• >Oppressors treat my people cruelly; creditors rule over them. My people, your leaders mislead you; they give you confusing directions. Isaiah 3.12 NET.

    This Old Testament text, referring to the people of Israel, is best apply today in a spiritual sense, to the church.

    #Bible #BibleVerses #Isaiah #WrongWay

  • The Despotism of #Isaias_Afewerki: Eritrea’s dictator makes his move on #Tigray

    No country in the world has a purer autocracy than Eritrea. The state of Eritrea is one man, Isaias Afewerki, who for twenty years was the leader of a formidable insurgent army that won a war of liberation against Ethiopia in 1991, and who has since ruled as president without constraint on his power. Three decades after independence, Eritrea has no constitution, no elections, no legislature, and no published budget. Its judiciary is under the president’s thumb, its press nonexistent. The only institutions that function are the army and security. There is compulsory and indefinite national service. The army generals, presidential advisers, and diplomats have been essentially unchanged for twenty-five years. The country has a population of 3.5 million, and more than half a million have fled as refugees—the highest ratio in the world next to Syria and Ukraine.

    President Isaias—Eritreans use the first name—got to his position and held it because his overriding concern is power. The country has no shrill personality cult, no slavish performances of obedience to the leader. Isaias is an underestimated cypher, a lesson in understated ruthlessness. In an era when autocrats have adopted new guises and mastered new tactics, he has persevered with old-fashioned forms of absolute despotism. He has not even pretended to change. He simply outlasted his most vigilant adversaries, expecting that, in due course, a new set of foreign leaders and diplomats would suffer amnesia, gamble on appeasement, or simply not care about norms of human rights and democracy.

    The latest twist to Isaias’s despotism is his effort to contrive a war between the federal government in Ethiopia and its antagonists in the region of Tigray. He wants to see both weakened—and Tigray so badly mauled that he can eliminate it as a viable political entity, once and for all.

    Isaias’s logic is genocidal. In November 2020—when the world was distracted by the U.S. election—Isaias sent his army to join Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s forces in a war to “crush” the Tigrayans. Abiy gave him political cover, lying about the Eritrean role. After a year of mass killing, rape, and starvation inflicted on Tigray, as well as havoc across Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa more widely, the Tigray war settled into a stalemate. It was broken late last month with a fierce battle between Tigrayan forces and the Ethiopian federal army. The Tigrayans won the first round.

    On the morning of September 1, the second round began. Eritrean artillery opened up huge barrages, firing at Tigrayan defenses while Ethiopian conscripts readied for Isaias’s signal to charge into battle.

    Eritrea was an Italian colony, carved out of the northern reaches of the feudal empire of Ethiopia during the late nineteenth century scramble for Africa. Isaias was born in 1946, five years after Italian defeat in World War II. Eritreans of his generation have a love-hate relationship with their former colonizer. The Italians exploited Eritreans as laborers and denied them education. But the imperial power also made Eritrea special. Italy’s initial interest was in the Red Sea coast, then as now a strategic shoreline. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, as much as one eighth of the world’s maritime commerce passed through the channel between Eritrea and Yemen. The same is true today, and every global power wants a presence in the Red Sea: China’s first overseas station is in next-door Djibouti, and Russia is negotiating for a naval base in Eritrea.

    Benito Mussolini dreamed of a new Roman Empire in Africa, including Libya, Somalia, and Ethiopia—with Eritrea as its model. The colony became Africa’s second biggest manufacturing center after Johannesburg. Architectural historians salivate over Eritrea’s capital Asmara, considered a showpiece for Art Deco buildings. Its Fiat Tagliero gas station modeled on an airplane is especially cherished by aficionados, of whom Isaias is said to be one. Successive wars have left the city undamaged and undeveloped, a museum of modernism. When a tall and ugly contemporary apartment block was built overshadowing the futuristic Fiat garage in 1994, the president is said to have intervened to insist that central Asmara retain its character. It is one of the few places where the fascist emblem of the bundle of sticks remains on public buildings.

    Mussolini’s new Roman Empire was the “first to be freed” by the Allies in 1941. The British Military Administration dismantled much of Eritrea’s industry in the name of war reparations and referred the future status of the territory to the United Nations, which proposed the delicate and ambiguous solution of “federation under the Ethiopian Crown.” The British left in 1952, remembered for impoverishing the territory but introducing a parliament and newspapers. The federal formula required that Emperor Haile Selassie rule with restraint, but after ten years of contrived unification with the rest of Ethiopia, dissolving Eritrea’s autonomous parliament, a small rebellion escalated. The first shots were fired in September 1961, and the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF)—founded in Cairo the year before—began its guerrilla operations shortly thereafter, with the single goal of independence.

    Isaias was a science student at university in Addis Ababa when he slipped across the border to Sudan and joined the ELF. He dedicated himself to learning Arabic because the rebels relied heavily on Arab countries for support. In 1967, he went to China for military training. On returning to the field, he was dismayed by the ELF’s lack of consistency in applying its revolutionary tenets and its failure to follow the Maoist model of consolidating a base area: any Eritrean nationalist was welcome to join, and differences of opinion were resolved by putting people of different political leanings in different units or holding inconclusive meetings. Along with another leftist who had trained in China, Ramadan Mohammed Nur, Isaias set up the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) in 1970. It was nationalist but also revolutionary.

    Successive Ethiopian regimes—imperial and communist—fought their wars in Eritrea on a huge scale and with unremitting brutality. Once or twice a year, they launched vast ground offensives. The emperor’s forces burned villages and singled out suspected nationalist sympathizers for detention and torture. Haile Selassie was overthrown in a revolution in 1974, and the head of the military junta, Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, switched to the Soviet bloc. The USSR supplied an arsenal and trained Ethiopia officers in its use. They mounted artillery barrages at EPLF-held hillside strongholds, after which massed infantry brigades stormed them, time and again, with relentless futility. Daily daytime air raids meant that the EPLF became nocturnal—all activities from transporting supplies to cooking and laundry took place during the hours of darkness. In the EPLF-controlled areas, every dusk, anonymous hillsides would transform into hives of activity as fighters emerged from their hideouts.

