Eritrea: The Danish Delegation to Eritrea and Their Unreliable Sources

 The Danish Delegation to Eritrea and Their Unreliable Sources

A delegation from the Danish Immigration Service (DIS) that has recently been to Eritrea on a fact-finding mission has come out with a hefty report, Eritrea – Drivers and Root Causes of Emigration, National Service and the Possibility of Return¹, that more or less concludes that the political and humanitarian conditions in Eritrea are not oppressive enough to justify asylum claims of Eritrean refugees reaching Denmark; and, by extension, other parts of Europe too. Here are the two main facts that the delegation claims to have established in its fact-finding mission:

(a)    that Eritrea, though still authoritarian, happens to be a normal country with enough food and goods, good transportation, no climate of fear, few checkpoints, no slums, little corruption, good schools, safe environment, no sponsoring of terrorism, improved National Service, reforms on the horizon, etc;

(b)   and that, on the concrete evidence part, many of those who had illegally left Eritrea (army deserters and conscription evaders, among others) and later opted or were forced to return back to the country faced little or no reprisal by the government upon their return.

The obvious implication of these two major facts would be: that Eritrean refugees in Denmark asking for asylum have no legitimate fear if they were to be returned, or rather deported, back to Eritrea. Ruling out acceptance based on claims of collective oppression, the study instead suggests a case by case examination of applicants to accommodate the exceptions. We need to explore the three points below in regard to the methodology and content of the DIS delegation’s report extensively to see that this argument has no merit at all:

(a)    why the delegation believes that its assessment of the humanitarian situation on the ground in Eritrea is more factual than the ones undertaken before by various organizations and individuals;

(b)   why its study in Eritrea entirely bypasses local sources, both human and material, in the gathering of information and, instead, focuses mainly on foreigners and officials – and, for that, all anonymous;

(c)    and how it semantically exploits the ambiguity in the term “return” to draw an unwarranted conclusion: that there would be no reprisals by the government if the refugees in Denmark were to be returned to Eritrea.

After going over these three critical points, we will put Professor Gaim Kibreab’s input in the report under scrutiny: how his subtle effort to paint a normalized Eritrea, a task that is also prevalent among many in the opposition, has been happily exploited by the DIS team to reach its unwarranted conclusion; the larger point being that normalizing the Eritrean condition cannot be done without undermining the humanitarian cause in the country.

Let’s start by focusing on the shoot-to-kill policy that the regime has officially adopted for years towards those who attempt to cross the border illegally, as the policy’s latest victims are still making headlines in Eritrean opposition websites, to discredit the DIS delegation’s report at a general-feel level, before we look at the details as problematized above.

 Shoot-to-kill policy

 How many times have we Eritreans heard from personal accounts of those who managed to escape the shootings – from Radio Salina, Paltalks and opposition websites – leaving fatally shot fellow travelers, friends or even family members behind? How many of the escapees have perished while crossing the Mereb River, given that the regime considers fleeing to its archenemy Ethiopia more treasonous than fleeing to Sudan? In fact, the latest incident of this cruel policy, the massacre of 13 youth out of the 16 (the fate of the other three is still unknown) that were attempting to flee the country,² makes a mockery of the DIS study. That these young Eritreans were cold bloodedly gunned down at the border to Sudan is enough of a proof that the shoot-to-kill policy is still ruthlessly practiced whenever and wherever the border patrols feel like it.

The way the regime callously handled the case of one family that has lost three daughters aged 13, 16 and 18 years in this massacre has all the trademarks of Shaebia: to the inquires of the distraught father, first, the government admitted that the missing were in its custody; then, it demanded that the parents pay a substantial amount of money for the their daughters’ release; and, in the end, it came up with a story that doesn’t comport with its two previous acts: that soldiers from the navy have stumbled upon the corpses of the 13 missing youths in the coastal desert.³ What epitomizes this cruelty is that, like the Arab Bedouin human traffickers at the Sinai, this regime callously made profit out of the dead bodies it had already murdered. But if we are to go by the report compiled by the DIS delegation, we would be getting a totally different picture: though authoritarian, that it still is a well-meaning government.

In contrast to the grim realty depicted above, invariably, all the foreign interlocutors in Asmara asked by the Danish team on the shoot-to-kill policy either downplay it as a thing of the distant past or totally deny that it has ever been carried out on the ground. Here are four indirect quotes from International organization (A), Western embassy (B), Western embassy (C) and regional NGO respectively in regard to the shoot-to-kill policy:

“Regarding the shoot-to-kill allegedly practiced at the border to Ethiopia it was stated that information on this might have been partly true previously, but that people are no longer being shot at just because they try to cross the border into Ethiopia.”

“Regarding the ‘shoot-and-kill’ policy applied in the border regions to Ethiopia a Western embassy (B) stated that there could be anecdotal reports about someone having been shot near the border. However, such stories are most likely not true as it is hard to believe that Eritrean soldiers would shoot at a fellow citizen. The government wants to stop the exodus, but not by shooting those attempting to leave via the border to Ethiopia. Instead, it has begun to open up to the international society in order to find a viable solution to the problem.”

“A Western embassy (C) found it unlikely the official ‘shoot-to-kill’ is actually implemented at the external borders. From time to time there are rumors that people who have tried to cross the border illegally are being shot at, but these rumors have not been confirmed by credible sources ...”

“The shoot-to-kill policy at the border to Ethiopia reported by international NGOs does not exist any longer, if it ever has been practiced …”

It is astounding to see how these Western sources in Asmara have turned out to be the regime’s best apologists. It is easy to see where in their “humanizing” efforts they have gone wrong: they couldn’t believe that the army could carry out such cruel policy, at best, or that regime would go that far, at worst. It is true that the shoot-to-kill policy is applied inconsistently, but the reason has more to do with incompetence and corruption than with the humanity of the army or the regime. First, given the long porous borders with Ethiopia and the Sudan, it has always been difficult to enforce it; in most instances people cross the borders undetected, especially if they are led by practiced guides. And although it is true that many in the army would be reluctant to shoot at their fellow conscripts, the regime depends mainly on death squads specifically assigned to these sensitive border areas to do the killings. Moreover, the fact that even these trusted border patrols have turned out to be unreliable enforcers has nothing to do with humanity but rather with corruption: many of the border guards are in cahoots with the human traffickers, and act more as facilitators than enforcers when there is a large amount of money involved. That is why usually it is the disadvantaged youth who try to make it across the border on their own that turn out to be the main victims of this policy.

Notice that all the four foreign sources in Asmara quoted above have found it hard to believe what they have heard in regard to the shoot-to-kill incidents; when it comes to it, they are more likely to give benefit of the doubt to the regime’ words rather than to the locals’, even as the government has yet to officially abandon this policy. The simple fact that all these sources have gotten it dead wrong when it comes to one major official policy of the regime ought to put the credibility of whole report to question. Below, we will in fact see that the entire repot has been written on statements from such unreliable sources that don’t shy away from making similar sweeping denials in regard to almost every other question raised by the delegation. We need then to go over the details of the report before we disqualify the report in its entirety. Let’s start with what it means to have “access” to Eritrea, since the Danish team claims that to be its biggest advantage over all other studies.

“Access” to Eritrea

The main reason the DIS delegation provides as to why its fact-finding mission is indispensably superior to others are threefold: (a) that the information available to the Danish authorities so far has been prepared by stakeholders; (b) that its study is the most recent, and hence the most updated, of its type; (c) and, most importantly, unlike all other studies or reports done before, that the Danish team happens to have direct access to mainland Eritrea itself. Here is how it puts it in its report:

“The available country of origin information relevant to the Danish case load was published by stakeholders with no or little direct access to Eritrea. Consequently, the hitherto available reporting on the conditions in Eritrea to a large extent seems to be based on information obtained from sources that were not present in Eritrea or on interviews with Eritrean refugees abroad. In addition, some of the available information appears not to be obtained recently.” This was followed by, “Therefore, the need for more updated and first-hand description on the conditions on the ground in Eritrea arose.” (emphases mine)

The first one can’t be taken seriously since it assumes that the DIS is not a stakeholder in this study; or that it is less of a stakeholder, say, than the UN Commission of Inquiry, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or Reporters Without Borders. The fact that the mission is initiated by the Danish Immigration Service itself, highly motivated as it has been by the dramatic rise of anti-immigrant backlash in the country and, consequently, by the need to stem the flow of migrants (especially from Africa), makes such a claim outlandish and needs no further comment. The second point is trivial in that it fallaciously assumes that the more recent the study the more factual it is; unless, of course, there has been a radical shift in the way the regime in Asmara has been conducting itself in the recent past. But since there has not been any noticeable shift, let alone a dramatic one, the timing of this study wouldn’t count as a significant advantage. Furthermore, since reports on the humanitarian situation in Eritrea have been coming out steadily for years, without wide intervals in between them, the time-gap the team is emphasizing cannot be that wide to merit reexamining the whole past or catching up with new developments. Besides, when the usual yearly reports of many humanitarian organizations for 2014 will soon be coming out, will it make theirs better than the DIS delegation’s report simply because they would by then be the most recent? This tells us how oxymoronic such a claim is, since any study is the most recent of its type at the time it is being conducted. If the above two factors have no merit whatsoever as advantages, then the delegation’s claimed advantage would rest on one fact only: accessibility to Eritrea. Given that no humanitarian fact-finding mission has ever been allowed direct access to the country before, on first sight this seems to be a huge advantage over other studies or reports. On closer examination though, this too turns out to be a farce.

