Who doesn’t want to understand Eritrea, the second youngest nation of Africa (24 May 1993), whose once-promising liberation-movement government was in 2016 accused by a UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) of crimes against humanity – crimes against the country’s own people? According to the COI report the crimes have been perpetrated since 1991, when the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) assumed power in the East African nation by defeating the Ethiopians, who annexed the Red Sea nation in 1962 by abrogating the UN-sanctioned federal status of Eritrea under Ethiopia. This triggered a bloody revolution that consumed three decades and cost hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian and Eritrean lives. Who doesn’t want to understand Eritrea, whose population – mainly its youth – have been voting with their feet at an alarming rate of between three and five thousand per month, according to the UN refugee organisation UNHCR and other international organisations?
Martin Plaut is the author of a recent book on Eritrea, Understanding Eritrea: inside Africa’s most repressive state. Plaut’s relationship with the Horn of Africa, and especially with Eritrea, dates back to the early 1980s, when Plaut joined the British Labour Party as secretary on Africa and the Middle East. The EPLF’s representative to London at that time, Mr Ermias Debessai (popularly known as Papayo) entered the Labour Party office and invited Plaut to visit the areas under control of the EPLF – ‘the liberated areas’, as we used to call them. After this, Plaut joined the BBC and covered Africa, Eritrea and surroundings. When he resigned from the BBC in 2012, he compiled a series of broadcasts on Africa. One of these was a tribute to his friend Ermias Debessai, who was Eritrea’s Ambassador to China and Uganda before the strongman of Eritrea, President Isaias Afwerki – who has been in power for 25 years uninterrupted, without any election – called him back to Eritrea in 1996. Ermias Debessai was accused of corruption by a special court and disappeared into one of the secret prisons of Eritrea, without receiving any opportunity to defend himself. In 2000, I had a chance to visit him in a prison hospital, a former military base of the Ethiopian 35th Brigade.
Asked why he was thrown in prison, Debessai said: ‘unconsciously we have created an idol and it is devouring us. There is no justice.’ In 2002 Debessai was placed under house arrest, only to be rearrested together with his younger sister and former soldier of the EPLF, Mrs Senait Debessai. The latter is the ex-wife of the current Eritrean Ambassador to Kenya, Mr Beyene Russom, and mother of their three daughters.
Where do you start if you want to understand the gradual evolution of the EPLF into Africa’s most repressive government? The first five of the 11 chapters of Martin Plaut’s book start by outlining the history of Eritrea and the thorny relationships of this young nation with Ethiopia to the south and the other neighbouring countries: Djibouti to the south-east, Sudan to the north and west, and Yemen across the Red Sea. Rightly, the book gives a lot of attention to the ‘unfinished business’ (Jacquin-Berdal and Plaut 2005) between Ethiopia and Eritrea. It seems that their history, heavily impacted by the scramble for Africa by Italy (in Eritrea, thus Ethiopia and Somalia), the UK (Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Eritrea) and France (Djibouti, which was ‘French Somaliland’), is still putting constraints on nation-building by the old and emerging nation-states of the region. The still-unresolved border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea has become an albatross round the neck of the Horn of Africa. Relatively speaking, Eritrea and Ethiopia lost more human lives in the two-year border war of 1998 to 2000 than during the 30-year independence struggle waged by the Eritreans against Ethiopia. Various sources estimate the number of casualties at more than 100,000.
In Chapter 3, ‘The thorny relationship with Ethiopia’, Plaut recounts how he unintentionally became part of the conflict when he reported that the UN-sponsored Eritrean–Ethiopian Border Commission ruling of 2002 had been misinterpreted by the Ethiopian government (44). The flashpoint border town of Badme was awarded to Eritrea but the Ethiopians thought that it had been awarded to them, and speedily organised a big festival in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa to celebrate the decision. Ethiopia sent its minister of information to London to persuade the senior managers of the BBC to withdraw Plaut’s report – but the request was refused by the BBC. The Eritrean government officials don’t like Plaut either. Especially since his retirement from the BBC in 2012, Plaut seems to be actively engaged in exposing the gross human rights violations in Eritrea.