    The EPLF’s ethos was egalitarian and ultra-disciplined. That was what ensured its survival under relentless onslaught. Its leaders insisted that Muslims, Christians, and members of all Eritrea’s nine ethno-linguistic groups were considered equal. Rather than postponing its revolutionary agenda until after the war, it enacted land reform and women’s emancipation in its “liberated areas,” and set up schools and hospitals for fighters and civilians alike. During its twenty years of armed struggle, it had no formal ranks, only positions of commander for specific tasks. After liberation, when it set up a memorial to its martyred fighters, the EPLF chose a monument in the shape of a plastic sandal. Manufactured in an underground factory dug out of a mountainside, sheltered from the daily air raids, plastic sandals had been the ubiquitous footwear of the guerrilla fighter.

    This was the image that Isaias projected to the world: an austere revolutionary, first among equals among comrades. Less mentioned was the fact that the EPLF was also Leninist in structure and discipline. The decisions of the central committee, once adopted, were to be implemented without question. Nor did the EPLF hesitate to kill. On many other occasions, EPLF members were executed on the merest suspicion that they might be spies. Scores of Eritreans were “sacrificed” in these purges, and hundreds perished in the vicious internecine war with the older, fissiparous ELF. In one episode from the early days of the EPLF, a band of well-educated volunteers was purged because they dared challenge Isaias. Known as the Menqa—or “bats”—because they supposedly conspired in darkness, the moniker says as much about the executioners as their victims. (Among them was Mussie Tesfamichael, one of Isaias’s close friends from his school days.) The Menqa were at least subjected to a process of investigation, and their fate became the subject of whispered debate. Not so for the next challenge to Isaias, from a group dubbed Yamin—“rightists” in Arabic—many of them highly educated, who simply disappeared without trace. The merciless elimination of dissent is the original sin of many revolutionary movements, a dark spot that cannot be erased.

    Ultimately, would-be dissenters fell in line because the EPLF was an astonishingly effective military machine. To call it a “guerrilla” movement would be a misnomer. It became a conventional army, defending its base areas in mountain trenches and fighting huge armored battles. The town of Nakfa in the desert hills close to the Red Sea—bombed into ruins by day-in-day-out attacks by Ethiopian fighter jets, yet never yielded by the EPLF—became the symbol of their resistance. (Eritrea’s post-independence currency is called the Nakfa.) After years of relentless combat, the EPLF turned the military tide. In fighting at the port city of Massawa in 1990, the EPLF captured ninety-nine Soviet-supplied tanks and inflicted thousands of casualties. They won a decisive victory in 1991, which was duly followed by a 99 percent vote for independence.

    The seven years after liberation were a period of hope for Eritrea. Fighters turned their energies to reconstruction. The diaspora returned, with professionals from Europe and America starting businesses, teaching at the university, and building retirement houses. Aid flowed in. Eritrea had the good will of the world.

    Signs of incipient autocracy, however, were evident from the outset. The secretive, centralized command structure that had been so efficient in wartime didn’t vanish when the EPLF became an ostensibly civilian government. Days before the declaration of independence, fighters protested the decision that they should continue to serve without pay for two more years. A group of disabled veterans marched—there’s no verb that conveys the determined collective motion of their wheelchairs, artificial limbs, and sticks—towards the capital to demand their pensions. They were shot at with live ammunition. Some were killed, others were arrested and disappeared. At a political convention in 1994, the EPLF dissolved itself and established the Popular Front for Democracy and Justice as a civilian political party. It was ostensibly to be one of many in a multi-party system, but in practice, the PFDJ was indistinguishable from the state itself. The EPLF’s shadowy financial network, set up for clandestine arms purchases, morphed into the party-owned Red Sea Trading Corporation, later the focus of UN investigations for a host of illicit activities.

    Veterans began to vote with their feet. Ramadan Nur quit politics. The minister of foreign affairs, Petros Solomon, a hero of the liberation war, asked to be demoted to run the ministry of maritime resources. Following elaborate consultations across the country, a constitution was drafted, but after the Constituent Assembly ratified it and handed it to the president in a ceremony at the national stadium, no more was heard about elections, an independent judiciary, or freedom of the press. Isaias had a reputation for knowing Eritreans one by one, forgetting no one, with an uncanny ability to espy their secrets. His intelligence network was both invisible and pervasive.

    In May 1998, Isaias escalated a border skirmish into a war with Ethiopia, which was governed at the time by a sister revolutionary movement, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Ethiopia had a tradition of martial imperialism that the Eritrean leader had learned to fear. Isaias’s border incursion—claiming a small town known as Badme—re-awoke Ethiopia’s militaristic spirit.

    The battle that was unfolding was both a comrades’ war and a cousins’ conflict. The two sides knew each other intimately. The EPRDF coalition was dominated by the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), founded during the revolution of 1974–1975. Over the next seventeen years, the EPLF and TPLF literally fought in the same trenches against Mengistu’s army, which employed Soviet tactics of relentless obliteration by artillery and airstrikes and massed infantry assaults.

    During that time, the EPLF and TPLF resisted with astonishing stoicism. But they also quarreled over doctrine and tactics. While the EPLF dug trenches to defend their base area in the desert mountains of northern Eritrea, the TPLF waged a textbook guerrilla war among peasant villages, withdrawing when the government army attacked and counterattacking when they could fight on their own terms. They disagreed over political doctrines too, in arcane debates that a generation later seem to belong in the seminars of Marxist theoreticians. Was the Soviet Union a “social imperialist” or ultimately an ally, even though it was the major backer of Mengistu? Were Ethiopia’s diverse ethnic groups—known in Marxist terminology as “nationalities”—entitled to self-determination?