To begin with, the fact that Eritrea has consistently and adamantly refused to provide access to the land to any fact-finding mission on its humanitarian record, the most recent of which has been that of the UN Commission of Inquiry, makes the DIS delegation’s venture into Eritrea suspect from its very inception. The extremely paranoid Asmara regime that has had a long track of record of expelling Western diplomats and organizations from the land on the slightest pretext (the Italian and EU Ambassador Bandini, all Western NGOs, US Aid, the UN blue helmets, etc.) would never relent to any inquiries on the humanitarian front unless it is 100 percent “guaranteed” beforehand that such a study would not disadvantage it. That is, when the Eritrean government allowed the Danish team access to the land, it had correctly guessed the team’s mission to be in convergence with its interest. Indeed, an unspoken understanding between the two must have been reached that assured Eritrea of the study’s outcome long before it started. This “assurance” can be easily gleaned from the way the study has been conducted.

When a fact-finding body is allowed into a country, the “direct access” that the body gains is not simply to the landmass but to relevant human and material sources of information on the ground. By human sources, we mean free access to the local population as sources of information; and, by material sources, we mean unfettered access to all the places relevant to the study. But the way the interlocutors in the land were selected and the way the team confined itself to “safe areas” only – that is, safe to the regime – guaranteed beforehand that such a method would categorically block access to these two indispensable sources. If so, in this case, being let into Eritrea doesn’t amount to getting access to the relevant sources of information vital to the study. It is in this way then that the “guarantee” mentioned above materializes on the ground.

Given the impossibly of direct access to indispensable sources of information in the land, the Danish team resorts to various deceptive means of “extracting information” in its effort to make up the difference at appearance level. In the absence of any facts to be extracted, its approach appears to be rigorous, ethical and exhaustive – a classical case of style over substance. Let me start with one such means: the use of anonymity in the study.

Façade of anonymity

If there are the three of you stranded in a deserted island, and one of the two comes to you and says, “Do you know that a certain individual has been badmouthing you today?” If you are on the slow side, you might ask, “Who?” This farce might go on a bit longer than necessary if he responds, “He wants to remain anonymous – I have promised him that much.” Given that there is only one “he” besides the two of you in the entire island, the anonymity remains to be entirely superfluous; for both of you already know who exactly that guy happens to be. The use of anonymity by the Danish fact-finding team has this farce written all over it. But the Danish delegates are no fools; they have perfectly rational ulterior motives for doing so.

The Danish delegation provides the following rationale for extending anonymity to all its interlocutors in Eritrea, “in order not to compromise their identity and to protect their countries’ or organizations’ continued cooperation with the Eritrean authorities,” a demand supposedly requested by the interlocutors. There is a way of rendering this false at a categorical level that would apply to all the interlocutors approached by the team in Eritrea: there is no doubt at all that the paranoid regime had minders following the Danish delegates wherever they went since the day they arrived in Asmara, simply because that has been the regime’s modus operandi in its dealings with any visiting foreigners, let alone fact-finding ones, in the land. If the regime already knows all the sources the delegation has been meeting with, wherein lies the rationale for extending anonymity to those very sources? But even if we discount the role of minders, there is too much information given out in the delegation’s report to fully or partially identify who these interlocutors in Asmara happen to be.

Let’s start with the anonymity given to a “well known Eritrean intellectual,” to see how this farce works at its best. First, let’s ask how many well known Eritrean intellectuals from Europe with dual nationality that came back to Eritrea in the late 1990s – all details provided by the Danish team – happen to still reside in Eritrea right now? If there is such a rare creature still roaming the streets of Asmara, most probably he is the only one. In that case, the regime could pin-pointedly tell who this fellow happens to be. Consequently, any political comment from such an individual would be impossible unless it adheres to the policy of the regime. If so, it must have been the case that this individual was made accessible to the team with the full knowledge, at minimum, or with the full approval, at maximum, of the regime. All of which makes the very attempt of making him anonymous by describing him as a “well-known intellectual” totally unnecessary. But this is not simply an exercise in futility on the side of the delegation. There is no doubt that the phrase, “well-known intellectual” was dishonestly coined by the Danish team to create three false impressions: first, that not only an intellectual, but also a well-known one, was involved in the study was meant to lend some kind of legitimacy to the study; second, that the interlocutor had to remain anonymous, suggesting that not doing so would leave him compromised, would further buttress the credibility of the study; and, third, that many well known intellectuals still live in Eritrea, numerous enough to provide anonymity to any one of them needing it, is meant to provide normality to an abnormal nation. Thus, the anonymity was superfluously grafted to an already-known interlocutor to the regime to provide a facade of objectivity and strict ethical adherence that the study has never had in the first place.

Now let’s see if there is any justification in extending anonymity to the foreign interlocutors residing in Asmara: embassies, international organizations, UN agency and regional NGO. Let me start with the last, since his case has a similar structure to the one mentioned above.

The Asmara regime is infamously known for expelling all NGOs from the land in 48 hours twice, simply because their tasks couldn’t be made to fit into its aspiration for total control over its population. Since then, any NGO that has been allowed to work in the land could only do so more or less as an extension of the regime’s apparatus. As a result, there are few of them in the land and, most probably, just one when it comes to the regional types. Furthermore, the idea of a regional NGO based in Asmara, that has to necessarily include Ethiopia if it is indeed authentically “regional”, adds to the riddle. That is, the mere impossibility of going “regional” for any NGO based in Asmara raises the suspicion of the very nature of such an organization. Under these conditions, first, the anonymity given to the regional NGO would be superfluous, since there are no other regional NGOs in the land; and, second, that the NGO at issue has gained its “regional” status through semantic fiat would make its anonymity doubly distanced from realty. In any case, this double ascription – false “regional” attribution and false anonymity – would assure that the regime would again be able to pin-pointedly identify who the interlocutor happens to be. Under these circumstances, it is clear that the interlocutor would never be able to provide evidence that would damage the image of the nation, because the moment he does that the NGO would be expelled from the land in 48 hours. And the statement he provides the team attests to that: he sounds like a rabid Shaebia cadre; he knows he is a privileged guest of the regime, and he is unabashedly returning the favor. And, again, this is not an exercise in futility on the Danish team’s side: by providing the regional NGO with a faked anonymity, it is trying to hide the blatant conflict of interest that would involve in interviewing such a notoriously unreliable person. 

So would it be with the UN agency, for I don’t believe there are any other UN agencies left in Eritrea except for that one. If so, how is it possible to provide anonymity to the only UN agency in the land by calling it “UN agency”? (And even if, playing the devil’s advocate, we want to safely assume that there could be a couple or so more, these would still be too few to provide the necessary full cover – more on that below.)

And so would be the case of the Western embassy based in Khartoum, but one that happened to be on a visit to Asmara during the delegation’s stay in Eritrea. Again, if he is a Western embassy visiting Asmara, how is it possible to provide him anonymity by describing him as “Western embassy, Khartoum (met in Asmara)”? There can’t be many Western embassies from Khartoum visiting Asmara at that time to provide anonymity to this particular Western embassy from Khartoum. Besides, here is what the report further says in regard to him, “He explained he had visited Asmara four times over the last year. A recent visit comprised a delegation from the embassy’s home country. The overall purpose of his visit was to gain a better understanding of the refugee situation … Discussions regarding this subject are ongoing.” Now after providing all this information about this individual, there couldn’t be any doubt that regime knows who exactly this diplomat happens to be. If so, again, wherein lies the need to provide him anonymity?

One major drawback in using anonymous sources is that, in most cases, the reader wouldn’t be able to tell if conflict of interest is involved in the verbal transaction. For instance, the kind of anonymity the Danish team extends to a government official doesn’t do much harm to the integrity of the study because people already know what to expect from a government official. That is, knowing the identity of that individual in particular would add nothing or little to that picture, since any other official could easily fill in that role. Not so in the four cases mentioned above. In a country where there are many well known intellectuals, it is possible to provide anonymity to any one of them using that description. In a country where there are many regional NGOs, it might make sense to anonymously call any one of them “regional NGO”. In a country where there are many UN agencies, it would make sense to provide anonymity to any one UN agency by calling it “UN agency.” And in a country where many Western embassies from a particular place are visiting the country, it would be possible to provide anonymity to any one of them using that description. But none of these conditions hold true in Eritrea; no such critical mass in the number of these organizations has ever been reached in the land. So it is clear what the delegation is doing here: first, the impression that it wants to leave on any reader who is not familiar with Eritrea (as it is with that Danish audience) is that of a nation with many well known intellectuals, numerous regional NGOs, a number of UN agencies and many visiting diplomats, in the process turning Eritrea into a normal nation; and, second, it wants to portray itself as a team going out of its way to be scrupulously ethical in protecting its interlocutors even where there is little danger. Notice, please, the double farce: that without normalizing Eritrea this way, it would be impossible to extend anonymity to any one of its interlocutors.

