Friday 6 July 2012

South Sudan Refugee Camp Under Water: Alarming Mortality Rates Indicate Worsening Crisis

Preliminary studies reveal mortality rates nearly double the emergency threshold in a refugee camp in South Sudan’s Upper Nile State, currently home to a quarter of the roughly 120,000 refugees who have fled Sudan’s Blue Nile State since late last year. The death rates were derived from rapid epidemiological surveys carried out in the Jamam refugee camp in Maban County prior to the onset of heavy seasonal rains that have flooded the camp and gravely expanded the risk of illness for the already weakened refugees. All agencies involved in the relief effort, led by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, must find better options for the people living in Jamam camp, one of three refugee camps in the area. Failure to do so will almost certainly lead to more misery and deaths. Read more

South Sudan: World's Youngest Country Yet to Embark on Road to Civil Liberties

The product of a visit to the South Sudanese capital of Juba from 9 to 15 May, it says that the divorce with Khartoum is not entirely consummated and that independence has brought no significant improvement in media freedom. It looks at the media war being waged by the two Sudans and highlights the impact of the ubiquitous, heavy-handed security forces. It also highlights a growing tendency of journalists to censor themselves, and stresses the need for laws regulating the media.

Ranked 111th out of 179 countries in the 2011-2012 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index, South Sudan is currently at a crossroads, the report argues.

“South Sudan is not currently prey to concerted and systematic harassment of its media. But there has been a disturbing accumulation of incidents and isolated acts of repression or intimidation that end up undermining the climate in which journalists and media operate,” Reporters Without Borders said.

In its conclusions, the report urges the authorities to severely punish anyone violating freedom of information and to stop using nationalistic arguments to pressure the media. It urges the military and security apparatus to put a stop to acts of brutality towards journalists. And it urges the National Legislative Assembly to quickly adopt the three media laws that were submitted by the government.

Reporters Without Borders also encourages the international community to condition aid to South Sudan on respect for fundamental freedoms, especially freedom of information, and encourages NGOs to support the development of South Sudan’s media and training of journalists. And finally, it calls on South Sudan’s journalists to adhere to professional ethics and resist pressure to censor themselves. Read more

Monday 2 July 2012

End the negotiations on expelling Eritrean asylum-seekers!

Monday, 02 July 2012 07:02 Kidane Isaac

By KIDANE ISAAC
A single party and president have ruled Eritrea since independence from Ethiopia in 1993.

Eritrean community activists are highly concerned about the recent invitation of Eritrean Ambassador Tesfamariam Tekeste to the Knesset Foreign Workers Committee, where possible return of Eritreans to Eritrea was discussed.

Eritreans came to Israel with the expectation to find protection and safety from the dictatorship in Eritrea and are therefore extremely bothered and disappointed that a so-called democratic state invites a representative of a dictatorial regime to discuss the option of deportation.

These negotiations leave us Eritrean asylum-seekers in a state of fear and insecurity.

In addition, Eritrean asylumseekers are concerned about the current political atmosphere against what the State of Israel calls “infiltrators” and the violent and inciting response by the Israeli society. The measures taken, such as expanding the Saharonim detention facility to over 12,000 places; to prolong imprisonment of asylum-seekers; to discuss the possibility of a “tent city” without basic necessities; and enforce fines against employers that hire “infiltrators” violate Israel’s obligations under international law.

We would like to pose the following questions: is it a crime to flee dictatorship? Are asylumseekers criminals, on par with, for example, arms dealers? Eritrean asylum-seekers forcibly returned to Eritrea face and will continue to face serious risk of arbitrary detention, torture and death. Persecution has become a reality for those forcibly returned from countries such as Malta, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen and Djibouti. Does the State of Israel want to join a list of countries that deported Eritreans to imprisonment and torture? Will the State of Israel take responsibility for the death of deportees from Israel? A SINGLE party and president have ruled Eritrea since independence from Ethiopia in 1993.

Our country is ruled by an extremely repressive regime that forces all citizens – until the age of 65 – to serve in the military for indefinite periods of time.

Anyone of draft age leaving the country without permission is perceived as a traitor, risking imprisonment in inhumane conditions, as well as forced labor and torture.

