‘Expecting ‘Catastrophe Protest’ in Asmara in 2018’: ENN on New Year (Part 3)

‘Expecting ‘Catastrophe Protest’ in Asmara in 2018’: ENN on New Year (Part 3)

Yosief Abraham Z

Faith vs. Religion and Politics:

Most of the time, people talk about religious people, but not about the irreligious citizens. In Eritrea, the Christianity since 380 A.D and the Islamic religion from 667 onwards, had the characters of faith but not religion. Faith is a path to respect, love, care and trust among different members of the society; eccentric to this, however, religion is a wall, a segregation bridge. When radicals--provoked by extremism--joined the religion, violence, instability, political notoriety, decayed humanity perspectives and debacles flourish to darken the illuminated part of being ‘human-kind.’

Therefore, anyone can have a faith of his own choice; but if he attempted to inculcate his own creeds to others persuasively and violently, there is the predicament. Hence, when our ancestors had their faith in God, they respected each other, shared the moments of grief and happiness together; indeed, they showed us their mettle when foreign agents were attempting to install seeds of polarizing sentiments and built the most amazing tower of triumph and tolerance.

Therefore, from 1997 until 2001, empirical experiences have been accumulated and learnt the country how to put clear border between faithful freedoms against extremists’ religious sabotages. Eritrea’s 1950s ‘Adey-Adika’ politics left us with lessons of how religion attempted to be injected to politics and this led to manipulations by Ethiopia’s imperial. How these feelings opened to the 1950s sham federation impacts are also archived in books by prolific writer and historian, Alemseghed Tesfay and have been one of the most treasured lessons in architecting our strategies.

Haraka’s profiles of 1958 till 1962 movements, ELF and EPLF journeys in the field and, of course, 1994-2000 incidents from Khartoum and fundamentalists who harbored in Sudan, post 1999 religious clubs stances and lessons to Eritrea, TPLF’s attempts and other listless events, left the country with epitomized experience in analyzing fundamentalism, especially on how to remedy scars of extremists by cultivating politics free of religious affiliations. Based on these experiences, therefore, extremists and radicals have the following characteristics as roots:

*Working against others willingness whether to believe in God or not and adhering violent mechanisms against others as persuasive measurements;

*Embattling fully against any secular government and attempting to embrace ‘religion’ centered primacies over national unity and social coherence;

*Defiance to respect others options, manipulating through financial provisions and supplies;

*Denying country as fundamental entity of citizens and working heartedly to derail common national interest into religious competition and to install animosity over other members of the society;

*Condemning others for their religions and follow blindly to attack—if there is any opportunity—to those ‘weak and traditional believers’ ideologically thereby to give place for ‘strong and miraculous believers’;

*Campaigning, in overt and covert manner, against others with absurd claim that the entire nation has to follow ‘this religion’ and working for it tremendously

*Claiming that political strategies have to assimilate this ‘religion’ for the targeted nation and the whole world… and other similar far-rightists or far-leftists factors have been clearly accumulated in the past historical chronicles of Eritrea and the world. Therefore, such empirical experiences left the country with credited remarks to analyze the sources or ins and outs of various sources of ramifications.
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Yosief Abraham Z is a freelance journalist and Excecutive Director of HorMid Media and Art Center. You can contact him at josiabraham29@gmail.com

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