but by the very “liberators” we had once welcomed with songs and open arms as they entered Asmara.
In their ascent, they had, in essence, stepped into the Derg’s place, though many of us were not yet willing – or not yet ready – to acknowledge the resemblance. For those unfamiliar with the Derg: it was the military junta that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991 and became the main force against which Eritreans fought the final, most intense phase of their independence struggle.
In the afterglow of independence, the first rush of euphoria slowly thinned, like mist dissolving under the sun, and the nation’s momentum slackened. It was then that the true intentions of the ex-combatants began to reveal themselves. Their gaze drifted toward the spoils of war, while ordinary citizens were left on the margins – trapped in an endless waiting room of history, wrestling with the absurdity of their condition, and yearning for a transformation that remained stubbornly out of reach.
Over time, it became clear that what I was witnessing was not mere administrative faltering, but a calculated choreography of power. Cloaked in rhetoric about institutional reform, the leadership systematically removed civilian professionals and replaced them with ex-combatants – many unprepared for the demands of governance. Authority, once imagined as a sacred trust forged through collective struggle, was recast as an inheritance: something to be claimed, guarded, and ultimately confiscated rather than shared.
The leadership’s political discourse, articulated through the idiom of policy formulation and institutional preparation, functioned primarily as a mechanism of deferral. Recurrent official statements – such as “We are drafting the necessary proclamations,” “We are demobilising combatants,” “We are mapping town and city plans,” “We are formulating macroeconomic policy,” and “We are drafting the constitution” – operated less as indicators of substantive progress than as instruments of political containment, designed to attenuate public expectations and preserve the Eritrean state under EPLF hegemony.
Promises of structural transformation – ranging from the repatriation of refugees from Sudan and the transition to civilian governance, to the integration of the diaspora, the mobilisation of citizens to elect their representatives, the promotion of small-scale enterprise, and the authorisation to build private homes – were repeatedly deferred under the pretext of procedural necessity. Such persistent postponement reveals a deeper political logic: the leadership’s overriding objective was not genuine institutional reform or social rehabilitation, but the consolidation and entrenchment of its own authority as a ruling class.
In this context, the post-war moment that might have inaugurated participatory renewal instead became a site of retrenchment. The population’s readiness for transition was met by an elite project of self-preservation, in which the rhetoric of state-building concealed a quiet restoration of hierarchical power relations. What emerged, therefore, was not a transition to democracy but a transition of dominance – an effort to reproduce authority under the guise of reform.
When the Past Refuses to Let Go of Me
I find myself wanting to linger in the past a little longer. I know that no amount of longing can reorder what happened on those battlefields where freedom fighters risked everything. Their past is an unyielding fact – consequential and irrevocable – one that shaped us and altered our reality. Because of this, I feel I owe it an honest reckoning.
Yet I keep asking why it pulls at me so insistently now. Is it the naïveté of that era that haunts me? At times, I feel a quiet relief – always with the deepest respect for our martyrs – that I did not take part in the armed struggle. Something in me keeps tugging at the liberation project, at how it was mishandled, abused, and ultimately betrayed.
Throughout the struggle, a single promise was proclaimed day and night: that a free Eritrea would be a democratic Eritrea. Enchanted by that dream, we repeated the chant awet nHafash (“victory to the masses”) without hesitation. Eritreans – patriotic, hopeful, and perhaps painfully naïve – supported the struggle to its very end.
We were not entirely unaware of Isaias Afwerki’s nature: that he – though not in any strict sequence – executed dissenters (including the Menka’e and Yemin groups), conspired to persecute and expel ELF freedom fighters from Eritrean battlefields in order to monopolise the struggle, forcibly recruited youth into the war effort, and formed a clandestine party to keep regular fighters in check. He also cultivated a culture of secrecy designed to keep everyone in the dark.
Still, we kept to his side. His rigid, authoritarian presence held us – like a spell woven from certainty and fear. We smoothed over his grave diplomatic and domestic failures, even the faux pas that rippled like fault lines through the inner terrain of the fighter community.
After seventeen years in exile, I arrived in Eritrea in the autumn of 1991. The war was over, but its dust still clung to everything – our streets, our memories, and our sense of what the future might hold. The land bore the wounds of decades of struggle, and so did the people: they moved with a precarious blend of exhaustion and hope, eyes dimmed by sacrifice yet still flickering with the promise that independence would finally deliver dignity, justice, and self-determination.
