REPORT/ERITREA
Issaias Afwerki: Photo by Helene Stikkel.
Prison country
In Eritrea, forced conscription is the new slavery.
By Lalon Sander
I t is the third lease of life for Yonas
Mehari and Petros Mulugeta.
They have made it to Germany
– they are safe. In recent pictures
these men are seen sitting relaxed.
Twenty-three-year-old Mulugeta has
closely cropped hair. He flashes a
friendly grin at the camera. Twenty-
eight-year-old Mehari is wearing a
shirt with patterned stripes in purple
and red. He looks more reserved with
his hands clasped loosely on his lap.
While they are happy to have finally
reached the safety in Germany, they
are also heavily traumatised, and in
need of regular counselling. Yonas
Mehari and Petros Mulugeta are
finally safe in Germany after escaping
from prison in Eritrea – not once, but
twice.
That they had to escape twice
is due to actions of the German
authorities, who refused the two men
asylum the first time they reached
Germany in November 2007. Their
asylum applications were rejected,
and they were deported back to
Eritrea, where they were immediately
imprisoned, labelled as traitors. For
months, they were tortured within
inches of their deaths, in crowded
prisons. That they managed to escape
the country a second time is almost a
miracle. In 2010, they made their way
back to Germany. This time, they were
allowed to stay.
“I can not understand why the
Germans forced us to return to Eritrea.
They are well-informed about how
dangerous the situation is for Eritrean
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deserters,” says Petros Mulugeta. “I
am so furious. I wonder if I can sue the
German authorities,” Yonas Mehari
adds. Both men demand an apology
and compensation – unlikely that
they will get either.
Mehari and Mulugeta are part
of a massive exodus of Eritreans. In
2009, according to the United Nations
refugee agency, UNHCR, there were
over 209,000 Eritrean refugees
worldwide, and 43,000 Eritreans filed
new asylum applications. The refugees
are on the run from one of the most
repressive regimes ruling one of the
most isolated countries in the world.
The strongman of Eritrea is Issaias
Afwerki, a veteran of the thirty-year-
long Eritrean liberation war against
Ethiopia. In 1993, two years after de
ISSUE 6 49

He describes the punishment
that required the prisoners to roll
naked in the mud containing sharp
stones and thorns, “Those stuck
to the skin and caused wounds. It
was horrible to watch.”
facto independence, Issaias became
the country’s first and only president.
Immensely popular in the 1990s,
Issaias has become dictatorial in
recent years, refusing to implement
the Eritrean constitution or hold
democratic elections.
After a border dispute with
Ethiopia, Issaias cracked down on
dissenting voices, and shut down all
independent news outlets in Eritrea.
According to Human Rights Watch, he
has since kept Eritrea “on a permanent
war footing,” by indefinitely extending
the compulsory military service.
Today, almost 300,000 Eritreans are
under arms, and almost as many in
the reserve forces.
It is this forced conscription the
Eritreans are fleeing from. “You
become a slave of the government,
and your slavery will continue
until you are sixty. You do not earn
anything, you can not start a family,”
says Petros Mulugeta, who escaped
after he was sent to a military labour
camp during his service. “We do not
question the military service per se. It
would be normal to serve in the army
for one year or one and a half, and to
return to a normal life afterwards. I
would do that and go on with my life.”
Yonas Mehari whose military service
continued for seven years until his
escape says, “If you join the army
once, you will stay there forever.”
It was not always like this. Once,
Issaias Afwerki was an idealistic young
freedom fighter. “To resolve the
economic problems of our people, to
give them a prosperous and tranquil
life, we must build a society that is
50 ISSUE 6
free from exploitation on men by
men,” he says in a video footage from
1974. He was twenty-eight then, with
eight years of experience in warfare,
and training from China.
Today, he is visibly aged, his once
thick black hair has receded and the
characteristic moustache greyed. In a
recent interview with Al Jazeera, his
eyes look tired and he angrily evades
critical questions by playing them
down as “a pack of lies.” In one of its
recent reports, International Crisis
Group comments, “In most Eritreans’
eyes, he is no longer the stout-hearted,
beloved leader of the nation-at-arms,
but a mentally unstable autocrat
with a bad temper and an alcohol
problem.”
Eritrea is now a country where
exploitation has become a routine.
Conscripts are paid a monthly pocket
money, roughly equivalent to three
dollars, during the first six months.
Later, they receive more, but never a
living wage. They work in all parts of
the economy: ministries, departments,
regional governments, agricultural
schemes, and digging wells.
Forty enterprises, owned by
Issaias’ ruling party, dominate every
aspect of the Eritrean economy, and all
aspects of life have been transformed
into national service. The main
beneficiaries of this system of forced
labour are senior officials of the
government, the ruling party, and the
military. It is a brutal and elaborate
system of forced labour in the service
of a political-military complex.
