Eritrea: Crackdown on Draft Evaders’ Families

Thursday, 09 February 2023 22:02 Written by

Site logo image

Martin Plaut posted: " The government has intimidated and harassed people of all ages to pressure them into handing over missing relatives. Relatives of those affected by the expulsions said that the government has confiscated homes of the parents of suspected draft evaders. " Martin Plaut

 

Martin Plaut

Feb 9

The government has intimidated and harassed people of all ages to pressure them into handing over missing relatives. Relatives of those affected by the expulsions said that the government has confiscated homes of the parents of suspected draft evaders. This has left older people and women with children without a roof over their heads.

Source: Human Rights Watch

Collective Punishment Over Forced Conscription Campaign

(Nairobi) – The Eritrean government has in recent months punished relatives of thousands of alleged draft evaders as part of an intensive forced conscription campaign, Human Rights Watch said today.

Eritrean security forces have been heavily involved in operations in support of the Ethiopian government since the outbreak of conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region in November 2020, and have carried out some of the conflict’s worst abuses. Eritrean authorities have conducted waves of roundups in Eritrea to identify people it considers draft evaders or deserters. Since September 2022, when Ethiopian and Eritrean forces carried out joint offensives in the Tigray region, the Eritrean government has inflicted further repression, punishing family members of those seeking to avoid conscription or recall, to enforce widespread forced mobilization, including of older men. Such punishment has included arbitrary detentions and home expulsions.

“Struggling to fill its dwindling fighting ranks, Eritrea’s government has detained and expelled older people and women with young children from their homes in order to find people it considers draft evaders or deserters,” said Laetitia Bader, deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Eritrea should immediately end its collective punishment of relatives of those who refuse to comply and instead focus on reforming its ruthless indefinite military service system.”

Eritrea has a policy of indefinite national service, including compulsory military conscription, which has been central to the government’s broader repression of its population since the 1998-2001 border war with Ethiopia, and its aftermath.

The statutory national service of 18 months was indefinitely extended to require all male and female adults under age 40 to be available to work at the direction of the state, either in a military or civilian capacity. In practice, adults older than 40 are also forced to serve. Despite the country’s 2018 peace deal with Ethiopia, the government has refused to reform this repressive system.

Once conscripted into the military, young men and women, some still minors, have very few options for discharge. As a result, they risk serious reprisals to escape what a United Nations Commission of Inquiry has characterized as “enslavement.”

Human Rights Watch interviewed 14 people who had recently fled Eritrea, relatives of people affected by the forced conscriptions and reprisals, as well as 11 journalists and other analysts, two of whom were inside Eritrea as the campaign took place. Human Rights Watch did not interview anyone still inside Eritrea for security reasons. Human Rights Watch also reviewed satellite imagery that corroborated important aspects of the accounts of those interviewed through mid-January 2023. In February, Human Rights Watch received reports of the return of some military units that had been sent to fight in Tigray, and of some reservists who had been at the border inside Eritrea.

The latest conscription drive started mid-2022, with the authorities targeting people considered draft evaders, including students who have dropped out of school to evade military training, as well as army deserters, some of whom already had served for years. Then, in mid-September, the government mobilized reservists, primarily men aged 50 through to 60, many of whom had been officially discharged from active military duty but continue to hold arms and are required to conduct guard duties. On September 17, Eritrea’s information minister told the media that only “a tiny number” of reservists were being called up, denying that the entire population was being called up.

During the latest mobilization drive, especially from September onward, the security forces have set up checkpoints throughout urban and rural areas. In addition, by working with the local officials, security forces have gone door to door, ostensibly to confirm eligibility for coupons that grant people access to subsidized goods, but in fact, to also identify draft evaders. They used the visits, people interviewed said, to identify discrepancies between the number of family members the coupon system said should be in a particular home and those of conscription age who were living there, often retaliating against family members who the authorities claimed had failed to track the missing people down.

Older parents as well as women with young children have been temporarily detained for days, some reportedly longer, and have been expelled from their homes during the government’s searches, Human Rights Watch found. A 71-year-old woman was evicted from her home in Asmara, the capital, because she was unable to confirm the whereabouts of one of her sons being sought by the authorities. Another son who lives abroad said:

My mother has some health issues, so the neighbors tried to plead with the authorities not to lock up the house after my first brother turned himself in. But when the second didn’t come, they shut up the house.

An Eritrean woman abroad whose relatives have also been evicted said: “The confiscation of homes, we’ve never seen this before. It’s an act of desperation.”

Despite a November cessation of hostilities agreement, signed between the Ethiopian federal government and Tigrayan authorities, Human Rights Watch continued to receive reports of ongoing roundups and reprisals through early 2023.

Many presumed draft evaders, rounded up near Asmara, were initially taken to the notorious, military-run Adi Abeito prison, northeast of the capital. Satellite imagery Human Rights Watch analyzed shows large crowds of people in the prison yard and surrounding areas of the prison from October 2022 through late January 2023. Relatives reported that many men were taken from the prison to their assigned military unit headquarters in this time period.

Satellite image recorded on January 23, 2023 offers a snapshot of the large crowds of people gathered in the compounds of Adi Abeito prison, located north of the capital of Asmara.

Satellite image recorded on January 23, 2023 offers a snapshot of the large crowds of people gathered in the compounds of Adi Abeito prison, located north of the capital of Asmara.  Satellite image © 2023 Maxar Technologies. Analysis and graphic © 2023 Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch was not able to confirm where reservists were taken, but did receive reports that dozens of reservists called up in Asmara were taken toward Tsorona town, near the border with Ethiopia.

“Everyone has always lived with the dreadful feeling of the risk of being conscripted, but this is at a whole different level,” an Asmara resident said.

Some forms of conscription for military service are permitted under international human rights law. However, Eritrea uses violent methods including the threat of penalty and punishment for those who do not participate, and collective punishment of relatives. Officials also show a lack of respect for the right to conscientious objection and provide no opportunity to challenge arbitrary enforcement and the indefinite nature of conscription. These factors constitute abuse, Human Rights Watch said. International human rights law prohibits holding anyone criminally responsible for acts they are not responsible for.

International and regional officials should take concrete measures against Eritrea’s leadership for the ongoing repression. They should ensure ongoing scrutiny by the United Nations Human Rights Council, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and UN experts.

They should adopt and maintain targeted sanctions against individuals and entities responsible for serious abuses inside Eritrea, as part of broader targeted sanctions for Eritrean and other armed forces responsible for serious abuses in northern Ethiopia, tied to clear human rights benchmarks, Human Rights Watch said. Eritrea’s regional partners, including Horn of Africa and Gulf states, should press Eritrea to ensure meaningful changes to the abusive national service system, which has continued to drive Eritreans into exile.

“Eritreans from all walks of life are bearing the brunt of the government’s repressive tactics,” Bader said. “Eritrea’s regional partners and international actors should take action to end rampant repression.”

Indefinite Forced Conscription and Eritrea’s Role in the Tigray War

Military training and national service are compulsory for all Eritreans, male and female, ages 18 to 40, and it is often indefinite despite provisions in Eritrean law limiting national service to 18 months. When the country’s 1998-2001 border war with Ethiopia broke out, former fighters and reservists who had been demobilized were forcibly conscripted and all national service recruits were retained under emergency directives. Conscription for many has continued to be extended indefinitely ever since, forcing many Eritreans, some under 18 and others above 40, into military service for years, some for decades.

Enforced indefinite conscription for many Eritreans starts during their final year of high school. Past Human Rights Watch reporting has documented that the Eritrean government forcibly channels thousands of young people, each year into military training even before they finish their schooling. Some of the students are still children, in violation of international standards. From here, people are sent either directly into military service or later national service.

The UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea found that “slavery-like” practices are routine within the national service system. Human Rights Watch has documented that during their prolonged conscription Eritreans, particularly those in the military, risk systematic abuse, including torture, harsh working conditions, and pay insufficient to support a family, which constitute illegal forced labor.

Human rights organizations have repeatedly documented that Eritreans who attempt to avoid conscription, including by dropping out of school, escaping from a military duty station, or fleeing the country risk punishment, notably arbitrary detention. In a 2009 report, Human Rights Watch documented that families of draft evaders were collectively punished usually by being jailed or forced to pay fines.

Conscientious objection is prohibited, and only rare exemptions are granted for people with a disability and, temporarily, on health grounds, although these exemptions are not systematically applied.

Since war broke out in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region in November 2020, the Eritrean government has conducted waves of roundups, which intensified parallel to events in Tigray.

Eritrean forces had remained in parts of Tigray throughout the Ethiopian federal government’s five-month humanitarian truce, including in Western Tigray, until fighting broke out again in August 2022. Media reported that Tigrayan authorities accused Eritrea of a massive offensive in late September.

Within Tigray, Eritrean forces have committed large-scale massacres, pillaging, and the worst forms of sexual violence and targeted civilian infrastructure. They also killed and raped Eritrean refugees and destroyed two Eritrean refugee camps in Tigray.

Following a cessation of hostilities agreement, signed in South Africa on November 2, 2022, between the Ethiopian federal government and the Tigrayan authorities, the parties signed another declaration in Nairobi, Kenya, on November 12, stipulating that the Tigrayan forces’ handover of heavy weapons would be carried out in conjunction with the withdrawal of foreign and non-Ethiopian federal military forces from the region. In mid-January 2023, media reported on the withdrawal of Eritrean forces from key towns in central Tigray, notably the town of Shire. Yet reports of ongoing Eritrean force presence inside Tigray and ongoing abuses by Eritrean forces continue to emerge.

