{"id":300877,"date":"2025-08-11T12:00:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T11:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=300877"},"modified":"2025-08-09T13:15:35","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T12:15:35","slug":"eritrea-we-wont-kneel-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/08\/eritrea-we-wont-kneel-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Eritrea: We Won\u2019t Kneel Down"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Eritrean Americans celebrated their 51st Eritrean Festival and their home country\u2019s resolute independence from August 1 to 3, 2025.<\/p><\/div>\n

6 Aug 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0This year\u2019s US Eritrean Festival was held in Stockton, California. Eritrean Americans were as gregarious and joyful to be together as ever, speaking their native language, Tigrinya, and celebrating their culture. I\u2019m always glad to be their guest, being one of the few Western journalists who writes anything good about this fiercely independent Red Sea nation. I like to think that every year I get a little better at the shimmy shake dance move during the evening concerts.<\/p>\n

One thing I love about the Eritreans I meet at their festivals is that most of them make regular trips home and try to find ways to support the country despite extreme, punishing sanctions that make it difficult even to send money to family. I\u2019ve attended festival sessions about raising money for cancer care or care of wounded veterans.<\/p>\n

One festival-goer told me that going home is more expensive than going to Hawaii, but he feels at peace there.<\/p>\n

In Berkeley, California, I met an Eritrean woman who said she\u2019d sent her teenage kids home for several years to learn the language and culture and avoid the drugs they\u2019d likely be exposed to at Berkeley High.<\/p>\n

Eritrea haters often ask why these festival-goers are here instead of back home, and there are several reasons. Many came to the US when Eritrea was still under the yoke of the Ethiopian empire, which ended in 1974, or the repressive Ethiopian Derg regime <\/a> that ensued from 1974 to 1991. Others fled the 1998 to 2000 proxy war with Ethiopia engineered by US policymakers. In many cases they or their children were born here.<\/p>\n

I spoke to an emergency trauma surgeon who returned to train surgeons and pediatric specialists from 2007 to 2012. He told me Eritrea is here to stay short of a nuclear war or wholesale natural disaster.<\/p>\n

Others are economic migrants who left because extreme sanctions have simply made life too hard, but they still attend the festivals, love the language and culture, and travel home regularly. Others go home to retire.<\/p>\n

One festival-goer told me he thought there would be a great migration home if sanctions were lifted. He said that he himself would like to start a business in Eritrea but sanctions make it all but impossible. Tiffany Hadish, the movie star whose father was Eritrean, attended this year\u2019s festival and told me that she hopes to someday build a resort in Eritrea, but that right now she can\u2019t even wire money to her own bank account there.<\/p>\n

Eritreans at the 2022 festival in Dallas gave hundreds of thousands of several million dollars eventually raised for cancer screening equipment for Eritrean medical centers and hospitals. I saw one after another stand up in the audience to announce their contributions, thrilled by the chance to give. Would they do that if they didn\u2019t love Eritrea?<\/p>\n

There is, of course, a diaspora that hates the current Eritrean government and its president, Isaias Afwerki, with considerable support from American and European ideologues. They forever complain that Eritrea does not practice electoral democracy, a Western form that global elites use to subvert popular movements in Africa, just as they do here in the US. Never mind that Western governments have arranged the assassination of truly popular elected leaders like Congo\u2019s Patrice Lumumba and Togo\u2019s Sylvanus Olympio.<\/p>\n

At this point in time and in Africa, a government should be judged on whether it serves the interests of its people and has their support, not whether it holds elections. The Alliance of Sahel States\u2013Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger\u2013aren\u2019t holding elections either, but they\u2019ve expelled the French and US militaries and nationalized the country\u2019s natural resources.<\/p>\n

Eritrea haters<\/strong><\/p>\n

Eritrea haters include white South African journalist Martin Plaut, who actually urged <\/a> a diaspora audience to burn an Eritrean Embassy down. Plaut also heroizes <\/a> Brigade N\u2019Hamedu, an organization of violent hooligans who for several years showed up to violently attack<\/a> the peaceful Eritrean festivals across Europe, North America, and in Jerusalem. Plaut refers to these violent attacks as \u201cprotests\u201d while referring to the wholly peaceful annual gatherings as \u201cmilitarized propaganda festivals.\u201d The fact that these diaspora Eritreans love their home country and culture seems to have given him an ulcer.<\/p>\n

Many of the attackers have been indicted for criminal violence, and some have been sentenced to prison in Europe.<\/p>\n

The location of this year\u2019s US festival wasn\u2019t announced until a week ahead of time because of security concerns, but it took place peacefully. Criminal indictments and convictions and legal actions seem to have stopped the violence.<\/p>\n

