Analysis Source 

• IRRI
 

 Posted 24 Sep 2020 Originally published 23 Sep 2020 Origin View original

Millions of the foreign nationals who live and work in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states hail from repressive or conflict-affected countries, and yet their situation rarely features in discussions about forced migration or the hosting of refugees. The result is both a lack of information about the specific protection challenges faced by forced migrants en route to and within the GCC States, and a limited understanding of where these individuals go, and what conditions they face, when they move on.

This new Rights in Exile Policy Paper on Forced Migration from the Gulf States to Africa (#GulfAfricaMigration), begins to address the gap. It documents the experiences of Eritreans who originally travelled to Saudi Arabia after being displaced from Eritrea, but who now find themselves pressured to leave the Gulf, but unable to return to their country of origin. For them, ‘return’ to the Horn of Africa is thus the first move in a series of new migrations and experiences of displacement within and from the continent. Uganda constitutes one of the countries to which they move in search of stability, security and protection. “We have left our country because they would steal our children [and take them] to the military. If a bullet is going to eat that child [gesturing to her son], I will bring him here, not stand and watch them do that. So I brought him here”, said one of female respondents interviewed during the research.

Based on interviews with Eritreans in Kampala, this policy paper outlines the key drivers of this population’s forced departures from Saudi Arabia, including the intensification of the country’s nationalisation programme, and their subsequent journeys to Uganda. The paper further documents the key challenges they face in Kampala, particularly with regards to applying for asylum, but also notes the plight of a sizeable population of Eritreans within the Gulf States, who are both unable to leave and unable to stay there legally, rendering them involuntarily immobile and in a state of extreme precarity. Amidst the extension of attempts to drive out certain low-skilled workers from the GCC States, and the worsening impacts of Covid-19 on employment conditions there, the protection challenges of choiceless departures to Eastern Africa and involuntary immobility will only worsen.

The author of the paper, Dr Georgia Cole noted that “their onward movement from Sudan [first country of asylum], should in no way be seen to invalidate their original claims for persecution, particularly when this has been compounded by the discrimination many of them suffered as Christians in Saudi Arabia”. As one respondent indicated, “we are still refugees. We didn’t get citizenship in Saudi and our government is still creating problems for us”. Another respondent added, “we went to Saudi because we could not wait as refugees in Sudan. We couldn’t wait for money – where was it going to come from?”. In despair, another respondent concluded that "even if we had the full status [in Uganda], there's nothing we can do with it. We left Saudi [Arabia] poor and we stay poor in Kampala. In Kampala, there's no hope for a better tomorrow."

While acknowledging a set of transformative reforms that would improve the situation of Eritrean forced migrants in and from the Gulf States, the paper outlines a number of areas for immediate policy advocacy. These include advocacy around the end of discriminatory forms of taxation within the GCC States that disproportionately target long-term migrants with resident families; strengthening monitoring mechanisms in major migrant-receiving states, such as the GCC States, to ensure that forced migrants and refugees within their labour markets are not returned to countries where they may face persecution or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; and the introduction of alternative legal statuses to regularise the position of forced migrants within Uganda in quicker, more humane and less expensive ways than individualised RSD procedures.

This case study further highlights that the key to assisting forced migrants may not be found in either ‘return to’ or ‘reform of’ the country of origin, particularly in cases where generations of displacement have resulted in significant populations residing (semi-)permanently in third countries. Shifts in employment for Eritreans in Israel, South Sudan and the Gulf States are indeed causing large numbers of these individuals to seek refuge in other African countries as they remain unable and/or unwilling to return to their country of origin. Assistance to these sites of departure and arrival, not the country of origin or traditional spaces of asylum, may prove more beneficial to the forcibly displaced. Basic statistics on return migration can therefore conceal important and widespread patterns of onward movements. Alongside contributing to the potential misallocation of funds and resources for response, this feeds into a misplaced optimism that these ‘return’ movements constitute a durable solution for displaced populations, and takes the pressure off the search for more innovative solutions that respond to their actual movements.

“When we say ‘African solutions for African problems’ this should manifest to protect Africans, and the continent’s body of laws should be interpreted to safeguard and not exclude Africans in-need. This is the least we can expect from the Pan-Africanist and the free movement regimes”, said Achieng Akena, IRRI’s Executive Director.