The European Union rolled out sanctions on Eritrea’s national security agency, headed by Maj. Gen. Abraha Kassa, for serious human rights abuses in Eritrea including killings, arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, and torture in March 2021. In September 2022, US President Joe Biden extended, sanctions for one year on Eritrean officials for serious human rights abuses in Tigray.

Collective Punishment of Families of Draft Evaders, Deserters

The government has intimidated and harassed people of all ages to pressure them into handing over missing relatives.

Relatives of those affected by the expulsions said that the government has confiscated homes of the parents of suspected draft evaders. This has left older people and women with children without a roof over their heads.

“My uncle was kicked out of his home,” said a woman whose uncle, about age 80, was evicted from his home in September by authorities looking for his daughter. “He’s now on the street. He’s homeless.”

A 71-year-old woman with chronic health issues was ejected from her home [in Asmara] in October when she was unable to locate one of her sons and was forced to seek shelter in an outdoor building with no lock.

The authorities have locked up the homes and put notices on the door.

Several people said that on occasion the local authorities threatened other people if they sheltered those evicted. “There is a standing order that no one can give shelter to those whose homes have been locked up,” said a man whose mother was ejected from her home. “This order was circulated by the local authorities.”

In early December, a 37-year-old woman was evicted from her home by local officials and military officers, following their search for her daughter who had refused to adhere to the call up. A relative said:

When she came to our home, they threatened her and my family. She wasn’t even able to stay one night. It was the local officials. They are watching. You can’t go to anyone’s house, it’s like a crime. She is living on the streets. Our relatives are sending her food there, but now authorities have told her she can’t stay on the streets. They threatened to send her to jail if she doesn’t send her daughter.

The authorities have also arbitrarily detained relatives of draft evaders in formal and informal facilities, including older people and people with health conditions.

In early September, a 78-year-old man was detained for three days in a village school because the authorities were looking for one of his sons. “My parents and nephew were given the option to lock up the house or for my father to be arrested,” said another son. “There was no warning.” None of the relatives were granted access to him during his detention.

There is no limit to how many members of a family can be conscripted. An 80-year-old man with diabetes was detained in early December for failing to bring forward the youngest of his six sons. His five older sons had already been conscripted.

Other Forms of Punishment

The authorities have also targeted people’s means of livelihood and income. Human Rights Watch received reports of government forces confiscating livestock in rural communities and preventing people from harvesting their crops to get people to hand themselves in, particularly in southern Eritrea in the first weeks of the campaign. Media reported that local administrations have also been withholding ration coupons from families whose members have not heeded the call. Two people said that their relatives’ shops were shut down to punish them for failing to hand over missing relatives.

Impact on Families

People described the significant toll of the collective punishment to Human Rights Watch.

“There is a lot of fear among the community, many people from all walks of life have gone into hiding,” said an Asmara resident.

“We don’t know if they [the authorities] are just doing this to terrorize people,” said a woman whose relatives have been targeted in the campaign. “They had left them [children and older people] in peace, but now they are trying anything to put pressure on them.”

A woman, whose relative was evicted from her home in Asmara, said:

People are afraid, you can’t help your relatives. That’s why people are giving up, they give their children, they give their husbands, as you can’t keep resisting.

Several other people said that they and their relatives are still willing to pay the price of protecting their loved ones. An older man, who was detained for three days after refusing to force his son to hand himself in, fell ill for several weeks after this detention, but the family remains resolute: “My brother is still in hiding, but we all support his decision,” said the brother who lives in exile.

Intensifying Forced Conscription Since Mid-2022

The government’s enforced conscription drives intensified during the summer. Human Rights Watch received reports of the drive starting in July 2022 in rural areas, notably in the country’s southern region around the town of Seghenyti, before intensifying in major towns including Asmara in mid-September through early 2023.

In mid-September 2022, the government also started recalling reservists, over age 50. The security forces set up checkpoints to verify whether people were exempt from military conscription and alongside the local administration conducted door-to-door searches in neighborhoods.

Local authorities keep track of people through a family coupon system, which specifies how many people are a part of the household and requires all family members to be there or to justify an absence in order to renew a family’s coupon. This system has played a central role in identifying alleged draft evaders during house-to-house searches.

“This is happening in literally every neighborhood in Asmara,” a resident said. “Every household that has a member who could be conscripted has been visited.”

People have also been rounded up from religious facilities. Reliable sources reported that on September 4, security forces detained young people attending a mass in a Roman Catholic church in Akrur, in the southern region. Human Rights Watch analyzed images posted online starting in early September appearing to show uniformed men rounding up young men and women outside of the Medhane-Alem Roman Catholic Church near Akrur, southeast of Asmara. Researchers were able to verify the locations shown in the images.

In October, three Roman Catholic priests were detained in separate incidents, including the bishop of Segheneity, Fikremariam Hagos Tsalim, who had called for peace in Tigray. The three were unlawfully held until their release in December.

Media have also reported that the authorities called for those previously exempted from military service to undergo new medical tests. However, Human Rights Watch received accounts of people with chronic health issues and disabilities, including injuries sustained during the 1998-2000 border war, being rounded up in the recent drive and sent off to military postings.

The conscription campaign has continued through early 2023, nearly three months after the cessation of hostilities in Tigray was signed.

Detention Sites

Relatives and observers said that many of those rounded up in Asmara of considered to be of conscription age have initially been taken to the infamous Adi Abeito prison on the northeastern outskirts of the capital then sent on to various military headquarters and other camps. Rights groups and the media have previously documented inhumane and degrading conditions and treatment in Adi Abeito. In 2021, the US-based Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) released a documentary with leaked footage that they said was from the facility that showed prisoners lying on top of each other, unable to stretch out, inside a warehouse and reported regular torture inside the compound.

Human Rights Watch reviewed dozens of satellite images captured between September 2022 and January 2023 over the three different prison compounds identified in the PBS documentary. Human Rights Watch independently confirmed the locations of the compounds that appear in the videos.

Human Rights Watch identified a substantial increase in the number of people in one of the courtyards of the Adi Abeito prison compound beginning in the end of October 2022. This increase was still visible as of January 23, 2023. The courtyard appears significantly overcrowded. People congregated in organized groups within the prison compound are also visible on satellite imagery in the same period.

An increase in the number of people in the adjacent courtyard, identified by PBS as the compound of the women’s prison, is observable on satellite imagery from the beginning of January.

In another courtyard of the prison compound, which the PBS documentary had identified as the area where prisoners are ill-treated and tortured, Human Rights Watch observed on satellite imagery, since mid-November 2022, that some courtyard areas are covered by tarpaulins. Human Rights Watch was not able to identify whether the number of people in this area increased.

While it is difficult to confirm where those rounded up and those called up were taken, several people told Human Rights Watch that reservists from Asmara were taken toward the border with Ethiopia around Tsorona, while some of the people of conscription age were initially taken to their units.

A man said that one of his two brothers evading the draft handed himself in:

The call up paper came a month ago exactly. My first brother turned himself in 16 days ago [mid-October] at the local administration in his locality. He stayed in Adi Abeito prison for 10 days. After that he was taken to his military unit base.

Two interviewees said reservists sent in the first roundups to the border were asked to bring their own rations and found very little when they arrived.

The BBC reported that some reservists were sent to the front lines. Videos that appeared on Tigrayan regional media outlets allegedly showed detained prisoners of war in Tigray, described as Eritrean soldiers, many of whom were older men.

Eritrean Torture Survivors Lose Appeal for Asylum Status in Israel

Wednesday, 08 February 2023 22:23 Written by

Site logo image

Martin Plaut posted: " The 103-page ruling accepted the state’s position that desertion from the Eritrean army merits asylum only if it has an ideological dimension – “something more” that would indicate that the asylum seeker was genuinely being persecuted. Source: Haare" Martin Plaut

 

Martin Plaut

Feb 8

The 103-page ruling accepted the state’s position that desertion from the Eritrean army merits asylum only if it has an ideological dimension – “something more” that would indicate that the asylum seeker was genuinely being persecuted.

Source: Haaretz

The new ruling accepted the state’s position that desertion from the Eritrean army merits asylum only if it has an ideological dimension – ‘something more’ that would indicate that the asylum seeker was genuinely being persecuted.

People wait in line at the Population and Immigration Authority in Bnei Brak in December.

People wait in line at the Population and Immigration Authority in Bnei Brak in December.Credit: תומר אפלבאוםBar PelegGet email notification for articles from Bar PelegFollow

Feb 8, 2023 12:51 am IST

An appellate custody tribunal has ruled for the first time that the criteria Israel set in 2019 for approving Eritreans’ asylum requests complies with Israel’s interpretation of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

The ruling, issued last week, therefore rejected the applications of 34 asylum seekers who were jailed and tortured in Eritrea because they intended to desert the army. They fled to Israel in 2010.

The 103-page ruling accepted the state’s position that desertion from the Eritrean army merits asylum only if it has an ideological dimension – “something more” that would indicate that the asylum seeker was genuinely being persecuted.

Until early 2013, Eritreans couldn’t file asylum applications at all because Israel gave them collective protection, and the state therefore saw no point in examining individual requests. But even after it started considering such requests that May, it rejected most of them. In January 2022, Haaretz reported that 98.5 percent of Eritrean asylum requests were rejected after being examined in light of the new criteria.

