Exile Nation
As thousands of would-be asylum seekers try to reach the UK, the government has hardened its stance on refugees fleeing one of the most brutal dicatorships on earth.
“Your government is sending me to hell. I’m going to hell.”
The Eritrean Jungle is a camp of canvas and corrugated iron shelters underneath the white plumes of a titanium oxide factory on the outskirts of Calais.
It is a bitterly cold February, and the inhabitants shelter inside a rusting barn packed with tents and illuminated with small fires lit with twigs and newspaper, kept burning with drips of cooking oil.
Wrapped in two layers of hooded sweatshirts on the edge of a circle of a dozen young men, Ahmed says that he has spent half his life under arms. He was conscripted at 18 and served the next 18 years in the Eritrean military — called up under the spectre of an Ethiopian invasion that never came.
There was no one day that made him snap, he says, but finally when an opportunity presented itself he slipped away from his barracks. He escaped through Ethiopia, then South Sudan, which by then was sliding back into civil war. From there, he crossed the Sahara through Sudan and into Libya, all the while paying out the little cash he had to people smugglers who blend fluidly into the militant groups that are now tearing that country apart. From the Libyan coast he packed onto an overcrowded fishing boat, which made landfall in Italy by night.
Every night he tries to make the crossing to the UK, but for now the Calais Jungle, he says, offers a kind of safety and freedom he could never have found at home in Eritrea, one of the most repressive countries on earth.
Only Syria produces more asylum-seekers than Eritrea. Nearly 40,000 Eritreans sought asylum in Europe in 2014; 90 per cent of them were between the ages of 18 and 24. Over the past decade, 5 per cent of the country’s population has left the country. They are fleeing from a regime that imposes universal conscription, trapping its citizens indefinitely in a kind of quasi-slavery. Opponents of Isaias Afwerki’s pseudo-Maoist regime are brutalised and imprisoned. Thousands of people, from cabinet members to military leaders to journalists, have disappeared into imprisonment or worse.
Faced with a mounting refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and growing nationalist sentiments back home, Europe’s leaders are under pressure to block the flow.
The European Union is discussing a new package of aid money to the country — what it calls an ‘upstream’ approach to controlling migration.
The United Kingdom has issued new, hardened guidance on asylum for Eritreans, based on a discredited Danish report that claimed the Asmara regime has ended its policy of forced labour — despite compelling evidence to the contrary.
Interviews with recent refugees and defectors show a regime that continues to enforce open-ended conscription and arbitrary detention, and to terrorise its citizens at home and abroad. Exiles talk of a constant and pervasive fear of the regime — a fear that continues well after they have braved a smuggling route through the Sahara that is lined with shallow graves; one that often ends in drowning or detention.
Would Ahmed speak out publicly? He looks up from under his hood with a weak smile and shakes his head.
“Isias’ hand reaches everywhere,” he says.
The next morning, the younger Eritreans gather on a hillside overlooking the highway to the ferry port, to watch as groups of Afghans make their move on the trucks heading for England; lines of people strung out, chasing the moving freighters like vapour trails.
Isias’ hand
On May 29 this year, Eritrea celebrated the 24th anniversary of its independence from Ethiopia. The country is a thin sliver of land on Africa’s Red Sea coast, bordered by Sudan to its north west and Ethiopia and Djibouti to the south. Colonised by Italy in the late 19th Century, the country was made a British protectorate after the Second World War, before being federated to Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia in 1952. In 1961, Selassie annexed Eritrea, sparking a bloody, thirty-year war for independence — the ‘Gedli’. The conflict outlasted the imperial regime in Ethiopia, which was deposed in a coup in 1974. The successor government — a military junta led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, known as the Derg — continued the fight, desperate not to lose its only sea ports.
The war in the Horn of Africa drew in Cold War powers. Until 1974, the US supported the Selassie regime in Ethiopia, while Cuba, along with a number of Arab nations, gave aid to the Eritrean independence movements. When the Marxist Derg took over in Addis Ababa, Soviet-aligned nations threw their weight behind Ethiopia.
In the mid-to-late 1970s, the fragmented Eritrean resistance began to coalesce around a new movement, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, under Ramadan Mohammed Nour, and his assistant, Isaias Afewerki, an ideological Maoist who had received military and political instruction in China in the 1960s. Outgunned and outnumbered, the EPLF fought a bush war that ground down the Derg, culminating in its own eventual collapse in a coup in 1991.
Afwerki became leader of the EPLF in 1987. Asmara fell to the EPLF in May 1991. Two years later, the country was officially granted its independence by referendum and Afwerki became its first president. The regime continues to derive its legitimacy from this victory, and its leader remains a cultish figure, even after leading the country into a second, costly border war with Ethiopia between 1998 and 2000, in which more than 70,000 people died.