In a recent press release United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay said that credible sources indicate that “violations of human rights include arbitrary detention, torture, summary executions, forced labor, forced conscription, and restrictions to freedom of movement, expression, assembly and religion.”

In addition we would like to recall the words of the Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who last year said that, “Eritrea is known in the international community as a country that does not safeguard human rights, and anyone who returns there is in danger, including danger of death.”

According to figures of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as of January 2011, 236,000 Eritreans have fled imprisonment, torture and murder in Eritrea and are currently living as refugees and asylum seekers outside of Eritrea. The UNHCR estimated that 3,000 Eritreans fled the country every month, mostly to Ethiopia or Sudan, despite a “shoot to kill” policy for anyone caught attempting to cross the border.

Many of those fleeing were young people escaping indefinite national service conscription.

Families of those who fled faced reprisals, including harassment, fines and imprisonment. Because of a global understanding of the human rights abuses that occur in Eritrea, the UN has insisted on a moratorium on all deportations back to Eritrea.

ERITREANS HAVE been granted refugee status in high numbers in most of the Western world.

According to UNHCR data, in 2010, the United Kingdom granted 66 percent of Eritreans applicants refugee status, Germany 83%, Switzerland 72% and Canada 96%.

Under international refugee law, asylum seekers have a right to claim asylum, which applies regardless of how they enter a country or whether they have identity documents. International law forbids countries from deporting asylum seekers without first allowing them to apply for asylum and considering their cases. Since the State of Israel refuses to grant Eritreans access to the Refugee Status Determination process and Eritreans are therefore not eligible to explain why they left Eritrea, the following is an outline of the dictatorial regime and its impact on Eritreans based on our own experience and a compilation of human rights reports by the United Nations, US State Department, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

THE MAJORITY of Eritrean asylum seekers in Israel fled forced military conscription, as national service is compulsory for all men and women over the age of 18. Our schoolchildren are required to complete their last year of secondary education at Sawa military training camp.

Children as young as 15 are caught in round-ups and taken to Sawa for military training.

National service for many means forced labor in state projects. We are used as slaves to build roads, or working for companies owned and operated by the military or ruling party elites. Although the initial national service period is 18 months, this period is commonly extended indefinitely.

We are paid minimal salaries that do not meet our families’ basic needs. Punishment for desertion and draft evasion include torture and detention without trial.

There were between 5,000 and 10,000 political prisoners in Eritrea including political activists, journalists, religious practitioners and draft evaders.

The whereabouts of most are unknown and they have never been charged or tried for any offense, as the rule of law is non-operative.

There is no freedom of religion in Eritrea; members of faiths other than Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches, and Islam are arrested, arbitrarily detained and illtreated.

For example, believers in Pentecostalism, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses are arbitrarily detained for practicing an unregistered faith.

Eritrea has more prison centers than hospitals. The conditions in these prisons are horrendous, and in many cases amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Many prisoners are held in underground cells or metal shipping containers, often in desert locations, and therefore suffer extremes of heat and cold. Prisoners are given inadequate food and water.

Many prisoners are held in severely overcrowded and unhygienic conditions. Torture and other ill-treatment of detainees are frequent. These conditions remind us all of those suffered by Eritrean hostages imprisoned in trafficking compounds in the Northern Sinai desert. Prisoners are forced to undertake painful and degrading activities, and were tied with ropes in painful positions for long periods. We, Eritreans in Israel, are all too used to this treatment since we escaped from persecution. We cannot be returned to such persecution.

One of the outcomes of the Knesset meeting was to send an Israeli delegation to Eritrea. We urge the delegation to take into consideration the above-mentioned human rights abuses when visiting Eritrea and be critical of the picture the Eritrean regime will paint.

We would like to remind the government of Israel of its obligations under the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol which states that: “No Contracting State shall expel or return (refouler) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

UNHCR’s official Guidelines to States on the protection needs of Eritrean asylum seekers that states that “individuals of draft age who left Eritrea illegally may be perceived as draft evaders upon return, irrespective of whether they have completed active national service or have been demobilized” and that “the punishment for desertion or evasion is so severe and disproportionate such as to amount to persecution.”

We would like to remind the Israeli government to work on our case with care and responsibility and we demand protection and safety until the political situation of Eritrea changes.


