Issue No. 192

How Bad Must It Get in the North Korea of Africa? 

In its most recent global rights report, Freedom House ranked Eritrea ‘not free,’ rating it just 3 points out of 100. Amnesty International cited 1000s of arbitrary detentions of Eritrean journalists, dissidents, and religious figures, and ongoing conscription into indefinite national service for youth as young as 16 in 2022. And Human Rights Watch has documented more than 580,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers abroad, the majority of whom cited their country’s national service as the reason for their exodus.
 
But numbers alone cannot describe the depths to which Eritrea has fallen. According to the US Department of State Country Report on Human Rights for 2022, Eritreans face, among other abuses, forced disappearance, torture, life-threatening prison conditions, unlawful interference with privacy, the use of child soldiers and child labour, severe restrictions on freedom of expression, interference with freedom of assembly, severe restrictions on religious freedom, severe restrictions on freedom of movement, and impunity for perpetrators of sexual and gender-based violence. The hopes from the early 1990s when the young country might have become a democratic and liberal ideal in the Horn of Africa have faded away.
 
Those who escape Eritrea generally flee across Sudanese or Ethiopian borders. As of the beginning of the 2020-2022 Tigray War, there were some 150,000 Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia. Among those who targeted them during the war were Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF); some 20,000 refugees are estimated to have been forcibly returned to Eritrea during that time. There were also more than 135,000 Eritrean refugees registered in Sudan before fighting broke out in Khartoum in April. These too have been caught between warring parties after fleeing dire repression.
 
Most Eritrean refugees who make it to third countries in the Middle East or Europe face economic and social hardship. Those who manage to settle and succeed are faced with a 2% ‘diaspora tax,’ which serves to fund the Eritrean regime and the EDF. Avoiding the tax means risking the lives and livelihoods of family members still in Eritrea; most don’t take that chance. The People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), Eritrea’s only ‘political party,’ maintains a thuggish presence overseas, running propaganda festivals for the regime that often descend into violence.
 
But Asmara isn’t satisfied controlling its own people; its dictator Isaias Afewerki has ambitions of regional dominance. The same Tigray War that saw Eritrean refugees caught between those they fled and those who saw them as the enemy, claimed the lives of between 162,000 and 378,000 civilians, mostly Tigrayans. Their lives were taken by Ethiopian Defence Forces and regional Ethiopian militia, yes, but many were brutally killed by EDF forces as well. The EDF was responsible for crimes against humanity including rape and other forms of sexual violence. And the EDF remains in Western Tigray and Amhara today, despite language in the Pretoria Agreement insisting on its departure from Ethiopia. It massacred hundreds of Tigrayans in Adwa just days before the agreement was signed.
 
It was not only Eritrean conscripts who invaded Tigray during the war, however. Some of the thousands of Somali ‘recruits’ whose so-called training was arranged by the administration of Former Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo in Asmara were also deployed to fight in northern Ethiopia. Despite this situation, Isaias somehow managed to convince the current Federal Government of Somalia to send more recruits for training in Eritrea in advance of phase two of its war on Al-Shabaab extremists, the same militant group with which Asmara has flirted for many years. Simultaneously, Isaias is pushing hard for his reinstatement into the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), while courting Russia and China. How can any of this benefit the Horn?
 
Eritrea’s reaction to the Sudan conflict is equally concerning, if unsurprising. The Vice President of Sudan’s Sovereignty Council, Malik Agar, in a visit to Eritrea in early July, revealed that Isaias viewed peace negotiations as “political bazaars,” stating that “[external] intervention would only exacerbate the complexities.” The idea that Eritrea is somehow serenely uninvolved in conflict in Sudan is laughable. Its ties with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), currently waging another campaign of ethnic cleansing in Darfur, are well-known. Its leader, General Mohamed ‘Hemedti’ Dagalo, visited Isaias in March, just weeks before the outbreak of armed conflict in Sudan. The two men share a similarly brutal and exploitative outlook with little regard for human life. Isaias is no doubt now examining Sudan’s tragic conflagration to see how it can benefit him most.
 
Perhaps the hardest question about Eritrea is; how can we stop Asmara from both devastating its own people and negatively impacting its neighbours? International actors ask themselves this question every day. Yet governments, international institutions and foreign mining companies still engage with Eritrea as if it’s a rational actor. It’s not. It’s time to disengage and pull the plug on the support that continues to hold up one of the most repressive governments in the world.

By the Ethiopian Cable team