How about the rest of the foreign interlocutors? On first sight, it might seem that the embassies and international organizations, given the number of interlocutors involved in each group, might escape the scrutiny. To begin with, since the interlocutors are identified through their institutions only, it is not clear whether an institution is represented by more than one interlocutor. For instance, if the identifiers “International organization (A), (B) and (C)” denote to three interlocutors in one international organization rather than in three different ones, then the idea of providing them anonymity would be incomprehensible, given that any damaging evidence from anyone of them would be attributed to the organization itself. But even if we assume this is not so, there are too few organizations (and embassies) involved in each group to provide the necessary full anonymity; that is, they don’t have that critical mass in numbers to provide full cover to any one of them. First, as pointed before, the role of the regime’s minders would be indispensable in following the Danish team as its delegates make their way from one embassy (or international organization) building to another. In this, the regime is helped with the knowledge that the embassies and international organizations visited happen to be few: five in the former, and three in the latter. If so, the regime might not know which one of the statements comes from which embassy among the five or from which international organization among the three, but it would definitely know which statements together (as a bundle) belong to which group in the study. In that case, those few involved in each group would fall under suspicion in the eyes of the regime if any one of the statements from that group turns out to be damaging. And if the statements are of similar type within a group in the extent of their damage, then for the regime it would matter little which one was given by whom. Under these circumstances, the traction that the team supposedly wants to gain from anonymity is not that much even where a plurality of the same type of interlocutors is involved, simply because the numbers involved in each group are too few to provide the necessary cover. In the parlance of insurance companies, this would be considered a partial coverage; and for that, one that leaves the individual vulnerable in major ways. If so, the realization of this kind of vulnerability by the interlocutors would strongly inhibit their input in the report.

Above, we have seen how the perception of anonymity has been unethically exploited by the Danish team to create the false impression of objectivity and fairness in its study. That alone ought to disqualify it. But there is a lot more, both in the methodology and content of the report that further throws doubt on its claimed objectivity. Let’s now focus on one major question in regard to the team’s methodology: why it decided to entirely bypass the local population and, instead, to depend on foreigners in Asmara, as its main source of information in Eritrea.

Foreigners as the main source

What is particularly odd about the DIS delegation’s study in Eritrea is that it entirely bypasses the local population as a source of relevant information, and instead focuses mainly on anonymous foreigners: five embassies, three international organizations, one UN agency and one regional NGO. The only two Eritreans included are a government official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a “well known intellectual” from Europe now residing in the country. While nobody in his right mind would expect any damaging evidence to surface from a statement of an official representing the regime, the latter inclusion too is dubious on no less compromising grounds – as we have noted above. Thus, if we exclude these two “local” sources as unreliable, we are left with a source pool entirely made up of foreigners in position in institutions with vested interests – to remain in good terms with the authorities. What makes it ironic is how the team describes them, “The delegation considers that to the best of its knowledge, the consulted interlocutors represent a broad spectrum of competent sources of knowledge on the relevant issues in Eritrea” (emphasis mine) Leaving aside the mockery of making these like-minded foreigners representatives of “a broad spectrum”, there is this question of the necessity to travel all the way to Asmara to interview them that further throws doubt to the integrity of the study.

If the entire fact-finding mission was undertaken behind embassy (and other foreign institutions: International Organization, UN and NGO) walls, wherefrom comes the need for the team to travel all the way to Eritrea? After all, all the interviews could have been conducted from Denmark though telephone or email without missing anything. The fact that this “traveling” has been superfluous to the fact-finding mission shows that the “direct access” the Danish delegation claims as its main advantage over other studies is in fact illusory. That is, given that the report is compiled from second-hand information the delegates have gathered from their interlocutors, it wouldn’t have made an iota of difference had the interviewing been done from Copenhagen rather than from Asmara. In fact, even this characterization of the gathered information as second-hand is an understatement, for all the foreigners interviewed seem to further depend on other sources for the information they provide the team; supposedly what the locals have told them on one occasion or another. If so, what passes for first-hand information by the team in the end turns out to be third-hand information.

Here, the fact-finding team might protest that, in addition to all those contacts with their interlocutors, they have also observed the humanitarian conditions on the ground with their own eyes. To repeat what they have written in regard to this: “Therefore, the need for more updated and first-hand description on the conditions on the ground in Eritrea arose.” In other words, they would be saying that their travel to Eritrea was not in vain because they had first-hand access to relevant places important to their investigation. But, again, this too happens to be another bogus claim because they have failed to make the slightest bit of attempt in that direction.

Visiting “safe” places only

Let’s now look at the Danish delegates’ first-hand observations – that is, aside from the second-hand and third-hand information they have gathered from their interlocutors – of the humanitarian situation on the ground in Eritrea. First, these observations, besides being paltry, are of the most trivial type confined to surface appearances only: They claim that they have had no problem accessing BBC and CNN from the comfort of their hotels, ignoring the glaring fact that all local private media have been banned for years now, with Eritrea having the dubious distinction of having the largest number of journalists in prison. They claim that there is enough food and goods in stores and markets, without ever asking whether all that is “accessible” to the majority of the population.⁴ Had they done that, they would have found out that those families that have no one member in Diaspora, which make up the majority of the population, live in grinding poverty. In fact, it would have been easy for the delegates to find out the average salary in Asmara, and see if it even comes close to cover the usual expenses at a subsistence level: rent and food. They say that Asmara has no slums, without visiting the poorest areas of the city – the slums of Gheza-Berhanu, Hadish Adi, Aba-Shaul, etc. They claim that the city is safe, without putting into consideration that the city has been rendered hazardous to the youth for more than 15 years (the main reason for the mass exodus); that is, ignoring the fact that the main threat to safety in Asmara comes from the regime itself. They say they saw people frequenting cafes and restaurants, without any attempt to find out who those privileged ones are⁵ – diaspora visitors, army authorities, human traffickers and, to a lesser extent, those who receive remittance. Had they tried a little bit harder, they would have found out that the nouveau riche in Asmara are referred by the locals as “enda-qulit” – “house of liver” – referring to the most horrific part of human trafficking, the selling of human organs. They accept the claim that the University of Asmara is partially opened without making the slightest bit of effort to verify that by visiting the campus. They also audaciously applaud that, despite the 25 kms radius limit for foreigners imposed by the regime, they have had no problem traveling 100 kms away from Asmara, entirely missing the irony of it: that they have been treated by the regime as collaborators rather than as fact-finders. Notice that even in all these areas primarily selected for their safety to the regime, the delegates do not show the slightest bit of intention of going beyond their voyeuristic observations. Imagine then what their stance would be in regard to those “unsafe areas” – unsafe to the regime, of course.

Well, the answer is clear: they have made sure that they never set foot on those sensitive places that would have been indispensable to their study, yet very damaging to the regime’s image. For instance, they let one of their interlocutors (the notorious regional NGO) rationalize away the religious persecution in the country in the most disgraceful way imaginable; yet, they never make an attempt to visit any of the worshipping places ( Evangelical, Jehovah Witnesses, Baha’i, etc) scattered all over Asmara that have been officially closed by the authorities. There couldn’t have been a much easier access than this; all it would have taken is for a passerby to point out the buildings for them. And, above all, for all their focus on the National Service, the fact-finders never make any attempt to visit Sawa, the boot camps, the training camps, the military camps, the detention camps, the prisons, the development projects, etc. Let me focus on Sawa to point out the extent of cynicism involved in this study.

Since Sawa is the starting point of all the totalitarian experiments that the youth had to go through in the National Service, one would think that a fact-finding mission on the nature of National Service would have made it focal to its study. The few descriptions that the report mentions are, of course, attempts to render it normal: that it hardly differs from any other high school campus. But there is one critical difference at a categorical level that would make any attempt to give the Sawa project benefit of the doubt, one that says that prior to finding out what goes on inside the camp judgment should be suspended, as suspect: the fact that the entire high school population of Eritrea (every year, tens of thousands of them) have to finish their last year of high school education in one single campus in a remote area. It is not that the DIS delegates fail to see this, but that they conveniently ignore the sheer totalitarian abnormality of this undertaking.

Let’s ask the Danish delegates this question: what would they say if it was somehow decided by the Danish authorities that the entire high school students in Denmark (a nation that has small population like Eritrea) should finish the last year of their schooling in a single camp located in a secluded remote area? I am sure each one of them would justifiably dismiss this as something that will never be entertained, let alone enacted on the ground, in a democratic state like Denmark. But this would still be an understatement; for, in fact, this hasn’t taken place anywhere in the world, even among authoritarian states. First of all, it would require a totalitarian mind to think in this kind of totality. But then again, not all totalitarian nations would undertake this, for it would require an additional component to it: monumental stupidity. When totalitarianism is infused with immense stupidity, the result ha always been humanitarian disasters of epic proportion. And in the Eritrean case, the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of youth which has been the cause for the nation’s economic, military and demographic meltdowns has its beginning at Sawa – a monumentally foolish undertaking. Yet, the sheer abnormality of this fact seems to have escaped the delegation. Instead, they focus on little details within the camp that would give it a façade of normality. This would be like visiting a concentration camp, and reporting on how clean the bed sheets are or on how disciplined the inmates are.

From the above, we can see that the entire observation of the DIS delegation doesn’t attempt to dig even an inch below the surface-level appearance allowed by the regime. There is a reason why the regime is adamant in not allowing the UN special rapporteur to the land: precisely because it knows that the UN team would be coming with the intention to dig deeper than what the government would ever allow. For instance, it knows that such a team would come with a long list in its hands: what and whom to look for and where to look at. To the contrary, the DIS team conveniently deprives itself of all the relevant material sources, fully realizing that doing so would be advantageous to the regime’s image and, consequently, to its mission – talk about stakeholders!