Once a political prisoner in Eritrea, Kidane Isaac is now an Eritrean community activist and the co-founder of the Refugee Voice in Israel.
(Source: The Jerusalem Post)
http://asmarino.com/articles/1461-end-the-negotiations-on-expelling-eritrean-asylum-seekers

Eritrean tyranny fuels mass exit

Saturday, 30 June 2012 05:43 Don Connel

Dan Connell   

Draconian military conscription rules in Eritrea mean children as young as 12 can be forced into duty. Dan Connell reports.

Binyam Zaid (22) was an unwilling conscript in the Eritrean army when he was caught trying to flee the country and jailed for 18 months at the Halhal military prison. On May 24 he was released in an amnesty that marked Eritrea’s 21st birthday and sent back to his unit.

Three days later he walked into the bush to relieve himself and never turned back.

Tigiste Beyene (35) was pregnant with her second child when she was sent to a desert prison in northern Eritrea for attending a banned Pentecostal prayer meeting. Upon release she was given 10 months to renounce her faith and pressed to do so by the local Eritrean Orthodox priest who had turned her in and by her family, who had to guarantee the state 50 000 nakfa (R28 000) to get her out. Four months later, she paid a smuggler 30 000 nakfa [R17 000] to take her to Ethiopia.

“The dark side of my life was not the year in prison, but the time I spent at home with my family,” she said as she sat on the dirt floor of her cramped 3m-by-5m mud-brick house. “It was a torment.”

Said Ibrahim (21), orphaned and blind, made a living as a singer in Adi Quala bars when a member of the security police claimed one of his songs had “political” content and detained him at the Adi Abieto prison. After a month he was released but stripped of his monthly disability payments for two years when he declined to identify the lyricist.

“I went back to my village and reflected on it,” he said over tea at an open-air cafĂ© in the Adi Harush camp, set up in 2010 when the Eritrean refugee camp Mai Aini reached capacity. It is already nearing its limit of 20 000, according to United Nations officials. “If the system could do this to a blind orphan, something was very wrong.”

After appealing to his neighbours for help, two boys, aged 10 and 11, helped him to sneak over the border to Ethiopia and asked for asylum with him.

Tense border
The newcomers join more than 65000 Eritreans in five camps along the tense border, whose disputed location was the spark that set off a fierce fight between the two countries from 1998 to 2000 and remains a source of heightened tension.

Most refugees tell similar stories of run-ins with the authorities in this once promising new nation, which has turned into one of the most efficient tyrannies on the continent over the past decade.

What distinguishes the influx here, as in Sudan on Eritrea’s western flank, is that most are young men who, like Binyam, are trying to break free of Eritrea’s national service, which they describe as a system of state-run indentured servitude that ties them up for 10 years or more, often as low-skilled workers in government departments or state- and party-owned businesses for which they are paid a pittance.

Launched in 1995, the programme initially demanded 18 months of military training and work on national reconstruction. Some grumbled at the time, but most saw this as a legitimate obligation of citizenship after a 30-year war for independence from Ethiopia that had left the territory devastated.

Even now, many escapees say they support the concept, just not the length of service, which has been extended further by requiring secondary school students to take their final year of school at a military base to prevent them from escaping. Students who drop out before that, or who fail to achieve passing grades, can be conscripted as young as 12.

Crisis seizing the country
The huge outflow of draft-age men it has triggered has become a major factor in the crisis seizing the country today. Its intensely secretive leadership shows signs of unravelling for the first time since a brutal crackdown on dissent in 2001 that followed Eritrea’s defeat in the last round of the border war.

Former soldiers say that most Eritrean Defence Force units are now operating at 25% of capacity or lower and the overall strength of the army, often estimated by outsiders at 250 000 to 300 000, may actually be less than 80 000.

Perhaps to compensate, Eritrea’s unelected president – former liberation front commander Isaias Afwerki – has ordered all able-bodied men not in the uniformed military to join village and neighbourhood militias and is issuing AK-47 assault rifles to them. He also ordered a shake-up in the defence force command structure, diminishing the authority of General Filipos Weldeyohannes, his favourite for the past five years, and elevating General Tekali “Manjus” Kiflai. It is  something he does periodically with top generals and political appointees to prevent anyone from accumulating a base of support.

