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.”

• Infographic Source  UNHCR   Posted 14 Sep 2020 Originally published 31 Aug 2020 Origin View original
• Download Infographic(PDF | 495.15 KB)

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020 MARTIN PLAUT ETHIOPIA, NEWS

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020 MARTIN PLAUT NEWS

Government Ignores its own Covid-19 Restrictions

Source: Human Rights Watch

Government Ignores its own Covid-19 Restrictions

Laetitia Bader

Director, Horn of Africa

LaetitiaBader

Satellite Imagery of the Sawa military camp, including the Warsai Yikealo Secondary School, recorded in January 2015.  Imagery © DigitalGlobe – Maxar Technologies 2019; Source: Google Earth

Videos and photographs circulating on social media earlier this week showed buses in Eritrea’s capital, Asmara, crowded with students, who were not wearing masks, as they were separated from their families and sent off to a military training camp in the country’s west.

Each year, Eritrea’s government forces thousands of secondary school students, some still children, to attend their final school year in the infamous Sawa military camp, where students study but also undergo compulsory military training.

This year’s departures take place amid a lockdown. To curb the pandemic, the government imposed strict movement restrictions and closed schools. Yet it still decided to send the students off to Sawa and risk exposing them to the virus.

That is likely because the final secondary school year in Sawa serves as the government’s main conveyor belt through which it conscripts its citizens into indefinite government service.

Last year we reported on what life in Sawa looks like: students under military command, with harsh military punishments and discipline, and female students reporting sexual harassment and exploitation. Apart from Sawa’s other defects, dormitory life there is crowded, facilitating the spread of the virus if introduced. The danger is compounded by its very limited health facilities.

This has a devastating impact on students’ futures. From Sawa, those with poor grades are forced into vocational training – and most likely military service. Those with better grades go to college, then into a civilian government job. Students have little to no choice over their assignment.

Former Sawa students abroad have campaigned recently for the government to stop sending students to Sawa, but in vain.

Even in “normal” times, life at Sawa is grim and abusive. During the pandemic, it is likely even more dangerous. Eritrea will not build education back better after the pandemic if it funnels students into military camps.

Instead of bussing new students to Sawa, the government should allow students serving in Sawa to return home and let them choose where they complete their final year in school, including at public secondary schools closer to home. It should end compulsory military training during secondary school and ensure that no one underage is conscripted.

Eritrea’s youth deserve real reform if they are to have any hope of a brighter future.

Palestine recalls Bahrain envoy, denounces latest deal as 'another treacherous stab to the Palestinian cause'.

Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner travelled to Bahrain as part of his Middle East tour earlier in September [Bahrain News Agency/Handout via Reuters]

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Bahrain has joined the United Arab Emirates in agreeing to normalise relations with Israel, in a US-brokered deal that Palestinian leaders denounced as "another treacherous stab to the Palestinian cause".

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, announced the deal on Twitter on Friday after he spoke by phone to Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"This is truly a historic day," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, saying he believed other countries would follow suit.

"It's unthinkable that this could happen and so fast."

Joint Statement of the United States, the Kingdom of Bahrain, and the State of Israel pic.twitter.com/xMquRkGtpM

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 11, 2020

In a joint statement, the United States, Bahrain and Israel said "opening direct dialogue and ties between these two dynamic societies and advanced economies will continue the positive transformation of the Middle East and increase stability, security, and prosperity in the region".

A month ago, the UAE agreed to normalise ties with Israel under a US-brokered deal scheduled to be signed at a White House ceremony on Tuesday hosted by Trump, who is seeking re-election on November 3.

The ceremony is due to be attended by Netanyahu and Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The joint statement said Bahrain's Foreign Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani will join that ceremony and sign an "historic Declaration of Peace" with Netanyahu.

Like the UAE agreement, Friday's Bahrain-Israel deal will normalise diplomatic, commercial, security and other relations between the two countries. Bahrain, along with Saudi Arabia, had already dropped a ban on Israeli flights using its airspace.

Friday's joint statement only made passing mention of the Palestinians, who fear the moves by Bahrain and the UAE will weaken a longstanding pan-Arab position that calls for Israeli withdrawal from already illegally occupied territory and acceptance of Palestinian statehood in return for normal relations with Arab countries.

The statement said Bahrain, Israel and the US will continue efforts "to achieve a just, comprehensive, and enduring resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to enable the Palestinian people to realise their full potential".

