According to a recent story coming out of Eritrea, approximately 100 Christians were rounded up and placed in shipping containers by authorities:
Eritrea’s persecution of Christians escalated throughout May, resulting in as many as 100 believers being arrested, a watchdog reported. Prisoners are often kept in “horrific” storage container jails where they are deprived of basic necessities.
“They’re rounded up and put into storage container prisons many times. Eritrea is on the eastern side of the continent of Africa where it gets extremely hot. These people are sometimes locked in storage containers with very little air ventilation and up to 120 degree heat,” Open Doors USA’s Emily Fuentes explained in an article for Mission Network News on Friday, describing the conditions the Christian prisoners are facing.
“[They] often get sick from the lack of hygiene in these places, and often don’t get the food they require to stay nourished. So it’s a horrific place for Christians who don’t fall into the approved denominations.”
Fuentes pointed out that “paranoid government crackdowns” led to the arrests of close to 100 Christians last month as authorities carried out door-to-door interrogations seeking to hunt down worshipers that fall outside the four recognized religious denominations.
Although members of Sunni Islam, Orthodox Christian, Catholic Christian, and Evangelical Lutheran groups are allowed to worship in the African country, those who fall outside these denominations are considered criminals.
International Christian Concern confirmed the persecution, stating: “Though Eritrea does allow four denominations to practice their faith they keep a close control on them. For those Christians that meet in their homes or do not belong to the approved denominations the punishment is extremely high. These Christians are rounded up and stuffed into storage containers without air ventilation and with little food.” (source)
A terrible story indeed. But could there be more to this story than what is being presented, and perhaps something with sinister intentions? Let’s take a step back from this story and look a little closer.
Eritrea is a country that was formed formally in 1993 by separating from what was the northeastern part of Ethiopia along the Red Sea coastline. Eritrea has an ancient history dating back to Biblical times and like that entire area has seen all of the turmoil common to the rest of the Middle East. But an interesting fact about Eritrea that was of the first places in the world to adopt Christianity, going back to the period of the Axiumite Kingdom in the 4th century AD just around the time of the Council of Nicaea. According to both the CIA and Pew Research, Eritrea is anywhere between 33% to 48% Muslim. Christians are a majority, representing 50% to 65% of the population, with 2% or less practicing another religions, usually in the form of local paganism.
According to the government and as noted by the article, there are five recognized religious sects in society. They are the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, and Sunni Islam. Then the Wikipedia article about Eritrea’s stance on religions in society makes an interesting observation:
All other faiths and denominations are required to undergo a registration process. Among other things, the government’s registration system requires religious groups to submit personal information on their membership to be allowed to worship.
The Eritrean government is against reformed or radical versions of its established religions. Therefore, radical forms of Islam and Christianity, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Bahá’í Faith (though the Bahá’í Faith is neither Islamic nor Christian), the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and numerous other non-Protestant Evangelical denominations are not registered and cannot worship freely. (source)
What a curious yet strangely similar statement. It should not be strange, since this is the exact position which the Russian government has on religious groups which want to enter into society. Interestingly, as I pointed out yesterday, the only desire that the US Government has for “promoting religious freedom,” like with “democracy” and other ideas, when it suits particular persons in the financial and industrial classes who control the nation. A little bit of research quickly yields an interesting article from both Eritrean news as well as the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Eritrea Osman Saleh will be in Russia on a working visit at the invitation of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
On January 30, the two ministers will meet to discuss the key issues on the international and regional agendas with a focus on preventing and defusing conflicts in Africa, specifically in the Horn of Africa and South Sudan, as well as in the Middle East, including Syria and Yemen.
Sergey Lavrov and Osman Saleh are expected to focus on matters related to stepping up trade and economic cooperation between Russia and Eritrea, including joint mineral extraction projects in Eritrea, and creating a favourable investment climate for Russian enterprises.
Russia and Eritrea are interested in further promoting a political dialogue. The two countries share close or convergent approaches to the objective of building a multipolar world as a way to make the system of international relations more just and safe. Russia and Eritrea cooperate within the UN and other international organizations.
Training Eritrean nationals in Russian educational institutions is an important aspect of bilateral relations.
During his visit, Osman Saleh is expected to meet with the heads of the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Agriculture Ministry, as well as representatives of the Russian business community.