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SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 ERITREA HUB NEWS

SEPTEMBER 23, 2020ERITREA HUBNEWS

Source: Africa ExPress

Eritrea: Italian school of Asmara closed: Enforced enlistments despite the virus

By Cornelia Toelgyes on September 23, 2020

Special for Africa ExPress
Cornelia I. Toelgyes
23 September 2020

The historic Italian school of Asmara , established in 1903, has temporarily closed its doors. This can be read in a decree signed on 31 August 2020 by the chargé d’affaires of the Italian Embassy in Eritrea. The new ambassador, Marco Mancini, was appointed only a few days ago by the Council of Ministers.

Last year the institute had a thousand members, only 10 percent were Italian.

The reasons for the closure are many and the responsibility is certainly to be attributed to both governments, the onset of the crisis began several years ago. And it got worse with the cut in expenses for Italian schools abroad (DL 64/2017 and DM 2051/2018), thus preventing the use of alternates. In this way it was necessary to resort to the constant recruitment of local teachers; often the chairs were uncovered and this obviously to the detriment of the quality of school education. Certainly Eritrea has interpreted this as a gesture of minor interest on the part of our government towards the Asmara school.

Italian School, Asmara, Eritrea

The situation further precipitated in March of this year because the school principal would not have agreed on the educational suspension, aimed at avoiding the spread of the pandemic, with the competent local authorities. The intervention of the President of the Council of Ministers, Giuseppe Conte, to the Eritrean government was useless. Asmara has not renewed the license with the consequent termination of the bilateral agreement of 2012 and has sealed the building.

The students of Italian nationality were then able to take the maturity exam regularly, something that was denied to Eritrean students, who are forced to take this test in Sawa, where they were enrolled together with their compatriots.

It is not excluded that behind all this there is also the desire to nationalize the school, as was done last year with other institutions owned by the Catholic Church in the country. On that occasion, however, the dictatorship appealed to the application of a 1995 legislation that limits the activities of religious institutions.

In the past, the most deserving Eritrean students of the Italian institute of Asmara enjoyed scholarships given by our government with the aim of contributing to the training of young Eritrean excellence. For about ten years and perhaps more, the allocation of funding for study purposes in favor of students from our former colony has become increasingly rare, to almost completely disappear. The Isaias regime is somewhat reticent in granting visas for them, since they cannot leave the country until they have finished basic military training which lasts several years. An intervention by the Italian government would have been useless, it would have been seen as interference in internal affairs.

SAWA military training camp, Eritrea

At the beginning of the month, photos and videos were posted on social networks framing young people in the capital Asmara as they are loaded onto buses without a mask, headed for the Sawa training camp in the west of the country. Nothing has changed since the 2018 peace treaty signed with Ethiopia, the archenemy of all time.

As every year, the regime forces thousands of young and very young to finish the last year of secondary school in the notorious Sawa military camp, where boys and girls, in addition to studying, undergo hard military training in often prohibitive climatic conditions.

If life is hard for boys in this hell , we can only imagine what it is for girls. And in this period, no measures are applied to stem the spread of the virus: the dormitories are overcrowded, no social distancing and health care is lacking, as reported by the Human Rigts Watch Organization in a recent article.

The impact with Sawa is terrible for everyone; in Eritrea no young person can dream of his own future, everything is written from birth. The deserving students, after finishing secondary school, can attend college (military university) in the same facility and are later sent to work for the government in various ministries. The others, on the other hand, are forced to attend professional courses, which almost always means military service.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), a human rights organization specializing in freedom of worship, said the Eritrean regime recently released 27 Eritrean Pentecostal Christians. Some of them had been lying in Mai Serwa prison, not far from the capital Asmara, for 16 years without any trial.

According to some CSW sources, it seems that the release of the 27 (19 men and 8 women) is somehow connected with Covid-19; they are among the first group of prisoners released out of a total of 54 that the asmarine authorities intend to release soon. Another group of 22 (mostly women and minors) belonging to the Methodist church were reportedly released in July. Their names have not been disclosed so far.

However, to prevent them from leaving the country,  these people are only free on bail; they had to pledge their property documents or those of a guarantor. Since 2002, the government has recognized only Sunni Islam, the Eritrean Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches.

