198 - How Best to Rein in Rogue Nations, Especially Those That Support Putin's Invasion
Israel and Eritrea
When I edited a book in 2007 entitled Worst of the Worst: Dealing with Repressive and Rogue Nations, my contributor colleagues and I rated the world’s most odious states in the following order: North Korea, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Equatorial Guinea, Togo, Uzbekistan, Syria, and Tunisia. Our criteria for “odious” included keeping inhabitants in a state of utter repression, denying all human rights and civil liberties, abandoning the four freedoms, preventing movement and emigration, demanding utter loyalty to the person of the head of state, limited schooling, the absence of free media and free expression, and an insistence on total conformity. Now, a new edition of the book would surely include Eritrea, Africa’s least free country.
In 2007, I wrote — in words that now describe Eritrea’s long-time leader — that the globe’s most odious rulers were sadists, kleptocrats, but “whatever their personal styles, they repress their subjects both for the sheer pleasure of demonstrating omnipotence and for fear of losing power to rivals. Either motive leads to the steady ratcheting up of mechanisms of control: heavy policing, physical attacks, collective punishment, torture, arrest and imprisonment without fair trial, censorship, indoctrination, rigged elections, travel prohibitions, forced relocations, coerced labor, compulsory cultivation of cash crops, and more. Everything is forbidden unless it is expressly permitted. Capriciousness substitutes for reason; unpredictability for logic.”
Over the last weekend, Israeli police had to break up rioting in Tel Aviv between gangs loyal to or paid by the Eritrean government and legal and illegal Eritrean immigrants to Israel opposed to the absolutely abysmal regime in their home country. Ever since Eritrea joined Ethiopia in freeing itself by revolutionary action from a mad Marxist dictatorship led by Mengistu Hailemariam in 1991, Isaias Afwerki, its mustachioed liberation leader, has presided over an immensely tight-fisted, obsessively paranoid, extremely repressive regime along Africa’s Red Sea coast. He is now 77. Eritrea recently joined Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopian army in helping to conquer and pillage Tigray, Ethiopia’s northernmost province; it borders Eritrea. It was among the very few states to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in votes at the United Nations.
Eritrea is an immensely oppressive and secretive polity. Afwerki limits press freedom and curtails religious liberty. Human Rights Watch accuses his government of committing horrific war crimes in Tigray – massacring whole villages and gunning down crowds of children.
Eritrea imposes indefinite conscription on its own people, an unprecedented policy that the United Nations calls “enslavement.” Eritrea furthermore collects a “diaspora tax” on its citizens abroad if it can identify and threaten them sufficiently.
Eritrea’s long years of utter repression have driven hundreds of thousands from their homes. They have fled across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia, into neighboring Sudan and Ethiopia, and to more distant Kenya and Uganda. Thousands have sought asylum in Europe, often after braving abuses in Libya and treacherous voyages across the Mediterranean Sea.
Untold tens of thousands of these fearful Eritreans have made their way over many years through Egypt to Israel. There they have experienced racism and discrimination, being unable to achieve the kind of permanent status that would give them the ability to work legally. Israel has even deported some Eritreans to Rwanda despite global conventions forbidding such arbitrary removals.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu now wants to send the “troublesome” Eritreans back home. His right wing-dominated government is as quick as American Republicans to demand banishing immigrants of all kinds, especially those that are alien culturally and darker in skin color. And Israel has a constructed a wall across a part of the Egyptian Sinai desert.
Controversially, Israel earlier welcomed and even airlifted thousands of Ethiopians who claimed to belong to one of the lost Jewish tribes. But the Eritreans, closely related to such Ethiopians, cannot claim to be historically Jewish.
Sending Eritreans home who escaped Afwerki’s domination and who have made it to safety in Israel would be deadly. But returning any who back his continued rule would be reasonable, thus separating supporters and opponents and removing the danger of further riots. About 24,000 Africans, including thousands of Eritreans, await decisions on their claims for asylum.
That the repressive nature of Eritrea has emerged as an Israeli problem (along with its own harsh treatment of Palestinians) should motivate the African Union and the United Nations to investigate the inner workings of Eritrea much more closely and publicly than ever. The troubles in Israel should now shine a spotlight on Afwerki’s totalitarian methods, his utter denial of democracy, and his fundamental inhumanity.
Our 2007 book noted the then ruler of Turkmenistan’s decision to re-name the months of the year after him and his family. He called himself the Turkmenbashi, head of all Turkmens. Afwerki is just as narcissistic, but without resorting to such preposterous nomenclature changes. But then Turkmenistan had oodles of natural gas and Eritrea has almost nothing that the world wants, or that brings export earnings to his regime.
Eritrea, slightly larger than Pennsylvania with a listed population of almost 4 million, sells sorghum and livestock, mostly to its Red Sea neighbors. Its per capita GDP is $715, low even for Africa. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index rates it 162nd of 180 countries, meaning that it is wildly corrupt.
I wrote about coups d’état in this space on Monday. Eritrea (and today’s Turkmenistan, among others) requires that kind of forceful regime change. But the militaries so far in both countries are loyal to their overlord. Afwerki also keeps a close eye on his generals and changes them frequently.
World order should pay close attention to the systematic denial of fundamental freedoms in states such as Eritrea and Turkmenistan. They deserve to be denounced and their leaders shunned more than they are. The African Union is particularly culpable in this regard, having long ignored Eritrea’s excesses and cruelties. It is past time that the African Union condemned its most egregious anti-democratic entities and suspended them from the Union, barred trade, and publicly separated itself from Eritrea’s bullying and killing of its own citizens.
It is so very tragic that many peoples of the world like those you describe of Eritrea 🇪🇷 are deprived of the most basic human rights. A few of us are born into freedom, lasting or not. It’s a roll of the dice. Nothing is fair. Children should not be born into extreme duress or conflict but when they are, it is very important that journalists like you call the attention of the world to such atrocities so that remedies may be found if enough attention by those in better circumstances will assist. Thank you for caring for these people.
So good to know that we will no longer need to know that we are currently living through the month of Rukhnama were we to find ourselves tomorrow in Turkmenistan ! Thank you, professor, for enlightening us !!!