The state has steadfastly insisted that desertion from the army, even if it carries a substantial penalty, isn’t grounds for asylum. In 2018, the Justice Ministry’s appellate custody tribunal rejected that position, saying that while desertion alone indeed isn’t grounds for asylum, it could be if deserting expressed a political opinion whose punishment could amount to persecution.

The state appealed that ruling, but as part of the subsequent legal proceedings, it drafted new asylum criteria that required it reexamine some 3,000 asylum applications.

The tribunal’s judge, Chanania Guggenheim, said that both the opinion drafted by the Population and Immigration Authority’s legal adviser in 2013 and the criteria drafted by an advisory committee in 2019 were legal, so there was no reason to intervene in them.

“The document includes two principles that, if one of them exists alongside desertion or draft-dodging, could establish grounds for asylum,” he wrote. “Moreover, it lists indicators and circumstances that could influence the examination of an application, both positively and negatively.”

“Even assuming someone who returned to Eritrea would be persecuted because of his desertion, this persecution isn’t happening due to one of the grounds in the convention, such as political views or belonging to a certain social group,” he added.

He also wrote that “there is no barrier to the Population Authority interpreting the Refugee Convention so as to wield its authorities legally; it is even obliged to do so.” This interpretation will be binding unless and until the courts rule otherwise, he added.

Guggenheim stressed that his ruling doesn’t eliminate the need to examine every application individually. But he said the criteria are based on “reliable, up-to-date information about the country of origin” and constitute “a suitable tool that could be of help in examining asylum requests from Eritrea.”

He also rejected one appellant’s request to publish the criteria in full, lest this undermine the credibility of asylum proceedings. But he said the criteria ease the burden of proof on asylum seekers.

Michal Pomerantz, who represented one appellant, said she plans to appeal the ruling.

The ruling also noted that not long ago, similar appeals were heard by three Supreme Court justices, yet now, they are heard by a single custody judge. This has drawbacks, Guggenheim wrote, but it also has an advantage – the tribunal’s decisions can be appealed to the regular courts.

Finally, he said the state should consider suitable solutions for asylum seekers who have been here for a long time due to the non-refoulement policy, which bars the deportation of asylum seekers from certain countries where conditions are particularly bad. Nevertheless, he added, this issue is not within the tribunal’s purview.
 

Somalia-Eritrea-Ethiopia: how human trafficking brought 200,000 to Libya and slavery

Wednesday, 08 February 2023 22:13 Written by

Site logo image

Martin Plaut posted: " Source: Africa Ex-Press [Computer translation from Italian] Between 2017 and 2021, over 200,000 migrants were brought to Libya and reduced to a total state of slavery. This is supported by research conducted by Mirjam van Reisen , p" Martin Plaut

 

Martin Plaut

Feb 3

Source: Africa Ex-Press

[Computer translation from Italian]

Between 2017 and 2021, over 200,000 migrants were brought to Libya and reduced to a total state of slavery.

This is supported by research conducted by Mirjam van Reisen , professor of International Relations at the University of Tilburg (The Netherlands), in collaboration with Munyaradzi Mawere of the University of Unisa, South Africa, as well as holder of the chair of African Studies at the Great Zimbabwe University .

Also participating in the study were Klara Smits , a PhD candidate at Tilburg University, specializing in human trafficking routes from Eritrea to Libya, and Morgane Wirtzè, a PhD candidate at Tilburg University, where she researches human trafficking and sexual violence. in Libya.

In these days  the book  ENSLAVED has been published. Trapped and Trafficked in Digital Black Holes”: Human Trafficking Trajectoriories to Libya”, which includes the result of the scholars' research.

Many of the refugees who have landed in Libya are Eritreans , they in particular are trafficked and enslaved, subjected to torture, abuse of all kinds and even sexual violence to force family members to pay a ransom for their release.

If they manage to escape from the concentration camps and reach the Mediterranean, they risk being intercepted and sent back to Libya or dying at sea. These are the conclusions of the research, published in the book.

Using ingenious digital methods , such as a tag with an electronic code, human traffickers transport refugees through a series of "black holes", digital voids, as migrants often do not have access to the internet and most are even cut off their cellular.

Thanks to digital technologies , traffickers control the internet access of refugees fleeing their countries, especially from the Eritrean dictatorship.

Many die along the way . During the period of this study (2017-2021), it is estimated that at least 200,000 refugees – men, women and children – were victims of human trafficking for extortion in Libya. It is estimated that the turnover of the shady traffic is around one billion dollars.

In the publication, the researchers argue  that inequalities in access and control of digital and connection technologies have contributed to making trafficking possible, reducing hundreds of thousands of human beings into total slavery.

The policies of the European Union , Libya and other countries in the Horn of Africa have also ensured that this state of affairs has persisted over time, indeed according to the researchers it seems that they have even fueled it.

Without legal aid in accordance with international law, Eritreans especially remain trapped in a cycle of human trafficking from which it is difficult, if not impossible, to escape.

The research arose from on-the-spot contact with refugees , who managed to send secret recordings or communicate via social media. Most of the interviews with refugees who have managed to flee took place in countries bordering Libya, such as Niger, Sudan and Tunisia. Refugees who managed to reach Europe were also heard directly .

This detailed ethnographic study identifies the routes , modus operandi, organization and key actors involved in human trafficking for the purpose of ransom refugees and migrants.

The book is part of the GAIC research network (Tilburg University) and the African studies series published by Langaa RPCIG and provides an important contribution to the literature on human trafficking, migration studies, African populations, modern slavery, social protection and governance.

Earlier this year , Eritrean Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam, one of the most vicious traffickers of human beings, was arrested in Sudan . His arrest was possible thanks to the contribution of the United Arab Emirates and Interpol.

The trafficker was placed on the Dutch Most Wanted list.

Thanks to its capillary network , which extended from Somalia to Libya, it organized the trafficking of thousands of Ethiopian, Eritrean and Somali youths to Europe, through Libya. Kidane has put aspiring asylum seekers through hell with torture, violence, to extort money from family members.

Kidane was recognized on the streets of Addis Ababa by a migrant, tortured by himself. The criminal was then arrested for the first time in Ethiopia in 2020. Tried for human trafficking, a year later he managed to escape from the federal court in the Ethiopian capital. Thanks to the complicity of police officers, he changed in the courthouse toilets before leaving the building incognito. Months later, Ethiopia sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment.

In the last two years , before his new arrest in Sudan, he continued his shady dealings undisturbed. The Netherlands has asked Khartoum for his extradition for trafficking in human beings between Africa and Europe.

Russia reveals its plans for relations with Eritrea

Tuesday, 31 January 2023 21:22 Written by

 

Martin Plaut posted: " Lavrov Announces Creation of Framework for Russia-Eritrea Trade Consultations Lavrov:  Russia and Eritrea have agreed to create a mechanism for trade consultations MASSAWA (Eritrea), 27 JAN- RIA Novosti Russia and Eritrea have agreed to est" Martin Plaut

 

Lavrov Announces Creation of Framework for Russia-Eritrea Trade Consultations

Lavrov:  Russia and Eritrea have agreed to create a mechanism for trade consultations

MASSAWA (Eritrea), 27 JAN- RIA Novosti

Russia and Eritrea have agreed to establish an interdepartmental framework for consultations on matters related to trade and economics. According to Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov, both countries will work to insulate their partnership from the ongoing effects of Western sanctions.

"We have a mutual interest in developing cooperation in the area of trade and economics. We have agreed to set up a bilateral framework for consultations between the relevant departments that will address economic, trade and investment issues,"  Lavrov told journalists.

He likewise noted that both nations will promote direct contact between their respective business communities "that have shown an interest in pursuing joint projects in the mining industry, energy sector, agricultural sphere and information communication technologies, among others."

"Of course, at the same time,"  the foreign minister concluded, "we will look into what concrete steps can be taken to shield our partnership from illegitimate Western sanctions."

Eritrea and Russia sign memorandum linking Russia’s naval base with Massawa

Wednesday, 18 January 2023 22:38 Written by

 

Martin Plaut

Jan 18


Source: 10 January 2023, NTS Sevastopol

Citing an announcement by Eritrean Ambassador to Russia Petros Tseggai, state media outlet RIA Novosti reports that the Red Sea port city of Massawa has signed a memorandum of understanding with [Black Sea naval base] Sevastopol.  

According to Tseggai, an official exchange of delegations is already planned as the two countries seek to develop closer ties.  The ambassador likewise noted that he visited Crimea and Sevastopol during the Soviet era and that the peninsula has seen only positive change since returning to Russian control [in 2014].  

Eritrea is an East African nation with an agricultural based economy and a growing industrial mining sector. Its capital Asmara enjoys a reputation among tourists as being the safest on the African continent.

The RIA Novosti report cited in the above video:

Source: 8 January 2023, RIA Novosti)

Massawa and Sevastopol Sign Agreement of Cooperation

Eritrean Ambassador to Russia Petros Tseggai:  Port city Massawa and Sevastopol have signed a memorandum of understanding

MOSCOW, 8 JAN- RIA Novosti

In an interview [today] with RIA Novosti, Eritrean Ambassador to Russia Petros Tseggai announced that the Eritrean Red Sea port city of Massawa and Sevastopol have signed a memorandum of understanding. In addition, an official exchange of delegations is scheduled.

“We have signed a memorandum of understanding between the ports of Massawa and Sevastopol,” Ambassador Tseggai said. “I would like to see something come out of this collaboration.”

He noted that an official exchange of delegations is already planned as the two countries seek to develop closer ties.