Even today, the dictatorship holds tens of thousands of its citizens in more or less 300 rotten prisons scattered throughout the country. Most of these unfortunates are incarcerated for daring to criticize the regime; extrajudicial detentions, enforced disappearances continue and family members often have no news from their relatives for years.

And if on the one hand Eritrea seems to have released some detainees to avoid the spread of the pandemic – official data do not report deaths linked to Covid-19, only 364 infected, among these 305 recovered – the regime continues the forced enlistment of Young people.

SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 ERITREA HUB NEWS

Source: Watson

[Note: computer translation from the original]

Switzerland reveals data from rejected asylum seekers to the regime in Eritrea. In the National Council, answers are now required from the Federal Council.

9/19/20, 10:09 9/19/20, 2:37 pm

Petar Marjanović

Eritrean refugees have experienced one tightening of asylum after another in the past few years.

In fact, those people fleeing the dictatorship and national service have little chance of protection in Switzerland today: first, illegal departure was denied as a reason to flee, then it was claimed that deserting from national service posed no danger to returnees the Federal Administrative Court ruled that there was no situation of general violence in Eritrea and that a return there would not be generally unreasonable .

This had precarious consequences for the people affected: They are not even “temporarily admitted” – instead, they are increasingly receiving negative decisions on their asylum applications. But because Eritrea still does not accept forced deportations, these people stay here anyway. Paperless and with a minimal need for emergency aid.

The federal government reports rejected refugees to the Eritrean authorities

Research by watson now shows a further tightening. The Switzerland since 2019 informed the Eritrean authorities if a rejected asylum seeker does not want to voluntarily leave Switzerland.

This data exchange was touted by the Federal Council last May as “improved cooperation in the area of ​​identifying individual cases”. Behind it, however, is a new practice that is being criticized by politicians, those affected, lawyers and activists.

The SEM takes the position that expelled persons have to organize their departure themselves by the given deadline. In the case of Eritrea, a voluntary return is reasonable if it is legally established that an asylum seeker no longer needs the “protection of Switzerland”. “However, if the person who is now required to leave the country remains inactive in obtaining travel documents and preparing to leave the country, the SEM will clarify the origin and identity of this person.”

The Swiss authorities exchange personal data with the Eritrean authorities. pictured: keystone

Principle: The Home country must not know anything about the asylum application – does that still apply?

Such identification checks are not unusual in the asylum sector. However, the principle applies that the home authorities of a refugee may not find out about the asylum application, even if the Swiss authorities have rejected it. This principle has been anchored in law since 2007. The asylum law prohibits since then the exchange of personal data of asylum seekers, if as a result the person or members would be harmed.

It is doubtful whether this principle will be adhered to – i.e. whether the SEM is violating the law by forwarding the data to the Eritrean authorities. The exchange of personal data can in principle take place in such a way that officials in Eritrea do not find out about an asylum application. A person involved, who does not want to be named, explains:

«We only report to them that we have an Eritrean here who has to leave the country. The authority then confirms whether this person is really an Eritrean citizen or not. “

Even if the Swiss authorities formulate their identification requests carefully and in accordance with the law: The Eritrean authorities will most likely be able to assume that it is a compatriot who has applied for asylum in Switzerland. This conclusion allows the statistics on “return assistance”: At the end of August, one of 430 ongoing identification requests to Eritrea concerned a case outside the asylum area.

There is no legal answer whether this practice violates the Asylum Act. The renowned migration lawyer and asylum law expert Alberto Achermann describes this as a “question of interpretation”. “It has not been legally clarified from what statistical probability an identification request reveals something about a possible asylum application,” says Achermann. The only thing that is undisputed is that this should not endanger a person or their relatives.

Federal data protection agency defines clear guidelines for data exchange

The Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (EDÖB for short) is more critical. His spokesman Hugo Wyler does not comment on whether figures reveal anything about a possible asylum application. He notes, however, that the Swiss authorities are only allowed to contact their home country or country of origin if “eviction actually takes place / can take place”.

“If you don’t do that for compulsory eviction and also not for voluntary returnees: then what for?”