Even then, standing amid that fragile optimism and witnessing the bossy attitudes of the ex-combatants, I felt an uneasy question press against my thoughts: was this truly the freedom Eritreans had fought for, or merely the beginning of a new form of domination?
Eritrea was in desperate need of rebuilding – a wounded nation crying out for the skills, energy, and devotion of its people, both at home and in the far corners of the diaspora. Many were ready – eager, even – to return and pour in their knowledge, their labour, their very lives without hesitation, determined to help forge a country worthy of the blood that had watered its soil.
Yet almost immediately, it became clear that an invisible but unyielding wall stood between the people and the new state – a barrier of suspicion and control that unsettled visiting citizens and stopped potential investors in their tracks, signalling that the promise of liberation was already slipping into the hands of a new ruling order.
Today, thirty-four years after independence, I remain in exile – living proof that the liberation we once imagined never had the chance to take root. The dream of a free Eritrea has been slowly stripped away, undone by the very leadership that once wrapped itself in its promise.
And I am only one voice among tens of thousands. Think of the countless Eritreans – brilliant minds, seasoned professionals, and people overflowing with knowledge and experience – who stayed in the countries that once sheltered them instead of returning to the homeland they loved from afar.
In the United Kingdom alone, the 2021 census counts around 25,000 Eritreans. Yet only a small handful ever found their way back, and many returned only as bodies lowered into the soil they could not live on. Even those with one foot in the grave chose exile over going home.
And still, the exodus continues. Former freedom fighters – once the proud architects of liberation – now find themselves standing in asylum queues. Imagine the weight of that irony, the quiet ache of leaving behind the very soil one once risked everything to free. London is filling with veterans of a different kind now: men and women who once carried rifles in the mountains, carrying instead the paperwork of refugees.
Meanwhile, more and more Eritreans push across deserts, seas, and borders, driven by a desperate hope for safety. They arrive in the UK and in far-flung corners of the globe seeking refuge from the very nation their families bled to liberate. It is a journey steeped in sorrow, a testament to both endurance and the profound betrayal of a dream.
What a sorrowful ending to a liberation paid for with so much blood, so much hope, so many lives. Unfortunately, our story does not end there.
Remember the Badme War?
The Eritrean–Ethiopian War (1998–2000), often referred to as the Badme War, constituted a large-scale interstate conflict that resulted in an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 fatalities. In contemporary policy and academic discourse, it is frequently cited as a paradigmatic case of a preventable conflict – a costly conventional war triggered by a dispute over a relatively small and strategically marginal piece of territory.
The Badme War illustrates how nationalism, misperception, and diplomatic breakdown can transform a localised border disagreement into a full-scale military confrontation. It remains an instructive example of the ways in which elite decision-making, escalation dynamics, and symbolic politics can drive conflict far beyond its material stakes.
Despite the extensive scholarship and policy reflection that followed the war, the lessons derived from Badme appear to have had limited influence on political behaviour in the region. Public susceptibility to nationalist mobilisation – particularly when activated by entrenched political elites – remains largely unchanged, reflecting the enduring power of state-controlled narratives and the limited availability of alternative political discourses.
Current developments reflect this continuity. Once again, state actors employ securitised rhetoric framed as a defence of national sovereignty, while underlying motivations appear linked to regime preservation, internal legitimacy, and demonstrations of political indispensability. The renewed calls for mass mobilisation to “defend Assab” are emblematic of this pattern: they are articulated in patriotic terms yet driven by deeper political anxieties within the governing leadership.
The Port of Assab possesses significant economic potential due to its deep-water characteristics, strategic geographic position, and historical function as a key conduit for regional trade. Nonetheless, the prospects for its evolution into a commercially viable, business-oriented port remain constrained by persistent geopolitical tensions and the instrumentalisation of the port in nationalist discourse.
In Ethiopia, growing domestic calls for renewed access to Assab – particularly as national elections approach – have contributed to a heightened rhetorical environment that risks further straining relations with Eritrea. Ultimately, Assab’s capacity to expand its commercial throughput and operate according to economic rather than political imperatives is contingent upon stable bilateral relations and a commitment to diplomatic engagement.
The central analytical question therefore remains: why have the leaderships of Ethiopia and Eritrea been unable or unwilling to pursue durable diplomatic solutions, instead reverting to symbolic posturing and coercive narratives that risk once again steering both societies toward a costly and avoidable conflict?
