Eritrea’s ambassador to the European Union, Girma Asmerom, was conspicuously absent. The Europe External Policy Advisors’ moderator had assured everyone that the invite was sent. In an interview published in the September/October issue of the Courier ACP, the ambassador claimed his country to be the most stable in the whole of Africa. But his seat remained empty at the Brussels conference for the promotion of peace and human rights in Eritrea.

The Eritrean nation’s short legacy of attrition and torture could no longer simply be ignored. And yet, polemics and controversy hovered among the participants. The presence of ambassadors from Sudan, Djibouti and, of course, Ethiopia stirred sentiments among the Eritrean freedom fighters, one former US ambassador to Eritrea, Human Rights Watch and numerous civil society organisations and academics.

Two envoys from the European Commission were also there, sitting and waiting for the inevitable barrage of questions on why they would give €120 million in aid from the European Development Fund to a regime that has held its population hostage for nearly two decades, to a regime that explicitly uses forced labour.

Eritrea ranks last in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index, worse than North Korea. This was the mix, and the crossed stares of disbelief and astonishing comments felt all the more surreal. Sitting in the back was Tsedal Yohannes, her eyes swollen with tears. Her presence cut straight through the statements of policy, the rhetoric and the palpable anger.

'Every year it is getting worse', she told Pambazuka News. Yohannes hasn’t heard from her sister, Aster, who was abducted by Eritrean police when she stepped off the flight at Asmara airport in 2003. Aster had been assured by Girma Asmerom, as well as by Eritrea’s ambassador to the US, that she would have a safe passage.

Aster wanted to see her children. Her husband, Petros Soloman, a renowned veteran fighter and former high government official, was already sitting in some dingy cell in one of the many prisons throughout the country, most likely at Eiraeiro, a jail located somewhere north-west of Ghatielay where the celebrated G15 EPLF/PFDJ are thought to languish.

'No one, apart from people like me who live in the comfort of my home, not within reach of the government’s tentacles, can mention their names publicly. We have no information about her well-being, when will she be brought to a court of justice, what is she accused of,' she told the conference participants. She then broke down and eyes turned away. An uncomfortable silence ensued. The small conference room made the whole event feel all the more intimate. Shoulders were against shoulders on the fourth floor of Scotland House, the wall of windows looking out onto a frigid grey overcast sky that is so typical of the Belgian climate.

Eritrea was the promise that never evolved. Three decades of guerrilla conflict, a struggle for independence hard won, the blood of tens of thousands spilled, for a brief semblance of peace and reconciliation in 1993 that has since been spoiled by a kleptocratic dictatorship and a Horn unable to come to terms with lasting peace. According to Professor Bereket Habte Saleassie, himself a former Eritrean freedom fighter, peace in this part of the world is defined simply as the temporary absence of war. The protracted border dispute with Ethiopia has implicated Eritrea’s leadership in countless human rights abuses upon its own people.

Scattered in small communities throughout Eritrea’s western lowlands to north-western Ethiopia, the Kunama minority ethnic group, in particular, have had to endure the arbitrary violence inflicted upon them by the Christian dominant Tigrinya, partisan to the Afwerki leadership in its zealous pursuit of self-proclaimed cultural superiority. The brutality of the 1998–2000 war with Ethiopia, widely considered as the most devastating bilateral war on the African continent in recent decades, and the crackdown of political–civil opposition in September of 2001 has rescinded into chaos and a cruel, inhumane collective punishment.

Even children as young as eight are not immune from arrests, says Alf Hansen from the Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights. There are anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 political prisoners of an estimated population of 4 million. Once, there had been a window of hope – a dash of light into an otherwise obscure corridor of concentrated power. In the early 1990s, US President Bill Clinton placed the nascent nation on a throne, crowned the prince with the promise of stability, democracy and self-reliance. A partner in post-Cold War Africa was in the making. Shortly thereafter, first lady Hillary Clinton, along with top American brass, paid Afwerki numerous visits.

'The taste of power', says Kjell Bondevik, president of the Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights and a former prime minister of Norway, 'has since gripped Isaya Afwerki.' Bondevik had met the former freedom fighter and current Eritrean president in the 1970s, when Afwerki seemingly held true to his Marxist ideals. 'We are not their enemies and we must re-establish trust with Eritrea to encourage regime transition', Bondevik told Pambazuka News.

Bondevik is pushing to open political dialogue to end Eritrea’s isolation and get the United Nations to appoint a special rapporteur and an international commission of inquiry tasked to investigate human rights. Underlying the strategic policy directive proposed by Bondevik is to get the international community to place democracy and the promotion of human rights higher up on the international agenda. This includes the whole Horn of Africa.

Whatever happened to Afwerki’s values and promises is mired in a nation that had itself been betrayed by the international community on too many occasions. But indications into the ruthlessness of his Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) surfaced when in 1974 they executed 11 dissidents – a calculating and portentous move.

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* Nikolaj Nielsen is a freelance journalist based in Brussels. His work has appeared in openDemocracy, Reuters AlertNet and other media. He writes the human rights blog at Foreign Policy Association.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.