The Emir of the microscopic, but wealthy, Great State of Qatar is moonstruck.  It seems that he is infatuated, head over heels in love with the Eritrean President-for-life and Eritrea! How else can one explain his Hatemic§ generosity which prompted him to be so kind as to shower the Eritrean President and the Eritrean Muslim population with his expensive, timely, gifts?

Rarely, if ever, has a head of a state or a great Emir like that of the great State of Qatar donated a private jet to another head of a state, especially when that other state is poverty-ridden and can’t nearly reciprocate in kind. A jet for the private use and pleasure of the Head of State of that poor state must be a love gift, and what a gift! Tyranny on wings.

But these acts of Arab generosity on the prince’s part present Eritreans with additional new liabilities and distresses on top of those already imposed by the prince’s friend, the Eritrean despot.  After all, it is Eritreans who have to keep up, from now on, to the new projected image of the tyrant as an owner of a private jet. What is this if not further corrupting him?

Tyranny Airlines

It will not be a long from the moment the tyrant receives his dream wings to the time when we see Eritrea dotted with a lot of tiny airdromes especially designed for the fit, the size and power of the only private jet in the country--Tyranny Airlines--especially because labor is abundant and for free.  Slaves in rags for uniform--son, brother, grandfather, daughter, mother and all--free and ready for toil. The Emir’s shiny gift morphs smoothly and perfectly into sweat, tears and blood for the poor.   

Gifts are symbols and expressions of endearment offered on and around a happy event or occasion, say, a birthday, a marriage or even a relief from a misfortune.  Which event is it, then, that the great Emir has seen, and Eritreans failed to see? Which event in the life of Eritreans now is the one that triggered his wonderful gift of wings to their oppressor?  

Certainly, there are many events in the life of Eritrea and Eritreans these days, but hardly, if ever, can any of them qualify to a tag of happiness. In addition to the quarter of a million refugees stranded in Eastern Sudan for more than forty years, we have now our youth fleeing the country by the thousands, many of them ending up becoming meals for the fish and the sharks of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea in the process.  Others face animals of prey in the deserts of the great Sahara.  Still others are in jailed in metallic containers and underground dungeons in Eritrea and some more face death from the bullets of the Egyptians in the deserts of Sinai.   And while the great prince was busy charming and impressing Eritreans with his extravagant gifts, many of their young were sent back by the Emir’s brother, the  master of torture, Mubarak of Egypt, to face torture and death at the hands of the Emir’s friend, the tyrant of Eritrea.  

Unlike the Emir’s blessed country, ours has no gas deposits for sale.   Hunger has become endemic in our country since the misrule of the tyrant.  We are told by the Emir’s friend, the tyrant, not to think of eating wheat-bread because thinking along these lines is dangerous and unrealistic.  How rational does the Emir think it is for a people banned from thinking about eating wheat bread, to think of flying sounds? We are also longing to reopen and revive our only university which was dismantled and cannibalized by the Emir’s friend, and make it once again the center of enlightenment for our people. We are in dire need to educate our young and prepare them to face the future without the gloom the older generations had to endure. Where did this Emir, then, pick up the idea that a power usurper and murderer, needs a private jet? It really stinks!  

Are these events really occasions appropriative to the offer of a jet as a gift to a mass murderer? The gift, if the great Emir missed it, sends quite a different message to Eritreans. The truth is that the gift looks to us, Eritreans, very much like a pat on the shoulder of the tyrant in approbation of a job well done. A job straight from hell, Eritreans may, as well, add! 

Owning a private jet is not a cheap or low cost endeavor, I guess.  For the jet to fly, it will need someone who will assume the position of a captain.  The president-for-life is a Field Marshal and, as such, cannot consider taking charge of a position as low as that of a captain.  He has to, perforce, consider recruiting a captain, a pilot--yet another expensive commodity by Eritrean accountants.  Unless, of course, the prince of the orient provided that, too, with the gift. There are also insurance fees to pay, frequent spare parts, landing and flying fees, international institutions fees and many other bills of expenditure.  If not provided for with the gift, Eritreans, one of the poorest people on earth, will end up paying all of it, courtesy of the great prince of the east.  Thus the gift unveils its logical substance in the end: incitement to pilfering and plundering Eritrean public monies.

Operation Agonize The Eritrean

The wealthy Emir, intentionally or otherwise, takes part in our subjugation and further impoverishment. 

It is an enigma to Eritreans seeing this wealthy Emir picking a quarrel with them, for no apparent reason. The vast majority of Eritreans can’t even spot his tiny Emirate on the map let alone taking the initiative of quarreling with or being an object of his and his Emirate’s quarrel. We hardly know him or his Emirate and, were it not for his legendary wealth, we probably wouldn’t have ever heard about him or his Emirate. We have no common border or history; we never shared historical experiences nor culture symbols with his country.  Eritreans were not supporters either of Bahrain or Qatar in their nasty small border war few years ago.
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So what for is Qatar taking revenge on Eritreans? Why is this prince, knowingly or otherwise, bankrolling "Operation Agonize the Eritrean?" Why is Qatar, knowingly or unknowingly, bankrolling the Sawa torture camp and other humiliation and dehumanization camps? What kind of taste or morality does a man posses if he presents as a gift a couple of shirt cuffs, a wrist-watch and a pair of gloves, to a man whose arms are amputated and is still suffering?  We don’t know; or rather, we know but prefer not to say at this time.  

