There were, once upon a time, quite a few Eritreans who sincerely believed that Eritrea was on its way to becoming a copy cat of another nation, an Israel of Africa, they promised. There were, between them, men who believed and pushed towards this great ambition. Then it was a dream come true to them, when the Eritrean tanks rolled into Badme in that ominous day. They never gave it a seconds thought or even look around them and ahead. They never put it into their conscience that what was happening could be a bait-swallowing and a snare arrangement for Eritrea, a snare so difficult to get out of, for a long time to come. But it was not to be, and they could not see what was around the corner and ahead, their imagination simply failed them, or was it completely shut and out of function?
Asking how and by whom that senseless war was started has now become almost an exercise in Metaphysics of the sort that generates much heat with very little or no light. In Eritrea you cant even raise the question, for it already has been resolved. According to EPLF/PFDJ it is simply: nothing has happened, or sometimes, when circumstances force the question to the foreground, things are grotesquely painted, stories rendered in wishy-washy fantasies. The Diaspora EPLF/PFDJ supporters have also created their version of postponed victory and kept their fingers crossed, listening if there is to be any catastrophe in Ethiopia, praying that when it happens it breaks it into one thousand and one pieces, and this is now the type of Nationalism endorsed in Eritrea by the tyrant. Had these intelligent people speculated on their wishes they would realize that in case these were to materialize, the tremor created in Ethiopia would demolish their shelter upon their heads and the resulting flood would almost certainly drown them.
The long promised African Israel has, however, has been much degraded, and in the end was petrified into a hellish Dystopia. The end game result is that we, now, have a new-born child, looking nothing like what the Eritrean people wished and died for, and certainly not at all like an "African Israel" a much preached utopia by those most ignorant of our kind.
What we have, now, at hand may be, without exaggeration, a DUMP HOUSE of radioactive waste shipped from Israel to the two Eritrean Islands of Fatima and Dahlak, in compliance with an agreement since 1993. This is according to the Saudi Arabian daily, Arab news, a newspaper not at all known for its unfriendliness to the Eritrean regime like its sister Al-Hayat which was a consumer of materials written by an Eritrean free-lance journalist now an adviser to the tyrant.
In the year 2003 this writer wrote in the pages of Awate.com on the notorious occasion of importing the sick Australian sheep against a payment made to Eritrea of one Million Australian Dollars, and said:
"These self-appointed non-extremists have to understand that the facilitator has pioneered a new skill for the dictator, a skill that can generate revenues and brings income to help him cling to power and perpetuate enslavement of our people. Those who tried to trivialize the importation of these suspect cargos are only, knowingly or unknowingly, trying to desensitize us against dumping of harmful cargos and familiarize us with the idea of making our country a dump and burial ground for hazardous materials to any bidder. ".
This writer confesses here that he was nave and simple hearted for he was warning people of things which, unknown to him, have already taken place, perhaps years before the advice was offered.
One may doubt the veracity of the Saudi Newspaper report, and it is only prudent to do so except that in this case the news carried by that newspaper conforms to the behavioral patterns of the tyrant and his style of governance (if governance can be used referring to his excesses and criminality). The case of the sick Australian sheep and this case of nuclear waste being dumped now, as your read this, in Dahlak and Fatima point to each other and there is no evidence that they are not, at the same time, pointing to other crimes of the same category.
There remains a strong point to the advantage of the Saudi newspapers report veracity: The Eritrean authorities didnt try to deny, or even cast doubt on it.
It was a cynical irony that at the same time the Saudi newspaper was telling the world about the toxic materials being dumped into our country, the tyrant was lying through his teeth and communicating using his tuba Shabait.com and its echo meskerem.net, to the effect that Eritrea is on strong footing in different domains, something incompatible with the facts of a country already a dumping ground of hazardous materials from other nations the governments of which are anxious not to keep near them, knowing well their fatal nature to human and other forms of life.