    The worst falling out occurred in the depths of the great famine of 1985, when the EPLF closed the main road that brought relief aid from neighboring Sudan. But three years later, they patched up their differences in order to defeat Mengistu, accomplishing the task in May 1991. For the next seven years the EPLF in Asmara and the TPLF/EPRDF in Addis Ababa appeared to be the best of friends. But their differences were deeper than the factionalism of leftist politics.

    Isaias held the TPLF and its leaders in a special contempt. He and many of the Eritrean leaders hailed from the Eritrean highlands, historically coterminous with Tigray. They speak the same language—Tigrinya—and share the same history, dating back to the Axumite kingdom of the first century C.E. that were divided by the colonial boundary drawn at the turn of the twentieth century. Many Eritrean and Tigrayan families are intermarried. Isaias grew up in urban Asmara, where his father was among the first Eritreans to go to secondary school. Middle-class Asmarinos’ maidservants were often from Tigray’s northernmost district, Agame, as were the street sweepers and boys who hawked prickly pears. Their Tigrinya has a different accent. In private, members of the Asmara elite disparage the TPLF—including their leaders—as “Agames,” the sons of their maids. For them, it is unthinkable that Tigrayans could be their military equals or that Tigray’s prosperity could surpass Eritrea’s.

    The ostensible reason for the 1998 war was a minor territorial dispute over the town of Badme. Underneath it was the question of who should be number one in the Horn of Africa—Isaias would never be content to be anything else. A few weeks earlier, when President Bill Clinton had traveled to meet Africa’s “new brand” of leaders—the other three were Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, and Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi—the White House chose Kampala as the venue. To the dismay of White House staffers, Isaias declined the invitation. He knew he wouldn’t dominate the meeting and didn’t want to sign up to a coalition he wouldn’t lead.

    A few weeks after the outbreak of that war, I went to see Isaias with Paulos Tesfagiorgis—who ran the Eritrean Relief Association during the liberation war and had after independence overseen the country’s only human rights organization, the Regional Center for Human Rights and Development, for a brief period until it was shut down. Isaias carefully stage-manages every encounter and likes to meet alone without staff to keep a record. But the Badme War seemed to have shaken him. Arriving at his office, the guards were casual in dress and manner. Security checks were minimal. The receptionist, wearing her fatigues, waved us upstairs. The austere camaraderie of the guerrilla days lingered, but every visitor was monitored.

    The presidential office was an unremarkable Italian-era building with the spacious corridors and high ceilings favored by Mediterranean architects from the era before air conditioning. Isaias’s own office was capacious, simply furnished, and dark. The curtains were drawn, and there was just one dim light shining on a coffee table. Isaias himself sat at a large desk, head in hands. He glanced up only to wave us to sit down. He was wearing a khaki safari suit and plastic sandals.

    We sat, we waited. Then Isaias stood up, more heavily than his frame seemed to warrant—he is tall but slim—and joined us. His few steps were tired, and he slumped into the low chair, summoned coffee, and sighed. His face is normally inscrutable. At that moment he looked weary and wounded. He seemed at a loss for words. What he said next was the only time anyone can recollect any hint of remorse or self-doubt. If it was a performance for our benefit, it was a convincing one. “What have we done?” he asked. “What have I done?”

    But Isaias’s brooding demeanor lasted no more than a minute. As he spoke, he transformed, becoming focused and energized. For more than an hour he surveyed the political and military landscape, the state of world geopolitics, and the failures of the previous seven years. His coffee remained untouched. He shifted his forceful gaze from Paulos to me and back. He was in command of our encounter, and our cups of coffee also went cold.

    Eritrea had made the first gains on the battlefield. From Isaias’s encyclopedic monologue, battalion-by-battalion, he seemed utterly confident in victory. He was up against a much bigger country, however—and as Ethiopia cranked up its military mobilization, it would outnumber and outgun its smaller neighbor. Then again, overcoming long military odds was a familiar predicament for Isaias, even a comfortable one. Since leaving his university studies for the field in the sixties, forging the most efficient insurgent army in Africa, out-fighting Ethiopians was just what he did. We couldn’t tell if he believed in his own mystique, but he was certainly compelling: there was no detail on which Paulos or I could challenge him.

    As Isaias detailed the deployment of his troops, their logistics and fighting capacities, he also portrayed himself as strategist, diplomat, quartermaster, and military tactician. All the other commanders who had led fighters in the previous war faded from his telling. And indeed, many were pushed away from any active role in the command. Isaias was determined that the victory should be his alone. We left the meeting with a clear sense of Isaias’s focused, manic micromanagement of the war, and a glimpse of the dark void that lay behind it. There was also no vision beyond battlefield victory and the inexorable working out of historical inevitability.

    Isaias ran his war and lost it. Perhaps eighty thousand soldiers died on both sides in battles that resembled the western front of World War I. In May 2000, the Ethiopians overran Eritrean trenches, and the rout began. Veteran EPLF commanders hastily took charge of the disarrayed units and organized a last-ditch defense which slowed the Ethiopian advance. Isaias, who had previously scoffed at any suggestion of a ceasefire, desperately called Washington, D.C., to beg for one. Prime Minister Meles then ordered his troops to halt. The Ethiopian army chief of staff, General Tsadkan Gebretensae, rued that order for twenty years. He is now a member of the Tigrayan central command, organizing the defense against the Eritrean attack.

