The Coming Down of the Final Curtain

After more than fifty years of horror, Eritreans will soon watch with jubilation as they witness the coming down of the final curtain on the totalitarian ruler, the angel of death, a Satan in human form, who lived among them for no other reason than to inflict immeasurable sufferings on them.

Great leaders leave great legacies. They all go on a high note because they know when to quit; as a result, their people memorialize them in many ways for centuries after they left. However, the totalitarian ruler of Eritrea is deliberately doing what he has been doing for fifty years, not because he wants to leave a great legacy but an ugly one. He wants Eritreans and the world to remember him as the devil who lived among humans in a human form; It is very baffling; the more Eritreans love him, the more he hates them.

The totalitarian ruler knows he is a devil in a human form, whose main goal from his inception is to inflict as much harm on the people of Eritrea and beyond. He also knows he has achieved much more than he had planned. He did not think Eritreans or the world would let him live this long and inflict this much damage on Eritrea and the entire Horn of Africa.

The totalitarian ruler of Eritrea does not have a qualm about who or what he is. More than a few times, the totalitarian ruler even told Eritreans that he was not what they thought he was, but Eritreans refused to believe their own ears or eyes. He has also been deliberately leaking information about his routine meetings with devil worshippers and those who practice sorcery and witchcraft in the lowlands and highlands of Eritrea. All Eritreans heard his confession loudly but still refused to believe their own ears.

The totalitarian ruler knows all future generations of Eritreans will cringe when remembering his ugly legacy. They will remember him as the eldest son of Satan and the Angel of Death. The totalitarian ruler has no problem when Eritreans in the future describe him as the devil because he knows he is one. He would wear that title proudly on his sleeve or as an epitaph on his tombstone, if he could direct his handlers from inside his grave.

However, two scenarios terrify him immensely: getting handcuffed and receiving his comeuppance or killed like a dog, like his bosom buddy Muammar Gaddafi. Therefore, he is always on alert, nervously watching his back, not to put up a fight but to run away to the northern part of Eritrea at a moment’s notice; to save his life.

To mitigate his fear, in the beginning, the totalitarian ruler decided to spend most of his days hiding around the port of Massawa until he got an eerie feeling after contemplating enemies coming stealthily from the open sea. Therefore, he built a private lake in Adi Hallo on the backs of poor Eritreans. Natural hills already fortify Adi Hallo and its surroundings, but now the private lake is meant to serve as a moat to assuage the totalitarian ruler’s nervousness and fear, or at least to give him leeway to avoid being killed or handcuffed.

For the totalitarian ruler, the safest haven is the northern part of Eritrea, an area where he has been planning, for so long, to spend his final days and hours.

The totalitarian ruler knows the northern parts of Eritrea like the back of his hands; plus, from the south, he can be guarded by his partners in crimes, those whose hands he drenched in blood, and those who will flee with their families with him. And from the north, by the tribal leaders of eastern Sudan. He trusts the tribal leaders of eastern and southeastern Sudan much more than any Eritrean group.

As a result, since 2011, but especially since 2015, he has been stashing away in the northern part of Eritrea grains and nonperishable foods that can sustain thousands of his partners in crime for many years; billions of dollars worth of foreign currencies, gold, and ample supply of guns and ammunition.

For over a decade now, packing all his belongings and sitting at the cliff’s edge, he has been waiting nervously and almost anticipating someone or something to push him over, anytime. He has imagined what his final days will look like; he played that scenario in his head thousands of times. But he has never pictured fooling many generations of all Eritreans or staying alive for this long. No doubt, he overestimated Eritreans.

Besides, he never thought the few apprentices he recruited and trained would also recruit and condition a significant number of apprentices, who would, in turn, recruit many more, and so on. He set and charted a default course for every citizen to follow religiously throughout their lives or risk his wrath. He liquidated tens of thousands of heroes and locked up tens of thousands of political prisoners in his hundreds of prisons.

Moreover, the totalitarian ruler transformed tens of thousands of heroes into cowards, thousands and thousands of citizens into informers and propagandists, hundreds of thousands of others into submissive slaves and zombies, and almost the entire nation into an idiocracy. That is quite an accomplishment, for a devil. Now, his wish is if only he could spend his waning days surrounded by his accomplices in the caves of the northern part of Eritrea. If only he could avoid being handcuffed or killed.

All things come to an end, and so does the totalitarian ruler’s reign of 50 years of terror. The totalitarian ruler can see the writing on the wall; he knows his judgment day is closing in on him, and so do all his apprentices realize they have not much time left. So, his apprentices had to do something about it.

There we go: The recent rah-rah party thrown in Europe and the USA by his apprentices will be referred to in the history of Eritrea as a farewell to the Angel of Death, to sending him off back into his (Satan’s) realm with a bang.

By the way, the totalitarian ruler has no love or respect for his apprentices; to him, they are a nuisance like a persistent fly that does not leave him alone with its buzzing around. But also, he knows that they will be among those who will first kick him harder when he falls.