Today was not the first day that my alarm clock failed to go off. But today was the first day that I almost missed my own meeting because my alarm clock failed to wake me up. Better late than never I supposed. So I caught a taxi cab – a ten fold increase in fare as compared to the bus – and opened the laptop to prepare. I noticed that the cabbie was a Hornist and avoided eye contact so as to escape the inevitable back and forth on establishing identity, politics and a long discussion on the miseries of the migrant life. I don’t know if this is just me, but saying where you are from has become a task that requires great mental agility these days. And I think this is particularly true for those of us from the Horn. I am always careful not to offend in case my cabbie runs us both off a bridge. Over the past 10 years I have determined that my identity is really dependent on my counterpart’s identity. If he is from Addis then I am from Addis. If he is from Oromia or Ogaden, then I am most certainly Eritrean.

TV was rammed down my throat this past weekend. Our new Internet Service Provider insists that we can not get our beloved surfing without the accompanying cable. The system is free, advanced and flows through fiber optics we are told. The screen was there for movies anyway so, viola, there I was soaking in cable TV all my own for the first time in my life.

The History Channel on HD is incredibly colorful and absorbing. After a whole day of gazing I progressed to listening to the contents of the programming. Before long I realized why I had avoided television for so long. The fact that all the programming is focused on religion can be excused by the timing of my surrender to cable. However, the History Channel’s attempt to do serious investigation of biblical history was horrifying in its lack of realism.

Yes reality is in the eye of the powerful. The biblical programming is probably regurgitating most of the propagandist history papers that are published in US theological and history departments. However, there should be basic, commonly agreed20to objective methods of historical investigation that any programmer of such documentaries must follow – or maybe not.

Western policy in the horn

In the last days of his government, Mengistu Hailemariam sat in front of the Ethiopian parliament and explained why the capture by rebels of a hill four hours drive north of the capital city did not signal defeat for his regime. He reasoned that the reality of military engagement meant that hills are captured and lost all the time with little implication. Never mind that the rebels had one tenth the number of soldiers as the government, and that they were essentially equipped with captured government weapons. He continued to state that even the defeat at Afabet in Eritrea, which astute commentators of the time predicted would be Ethiopia’s Dien Bien Phu, really meant little since Afabet was a small town of 700 inhabitants. Never mind that it contained the largest Ethiopian garrison in Eritrea outside Asmara with the most elite of the Ethiopian fighting force, Nadew ez, within it.

Such egregious miscalculations by policy makers and leaders happen all too often. Typically they lead to the unnecessary extension of violence and suffering without having much altering impact on the final results.