The EPLF’s successor organisation, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice –PFDJ — runs a de facto one party state, controlling the judiciary, press and most of the enterprises in the country.
Leaving the country without permission is illegal. Exiles who wish to return must sign a taesa, or ‘regret form’, which states that the returnee “regrets having committed an offence by failing to fulfil my national obligation, and that I am willing to accept the appropriate measures when decided.” To return to Eritrea, all exiles — whether they left legally or otherwise — must pay a two per cent tax on their earnings overseas to the regime, a hangover from the years where the diaspora willingly sent money home to finance the revolution. In 2011, the UN Security Council condemned the tax and demanded that Eritrea stopped collecting it.
Dissent is managed partly by force, and partly by a rumour mill, known as Bado Seleste — Zero Three — a reference to a wartime propaganda service. The government has let it be known that there is an informant in every house, and that every phone is tapped.
Zero Three extends into the diaspora. Refugees refuse to speak on the record or be photographed for fear of reprisals against them or their families. Those that do put their heads above the parapet are targeted. Activists in London report being followed, having their tyres slashed and receiving late night phone calls.
A state of perpetual, frozen conflict is used to justify universal national service. All Eritrean men and unmarried women are eligible for conscription, which by law is limited to 18 months but is in reality, indefinite, according to interviews with dozens of refugees who left Eritrea in the past six months.
Those that have left say that they are expected to serve with next to no pay in whatever role the government decides for them. In many cases, this is unpaid labour for state enterprises or powerful individuals, building roads and houses. Several women said their national service consisted of domestic duties for military officers. Amongst the interviewees were boys of 17, who also claimed to have been called up.
Awate, interviewed in Calais, walked across a minefield to escape in late 2014 and says he worked on road construction for most of his seven years of national service. “Just because you wear different clothes,” he says, “you’re still in the military.”
Some have alleged that the government has used forced labour to assist the few international investors in Eritrea. In November 2014, three Eritrean refugees in Canada filed a civil lawsuit against Nevsun Resources Ltd, a Vancouver-based mining company, claiming that they had been pressed into working at the company’s Bisha Mine by its state-owned local contractor, Segen Construction Company.
Indefinite national service, under which conscripts can be required to perform any kind of work, constitutes forced labour under the International Labour Organisation definition, and as such forms the basis of most Eritreans’ asylum claims. Anyone of conscription age who has left the country illegally is liable to be persecuted on their return, and over the past few years, more than 95 per cent of asylum applications made by Eritreans in Western Europe have been accepted.
Claims of human rights abuses are under investigation by the UN. Sheila Keetharuth, a Mauritian lawyer appointed in 2012 as the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Eritrea, has not been permitted to enter the country to investigate.
In March 2015, an interim report from a separate UN investigation, the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea — which was also not given permission to enter the country — found that “detention is an ordinary fact of life, experienced by an inordinate number of individuals — men and women, old and young, including children.”
Despite the evidence of ongoing abuses, Europe’s position towards Eritrean refugees is hardening.
In October 2014, the Danish Immigration Service published a paper: ‘Eritrea — Drivers and Root Causes of Emigration, National Service and the Possibility of Return’. The authors interviewed Western embassies, UN agencies and non-government organisations, quoting two experts by name — Tamrat Kebede, who runs a migration NGO in Ethiopia, and Professor Gaim Kibreab, an expert on Eritrean migration at London South Bank University.
Although their report includes numerous references to the reality of life in Eritrea — national service of arbitrary length and the imprisonment of political opponents — it emphasises that it is possible for draft evaders to return to the country by paying the two per cent tax and signing the regret form. Professor Kibreab’s testimony was cited three times as leading evidence to support the idea that returned asylum applicants could move freely in and out of Eritrea.
It concluded that reports of human rights violations “should therefore not be considered representative of an accurate image of the current situation in Eritrea regarding issues such as National Service, illegal exit and the general human rights situation.”
The DIS report was widely interpreted as an attempt to lay the ground for a less permissive approach to asylum for Eritreans in Denmark.
The United Nations High Commission on Refugees released a highly critical response to the DIS report, saying that it lacked nuance, selectively picked quotes from its experts and largely ignored testimony from the UNHCR’s local office in Shire, Ethiopia.
Kibreab has distanced himself from the report, noting that it left out his qualifying statements. The document was later withdrawn. However, when the UK’s Home Office issued its new guidance on Eritrea for asylum caseworkers in March 2015, it cited the DIS report as its “most up-to-date information available from inside Eritrea”, referencing it nearly 50 times.
The DIS report, the Home Office guidance says: “Indicates that that those who refuse to undertake or abscond from military/national service are not viewed as traitors or political opponents… As a result, Eritreans who left illegally are no longer considered per se to be at risk of harm or mistreatment amounting to persecution on return.”