Chapter 6, ‘From freedom to dictatorship’, is the heart of Plaut’s book. Over 28 pages Plaut attempts to explain why Eritrea has descended from ‘freedom’ to dictatorship. The chapter title implies that there was initially freedom in Eritrea while, in the same chapter, Plaut notes that
Their [the UN Commission of Enquiry’s] verdict was clear. The Commissioners reported that Eritrean officials had committed ‘crimes of enslavement, imprisonment, enforced disappearance, torture, reprisals as other inhuman acts, persecution, rape and murder.’ They concluded that ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed in Eritrea since 1991.’ (128)
Chapter 7, ‘Eritrea’s economy: smoke and mirrors’, is a good read about the covert and overt economy of the country. The People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), the successor of the EPLF since February 1994, dominates both the clandestine and visible economies by creating so-called private and semi-private trading companies such as the Red Sea Trading Corporation (RSTC). Although the PFDJ is often referred to as a political party, its leader and the head of state, Afwerki, rejects this, saying that there is no political party in Eritrea, but only a front, a national movement. In an interview published in the EPLF/PFDJ magazine Hiwyet in 2001, he said, ‘I don’t consider the EPLF [read: PFDJ] a political party. It is a national movement, a Front that encompasses the whole Eritrean people.’ He added, ‘If the PFDJ perceives itself as a political party, then the consequence is the pollution of the history of Eritrea and the Eritrean people. The Front has mingled itself with the blood and spirit of the Eritrean people’1 (PFDJ 2001, 4; also cited in Gaim 2009, 4).
It is President Afwerki’s conviction that Eritrea cannot exist without the Front. The PFDJ runs the country as if the country belongs to it. It imports, exports and runs various shops and companies across the country, and in various parts of the world, without paying any tax – something that the UN Somalia and Eritrea Monitoring Group (SEMG) exposed to the world but which was widely known among informed Eritreans. The SEMG was established in 2009 after the UN Security Council imposed sanctions against Eritrea for its alleged support of the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab and for its intransigence and unwillingness to solve its border conflict with Djibouti peacefully. The sanctions have been extended till December 2017. Various independent observers perceive the SEMG as an instrument of the USA and its ally Ethiopia to punish Eritrea.
Also in Chapter 7, Plaut sets out the Eritrean government’s sources of income. These are: 1) Arabic countries, notably Qatar – Eritrea belongs to the Saudi coalition against the Houthi rebels in Yemen; 2) remittances and extra territorial tax – every Eritrean in the diaspora is obliged to pay 2% of his or her monthly income to the regime with irregular contributions for the ‘defence of the country’; 3) ‘trade in contraband goods and smuggling’ (147); and 4) human trafficking. There is no independent corroboration for the last allegation – that the Eritrean government has been earning money by selling its own people – other than allegations by the UN SEMG.
The head of economic affairs in the PFDJ, Mr Hagos Ghebrehiwet, is the second most powerful man in the country. Together with the president, he clandestinely slashes the budget for the various ministries and is directly accountable to no other institution than Isaias Afwerki himself. A recent ministerial delegation to China in July 2016, including Eritrean Minister of Finance Mr Berhane Habtemariam, was led by Hagos Gebrehiwet. Eritrea has no parliament, no constitution and no other independent institutions. Secrecy governs. In a recent interview with the BBC, the Eritrean finance minister said: ‘We have not given out any information about our budget for seven years because our enemies will use it against us’ (Harper 2016).