    Meles’s calculus was that Isaias would be overthrown or contained, which seemed possible at first. Eritrean veterans knew who had bungled the war and who had salvaged some honor in the defeat. Demands for change grew louder. Paulos organized a group of independent Eritreans to petition for human rights and democracy. They met in Germany, writing a letter to Isaias, reflecting on their country’s predicament and asking for Eritrea to turn towards the path of democracy. (The story is vividly told in Stephany Steggall’s book, The Eritrean Letter Writers.) In November 2000, the “Group of 13” (G-13) met with Isaias in Asmara.

    This was not an encounter that Isaias wanted and one for which he appeared astonishingly ill-prepared. Meeting the group alone, he began by accusing them of betraying Eritrea and giving solace to its enemies, then demanded they apologize and retract the letter. They of course refused. One of the G-13, the eminent physician Haile Debas, read out the substance of their letter, watching Isaias’s reactions closely. The president was ill at ease and unable to handle a well-articulated challenge. Leaving the meeting, Haile remarked to Paulos, “We have a bigger problem than I thought. He is mentally unstable.”

    A few months later, fifteen senior EPLF leaders—the “G-15”—formulated similar demands. Isaias ignored them. They made the fatal error of waiting. In private conversations (some of them recounted in Dan Connell’s book, Conversations with Eritrean Political Prisoners) they shared their dismay at how Isaias had betrayed their dreams and their remorse over their own failure to confront him over his abuses. For his part, Isaias was biding his time. A week after 9/11, with the world’s attention distracted, he struck with his trademark ruthlessness.

    Petros Solomon returned from his morning jog to find security men waiting for him outside his home. His young children were waking up inside. They have not seen or heard from him since. Their mother, Aster Yohannes, was studying in the United States at the time. After negotiating with the president’s office, she flew home. When Aster’s flight landed at Asmara airport, security agents boarded the plane and took her straight to a prison camp. Her children waited at the arrivals holding their flowers until the airport had emptied. She, too, has been neither seen nor heard of since. Their daughter Hanna has patiently campaigned for her parents not to be forgotten. She told her story in PBS Frontline’s Escaping Eritrea last year.

    One of the G-15 dissidents recanted. Three were abroad. The other eleven—among the most celebrated leaders of the liberation struggle—disappeared into Isaias’s gulag. Some are feared dead, others incapacitated. No one knows. No charges have been published.

    Abiy Ahmed became prime minister of Ethiopia in 2018. A reformer and relative political novice, he offered an olive branch to Isaias. One veteran diplomat compared it to a rabbit asking a cobra for a dinner date. The two men declared an end to the conflict with Eritrea, and Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The details of the deal weren’t revealed to the African Union or the Ethiopian parliament, however. Best practice—and the standard procedure at the African Union—is for a peace agreement to include provisions for democratization, human rights, and demobilization of over-sized armies, all subject to international monitoring and reporting. In this case, everything was chanced on words of goodwill. The Nobel Prize was a triumph for wishful thinking, but the Norwegian committee wasn’t the only one guilty of gullibility. The deal was greased by prince Mohamed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi. The U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Tibor Nagy, anticipated a “warm, cordial” relationship with Eritrea. Isaias got sanctions lifted, a security pact with Ethiopia, and an emergent axis of autocrats that brought Somalia into his sphere of influence.

    After Eritrea was brought in from the cold, Isaias didn’t relax his grip. Instead of demobilizing his vast army, he shopped for new weapons. Instead of allowing his people to move freely, he dispatched security agents to Addis Ababa. When Covid-19 hit, he took the opportunity for a rigorous lockdown. He trained special forces for the Somali army, reportedly with the goal that President Mohammed Abdullahi “Farmaajo” could dispense with the inconvenience of an election. The Somalis are skilled at restraining would-be autocrats, however, and managed to hold their election in May, removing their aspiring dictator. Isaias is also fishing in Sudan’s troubled waters.

    But for Eritrea’s despot, these are sideshows. The contest with Tigray is the main event.

    For Isaias, this portends a final decision by force of arms. He will fight without mercy. If he prevails, his lifelong ambition of becoming master of the Horn of Africa will be within his grasp. Should Isaias fall, a complacent international community will be able to claim no credit for the end of his dictatorship and destabilization. Hopefully, after a lost generation, Eritreans will be able to enjoy their long-awaited liberty.

    https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-despotism-of-isaias-afewerki-de-waal
    #Afewerki #Erythrée #dictature #Tigré

    ping @karine4 @isskein

  • Refugee : The Eritrean exodus
    Série en 5 parties

    Follow Chris Cotter, an American traveler, as he explores a common migration path through Ethiopia and into Israel, tracking the plight of Eritrean refugees. Chris and his crew visit several refugee camps, including the never-before-documented Afar region. The refugees tell stories of oppression, torture, and survival. Searching for solutions, Chris speaks to various NGOs and experts, including Assistant Secretary of State, Anne Richard. The outlook is bleak, but the spirit of the Eritrean refugees is hard to ignore.

    https://www.theeritreanexodus.com

    Part 1 :
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjouQhlllLY

    Part 2 :
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WHlK12IOG8

    Part 3 :
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkDeHGb8uWA

    Part 4 :
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqP2DQe34wo&t=36s

    Part 5 :
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqS6AadI4rk


    #réfugiés #réfugiés_érythréens #asile #migrations #Erythrée #Ethiopie #camps_de_réfugiés #frontières #histoire #frontière #indépendance #guerre_d'indépendance #Isaias_Afwerki #service_militaire #dictature #prisons #prisons_souterraines #sous-sol #souterrain #torture #enfants #Shire #Aysaita #Adi_Harush #Mai-Aini #Hitsas #viol #trafic_d'êtres_humains #Sinaï #kidnapping #esclavage #esclavage_moderne #néo-esclavage #rançon #Israël
    #film #film_documentaire #série

    –-> Très nord-américain dans le style, mais des images des camps de réfugiés en Ethiopie très parlantes et que je n’avais jamais vues...

    ping @isskein @karine4

  • Eritrea in caduta libera sui diritti umani

    L’Eritrea di #Isaias_Afewerki è oggi uno dei peggiori regimi al mondo. Dove la guerra con l’Etiopia è usata per giustificare un servizio militare a tempo indeterminato. E dove avere un passaporto è quasi un miraggio. Gli ultimi attacchi sono stati rivolti agli ospedali cattolici.

