As someone living in Eritrea, I am deeply troubled by the discrepancy between the scale of crimes being committed against the people on the one hand, and the inadequacy of reporting them on the other. Not that theres total absence of human rights activists. I am fully aware of the tireless efforts of organisations and individuals, such as Awates EHRAG, EHDR-UK and the various political and civic organisations in the opposition camp, who are working hard to expose the regimes human rights abuses. My contention is that what has been exposed is just the tip of the PFDJs iceberg of horrors.
PART 1: Brutalizing Families: A time-honoured PFDJ practice!
News from Eritrea concerning the brutal treatment and incarceration of parents and other family members has been all over the Eritrean Internet outlets in the past couple of months. This time the victims are mostly elderly people and mothers. This practice, however, is not new in Higdef-land. Even though this is the first time it took the form of an all out, wide-scale campaign, such ill-treatment of parents has been going on all along, even before the start of the border war with Ethiopia.
The PFDJ authorities have regularly been detaining parents on grounds of the latters alleged role in aiding their children to escape the country or simply to avoid Sawa. I know personally of a number of cases involving harassment of parents including imprisonment and torture. Of these, there are two incidents I have witnessed in person.
Sometime around December 1996, I was travelling in Dankalia on a work visit. In the outskirts of one of the coastal villages north of Tio, we passed a government vehicle (Toyota pickup with a canvas-covered rear part). As we zoomed past the dust-covered pick-up, my co-travellers and I had a glimpse of about half a dozen elderly Afar men crouched on either side of the back seats. They were guarded by armed policemen, two of whom had one leg each dangling off the rear of the vehicle. Apparently, these were men in police custody, but we couldnt figure out, at that time, the reason for their detention. Later we were informed that these were village elders from three hamlets in the vicinity. It was drafting season, and the Ministry of Defence was preparing for (if my recollections are accurate) the Sixth Round of the National Service in Sawa. The local administration in Tio area (Arata sub-zone), like many other localities (esp. in rural areas) had been allocated a national service quota i.e. they had orders to register and send to Sawa a specified number of youngsters. The Tio administration, in turn, apportioned the required number to each village in the sub-zone. As it happens elsewhere, many of the youth in the sub-zone habitually tend to vanish when the drafting season approaches. Most of the villages, therefore, failed to turn in the required number, and those men we saw on the road were among many other village elders and local administrators who were being punished for their failure to meet the ill-famed quota.
Another case of which I have first-hand knowledge took place in 2001 and involves a middle-aged man I know in person. The man, whom I will call Mr. M., was first summoned to a local police station close to his residence in Asmara. When he reported there, he was kept waiting for hours, and finally, under the cover of darkness, escorted by plain-cloth security agents to a previously unknown jailhouse. (Later, after his release, Mr. M. could not exactly locate that secret house, even though he was able to determine which part of the city he was taken to)*. From what little sense Mr. M could make of his surroundings, the place was a single storey villa in a residential area with several rooms and an excessively large service quarters, enclosed by unusually high walls. As soon as he arrived in that place, he was locked in one of the low-ceilinged service quarter rooms. A few hours later, an interrogator appeared in his cell and subjected Mr. M to a gruelling interrogation about the disappearance of his son, a high school student. This was followed by four days and nights of beatings and torture. For several hours at a time, he was suspended from a beam, his hands tied behind his back, in a torture routine locally known as Jesus Christ.
A few days after his release, I was horrified to see his arms still swollen and full of wounds. One of the ironies of this incident is that Mr. M had been an ardent supporter of the EPLF almost all of his adult life.
The following incident happened in one of Asmaras neighbourhoods and was witnessed by a person I know. The incident, which took place in 2002, involves the arrest of one of the residents in the neighbourhood - a middle-aged woman. One of her daughters was expected to go to Sawa but had disappeared. The mother was first summoned by the local administration and ordered to produce the missing daughter. The woman maintained all along that she did not know the whereabouts of her daughter. A few days later, one morning, she was snatched from her residence and put in jail. Now this woman happened to be one of those adetat who were actively contributing to the war effort in the preceding years including donating some of her jewellery (hagerei sillimatei). Two of her male children were already in the national service. (She was later, in 2003, informed of the death of one of them). My friend has a vivid recollection of that morning: I can still remember her bitter, angry words as she was forcibly dragged through the yard and out onto a pick-up vehicle that was waiting in front of the house, she remembers.
Another story, of which I have intimate knowledge, is as brutally typical of the situation as is heartbreaking. A woman was arrested (for dubious reasons, as usual) and taken to one of the countrys mushrooming prisons [name and location of prison withheld]. As she entered the womens chamber, she was astounded by the sheer number of women, of all ages, languishing there. After a few minutes of adjusting to the reality in the chamber, her eyes fell on one particular woman half-lying on a small straw mat and resignedly leaning against the wall. The woman, the new inmate reckoned, was probably in her seventies. As it turned out, this elderly woman was accused, as were many of the other inmates, of hiding the whereabouts of an offspring in her case a granddaughter.