“People in our country have yet to fully appreciate the promise of such a partnership,” the Eritrean diplomat added. “We will have an official exchange of delegations and this will develop.”

Ambassador Tseggai said that he visited Crimea during the Soviet era when he was a student in Odessa, and that Sevastopol made an impression on him at that time.

“I visited Alushta as a student. Now it (Crimea) has improved a lot. During the Soviet era it wasn’t bad either. I was in Sevastopol, which I'm told was completely destroyed during the Second World War. Both (British Prime Minister Winston) Churchill and others said it wouldn’t be rebuilt even in 70 years,” noted the ambassador.

 

How the notorious Eritrean trafficker, Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam, was finally brought to book

Saturday, 14 January 2023 20:48 Written by

Site logo image

Martin Plaut posted: " “He’s brutal, he’s not a human being, he’s an animal,” said a 20-year-old Eritrean woman who said she was held in captivity by Kidane in Libya between 2017 and 2018. “He burned me, not only my hair, my body as well. He did stuff to me I don’t want to re" Martin Plaut

 

Martin Plaut

Jan 13

“He’s brutal, he’s not a human being, he’s an animal,” said a 20-year-old Eritrean woman who said she was held in captivity by Kidane in Libya between 2017 and 2018. “He burned me, not only my hair, my body as well. He did stuff to me I don’t want to remember.”

People smuggler who escaped from an Ethiopian courthouse is recaptured in Sudan and extradited to UAE

Source: Financial Times

How the law finally caught up with notorious human trafficker Kidane

People smuggler who escaped from an Ethiopian courthouse is recaptured in Sudan and extradited to UAE

Andres Schipani in Nairobi and Simeon Kerr in Dubai

 2 HOURS AGO

Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam, a notorious people smuggler, showed the extent of his powers two years ago when he was able to escape from the Ethiopian courthouse where he was being tried.

Before being sentenced in absentia to life in prison for human trafficking and extortion, the Eritrean national asked if he could go to the bathroom, according to multiple accounts. There, helped by two associates who had flown in from Sudan, he swapped his prison attire for civilian clothes and simply strolled out of the building.

The law caught up with Kidane last week when he was arrested in Sudan and deported to the United Arab Emirates, where prosecutors are considering charges related to money laundering.

Kidane is alleged to have financial ties to the Gulf state. In a 2021 communication to the International Criminal Court, based on victims’ testimonies, a group of human rights organisations said Kidane had bank accounts in Dubai “to which migrants and refugees and their families pay for their trip and ransom”.

“Smuggling and trafficking human beings is an appalling crime and we have now shut down one of the most important trafficking routes into Europe,” said Brigadier Saeed al-Suwaidi of the federal anti-narcotics unit at the UAE interior ministry. It sent “a strong message to human traffickers: we’re working together and coming for you, one by one”, he told a press conference after the capture.

Kidane is accused by authorities in the Netherlands of leading a criminal syndicate that employs violence and intimidation, including torture and rape, to traffic and exploit people fleeing the Horn of Africa. “He’s a vicious man,” said Meron Estefanos, an Eritrean activist due to testify against him in the Netherlands.

“He’s brutal, he’s not a human being, he’s an animal,” said a 20-year-old Eritrean woman who said she was held in captivity by Kidane in Libya between 2017 and 2018. “He burned me, not only my hair, my body as well. He did stuff to me I don’t want to remember.”

Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam

Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam, a notorious people smuggler has been extradited to the UAE after being captured in Sudan © Dutch National Police

Emirati courts are also set to consider requests for Kidane’s extradition to Ethiopia as well as the Netherlands, which placed him on its most-wanted list in 2021 for alleged crimes against Eritrean migrants and refugees in Libya.

According to Dutch police, Kidane is head of a notorious camp in Libya where “thousands of migrants” face “severe beatings, kidnapping, rape and unlawful deprivation of liberty”. They arrive there after an arduous journey through Sudan, Chad or Niger with the hope of completing the passage and starting a new life in Europe.

“Many do not survive the journey to Europe, and even if they do . . . he extorts money from them by making them pay him for the next member of their family who is on their way,” Dutch police said in a statement.

Interpol, which has pursued Kidane since 2019, estimated that Kidane trafficked thousands of victims over a nine-year period. “His arrest will neutralise a major people smuggling route towards Europe and protect thousands who would have been at risk of exploitation,” Interpol said.

Kidane’s capture involved co-operation between Interpol and police in the UAE, Sudan, Ethiopia and the Netherlands. It was information passed by Interpol to the UAE that allowed for Kidane to be tracked to Sudan. Emirati officers then flew to Khartoum on January 1 after alerting the Sudanese authorities, who arrested Kidane. About 10 suspects were also arrested in the UAE on suspicion of related money laundering activities.

Demelash Gebremichael, commissioner-general of the Ethiopian Federal Police, said this “tremendous effort has led to the arrest of an international criminal sentenced to life in prison in Ethiopia. It’s a notable success.”

Kidane was adept at using false identification papers to evade detection while criss-crossing borders across Africa, according to Stephen Kavanagh, Interpol’s executive director of police services.

“This is just the beginning — when these networks become vulnerable, we have to push harder,” he said, pledging to target the broader ecosystem of collaborators around the human trafficking network.

Also this week, a man alleged to be Tewelde Goitom, a Kidane associate better known as Welid, appeared at a pre-trial hearing in the Netherlands claiming to be a victim of mistaken identity. Tewelde was sentenced to 18 years in prison in Ethiopia in 2021 and then extradited to the Netherlands. The defendant denies being Tewelde and a Dutch forensics lab is trying to confirm his identity.

The two men, Kidane and Tewelde, are accused by Meron and human rights groups of running their operations from a farm compound in Bani Walid, a town in western Libya described as a “ghost city” by migrants due to the large number of people who have disappeared there.

“Warehouses on the farm hold up to 1,200 people and are guarded by 70 armed men. Migrants and refugees report being tortured and starved on the farm. Some reported people suffocating and falling out of speeding trucks,” the human rights organisations told the ICC.

Bani Walid emerged as a smuggling hub in 2018 as the expansion of Islamist armed groups across eastern Libya forced smugglers to reroute there.

A UN panel of experts called Bani Walid “a major transit point for migrants and refugees from East and sub-Saharan Africa who originate from or travel through Sudan, Chad or Niger”, and described the “systematic” detention and abuse of migrants at its informal facilities.

Marwa Mohamed, head of advocacy and outreach at rights group Lawyers for Justice in Libya, welcomed Kidane’s capture, but warned that much work still needed to be done.

“While the arrest of Kidane as a ‘big fish’ in the trafficking world is significant, this alone will not dismantle the trafficking networks or impact trafficking routes through Libya. Kidane was not operating alone,” she said.

“We saw trafficking and smuggling continue even while Kidane was on the run and hiding outside Libya. He was part of a wider large-scale system of migrant and refugee abuse in Libya that is still operating to this day.”

Human Rights Watch Report on Eritrea

Saturday, 14 January 2023 20:46 Written by

Site logo image

Martin Plaut posted: " There were over 580,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers abroad as of the end 2021, and “the overwhelming majority cited the indefinite national service as the principal reason they fled the country,” according to the May 2022 report of the UN speci" Martin Plaut

 

Martin Plaut

Jan 12

There were over 580,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers abroad as of the end 2021, and “the overwhelming majority cited the indefinite national service as the principal reason they fled the country,” according to the May 2022 report of the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea.

Source: Human Rights Watch

Eritrea

Events of 2022

A civilian man who fled violence sits in a bed covered with a mosquito net at the compound of the Agda Hotel, in the city of Semera, Ethiopia, February 17, 2022.

© 2022 EDUARDO SOTERAS/AFP

1.      Indefinite Military Conscription and Forced Labor

2.      Unlawful, Prolonged, and Abusive Detentions

3.      Freedom of Religion

4.      Refugees and Returnees

5.      Key International Actors

Eritrea’s government continued to severely repress its population, imposing restrictions on freedom of expression, opinion, and faith, and restricting independent scrutiny by international monitors. Eritrea continued to negatively impact the rights environment in the Horn of Africa region.

Eritrea is a one-man dictatorship under unelected President Isaias Afewerki, with no legislature, no independent civil society organizations or media outlets, and no independent judiciary. In 2001, Isaias closed all independent newspapers and arrested 10 journalists held incommunicado to date. Elections have never been held in the country since it gained independence in 1993, and the government has never implemented the 1997 constitution guaranteeing civil rights and limiting executive power.

The government has taken no steps to end its widespread forced labor and conscription, instead, reports of mass roundups (giffas in Tigrinya) and forced conscription to fill the army’s ranks increased in the second half of the year as fighting resumed in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. In September, it reportedly recalled reservists (up to the age of 55) in anticipation of renewed fighting alongside Ethiopian security forces in Tigray.

Eritrean forces remained in parts of Ethiopia’s Tigray region where they have continued to commit serious violations, including mass arbitrary detentions, and pillage and rape of Tigrayans in Western Tigray zone.

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did not report any information on vaccination campaigns in Eritrea.

Eritrea was re-elected, in late 2021 to the United Nations Human Rights Council on an African group non-competitive slate. However, this did not result in reforms of its oppressive policies, according to the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea.

Eritrea continued to refuse to cooperate with key UN and African Union rights mechanisms, including by denying access to the UN special rapporteur. In December 2021, it opposed the establishment of a commission of human rights experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) to investigate abuses by all parties in the Tigray conflict.

Eritrea’s 2015 penal code punishes homosexual conduct with five to seven years in prison.