Bypassing the human source: the locals

We have seen how the Danish delegation barely utilizes the material sources of information in the land. What is more astounding is that it never attempts to contact the locals: not even a single local was approached by the team’s free initiative. And this is despite the claim by the team that its fact-finders have been everywhere. They have been to stores or markets, but neither the buyers nor the sellers are ever consulted; they have walked the streets of Asmara, but not a single pedestrian is approached by them; they have taken buses outside of the city, but there is no interchange between them and the passengers, be they peasants or urbanites; they talk about the quality of education, but neither the students’ nor the teachers’ opinions are asked on this matter; they visit full cafes and restaurants, yet the last thing they attempt is talk to the clients or owners; the subject of National Service dominates their report, yet there is no effort to contact the youth who are mostly affected by it or their parents;⁶ they doubt the prevalence of round-ups in Eritrea, especially in Asmara, yet they avoid the main source: the people of Asmara themselves, who would have had first hand experiences if it has taken place in the recent past in their city; etc. I honestly believe that there has been better contact between Westerners and Ebola victims in West Africa than between the Danish team and the man on the street in Eritrea. And if they have ever had any of the above contacts, none of that information has made its way to their report. True to their voyeuristic undertaking, the natives are to be watched from a safe distance only. What explains this total self-imposed segregation?

There are two ways this could be explained, neither of which paints a flattering image of the DIS delegation. Under charitable interpretation, the delegation had originally intended to include the locals as its main source of information in its study, but on its arrival in Eritrea it belatedly found out that this would be impossible; to its consternation, of course. So, denied access to both human and material sources of the land vital to their study, the fact-finders retreated behind embassy walls to make the most out of an impossible situation. But this is implausible because, had it been so, they would have either called the entire project off or, at minimum, admitted that their study had been debilitated in such a major way. Given that, in their report, they still tout direct access to Eritrea as their main advantage to other studies, I seriously doubt that this is the case.

A more plausible explanation would be that the Danish team knew all along, way before their visit to Eritrea, that it would be impossible to get access to any human or material sources on the ground that would go contrary to the Asmara regime’s interest, and yet still decided to go ahead with their “fact-finding mission”. There is a cynical answer as to why: they didn’t mind it at all because the regime’s concern happened to converge with their main goal. The fear was that if the public were allowed to freely talk to them and if they were given access to all those verboten areas, the team would be provided with all kinds of information that would go contrary to its main objective. So, for the fact-finders, it was a huge relief to know beforehand that they would get no access to the public and sensitive areas at a technical level, that is, at no fault of theirs: simply because the regime wouldn’t allow it – how convenient!

Here, a point of clarification is needed: if accessing the public and sensitive areas as sources of vital information was impossible in the first place, it would be absurd to demand of the team that it should have included them in their study. Rather, the question is hypothetical. If so, the real question ought to be: why did the team go ahead with the study, fully realizing that the main sources of information – both human and material – would be denied to it? To get to the bottom of this, we need to ask a counterfactual question: had the delegates ignored the regime’s restrictions and went ahead asking questions left and right wherever they went, what would have happened?

The fear factor

One of the embassy sources happens to claim, with a straight face, that “there is no climate of fear to detect in the population”. Instead of taking this sweeping assertion at face value, there is a simple test that the Danish team could have conducted to find out the veracity of the statement: go out in the streets and randomly ask passersby the various questions they have been asking the Westerners in the safety of their offices. Had they done that, knowing that minders always follow any inquiring foreigners, none of the locals would have been willing to talk to them freely. But, above all, the team would have detected fear in their eyes and body language. In fact, one of interlocutors does point out that nobody dares complain to the officials about the frequent electric blackouts and water shortages. It goes without saying then that if people dare not complain on such mundane apolitical grievances, they would not dare utter anything in regard to political or humanitarian conditions in the land. All of which tells us that the Danish delegates never attempted to venture outside in their inquiry because, besides the immediate consequence that would have followed such an unauthorized inquiry (possibly getting expelled in 48 hours), they were already in full cognizance of the fear factor.

The surest sign that one is visiting a totalitarian state is the ever-present fear among the masses, one that never leaves the scene, no matter what the subject matter happens to be. And since for the Danish team, the image of a normal nation where such climate of fear is absent was very important, it would have been outright foolish had its fact-finders gone outside in the streets to elicit the kind of reaction that would be devastating to the preferred outcome of their study. If so, there is no greater testimony than the team’s methodology itself – that is, the fact that it completely retreated behind embassy walls to conduct its fact-finding mission – to the ever-present totalitarian terror under which the population lives.

To sum up, it is important to note how the Danish team has effectively exploited the ambiguity embedded in the term “access” to draw an unwarranted conclusion. The critical point is that having “access” to the Eritrean landmass doesn’t necessarily amount to having access to the relevant sources of information on the ground, especially when the fact-finders happily collaborate not to venture where the evidence happens to be. Conversely, one can argue that, given the totalitarian grip over the population in the land, one can have a better access to these sources in the refugee camps outside the country, where the locals could talk freely; which the team never made an attempt to do while it was in Ethiopia. Had it done so, it would have met the most recent arrivals – some as recent as a day ago – thereby meeting another of its self-imposed conditions: that its study should be the most updated. In fact, let alone from the refugee camps, one can have a better access to the Asmara sources from as far outside as Copenhagen. It is to be remembered that one of the factors compromising the content of the interlocutors has been that, through its minders, the regime would know which interlocutors have been visited by the team. Communicating from a distance though – say, through telephone or internet – would have wiped out the trails that the minders would have followed in the land and thereby emboldened the interlocutors to be more objective. If so, contrary to the team’s claim, at this point in time, Eritrea happens to be better accessed from outside than from inside. And yet, the semantic obfuscation doesn’t end in the methodology only, but also in the main content of the report, where the delegation exploits the ambiguity of yet another term to reach an equally unwarranted conclusion: “return”.

 No reprisals to those who “return”?

 Let me again draw attention to the DIS delegation’s two-pronged objective that can be captured by what are negatively presupposed in this paragraph from its report:

“The majority of Eritreans seeking asylum in Denmark state as reasons for leaving Eritrea the National Service, the condition and duration thereof, and the fact that they have left Eritrea illegally. Therefore they fear reprisals from the Eritrean government upon return to Eritrea.”

First, central to the team’s task of drawing the image of normal Eritrea is the image of normal National Service, where conditions are not that bad, the duration of service is short and, above all, the intention is rather noble: building the nation. After painting a much sanitized picture of the National Service than the realty on the ground would allow, the delegates then strive to include hard evidence before they draw the conclusion that it would be OK for refugees that left the nation illegally to return: that, in fact, those who had illegally left the country (army deserters and conscription evaders) and later returned back to Eritrea have been met with no reprisals. There is a reason why the team goes out of its way to normalize the National Service first: because, it wants to eliminate the forced return to National Service, the very hell-hole from which the refugees had escaped in the first place, as a form of “reprisal”. Once it has done that, the only reprisal that returnees would have to fear would be long prison terms. After having cut the problem to its liking, the Danish team goes ahead to shamelessly exploit a semantic ambiguity of one term – “return” – to hit its main objective.

Although Professor Gaim Kibreab’s description of National Service is more correct than most sources in the report, he occasionally goes out of his way to protect the image of the system in Asmara, a habit that he carries from his past writings. In the process of doing so, instead of disambiguating the term “return” for what it actually is, he provides the DIS delegation the semantic cover it needs to undertake its study with all the ambiguity that the word carries: “In the past two to three years the government attitude towards National Service seems to be more relaxed. It is now possible for National Service evaders and deserters who have left Eritrea illegally to return to their country. They must go to an Eritrean embassy and sign a repentance letter in which they accept any penalty of the offense committed. In addition they must pay the two percent Diaspora tax. Finally, they are obliged to participate in public festivals in Eritrea. …”

No wonder the Danish team happily quotes this paragraph a number of times, over and over, in its report. In the above quote, a more appropriate word should have been “visit” or “travel” instead of “return”, for it refers to those who briefly visit the country and then go back to their adopted countries. Exploiting the ambiguity of the term, the team wants the term to carry a heavier burden than it should by framing its argument this way: “Since there is no harm done to the refugees who have already returned to Eritrea, there won’t be any harm if the refugees in Denmark were to be returned to their land permanently” But this is deceptive since the two senses of the word “return” as used in this statement have no equivalence. A more appropriate framing of the team’s argument should have been, “Since there is no harm done to the refugees who have already visited (or, traveled to) Eritrea, there won’t be any harm if the refugees in Denmark were to be returned to their land permanently.” But this latter claim turns out to be outright incoherent, for if the refugees were to be returned in large numbers for good to Eritrea by force, then the regime would have tightened its totalitarian grip over them, knowing that they have nowhere to go. That is what has happened to the few that has been deported back so far (from Malta, Libya and Sudan): after doing some time in detention, they were recycled back to the indefinite National Service. That is, for the regime, it matters little whether the escapees are captured within or outside Eritrea. But if the visiting refugees, now traveling to Eritrea as Diaspora tourists, were to be met with this kind of harsh treatment, it would have been total foolishness. One has to look at the regime’s “vulgar pragmatism” to see how this works.