The DIS, the Home Office and Tamrat Kedebe did not respond to requests for comment.
Henok’s story
Those that have experienced repatriation also disagree with the Home Office’s assessment.
Broad and stocky, Henok — he has changed his name since arriving in the UK — is an intense young man, quick to laugh, with a soft South London inflexion to his voice that he has picked up over nine years in England.
“That’s rubbish, mate,” he says of the new guidance.
Although it is hard to independently verify the individual details of Henok’s story, almost all of its individual elements are echoed by other refugees interviewed for this article, and by accounts, published by human rights groups, of asylum seekers who were deported from Israel back to Eritrea and later escaped.
“I remember seeing one side of the boat come away. People are panicking, crying for Jesus to save them. I thought: that’s it. I’m going to finish here then.”
Henok grew up in Asmara. He was conscripted at 15. His mother, a nurse, had taken him out of high school to keep him safe from national service but he was picked up anyway, pulled from his bed by soldiers at seven o’clock one morning in 1998. He was taken to a military base on the coast, which was filled with teenage conscripts labouring in temperatures that hit 50ºC in the daytime.
“We didn’t go there to have training. We went there to work. We were building. Every day we were building. We had just one day a week of training to be a soldier. Just one day a week,” he says. “The rest of the week we just built. We built houses for the officers with air conditioning — villas. There weren’t any machines. You just had to dig and carry by yourself. It was like the stone age.”
They were fed twice a day — one bread roll and a cup of tea in the morning; another, sometimes with soup, in the evening. When they got sick, the only available treatment was Panadol. Henok was beaten twice for complaining about the medical care and the food.
After months of ‘training’, Henok and a friend escaped. They climbed into the back of the bread truck that made a weekly trip to Asmara and hid under a tarpaulin, convincing each other that if they were caught, they could pretend they were cleaning the inside of the vehicle. Once in the capital, Henok’s family hid him for several months, then arranged for him to cross the border to Kassala in Sudan, and then onwards to Khartoum.
He lived for a year in Khartoum — a hunted existence, as the Sudanese government periodically rounded up Eritreans and deported them. His plans to go to stay with a cousin in Kenya proved impossible without documentation, so he turned to an uncle in the US, who gave him the money to head north through the Sahara to Libya in December 2001. The journey took two weeks, crammed into a lorry in the desert. Henok and his companions counted the corpses by the side of the trail.
“You’d go one hour, you’d see a skeleton,” he says. “People die there. Maybe the lorry is broken, maybe an ambush kills them. It’s a very bad journey.”
When they reached Libya, the driver told them they were lucky — the truck had not broken down or been attacked en route.
“Libya was a very difficult country. Really difficult. You can’t live in Libya, even for one day,” Henok says. “It’s dangerous… I saw foreigners die.” Within a few months, he borrowed another $1,000 from his uncle to pay for the crossing to Italy.
“They put you in a warehouse first. There are 200 people in the warehouse. The boat is small. It’s not big enough for 200 people, but they don’t care,” he says. “We have three kids there. Some ladies. Three girls. Three, four old people over 60. The first day was good, then the weather changed.”
On the second day, the motor cut out and the boat, a small, wooden fishing vessel, began to break apart in the heavy seas. “I remember seeing one side of the boat come away. People are panicking, crying for Jesus to save them. I thought: that’s it. I’m going to finish here then. I remember crying, saying sorry for everything. Sorry for my mum and my dad. That’s it. I’m going to die here.”
“The captain has a life jacket,” he says bitterly. “He’s from Morocco, he’s been smuggling people for a long time. He says: ‘I have one chance to save you guys. He had a small radio, but it had already gone in the water. It wasn’t working. The battery had got wet. He opened it, cleaned it, and tried to call Italy. God listened to our prayers. The radio worked.”
The boat was picked up by the Maltese navy. Henok remembers one man hoisting a child over his head in a desperate plea to their rescuers. They were taken to Malta, fed, clothed and looked after. For two months, they were in a holding pattern, waiting. While they were grateful, he says, the mood amongst the refugees deteriorated — they wanted their freedom, not handouts, and went on hunger strike. After two weeks, they were told they would be granted asylum in Canada or the US.
That was a lie. Unknown to the refugees, the Maltese government had agreed to send the Eritreans home, with a promise that they would be given their freedom in Asmara. Maltese soldiers came with buses in the middle of the night and escorted Henok, in handcuffs, onto a plane back. After a three year journey out of Eritrea, it took just four hours to get back.
He remembers telling one of his Maltese guards: “When you go back, speak to your government. Your government is sending me to hell. I’m going to hell. I’m going to get killed.”
