How Ambiguity Helped Endure Dictatorship - Part IV

In Part I, I argued that Eritrea’s political crisis did not begin after independence. It began with a culture of domination that predated independence.

In Part II, I examined how that culture carried into the armed struggle and why independence did not automatically produce citizenship.

In Part III, I explored how fear became normalized. How suspicion replaced trust. How survival anxiety turned control into something that felt necessary.

Here’s Part IV. Eritrea did not lack a foundation at independence. It had already answered the hardest questions once and for all.

In the 1950s, during one of the most polarized periods in our history, Eritreans debated language, religion, land, identity, and even the possibility of partition. Yet the 1952 constitutional arrangement reflected a civic understanding: Eritrea was a plural society. No single language, no single religion, no single region defined it. Even fierce political rivals understood that survival required balance.

Independence in 1991 should have consolidated that shared civic model. Instead, ambiguity replaced clarity.

After liberation, the EPLF did not open the political space. Former ELF members were sidelined. Independent political parties were not allowed. Freedom of speech was curtailed before it could mature. The liberation front dissolved into the PFDJ, and the state became indistinguishable from a single political organization.

But the deeper strategy was not only exclusion. It was ambiguity.

The government refused to formally declare a national language. It left land questions centralized and politically sensitive. It allowed religion to remain a quiet line of suspicion rather than building transparent guarantees of equality. It turned the right of refugees to return into a politically loaded issue instead of a reconciliatory project.

Nothing was fully settled. Nothing was fully clarified. Everything remained just open enough to provoke anxiety. This was not accidental.

In a country with no natural supermajority, ambiguity is a powerful tool to rule freely. As i tried to explain in Part III of this series, Eritrea cannot be ruled by a single ethnic, religious, or regional bloc. It can only survive through coexistence. That structural fact makes clarity dangerous for any leadership that depends on control. Because clarity stabilizes citizenship. Ambiguity destabilizes it.

When language is not clearly settled, communities worry about cultural erasure.

When land remains politically sensitive, regions fear dispossession.

When religion is not openly safeguarded, believers suspect discrimination.

When refugee return is politicized, demographics become a silent battleground.

Each group begins to watch the other. Suspicion replaces trust. And when people see the same social circles repeatedly represented in sports delegations, scholarship selections, diplomatic postings, and leadership opportunities, it is not accidental. It is an indication of how ambiguity quietly hardens into informal gatekeeping. When rules are unclear, access becomes relational. When institutions are weak, networks decide. Over time, this reinforces the perception that opportunity is not national but selective and suspicion deepens.

In such an environment, the regime presents itself as the only neutral referee. The only guarantor of “unity.” The only force preventing collapse. Fear then becomes governance.

This dynamic also distorted the opposition. Instead of organizing around citizenship, constitutionalism, and shared civic rights, many opposition movements were pulled into identity contests. Some framed Eritrea as belonging to a particular ethnic bloc. Others imagined it through a religious lens. Others tied their political projects to regional alignments.

This fragmentation did not arise from nowhere. It grew in the soil of unresolved questions.

Ambiguity also opened the door to external involvement. When identity and belonging remain politically contested, neighboring actors find leverage. Ethiopia, and particularly Tigray during certain periods, were able to influence Eritrean affairs precisely because internal cohesion had been weakened by suspicion.

A nation state can be built in two ways. One model builds the state in the image of one group: one language, one religion, one region. That model is ethnic, religious, or regional by design. It demands conformity and treats difference as a threat.

The other model builds the state in the image of all. It recognizes that no single group embodies the nation. It rests on equal dignity, equal citizenship, and shared ownership. In Arabic language, one might call this an ummah, not an ethnic or religious bloc, but a moral community bound by shared covenant and responsibility. In other words, it is a civic nation of many identities under one political roof.

Eritrea’s struggle for independence leaned toward the second model. The war was not won by one group. It was won by collective sacrifice across regions, languages, and faiths.

After independence, instead of consolidating that shared civic nation, the regime left its pillars deliberately unsettled.

Ambiguity kept communities anxious. Anxiety made control appear necessary. Control sustained dictatorship.

The endurance of Eritrea’s dictatorship, therefore, cannot be explained only by repression. It must also be understood through the politics of uncertainty. When people are unsure about their place, their language, their land, their demographic future, or their security, they cling to order, even flawed order.

Ambiguity became a tool.

And as long as fundamental questions remain undefined, Eritrea will remain politically fragile: not because its people lack unity, but because their unity was never institutionally secured.

A dictator can rule through fear. But it endures through uncertainty.