At the 2023 Eritrean Festival in Seattle, Brigade N\u2019Hamedu showed up to tear down exhibition tents, light fires, and even put three festival-goers in the hospital, and the Eritrean Association in Greater Seattle <\/a> filed a civil complaint against them. Their lawyer appeared at this year\u2019s festival to explain its advance with decisions striking Brigade N\u2019Hamedu\u2019s motion to dismiss and its second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth affirmative defenses.<\/p>\n

One of this year\u2019s festival-goers told me that he challenges Brigade N\u2019Hamedu to hold its own festival in a convention center in another city on the same weekend and let Eritrean Americans choose which to attend. He said they couldn\u2019t attract anything close to the 17,000 Eritrean Americans who attended in Stockton, but let them try. The same 200 rioters, he added, have shown up every time a festival has been attacked in the US.<\/p>\n

Michael Rubin of the extreme right-wing American Enterprise Institute is another prominent Eritrea hater. He relentlessly screeches <\/a> for regime change and has even comically told Eritreans that they could be Rwanda, which last celebrated electoral democracy by awarding its President Paul Kagame, a longtime Western puppet, with a wholly implausible 99.14% percent of the vote. That smashed <\/a> his earlier records of 93%, 95%, and 98%. Kagame is also in the habit of imprisoning, disappearing, and outright assassinating political opponents at home <\/a> and abroad <\/a>.<\/p>\n

During the festival it was revealed that President Trump had sent a letter <\/a> to President Isaias Afwerki on June 30 to say that he is \u201creversing the negative, harmful damage of the Biden Administration around the globe\u201d and that he would like to re-establish a respectful and productive national relationship between the US and Eritrea \u201cbased on honesty, respect, and opportunities to improve peace and prosperity across the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eritreans welcomed this cautiously, hoping that sanctions might be lifted when they come up for renewal in September.<\/p>\n

One day later three Democratic Senators, California\u2019s Adam Schiff, Delaware\u2019s Chris Coons, and Illinois\u2019s Dick Durbin, introduced a Senate resolution <\/a> condemning Eritrea. They didn\u2019t suggest any concrete action or any particular reason for introducing this resolution now, and Eritrea could hardly be more sanctioned than it already is, but this may signal their intent to oppose lifting the sanctions when they come up for renewal in September.<\/p>\n

For some reason Democrats have always treated Eritrea far more harshly than Republicans.<\/p>\n

This year the largest festival meeting hall was filled with Eritrean Americans who\u2019d come to hear a presentation and discussion of a new book of interviews with President Isaias Afwerki conducted by French journalist Michel Collon.The book, published by Investig\u2019Action, is My Struggle for Eritrea and Africa<\/em> <\/a>.<\/p>\n

In his introduction, Collon writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as it was liberated, Eritrea was put under pressure by the World Bank: \u2018We will write your economic programme. Otherwise . . .\u2019\u00a0\u00a0 And since that threat, for refusing to submit to Western multinationals, Eritrea has been subjected to every possible form of aggression.\u201d Meaning sanctions, regime change operations, proxy wars, media wars, and even migration wars in which the CIA uses social networks to lure Eritrean youth into the nets of migrant trafficking mafias.<\/p>\n

Eritrea has refused to collaborate with the US and NATO\u2019s global security architecture. Eritrea and Zimbabwe are the only two African nations who have refused to collaborate with AFRICOM, the US African Command, since its inception in 2007, but they have since been joined by Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.<\/p>\n

Eritrea has also nationalized its natural resources, another cardinal sin in the eyes of the West\u2019s corporate states.<\/p>\n

It guarantees health care and education, always an example that the US finds intolerable.<\/p>\n

Since Eritrea\u2019s initial refusal of World Bank debt dependence, it has pursued a development model with the tortoise as its metaphor: slow and steady, self-reliant, step-by-step.<\/p>\n

It even refused to mass vaccinate for COVID because its national COVID council never detected signs of a pandemic. This of course inspired Eritrea haters to howl, \u201cWhat is this country going to do next???\u201d<\/p>\n

At the book session, I took the mic to note that Trump isn\u2019t likely to lift the sanctions for free, that he no doubt wants something, and ask how Eritrea would negotiate. The answer was that Eritrea is not for sale, that its sovereignty is inviolable. \u201cEritrea won\u2019t kneel down.”<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/a>. In 2014 she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize<\/em> for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at <\/em>ann@anngarrison.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 blackagendareport.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

6 Aug 2025\u00a0–\u00a0This year\u2019s US Eritrean Festival was held in Stockton, California. Eritrean Americans were as gregarious and joyful to be together as ever, speaking their native language, Tigrinya, and celebrating their culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":300878,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[237,2432],"class_list":["post-300877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-africa","tag-eritrea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":300879,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300877\/revisions\/300879"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}