In a recent report,
the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea found such
rights to be few and far between in the African nation. Detecting an “overall
context of a total lack of rule of law,” the Commission suggested that the
Eritrean government’s “violations in the areas of extrajudicial executions,
torture (including sexual torture), national service and forced labor may
constitute crimes against humanity.”
The national military
service, which is “indefinite” in duration and thus conducive to
“slavery-like practices,” means the state has a permanent pool of bodies that
can be forcibly put to work. Because of the dismal domestic set-up, the UN
estimates that 5,000 persons flee
Eritrea per month — many of them crossing Ethiopia, Sudan, and Libya and
then boarding decrepit vessels bound for Europe (or, as the case may be, the
bottom of the sea). The Eritrean government, on the other hand, has a slightly
different opinion on matters. According
to the country’s foreign ministry, the exodus is a result not of wanton
human rights violations but rather of human trafficking projects: “The principal objective of this organized crime
is to prevent Eritrea and its people from defending their sovereignty by
dispersing and debilitating their human resources.”
Furthermore, the official line goes, the figure of 5,000 per
month is exaggerated — with some of the exaggeration allegedly thanks to other
varieties of African migrant who claim Eritrean nationality for asylum
purposes. Last month, Reuters reported
that Eritrean Ambassador Tesfamicael Gerahtu had told
the news agency "there was an international ‘conspiracy’ to tarnish
Eritrea, saying Western nations had in part been swayed to act against it by
regional rivals.”
Italy, for one, is apparently playing
right into the hands of the conspirators, with the Italian foreign ministry
recording a total of 34,329 Eritrean arrivals to the country’s shores last year. In the
first six months of this year, 18,676 incoming Eritreans were tallied.
During a recent visit
to Rome, I had the opportunity to visit the Baobab center near Tiburtina
train station, a facility that caters primarily to Eritrean migrants transiting
to northern Europe. I was accompanied by Ahmad Al Rousan, cultural mediator
with Medici Senza Frontiere/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which provides
psychological first aid to traumatized migrants, in addition to other services;
since May, MSF has helped save over 11,000 migrant lives via search
and rescue operations in the Mediterranean.
Al Rousan told me that according to the volunteers who
manage the Baobab center, the place is meant to accommodate between 170 and 180
persons but sometimes houses up to 800. When I visited, the guests included a
two-week old baby, reportedly born on the beach in Libya shortly prior to cast
off for Europe, and a young woman who was weeping uncontrollably, having just
received news that her brother had been kidnapped while attempting his own
journey to Italy. Kidnapping is a common hurdle for Europe-bound African
migrants, often costing families thousands of dollars to extricate the traveler
from captivity. Other regular features of the migration process include
torture, beatings, and sexual abuse — particular specialties at Libyan
immigration detention centers. Earlier this year, Amnesty International cited
the testimony of one detainee who described the beating death of a pregnant
woman by detention center officials.
But the real victim of the whole panorama is, of course, the
Eritrean government, whose “human resources” are being “dispers[ed] and
debilitat[ed]” by international conspiracies. As Reuters notes,
Eritrea has “long accused its much larger neighbor Ethiopia… and others in the region of trying to
destabilize it.” READ MORE AT TeleSUR ENGLISH.