Countries at the Crossroads 2007

Eritrea showed considerable promise upon winning its de facto independence in May 1991 after a 30-year war against successive U.S.- and Soviet-backed Ethiopian governments that had laid claim to the former Italian colony. Eritrea formalized its status as Africa’s newest nation in a near unanimous vote for sovereignty (99.8 percent) in a United Nations-monitored referendum in which 98.5 percent of the 1,125,000 registered voters participated.¹ Over the next three years, the transitional government established new state institutions—executive, legislative, and judicial branches presiding over a three-tiered administration (national, regional, local); a streamlined civil service; professional armed forces; and new police and security forces, while also managing a highly participatory constitution-making process.

However, the leadership of the independence movement was deeply divided in its commitment to democratic governance. Regime hardliners, who got the upper hand during a series of regional conflicts capped in 1998-2000 by a bloody border war with Ethiopia, plunged the new country into a cycle of military mobilization and political repression that stymied the country’s development prospects and reversed progress toward democracy. This situation worsened in 2006 with an increase in politically motivated arrests, torture and deaths of political prisoners, persecution of religious minorities, and tightened restrictions on nongovernmental organizations and aid agencies.

The victorious Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF)—renamed the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) in 1994—today rules with an iron fist under the leadership of former military commander, now president, Isaias Afwerki. The constitution, ratified in 1997, has yet to be implemented; national elections, repeatedly postponed, have yet to be held. Meanwhile, other political parties and independent nongovernmental organizations are prohibited, and what few private media emerged in the immediate post-independence years have been shut down. Thousands of people have been detained for political offenses ranging from public dissent to noncompliance with open-ended national service requirements. Among the more prominent political prisoners are 11 former independence movement leaders and government ministers—dubbed the Group of 15—jailed in September 2001 after publicly criticizing the president’s undemocratic practices. Detainees also include journalists, mid-level officials, merchants, businessmen, young people resisting conscription, and church leaders and parishioners associated with banned religious organizations.

Eritrea is a nation in a perpetual state of emergency, under siege by its own leaders, with a population denied the most basic freedoms of speech, assembly, press, and religious practice. The continuing confrontation with Ethiopia not only dominates the political discourse to the point where all dissent is branded as treason, it also provides cover for militarizing the new state from top to bottom and for exporting instability to neighboring states—among them Sudan and Somalia—in an effort to weaken Ethiopia. The unresolved border conflict serves as justification for President Isaias to maintain a near-total monopoly on all forms of domestic political and economic power. The absence of any independent media and the complete suppression of civil society preclude the development of a legal opposition within the country—or of any organized public discussion of what such an opposition might look like, were it to be permitted. The ruling party itself is largely a shell through which the president exercises one-man rule that he shows no sign of relinquishing voluntarily. Under these conditions, national elections, when eventually conducted, will only serve to confirm the current dictatorship.