Taken against the backdrop of recent Ethiopian incursions along the disputed border – none answered by the Eritreans – these moves could signal the possibility of renewed head-to-head conflict, a threat Afwerki frequently invokes to justify his continuing crackdown on public debate. However, they may also indicate that the embattled leader, who has steadfastly refused to implement a Constitution ratified more than a decade ago and has never permitted national elections, is circling the wagons to protect himself from internal challenges.

His abrupt disappearance from public view for most of April – an unprecedented absence for a man whose daily comings and goings are the centrepiece of coverage in the state-run media – set off a wave of speculation among exiles that he was either incapacitated or dead. Although he reappeared in May, reports that a cabal of second-tier officials is meeting to plot a transition continue to circulate.

Irritant
But, although Eritrea appears obsessed with Ethiopia, the reverse no longer seems to be the case. “Eritrea is an irritant, not a strategic enemy,” said Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

“Our strategic enemies are poverty and backwardness,” he said in a two-hour interview on the subject of Ethiopia’s economic and social transformation. “We have seen poverty at its worst,” he said. “Nothing is more dehumanising.”

A former guerrilla commander himself, who came to power at the same time as Afwerki when the rebel armies they commanded routed the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam, Zenawi insisted that he would step down at the end of his term in 2015. But he wants to wind down the conflict with Eritrea first, stabilising relations and reaching a service agreement to access Eritrea’s Red Sea ports similar to the pacts Ethiopia has with Djibouti, Somaliland, Kenya and Sudan.

“I would like Eritrea to be at peace with itself so it can be at peace with us and we can all benefit from common prosperity,” he said. “But I am not choosy how it happens.”

The decade-long standoff between the two countries, which  played out in a web of proxy wars across the region, none of which reached the point of a direct confrontation, took a turn for the worse in 2010 when Ethiopia charged Eritrea with a bomb plot intended to disrupt an African Union summit in Addis Ababa.

“They wanted to transform Addis into Baghdad,” said Zenawi. “This made it impossible for us to ignore what they were doing.”

Pressure
Since then, Ethiopia has sought to increase the pressure on the Afwerki regime, first lobbying for sanctions at the United Nations and then launching a series of attacks on “hard targets” close to the border inside Eritrea, while simultaneously waging a hearts-and-minds campaign aimed at the Eritrean public.

Ethiopian media have toned down their once vitriolic coverage of Eritrea – or simply ignored it – and Eritreans deported from Ethiopia during the border war have been urged to return to reclaim seized assets. But the most dramatic shift was the announcement of an “open camps” policy permitting refugees to live anywhere in Ethiopia so long as they prove that they have the means to support themselves. More than 1000 Eritreans now attend Ethiopian universities, refugee officials say.

Ethiopia also hosts about 34 Eritrean opposition parties, a number that has refugees here scratching their heads in frustration and leads many to dismiss them as little more than a talk shop. During a week of interviews in three camps, the Addis Ababa-based parties were rarely mentioned.

“The only time we see them is when they want to recruit us,” said one refugee, who denounced the government in Asmara, but saw the squabbling opposition parties as cut from the same cloth.

Many here think that change, when it comes, will arise from within the country and that it may take time to sort itself out. One scenario is for a junta to take over that would include key figures from the three main power centres: the military, the national security forces and the ruling party, the ironically named People’s Front for Democracy and Justice, over which the defence minister, General Sebhat Ephrem, presides.

Inherently unstable
Such a coalition would be inherently unstable because it would comprise bitter rivals, all of whom aspire to step into Afwerki’s shoes, even though none has his charisma or commands a similar following among the rank and file.

What makes Ephrem attractive as a front man is that Afwerki has long treated him as a largely ceremonial figure and given him little actual power, so he is not seen as a threat by his more ambitious colleagues.

Ephrem is also popular with Western governments and carries a degree of credibility with the public for his prominent role in the liberation of the country, first as the head of civilian mobilisation and then as the military chief of staff in the final years of the war.

How long such an arrangement would last, though, is an open question.

Dan Connell, a lecturer in journalism and African studies at Simmons College, Boston, has covered events in Eritrea for more than 35 years (danconnell.net)
(Source: Mail & Guardian)
http://asmarino.com/articles/1459-eritrean-tyranny-fuels-mass-exit