    Il rispetto dei diritti umani in Eritrea è solo un ricordo che si perde nei tempi. La lista di violazioni è lunga e gli esempi recenti non mancano. L’ultima mossa del regime di Isaias Afewerki, al potere dal 1991, è stata quella di ordinare la chiusura dei centri sanitari gestiti dalla Chiesa cattolica nel paese, responsabile di una quarantina tra ospedali e scuole in zone rurali che garantiscono sanità e istruzione alle fette più povere della popolazione. Ebbene, qualche giorno fa in questi luoghi si sono presentati militari armati che hanno sfondato porte e cacciato fuori malati, vecchi e bambini. E preteso l’esproprio coatto degli immobili.

    Il 29 aprile, quattro vescovi avevano chiesto di aprire un dialogo con il governo per cercare una soluzione alla crescente povertà e mancanza di futuro per il popolo. Mentre il 13 giugno sono stati arrestati cinque preti ortodossi ultrasettantenni.

    Daniela Kravetz, responsabile dei rapporti tra Nazioni Unite e Africa, ha riportato che il 17 maggio «trenta cristiani sono stati arrestati durante un incontro di preghiera, mentre qualche giorno prima erano finiti in cella 141 fedeli, tra cui donne e bambini». L’Onu chiede ora che «con urgenza il Governo eritreo torni a permettere la libera scelta di espressione religiosa».

    Guerra Eritrea-Etiopia usata come scusa per il servizio militare a tempo indeterminato

    L’ex colonia italiana ha ottenuto di fatto l’indipendenza dall’Etiopia nel 1991, dopo un conflitto durato trent’anni. E nonostante la recente distensione tra Asmara e Addis Abeba, la guerra tra le due nazioni continua a singhiozzo lungo i confini.

    Sono ancora i rapporti con la vicina Etiopia, del resto, ad essere usati dal dittatore Afewerki per giustificare l’imposizione del servizio militare a tempo indeterminato. I ragazzi, infatti, sono arruolati verso i 17 anni e il servizio militare può durare anche trent’anni, con paghe miserabili e strazianti separazioni. Le famiglie si vedono portare via i figli maschi senza conoscerne la destinazione e i ragazzi spesso non tornano più.

    Le città sono prevalentemente abitate da donne, anziani e bambini. E per chi si oppone le alternative sono la prigione, se non la tortura. Uno dei sistemi più usati dai carcerieri è la cosiddetta Pratica del Gesù, che consiste nell’appendere chi si rifiuta di collaborare, con corde legate ai polsi, a due tronchi d’albero, in modo che il corpo assuma la forma di una croce. A volte restano appesi per giorni, con le guardie che di tanto in tanto inumidiscono le labbra con l’acqua.

    Eritrea: storia di un popolo a cui è vietato viaggiare

    l passaporto, che solo i più cari amici del regime ottengono una volta raggiunta la maggiore età, per la popolazione normale è un miraggio. Il prezioso documento viene consegnato alle donne quando compiono 40 anni e agli uomini all’alba dei 50. A quell’età si spera che ormai siano passate forza e voglia di lasciare il paese.

    Oggi l’Eritrea è un inferno dove tutti spiano tuttti. Un paese sospettoso e nemico d chiunque, diventato sotto la guida di Afewerki uno dei regimi più totalitari al mondo, dove anche parlare al telefono è rischioso.

    E pensare che negli anni ’90, quando l’Eritrea si separò dall’Etiopia, era vista come la speranza dell’Africa. Un paese attivo, pieno di potenziale, che si era liberato da solo senza chiedere aiuto a nessuno. Il mondo si aspettava che diventasse la Taiwan del Corno d’Africa, grazie anche a una cultura economica che gli altri stati se la sognavano.

    L’Ue investe in Etiopia ed Eritrea

    L’Unione europea sta per erogare 312 milioni di euro di aiuti al Corno d’Africa per la costruzione di infrastrutture che consentiranno di far transitare merci dall’Etiopia al mare, attraversando quindi l’Eritrea. Una decisione su cui ha preso posizione Reportes sans frontières, che chiede la sospensione di questo finanziamento ad un paese che, si legge in una nota, «continua a violare i diritti umani, la libertà di espressione e e di informazione e detiene arbitrariamente, spesso senza sottoporli ad alcun processo, decine di prigionieri politici, tra cui molti giornalisti».

    Cléa Kahn-Sriber, responsabile di Reporter sans frontières in Africa, ha dichiarato essere «sbalorditivo che l’Unione europea sostenga il regime di Afeweki con tutti questi aiuti senza chiedere nulla in cambio in materia di diritti umani e libertà d’espressione. Il regime ha più giornalisti in carcere di qualsiasi altro paese africano. Le condizioni dei diritti umani sono assolutamente vergognose».

    La Fondazione di difesa dei Diritti umani per l’Eritrea con sede in Olanda e composta da eritrei esiliati sta intraprendendo azioni legali contro l’Unione europea. Secondo la ricercatrice universitaria eritrea Makeda Saba, «l’Ue collaborerà e finanzierà la #Red_Sea_Trading_Corporation, interamente gestita e posseduta dal governo, società che il gruppo di monitoraggio dell’Onu su Somalia ed Eritrea definisce coinvolta in attività illegali e grigie nel Corno d’africa, compreso il traffico d’armi, attraverso una rete labirintica multinazionale di società, privati e conti bancari». Un bel pasticcio, insomma.

