How Tonight Resembles Yesterday

·       President Al-Hamdi and the story of (The Last Lunch)

·       I watched yesterday at 10:05 PM a special episode titled (The Last Lunch) broadcast by Al Jazeera. The episode’s events revolve around the martyrdom of a statesman and a popular and nationalist leader: namely, Major Ibrahim Al-Hamdi...the leader of the march of the Happy Arab Yemen in the mid-1970s...when the hand of treachery reached this leader who was not only popular in his country Yemen, but whom we loved across the Arab East and West...when he undertook change in his country with an ambitious program to break free from tribalism, injustice and the scourges that were ravaging Yemen.

·       Eliminating the habit of qat was not the only thing he aimed to do...rather, in the second day after the heinous assassination he had a program to visit the southern part of Yemen to restore cohesion to the proud Yemeni people and to announce unity as a preliminary framework for a larger Arab unity plan he had in mind.

·       For this objective, and perhaps this is what enraged the tyrants of then and now...including leaders in the Saudi neighborhood who felt, indeed who were certain, that such young Arab nationalist leadership would destroy all their hopes of keeping Yemen under their sway...despite all the money that was flowing to groups within Yemeni tribes in the hope of buying consciences and preserving loyalty to Saudi Arabia first...so there was the conspiracy...the meticulous...malicious plotting.

·       Saudi money succeeded in buying the conscience of a small group of military personnel in the closest circle around the martyr Al-Hamdi, so Al-Ghashmi...a karakán of the army in charge, who had woven a special friendship with the genuine, spontaneous and sincere Arab martyr...and Al-Ghashmi conspired, together with the commander of the Taiz brigade in those days Ali Abdullah Saleh...they conspired to assassinate President Al-Hamdi and his brother, commander of the Al-Amaliqa Brigade, the martyr Abdullah Al-Hamdi...thus came the invitation to the final lunch when Al-Ghashmi and Saleh invited their late leader, and some of the Yemeni attendees...

·       The Saudi plan, represented by the Saudi military attaché in Yemen, secretly supervised the completion of the assassination...and scenes were staged at the banquet that the conspirators had prepared for it...Al-Hamdi’s brother entered the reception hall...and no one saw him again...then the late President Al-Hamdi entered in his spontaneity, and Al-Ghashmi and Saleh asked his permission, after he sat a little, to talk with him a bit away from the attending people...they succeeded in luring the president into an ambush, where the assassination team...

·       was in one corner of the reception hall...and we do not know whether they had tools like a saw...for dismembering...and dissolving...the president did not emerge; his brother Abdullah had been finished off, executed with cold nerves and calm, and the president was treacherously killed by the military friends closest to him whom he had trusted. Moreover, they fabricated a charge for them of the presence of two French girls in their apartment or in the room to which their bodies were taken, in order to create the impression that the president and his brother were living a debauched life...and these two girls, at least one of them, was registered with the French intelligence as an asset and an employee of theirs. The conspiratorial circles against Al-Hamdi were large and extended...beyond borders...the two girls were killed and disposed of thereafter, and Al-Ghashmi ascended to the presidency after they marched in their leader’s funeral; however, Al-Ghashmi was assassinated and most of those who conspired against Al-Hamdi, and against Yemen, and against the Arabs, died...just like the play of killing the late Al-Khashoggi...over there in Istanbul...

·       It is the darkness coming from there...they do not want the Yemeni people to progress, to have dignity and unity...they were worried about the danger of leaders like President Al-Hamdi, who began to light candles for his people, and for us Arabs, in the tunnels of prevailing darkness...yesterday and today...so the assassination was carried out by Yemeni hands, and by a joint treacherous plan...which ended the life of a project and an idea we Arabs all needed...

·       And it would not escape me to praise the ability of the program team of the special episode on Al Jazeera, which was able, after more than four decades since the ominous assassination, to bring forth some secrets and witnesses from that time to give their testimonies.

·       We do not deny that the timing and the purpose of Al Jazeera broadcasting this special episode were felicitous and purposeful and not free of malice...and incitement...and stirring scandals...and uncovering the hidden.

·       The assassination of the late Al-Khashoggi was not new.

·       May God have mercy on you, Al-Hamdi, the brave President...but his memory is present still, for we loved you as we love the Arab Yemen...whose women will not hesitate to bear others like Al-Hamdi....and darkness will not last...for long...the winds of change...in the region...are blowing...