Issaias and his cronies also control
a national system of surveillance and
repression. It is he, who “appoints
everyone from high court judges,
senior military commanders and
cabinet ministers to middle-ranking
officials,” reports International
Crisis Group. Anyone who criticises
the government or the president;
anyone who tries to evade military
service; anyone who tries to leave the
country; or, anyone who belongs to
an unregistered religion, can be taken
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into custody and imprisoned.
The families of the prisoners rarely
get to know their whereabouts, and
often the prisoners never return. In all
parts of the country, local government
officials keep detailed records of
the families in the area, and ensure
that those of age are conscripted. In
larger towns, the police and military
forces capture evaders or deserters
through systematic round-ups. Every
year, nearly half of the 20,000 new
conscripts are recruited straight out
of the schools.
The only place in the country
where secondary schooling is offered
is the Sawa military camp. It was here
that Petros Mulugeta finished high
school. “They tell you that you are
a student taking part in a training
program,” he says. “Actually, they
only offer military training.”
He was trained in the use of
grenades and Kalashnikovs, while
being subjected to harshest of
treatments, “The conscripts are not
allowed to sit in groups. They are not
allowed to talk to each other for more
than a few minutes. I thought I had
no chance to continue my studies or
leave the army, ever.”
Yonas Mehari had more patience.
He spent seven years in service and
was appointed as a prison guard, “I was
expected to carry out punishments.”
He describes the punishment that
required the prisoners to roll naked
in the mud containing sharp stones
and thorns, “Those stuck to the skin
and caused wounds. It was horrible to
watch.”
When he refused to continue
torturing prisoners, Mehari was
imprisoned, “By the time I was
released, I was absolutely fed up. I
decided to escape and started walking
towards Sudan.” Around the same time
Petros Mulugeta was fleeing a military
labour camp. By trying to cross the
border, both men risked being shot
on sight by Eritrean border guards.
In November 2007, they arrived in
Frankfurt, Germany, smuggled in by
Yonas Mehari and Petros Mulugeta: Private photo.
traffickers from Sudan. It was in the
transit area of the Frankfurt Airport,
they met each other for the first time
while waiting to be interviewed by
German authorities.
In the 1990s, military service in
Eritrea was less ominous. According
to Human Rights Watch, “During the
first four rounds of national service,
those who were called up were
demobilised after eighteen months.
But after war broke out with Ethiopia
in 1998, everything changed.”
In 2000, a peace agreement was
brokered, but Ethiopia refused to give
back an Eritrean border town it had
captured. Moreover, during the war,
deep rifts developed in the Eritrean
leadership as Issaias began directing
military operations. “Many maintain
his interference and refusal to consult
or delegate was the cause of military
failures during that period,” notes
International Crisis Group.
After the war, dissenting voices
became louder. Most prominently,
a group of liberation war veterans
known as the Group of 15 criticised
Issaias’ rule as unconstitutional and
called for democratic elections. In
response Issaias cracked down on
opposition.
In September 2001, as the world
was occupied with the 9/11 attacks,
he imprisoned eleven of the Group
of 15 – three of them were out of the
country, one recanted. The offices
of independent media outlets were
also raided and many journalists
were imprisoned. Shortly afterwards,
Issaias’ government extended the
military service indefinitely.
Eritrea is now the only country in
Africa without a single independent
media outlet. A British freelance
journalist was expelled from the
country in 2008, because he refused
to disclose his sources. Reporters
Without Borders ranks Eritrea as the
worst country in the world for press
freedom, even worse than North
Korea. And, of the eleven imprisoned
members of the Group of 15, nine are
now reported dead.
In 2007, after reaching Frankfurt
Airport, Yonas Mehari and Petros
Independent World report
Mulugeta informed the German
Federal Police that they were
seeking asylum. During questioning,
a representative of the Federal
Office for Migration and Refugees
(BAMF) explained that Mehari and
Mulugeta were required to describe
in detail their ranks, military units,
uniforms, and weapons; and, explain
how military identification numbers
were composed; also, name military
operation areas and commanders.
When Mehari said that he did
not have an identification number,
and named four military zones, his
interviewer triumphantly informed
him, “It is incorrect that there are
only four zones, in fact there are five.
I would also like to point out that each
and every soldier has an identification
number, and must wear this number
on his uniform. So, if you tell me that
you did not have a number, you were
not a soldier in the Eritrean army.”
In December 2007, their
applications for asylum were rejected
as “obviously baseless” since it was
“obvious that they had never been
ISSUE 6 51
soldiers in the Eritrean army.”