'Grave harm'

Netanyahu welcomed the agreement and thanked Trump.

"It took us 26 years between the second peace agreement with an Arab country and the third, but only 29 days between the third and the fourth, and there will be more," he said, referring to the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan and the more recent agreements.

For its part, Bahrain said it supports a "fair and comprehensive" peace in the Middle East, according to BNA state news agency. That peace should be based on a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the report said, quoting King Hamad.

Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and senior White House adviser, hailed the agreements as "the culmination of four years of great work" by the Trump administration.

Speaking to reporters in a call from the White House soon after Friday's announcement, Kushner said the UAE and Bahrain agreements "will help reduce tension in the Muslim world and allow people to separate the Palestinian issue from their own national interests and from their foreign policy, which should be focused on their domestic priorities".

The Palestinian leadership, however, condemned the agreement as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause and recalled the Palestinian ambassador to Bahrain for consultations.

Palestinians have protested against Arab states normalising ties with Israel [File: Raneen Sawafta/Reuters]

In a statement, the Palestinian Authority said it "rejects this step taken by the Kingdom of Bahrain and calls on it to immediately retreat from it due to the great harm it causes to the inalienable national rights of the Palestinian people and joint Arab action".

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), based in Ramallah, the occupied West Bank, called the normalisation "another treacherous stab to the Palestinian cause". And in Gaza, Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said Bahrain's decision to normalise relations with Israel "represents a grave harm to the Palestinian cause, and it supports the occupation".

'A purely Saudi decision'

Khalil Jahshan, executive director at the Arab Center of Washington, said Saudi acquiescence was key to Bahrain's decision.

"It is a purely Saudi decision. In the absence of the ability, due to internal constraints, by the leadership in Saudi Arabia to respond positively to Trump, they gave him Bahrain on a silver platter."

Bahrain, a small island state, is home to the US Navy's regional headquarters. Saudi Arabia in 2011 sent troops to Bahrain to help quell an uprising and, alongside Kuwait and the UAE, in 2018 offered Bahrain a $10bn economic bailout.

Al Jazeera's Nida Ibrahim, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, agreed, saying Palestinian officials believe the Bahrain and the UAE deals would not have happened "without regional backing".

"The fear among the Palestinians is that these deals are a green light for more Arab states to normalise with Israel," she said. "And many Palestinians say that for years they saw the US as Israel's lawyer or partner and now they see it as Israel's agent. That's because Trump is the one announcing these normalisation deals."

Since taking office, the Trump administration has pursued staunchly pro-Israel policies, including moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, ordering the PLO to shutter its Washington, DC, office and recognising Israel's occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights.

The US president and his advisers have championed a so-called "deal of the century" proposal to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - and they have courted Arab Gulf states to try to drum up support for that initiative.

Bahrain, for example, hosted a US-led conference in June 2019 to unveil the economic side of the proposal, and Emirati and Saudi leaders voiced support at the time for any economic agreement that would benefit Palestinians. Palestinian leaders boycotted that summit, however, saying the Trump administration was not an honest broker in any future negotiations with Israel.

Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera's Kimberly Halkett said while the deals between Israel, Bahrain and the UAE are not high on the list of priorities for most US voters, a large portion of Trump's supporters are Evangelical Christians who favour his pro-Israel positions.

Halkett said Trump is trying to show them before the November 3 contest that he can get the "deal of the century" done in his second term.

"He's acting as if this is a framework that will bring about that so-called 'deal of the century'," Halkett said, despite the fact that "the president and his administration's representatives are not even talking to the Palestinians right now".

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

Source=https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/09/israel-bahrain-agree-establish-full-diplomatic-ties-200911171014685.html

October 12, 2019

Source: Washington Post

Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, left, and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed disembark from an airplane upon arrival at Juba International Airport in South Sudan before meeting with South Sudan’s president for tripartite talks on regional affairs on March 4. (Akuot Chol/AFP/Getty Images) By Adam Taylor October 11 at 2:14 PM

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, with the committee that decides the awards singling out his efforts to achieve peace with neighboring country Eritrea.

But notably, the prize was not awarded to Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, Abiy’s partner in the talks.

Instead, Nobel Committee Chair Berit Reiss-Andersen simply acknowledged that “peace does not arise from the actions of one party alone” and said that they hope the “peace agreement will help to bring about positive change for the entire populations of Ethiopia and Eritrea.”