Repressive states are themselves the enemies of such secrecy. They produce refugees, and these asylum-seekers expose the regime when they tell their awful stories. Members of the UN COI and the UN Special Rapporteur on Eritrea, Mrs Sheila Keetharuth, rely solely on the testimonies of refugees since they are not welcome in Eritrea. Chapters 8 and 9 of Plaut’s book deal respectively with this and with how the long arm of the Eritrean regime – through its embassies, consulates and ‘offices of the Front’ – coerces the ‘old’ Eritrean diaspora that willingly supported the Eritrean armed struggle for independence and freedom. The Eritrean government keeps not only the Eritrean diaspora hostage but also Western governments who depend on the Eritrean government to curb the number of Eritrean refugees: Plaut notes in Chapter 11 that:
The Eritrean government is engaged in a serious attempt to broaden its appeal and to break out of the international isolation in which it finds itself. In this it has allies among the foreign community and the EU states in particular. They are so determined to try to halt the flow of refugees that they are willing to close their eyes to almost any abuses by President Isaias’s government. (211)
In his sub-chapter ‘Using the [Dutch] courts’ (191–193) in Chapter 9, ‘Exile: life for the diaspora’, Plaut reveals how an ex-chairman of the PFDJ Youth section in the Netherlands has been trying, hitherto in vain, to silence critical journalists and academics – including one of Eritrean origin – by using the Dutch rule of law, legislation that is totally absent in Eritrea. He reports ‘vociferous attacks on social media’ (193), noting that Professor Mirjam van Reisen, one of those charged in the court cases, was ‘physically threatened’ (193) – although it is ambiguous whether this means threatened with physical violence in the social media attacks, or threatened in person with violence, which is unsubstantiated. The book has some inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims, which I hope will be addressed in new editions: for example, it claims that Isaias Afwerki himself gave the order to execute Mussie Tesfamichael in 1974 (105). According to my information, based on an interview with one of the founders of the EPLF/PFDJ who lives now in exile, the decisions to execute Mussie Tesfamichael and his group were taken by a commission. Appendix 2 and ‘the enigma of Isaias’ (104) are simplistic and come across as armchair psychology. It is suggested that Afwerki’s dictatorship had its roots in the traditional Eritrean beer brewed by his mother. But it was the president’s grandmother who brewed and sold the beer. Her name was Adey Medhin Berad – Adey meaning ‘mother’, Medhin being her first name and Berad from the Eritrean and Ethiopian word for a beer pot, a traditional beer pouring vessel. Most of the beer sellers were situated in socio-economically poor neighbourhoods, but I find it a weak explanation to dissect the character of the president, who incidentally was a student of Addis Ababa University.
Chapter 10, ‘Opposition’, describes how the Eritrean president established and kept himself in power over 25 years, without elections or even any notable challenges to his power except in 2000 when he was weakened by the outcome of the border war with Ethiopia, and the elites around him – disaffected by his increasingly authoritarian rule – saw an opportunity to challenge him in the last regular meeting of the Eritrean Assembly. Afwerki survived by promising three commissions: one that would analyse critically how the border war was conducted, and two others that would respectively be tasked with preparing the electoral legislation and organising the elections themselves, based on the ratified constitution of 1997. In September 2000, the Transitional National Assembly of the Eritrean Parliament promised that elections would take place in 2001. The disaffection increased after Afwerki disbanded the commissions and refused to call any meetings of the PFDJ central council or the Transitional National Assembly. Some of the elites, the so-called G15,2 started to challenge him openly using the nascent independent newspapers of the country. Afwerki hit back. He arrested all members of the G15 except three who were in exile and one who recanted. He closed all independent media and arrested the journalists. Nobody – except for the strongman and some selected trustees – knows where they are and whether they are alive. The chapter dwells on the internal and external opposition which, respectively, are non-existent and weak. Opposition from the diaspora lacks unity and an effective strategy. The only attempt to overthrow Isaias Afwerki by violence took place on 21 January 2013, when an unknown number of tanks, accompanied by some soldiers and their leader Colonel Said Ali Hijay (Wedi-Ali), drove to the former Italian and Ethiopian military base ‘Forto’ that was now the Eritrean Ministry of Information and Culture. The coup failed miserably. According to the president’s interview with the state television channel ERI-TV on 14 February 2013, Wedi-Ali committed suicide the following day and his followers returned to their units, explaining how they were misguided (YouTube 2013).
The book brings together some important elements for further scholarly study, but for those who have read A dream deferred (Gaim 2009), Conversations with Eritrean political prisoners (Connell 2005), Eritrea at a crossroads: a narrative of triumph, betrayal and hope (Giorgis 2014) and the reports of the Commission of Inquiry and the SEMG and WikiLeaks (US State Department 2009; Tisdall 2010), the book’s claim – that it ‘tells the untold story of how this tiny nation became a world pariah’ (inside back cover) – promises more than it can deliver.
The eleventh and last chapter of the book, ‘The outlook for Eritrea’, seems to end like a night candle. It comprises only six pages. I admire Plaut’s optimism based on his birthplace South Africa, and the leadership exercised by Nelson Mandela and F. W. De Klerk. Plaut expects a bright future for Eritrea and Ethiopia if: 1) Ethiopia accepts the border ruling of April 2002 and withdraws its troops from the Eritrean town of Badme; 2) Isaias Afwerki disappears from power; and 3) the opposition unites and promises never to be like Isaias Afwerki.