Vulgar pragmatism

Shaebia/PFDJ (that is, the ruling party) is very much known for its vulgar pragmatism, but pragmatism nevertheless. It is vulgar because whatever it does is guided by no higher economic, social, cultural, ethical, political or ideological principle; this “pragmatism” is nihilistic to the core. The single objective of this pragmatism always remains the same: self-preservation of the organization above everything else. The means of achieving this objective is: whatever it takes!  The only inhibiting question that it asks in pursuing this objective is: can I get away with it? In the process of doing so, nothing else, except stretching its political lifespan beyond necessity, matters to the regime – not even the nation’s very existence.⁷

In the above quoted paragraph, by stating, “In the past two to three years the government attitude towards National Service seems to be more relaxed”, Gaim Kibreab makes it seem as if there is a change of heart in the way the regime does its business in regard to National Service; thereby providing support to the Danish team’s claim that its study is more factual because it is the most recent of its kind – that is, recent enough to capture this alleged relaxation or reform. But this appearance of change doesn’t require change of heart (or reform), but keeping up with the changing context as dictated by its vulgar pragmatism.

The regime’s treatment of the National Service escapees (this category includes all potential escapees too) has always been characterized by a stark dichotomy: so far as the conscripts are under the regime’s control within the boundaries of Eritrea, their condition is characterized by extremely harsh treatment; but the moment it believes they are out of its reach for good in foreign land, it adapts a less coercive means to achieve its end. What remains constant in both instances though is the question that the regime keeps asking: how can I make the most out of the situation; that is, financially and politically? In the first case, indefinite National Service is meant to deliver all sorts of financial and political dividends to the regime: endless military service, inexhaustible free labor and, above all, total control over the youth. But once the youth are out of its reach in safe havens across the ocean, it uses its blackmailing strategy to get the most out of the radically altered external situation. On the financial side, first, the blackmailed (with the issuance of passports, of course) will have to pay the mandatory 2% Diaspora tax and various other donations on regular basis. Second, at a time the number of older Diaspora visitors is dwindling, the tourist money that these new Diaspora visitors bring in their visits is much coveted. And third, it also gets revenues from various “services” that it renders to them: remittance transaction, business, housing, marriage, etc; and, for many, the possibility of eventual return upon retirement. In fact, the financial part of this deal makes up the greater part of the regime’s hard-currency policy; again, as dictated by its vulgar pragmatism. And on the political side, it expects no involvement with the opposition, at minimum, and active support of its policies, at maximum, from the visiting refugees.

An example of how the blackmailing strategy works effectively in the provision of services can be readily grasped by looking at the marriage variable. One striking demographic characteristic of the new waves of refugees landing on the shores of Europe is that they are overwhelmingly male, in their 20’s and 30’s, and to some extent, in their 40’s. Most of them have been forced to extended bachelorhood because of too many wasted years in the National Service, refugee camps and transit nations, and many others have left their wives and children behind. Once they are settled in the host countries, most want to get married (or reunited, for those with families) as soon as possible. Given the disproportionately few Eritrean women available in Diaspora, the only place the bachelors (the overwhelming majority) could get brides is from Eritrea. And the government is well aware of this, and is poised to milk the situation for all it’s worth.

Now, let’s return to the original question: why are there no reprisals to visiting refugees by the government? Simply because the moment the regime starts doing that, nobody among the hundreds of thousands of the new refugees would ever show up in Eritrea; they will simply stop visiting, and with that all the financial and political dividends would be lost. But if the host countries would start en mass deporting the refugees, there would be no incentive for the regime to treat the returning ones the way it is doing now with the visiting ones, for they would automatically lose the political and financial clout they have had in supporting the regime from outside. The regime would automatically resort back to its old totalitarian self in treating them; in fact, knowing that the youth have nowhere to go, it would be much more harsh with them than it used to be before.

It is important to reiterate the point that in both the internal and external contexts, the regime’s goals remain consistent: political and financial gains. The National Service serves two main purposes: as a mechanism to control the youth (political) and as a means of inexhaustible free slave labor (financial). And when the youth are outside of its reach, the government seeks the same goals, albeit modified to fit the radically altered external context. Those who get passports from the regime to visit the homeland would be obliged to support the regime financially and politically from outside. If one fails to see the consistency within which these two different approaches work, driven as they are by the same “principle” of vulgar pragmatism, one ends up accounting that difference as change of heart or reform, as both Gaim Kibreab and the Danish team tend to do.

To sum up, we have been looking at the team’s abuse of another term – “return” – to draw an unwarranted conclusion. The semantic ambiguity in this term was so obvious that it could not be attempted without insulting the intelligence of the readers. Yet, there doesn’t seem to be an end to this semantic obfuscation, for the delegates again use another term – “regularize” – without realizing that they couldn’t do that without simultaneously pointing the accusing finger at themselves.

“Regularizing” relationships with the regime

There is one particular term that the Danish fact-finding team uses to describe the warming of relations between the government and the visiting refuges who have illegally left the country: “regularize”. What is ironic is that the team doesn’t realize that it had to necessarily regularize its relationship with the regime to achieve its equally dubious goal.

We meet these regularizing acts at methodology and content levels. Above, we have seen how the team uses biased selection of interlocutors and false ascription of anonymity to prejudice the outcome of the study.  But that is not where it stops; for the statements of the interlocutors are further manipulated to provide a more normal Eritrea than their collective contents would warrant. If one who has read the appendix comes out with the impression of a harsher world than what is depicted by the report, which is supposedly derived from the appendix, then it is clear that the entire report is compiled through a selective bias: omitting what is not wanted, juxtaposing blatant contradictions, hedging damning evidence with negating ones, reiterating the ones they like most, etc. Below, I will mention a few of the contradictions to make my point.

If there are blatant contradictions in statements among the interlocutors that the Danish team has interviewed – that is, contradictions which could have been easily resolved by asking further questions or involving more interlocutors – the team is more likely to leave the contradictions as they are if it believes that doing so would serve its interest. Let me mention four examples that have to do with the National Service since that happens to be its main focus of study: salary, training, round-ups and penalty.

By asking a larger pool of people, it could be easily established how much those who serve in the National Service get paid; that is, there are too many former conscripts that have gone through this experience out there – tens of thousands of them – to get this wrong. Although around 500 Nakfa is the usual monthly salary mentioned (and there are three such amounts mentioned in the report: 450.00, 500.00, and 600.00 Nakfa), the team goes out of its way to add this, “After 18 months, it could increase to a maximum of 1,500.00 Nakfa.” – a statement it attributes to several of its interlocutors. With this unwarranted addendum, the team is trying to give the impression that with the length of service, the salary of the conscripts improves, which is a total lie; such an amount is what teachers get for their monthly salary. Besides, it couldn’t be an oversight on its side that it fails to provide the reader the real value of Nakfa, because that too would work against its mission of regularizing the irregular. What is irregular in this is when one realizes that all that the 500.00 Nakfa per month salary amounts to is a meager US $8.00. Imagine then someone who has gone through 10 years of National Service – and tens of thousands have served more years than that – for the total sum of US $960.00! Ten years of labor under harsh conditions for US $960.00 – if that isn’t slavery, nothing is.

But if we are to go by the delegation’s calculation, we would get a totally different picture. First, as pointed above, the real salary is multiplied by three to get us 1,500.00 Nakfa. Then, it uses the official exchange rate of 15.00 Nakfa to US $1.00 (as added in the report’s footnote) to get us US $100.00 per month, which by Eritrean standards is quite good salary. But the reality is that no Eritrean in his right mind would ever use the official exchange system, for the going rate in the black market is more than four times that (more than 60.00 Nakfa for US $1.00). Even the government uses the unofficial rate when it illicitly channels remittance money from its Diaspora clients to Eritrea, or else not even its diehard supporters would use its channels. Now look at the stark difference between the two pictures: the realty on the ground is that those in the National Service get US $ 8.00 per month, but what the DIS team is doing, with its double manipulation of numbers, is to leave the impression that they get US $100.00 per month. The delegates could have easily found out how the exchange system in Eritrea works by asking remitters throughout diaspora; yet, they prefer to go strictly “official” where doing otherwise would draw a bleak picture of a world they want rather sanitized to a point of normalcy.

The second contradiction has to do with the training given at Sawa. Although other interlocutors in the report have made it clear that the students undergo military training at Sawa, the team couldn’t resist adding this from its most notorious informant, “Sawa is not a military camp but is basically two years of high school. There are academic classes, some physical training, marching but no weapons training as such” Now, notice the subtle change in the vocabulary: if Sawa is to be seen as a regular school campus, then “military training” has to be changed to “physical training” and arms are made to disappear from the campus. If this is true, how is it possible for hundreds of thousands that have gone through Sawa to immediately join the army after they are done with their “physical training” without training in arms? These contradictory evidences provided by the interlocutors, again, could have been easily sorted out by asking further questions. Instead, the team conveniently leaves the contradiction to stand as is.

A third similar contradiction has to do with the round-ups of evaders and deserters. The team tries to establish two things: that roundups are things of the distant past and that, if they ever existed, it must have been in rural areas. The aim is to sow doubt in the mind of the reader as to the prevalence, scope and frequency of round-ups. For instance, even though one interlocutor clearly states that it has been months since he has heard about round-ups (which means it did take place before that), the team couldn’t help but add this from its notorious informant, “However, during the last five to six years there has been a relaxation in recruitment procedures and one does not see soldiers undertaking round-ups of people into national service any longer.” Now, the gap between these two testimonies is so huge that it would have been easy to find out which one is false by asking other people. The people of Asmara have undergone waves of round-ups that they could tell with pinpoint accuracy as to where and when these roundups have taken place. Yet again, the team chooses to leave this contradictory information as is, leaving the impression that things might not be as bad as the governments detractors claim it to be in regard to round-ups.

