…In Eritrea the records speak for themselves… whilst in most repressive regimes people debate about the true independence of independent press in Eritrea no one is in any doubt because the independent press does not exist and as its owners and writers have not been seen or heard from (minus those who have been exiled) then far from being an academic debate the non existence of freedom of Press in Eritrea is the only possible conclusion that a person with all mental faculties intact can come up with….so when the PIA sat next to the Acting minister of information the other day and told a room full of young people some of whom are aspiring journalists and some of whom are allegedly correspondents to the only TV network in the country and they never batted an  eyelid… I questioned not their integrity but their sanity…. Because integrity can be compromised in situations where something is neither black nor white but where there is a full gone conclusion and you fail to make it, it is your sanity that has been compromised….  

Rule of law… means the supremacy of the law…No one is above the law… and hence any detention that does not follow the law of the land has undermined the rule of law in the land… every single day, every Eritrean under the Eritrean sun, wakes up to an array of illegal detentions that are so unjust and even the half baked justifications have long since passed their sell-by dates and have become not stale but outright poisonous… on the eve of September 18, 2001 many people were duped into thinking that the incidents of our Black September were temporary blips that will be fully explained in due course…. But when many Septembers had come and gone with no explanation there simply is no justification to the status of rule of law in Eritrea…. There is simply none! There really is no other explanation that would explain the reality of a nine year old who has been separated from both her parents as they languish in jail, for crimes that has not been brought before any court in the nation, for seven out of her nine short years…there is no law that could allow this…. It is with this in mind that I question the sanity of the minister of justice when, in Keren, on the 16 July 2008, she stressed the significance of enhanced coordination among the legislative, judicial and executive bodies in facilitating and resolving legal cases… if Ms Hashim was debating the strength of a sentence passed on cases that every Eritrean knows and is concerned about it would have amounted to a debate on which function has not functioned as expected…. If she had argued about the time scale… it would have been a debate about capacity but in the face of the complete and utter disappearance of top officials in the country and many more less prominent folk her seminar far from being a philosophical debate is an indictment of her sanity….so far as I am concerned….(unless she is so ruthless in her callousness…). The biggest problem regarding the justice system in Eritrea isn’t in how long cases in district courts are taking to resolve, it is the fact that people disappear into the maze of prison systems that sucks people into oblivion…and that and only that should be the preoccupation of a minister of justice….anything less would tantamount to adorning the emperor’s new cloth with yet more invisible gold trimmings….

…when up to a thousand asylum seekers are forcibly deported back to the land they fled dodging live bullets and when they line up row after row of the assorted wretched folk to prove the fact that they were no myth … and statistic after statistic tells you that many more are on their way to where these lot have just been captured and returned from and these are but a tip of the iceberg (the tip of the tornado…. Perhaps) that threatens to overcome those who became so intolerant of them… there is one and only one conclusion that can be made… the youth of Eritrea are not happy! And they are fleeing the country in their droves…no one bought the story of the 500 nkfa and a disco night out with big wigs of PFDJ … but when an entire youth fun fare (pardon me… festival….) follows… one is left with the bad after test of the selfishness and bad test of the Diaspora youth who I know would question as to what it is about the very site of the festivities that causes tens of thousands of young people to leave the country that they treat as their extended dance floor…. A dance floor away from their rented dance floors here in their real homes!  The biggest concern of the Eritrean youth is not how much gender equality there is…. Hell… it is not even how much education they receive any more…. It is about which conflict is being lit for them to die in…those who survived hanish died in sudan those who survided that died in badme and now those who have been emaciated  carrying boulders heavier than them wonder if they might die at ras dumera…. That in a nutshell is their preoccupation and no amount of donated second-hand, books are going to help them escape the immense pressure they are under….. them books will massage the ego of the beautiful people who has descended on them for their annual retreat but these lot have neither the time nor the luxury to sit and debate the ideas contained thereof.

Of course there is religious persecution in Eritrea…. How else can one explain the disappearance of the religious father figure of 40% of the population? In an interview towards the end of last year… Girma Asmerom (Ambassador in Belgium) stated that the Disappeared patriarch is alive and kicking and praying at a monastery that no one is able to name or locate…. If the good ambassador has talked about a simple priest then we would have debated if this should be an issue of church? State? etc if the ambassador had talked about a misconduct or even mental illness on the part of his Holiness then we would have debated the authority that was apt to make such a decision…  but in the light of a Patriarch being appointed when another one is Alive and kicking and still praying… there is no other explanation but interference and an  unsanctioned one… this is a denial of freedom of religion of the worst kind…. So when Ambassador T Gerhatu (ambassador to the UK and Republic of Ireland) sat in front of me and blatantly denied any religious (or other type of) persecution I felt like screaming ‘can’t you see that we can all see that your emperor is utterly naked… and no amount of miming is going to convince anyone that there is something we just have not been able to see!??’ …. I didn’t I was too flabbergasted at his heartlessness and infact later felt sorry for the poor sod who is probably stuck between the soft fluff of delusion and the harsh reality of the truth…

Once upon a time PFDJ officials had no problems adding a decoration or two to their Emperor’s new cloth…here is my favourite version of the story (by my children’s favourite  story teller…they have acquired their mother’s test for a good story!)

The King is simply mad about new clothes and stops in at the Royal Tailor's shop several times a day. He loves to buy gorgeous suits and cloaks and fur-lined boots. His obsession makes him cruel, though, and he mistreats servants who muss his clothing. He even had one man minced and turned into margarine! The people longed to get rid of him. A dozen brainy men formulate a plan and convince the Tailor to go along with it. The next time the King stops in, the Tailor tells him about some marvelous new cloth he's just had imported from Tibet. It's magical and will keep you warm even in the icy cold. As the King enjoys to ski every day, he orders the Tailor to make him a ski suit of this material. He asks to see it and the Tailor tells him it's before him. The King complains of not being able to see it until the Tailor tells him that the cloth appears invisible to fools and nincompoops. On that cue, the dozen men come in and rave about the unseen cloth. The King falls for their trick. The next day the Tailor comes to outfit the King in his new skiing suit. They tell him that he doesn't need to wear any undergarments, so he strips naked. The men are smart and have turned up the central heating, so the King sweats and believes he is wearing the warm cloth. Just then the Queen and her ladies of retinue come strolling through. Most avert their eyes, but some seem to enjoy seeing the, uh, "royal treasures." The King then cries, "Now I'm off to ski!" and heads for the mountain, oblivious to the freezing weather. In half an hour he was frozen solid and the people all cheered. (by Roald Dahl)