Asylum law expert Alberto Achermann

In the case of Eritrea, the conclusion is obvious: if a rejected Eritrean refugee does not want to leave Switzerland voluntarily and cannot be brought to Eritrea due to the lack of a return agreement, then data exchange is not allowed. Asylum law expert Achermann asks himself what the purpose of such identification requests is: “If you don’t do it for compulsory eviction and also not for voluntary returnees: what then?”

The SEM justifies this with the statutory mandate, according to which the federal government must provide the cantons with implementation support. “The fact that a person does not want to return voluntarily or that the cooperation in his country of origin is inadequate does not change anything,” SEM spokesman Reto Kormann continues.

Diplomacy and millions did not get Eritrean politics any further

It is possible that Switzerland will want to keep the communication channel to Eritrea open through such cooperation in order to somehow, at some point, be able to negotiate a readmission agreement. The efforts made so far have not been politically successful. An internal SDC report that watson received on the basis of the Public Information Act states that Eritrea’s government does not want any returnees from abroad. “On the one hand because of the lack of remission payments, on the other hand because of a certain fear of troublemakers.”

The SDC report from 2019 was blackened in important parts. screenshot: watson

The report also notes that so far not a single state has had luck with a readmission agreement. Not even a “confidence-building measure” in the form of EU investments amounting to 200 million euros helped . The internal analysis adds laconically: “There was no corresponding consideration in the form of a readmission agreement”.

Eritrea can collect diaspora tax thanks to information from the federal government

The delicate exchange of data is therefore not well received by the Swiss Refugee Aid. She describes the SEM’s approach as “very questionable”. Eritrea is still a “repressive dictatorship and human rights violations are the order of the day”. If the Eritrean authorities learn that there may be citizens critical of the regime in Switzerland, then family members in Eritrea could be put under pressure.

Eritreans on the run: here in Yemen in 2014. image: epa / epa

Eliane Engeler, spokeswoman for refugee aid, also mentions the so-called “diaspora tax”. Eritrea levies a 2 percent tax on its citizens abroad, with which the country is to be built up. In 2013, the Federal Council was unable to confirm rumors that this tax would also be collected by force or with attempted pressure. However, he found that Eritrean embassies sometimes insist on paying the diaspora tax before offering a compatriot any consular service.

Such a consular service would be, for example, official papers, birth certificates or even passports. If it turns out that a rejected asylum seeker has deserted from the Eritrean national service, a higher payment or a “letter of remorse” will be required. There is no guarantee that you can feel safe after voluntary return. That is why many Eritreans stay in Switzerland or hide elsewhere in order to be outside the radar of the regime-loyal embassy.

SP National Councilor wants to request answers from the Federal Council

The SP politician Samira Marti represents the canton of Baselland in the National Council. pictured: keystone

The delicate exchange of data is also causing criticism in the Federal Palace. SP National Councilor Samira Marti says: “If it is true that the SEM lets the Eritrean authorities know which people have been refused asylum in this country, then that is a real scandal.” The Basel bidder sits on the National Council’s State Political Commission, which deals with the Federal Council’s migration policy. Marti announced that she would address this exchange of data in the commission and demand answers from the Federal Council on the legality of this “questionable partnership between Switzerland and Eritrea”.

In her statement, the social democrat emphasizes the precarious asylum situation of the people from Eritrea. «Since the tightening of the case law, many Eritreans have been living in unworthy conditions. If Switzerland now reports rejected asylum seekers to the Eritrean regime, then it is a new summit in the tragic asylum policy. “

Switzerland was sharply criticized for this in May 2020 by a special rapporteur for the UN Human Rights Council. The report expressed concern about the 56 people who have voluntarily returned to Eritrea: “These people could be at risk because their return conditions cannot be adequately monitored.”

Former Federal Councilor Didier Burkhalter, the predecessor of today’s Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis, does not want to comment on the current development between Switzerland and Eritrea. Burkhalter stresses, however, that his principle on human rights issues has not changed. “Only a clear improvement in very specific areas of human rights” would make it possible to start a “real dialogue with this country”. In a statement to watson, he mentions the possibility for “neutral and credible organizations” such as the International Red Cross to visit prisons in Eritrea.

This is still not the case today.

