Happy New Year!

Asmarino wishes all its visitors Happy New Year! It also wishes all those writers who have enriched it through their educational, insightful, constructive and controversial ideas a Happy New Year! It realizes that without their contributions, it would be nothing. But, above all, it reserves its grandest wish for a happy new year and for many more happy new years yet to come to the Eritrean masses – if there are any people on this earth that need this wish, it would be Eritreans at home:

• Happy new year to the tens of thousands of prisoners languishing in the dungeons of the Isaias regime!
• Happy new year to the hundreds of thousands of Warsai wasting their lives in indefinite national service!
• Happy new year to all those denied the right to worship their God in whatever way they deem right!
• Happy new year to all the peasants who are suffering most in the PFDJ-engineered famine!
• Happy new year to all the students who have been denied proper schooling and whose dreams have been forever deferred!
• Happy new year to all those refugees who are whiling away in refugee camps and risking their lives in unforgiving deserts and high seas!
• Happy new year to all the parents who have lost their children in wars, prison, execution and exile!

The day Asmarino folds over for good will be the day its mission is declared accomplished; and that mission seems to have gotten a huge boost from the UN resolution to sanction Eritrea. Things have started brightening up. If we can keep this momentum in 2010, this may be the Year of Deliverance: the year Eritrea’s nightmare under the rule of PFDJ might finally come to an end.

Let’s say “Amen!” to that.

And with that good thought in mind, let the champagne flow tonight.

Asmarino Staff