They landed in Asmara, and a captain from the Eritrean army boarded the plane. “He comes to us and says: ‘welcome to Asmara. You are safe in your land’.” That was also a lie.
The new arrivals were placed in holding and asked to fill out immigration forms. Henok gambled that the government had no central database to check against and fabricated his answers, claiming to have been born in Sudan. The returnees were taken by bus to the Adi Abeto military prison, where they were put in shackles and interrogated.
Two months later, two men were shot trying to escape — one fatally — and the prisoners were moved to Dahlak, a baking hot, malarial archipelago on the Red Sea that houses a notorious military prison. There, he says, around 800 inmates worked in the heat, cutting trees and doing other manual labour, unable to wash for weeks on end. Prisoners were tortured for infractions by being trussed up with rope and left in the sun for hours — something other former Dahlak inmates call ‘the helicopter’. Several people died; Henok says he tried to kill himself three times.
He was there two years, until an officer arrived from the mainland.
“He was a major general. A big man,” Henok recalls. “He came in a big nice car, 4x4, a black one. Big guy. Fat guy, big belly. Good condition. He comes and he says ‘I’m going to mention names. If I say your name, come this way’.”
Henok’s name was called — along with 30 others, all of whom had lied on their immigration forms in Asmara. They were moved again, back across the country to the Sawa Defence Training Centre in the far west, a huge, sprawling military zone where new recruits are sent for instruction.
For three months, they went through basic training, learning at last to be soldiers. Then, while their comrades and officers were drinking and dancing on Eritrean Independence Day, 2006, Henok and seven other survivors from Dahlak slipped across the Sudanese border.
Doublethink
There is a degree of doublethink in evidence in British policy on Eritrea. The UK’s own Foreign and Commonwealth Office continues to refer to Eritrea as a ‘country of concern’ due to its human rights abuses, and internal memos refer to the limits of reform under Afwerki’s regime. At the same time, the Home Office, charged with handling the incandescent political hot potato of immigration, briefs that the regime has changed.
Speaking on the BBC in May, the Home Secretary Theresa May referred to Eritrean asylum seekers as economic migrants, placing them in the same category as thousands of rejected applicants from the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. It is, according to Feruz Werede, a London-based Eritrean activist, a convenient half-truth — most Eritreans simply want the freedom to build lives outside of the shadow of their government. They are economic migrants only in the sense that they are fleeing poverty that is forced upon them.
“[British people] don’t understand. I don’t blame them. There is no civil war,” Werede says. “But there is poverty, there is slavery, there is a dictatorship. There is every kind of human rights violation, but that’s not going to make it on the surface.”
Later this year, the European Commission expects to sign a new development finance agreement with Eritrea; part of a wider process of re-engagement with the country that began in 2007 with a €122 million ($133 million; £86 million) programme, which primarily focused on food security.
An EC spokesperson says that the new programme will focus on dealing with the economic and social factors that drive migration. The Commission believes that investing in “access to renewable energy” as a way to create jobs will reduce the pressure to flee the country.
Asked whether there was any evidence that previous engagements had prompted any change of behaviour by the regime, the spokesperson acknowledged that it was difficult to make any link between financial support and reform in Asmara, but said that cooperation with Eritrea has facilitated more contact with the government, allowing Europe to raise its concerns over human rights.
“[British people] don’t understand. I don’t blame them. There is no civil war. But there is poverty, there is slavery, there is a dictatorship. There is every kind of human rights violation, but that’s not going to make it on the surface.”
Opponents of the plan warn that aid money risks legitimising the regime.
“It’s absurd,” says Meron Estefanos, a prominent Eritrean exile and rights activist, now based in Stockholm. “It feels like they are getting compensated for oppressing their people, for making them leave… It’s absurd that instead of listening to the people that are fleeing, [the EU] trusts the dictator that made them flee to begin with.
“It’s an insult to the suffering. It’s just prolonging the dictatorship’s time. It means more suffering, and it means more people will flee.”
As evidence of European nations’ inability to influence the Afwerki government’s hand, Estefanos points to the ongoing imprisonment of Dawit Isaak, a Swedish-Eritrean journalist who has been held incommunicado by the regime since 2001, despite lobbying from Stockholm and Brussels. If the EU cannot get one of its own citizens released, she argues, how is it going to change the country?
Estefanos does not believe that aid money will reach the people that need it. Although the EC says that state corruption is very low in Eritrea, activists point to money that has already made its way offshore.
The ‘Swiss Leaks’ files, released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in February 2015, showed that one bank account at HSBC’s Swiss arm held $695.2 million for an unnamed Eritrean client based in Asmara.
“Where does the money go?” Estefanos says. “Does it go to the people? I doubt it.”