I would say that although the act shows that the man is rich and capable of giving away-- but it also indicates a gross defect in taste and sensitivity. You can attribute an array of negative descriptions to such a man including tastelessness, mindlessness and rudeness, and whatever you say will all fall under the category of corrupted and corrupted taste.  

Eritrea's Mufti: A Cadre In A Turban

And this exactly what I spotted in the latest of the Emirs generosity: a mosque for the Muslims of Eritrea as declared by a PFDJ official: a cadre in a turban and robe assigned the rank of playing the role of the Mufti of the Muslims of Eritrea.  

Is the mighty Emir living secluded in a bubble? He seems not to know that Muslims of Eritrea are not dying of lack of mosques.  Has the Emir of Qatar no knowledge that their communities’ leaders, as well as that of Eritrean Christian communities’ leaders have been murdered, exiled and jailed? That their teachers in Asmara and Keren were unlawfully incarcerated and later shot to death extra judicially? Has the Emir no knowledge that Eritrea now is a land of declared religious persecution. If he doesn’t know, it is bad; but if he knows it, it is diabolic and evil.  

We didn’t, either, miss the implication of the Emir’s gift to the Muslims of Eritrea, indicating (the succession tells it all: first the winged gift and then the great mosque) that we Eritrean Muslims oppose the dictator for being a Christian! Eritreans Muslims recognize this for what it looks. It looks to them like their old and familiar friend, the old trick of divide and rule, only this time played for the tyrant by the wealthy Emir, the great prince of the east himself. 

We, Eritreans are also aware that the Emir’s mosque goes a long way towards rehabilitating and meliorating the tyrant’s image in the Islamic and Arab Worlds-- including his newly found friendship in Iran--and that the great Emir’s moves are only a knot similar to the famous turbaned photo demonstration of the tyrant in Gash Barka few years ago.  

A Contrast In Generosity

This also comes at the same time when the regime has unearthed and published the ridiculous claims of the Sudanese mercenary, the late Muhammad Abulqasim Hajj Hummed, who died two years ago and who claimed that when the tyrant was sick in the early nineties and lying unconscious, it was Boutros Ghali who authorized and imposed the transporting of the sick tyrant to Israel.  Hello, Eritrea was independent then, and Butros Ghali was never authorized by the people of Eritrea to choose and decide for them. But we know that all these are all ploys, Machiavellianism and expediency, like the great Emir’s mosque is now.     

One cannot see how far the Emir’s gift to the Eritrean Muslim is pathetic, dreary and unwelcome unless one remembers and compares it to how one country out of all nations on earth, a country that Eritreans are told of by the despot as being their sworn enemy, prompted to take a smart, humane move in expressing its will to receive Eritrean refugees facing deportation by the torture master, Mubarak of Egypt, to his peer, the tyrant of Eritrea. True and genuine generosity and human decency needs no billions of tons of natural gas cylinders stacked for it to be at play.   

No need here to speak of the tyrant’s acceptance of the gift of humility, which belies all his past haughty claims to dignity and austerity, now that he is prostrating at the Emir’s feet for a jet never properly fitting the vanity of a tyrant in tatters. 

Let the great Emir, then, know that so many Eritrean Muslims oppose his friend, the tyrant, because he is a tyrant and because he is corrupt, not because he is Christian, which, as far as his deeds tell, some Christians argue, he is not that at all it.  We oppose his Muslim lieutenants as much including the turbaned and the in-robe cadres. We also think of mosques not as base as stones, concrete and steel or even gold and jewels. That stone housing is only the embodiment of what is already sublime and renders meaning only to the heart, that is why we believe that in times of distress we can perform our prayers in the heart anywhere in god’s land, no need for walls, ceilings, domes, carpets even water and food sometimes.   

That is also why we see that the life-span of the Emir’s mosque is overlapping tightly on the little remaining life-span of tyranny in our country. That is why, again, that we promise the great Emir, that when tyranny falls down dead at our feet, and it will inevitably do so, we will not knock his mosque down or demolish it, but we will not pray in it either.   Instead, we will lock its doors, keep it lonely, washed clean and standing as a monument immortalizing the memory of the hands which were enabling enslavement on our young and old, despotism in our governance and devastation of our land.   

We would also like to remind the great Emir, that there were in times bygone, successive strong, wealthy and powerful forces, incomparably wealthier and more powerful than the Emir and his tiny state, and these forces were enabling Ethiopia to hold its grip on our country, but at last they had to yield.  

The morale is that the friendship of tyrants is transitory and chimera-like.