I, too, wonder how a European country that is peaceful, liberal, and free allows messengers of dictatorial regime in Eritrea to play their game and extort money from Eritreans living in Europe. This is just strange.

Any PFDJ or whatever official who dares to talk about prosperity in Eritrea deserves to be challenged by asking what prosperity he/she is talking about having put under tight grip virtually all its people young and old, men and women, urban and rural....

What makes things even worse is why Eritreans in diaspora allow such things to happen. If the festival is all about Eritrean community in Holland, then that is fine. As community it is fine to have festival in the name of your country, culture and more. However allowing such a dictatorship (thanks to whom thousands of our brothers and sisters are facing all the hardship to run away to Sudan, Libya and then take the all danger of Mediterranean waters to reach Europe) to come and shamelessly talk about prosperity and try to extort money from Eritreans is shameful, disgraceful and betrayal to our martyrs who gave their life in order to defend Eritrea and give its people real freedom and prosperity where one won't need menkesakesi wereket within his/her city.

Eritreans in diaspora when are you going to open your head and be convinced that there is nothing like hade hizbi hade libi propaganda or mengisti malet hizbi; hizbi malet mengisti; or the infamous connection mengisti is hager and hager is mengisti..... all this is PFDJ's tactics to control and keep us in fear. Please let us challenge them the very fact that a government is by definition a temporary entity that has to be selected (voted in) by people in order to serve the country for a specific period of time. That is all. A government can never be connected with a homeland. The home land belongs to all of us with different, probably conflicting ideals, which is natural and these ideals are what people need to see in order to select which officials to put in the government to lead the country or which officials to kick out of government offices for incompetence.

The good news is though even Roman Empire has been reckoned with and surely PFDJ and its regime's existence will be trashed down to toilet when the right time comes at which time Eritreans in Eritrea and abroad will have the right to vote, the right to freely move in and out, the right to have their property rights reserved, and the right to call into account their government.

Long live Eritrea

Being a extremely proud Dutch / Eritrean Canadian, I pains me to see ANY representative do anything at any festival outside of Eritrea on behalf of the PFDJ! This regime enjoys the freedom of international movement in other countries that it wouldn't dream of giving its own citizens. It's a shame the liberal Dutch, whom have dropped the ball on calling Tyranny what it is for a veeeeeeeeeeeery long time now, allow this display of propaganda! It's time to get back to its Calvinist roots and not allow this amoral regime any forum for it's lies and call into its accounts its religious persecution!