News and Press Release

 

Source: OCHA

Posted:  21 Sep 2020

 

Originally published  21 Sep 2020

SEPTEMBER 20, 2020 MARTIN PLAUT NEWS, POLITICAL PRISONERS, RESEARCH & INFORMATION

Source: Prisoners List

By Eritrean journalist Ahmed Raji, published on : 09/18/2020 – 06:58

Find it here: Prisoners list ERI 4 pd 13b

An online memorial to missing Eritrean prisoners. Setit site

Text by:Leonard VincentTo follow

On September 18, 2001, 19 years ago, the main reformists in Eritrea were arrested after denouncing the “dictatorial drift” of President Issayas Afewerki. This roundup marked the start of a wave of arrests in the following days, especially among journalists in the capital. None of these prisoners have been released to date and it is not known where they were held or their state of health. But to ensure that political prisoners are not forgotten, Eritreans in the diaspora have compiled an exceptional document released last month, listing the missing in detail.

PUBLICITY

We inevitably think of a memorial. Leafing through the fifty or so pages published last month on the Setit site , named after Asmara’s major newspaper which forcibly ceased to appear in September 2001, is like walking along the wall of a virtual monument: page after page follows one another. identity photographs, old and banal images, faces never seen for twenty years; short biographies, a job, a background; sometimes just a name and an approximate date of arrest, for lack of being able to find the families or relatives of the countless political detainees in this closed country in the Horn of Africa.

Since his New York exile, the former Eritrean journalist Ahmed Raji coordinated this publication based on data from NGOs, human rights associations, activists in exile, and families. He who was the friend of many of these disappeared from Eritrean prisons assumes a militant act in the face of ”  exceptional cruelty  “.

“  The government’s strategy is to simply throw these people in jail and forget about them ,” he explains. The prisoners are not even questioned! Some have been in prison for years, even decades, without knowing why they are being held. The guards who fled the country say that they are simply told: your role is to prevent them from escaping, period!  ”

Enforced disappearance is a common practice

Thanks to these rare testimonies from fugitives, it is also assumed that some of these prisoners died in detention, for lack of treatment or as a result of unfathomable psychological distress. Sometimes, very rarely, a body is returned to the families, but most of the time their death remains only a hypothesis. Similarly, we know the places where they would be held, secret or not, but without great certainty. The document published on theSetit also offers a satellite photo of one of these prisons, the isolated penitentiary of Eiraeiro, lost in the mountains, opening a sad chronological timeline going from independence in 1991 to the present day.

Because enforced disappearance is a common practice in Eritrea. “  It turns out that this is an old tactic of the ruling party, the Popular Front for Democracy and Justice, the FPDJ, which during the national liberation struggle was called the Popular Front for the Liberation of ‘Eritrea, the EFLP, explains Ahmed Raji. We have data on disappearances in the bush, long before independence. But that would be another story, more work to be done.  ”

“Remembering is an act of defiance”

On the cover page of the document is a motto: “  Remembering is an act of defiance . This is the same message that Ahmed Raji hammers to justify this painstaking work. “  By making these people disappear, the intention of the government is to ensure that they are forgotten ,” he explains. The intention is to erase them from the collective memory of the people. And our goal is quite simply to prevent the regime from achieving that goal.  ”

The profiles of the missing are diverse. They are not only famous politicians or opponents, rebellious soldiers, but also ”  young and old, women and men, intellectuals, peasants or teachers,” says Ahmed Raji. A bit like a parallel Eritrea.  “. A host of faces and shattered destinies, he concludes, in the form of “a  mirror image of Eritrea.” But an Eritrea that would be underground.  ”

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020 MARTIN PLAUT NEWS

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020 ERITREA HUB NEWS

Source: Africa is a country

Eritrea’s deteriorating state

BY

Abraham T. Zere

The Eritrean government continues to force students into military service in the middle of a pandemic. Things are about to get even worse.

Asmara, Eritrea. Image credit Clay Gilliland via Wikimedia Commons.