Indefinite Military Conscription and Forced Labor

The government continued to conscript Eritreans, mostly men and unmarried women, indefinitely into military or civil service for low pay and with no say in their profession or work location. Conscientious objection is not recognized; it is punished. Discharge from national service is arbitrary and procedures opaque. Conscripts are often subjected to inhuman and degrading punishment, including torture, without recourse.

Since Eritrea joined the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, new waves of mass roundups of Eritreans believed to be evading service to fill the army’s ranks have been regularly reported, which have included child recruitment according to the UN special rapporteur on Eritrea. Roundups increased in August and September as fighting resumed in Ethiopia; families of draft evaders also faced reprisals, including arbitrary detentions and evictions from their homes. In September, the media said that reservists, men 55 years old and below who had been discharged from the army but were still expected to undergo guard duties, were also being called up. Families are not given official information about the fate of their loved ones sent to fight in Tigray.

Conscription begins at the Sawa military camp where students, some as young as 16, are forced to attend their final year of secondary school while undergoing compulsory military training. Students in the camp are under military command, with harsh military punishments and discipline, and female students have reported sexual harassment and exploitation. Dormitories are crowded and health facilities very limited.

Unlawful, Prolonged, and Abusive Detentions

There continued to be widespread mass roundups and prolonged arbitrary arrests and detentions without access to legal counsel, judicial review, or family visits, some for decades, targeting perceived government’s opponents, including draft evaders.

Countless prisoners languish in the country’s extensive formal and informal prison network, held in overcrowded places of detention with inadequate food, water, and medical care.

Many detainees, including top government officials and journalists arrested in 2001 after they questioned Isaias’s leadership, are held incommunicado. Some are believed to have died in detention. An additional 16 journalists were also arrested at the time. Ciham Ali Abdu, daughter of a former information minister, has been held for 10 years since her arrest at age 15. Former finance minister and critic of the president, Berhane Abrehe, has been in incommunicado detention since September 2018.

Freedom of Religion

For over two decades, the government has denied religious liberty to anyone whose religious affiliation does not match the four denominations that the government “recognizes”: Sunni Islam, Eritrean Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Evangelical (Lutheran) churches. People affiliated with “unrecognized” faiths continue to be imprisoned, and torture has been used to force them to renounce their religion.

The trend of releases that took place in 2020 and 2021 was reversed. People continue to be detained purely because of their religious beliefs. In March, 29 Christians were reportedly detained during a prayer meeting in Asmara and taken to the Mai Serwa prison. Twenty Jehovah Witnesses remained in detention since at least 2014, including Tesfazion Gebremichael, 80, detained since 2011.

Between October 11 and 15, the Eritrean government detained three Catholic priests, Abba Abraham Habtom Gebremariam, Father Mihretab Stefanos, and Bishop Abune Fikremariam Hagos. Abune Hagos who was arrested as he returned to Eritrea from Italy, had in 2019 penned, along with three other bishops, a pastoral letter obliquely calling for justice and reform. In February, Abune Antonios, the deposed Eritrean Orthodox Church patriarch, died while under house arrest, to which he had been subjected since 2006.

The government continued to take control of schools and other institutions run by the Catholic church. In August, media reported that the government planned to take over two Catholic-run vocational training centers. Some peaceful protesters arrested in 2017 and early 2018 for protesting the government takeover of Al Diaa Islamic school, remained in detention.

Refugees and Returnees

Eritrea is not a party to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and has not ratified the 1969 African Refugee Convention.

There were over 580,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers abroad as of the end 2021, and “the overwhelming majority cited the indefinite national service as the principal reason they fled the country,” according to the May 2022 report of the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea.

Eritreans seeking protection abroad have been targeted for abuses by Eritrean authorities and security forces, both while abroad (in Ethiopia), and after forced returns from other countries, such as Egypt.

Since the outbreak of conflict in Tigray in November 2020, warring parties, including Eritrean forces, have subjected Eritrean refugees to serious abuses.

In January, the UN reported that a January air strike near the Mai Aini camp in Tigray region killed three Eritrean refugees, two of them children. Humanitarian access and basic services to the 25,000 Eritrean refugees living in two remaining camps in Tigray has been affected by fighting, an uptick in drone strikes, and the Ethiopian government’s effective siege on the Tigray region.

In January, the UN reported 20 preventable deaths there due to lack of medicine and health services. Nongovernmental organizations and UN rights experts raised concerns that the effective siege and impunity for conflict-related abuses was contributing to Eritrean refugee women’s vulnerability to sexual violence and exploitation.

In March 2022, Egypt forcibly returned 31 Eritrean refugees and threatened additional repatriations; in December 2021 it had deported 24 Eritrean refugees, including children. In Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, for several months, undocumented Eritreans were reportedly arbitrarily detained and released after paying significant sums.

In April , UN human rights experts cited “patterns of human rights violations against Eritreans who have been forcibly returned” to Eritrea, including torture, ill-treatment, enforced disappearance, and arbitrary detention. They stated that some Eritreans, deported by Egypt in October 2021, had not been seen or heard from since and were believed to be held in incommunicado detention by Eritrean authorities.

Key International Actors

In January, the UN launched a new development cooperation framework with Eritrea, sending a high-level delegation to Asmara.

In March, Eritrea voted against a UN general assembly resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one of only five countries (including Russia) to do so. President Isaias later defended Russia in an annual Independence Day speech. He reportedly invited Russia to establish a naval base on its Red Sea Coast.

In its concluding observations on Eritrea, in April, the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC) noted that by not affording children the right to freedom of religion, Eritrea had violated the provisions of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.

The committee recommended that Eritrea, referring to the final year of schooling in the Sawa military camp, should ensure that children are not educated in a militaristic environment, revise its policy recognizing only four religions, the law prohibiting independent local media platforms, take legislative measures to explicitly outlaw the use of corporal punishment, and authorize the committee to conduct a fact-finding mission to investigate allegations of child military training in the Sawa camp.

In September, US President Joe Biden extended, for one year, the ability to sanction Eritrean officials for committing serious human rights abuses in Tigray. The European Union maintained individual sanctions on Maj. Gen. Abraha Kassa, head of Eritrea’s national security agency, which it rolled out in March 2021, for serious human rights abuses in Eritrea including killings, arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, and torture. In September, the US condemned Eritrea’s re-entry into the conflict.

In July, Somalia’s new president visited Somali troops being trained in Eritrea, reversing his predecessor’s denials that any were there.

The missing Eritreans

Saturday, 14 January 2023 20:38 Written by

Site logo image

Martin Plaut posted: " Source: New Yorker January 16, 2023 Issue The Crisis of Missing Migrants What has become of the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared on their way to Europe? By Alexis Okeowo January 9, 2023 Cristina Cattaneo, a" Martin Plaut

 

Martin Plaut

Jan 10

Source: New Yorker

January 16, 2023 Issue

The Crisis of Missing Migrants

What has become of the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared on their way to Europe?

By Alexis Okeowo

January 9, 2023

A shadow of a boat looms over the scene of a pathology lab.

Cristina Cattaneo, a forensic scientist, said, “Knowing whether your son is dead or not is a fundamental right.”Illustration by Chris Kim

By the time Nasenet Alme Wildmikael arrived in Germany, in 2015, she had passed through four countries by land or sea and had spent a month in a migrant prison. Wildmikael was twenty-three and petite, with full cheeks and a puff of curly hair. She had grown up in a small town in western Eritrea, the fourth of ten children. Her father died when she was young, and her mother raised the kids alone, working as a laundress. Although they had little money, she refused to let her children work. Wildmikael’s home life was happy. She loved cars and wanted to be a mechanic. But there was little opportunity for the necessary schooling, and her future was uncertain. “Even if you dreamed to have something more, you knew that you would never reach it,” she told me recently.

When Wildmikael was sixteen, she fell in love with a neighbor, a boy named Biniam, and soon became pregnant. Their son, Yafet, was born in 2008. Biniam took part in the baptism and promised to marry Wildmikael, but he left for Sudan before Yafet turned one. This was her first heartbreak. Biniam didn’t explain why he left, but Wildmikael believed that he wasn’t ready to be a father and wanted to escape repression in Eritrea. President Isaias Afwerki, the country’s longtime leader, has been accused of a variety of human-rights violations, including mass surveillance, arbitrary arrest, torture, and indefinite military conscription for Eritreans. To leave the country, Eritreans must have an exit visa, but the government rarely grants them. Many citizens feel trapped. Some five thousand people a month attempt, illegally and at great risk, to leave the country, according to the United Nations. (The Eritrean government has denied committing human-rights violations.) Wildmikael’s brother, at sixteen, had to enter military service, where conscripts endure forced labor, low pay, and physical abuse; those caught trying to escape are imprisoned or killed. “I didn’t want my son to be in the military,” Wildmikael told me. When she was eighteen, she left Eritrea with Yafet, walking three days through the desert to reach Sudan.

In Khartoum, the capital, Wildmikael spent six years serving chai at a café. Biniam also lived in the city, but he was not involved in Yafet’s life. Wildmikael and Biniam were both undocumented, a precarious status in Sudan: security services have abducted Eritreans living in Khartoum to send them back. By the spring of 2013, Biniam, at the age of twenty-six, had left Sudan. Later that year, Wildmikael found out that he had disappeared. He had been texting friends throughout his journey, but his messages stopped after he boarded a boat in Libya, bound for Italy. Soon afterward, on October 3rd, a rickety fishing boat crammed with migrants, many of them Eritrean, sank off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost island. The authorities found the remains of three hundred and sixty-six people in the wreckage. Photographs of the possible victims circulated among the tight-knit Eritrean community in Khartoum, and Wildmikael saw someone who looked like Biniam. She felt grief. “I was really hurt by him, but I loved him,” she said. “I grew up without a father, and I didn’t want my son to grow up without a father, too.”

