If you look at the pictures I linked to, you see very much normal life — except for the absence of conscripted young men and women, some of whom I saw working on road-building projects outside of Asmara. There is no cult of personality around Afwerki or bizarre displays of military might amid impoverishment. Food was plentiful in the cities, but clearly many people were struggling to be able to purchase the food in the marketplaces. Also, the reference to religious persecution is misleading. The EPLF and now the Eritrean government has banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Pentecostal Church, and it is the representatives of those groups that have raised the issue in the west. But as you can see in my photos Coptic churches co-exist with mosques. Co-existence and lack of sectarian conflict is a striking aspect of Eritrea, a country where Christians and Muslims are about equal in number.

I think Afwerki is paranoid, which explains much of the internal political and press repression, jailing his former comrades in Stalinesque purges, along with the conflict with Ethiopia. The EPLF had no superpower allies and the fact that the US, then Soviet Union, and now again the US allied themselves with Ethiopia against Eritrea reinforces Eritrea’s isolation and Afwerki’s sense of persecution. The west needs to broker a settlement of the dispute between the two countries. I know they’re relatively unimportant and Eritrea is no match for Ethiopia in strategic importance in the “war on terror,” but as the current refugee crisis shows, the west cannot afford to ignore these distant conflicts.