The Government Response Stringency index (GRSI) is a composite score developed by researchers at Oxford University, to compare countries’ policy responses to the coronavirus pandemic. It uses nine response indicators to rank governments, including school closures, workplace closures, and travel bans in its assessment of who has the strictest measures. Eritrea has topped the list most of the time.Eritrea has enforced a total lockdown since April 1, effectively banning all public transport, closing schools, and suspending everything in the literal sense, even postponing publishing the state newspaper—the only newspaper in the country—for five months. Although the pandemic’s consequences had been fatal across the world, in extremely impoverished countries like Eritrea where the essential food items are rationed in stores run by the ruling party, the magnitude of the lockdown is immense. Eritrea’s elites who hold absolute power have already frozen the state in time for more than two decades. Now families who have relatives in the diaspora depend on remittances to survive, subjected to extremely low exchange rates set by the ruling party’s financial sector, while the unlucky ones without family abroad suffer even more.

While the entire country has been put on hold, there is always an exception. During the past months, President Isaias Afwerki has traveled internationally three times to Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt with his big entourage. He also received Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the President of Sudan’s Sovereign Council, General Abdul Fattah al-Burhan in July and September, respectively. Prior to that he has been absent from the scene for more than two months ensuing the usual rumor of that he is incapacitated, or dead.

The second exception is secondary in school in Sawa, the notorious military training center. Since 2003, the final year of secondary school has been taught at Sawa. Eritrean secondary school students as young as 16 years old attend their last grade of secondary school at the harshest place and most unconducive environment. According to the country’s national service proclamation and other international treaties Eritrea signed, the minimum age of military training is 18. With barely any facilities; a temperature that reaches up to 45 degree Celsius (about 113 Fahrenheit); and very frequent sandstorms, Eritrean children in Sawa are officially introduced to the machinery of slavery. In the one-year program, students combine military drills and academic studies. After spending a year in the military camp, they sit for the secondary school graduation certificate examination, which decides the fate of their life: either join colleges or head to the army with no exit. The school has been described by Human Rights Watch’s senior Africa researcher as: “at the heart of its repressive system of control over its population.”

Many governments have been releasing thousands of prisoners and adopting their programs to ensure social distance since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. The Eritrean diaspora has been pleading to their “government” to release prisoners of conscience and disperse thousands of students in Sawa, known for its overcrowding. In early April, the head of Economic Affairs for Eritrea’s ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) party, Hagos “Kisha” Gebrehiwet, in an online seminar said that Sawa and prisons are the safest places for quarantine as they are secluded. About three months later, Sawa hosted two heads of states with their first ladies accompanied by an entourage. In July, Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, facing tremendous pressure at home and in search of externalizing his domestic crises, visited Sawa to observe “graduation-parade rehearsals.”

A month later in mid-August, Sawa held its graduation ceremony, televised live. President Isaias Afwerki, who has never attended any graduation ceremonies of the defunct University of Asmara or other colleges, never misses Sawa’s ceremony. There was no indication in the ceremony of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Amid the strictest lockdown, 11th grade students have been recalled in August in what the minister of information described as “partial easing of restrictions,” to make up for the lost months. The aim was to prepare them at Sawa to attend their final year of training. Partial easing of lockdown restrictions, however, did not materialize apart from the recall of the students.

According to official announcements from the country’s ministry of health, the latest cases of COVID-19 have been from nationals who have returned from neighboring countries and no local transmission has been reported since early June. Yet, the lockdown has not been eased and there are now different quarantine centers for nationals who are returning from neighboring countries. It seems the pandemic came as a blessing for the regime that has been looking for excuses to confine its population.

There is no sense of urgency in today’s Eritrea. It is a country under self-imposed political siege. Eritrean parents are still unsure about the fate of their children who were expected to start school in September. There is not any information about the lockdown’s end. In an already improvised state, famine has started hitting hard. The only response from the state has been to reinforce the lockdown.

There is no way to challenge the state policies from inside Eritrea. Former students of Sawa, in exile, have been campaigning to end the practice of sending secondary school children to the military camp. The campaign #EndHighSchoolInSawa has gained traction among the Eritrean diaspora and has been amplified inside the country with the help of the diaspora-based independent media. Some prominent figures, such as former defense minister and now an exile, Mesfin Hagos, have joined the call.

“The most important impact of the #EndHighSchoolInSawa campaign is it re-sensitizes as many Eritreans were numb and accepted this hideous policy as normal,” says US-based Haikel Negash, who was among the initiators of the campaign; she is also a former student of the school. Her colleague and a PhD student of history at Queens University, Samuel Emaha maintains that although they could not stop the school, “The campaign aims to bring the issue to the agenda and attention of the common people. The campaign effectively brought the problems associated with the program, mainly because former students lacked the platform to speak about the school.”