Two years later, Wildmikael decided to try making it to Europe, too. “I knew that it was difficult to go from Sudan to Libya, especially if you are a woman,” she said. “I knew that people were dying in the sea to reach Europe. I knew everything. But I made the decision.” She wanted to earn money to send to her mother back home, and to give Yafet opportunities that she had been denied. “I really wanted to study and to have a job, a normal life,” she told me. She decided to leave Yafet, who was six, with a family friend in Khartoum. This was her second heartbreak. But it was for his safety: she knew a woman who had drowned in the sea with her sons. If Wildmikael received asylum in Europe, she thought, Yafet could fly to join her.

She made her way through the Sahel desert, using a route where many migrants have died of hunger or thirst, and where sexual violence is so common that some women take contraceptives before embarking. In Libya, she was held in a detention center in Tripoli. The guards fed the prisoners once a day and frequently beat the male detainees. After a month, she was released, and paid almost two thousand dollars to board a boat to Italy. “When I was on the boat, I thought I would never reach the ground again,” Wildmikael said. “But, alhamdulillah, I arrived.” She continued on to Germany, and was eventually granted asylum and given a renewable two-year residency permit. She moved to Vacha, a serene town in the center of the country, where she enrolled in German classes and made friends with her neighbors, an elderly German couple who helped her navigate the grocery store. “I felt like I had freedom,” she said.

But when she called the German Embassy in Khartoum to send for Yafet, she was told that he couldn’t join her. German law stipulated that she needed his father’s consent to bring him, or a death certificate proving that his father was dead. Migrants who don’t survive the journey to Europe are rarely found or identified, though, and Wildmikael had no proof of Biniam’s death. She hired a lawyer, who told her that, without official documentation, she had little recourse. When I met Wildmikael, last year, she had not seen Yafet, who is now fourteen, in almost eight years. They had interacted only through daily video calls. She sent three hundred euros a month to Sudan for his needs, including to pay for a private tutor, because he couldn’t attend school as an undocumented migrant. “He’s a really smart boy,” she told me. “He studies every day, and he learns quickly.” Yafet had recently asked if he could make the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean himself, to join her.

Last year, through Eritrean diaspora networks, Wildmikael contacted a forensic anthropologist named Cristina Cattaneo, the head of the Anthropological and Odontological Lab (labanof), at the State University of Milan. Cattaneo has spent much of her career identifying the bodies of people who have gone missing in Italy. Since 2013, she has also used the tools of forensic science—antemortem photographs, dental superimpositions, body markings, personal belongings, DNA samples—to help identify the bodies of missing migrants. When Cattaneo first heard from Wildmikael, she was struck by how long Biniam had been missing, with no state effort to determine what had happened to him. “You feel that the system has failed enormously,” she told me. “We have European relatives of victims of disasters who complain, rightly so, because they have to wait two or three weeks for a burn victim to be identified. It’s even more outrageous that people have to wait ten years.” Cattaneo hopes to give some dignity to the deceased, and a sense of closure to the living. She immediately took on the case. “It’s about respecting the rights of humans to have their dead identified,” she said.

In the past decade, the Mediterranean Sea and the shores of Italy, Malta, Cyprus, and Greece have become a vast graveyard. As a result of conflict, repression, economic circumstances, famine, and drought, more than two million people have tried to cross the Mediterranean to Europe since 2014, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. At least twenty-five thousand have disappeared in the crossing and are presumed dead. Most of these bodies remain at the bottom of the sea; some have washed ashore and been buried in unmarked graves—two thousand in Italy alone. The relatives of those who go missing are often left with only social-media posts from their loved ones and unfinished text conversations. “What about the families? There’s nobody that provides an answer,” José Pablo Baraybar, the forensic coördinator at the International Committee of the Red Cross, in Paris, said.

The International Commission on Missing Persons was started in 1996, by President Bill Clinton, after the conflict in the Balkans. Forty thousand people had gone missing. The I.C.M.P. helped countries arrange the excavation of mass graves and the extraction of DNA from human remains. Seventy per cent of the bodies were ultimately identified. In 2004, after the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the organization helped affected countries extract DNA samples to build an extensive database of the missing, which led to the identification of tens of thousands of people. “Finding missing persons and investigating their disappearances is a state responsibility, regardless of whether the person is a citizen or noncitizen, regardless of their nationality, their ethnic background, their racial background,” Kathryne Bomberger, the Commission’s director-general, told me. “Clearly, there is a double standard.”

The I.C.M.P. has pushed for a similar effort to locate and identify the bodies of deceased migrants today, and to investigate their disappearances. In 2017, a member of the Italian parliament proposed a motion that would fund migrant identification, but it never made it to a vote. The following year, Italy, Malta, Greece, and Cyprus agreed to share information on the DNA of migrant bodies with the Commission, but so far none of the countries have submitted the relevant data. Instead, the European Union has invested heavily in efforts to block migration, even at the risk of contributing to migrant deaths. In 2018, it equipped and trained the Libyan Coast Guard to intercept migrants headed for Europe. Sometimes the Coast Guard sank boats in the process. Captured migrants have been taken to prisons in Libya, where they have been tortured, extorted, and sold into forced labor. The E.U. has discouraged humanitarian groups from rescuing migrants in sinking boats; Italy has repeatedly blocked vessels carrying migrants from disembarking in its waters.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKEROusmane: The Power of Found Family

Unrecorded deaths have legal ramifications. People who can’t prove that a spouse has died find it difficult to remarry. The relatives of missing migrants face challenges when filing civil suits or joining criminal proceedings against smugglers accused of overloading boats or sending faulty ships to sea. When governments are at fault, it is difficult for families to hold them accountable. In late June, about two thousand migrants and refugees from Sudan and other African countries tried to scale a border fence between Morocco and Melilla, a Spanish enclave. Dozens were injured in a stampede, and security forces in Morocco savagely beat the migrants and shot them with rubber bullets. On the other side of the fence, Spanish guards tear-gassed them. At least twenty-three people were killed, and seventy-seven were reported missing. In the days afterward, the Moroccan Association for Human Rights posted photographs on Twitter showing freshly dug graves, and alleged that the government planned to bury the deceased without identifying them, alerting their families, or investigating the causes of their deaths. (The Spanish Ministry of the Interior has stated that its security forces, and those of Morocco, “acted in a proportional and temperate manner.”)

Psychiatrists call the emotional purgatory of not knowing whether a loved one is dead “ambiguous loss.” Family members suffer the pain of knowing that a loved one is likely gone, but are denied the rituals of mourning—burial, funeral—that allow them to move on. “From a clinical point of view, the symptoms are quite similar to those of people tortured,” Marzia Marzagalia, a psychiatrist in Milan who treats migrants, told me. Those suffering from ambiguous loss often struggle with sleeping and eating, have nightmares, feel that they are in danger, and experience obsessive ideation and physical pain. Ambiguous loss can also lead to depression and alcoholism, and has been linked to cancer, gastrointestinal disorders, and immunological diseases. “I have a mother who lost three children,” Marzagalia said. “She didn’t see them die on the boat. She left with them and arrived alone. And she goes on looking for them.”

Cattaneo, of labanof, the forensic lab, is fifty-eight and slight, with curly, dyed-blond hair, a scratchy voice, and a forceful bearing. She speaks quickly in both Italian and English, and generally expects others to get to the point quickly, too. She grew up in Montreal, studied biomedical sciences at McGill University, and co-founded labanof, in 1995. In its early years, the lab primarily worked to identify the victims of murders or accidental deaths in Milan. “If the body doesn’t have a name, how can you start investigating the crime?” she said. In 2007, Cattaneo’s lab spurred the creation of Italy’s Special Office of the Commissioner for Missing Persons, which now coördinates identification efforts. In 2012, the lab created a national database that collected photographs of unidentified bodies, the country’s first. Three years later, two Croatian sisters found a photo of their father, who had been missing for twenty years, and learned that he had died suddenly on a work trip to Milan; they had always believed that he had walked out on their family. “Twenty-five years ago, many of the unidentified bodies that we were doing autopsies on were migrants from Ukraine or Romania,” Cattaneo said. “But never like this.”

On October 3, 2013, Cattaneo was in Geneva, speaking at the International Committee of the Red Cross, when she saw the news that a migrant boat had sunk less than two miles from Lampedusa’s coast—one of the first big disasters of what came to be called the “migrant crisis.” Five hundred and eighteen people had been on board, and most had died. “I was outraged,” Cattaneo recalled. None of their families would ever know what happened to them. Cattaneo agitated the Special Office of the Commissioner for Missing Persons to allow the lab to identify the victims. People thought that the process would be too onerous, she told me, and that the families wouldn’t care about learning their relatives’ fates. “We said, Let’s try,” Cattaneo recalled. “Let’s do one pilot study.”

