Contested Terrains of Collective and Public Memory in Post-Independence Eritrea
Start Date
12-1-2012 1:30 PM
End Date
12-1-2012 3:00 PM
Description
Eritrean history is marked by recurring incidents of mass political violence that took place before and after the country’s independence in 1991. One of the most controversial episodes is the Civil War of the 1980s between the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and its forerunner, the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). Signifying the widely cited quotation of Winston Churchill, history has been written in Eritrea by the victorious EPLF, which renamed it self the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) in 1994, and has remained the only legitimate political party in Eritrea. Senior military and political leadership of EPLF and ELF maintain widely divergent and contrasting memories of the Eritrean Civil War, significantly contributing to contested public memory of the past. Since Eritrea’s independence in 1991, ex-freedom fighters of EPLF have dominated the political landscape in Eritrea, while ex-freedom fighters of ELF have largely remained in exile. This paper explores the politics of denial and memory in Eritrea with a focus on the rhetorical strategies utilised by the Eritrean government to promote its hegemonic political culture in post-independence Eritrea, and the impact of this in transitional justice and democratisation efforts. The disciplinary discussion involved in this research is mainly transitional justice as related to the politics of memory and denial. Using primary and secondary sources, the study adopts a methodology that extracts credible consensus from opposing views in order to reach at practical conclusions for democratisation efforts in Eritrea. This is seen as a most important added value of the research to academic discourse on transitional justice in Eritrea.
Contested Terrains of Collective and Public Memory in Post-Independence Eritrea
Eritrean history is marked by recurring incidents of mass political violence that took place before and after the country’s independence in 1991. One of the most controversial episodes is the Civil War of the 1980s between the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and its forerunner, the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). Signifying the widely cited quotation of Winston Churchill, history has been written in Eritrea by the victorious EPLF, which renamed it self the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) in 1994, and has remained the only legitimate political party in Eritrea. Senior military and political leadership of EPLF and ELF maintain widely divergent and contrasting memories of the Eritrean Civil War, significantly contributing to contested public memory of the past. Since Eritrea’s independence in 1991, ex-freedom fighters of EPLF have dominated the political landscape in Eritrea, while ex-freedom fighters of ELF have largely remained in exile. This paper explores the politics of denial and memory in Eritrea with a focus on the rhetorical strategies utilised by the Eritrean government to promote its hegemonic political culture in post-independence Eritrea, and the impact of this in transitional justice and democratisation efforts. The disciplinary discussion involved in this research is mainly transitional justice as related to the politics of memory and denial. Using primary and secondary sources, the study adopts a methodology that extracts credible consensus from opposing views in order to reach at practical conclusions for democratisation efforts in Eritrea. This is seen as a most important added value of the research to academic discourse on transitional justice in Eritrea.