As Eritrea suffers, the world looks away

By Neil Skene

St Petersburg, Jan 30, 2005 (St Petersburg Times) – Matthewos sensed the danger. When last I saw him, in April 2001, he handed me his photograph. “Just in case,” he said.

I dismissed the concern. It was a cheery spring day in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. Matthewos Habteab was the editor of Meqaleh, one of nearly a dozen newspapers that had sprung up over the previous four years. The young country had passed a constitution and elected as president the guerrilla hero who had won Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia. Even U.S. first lady Hillary Clinton had come to visit. The people, including the journalists, were loyal and hopeful when I first visited in October 1999.

But the promising future didn’t happen.

Today Matthewos and 13 other journalists are in their fourth year in prison somewhere in Eritrea – the location undisclosed, charges unfiled, hearings unheld, families unwelcome. The journalists were rounded up and their papers shut down on Sept. 18, 2001, just a week after the 9/11 attacks in the United States. The warrior-president, Isaias Afewerki, embraced tyranny while the world was looking elsewhere.

The arrests of others followed within weeks: 11 prominent Eritreans who had drafted a protest of the government’s failure to implement the country’s constitution; two Eritreans employed by the U.S. Embassy; and about 200 Christians, many of them members of Jehovah’s Witnesses, in a crackdown on those practicing outside the four sanctioned faiths. Some of the Christians arrested “reportedly have been subjected to severe torture and pressured to renounce their faith,” says John Hanford, U.S. ambassador for international religious freedom. They’re all still in prison.

“It is not only the arrest of 14 (journalists). It is the complete arrest of public expression and ideas,” says Haileab Kidane, a founder of the newspaper Admas, who left the country in time and now lives in Pretoria, South Africa.

So why don’t we do anything? Because President Isaias plays to U.S. priorities. Eritrea is important “to stem the presence and influence of terrorism in the Horn of Africa,” says the State Department.

The department has issued a grand total of one news release specifically about Eritrea in the last three years. It said this: “Eritrea is committed to fighting global terrorism, and it has been a solid partner with the United States in that battle in the past. Eritrea was one of the first nations to sign on as part of the Coalition of the Willing (in Iraq).”

While our government says it has warned Eritrea of possible cuts in U.S. aid because of the oppression, nothing has happened.

So tyranny and brutality in out-of-the-way places are as ignored today as the genocide in Rwanda was so famously ignored by the Clinton administration a decade ago.

The film Hotel Rwanda, now in theaters, tells the story of a gentle manager of an elegant hotel whose courage saved hundreds of Tutsis from massacre by Hutus in Rwanda. But individual acts of courage happen all over Africa. Visit the now-empty political prison off the coast of Cape Town in South Africa where Nelson Mandela was in prison. It was filled with people, many of them just unheralded foot soldiers in the struggle against apartheid. In all directions from Rwanda – from South Africa to Liberia, from Sudan to the Ivory Coast – everywhere are stories of individuals who risked their lives for the cause of freedom.

But America remains on the periphery.

Even today in Sudan’s genocide, American aid consists of supplies and peace talks. No American is standing guard on behalf of those under attack, the role that the heroic Rwandan hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina, so desperately and unsuccessfully sought from the U.N. commander in Rwanda. It is startling, in the Rwanda film, that the one person outside Rwanda who seems to care enough to do something is the president of Belgium’s Sabena Airlines, who uses his influence to get the French to stop the machete assault on the people at Sabena’s Hotel Mille Collines.

As for Eritrea, thousands are trying to leave every day, Haileab tells me in an e-mail. But not every country welcomes them. Despite a plea from the U.N. Human Rights Commission that countries not deport Eritreans even if asylum is denied, Libya put 76 Eritrean exiles on a cargo plane home last August. Desperate, the Eritreans used knives to hijack the plane – to Sudan, of all places, where they turned themselves over to authorities and sought asylum. Sudan, according to Amnesty International, has already tried and convicted 15 of them and sentenced them to five years in prison, followed by deportation.

Press freedom organizations have appealed unsuccessfully for the journalists’ release. The ejection of a BBC and Reuters correspondent three months ago prompted the activist group Reporters Without Borders in Paris to brand Eritrea “Africa’s biggest prison for journalists.”

On Dec. 7, the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum in Paris sought the release of Dawit Isaac, who returned to Eritrea from Sweden in 1996 to establish the Setit newspaper. Setit may have inspired the crackdown with its call for democracy in the fall of 2000.

The Eritrean journalists came from other jobs to start their newspapers in the late 1990s. They had little experience but a lot of enthusiasm. Many of them came to a series of seminars I taught in Asmara starting in 1999 on the basics of journalism: finding story ideas, interviewing, writing well and developing critical editorials.

On a Friday night at the end of the first session, four of the editors took me to dinner. They chose their favorite spicy national dishes, such as lamb, and we drank and laughed and told stories.

Matthewos was one of them. Another was Yousef Mohamed Ali, once a fighter for Eritrean freedom and later chief editor of Tsigenay, who was part of a roundup of eight journalists in October 2000. Yousef was tortured, but he returned to his newspaper and was in my last seminar in April 2001. He is in prison with the others now.

Two others who were at that dinner escaped before the 2001 roundup.

One, Milkias Mihretab, editor of Keste Debena, had also been detained in that first roundup. This time he escaped through Sudan, made his way to the United States, gained asylum and started a paper in Tigrinya, the native language.

Khaled Abdu, editor of Admas, also escaped and is in Sweden, still seeking asylum. He and Aaron Berhane of Setit, another seminar participant who escaped, have received Hellman/Hammitt awards from Human Rights Watch, given to persecuted writers around the world.

Others from my seminars are among those in prison: Amanuel Asrat, chief editor of Zemen; Temesgen Gebreyesus of Keste Debena; Said Abdulkadir of Admas; Semret Seyum of Setit; and Dawit Habtemichael of Meqaleh.

Matthewos was not the only one who had sensed danger. But the journalists kept doing their work. They sacrificed their own freedom in a desire to tell the truth and make their country a real democracy. The rest of the world has barely noticed.

Neil Skene, a lawyer and writer living in Tallahassee and former editor of Congressional Quarterly in Washington, taught journalism programs in Eritrea on three trips from 1999-2001 on grants from the U.S. State Department. He taught similar programs in Swaziland and South Africa last year.