Part 17

The PFDJ’s regime and its regional authorities,  in the Kunama land, are sequestrating and stealing grain from every Kunama household:

The very recent reports from the Kunama land confirm that the Eritrean PFDJ’s regime and its regional authorities in the Kunama land are nowadays entering every Kunama household, in the urban centres as well as in the countryside, checking and sequestrating what they believe to be the surplus of last year’s agricultural products. This is an event never taken place and never heard of or experienced in the entire Kunama history. This is inhuman, a grave crime, the worst kind of violation of human rights, jeopardising the very existence of the Kunama people. This is the clear proof of the ethnic-cleansing activities we Kunama have long been accusing the PFDJ’s regime of Ato Isaias Afwerki, of conducting against the Kunama race. It is known that the Kunama rural as well as urban population has always been self-sustaining, depending entirely on the products of its own native and ancestral land. The Kunama has never been dependent either on the regime’s salaries, on social welfare or on governmental or on non-governmental aid programmes. Although even today, the Kunama land has been massively settled by almost all members of the Eritrean nationalities, the Kunama population is still able to remain self-sustaining, reaping enough products from its own land.

2007 is said to have been a particularly good year, with abundant rain-falls and harvesting of abundant crops. Obviously, the PFDJ’s regime, which through its regional administrative authorities is always present and very actively involved in the agricultural sector in the Kunama land, has been very carefully following the land products that the Kunama rural and urban populations have been gathering from their own crop-fields.

In a recent “Editorial Article”, titled “Gearing Up Against Natural Challenges”, the PFDJ regime official organ the “shabait.com’s Staff” wrote:

“achieving food security being the priority task in our development strategy, the abundant rains in 2007 and the necessary agricultural infrastructure that were laid out beforehand has enabled us to reap a bumper harvest. Although nature had indeed cooperated, the good harvest in 2007 has been primarily a result of the hard work and determination of the Eritrean people, government and defence forces. As a result of this resourcefulness, our capacity to conserve water has improved and we have been able to open a small window towards enhanced irrigation farming”.

Very unashamedly, the regime’s mouth-piece, instead of giving credit to and solely thanking nature for having being kind towards Eritrea and to the Eritrean people, it attributes the abundant rainfall and good harvest, “primarily” to the acclaimed government’s “development strategy, water conservation” and “irrigation programmes”. The “shabait.com’s Staff” does either not know or it has forgotten that the Kunama land has always offered “bumper harvest” whenever nature has been kind and generous enough with abundant rainfalls. It was not therefore either the PFDJ regime’s “development strategies” or its “water conservation” and “irrigation programmes” which enabled the Kunama people to have made a “bumper harvest” in 2007. It is well known that nowhere in the whole of the Kunama land have “water conservation” and “irrigation programmes” been materialised for the Kunama people, but firstly for the regime’s regional authorities, for the regime’s generals, for the well-to-do Eritrean-Tigrians living in the Diaspora who have acquired agricultural lands in the Kunama land and for the Eritrean-Tigrian farmers and ordinary populations in the Kunama urban and rural areas. Let alone, accomplishing “water conservation” and “irrigation programmes”, for the Kunama farmers and ordinary populations, the Kunama households are not being offered even enough potable water and this, not only in their rural areas, but not even in urban centres.

Another false argument the PFDJ’s regime is making to justify its inhuman activity of “sequestrating and stealing grain from the Kunama households” is the following:

”while harvesting a bumper harvest that goes beyond food security towards export being one of our long-term objectives, tackling and being ready beforehand for the natural disasters that might hamper this objective is also one of the priority tasks in our long-term plans. As global metrological studies predict, most parts of the Horn of Africa will experience variations in weather conditions in 2008. Although the accuracy of these predictions could only be seen in time, making advanced preparations is always the best way to address problems”.

If, as the above paragraphs do testify, “the long-term objectives” of the regime are to “export” the Eritrean land products, the “sequestrating and the stealing of grain, thought to be surplus”  and kept in the Kunama households, which the regime and its civil servants are conducting at the present is not intended to “tackling and being ready beforehand for the natural disasters that might hamper the food security” for the Eritrean people in general and for the Kunama in their own territory, but it is for the regime to amass enough grain to be either sold to the same households from whom it has been sequestrated, as it has been “predicted”, during the “variations in weather conditions in 2008” or even to export it in order to secure itself of the most needed foreign currency. Surely, “making advanced preparations is always the best way to address problems”, but to deprive one’s own citizens of their daily bread, to “address” those imaginary “problems” is an unjust, immoral and a cruel policy which only a cruel and a criminal force can ever conjure it out. The most worrying fact is that the regime’s act of “sequestrating and the stealing grain” from the households is reported to being conducted only in the Kunama land and solely in the Kunama rural and urban households. No one can therefore deny that this is the clearest proof that the PFDJ’s regime, its regional authorities in the Kunama land, predominantly made-up of the Eritrean-Tigrian ethnic-group’s members, are conducting a very subtle and a systematic ethnic-cleansing activities against the Kunama people.

From these pages, the members of the Kunama Civic Society/Kunama Narkaba Tummada (KCS/KNT) and of the Voice of the Kunama People/Kunama Agara Mena (VKP/KAM) are launching an urgent appeal to all Human Rights Organisations to promptly intervene that the PFDJ’s regime stopped now using “famine” to ethnic-cleanse the Kunama people. We are also addressing the PFDJ’s regime itself and its regional authorities in the Kunama land that we hold them fully responsible for the plights of the Kunama people they have been causing all these years, with the final objective of annihilate them. From now on, every death of a Kunama person in the Kunama land is to be attributed to the regime’s criminal activity of depriving him/her of his/her daily bread so as to gradually eliminate the entire Kunama race from its native and ancestral land. Let the ordinary Eritrean-Tigrians too, now settled in the Kunama land and witnessing whatever injustices their regime is committing against the Kunama people, not feel fully exempt from either directly or indirectly contributing in the regime’s ethnic-cleansing activities against the Kunama people. Whoever witnesses injustice and ignores it commits the crime of negligence which we retain to be just as grave as that of the criminal him/herself.

The KCS/KNT and the VKP/KAM: (April 01, 2008).