Russia expects the upcoming visit by the Eritrean Foreign Minister to provide the impetus needed for facilitating joint efforts by Moscow and Asmara to put the potential in bilateral relations to effective use. (source, source)
Eritrea is also of interest because many “refugees” who have been brought to Europe as part of the false “migration crisis” from Africa also come from Eritrea:
Business is booming. Vanquish any given criminal group and who knows how many remain active, ready to exploit the army of the desperate. There are between 500,000 and one million people ready to leave from the Libyan coast to Sicily. In 2013, almost 40,000 immigrants landed in Italy for a total of 450 landings, mainly from war-torn countries such as Syria (10,851), followed by Eritrea (9,213), Somalia (3,254), Egypt (2,618) and Nigeria (2,458). In 2014 the numbers have soared: in the course of “Mare Nostrum” operations 207,000 were rescued. (source)
It is also of interest to note that due to its proximity to the Gulf Oil States, Eritrea also has heavy investments in it from Petrodollars, in particular from the European Union and Germany:
After months of talks, the European commission last week announced a new five-year assistance package to Eritrea worth €200m (£145m).
Officially, those funds are to support development in the energy sector and improve governance. In fact, it looks like another move to stem the flow of Eritrean asylum seekers to Europe while letting European companies exploit the country’s natural resources.
The grant from the EU development fund, the first from Brussels to Amara since 2009, has the full agreement of the EU’s 28 member states.
In the view of Neven Mimica, the EU commissioner for international cooperation and development, the package will help to tackle the root causes of migration from Eritrea.
However, preventing asylum seekers from fleeing is not the only potential benefit to the EU arising from the agreement. According to the statement, the €200m fund will be used in part for the energy sector, allowing more space for private investors.
New research shows that Eritrea’s Red Sea coast has “massive oil and gas reserves”, but the endless conflict with Ethiopia and the isolation of the Afwerki government have left the country’s natural resources largely untouched. (source)
This article above was written in 2015, before the current “refugee crisis” began, and in contrary to what it states, the “crisis” has only deepened. The sources only confirm that migration as increased, and in particular from Eritrea. As we have noted about this and the entire “crisis” as a whole, agreement was never about solving any “crisis” or helping anybody in terms of objective good. It always was, is, and will be about geopolitical objectives, and in this case it is about making economic preparations for a war.
The map below will help put things in perspective a little:
This is a map of oil and gas pipelines to Europe. Notice how most of those pipelines curiously flow through Russia, with Turkey taking second place. This is just a visual depiction of the obvious fact that most of Europe’s oil and gas comes through Russia. Right now Germany is currently planning for a war against Russia as part of its desire to re-assert its former imperial past, as we have constantly written about here at Shoebat.com. In the case of any war between Russia and Germany, Russia will immediately turn off all pipelines going to Europe, thus economically cutting the continent off from fuel supplies.
This not something new. It was the reason why the National Socialists through their Axis allies brought Eritrea into their sphere of influence in World War II. Given all that we have been discussing about how Germany is planning for a Third World War and how the patterns and alliances of old are re-forming again today, is it really a surprise to see Eritrea, whose geopolitical location is a staging ground for playing out conflict between Germany (and today now the USA) and Russia, not to mention its importance in supplying massive amounts of energy resources, as in enough to drive an empire preparing for war?
If you do not recall, several months ago there was a story that went all around the Western media about GAY DEATH CAMPS IN RUSSIAN CONTROLLED CHECHNYA, with the emphasis being in all capital letters because the story was constantly paraded in the media even though there was a dearth of evidence for such accusations. In an age of smartphones, pictures, and video at the click of a button, does it not seem strange that there is such a lack of media evidence about these camps? It should be a cause for concern, since it suggests there is far more here than what meets the eye, meaning that it is likely they do not exist. But if one takes the point of view of a propagandist looking to incite anti-Russian sentiment, what is more important- the existence of actual, truthful accuracy, or a story that whether it is true or not generates the desired end? It is an evil and dishonest way of looking at the world, but as it was once said, “in a war the first casualty is truth.”
Just like with the story above with these “Eritrean Christians,” the stories that were told in Russia had nothing to do at all with actual “gay death camps” just as much as this story most likely has little to do if there were a hundred people locked in shipping containers or not, if anybody was even locked in any shipping containers at all. The point was about the creation of an image before the public that will be continually prepared over time and later will be used to justify a pre-chosen response. In the case of the “gay death camps,” it is about justifying an attack on Russia in the name of “human rights” just as the questionable persecution of Christians that I wrote about yesterday in Russia is being used to try and justify portraying Russia as “persecutor of religious freedom” when such is not true at all. In the case of Eritrea, this is about justifying military intervention in order to strike at Russian interests as part of the greater geopolitical chess game that is taking place around us.
So back to the original article- which make no mistake, the persecution of Christians in many countries is real and terrible, and it must be pointed out when it happens. But do not make the common mistake of simply accepting every story of persecution that comes out in the news as true or noteworthy, for as we have been striving to emphasize, many times these stories are simply vehicles to drive support for greater geopolitical goals by men who care nothing about Christians, Muslims, or anybody else, but solely the pursuit of power at all costs.