    Pericoloso lasciare l’Eritrea: il ruolo delle ambasciate

    Chi trova asilo in altre nazioni vive spiato e minacciato dai propri connazionali. Lo ha denunciato Amnesty International, secondo cui le nazioni dove i difensori dei diritti umani eritrei corrono i maggiori rischi sono Kenya, Norvegia, Olanda, Regno Unito, Svezia e Svizzera. Nel mirino del potere eritreo ora c’è anche un prete candidato al Nobel per la pace nel 2015, Mussie Zerai.

    «I rappresentanti del governo eritreo nelle ambasciate impiegano tutte le tattiche per impaurire chi critica l’amministrazione del presidente Afewerki, spiano, minacciano di morte. Chi è scappato viene considerato traditore della patria, sovversivo e terrorista».

    In aprile il ministro dell’Informazione, #Yemane_Gebre_Meskel, e gli ambasciatori di Giappone e Kenia hanno scritto su Twitter post minacciosi contro gli organizzatori e i partecipanti ad una conferenza svoltasi a Londra dal titolo “Costruire la democrazia in Eritrea”. Nel tweet, #Meskel ha definito gli organizzatori «collaborazionisti».

    Non va meglio agli esiliati in Kenya. Nel 2013, a seguito del tentativo di registrare un’organizzazione della società civile chiamata #Diaspora_eritrea_per_l’Africa_orientale, l’ambasciata eritrea ha immediatamente revocato il passaporto del presidente e co-fondatore, #Hussein_Osman_Said, organizzandone l’arresto in Sud Sudan. L’accusa? Partecipare al terrorismo, intento a sabotare il governo in carica.

    Amnesty chiede quindi «che venga immediatamente sospeso l’uso delle ambasciate all’estero per intimidire e reprimere le voci critiche».

    Parlando delle ragioni che hanno scatenato l’ultimo atto di forza contro gli ospedali, padre Zerai ha detto che «il regime si è giustificato facendo riferimento a una legge del 1995, secondo cui le strutture sociali strategiche come ospedali e scuole devono essere gestite dallo stato».

    Tuttavia, questa legge non era mai stata applicata e non si conoscono i motivi per cui all’improvviso è cominciata la repressione. Padre Zerai la vede così: «La Chiesa cattolica eritrea è indipendente e molto attiva nella società, offre supporto alle donne, sostegno ai poveri e ai malati di Aids ed è molto ascoltata». A preoccupare il padre, e non solo lui, sono ora «il silenzio dell’Unione europea e della comunità internzionale. Siamo davati a crimini gravissimi e il mondo tace».

    https://www.osservatoriodiritti.it/2019/07/04/eritrea-news-etiopia-guerra
    #droits_humains #Erythrée #COI #Afewerki #service_militaire #guerre #Ethiopie #religion #passeport #torture #totalitarisme #dictature #externalisation #UE #EU #aide_au_développement #coopération_au_développement #répression #Eglise_catholique

  • Il “vicedittatore” eritreo, aggredito a Roma: è colui che ha ordinato il mio rapimento in Somalia

    Il 5 luglio scorso a Roma all’uscita da un ristorante l’ambasciatore dello Stato di Eritrea,
    Petros Fessazion, è stato aggredito da alcune persone, quasi certamente suoi connazionali
    stanchi di un regime repressivo che nega le libertà fondamentali dell’uomo.
    Ma con l’ambasciatore Petros, probabilmente c’era Yemane Gebrehab, il numero due della dittatura
    al potere nell’ex colonia italiana, rimasto gravemente ferito a uno zigomo.

    Ma nell’ospedale romano dove è stato ricoverato non risulta nessuno con quel nome.
    Che abbia dato generalità false per evitare di essere riconosciuto è assai probabile, ma, ovviamente
    non è certo. Per altro la presenza di Yemane era prevista in numerose iniziative in Europa
    dove il “vice-dittatore” non è comparso. Massimo Alberizzi scrive a Petros e a Yemane,
    che a suo tempo l’aveva condannato a morte e fatto rapire in Somalia.


    http://www.africa-express.info/2017/07/17/il-vicedittatore-eritreo-aggradito-roma-ha-ordinato-il-mio-rapiment

    #Petros_Fessazion #Erythrée #Yemane_Gebreab #Isaias_Afeworki

    Et quelques #victimes du régime:

    Dove sono finiti in miei amici #Petros_Solomon, #Haile_Woldensaye, #Mohammed_Sharifo , ex ministri, o #Isaac_Dawit, giornalista, solo per citarne alcuni, arrestati e messi in qualche arroventata galera dell’infuocato bassopiano? E Aster, la moglie di Petros? Avete ingannato anche lei, una combattente per la libertà, una vostra compagna d’armi.

    #Aster_Yohannes

    • Et un article sur Yemane Gebreab, numéro 2 du régime érythréen, reçu via la newsletter de Human Rights Concern Eritrea, 15.11.2017 :
      Yemane Gebreab’s Deadly Schemes and Network of Terror

      Various media outlets have reported that Yemane Gebreab (the Eritrean President’s Advisor) was not allowed to address the Eritrean government supporters’ public seminar, in Arlington, on 8 October 2017, during his visit in the United States. He was denied entry to the seminar venue by US law enforcement officers. It seems plausible that he was in violation of a US Executive Order which listed him as a person who threatened US national security and foreign policy with regard to the Somalia situation. Human Rights Concern Eritrea (HRCE) has previously written about the danger Yemane Gebreab poses to Eritreans inside and outside Eritrea and the international community at large. In particular, Yemane Gebreab set-up an unsuccessful assassination attempt in Somalia on an Italian journalist who lived to tell the story.