Another obvious contradiction has to do with the kind of treatment evaders and deserters get when they are caught. Many of those asked provide various lengths of detention or penalty – from severe to benign – but none of them has ever insinuated that the very act of desertion or evasion itself exempts one from further serving in the army. The notorious interlocutor though begs to differ, “Those who desert or evade National Service and are caught on their way out of the country are brought to detention camps where they will stay for three to six months. They will then be released unconditionally. They are not returned to National Service as they are regarded as ‘rotten apples’ by authorities. The authorities want to keep the deserters from exercising a bad influence on others.” Anyone familiar with the system would laugh at the naivety of this suggestion. Let me provide though a more logical response as to why: if all that is required is a mere few months of detention to exempt oneself from years and years of National Service, the whole army would melt away within a day. In fact, the reason why the regime is no more holding the thousands of captured deserters and evaders for years in prison is that, true to its vulgar pragmatism, it cannot afford it anymore. Because of the mass exodus, the army has been thoroughly hollowed out, and direly needs the rounded-up and captured to be reinstated into the rank and file as soon as possible. That is, the regime has to necessarily recycle the detainees if the army is to survive, a phenomenon that I once called “human recycling”⁸. Simply put, without round-ups, and the human recycling that it entails, the army would simply collapse. Yet again, the delegates never attempt to find out what motivates the regime’s change in its round-up policy towards deserters and evaders; they would rather leave it as “reform”.

Now, it is important to remember that in each and every case mentioned above, these easily resolvable contradictions were left to stand in their opposites in order to paint a much sanitized picture of National Service. The DIS fact-finders seem to forget that they arrived in Eritrea not on opinion-finding but on fact-finding mission. That is why it is important that whenever they are faced with blatantly contradictory testimonies, they ought to have made extra effort to find out which one is closer to the truth. Instead, we have seen above how they leave two blatantly contradictory evidences side by side as if they are two different opinions or interpretations of the same fact. If they are met with false information that keeps sticking out, it ought to have never found its way to the report. Similarly, blatant lies that consistently come from a single source ought to have been enough of a ground to disqualify the entire testimony of that interlocutor – and the regional NGO would be a good candidate for such disqualification.

Already, I have quoted the notoriously unreliable regional NGO three times above, in his claims that round-ups existed only five to six years ago, that there are no training in arms in Sawa and that deserters and evaders are unconditionally released after few months in detention. Now, let’s look at how he normalizes the religious persecution in Eritrea without being met with any challenge to see the promiscuous benefit of doubt allowed to him by the Danish team. This would be especially revealing because if there is anything that is well documented in regard to the humanitarian plight in Eritrea, it is the religious persecution; something the Danish team would find it hard to deny.

The government has officially banned Evangelical groups and Jehovah Witnesses, closed all their worship places and imprisoned many of their followers; thoroughly infiltrated the Tewahdo Church, with its Patriarch still in detention; and totally silenced the Muslim religious authorities, with many conservative followers still in prison with their fates unknown. Now, given the huge amount of evidence compiled by humanitarian and other groups in regard to religious persecution in Eritrea, one would think that anyone who blatantly contradicts or explains away this fact would be met with challenge. None of that takes place when the notoriously unreliable regional NGO denies whatever can be denied and explains away whatever he cannot deny. Below, I am interested in the latter, for that is where we catch him at his lying best.

Here is how he rationalizes the government’s policy against minority Churches, “As a result of the Islamic Jihadist, the Eritrean government is deeply concerned about all the extremist/political and therefore decided to illegalize the group. Jehovah Witnesses, the Baha’i and Muslim Wahabis are illegal in Eritrea.” Now, how is it possible to make such a connection between Islamic extremists and the minority Churches without falling into incoherence? To further buttress the inclusion of the latter, he adds, “The Government is very sensitive about the issue that could create division between the populations. Groups who are considered to create division are labeled ‘fringe groups’. The fringe groups are mostly found in Asmara.” Again, nothing is offered as a form of explanation how these minority Churches could cause division among the population, for nothing like that has ever happened in the past to warrant this kind of radical response. And, by the way, there is no mention of Evangelical groups in his statement, even though the Evangelical followers happen to make the overwhelming majority of the religious persecuted. Could it be that he sensed that the Danish delegates would find that objectionable? Besides, I am sure that the Danes have their own share of Jehovah Witnesses; if so, have they ever found them as divisive or as a threatening fringe group, so much so that it requires the entire obliteration of their religion from the land?

Had the Danish team done its study intelligently and honestly, it would have been easy to find out why the regime is against these “new religions”, especially the Evangelical Churches: they happen to attract the young generation in huge numbers. For a totalitarian regime that wants to mold the youth in its own image by totally owning their bodies and minds – the task assigned to the National Service – this is an absolute no-no. It set out to totally obliterate these minority religions from the land because it believes they have become its main competitors for the loyalty of the young generation, the very youth that are finding their way to far-flung places like Denmark in Northern Europe. And yet, the team leaves the incoherent arguments of this interlocutor without being challenged. Again, the impression the delegation wants to leave on the reader is that even in its religious persecution, the government has legitimate fears.

The following quote from the regional NGO probably best captures his and the team’s tendency to make Eritrea appear though somewhat dysfunctional but still a normal nation, “All countries in the Horn region are dysfunctional in varying degrees and all have human rights and other issues, so Eritrea is not the only country in which human rights violation are particular serious or common.” Notice how this “lumping together” is used twice to normalize Eritrea. Above, the regional NGO deliberately lumps the minority Churches with Muslim extremists together to provide a rationale to the regime’s religion policy. And here, he lumps the neighborhood nations and Eritrea together to normalize its totalitarian aspect. And yet again, the Danish team refuses to see the distinction.

We have seen above how the DIS delegation has bypassed the entire local population as a source of information in its fact-finding mission. How about Eritreans from outside? One would think that, given the inaccessibility of the locals in Eritrea, the team would try to make up for this deficiency by involving Eritreans from outside; preferably, among the most recent escapees. None of that happens. Instead, it adds only one Eritrean source from the opposition camp to create an appearance of impartiality in its study; and, for that, one who has been residing in Europe for long: Professor Gaim Kibreab. But even within the confines of the opposition group, the selection is not as objective as it seems. 

Oposition source from London

Gaim Kibreab has already written a disclaimer, dissociating himself from the report. This fact alone would make it look that whatever we say against` the Danish team, it couldn’t be that it chose the professor with ulterior motives in its mind. But looks are deceiving, for it seems to me that Gaim Kibreab is protesting too much, given that the team’s credible response to his protestations still remain unanswered. Anyways, since he happens to be not only the team’s only but also major source from the opposition camp, and given that the team happens to mention or cite him the most (more than 20 times) in the report, it would be worthwhile to put his claimed innocence to scrutiny. Let me start with the general feel of his writings, one that I believe attracted the Danish team to focus on him and him only as their main source from the opposition camp in the first place.

After reading Gaim Kibreab’s articles or books, one usually comes out with the feeling that even though there are some serious problems in the country, overall it is not that bad in Eritrea: that the Eritrean government is not the evil regime that the opponents make it look; that Isaias Afwerki is not the devil the opposition paints him to be; that the PFDJ is not the totalitarian organization its detractors want to make it seem; that the National Service is not the kind of hell that the escapees vividly describe; etc. The Danish team has already sensed this normalizing (or rather, regularizing) tendency in his writings when they decided to include him as their only and major source from the opposition. So the delegates’ fault is not that they have misread him, as he is claiming now, but that they sized him up correctly long before they approached him, for their aim was not objectivity but confirmation to what they wanted to conclude.

Gaim Kibreab’s normalizing tendency is prevalent in almost all his writings; so much so that, at times, you don’t even have to read the articles to get the normalizing spirit of their content; all that you need is to take a glimpse at the title to see where in his normalizing task he is heading to. On April 13, 2011, I wrote an article titled The Elite: Normalizing the Abnormal State of Eritrea, with Gaim Kibreab, among other elites, in mind. Below is a quote from that article pertaining to him:⁹

Begin of quote:

“The Eritrean National Service: A Missed Opportunity”

Gaim Kibreab, in an article titled, The Eritrean National Service: A Missed Opportunity, extensively writes about all kinds consequences that this ill-conceived policy has brought to the nation. But to me, whatever horrors the writer recounts about the National Service under this title – and he does a lot of that – has already been neutralized by its title. Let me start with an example: Imagine someone saying the following about an axe-murderer, “What a missed opportunity! He could have used his axe to build cottages for the poor.” Why does this statement strike us as absurd? The alternative scenario is so farfetched that no one should ever contemplate it, not even the mother of the axe-murderer. There is such a huge, unbridgeable gap between the reality and the conceived alternative that it should have never been entertained in the first place. But if someone does so, it is only by attributing to the axe-murderer humanizing aspects that he doesn’t possess, something that could only be done if the person who uttered that statement has not entirely given up on the murderer; only if he believes his actions are still redeemable. And this is not the kind of redemptive value that a priest or psychiatrist ascribes to a criminal under his custody. This is the kind of trust that one gives to an ax-murderer while he is still at it – while he is still at large.