In some years, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to multiple parties for their work trying to end a conflict. In 1994, for example, the prize was awarded to Israel’s Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, as well as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

But the decision to award the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize only to Ethiopia’s Abiy was hardly surprising. Eritrea’s Isaias leads one of the most repressive military dictatorships in the world; his government has been compared to North Korea and accused of possible crimes against humanity.

And even though he reached an agreement with Abiy in Eritrea’s capital last year to end the conflict between the two nations, in practice the agreement remains largely unimplemented, and there have been little visible benefits for Eritreans.

“I think there was a lot of hope in Eritrea,” said Laetitia Bader, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “But very quickly, Eritreans saw that things were not changing on the ground.”

Vanessa Tsehaye, an Eritrean activist based in London, noted, “I’d say it has brought no positive developments for the Eritrean people, because the lived reality is the same more than a year after the peace deal.”

The conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia stretches back decades. After European powers left occupied Eritrea in 1951, landlocked Ethiopia claimed the land of its coastal neighbor, eventually resulting in a civil war that started in 1961 and lasted three decades.

In 1991, Eritrean forces helped overthrow the communist-led government in Ethiopia, and two years later, Eritreans voted for independence.

However, the two nations did not reach an agreement on the border between them, and in 1998, small-scale border incidents around the town of Badme grew into a full-fledged conflict. It’s estimated that almost 100,000 people died, and after it ended, Ethiopian troops had control of Badme and other disputed areas.

As part of a peace agreement brokered in Algiers, in 2000, a commission cited colonial-era documents to rule that the land around Badme was part of Eritrea. But Ethiopia did not agree to the arbitrated border, and the two sides remained in a standoff.

Their relationship was dubbed “no war, no peace,” which meant that diplomatic, trade and transport ties were severed, and the countries remained on a war footing, clashing repeatedly and supporting rival rebel groups.

Abiy, a former intelligence officer who had taken part in the operations to drive Eritreans out of Badme, took office as Ethiopia’s prime minister in April 2018 and almost immediately began changes in the country, which had long been ruled by authoritarian governments.

On June 5, 2018, Abiy made a key pledge to accept the peace agreement with Eritrea and withdraw Ethiopian troops from occupied territory. Within weeks, Isaias responded by saying that both nations yearned for peace.

Just a month after Abiy’s announcement on July 8, the Ethiopian leader touched down at the airport in Eritrea’s capital Asmara, where he was greeted by Isaias. The leaders embraced and later announced they would reopen embassies, allow direct communications and restore transport links.

“Love is greater than modern weapons like tanks and missiles,” Abiy said. “Love can win hearts, and we have seen a great deal of it today here in Asmara.”

Despite the signs of goodwill, critics say not much has changed between the two nations. Among the Eritrean diaspora, many voiced disapproval for the Nobel Peace Prize focusing on the agreement with Eritrea when so little had changed in practice.

“I didn’t know one could win a peace award without achieving peace!” Selam Kidane, a London-based activist wrote on Twitter.

Border crossings between Ethiopia and Eritrea were opened last year, but Eritrea soon closed the border again. Analysts suspect that Eritrea, which has virtually complete control over its citizens, is delaying because of fears about wider reform.

Isaias, a former freedom fighter, has led the country since 1993, and his government has left no room for opposition. In 2015, the United Nations released the results of a year-long investigation into human rights in the country, finding “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations,” including extrajudicial killing, torture and forced labor.

Bader said that there was little evidence that there had been any positive change to some of the most restrictive elements, such as the arbitrary arrest of people for perceived political crimes, or the indefinite national service that sees many Eritreans permanently conscripted to the military.

“The government has often argued that it was the ‘no war, no peace’ situation with Ethiopia was what forced it to conscript its whole population,” Bader said.

Jeffrey Smith, the director of Vanguard Africa, said that he viewed the Nobel Prize as “encouraging Prime Minister Ahmed and the new regime in Ethiopia as much if not more than it is about the progress already made.”

But for activists such as Tsehaye, the peace deal had helped legitimize Isaias, the leader of an isolated and repressive nation of 5 million people on the world stage. The Eritrean leader had traveled with Abiy to foreign nations, and the United Nations lifted sanctions on Eritrea.

“Peace is always a good thing, it’s never something that we should be against,” Tsehaye said, “but we need to understand peace beyond its literal meaning of no war.”

Source=https://eritrea-focus.org/why-eritrea-didnt-win-a-nobel-for-its-peace-accord-when-ethiopia-did/