Ines Welge of Pro Asyl, a refugee
rights group, analysed the treatment
of Mehari and Mulugeta, “The BAMF
representative subjected Yonas Haile
Mehari and Petros Aforki Mulugeta to
a military quiz, apparently to argue
that they were in fact not deserters,
based on their wrong answers.” As
Frankfurt’s administrative court
upheld the BAMF decision, Welge
noted, “The administrative court in
Frankfurt failed in its monitoring
capacity and its intended role as the
guardian of the fundamental rights of
asylum applicants.”
In January and February 2008,
German police tried to deport Mehari
and Mulugeta on passenger flights –
they kept on yelling so loudly that the
pilots refused to fly them. So, in May
2008, a private plane was arranged to
take the two men back to Eritrea. Four
policemen and two doctors flew with
them.
It was a small plane, one that
would require refuelling in Egypt.
“There were only six seats,” Petros
Mulugeta recalls. “Two persons had
to sit near the toilets on our luggage.”
At the Asmara International Airport
in Eritrea, they were handed over to
Eritrean police.
The Eritrean regime holds
thousands of prisoners, for that,
as Human Rights Watch notes,
“Eritrea has a formidable network of
detention facilities, some of which are
well-known, and others secret, some
authorised, and others not. Each town
and administrative district in Eritrea
has a jail. Wherever there is a police
post is a cell and each military division
has its own prison.”
While beatings are regarded as
normal, a number of harsher torture
methods are also routine in Eritrean
prisons, like Helicopter, in which
the victims’ hands and feet are tied
together behind their backs and they
are left face down under the sun; or,
Jesus Christ, in which they are tied
to a tree or a cross and beaten while
52 ISSUE 6
suspended.
In a room at the Asmara
International Airport, Mehari and
Mulugeta were interrogated for hours
about what they had been doing in
Germany; how they had managed to
escape from Eritrea; and, what they
had told the Germans as they applied
for asylum.
Later that night they were
transferred to the local police station,
where they were interrogated again
and again. Petros Mulugeta feared
for his life. He recalls what the
interrogators were saying, “You are
traitors, traitors to your own country.
Beating you would not be enough,
you are going to receive worse
punishments, that you deserve.”
After a month, Mehari and
Mulugeta were driven to the military
camp in Wia, one of the hottest areas
in Eritrea. Mulugeta was placed in a
zinc hut above ground, inside forty
people were crammed into a sixteen-
square-metre area. He witnessed
prisoners trying to escape a number
of times, “They knew for sure that
they were going to die in Wia, and if
they died while escaping, their death
would be a faster one.”
“We believed that the dead men
were the luckiest,” says Mehari, who
was placed in an underground room.
With over four-hundred people in that
room, it was too crowded to lie down,
“It was best to be standing because if
you lay down, your skin stuck to the
floor. The floor was terribly hot.”
Both men became so sick, that
their captors moved them to military
hospitals, Mulugeta in Keren, and
Mehari in Gheden. Thanks to the
hospital care and food, they regained
some strength and ran away for life at
the very first opportunity they got.
Meanwhile, the Eritrean foreign
ministry confirmed to the German
authorities that Mehari and Mulugeta
had indeed been imprisoned for
desertion and leaving the country
illegally. Their lawyer in Germany
managed to get their asylum claims
Independent World report
• Service for life: State repression
and indefinite conscription in
Eritrea is a 2009 report
by Human Rights Watch.
www.tinyurl.com/3ovmdmf
• Eritrea: The siege state – report
by International Crisis Group.
www.tinyurl.com/364mzlk
recognised, then located Mulugeta in
Sudan and Mehari in Ethiopia.
Despite the ordeals, life for Mehari
and Mulugeta in Germany is far
better, when compared to the fates
of Eritreans in some other countries.
A much larger number of refugees
never make it this far – in 2009,
almost two thirds of the refugees
fleeing from Eritrea ended up in
Sudan and Ethiopia. Many try to make
it to Europe via Libya but are either
imprisoned or robbed and exploited
by traffickers and policemen on the
way.
In Libya, hundreds of refugees
are reported to be detained in
prison. Others, who have made it to
the European Union territories, are
detained in Malta or forced to beg
in the streets of Italy. In June 2008,
Egypt forcibly returned around 1200
Eritreans who had fled Sudan fearing
deportation. Human rights groups
estimate that at least 740 of them
were imprisoned upon return and
remain so to date.
It is the third lease of life for Yonas
Mehari and Petros Mulugeta. As
Mulugeta puts it, “We have been born
again.” With the help of the Eritrean
diaspora in Frankfurt and a human
rights group, they have now moved
into their own apartments. They plan
to learn German and find jobs – far
away from Issaias Afwerki’s Eritrea.
Lalon Sander is special correspondent
of Independent World Report.