Part 06N07:-If it is not the President Isaias Afwerki himself, they are his “Ministers (who) conduct tour in Gash-Barka region“.

The VKP/KAM: (November 18, 2007.)

Part 05N07:-Gash-Barka region  efforts underway to promote tourism“ By Staff Sept 1, 2007  The VKP/KAM: (November 18, 2007).

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Part 7

  What rights do  the PFDJ’s regime,  Ato Isaias Afwerki,  his generals and many of their non-native Kunama supporters have,

to invade the Kunama land, confiscate and dispossess (steal from) the Kunama people of their native and ancestral land rights,

settle in, buy, sell, cultivate, use, misuse and trade with it?

For the Kunama people, their “land,” apart from being their ancestral and native one, it is also the only source of their existence. In other words, and particularly for the Kunama rural population, their land is their only and the greatest employer and provider of their subsistence There is therefore no one and nothing else which can replace it as the guarantor of the Kunama people’s existence. Their land is also an emblem of their ethnic, cultural and traditional identities. Everything which surrounds the Kunama people’s genealogy, history and society, has its basis, evolves in and concludes within the land of their ancestors. The Kunama, known as one of the prime inhabitants of Eritrea, if not even of larger territories extending well into the Ethiopian State of Tigray, have, unlike the rest of the other Eritrean nationalities, a clear history of being the only Eritrean ethnic-group which, precisely because of its long settlement in its territory, has been eluding many historians, ethnologies, anthropologists and other researchers, trying to retrace its true origin and whether it is at all an immigrant into or just a native ethnic-group of the territory it has been occupying ever since. The Kunama people’s only true history therefore is that they are the uncontested inhabitants and have their legitimate property rights of their own native and ancestral land. Such land property rights cannot be arbitrarily deprived of by any authority, let alone by a non-elected and non-recognised authority and regime like the “People’s Front for Democracy and Justice” (PFDJ.) A “provisional” turned into a permanent dictatorial and cruel regime cannot have any claim, let alone a legal authority and right to engage itself in serious matters like those concerning nationalities, their social, cultural values and land property rights. These are existential elements one should fully accept, respect and even promote, if one is really good-intentioned.

The very fact that already from the very beginning of its rule, the PFDJ’s regime of Ato Isaias Afwerki had taken up the very controversial and illegal policy of changing the traditional geographical borders and replacing the old names of the Eritrean regions, which at the same times were also the traditionally recognised and accepted borders of the home territories of many Eritrean ethnic-groups like the Kunama people, was an evil move to create confusion and raise unnecessary resentments and conflicts within those nationalities. That initial scratch has now turned into a big plight, dangerously raising deep resentments and confrontations.

Though today, the PFDJ’s regime has not only allowed the members of almost all of the Eritrean ethnic-groups to freely and massively settle in the Kunama land, it has also decided to allocate parts of the two Kunama regions of Aimasa and Tika as the territory of the Hedared populations and recognised “Tessenei” as their regional capital town. This is a very clear usurpation, not only of the territorial property rights of the Kunama people, but also the use and abuse, on the part of the regime, of its own authority in arbitrarily disfiguring the landscape and the demographic features of the Kunama people and of their native land. Not even the “Hedareb populations” themselves would ever claim that “Tessenei” and its surroundings are their native and home territories, for they very well-know that the Kunama are the true native inhabitants and therefore that entire regions is theirs and only they are the real owners of their own  ancestral land. The regime’s policy therefore is solely to foment conflicts among those otherwise peacefully co-habiting neighbouring populations.

The VKP/KAM’s team has been repeatedly pointing out that based on their own egalitarian (“favouring the doctrine of equal rights, benefits and opportunities for all citizens”) social system, the Kunama have the tradition of owning their native and ancestral land in common, as a single people, as Kunama. This is a uniquely Kunama land ownership and tenant tradition which has neither a parallel system in any of the other Eritrean ethnic-groups nor is it to be translated into meaning that the Kunama land belong to the state. Such peculiar Kunama common land ownership had led the Italian colonisers to misinterpret, misuse and declare the Kunama land as “Terreno Demaniale” (State Land), but even this did not mean either the land of the “Colonial State of Eritrea or of Italy,” but of the Kunama people, which, in today’s concept, can be translated as meaning of the “Kunama State.” As it is known, today, the PFDJ’s regime as well as many members of the other Eritrean nationalities, particularly the Eritrean Tigrians, believe that, as “Terreno Demaniale/State Land/Meriet Mengisti,” they are entitled to freely occupy, settle in, buy, sell and trade with the Kunama land. They should simply be informed and know that every piece of the Kunama land which has been freely occupied, bought and sold, under the auspices of the PFDJ’s regime of Ato Isaias Afwerki, will be returned to its own true owners, the Kunama people/Kunama State. An entire ethnic-group cannot be deprived of and denied of its own native ancestral land property rights.

The geographical borders of the Kunama land, as well as the territorial property rights of the Kunama people are well known not only to the neighbouring, but also to the other Eritrean populations and therefore the present land policy of the PFDJ’s regime, which has turned the Kunama land into a playground of the Eritrean demographic diversity, will have to be unquestionably annulled, as it is a clear injustice committed against the Kunama people and against their native’s land property rights.

In its “Final and Binding Verdict on the Ethio-Eritrean border issue, the Ethiopian-Eritrean Boundary Commission (EEBC,”) did clearly draw the lines of the Kunama land, from the south-east to the south west. Its borders from the north-east to the north-west are already and traditionally known to its neighbouring Baria and Beni-Amer populations and therefore any new re-drawing of those borders or the claim that “Tessenei and its environs” are the land of the Hedareb populations is really “adding insults to injuries” on the Kunama people. It is also designed to fomenting open conflicts with those innocent populations.

In conclusion therefore, let us remind all that, neither the present PFDJ’s regime of Ato Isaias Afwerki has any right to interfere in the land property rights of the Kunama people, nor do their supporters have whatsoever right to freely and massively settle in, occupy, buy, sell, trade with and claim any land property rights in the Kunama land. Besides, let us just and kindly advise the Hedareb populations to refrain themselves from believing in the PFDJ regime’s cunning policy and get carried away into claiming, in the future, for the land property rights in Tessenei and in its environs which are the territories of the Kunama Aimasa and of the Kunama Tika. Finally, let the Kunama people themselves be the ones to decide whether their system of owning their native and ancestral land in common and as members of the Kunama ethnic-group, is to remain as it is or else be turned into the Tigrian “Risti” like system, (private land ownership). No other authority is therefore called for or to be called to settle such a serious and an exclusively Kunama people’s affair.

The VKP/KAM: (December 8, 2007.)