      Whilst the flier which was distributed to advertise the event at which Yemane Gebreab was going to be present, alongside Eritrean Foreign Minister Osman Saleh, the official website of the Eritrean Government reported that Osman Saleh alone conducted the seminar. Since the news that Yemane Gebreab was detained spread quickly, it appears the Eritrean Government tried to cover up this embarrassing turn of events. Manufacturing after-the-fact appearances is no new thing for the Eritrean government.

      The UN conducted an inquiry into human rights violations in Eritrea and concluded in June 2016 that crimes against humanity were both widespread and systematic. The country is a one-party state, run by the top members of the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), whose chairman is also the current and only president since 1991, Isaias Afewerki. His personal advisor is Yemane Gebreab, the man who proposes policies and implements them. Except that he does much more.

      Yemane Gebreab is widely known as the Presidential Advisor in Eritrea and head of Political Affairs in the PFDJ. However, these titles are nominal and only some of the roles he plays. Not only is Yemane Gebreab one of the main political minds behind the PFDJ, but his activities also range as widely in scope and depth as they do in nefariousness. He is active both at national and international level. HRCE has previously called for his arrest, and has since spoken to and received confidential testimonies from agents who in the past were deployed by Yemane Gebreab himself. They confirmed what most Eritreans already knew about him, through word of mouth or partial first-hand experience.

      On the international front, Yemane Gebreab is perhaps most infamous for masterminding and establishing the Young PFDJ (YPFDJ), a youth organisation which has parallels with the Balilla organisation which existed in Fascist Italy during the first half of the 20th century. YPFDJ even has enforcers called Eri-Blood, who intimidate anyone who expresses discontent with the Eritrean government and its practices. However, intimidation is not the only purpose of this organisation. Through the YPFDJ, whose members are not necessarily only youth, the PFDJ organises propaganda campaigns and spreads misinformation among the diaspora and other groups which interact with the Eritrean community abroad. Just as the YPFDJ meetings, often headed by Yemane Gebreab himself, spread false propaganda, they also serve as a means to fundraise and host events where money is either directly collected or obtained through sales of tickets or other items. This alone should have landed Yemane Gebreab in a US jail in the years since the standing executive order was first issued in 2010 by the then president Barack Obama.

      Most of the funds raised by the YPFDJ and PFDJ in the diaspora come from the older segments of the Eritrean community abroad. Worryingly, however, Yemane Gebreab organises these supporters to act as his informants. The former-agents whom HRCE has spoken with say that even middle-aged or elderly women, or other members of the Eritrean community abroad who might not raise suspicion, are used to spy on fellow Eritreans in the diaspora. Though many Eritreans knew this already, the testimony HRCE has received confirms the extent to which this tactic is systematic and widespread. Whilst the ordinary civilian may be used as an informant for Yemane Gebreab, trained individuals ranging from youth to middle-aged are deployed in the diaspora community.

      These youth, invariably members of the YPFDJ, but not necessarily openly so, are individuals who are carefully selected and sent to training camps inside Eritrea, often under the pretence of a vacation visit. They are trained using a program run by Yemane Gebreab which is intended to produce cadres fiercely loyal to the regime. These youth are taken around the country in a program called Zura-Hagerka, to the youth festival in Sawa Military Camp, to Nakfa (the old bastion town during the war for independence) to camps around Asmara (such as Asha Golgol) and other towns where their training is conducted. Not all of these youth are selected to become Yemane Gebreab’s agents. However, those who are selected are deployed in the diaspora and made to inform on the community, infiltrate organisations or set-up money laundering businesses, or even become part of the Eri- Blood.

      It is worrying that Eritrean youth from the diaspora willingly and voluntarily choose to partake in these criminal affairs, although the PFDJ regime has become expert at targeting the more vulnerable and disillusioned amongst the youth abroad. Unlike them, however, there are other Eritreans who also operate in the diaspora but have no choice in the matter. These are conscripts who hail from within the country and are trained in special cadre programs. These Eritreans might get brainwashed to the level of accepting the rhetoric fed them by Yemane Gebreab, although most are deeply aware that they have no choice but to obey, for it is not only their lives which are endangered; they also fear for their families. Few who manage to escape the grip of Yemane Gebreab’s network manage to share inside information. They are unambiguous about the fact that Yemane Gebreab runs these programs, participates in training and brainwashing cadres, as well as being the person who has the final word in all decision-making.

      The cadres deployed outside Eritrea by Yemane Gebreab have a slightly different job from the YPFDJ youth who are trained in the country and then sent back to their diaspora communities, although it must be kept in mind that often their roles overlap. These agents are told the country depends on them and that their training and job has been entrusted to them by the Eritrean people. They are made to believe they are the true inheritors of the legacy which led to the country’s independence and are instructed in no uncertain terms to put the country before their lives. Of course, by “country” Yemane Gebreab means the interests of himself, Isaias Afwerki and their kleptocratic clique. In fact, veneration of Isaias Afwerki is part of their training as they are assured that if it were not for Isaias Afwerki and the PFDJ, the country would be lost.

      Thus trained, involuntarily conscripted men and women from Eritrea are often sent to work in embassies, consulates or other PFDJ offices around the world. The former agents whom HRCE spoke with clarify that these cadres are assigned the job of spying and watching every move of ambassadors, consuls and other staff in these offices. The sources recall how, during their training, Yemane Gebreab would warn them to watch very closely Eritrean officials, diplomats and other leadership figures who visit from Eritrea. He would caution them that they are to monitor these diplomats’ movements as if they were a cancerous tumour. Accordingly, he instructs the agents he sends abroad to record what Eritrean diplomats and officials say in meetings and at public events, keeping an eye out for any sign of dissent or criticism. If these officials show any hint of discontent, they are to be reported and are consequently recalled back to the country.

