On Eritrea

Bernal, Victoria.2014. Nation as Network, Diaspora, Cyberspace and Citizenship. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 208.pp; $115.49. ISBN:978-0-226-14481-8 Victoria Bernal writes about the survival battles that Eritreans engage in. Eritrea got it’s independence in 1991, but the war with Ethiopia never quite came to an end. Further, their President, as Dictator and War Hero presents a Janus face to his people. The web then becomes the space where war crimes, present day repression, and the agonies of the people are clearly voiced. Dehai was the first and most well known website. The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) was a splinter group from the Eriterean Liberation Front, which had begun armed struggle against Haile Selassie as early as 1961. In the thirty years of war that followed, many left home and went to many parts of the world, such as America, The Gulf and Europe. The war jeopardised everything. With the disruption of agriculture, foreign investment, and the building of support institutions, in order to conduct the long war, the people fled. In their new homes, they kept in touch with those whom they had left behind, and those who shared their servitude in distant lands, through websites which were also politically and government monitored, and sometimes manipulated. Bernal records the ways in which the Netizens discussed key issues such as Martyrdom, the role of the citizen, the dictatorship of President Isaias Afewerki and the funds coming into the country from those who felt that their monetary contributions would set the agenda for development. By paying taxes, the Diaspora could legally say that they had contributed to their country’s growth. Bernal describes in Chapter 1, Infopolitics and Sacrificial Citizenship how difficult it was for people, often holding refugee or political asylum status, to donate to the cause, but their feelings were strong, and it was the only way that this concept of nationhood could work for them. The second chapter, Diasporic Citizenship and the Public Sphere, discusses how Dehai, Asmarino and Awate, as websites, in the 1990s and onward, deal with political participation, the venting of feelings, and the expression of solidarity. The relationship between the small groups of gatekeepers, as well as individuals posting on the web, represented the volatile nature of identity politics, and the sharing of information. It’s not just commitment of money and ideas, it is also time, as it is spent on the web. As one informant told Bernal, “I didn’t do anything else on the internet. I just went to Dehai. It is a big commitment of time.” (73) From supporting the State to defining freedom in a portal took time, but when it happened, the critics were able to be judgemental about how the State was evolving and the policies associated with it. Chapter 3 is called The Mouse that Roars and attempts to understand how plural voices in the public sphere meant that dissent could find a place in discussion. Cyberspace became the platform where discussions could find free rein, questioning violence, patriarchal imperatives of state policy, and dialogue between the Nation state and it’s citizens. Censorship would begin to tag the writers, and web managers were thought to be complicit with this form of regulation. Bernal believes that self censorship and peer censorship were more important forms (109) The subjective states of writers who did manage to get their opinions published on the web expressed the nature of their very strong emotions, and the responses were also equally abundant and mercurial. There were suspicions too, that Dehai was a tool of the State. Diaspora websites thus collaborated with official websites. Dissemination of information and news was seen to be Dehai’s basic rationale, while Asmarino and Awate were not so subtle and were often openly and loudly critical. In Chapter 4, Mourning Becomes Electronic, the author looks at war memorials. Martyrs are paid tribute, dying is a national and voluntary sacrifice made for the nation, in which women might be mere survivors. War is a vocation, and fending off the Ethiopians continues to be a challenge. Like museums and maps, the memorial reads territorialisation in unique and biographical ways. These questions of sacrifice are profoundly raised by Bernal in Chapter 5, Sex, Lies and Cyberspace, where the author adroitly looks at rape as a weapon of war, the silence of women, and the servitude of the diaspora in other countries. The tragedy is internecine warfare, showing a new diaspora is now in place, which is escaping from the violence of President Isaias Afewerki. Susan Visvanatha. thanks to Vlad Naumescu for sending me the book many years ago.