I spent Monday, June 22 in Geneva, Switzerland protesting alongside
over 5,000 fellow Eritreans in front of the UN “Commission of Inquiry”
offices.
We were there because a UN “Commission of Inquiry” had just issued as
nasty a lot of lies about Eritrea as one could imagine. But then none
of the 3 Commission members had ever been to Eritrea and two had even
called for “regime change” in the country?
That's right, two out of 3 chosen by the leadership of the UN to
“investigate” the human rights situation in the country had already
called for overthrowing the government of Eritrea?
When I spoke at the demonstration I made the point first of all that
the UN was nothing more than a puppet for the Obama White House, the
Obama mafia is what I called it (one of the most crowd pleasing
remarks of the day).
I singled out two criminals amongst the Capos in President BHO’s inner
circle. One we know all to much about, Susan Rice. Once Ambassador to
the UN she oversaw the destruction of Libya and was the sanctions
enforcer against Eritrea.
The other almost unknown criminal, Obama’s quiet consigliere, Gayle
Smith, is much more dangerous as “Special Advisor to the President”
and “Senior Director of the National Security Council” in an office
next door to President BHO.
Gayle Smith, whom Obama is presently trying to install as head of the
USAID, the main source of cover for US Intel agents in the third
world, has a long history of first hand involvement with Eritrea going
back to her rookie days as an undercover CIA agent posing as a
journalist during some of the most challenging days of the Eritrean 30
year war for national independence.
Ms. Smith got married to her first husband in the late 1970’s in the
town of Nakfa, then the headquarters of the guerrilla army called the
Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF) in the Sahel Desert in what
is today Eritrea.
Gayle Smith literally “spent time in the trenches” in the Horn of
Africa, moving on from the Eritrean guerillas next door to the
“marxist-leninist-Enver Hoxha-ite” guerrilla army called the Tigray
Peoples Liberation Front, from the ranks of which Ms. Smith mentored
one Meles Zenawi, late Supremo of Ethiopia.
>From being a “journalist” in 1991, Gayle Smith turned up as Chief of
Staff at USAID in 1994. Journalist to Chief of Staff in 3 years? One
could say she caught then Secretary of State Madeline Albrights eye,
for 4 years later Ms. Smith was African department head at the
National Security Council (under Tony Lake, later failed nominee for
CIA Director, now head of UNICEF).
As head of African operations at the NSC Gayle Smith helped launch the
Ethiopian invasion of Eritrea which culminated in a May-June 2000 war
that left almost 150,000 dead Africans (123,000 Ethiopians and 19,000
Eritrean).
I went on to speak of the hard times Eritrea, where I have lived since
2006, has been going through this past decade. Climate disaster in the
form of historic droughts, with 5 years in the past 11 seeing crop
failures country wide.
I tried to appeal to the handful of mainstream media in the audience
by asking them what would life be like in Europe if all the
agriculture had failed in 5 of the last 11 years? Wouldn't the society
be facing a major crisis?
Our young people are leaving in their thousands because Eritrea's
economy is bad. As Salam, a young Eritrean woman told Hoda Abdel Hamid
on Al Jazeera “our country is nice, but no jobs” to explain why she
had risked her life leaving from anarchic Libya for Europe.
Thanks to Wikileaks we know that the UN inSecurity Council Sanctions
imposed on Eritrea on Christmas Eve, 2009 was a cold blooded attempt
to sabotage the Eritrean economy by preventing the start of the
Eritrean mining industry, which brings badly needed hard currency into
the country. And this is just one of many such examples of the Obama
Mafia’s economic sabotage against us.
Bad economy means no jobs, and jobs is why our young people, like so
many other African youth, are risking their lives to reach “the
promised land”, trying to make a buck to send back home to help their
families.
The same can be said of the hundreds of thousands of Cubans in the
under 50’s generation who left their homeland not because they hated
their government but to make some money to help their family back in
their motherland.
I knew I was preaching to the choir, but maybe, just maybe, the large
contingent of Diaspora Eritrean youth, with the flags of Norway,
Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, France, UK, Germany, Switzerland and Italy
waving side by side with the Red, Gold, Green and Blue of Eritrea,
would be better armed to take on the near relentless onslaught against
Eritrea led by the likes of the New York Crimes newspaper.
When the demo started to wind down in the early evening, famished, I
drifted off looking for something to eat (all our food had gotten
locked in the bus that we had come from Germany in) and was shocked to
find out how expensive Switzerland is. 20 euros for a small pizza that
cost 5 euros in germany?
But then Geneva is the home of almost all the UN and various NGO (no
good outfits?) headquarters and the UN and the NGO’s pay their minions
well. With wages being frozen in Germany these past ten years, no
wonder so many Germans come to Switzerland for relatively well paying
seasonal jobs in the service industry.
Riding the bus back to Stuttgart, Germany I was suprised to see how
shabby the farm houses looked in Switzerland compared to the very
tidy, sparkling clean German farm manors. The Swiss maybe richer but
the Germans certainly seem to be harder working.
The one thing I left the demo realizing is just how nationalist the
Eritrean diaspora is, and that by attacking our country in such a one
sided slanderous way it only made the Eritreans in Europe more united.
Which explained how that with less then a week’s notice over 5,000 of
my fellow Eritreans managed to drop their day to day struggle to
survive and spend long hours on busses making sure that their voices
would be heard, if not listened to, in the heart of the UN, Geneva,
Switzerland.
Thomas C. Mountain has been living and reporting from Eritrea since
2006. He can be reached at thomascmountain at g mail dot com
Received on Tue Jun 30 2015 - 09:11:21 EDT