@Yehdavid@hawelti@SirakBahlbi Regime puppet like you prolong #Eritrea's ongoing atrocities & trauma & you know it but you only care about your bottom line. This is selfish, shameless, & ignorant. Stop with your fake pride & outrage. Enjoy your 5 seconds because there is no back & forth with brainwashed 🤡
Silence for humanity. Noise for popularity‼️
That is the question facing Eritreans who rush to cheer the regime’s preferred spectacle while a disappeared child is treated as an inconvenience.
Ciham Ali Abdu was fifteen when Eritrean authorities seized her at the Sudan border on 8 December 2012. She was trying to leave. She has never been charged. She has never been seen in public since. Her family has received no proof of life, no location, no trial, no explanation. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have called it an enforced disappearance: a girl vanished into the state’s secret prisons because her father, former Information Minister Ali Abdu, defected.
She is a dual U.S.–Eritrean national. That fact has not produced her release. Birthdays have come and gone. Childhood ended in a cell no one will name. If she is still alive, she has now spent nearly half her life as a hostage to presidential revenge. She was 15 years old at the time of her disappearance.
Now look at the energy suddenly available for Snit Habteab, Eritrea’s first Miss World contestant. Diaspora networks organize. Votes are mobilized. National pride is invoked. Ambassadors post. The same political community that can flood a pageant leaderboard falls silent when the subject is a girl the government disappeared.
Pageants are not the crime. A young woman competing on a world stage is not the enemy. The indictment is the hierarchy of concern. Crowns, flags, and viral pride cost money, time, and coordination. Justice for Ciham costs a sentence: Where is she?
Charge her or free her. Stop punishing a child for her father’s flight.
If your loyalty is to Eritrea, ask what kind of nation you are advertising. One that can produce a neuroscientist and pageant representative—and one that can swallow a fifteen-year-old and refuse to say whether she is alive. You cannot claim both without answering which one you will actually fight for.
A crown is temporary. A disappeared girl is a moral ledger that does not close. Popularity is cheap. Humanity is the test.
#FreeCihamAli
demanded that she be released from custody, who knows what she might have become?
Perhaps Siham could have made her country proud through fashion and art, just as her sister is doing today.
Who knows what dreams she had?
Who knows what she could have achieved?
@Habtishgreat@UN
Exactly! A newspaper dress is almost painfully ironic in a country where independent journalism and free expression are virtually nonexistent. If anything, the outfit highlights the hypocrisy- silencing #Eritrea| voices while celebrating the image of a free press.
@ElizabethTecle@asmarino80@Yehdavid@Yehdavid It's never too late to change. Don't take our words just do your own research. & for #Eritreans, we really see the regime terror & oppression regularly. But I understand it's a choice to ignore 🇪🇷 #SilentGenocide despite @UN confirming Crimes Against humanity etc.
and has committed no crime, would we be willing to buy a conscience and speak up for her as well?
Or have we become unconscious to the injustice around us?
We are human beings. We have a moral responsibility to speak for those whose voices are not being heard.#Justice@hrw
our brothers and sisters escaped Eritrea seeking freedom.
Now they are trapped in Libya.
Give Eritrean refugees a safe way out and relocate them to countries where they can live safely and rebuild their futures.
#FreeEritreanRefugees#HumanRights#Libya
@BereketKahsai1 Sadly nothing has changed families still wait
loved ones remain missing & underground prisons still hold people without trial.
25 years behind bars 💔25 years without justice 💔🇪🇷 @UNHumanRights@hrw