By Haile Abraham,
THE recent interim oral report delivered to the Human Rights Commission by Mr. Mike Smith of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea was, to the say the least, an insult to our intelligence and a travesty to common sense.
To start off, Mr. Smith, the current Chair of the Commission, claimed that his team has found “very clear patterns” of human rights violations in Eritrean simply based on some sham interviews of more than “500 members of the Eritrean Diaspora.” He didn’t mention where in the Diaspora other than saying that his team collected the information from “relevant sources outside the country.”
It is well-known fact that a sizable majority of the so-called Eritrean “refugees” are Ethiopians, and that the few Eritreans are actually Economic Migrants. But how shameful is it of Mr. Smith to go to Djibouti and Ethiopia, the two main arch enemies of Eritrea, to collect his information and claim that it is from “relevant sources outside the country”? Because according to a ReilefWeb report on February 13, 2015, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea had visited both Djibouti and Ethiopia from 16 to 27 February, 2015 to hold meetings and collect testimonies and accounts on the human rights situation in Eritrea.
So how honest and comfortable would Mr. Smith and his bosses at the UNHCR feel when he audaciously claimed that the visit to these two hostile countries to Eritrea would “provide us with an opportunity to hear first-hand accounts of violations of human rights from those who have recently fled Eritrea.”?
If this is not a joke, I don’t think it should be taken seriously unless one is a member of those with a hidden agenda. And those with a hidden agenda will shamefully listen to Mr. Smith’s unsubstantiated allegations and his well fabricated full report that he will deliver to the Human Rights Council in June 2015. There is no doubt that the folks with a hidden agenda at the UN will listen to his lame report and will come out swinging at Eritrea.
But this is nothing new to Eritrea. The same old tactics have been tried several times by another shameful UN debilitated wing known as SEMG (Somalia and Eritrea Monitoring Group). This group shamefully failed on many occasion and so will the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea, which is believed to be the last-ditch and desperate attempt by the UN to carry out its hidden agenda.
Eritrea will once again prevail and the UN’s hidden agenda will once again be exposed!
