The Eritrean refuge situation has been in a crisis level for a while
and is now intensifying, according to Dan Connell, an author and
longtime friend of Eritrea’s struggle for independence. In an interview
he conducted with Radio Assenna on his recent visit to the Eritrean
refugee camps in North Ethiopia, Mr. Connell said that the refuge
situation is in “continuous flux” where some are being resettled in
third countries, others are moving out to central Ethiopia, following
Ethiopia’s recently implemented Open Camp Policy while many are still
arriving from Eritrea. Dan Connell recently returned from Northern
Ethiopia after vising three Camps that are sheltering Eritrean refuges.“One of the most disturbing parts to it was that an increasing trend towards an unaccompanied minors coming to the boarder,” he highlighted. He elaborated that in “many cases what you see is kids who are searching for an older brothers and sisters or their mothers and fathers who had left before. Mr. Connell said that he has himself witnessed the screening of newly arriving refuges and put the rate at between 30 to 35 Eritreans a day.
“You have a significant number of young men which makes these camps very different from most of refugee camps in the world where you find mainly women, children and the elderly,” Mr. Connell underscored. According to him Eritreans are fleeing in all directions depending their [geographical] background in Eritrea. He elaborated that Majority of Tigrigna speaking highlanders with the small minority of Saho gets Ethiopia more accessible while the Afars and the Tigre finds Djibouti and Sudan respectively to be a much safer route.
Dan Connell said, “whenever you have a significant portion of young
working age men and women fleeing a country, you are basically gutting
the workforce, making it difficult for the country to develop in the
future except under forced servitude.”
Speaking of the situation which lead into the festering of all the
problems and ills that Eritrea found itself today, Dan Connell said
that, despite an uneasy feelings that he and others like him saw early
on when the EPLF refused to include ELF in the transitional government
it set up, hinting the closing door for a future vibrant democratic
society, they kept the “criticisms and questions about them in private
and allowed the situation to percolate along the 1998-2000”.Dan Connell said that the biggest problems at this point are that the Eritrean opposition is “so scattered so internally divided and without clarity for what it stands”. According to him, unless this changed beyond issuing statements, there will not be much interest
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