Seeing all these, one suspects that there is a plan in the deranged mind of the tyrant to annihilate the Eritrean people and assassinate their future. This should not sound strange or inconceivable; there are historical precedents to this. There were kings and heads of nations in history who hated their subjects, conspired against their own people and committed genocide. Saddam Hussein gassed the population of Halabcha, a Kurdish town in Northern Iraq. Hatsie Tewodros of 19th Century Abyssinia told his European captives:
"How can I show these ragged soldiers of mine to your well-dressed troops? .The Mortar, he added, had been made not to be used against the British but his own countrymen"
The plan to annihilate the Eritrean people, in the deranged mans mind, seems to be: annihilate this generation in war pogroms and prisons, and the next one by importing toxicants and Radio-active waste, specially that this will, at the same time, inflate his personal assets in Swiss and Italian banks. It is only a matter of time until the poison leaks to the body of the food-chain and to the bodies of Eritreans of the next generation as a final destination. A radiating generation seems to sound beautifully in the deranged mans mind! How can one boast of a nation, while at the same time selling the live flesh of the nationals of that same nation? Flesh sold so shamelessly, that claiming the nation as "it is on a strong footing in different domains" would sound hollow and outright lying? Who is this liar trying to convince, then? How can this be explained?! To top this, the victims have to show gratitude and express it in all those "all-night all-day" parties of gwaila, exactly like the unfortunate victims of Phalaris, an ancient tyrant, who were imprisoned in a brazen bull, and slowly tortured over a steady fire. Reeds placed in the nostrils of the bull in such a manner that the shrieks of the prisoners were transmuted into music; Sren Kirkgaard in his book "Either/Or" describes: "their cries should not reach the tyrants ears so as to strike terror into his heart; when they reach his ears they sounded like sweet music".
In that great Novel by Feyodor Dotoyevsky, "The possessed", one of the characters, Pyotr Verkhovensky (a personality remotely reminding one, of our Dictator), a revolutionary and a Nihilist comes to a provincial town where his father Professor Stepan Verkhovensky lives. At his arrival and staying in the town the gates of hell were broken loose. Death and mayhem were planned and caused by this cruel personality and even managed to torch the town and set it to fire. He didnt even have mercy on his old father who, seeing himself losing every thing and seeing the destruction all around him, embarks on a journey to escape his surroundings in town. He accepts a ride from strangers and stops at a hut for food on his way to the town of Spasov. He meets a peasant, Sofya Mateevna, who was selling gospels in the hut. He offers her a ride to catch the ferry to Spasov. They stay in a hut to wait for the day until the ferry will arrive, but Mr. Verkhovensky falls very ill. She stays with him because of his insistence and because she is unable to leave a dying man. At one point he asks her to read for him from her gospels. She opened a page and read (from Luke viii. 32-36):
"And there was there an herd of many swine feeding on the mountain: and they besought him that he would suffer to enter to them. And he suffered them. Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked. When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country. Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the foot of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind: and they were afraid. They also which saw it told them by what means he that was possessed of the devils was healed".
At the end of the passage, my friend, said Mr. Verkhovensky in great excitement, this wonderful-extraordinary passage has been a stumbling block to me all my life- so that I remembered the passage from childhood. But now an idea has occurred to me; an awful lot of ideas keep occurring to me now. You see, that is just like our Russia. These devils who go out of the sick man and enter the swine- these are all the sores, all the poisonous exhalations, all the impurities, all the big and little devils that have accumulated in our great and beloved invalid, in our Russia. "
Had Stepan Verkhonvsky been one of us he would have said "Our great and beloved invalid Eritrea" and wouldnt have made much of a difference, for Eritrea is now possessed by the "devils".
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if you dont agree that the dictator is not out to enrich himself and annihilate the Eritrean people, tell me then what is he doing.
Sren Kirkgaard, an excellent Danish philosopher and intellectual, with a lasting influence on 20th Century European Literature and Philosophy.