National Service is the axe that the Isaias regime has been wielding to cause all the havoc in the nation for more than a decade. It has been the cause for almost all the ills that afflict the nation: the draining of the nation’s most productive labor force … ; the slaving of hundreds of thousands in make-shift labor camps; the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands more; the proliferation of hundreds of prisons, most of the inmates being from the national service itself (deserters, draft dodgers, dissenters, etc.); the rampant sexual abuse of women, with HIV, illegitimate pregnancies and mental traumas as its legacy; the main incentive for Isaias’ misadventures in the neighborhood, including the border war; the incarceration of the parents of deserters and draft dodgers; the expropriation of land, given the free slave labor afforded by the national service; a total waste of life for most – no education, no jobs, no raising family, etc; the draining of the economy, given what it takes to arm them, feed them, house them, clothe them, look after their health, etc … And to make it more poignant in the present context: it is the reason that Eritreans are held hostage in Sinai …, and refugees are dying in their hundreds in the Mediterranean Sea. I could go on and on. If there is one single policy that has snuffed out normality from the daily lives of Eritreans from all walks of life and single-handedly created the abnormal world in which the people find themselves in, then it would be the National Service.

Given the above, if someone sees this totalitarian experimentation as a missed opportunity, it is only by giving it redeeming values it has never had. We need to look at how the word “miss” is used in the context to see how the trivialization of the regime’s crime is accomplished even when the writer has the worst consequences in mind. Suppose someone throws an axe at an escaping criminal, but misses him to hit instead his own dog. The dog’s owner would be exculpated on two grounds: first, his intention was well-meaning; and, second, the killing of his dog was entirely accidental. At most, he will be accused of negligence. Similarly, by saying that the National Service is a missed opportunity, the writer not only trivializes the horrendous human cost exacted by the National Service (even as he mentions many of those himself), but also leaves the sense in the reader that Shaebia has had no ill intent in undertaking this experimentation, as if all the tragic consequences are entirely accidental in nature.
 
There could be only one reason why Gaim Kibreab is doing this: he hasn’t given up on Shaebia or ghedli, a malady that afflicts much of the opposition. By unnaturally narrowing the gap between the reality and the conceived image of the regime, he is telling us that Shaebia has not strayed off the right path by that much, and all that it needs is a gentle nudge from us to find its way back to the rightful path of its past. As in the case of the example, only someone who thinks that this present regime is redeemable would ever entertain such an absurd scenario. That is to say, the writer keeps normalizing the crimes of this regime in order to salvage the ghedli-conceived “Eritrea” he has in mind.

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The normalizing task continues

We have seen before how, by falling into the “return” semantic trap that the DIS delegation has effectively exploited, Gaim Kibreab has contributed to the picture of a “normal Eritrea”. That this is not some kind of oversight on his side, we can see from his past writings, one sample of which is provided above. Let me mention three other quotes from his input in the DIS delegation’s report to see that this normalizing task is a pattern, rather than anomaly, with him:

On the subject of penalties of parents of National Service evaders or deserters, he says, “The Eritrean government does not as a general rule harass relatives of National Service evaders or deserters. Generally, it is families targeted by the state or its agents for varieties of reasons or suspected for having organized the flight of their offspring or relatives that are targeted. The authorities might in some cases detain the parents for a short time and are released after paying a hefty fine.”

It is true that the government is not enforcing the penalty on parents as forcefully or as widely as it used to do before. But this is not because of change of heart, but a move consistent with its vulgar pragmatism: simply because, given the hundreds of thousands that have left and are still leaving the nation, it cannot detain the whole population. That is why the penalty was more frequent and harsher at the beginning because it felt that the youth would restrain themselves if they realized what the consequences of their acts to their families would be. So the policy wasn’t designed to punish parents for what they do, but for what their sons and daughters do. There are too many cases of parents penalized when their sons or daughters crossed the border while they were still active in the army to claim otherwise. In fact, the most frequent escape usually takes place whenever the conscripts are assigned along the border. As a rule, if conscripts escape while still on duty in the army, it should be the army that should be held responsible for their escape and not their parents. But that rationale would totally miss the nature of the regime’s vulgar pragmatism. The regime doesn’t give a damn about accountability or legality; all it wanted was to make it harder for the conscripts to escape from the country by any means necessary. As usual, it was depending on its blackmailing strategy that said: if you escape, the government’s wrath will fall on your parents. But this threat totally failed as a deterrent, which explains the regime’s partial retreat from this strategy.

Gaim Kibreab though, instead of explaining the regime’s behavior in terms of its vulgar pragmatism, goes out of his way to provide a legal rationale for it: “for having organized the flight of their offspring or relatives.” Now notice that, under this condition, the parents would be penalized for crimes that they did only, and not for crimes that their sons or daughters supposedly committed. This way, he provides some kind of legal justification to the government’s act, and consequently turns it into the normal kind.

In fact, we can see that the regime is not weaned out of this habit in that whenever it feels the strategy of penalizing family members works, it still does it. For instance, in this year it was mentioned (by Arbi Harnet and others) that many parents and spouses were detained in the area of Kohayin when their family members failed to show up for National Service; even pregnant women were not spared. Now the question is, why does the regime conduct such a collective punishment in Kohayin while it does no such thing in Asmara? True to its vulgar pragmatism, the answer is because it believes that only in the former case would the desired result be achieved.

Kohayin, unlike many urbanized and semi-urbanized areas, still remains a throwback in time; it resembles a piece of the old feudal habesha world, with modernity still held at bay. That is why one doesn’t find many from this area in Diaspora. That means almost all those that are evading the conscription are still living in their area, of course successfully hiding from the authorities. In other words, unlike the urbanized ones, they happen to be retrievable. So when the government is unusually harsh to peasants in Kohayin, it is with the belief that such a harsh treatment would deliver the intended result. True to its vulgar pragmatism, it would never attempt such a harsh measure in urbanized and semi-urbanized areas now, because when the youth disappear from these areas they simply leave the country – that is, unlike the case of Kohayin, the escapees are not retrievable.

Another instance where Gaim Kibreab is at his normalizing task is when he comments on corruption in the country: “Some of the military commanders, ‘the Colonels,’ are very corrupt and unfortunately the President has allowed them to run the country because he needs them on his side. Some individuals within the judiciary are corrupt and so are individuals in authorities that are responsible for housing, visa issuance and recently the military. However, it cannot be said that the government bureaucracy as such is corrupt. Given the dearth of press freedom and freedom of speech and expression, the truth is nobody knows.”

Now, please try to carefully read between the lines. In the first sentence, the Professor paints the picture of a President tolerating corruption simply because at this point in time he cannot do without the corrupt colonels; he cleverly puts the whole problem in terms of affordability. Counterfactually put, Gaim Kibreab is telling us, if an environment emerges wherein the service of these corrupt colonels (to the “security of the nation”, I presume) is no more needed, the President would get rid of them or the corruption. With this, he provides the Danish delegation with the image of an incorruptible President. I am sure the delegation happily accepted this improved image of the President, for by normalizing the President, one also normalizes the Eritrean environment conducive for refugees’ return. But the reality happens to be just the opposite. Nobody knows for sure where the mining revenues are disappearing, for the hundreds of millions dollars flowing into the regime’s coffers every year have yet to make the slightest bit of difference in the people’s lives. But even if we are to stick to the austere picture that Gaim Kibreab paints of the President, it is far from clear why the President’s deed doesn’t count as corruption. For the Professor, if a head of a nation allows rampant corruption among higher officials in order to extend his stay in power, it is only the takers (the higher officials) that are corrupt; the giver (the President) is exempted from such characterization. Yet, the Danish team fails to point out the absurdity of this logic.

Further, this sanitization process in regard to corruption in the nation doesn’t stop at the President. Even though Gaim Kibreab includes authorities in housing, visa issuance, military and the courts in his list of corrupt officials, he wants to exempt the government bureaucracy from that list. First, he seems to forget corruption is endemic wherever the money is. And in Eritrea, the money happens to be in housing, almost all of it from Diaspora; in visa issuance (again, Diaspora money); in the army, where free labor is in abundance to be exploited (ex: the colonel’s farms) and where most of the human trafficking takes place (again, involving mostly Diaspora money); and in the courts (for obvious reason), especially now when army officials make most of the decisions. Nowadays, corruption has become rampant even in education; for instance, for a child to be accepted in the most coveted schools in Asmara, one has to be either well connected (with the exclusive teghadelti club) or rich enough to bribe the education authorities with a hefty sum of money. So if you put these so called government bureaucrats in these lucrative places, at no time they would turn into outright thieves. For Gaim Kibreab though, the image of incorruptible Eritrea that Shaebia attempted to portray to the outside world in the early years of independence still gets some traction in his mind.

And, last, here is what he says on the issuance of passports to refugees by the government: “When Ethiopia some years ago began to issue Ethiopian passports to Eritrean citizens in the neighboring countries, Eritrea began to issue passports at its embassies in Khartoum and Nairobi. Eritreans who need an Eritrean passport often approach their embassy in Khartoum. If they sign the repentance letter (letter of regret) and show proof of having paid the Diaspora tax, any Eritrean who does not engage in any political or civil society activity against the government would be issued a new Eritrean passport, regardless of his or her National Service status.”