Many former students of the school have now been loudly describing their harsh treatment at the school. Some former students have shared that they experienced rape and sexual harassment at Sawa, in line with reports on the problem from human rights organizations for years.

But the campaign was unable to force the Eritrean government to change its policy. Since September 8, high school students from all over the country have been heading to Sawa. The possible consequences of such a policy in the pandemic is not difficult to imagine. Students in Sawa live in crowded military barracks in the most communal lifestyle anyone could imagine. Social distancing is not only impossible, but there is enforced physical proximity. None can justify that the benefits of this untimely pronouncement would outweigh the possible consequences. Many have been pleading for the government to reconsider its decision, in the face of pandemic. But the regime prefers to contribute to the fastest possible spread of the pandemic.

Source=https://eritreahub.org/eritreas-deteriorating-state

SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 ERITREA HUB ETHIOPIA, NEWS

Numbers being held in appalling conditions may be far greater than first thought

Source: Daily Telegraph

ByZecharias Zelalem and Will Brown, AFRICA CORRESPONDENT15 September 2020 • 11:21am

Saudi Arabia has come under mounting pressure from governments and human rights groups to release African migrants detained in deplorable conditions CREDIT: The Telegraph

Details are beginning to emerge showing that the sheer scale of Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on African migrants is far greater than anyone imagined.

Last month a Sunday Telegraph investigation found that hundreds if not thousands of mainly Ethiopian migrants are being kept in appalling conditions in centres across the Gulf Kingdom as part of a drive to stop the spread of coronavirus.

Using smuggled phones detainees detailed horrific accounts of disease, beatings and suicide.

But recent statements from Abdo Yassin, Ethiopia’s Consul General in Jeddah suggest that the centres highlighted by the Telegraph are just the tip of the iceberg.

Last week, Mr Yassin said that dozens of prisons are housing Ethiopians and that about 16,000 Ethiopian migrants are being held at just one detention centre at Al Shumasi, near the holy city of Mecca.

“Jeddah has over 53 prisons. Ethiopians are held in every one of them,” Mr Yassin told the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation. “If you take the one at Al Shumaisi…located around 60km from Jeddah, there are about 16,000 Ethiopians kept in the prison and the holding cells.”

Last month, the Telegraph was able to communicate with migrants at the centres at both Al Shumasi and Jazan, a port city on the border in Yemen. It is unclear how many people are being held at the detention centre at Jazan.

However, satellite images of the Jazan centre show more than a dozen buildings there. There are believed to be several other centres across the Kingdom.  Earlier this month, under international pressure from human rights groups, Western politicians and the United Nations, Saudi Arabia said it would investigate all of its detention centres.

However, migrants told the Telegraph that since news of their plight went around the world, they have been beaten brutally by prison guards who scoured the rooms for smuggled phones. They say they were stripped naked and that some of them were put in handcuffs during the searches.

The Ethiopian government in Addis Ababa has come under mounting pressure at home to repatriate the migrants stuck in the centres after the Telegraph revealed that officials tried to stop the migrants communicating with the outside world, most probably to avoid a diplomatic fall out with oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

Last week, nearly 150 women and children were repatriated to Ethiopia from Saudi Arabia. This was initially greeted as good news.

However, an Ethiopian government document from August shows that their repatriation was part of an arrangement between Saudi and Ethiopian authorities, which required migrants to purchase their own one-way tickets home from Ethiopian Airlines: something that the vast majority of impoverished migrants cannot do.

To make matters worse, Ethiopia’s embassy in Riyadh announced on Monday that Saudi immigration authorities had voided the agreement, leaving Ethiopian migrants with no remaining avenues to escape the Kingdom.

“It is shocking to hear that up to 16,000 Ethiopian migrants might be languishing in detention in the  Al Shumaisi facility. Human Rights Watch and the Telegraph documented horrific conditions in two other centres in Jazan Saudi Arabia where thousands more Ethiopian migrants may also reside,” said Nadia Hardman, a researcher at the NGO Human Rights Watch.

“We repeat our call on Saudi Arabia to immediately release the most vulnerable and improve the miserable conditions for the thousands that remain.”