The police had already recovered the bodies from the wreck and taken photographs and DNA samples. They were able to identify a hundred and fifty people, and asked Cattaneo’s lab to help with a hundred and seventy-six more. The Italian missing-persons office requested that Sudanese and Eritrean embassies in other European countries announce that Italy was trying to identify victims from the boat. In the months that followed, eighty families paid their own way from Denmark, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in Europe to meet with Cattaneo’s team, in Milan and Rome. They carried photographs of missing family members and brought relatives who could give DNA samples; one family brought nail clippings from a grandmother who could not travel, in case they proved useful. On the morning of the meetings in Milan, Cattaneo found several families sleeping on benches in the lobby of the lab. At the meetings in Rome, an older Eritrean man, whose son had gone missing, sat in a corridor of a government building watching CNN footage of a recovery effort after a recent plane crash. “He was seeing everyone run for those people,” Cattaneo said. “But he had waited a year for someone to move a finger for his son.”

In some instances, when the bodies were well preserved, Cattaneo’s team was able to make quick identifications using recognizable tattoos or dental superimpositions. She identified a dozen bodies within days, with photographs provided by relatives. “They were showing us the Facebook profile of the missing person, and you had amazing pictures of tattoos, people on the beach with the smiles showing the dental profile—and you can identify with that,” she said. One Eritrean woman was looking for her nephew, who had just graduated from high school and had ritual facial scarring; Cattaneo soon identified his body. The son of the man who had been watching CNN had a tattoo of a cross, and Cattaneo found him as well. In the end, Cattaneo’s lab and the police identified about sixty per cent of the people whom the families were searching for. “It showed that you can identify these migrants, and that people are looking for their loved ones,” Cattaneo said. “I was really happy to prove people wrong.”

This past March, I visited Cattaneo on the campus of the State University of Milan, in Città Studi, the city’s academic district. Her office, just above the lab, is big and homey, with a red couch covered in letters and anatomy books. A replica of Michelangelo’s last Pietà—representing empathy for the relatives of the dead, she told me—stood near the room where her team meets with migrants’ family members, at the top of a staircase that leads to the city morgue. Outside, it had been sunny, but downstairs the lab was cool, lit by fluorescent lights. One lecture hall had a ceramic table on which Mussolini’s autopsy had been performed.

Cattaneo took me to a room containing human remains from a shipwreck. Hundreds of beige boxes stacked along a wall held personal belongings that had been found on the boat: love letters, I.D. cards, wallets, glasses, headphones, toothbrushes, jewelry, Fanta soda cans, prayer books. I saw children’s socks and school report cards. Cattaneo showed me bundles of photographs of shipwreck victims at weddings, graduations, birthdays. There was also a stack of thank-you notes from families whose relatives had been identified. “The main reason, for me, to identify the dead is to respect the mental health of the living,” Cattaneo said.

Since the lab’s early days, it has received no state funding, relying instead on grants from nonprofits. In between criminal investigations and teaching at the university, Cattaneo has to squeeze in her migrant-identification work, with help from a volunteer team of devoted forensic anthropologists and graduate students. The lab has solved fifty cases. But there are still four hundred and thirty open cases from sixty-eight shipwrecks on which the team has gathered data. Cattaneo said, of her team’s work so far, “This was done to prove a point, but it can’t be it.”

The successes can be gratifying. Last year, she took on a case for Abraham Gmichael, an Eritrean immigrant living in Australia. Gmichael’s brother-in-law Abrahele, a teacher, had resisted Eritrea’s compulsory military service and, at thirty, with a wife and three young children at home, decided to make his way to Europe. He planned to bring his family once he was settled. Gmichael had lost touch with Abrahele in October, 2013, around the time of the Lampedusa shipwreck. When Gmichael’s family heard that the boat had sunk, they suspected that Abrahele had been on board. “It was horrific,” Gmichael recalled. “You can’t even express it in words.” Abrahele’s wife lost consciousness and fell. “It was scary. Not only him—I had neighbors, close friends, who lost their lives. It was chaos. Many people around me were grieving.” Last year, Gmichael tried to sponsor Abrahele’s wife—Gmichael’s wife’s sister—and children to join his family in Australia. But the Australian Department of Home Affairs required Abrahele’s death certificate.

Gmichael spoke to Tareke Brhane, an Eritrean activist in Italy who has become one of the most prominent advocates for migrants in Europe. Brhane contacted Cattaneo. He then helped the International Organization for Migration obtain DNA samples from Abrahele’s children, who were in Ethiopia, and Cattaneo tested the samples against the DNA extracted from the shipwreck victims. The samples were a match. “It was a case where you had three children, and then, zoom, you bang in on the DNA,” she said. Abrahele had died on the boat, and Cattaneo knew where his body had been buried. His widow and children are now preparing to move to Australia. “It feels amazing,” Gmichael said. “His parents, when they heard that his death certificate was ready, they celebrated. Because now we know that he actually lost his life. It makes a big difference to them.”

But the work is not always so straightforward. In 2015, another migrant boat sank between Libya and Lampedusa. The vessel, a twenty-metre fishing boat, had been carrying roughly a thousand people. Italy arrested the traffickers, who had charged passengers twelve hundred to eighteen hundred dollars for passage—extra if they wanted life jackets—and had cut marks on the heads of those who disobeyed orders; they had also forced passengers to sit on the hatch of the hull once it started filling with water, to stop people inside from escaping. Two men were convicted of human trafficking and manslaughter. A year after the boat sank, Italy raised it from the sea and tugged it to the Sicilian town of Melilli. The Special Office of the Commissioner for Missing Persons asked Cattaneo’s lab and other universities to perform autopsies on the bodies before they were put in coffins and buried. “When the fire brigade opened the boat, there were layers and layers and layers of dead bodies face down,” Cattaneo recalled. “I tried to put my arm in to see if I could reach the last layer, and I couldn’t feel it. It gives you the impression of what kind of an end they met, and how desperate they must have been to have travelled in that situation.” There were dozens more bodies below the cargo hold and in the space where the anchor chains should have been stored. Cattaneo saw skeletons of adolescents under the floorboards. The way people had been crammed onto the boat reminded her of images she had seen of slave ships. The victims were from Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, Bangladesh, and elsewhere; half were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen.

Cattaneo and her team did autopsies for three straight months, inside a hangar on a military base in Melilli that overlooked the sea. While performing an autopsy on a nineteen-year-old boy, Cattaneo found that he was carrying a plastic bag of soil; she wondered at first if it was drugs. But when her team found other passengers with similar bags, she learned that they were carrying earth from their home countries. It made her think of the summers she spent as a child in her ancestral village, in northern Italy, and then having to return to Canada; she would break off twigs from trees and put them in the pages of her books. “I was surprised, and ashamed that I was surprised,” she said. The International Committee of the Red Cross worked with Cattaneo’s lab to get DNA profiles from a hundred and twenty families, and to interview survivors, people who had tried to board the boat but were turned away, and smugglers. But identification was more difficult than it had been with the Lampedusa wreck. Because the boat had been underwater for a year, most of the victims’ faces had dissolved, and some of their remains had commingled, making DNA testing difficult. The lab identified just six people from the wreckage.

Back in 2013, a week after the October 3rd sinking, another boat had sunk in Maltese waters. Some three hundred Syrian migrants, many of them children, drowned. Officers with the Italian Coast Guard were arrested for failing to help, despite receiving several distress calls. (The case never went to trial, and the statute of limitations for the charges expired in 2022.) “Italy was saying it’s Malta’s responsibility, and Malta was saying it was Italy’s responsibility, and they all died because it was nobody’s responsibility,” Cattaneo said. She interviewed several Syrian parents and took DNA samples from them. One father, a doctor, told Cattaneo that all three of his children had disappeared when the boat capsized. But Cattaneo has not identified any bodies from the wreck. The lab had only twenty-one bodies; Malta reported having twenty-eight. The rest were likely still in the sea. “None of the people who gave us their DNA have their loved ones among the cadavers,” Cattaneo said. “And nobody is talking about raising other boats.”

In the lab, Cattaneo and a colleague, a forensic anthropologist named Debora Mazzarelli, turned to Wildmikael’s case. They had been trying for months to verify that Biniam was in the October 3rd shipwreck. The survivors had compiled a list of possible passengers, and he was on it. Cattaneo and Mazzarelli saw a photograph of a corpse with a facial structure that resembled Biniam’s—“Nobody else looked like him,” Cattaneo said—though it was hard to be sure. The body was bloated, and the photographs that Wildmikael had sent were out of focus. But they sent Wildmikael pictures of the corpse, and she felt sure that it was him. When Wildmikael had first heard the news that Biniam might be dead, she was angry—that he had left her, that he had never got to truly know his son. But when she saw the photographs she cried. “I realized he had actually died,” Wildmikael said. “Once I saw the picture, I realized it was real.” Still, identifications using visual clues such as photographs, without scientific support, are wrong thirty per cent of the time. Cattaneo’s lab needed more. She decided to run a DNA test to see if the body was a match with Yafet. “You know how many cases we have where we’re so close?” she said.

The island of Lampedusa exists in an uneasy tension: it is both a holiday destination, because of its white-sand beaches, and the first stop for migrants crossing the Mediterranean, because it is the closest Italian point to Africa. I recently visited the island with a group of activists from the 3rd of October Committee, an N.G.O. created after the Lampedusa shipwreck. The group was led by Brhane, the Eritrean activist in Italy. Tall and lanky, with a cloud of black hair and an easy way with strangers, he had spent four years in Libyan detention centers before finally making it to Europe and receiving asylum. “I still question, How did I cross the desert, survive the prisons and the violence, and I’m still smiling?” Brhane said. We had spent the day at a school on the island, where Brhane and his colleagues spoke about why people leave their homes to come to Europe. Afterward, Brhane visited a cemetery where migrants are buried in unmarked graves. Flowers from townspeople adorned several headstones. The group had been pushing local political leaders to memorialize the deaths of unidentified migrants. “We’re going to go all over cities in Sicily trying to map who is buried there, who has a name or not,” Brhane said.

