…No better way to die…

…No better way to die…

Barely into your adulthood… with your entire life ahead of you… sporting, academic and many unacknowledged accolades adorning your high school leaving certificate… an unlikely soldier at the world’s most senseless war..1998… baby brother I never thought I would hear my self say this but you are one lucky dead brother! A martyr

… nearly all your friends are now dead too… although we don’t call them ‘dead’ anymore or ‘martyred’ as they call you, your older brother and his friends… we call them ‘lost’, ‘disappeared’… utterly and completely ‘unaccounted for’… ‘dehay deybilom’… God and their mothers only know how many of them we have… in the barbaric prisons in Eritrea they die being tortured… in the training camps they commit suicide… at the borders they are hunted like wild beasts… across the boarders they are sold like cattle and if they die there, they are buried in refuse dumps… further afield they become fish feed… washed ashore they are the ‘beasts of no man’s land’… to the land that has lost them they are traceless… to their retched parents a light that was snuffed out… to the regime that squeezed their vitality and threw them out they are collateral damage!

…and so you my dear brother… the one that didn’t live long enough to see the bright light in your friends’ eyes dulling… their future dimming and their verve withering… you are so lucky…you were simply ‘martyred’…

The cruelty of war that deprives a young soul his very life… the injustice of a stroke of pen, an angry exchange, a heartless decree and lives that break to never mend again… yes war…becomes a gentler option for death than the many deaths that Eritrea seems to never fail surprising its young with…

As they light a candle for you and all those before you… I will light one for the children that we all were once… the generation that grew to inherit the miseries of Free Eritrea… the boys that disappeared without a trace… the girls that would never be brides and mothers… just widows married to a future that never was… the mothers who compare notes on new names for death when they should be naming baby grand sons and daughters… and the fathers that were silenced once for all…

When they all go silent for an entire moment… I will start my scream and I will never stop until every last one of your friends is remembered and their plight told, their short life celebrated and finally name their death cruelty of the highest degree…

…Please keep an eye for them up there for me…

Selam
20th June 2013

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