We have seen the reasons why the Eritrean government allowed refugees to visit Eritrea: for a hard-currency strapped and politically isolated nation, the financial and political gains that come attached with the issuance of passports happen to be too lucrative to resist. Whether Ethiopia issued passports to Eritrean refugees remains to be entirely superfluous to this fact. Yet, Gaim Kibreab could not resist dragging Ethiopia into the picture, thereby rationalizing Eritrea’s behavior in this regard. His not so subtle message is that, had Ethiopia not started it, Eritrea would probably have refrained from this abnormal act.

From the above it is clear that, despite his protestations, Professor Gaim Kibreab’s tendency to normalize the regime in Asmara seems to have much in common with the DIS team’s mission than he is willing to admit. There is no doubt that the Danish team set out to paint a “normal Eritrea” from the very beginning, and it found one of its enablers in Gaim Kibreab: the fact that he is in academia, that he has written a number of articles and books and that he is from the opposition provided the delegates with the perfect cover they needed to infuse their research with a certain measure of “fairness” and “objectivity”. The Professor knew exactly why they were approaching him, and happily provided them with the normalized picture that they needed badly to reach their unwarranted conclusion.

To sum up: We have seen how the DIS team’s study was compromised at various levels: in its illegitimate use of anonymity; in its exploitation of semantic ambiguities; in its biased selection of interlocutors; in its deliberate bypassing of the local sources of information; in its reluctance to resolve blatant contradictions; in its unwillingness to disqualify a notoriously unreliable interlocutor; etc. Taken together, these egregious failings to adhere to the norms of objectivity would render the Danish delegation’s study totally unacceptable.

Conclusion: the true stakeholders

 What is happening now in Eritrea with the mass exodus is similar to a Greek tragedy. One cannot deny that the youth are fleeing the nation in their hundreds of thousands because of totalitarian oppression in the country. Once one admits that, one cannot but grant that when these refugees set foot in free countries, eventually they will have to be given asylum based on humanitarian grounds. But this fact further becomes a reason for many other refugees to follow in their footsteps, for understandably refugees will flock to places where they find acceptance, good living conditions and freedom. And as this trend continues, the nation gets more and more emptied until it gets thoroughly hollowed out of its productive population. Even though the totalitarian oppression in the country is the main push factor that is behind the mass exodus of the youth, there is no doubt then that the pull factor of Europe as attraction has a great role to play. Ironically then, when the gates of Europe are left wide open, what seems deliverance at individual level to the refugees, it becomes the death sentence to the new nation-state Eritrea. That is why when I am writing this article denouncing the Danish team, part of me happens to be somewhat sympathetic to the very idea of Fortress Europe, for the post-independence generation will never fight back against the system in Asmara unless the alternative from outside is denied to it – that is, if ever. It seems to me that the Warsai generation happens to love Europe more than it hates the system in Eritrea.

What makes the Eritrean tragedy intractable is that there are layers to its making. Above, we have seen how a whole generation has become incapable of fighting back because it has become reluctant to put a face (the system’s) to its enemy. Another layer is added to this tragedy when we include those refugees who are too quick to regularize relationships with the regime once they are settled in their host countries. This tendency to sympathize with their victimizers further becomes a means by which the regime victimizes the youth they have left behind in Eritrea. Yet another layer is added to this tragedy when we look at the prevalence of the normalizing tendency among many in the opposition; so much so that that it has debilitated them into a point of catatonic inaction. These are the Arbi Harnet types who, in their effort to render the Eritrean climate as “authoritarian but normal”, go out of their way to find an external enemy that would be accountable for all the abnormal things in Eritrea; their attempt to render Demhit the Grand Monster is part of that normalizing task. Similar to Gaim Kibreab’s effort to find Ethiopia culpable for Eritrea’s use of passport to blackmail refugees, they have to necessarily find Ethiopian enemies within Eritrea to blame for the horrors that take place in the National Service. If so, any action from outside that might potentially bring regime change in Eritrea is treated by them as too extreme. Change from within has become their battle cry not because it is doable, but because it leaves the regime safe from “extreme” measures.

So what is to be done? Perhaps this riddle can be further elaborated upon by asking this question: who are the stakeholders in the Eritrean problematic, which is manifesting itself as totalitarian oppression to its population, as migrants problem to Europe and as Somalization of its northern neighbor to Ethiopia? And if any solution is to be found to this problem, simply identifying the stakeholders won’t do; we have to identify which of the stakeholders have the necessary agency to bring about the desired change. There is no doubt that the greatest stakeholders are the Eritrean masses, but the totalitarian grip over them and the mass flight of the youth have deprived them of any agency. The youth, having opted for individual solution to a collective problem, have also deprived themselves of any agency to bring change in Eritrea, wherever they happen to be. And once they become new members of their host countries, they have willingly forfeited their “stakes” in Eritrea. As for the opposition camp in Diaspora, it is too fractious and too distant to make any difference. That leaves Europe and Ethiopia as potent stakeholders, the former because it wants to do something to stem the flow of refugees from Eritrea and the latter because it wants to prevent Eritrea from being another Somalia.

If Europe is really seeking a lasting solution to this problem, it should talk only to stakeholders that can do something about it. Talking to Eritrea is a nonstarter because the Asmara regime is the cause of the problem. The regime has staked its existence on the National Service; it realizes the day it mass-demobilizes its conscripts, it will usher its terminal end. Thus, the day hundreds of thousands of youth are allowed to go back to the cities and towns of Eritrea is the day it dreads most. Even though its best preference is for the youth to remain stranded in the National Service indefinitely, if it comes down to two worst choices, mass exodus or mass demobilization, it prefers the former. Given this, the idea of talking to the regime to tackle the problem to the satisfaction of all stakeholders is absurd, because this would be no less than asking it to commit suicide. In that case, the only way National Service will come to an end is if there is regime change in the country. And the only way this change could be attained is through the help of Ethiopia. Unlike the fleeing youth who plan never to return to the country, Ethiopia as a nation has nowhere to go but to remain in the neighborhood. That is to say, it owns the Eritrean problem by virtue of its geopolitical position; that is, by the mere fact it is a neighbor that would be affected the most by what would happen in Eritrea (and vice versa). Thus, if there is any entity that Europe needs to consult on this matter, it would be Ethiopia.

At non-collaborative level, there is a lot that Denmark can do on its own. Above, we have seen how it is impossible to reconcile the acts of those refugees who claim persecution by the same regime that they keep regularizing relationships with. Even though their tendency to sympathize with their victimizers might be of interest to psychologists, it could in no way be a legal ground for acceptance. That is, this regularizing action should never be tolerated wherever and whenever it takes place. Thus, it would be much more fruitful if the Danish government focuses on these individuals and quickly identify their regularizing acts; namely, visits to the country, and direct financial contributions and political support to the Asmara regime. Once these regularizing acts are identified for what they are, it would be obvious how the Danish government should counter them: outlaw any visits to the country, any financial contributions (ex: 2% tax) and any discernable political support. For instance, it is well known that the regime conducts huge festivals and meetings in many parts of Europe, especially in Scandinavian countries, frequented by many of these regularizing refugees; these gatherings being where the regime conducts fundraisings and gets political support. The Danish government can start by outlawing such meetings in the country. And if there are any refugees that ought to be deported back to Eritrea, it would be the officially regularizing ones (by virtue of the passports they get from the regime); for by their very acts they are claiming that there is no oppression in Eritrea.

Notice though how the DIS delegation’s conclusion would debilitate the Danish government from taking any of the above recommended steps: once one identifies a nation as a normal one, it wouldn’t make sense to deny it the financial and political support it gets from its Diaspora population. Nor would it make sense to deny these refugees from visiting the nation. Thus, in its attempt to criminalize the entire refugee population, the Danish government had to necessarily turn the rogue regime in Asmara as a “regular government”. Once it does that, it denies itself the only legitimate and effective steps it could have taken to address the problem, be it at collaborative or non-collaborative level. This is, indeed, an end result of a study conducted in the most dishonest way to get to a conclusion reached long before it started.

Reference

[1] Danish Immigration Service Fact-Finding Mission; Eritrea – Drivers and Root Causes of Emigration, National Service and the Possibility of Return; newtodenmark.dk. All quotations in this article, unless specified otherwise, are from this report.

[2] Awate Team, Evidence: Eritrean Government Murdered 13 Children”, Dec 23, 2014; awate.com

[3] AI Staff; Murdered in Cold Blood by the PFDJ Regime; Dec 24, 2014; asmarino.com

{4] Stop National Service Slavery in Eritrea; Response to the recent report from the Danish Fact Finding Mission to Eritrea; Nov 29, 2014; asmarino.com

[5] HRC-Eritrea; Open Letter to: Delegation of the Danish Immigration Service; Dec 08, 2014; asmarino.com

[6] Stop National Service Slavery in Eritrea, Ibid.

[7] Ghebrehiwet, Yosief; Eritrea’s Pragmatic Terrorism: the Relevance Factor; Oct 06, 2009; asmarino.com

[8] Ghebrehiwet, Yosief; (II) Discontent at the Top; Mar 24, 2011; asmarino.com

[9] Ghebrehiwet, Yosief; The Elite: Normalizing the Abnormal State of Eritrea; Apr 13, 2011; asmarino.com

 Yosief Ghebrehiwet

 12-28-2014