There is a Tigrinya proverb. ሓቂ ዘረባ፡ ሞት ቀረባ። Speak the truth, though death draws near. The Eritrean people have always understood that some things must be done regardless of the cost. The martyrs we honor on June 20 understood this better than anyone.
They were not fools. That is the first thing people forget.
When they left their villages to join the struggle, they understood the arithmetic. A handful of fighters in the hills against Ethiopia, one of the largest armies in Africa, backed by superpowers, armed to the teeth. The odds were not close, and were laughable. Anyone with sense could see that this fight, by every rational measure, was already lost.
They joined anyway. The young men and the young women alike, walking side by side into the same mountains, carrying the same goal, ready to pay the same price.
And the field filled with the unlikeliest of soldiers. Among them were students who had every reason to stay away. There were many who left their studies and positions and joined the armed struggle. Young Eritreans who had clawed their way into universities abroad, who held futures in their hands, who could have built quiet and comfortable lives far from the bombing. They put down their books and walked into the mountains. They traded the library for the trench. They knew exactly what they were giving up, and they gave it up gladly.
I imagine the night they decided. Maybe they sat outside, and thought of their mothers, who would weep. They thought of the field, where so many had already gone and so few had returned. They knew, with a clarity that should frighten us, that they were probably choosing to die.
But there is a kind of belief that does not wait for good odds.
I imagine two of them in the dark before an offensive. Two friends, young, sharing the last of a cigarette. One says nothing for a long while. Then, quietly, ብጻይ፣ ናጽነት’ሲ ንሪኣ ዶ ንኸውን? (do you think we will see it? The free country?) The other smiles in the dark. ክንደየናይ፣ ምምጽኣ ግን ኣይተርፍን’ዩ። (Maybe not us. But it will come.) The first one nods. Then it is enough. That was all. Just two who had already made their peace, waiting for the morning that would take one or both of them.
They did not fight because they expected to win. They fought because some things are true whether or not they succeed. That a people have the right to govern themselves. That dignity is not granted by an occupier but claimed by the occupied. That a life lived on your knees is not worth more than a death on your feet. They looked at a hopeless war and decided their lives were a price they were willing to pay for a country they might never live to see free.
That is not foolishness. That is the highest thing a human being can do.
And so they went. And they died, somewhere in the rocks and the heat, tens of thousands who paid exactly what they had promised to pay. Eritrea exists today because these men and women refused to accept that the impossible was the same as the untrue.
Now I hear the comfortable objection. I have heard it many times. I felt obliged to reply to it. One time, and one time only.
"But look what became of it. Look at the country they died for. Hardship, the struggle of life. So what was the point? What a tragedy, that all that sacrifice bought such a bitter outcome."
I want to answer this plainly, because it is not only wrong. It is a quiet insult to the dead.
First, you do not get to judge a sacrifice by what came after it. They gave their lives for an idea, for liberation, for the simple right of their people to determine their own fate. They fulfilled their promise completely. They died free, or fighting to be free. You do not blame those who plant the tree because the years that followed brought drought. The planting was good. The planting was sacred.
Second, look harder at what the objection actually says. It says the people should have stayed colonized, because at least colonization was familiar. It says freedom was not worth having unless it arrived perfect and stayed perfect forever. No serious person believes this about any nation on earth. We do not tell the Americans their revolution was pointless because of the long struggles that followed. We do not tell the Indians, the Algerians, the Vietnamese that they should have remained subjects because independence proved hard. A nation's right to exist is not contingent on the ease of the road that follows. The right comes first. Everything else is the long, difficult, unfinished work of the living.
And here is the part the objection often overlooks. They gave us the ground to stand on. A young nation, barely on its feet, faced, among others, the ordinary difficulties of state-building compounded by a hard regional environment. Border conflict came early. Sanctions were imposed and later eased as the stated grounds weakened. Shifting alliances and instability across the Horn shaped the choices available to a small state with limited room to maneuver. External pressures were part of that picture, and they made an already difficult path harder. None of this falls at the feet of those who died for independence. Their task was to secure the right to self-determination, and they accomplished it. What a nation does with that freedom, and the conditions under which it must do so, is the work of the living.
So no. It was not a tragedy that they died for this country.
The tragedy would be if we, the living, decided their belief was naive and laid it down. They looked at hopeless odds and chose the country anyway. The least we can do is look at our own hard road and refuse to call their sacrifice a mistake.
There is another proverb. ኩሉ ይሓልፍ፡ ፍቅሪ ይተርፍ። (Everything passes, love remains.) The hardships will pass. The interference will pass. The years will turn, as years do. But the love that sent them into those mountains, the love that emptied the lecture halls and filled the trenches, that love remains. It is the one thing time cannot take.
They knew they might not win. They fought for us anyway..
That is the point. That was always the point.
N.B. One last saying I promise. There is an expression,
ሓርበኛ ኣይነብርን እዩ፣ ታሪኹ እዩ ዝውረስ። (The patriot/veteran does not live on. It is their legacy that is inherited.)
We say it of the dead, and it is true of them. But it is also true, in a quieter way, of the ones who lived. Because some of them did make it out. Some walked down from the mountains in 1991 and saw the thing they had bled for. They saw the flag rise. They saw a country where there had only been a war. After thirty years, after burying nearly everyone they had started with, they lived to stand on free ground. I wonder how that feels. To survive when so many did not. To carry, in a single body, the memory of all the bodies that did not come home. The ones who promised they would meet again after independence and never did.
I have seen old veterans weep. A veteran who can speak about the worst battles without flinching, calm as stone, and then break completely at the mention of a single friend. A name. A face from forty years ago. They carry their fallen comrades the way you carry something precious and heavy, every day, without ever setting it down. They are the living proof of the saying. They walk among us still, but it is the history they hold that we inherit from them, the stories they alone can tell, the names they refuse to let us forget. When they are gone, those names will pass to us. That is the whole point of remembering. We become the keepers of what they carried.
So on June 20, we honor the dead. But we should also look, while we still can, at the ones who survived to mourn them. Sit with them. Listen. Let them tell you about the friend who smiled in the dark before the offensive and never saw the morning. Their memory is the last living bridge to all of it. Soon enough, it will be ours to carry.