      While abroad, the cadres deployed from Eritrea are also made to monitor and report on Eritrean-owned businesses and Eritrean individuals. They may receive orders to repatriate individuals targeted by the PFDJ and Yemane Gebreab. In practice, this translates to finding ways to undermine these individuals and business owners so that either their immigration status or licences are revoked. It may even extend to outright abduction and enforced disappearance. This practice seems to be done more in African and middle-eastern countries, where some of governments might even co-operate with the PFDJ in deporting targeted individuals. Examples of this can be found in neighbouring countries such as Sudan, where, throughout the years, abductions of Eritreans from Sudanese territory are conducted by Eritrean agents.

      Moreover, agents who answer to and co-operate with Yemane Gebreab can also be foreign nationals. Recalling the assassination attempt on the Italian journalist mentioned above, the Somalis who allowed the journalist to escape were reprimanded by Yemane Gebreab. Furthermore, part of the reason his name is the only non-Somali name on the list in the Executive Order concerning the turmoil in Somalia is due to his and his agents’ work in the region.

      However, the international activities by Yemane Gebreab form only part of the picture, as he is also deeply entrenched in the terror his activities within the country cause to the Eritrean People. As mentioned in a previous article, Yemane Gebreab admits in an interview that he and the PFDJ arrested without due legal process and detained incommunicado a group of journalists and his former colleagues and senior ministers known as the G11 in 2001. (The G11 were part of the G15, a group of senior government officials who publicly called for democracy and change, but only 11 of them were in the country at the time of arrest, and few are thought to survive to this day). Though this case is the most famous internationally, Yemane Gebreab is co-perpetrator of other persecutions and enforced disappearances within the country.

      Inside Eritrea, Yemane Gebreab is one of the main political minds behind the PFDJ, and as such, he plans and implements various repressive internal policies. He plays a crucial role in the establishment and running of youth programs, including the national service and the National Union of Eritrean Youth and Students (NUEYS), the internal equivalent of the YPFDJ and the organisation which handles all Eritrean youth affairs before they are conscripted into the military, which occurs before they even finish secondary education. This includes participation in PFDJ organised events and the release or withholding of the ID card all students must have before they are conscripted, on penalty of detention and early conscription into the military.

      Whilst Gebreab partakes in shaping such national policies to the extent that he is known as second-in-command in the country after Isaias Afewerki, the cadres he controls are put to work even inside Eritrea. The espionage network in Eritrea is as unnerving as possible, but what makes it even more fearsome for those who have to live under it is that elements like those organised and deployed by Yemane Gebreab do not fall under the control of any normal intelligence agency. They receive orders and respond solely to the president’s office and to Yemane Gebreab. For years the Eritrean population has lived in dread of accidentally offending one of these informants or any other covert agents infiltrated within the population.

      A particular terrorising effect is achieved by the agents of Yemane Gebreab inside Eritrea by the fact that they not only spy on the population but also demand that citizens inform on each other. The testimonies received by HRCE clarify that the cadres and agents trained and deployed by Yemane Gebreab are often given quotas and targets to monitor. Consequently, they follow the target in public places such as cafes, places of work, churches, mosques, etc. In such places, these agents approach the persons running the locales, businesses or places of worship and force them to inform on the targeted citizens. This creates a daily atmosphere of terror in the population, because no one can be sure if their colleague, their waiter, their church leader or their imam is watching their every move and reporting to these agents. To use a recent development within the country as a further example, it appears that the PFDJ regime is now assigning one family in each neighbourhood to act as informants on a group of surrounding families, reporting the comings and goings of each member of the assigned families they watch.

      At this point it is important to remind the reader that Eritreans live in terror of the consequences that may befall them if they appear to know anything unauthorised or do not cooperate with the demands made of them. In such ways Yemane Gebreab instils fear among Eritreans so that no one dares to speak to their neighbour openly, let alone organise to demand their rights or change the system. There is now an entire generation born and raised in such conditions of fear, and Yemane Gebreab is the main actor pulling the strings of the mechanisms that have terrorised many of the young people as well as most of the adult population for their entire lives, both inside and outside Eritrea. Gebreab has committed crimes against humanity and used people who have been forced into slavery to partake in his schemes. He is one of the main persons, perhaps only the second after Isaias Afwerki, to have illegitimately detained and directly caused the deaths of hundreds accused of dissenting against the PFDJ, of whom the most famous are amongst the G11 and journalists forcibly disappeared in September 2001.

      It baffles the mind then that Yemane Gebreab has thus far been allowed to enter Europe and the United States of America freely. European leaders and representatives of other United Nations member states should refuse to interact with such a criminal and should denounce him. The UN has recommended that those who systematically perpetrate crimes against humanity in Eritrea should face prosecution and Yemane Gebreab should be one of the most wanted men in Eritrea, detained immediately upon setting foot outside Eritrea and prosecuted at the International Criminal Court (ICC). HRCE recognises that some steps such as sanction and seizure of financial assets have been taken by the United States. However, it is feared that the seriousness of Yemane Gebreab’s crimes are grossly underestimated by the leaders of such countries and international organisations.

      HRCE appeals to all countries to deny entry to Yemane Gebreab and to refuse political and financial cooperation with him and the party he represents. It seems that Yemane Gebreab has been set free losing a major opportunity to detain him. However, if the U.S, European or other country’s authorities get another chance to put him in custody, HRCE recommends that instead of being released to perpetrate further crimes against humanity, he should be detained until he is brought before the ICC to answer for the major role he has played in terrorising and eliminating innocent Eritreans.