The October 3rd sinking was an unprecedented event in Italy. “For the first time, the sea gave us back the bodies,” Brhane said. “Nobody could say they did not know. Nobody could say they did not see it.” For about six months, he went on, Italian politicians and the country’s media showed compassion for migrant deaths. But then their attention drifted elsewhere. Every October, his organization holds a weekend of events on Lampedusa to preserve the incident in the national memory; survivors and relatives of the missing, including a Syrian couple who lost their children, come to the island. “It’s difficult because a lot of families still believe their relatives are alive,” Brhane said. “Only a small percentage have the bodies to test the DNA. The majority are in the sea, and the Italian government does not want to spend the money to bring them out. They are waiting for answers that we cannot give them. They are suffering.”

Thirteen per cent of the bodies of migrants who died on journeys between 2014 and 2019 have been recovered, according to estimates. The rest are still at the bottom of the Mediterranean or decomposing in North African deserts. “Seventy per cent of the bodies no longer exist,” Baraybar, of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told me. “So we also have to do forensics without bodies. Their fate can only be inferred.” A group of Tunisian mothers looking for their sons had given samples of their DNA to the lab, but Cattaneo had no bodies or genetic profiles from the relevant shipwrecks to test them against. “You just feel this huge sense of responsibility,” she said. “You know that most of the time you won’t be able to give them an answer.” Even when Cattaneo has the bodies, it’s difficult to find the families they belong to. She relies on activists, like Brhane, who are connected to migrant diasporas. “Where do you get hold of the relatives? How?” she said. “Some may be in the countries of origin, some may be in transition, some may already be in Europe.”

Cattaneo believed that European countries should be forced to recover bodies from their waters and to pay for autopsies, outreach, and DNA testing. The countries should then store this information on a database. “These countries have not experienced a missing-persons problem at this level since the Balkans or World War Two, so those mechanisms, to be fair, don’t exist,” Bomberger, of the International Commission on Missing Persons, said. “But the numbers of missing persons around the world is on the rise. Cristina’s a hero, but it can’t be the burden of one woman to deal with twenty thousand disappearances.”

Few European leaders agree. “Not only is the problem not considered a problem for lots of political actors—it’s a great angle for a right-wing government to leverage for their own benefit,” Simon Robins, a researcher on humanitarian protections, said. Baraybar believes that, as long as countries don’t modify their migration policies, “a magical solution doesn’t exist,” because so few bodies are recovered. It cost Italy 9.5 million euros to raise the Melilli boat from the water; raising more vessels could be prohibitively expensive. Conservative politicians have argued that migrants are crossing the sea by choice and know the potential consequences. Lena Düpont, a German member of the European Parliament, told me that money would be better spent on efforts to prevent migration in the first place, including investing in development in sub-Saharan Africa and continuing partnerships with the Libyan Coast Guard to stop migrants from reaching Europe. “It’s not that we don’t care about those who drown in the Mediterranean,” Düpont said. She later added, “We want to prevent dead bodies from being thrown to the shores of our union. . . . We need to focus on having the right instruments in hand, and a functioning system, for preventing those deaths, given that we do have tight resources at the European level.” Meanwhile, anti-migrant sentiment continues to sweep through Europe. “Stop landings” was a popular slogan during Italy’s elections last year, in which Giorgia Meloni, a far-right nationalist, was elected Prime Minister. “Italy cannot accept tens of thousands of immigrants who only bring problems,” Matteo Salvini, a former interior minister, said, days before a recent visit to Lampedusa. “Italy is not Europe’s refugee camp.”

During my visit to Milan, I sat in on a virtual meeting between Cattaneo and Pierfrancesco Majorino, another member of the European Parliament. Majorino had arranged for Cattaneo to testify before Parliament in support of a bill on migrant identification. “They’re hearing us for six whole minutes,” Cattaneo told me dryly. The bill would make European countries responsible for identifying the bodies of migrants found in their waters and create a database that humanitarian organizations could use to identify them. “The core of your message should be that Europe needs to recognize the right of identification,” Majorino told her. Cattaneo said, “We’ve met hundreds of families who have brought us information, and it’s just not getting across, and nobody’s doing anything. It’s morally outrageous.”

Even with such a law in place, the work would remain difficult. “It’s not like an air crash, where you have two hundred victims and you have a passenger list,” Cattaneo said. “It’s more like a tsunami, but it’s even more difficult because you don’t have one tragedy on one date. You have thousands of disasters—and small disasters. One fishing boat with five victims, the other one’s a thousand.” She believed that Europe could make the journey less brutal in the first place, allowing migrants to travel safely through humanitarian corridors. “There shouldn’t be all these dead people,” Cattaneo said. “It’s crazy.” Russian troops had invaded Ukraine a few weeks earlier, and Europe had been extraordinarily welcoming to refugees. Germany and Austria were offering free train rides, and the European Union had activated, for the first time, a “temporary protection directive,” which allowed Ukrainian refugees to remain in Europe for at least a year, with the right to work and to use social services. “It is done for Ukrainians because they are Ukrainians and not sub-Saharan Africans,” Cattaneo said. Majorino replied, “There is no doubt that their origin is the deciding factor.”

This past spring, I visited Wildmikael at her home in Vacha. It was her day off—she worked in the warehouse of an online retailer—and she was wearing a lemon-yellow sweatshirt and gray sweatpants. She made tea and prepared a plate of spaghetti, then led me to her living room, which was decorated with candles and plants. She had dedicated part of a wall to photographs of her family and of classmates from her German-language class. Brhane had recently arranged to have a DNA sample taken from her son, Yafet, which Cattaneo would test against the body that had been recovered from the October 3rd wreck. “I’m a little scared,” Wildmikael said.

In September, Cattaneo learned the result: the DNA samples did not match. At first, Cattaneo considered the possibility that the body was in fact Biniam’s but that he was not really Yafet’s father. Yet Wildmikael insisted that he was the only man she had ever been with. Cattaneo analyzed the samples again, but got another negative result. In the end, she decided that the body was probably not Biniam’s, after all. “The geneticist said it’s either some very rare—though we don’t know how frequent it is in sub-Saharan populations—mutation or it’s not him,” Cattaneo said. She had also checked Yafet’s DNA against all of the lab’s genetic profiles from the wreck, but none had matched. “This boy’s father could have never been recovered from the sea,” she said. “Maybe he was in another shipwreck.” Wildmikael, after several months of waiting, was incredulous when she heard the news, and then devastated. “The only thing I am sure of is that he died on the way to Italy,” she said. “Apart from that, I don’t know if that is the body of the father of my son.”

On my last day in Milan, Cattaneo and I walked through the city toward Piazza del Duomo. The missing-migrants crisis was not confined to Europe. The remains of hundreds of deceased migrants are found at the U.S.-Mexico border every year, and families rely on volunteers to piece together the fate of loved ones. “Knowing whether your son is dead or not is a fundamental right,” Cattaneo told me. “In other historical periods, the dead were treated with more respect.” She said that she was ready, if necessary, to sue on behalf of family members of the missing: “If the European Parliament, having known all this information, consciously says, ‘We don’t care, we won’t do anything about this,’ then we start the class-action lawsuit.”

Wildmikael was now one of countless people who would probably never know what happened to a missing relative. “We have so many people in situations like this,” Gmichael, the Eritrean whose brother-in-law was identified, told me. “So many young people have lost their lives, and their parents don’t know where they are for more than ten, fifteen years.” Gmichael had heard of fathers calling on community elders to help fabricate stories about missing children in order to soothe mothers who needed closure. “The story of almost every household in Eritrea is so terrible,” he said.

Wildmikael recently submitted a visa application for Yafet. Biniam had now been missing for almost ten years, which could make the application easier to file, and she also included the survivors’ manifest of the October 3rd shipwreck, which listed Biniam as having been on board. If Yafet’s application wasn’t successful, he could apply again when he turned eighteen, in four years, at which point the barriers for him to come to Germany would be lower. But four years was a long time. Although Wildmikael talked to her son every day, she could no longer remember what it was like to be with him in person. And she had to make peace with the fact that she would probably never know what happened to Biniam. “He was the father of my son, and now he’s dead, and they don’t believe me,” she said. “I just need an answer.”

 

France and Germany send ministers to see whether peace is taking hold in Ethiopia

Monday, 09 January 2023 21:34 Written by

 

 

Martin Plaut

Jan 9

Source: AFP

 French and German Foreign ministers 1

 Last updated: 05/01 - 12:46

ETHIOPIA

French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna announced Thursday that she would travel to Ethiopia next week with her German counterpart Annalena Baerbock "to consolidate peace", after the agreement signed on November 2 between the government and Tigrayan rebels.

"I will be going next week with my colleague and friend Annalena Baerbock to Africa, to Ethiopia," Colonna told LCI television.

"We will travel together to consolidate the peace agreement that has finally been reached" to end the war that ravaged northern Ethiopia for two years "and to support the action of the African Union,” she added.

The peace agreement provides in particular for the disarmament of rebel forces, the restoration of federal authority in Tigray and the reopening of access and communications to this isolated region since mid-2021.

A diplomatic source told AFP that the visit of the two heads of diplomacy would take place on January 12 and 13. 

They will also discuss food security as well as relations between Ethiopia and the European Union, as well as relations between the EU and the African Union, according to the same source.