What is the Price of Freedom?
What is the price of freedom? What would you sacrifice to earn it? And how hard would you fight to retain it? The questions seem especially relevant in today's world. Let history teach us.
This is the endnote I wrote for "I Will Not Grow Downward - Memoir of an Eritrean Refugee," the story of a man who spent the first thirty years of his life witnessing his country's bloody war for independence, only to watch a madman squander it once it was won, then the next twenty years oppressed, forced to serve under unending military conscription, and fighting to be reunited with a family torn apart by lies, tyranny, and war.
Ebook: https://books2read.com/ap/xybYB3/Kenneth-James-Howe
Paperback: https://amzn.to/2CU4kMa
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What is the price of freedom? Not just the tens of thousands of dollars it takes to escape an oppressive regime, navigate a refugee system, and make one’s way to freedom. And not the cost in lives and livelihood of a war to gain one’s freedom. What is the cost to a people who have already won it and risk losing it again?
In a speech before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, the American abolitionist Wendell Phillips argued: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” because “power is ever stealing from the many to the few.”
A century and a half later, these sentiments are certain to resonate with the estimated five million people of the small African nation of Eritrea. In the decades since they won their independence from Ethiopia, the country’s powerful few have stolen nearly everything they can from the vast impoverished majority of its citizens. The crimes continue to be perpetrated to this day, concealed behind a veil of secrecy so opaque that few outside the isolated country are aware of what is happening there— if they are even aware of the tiny nation’s existence at all. There is good reason why Eritrea is known as the “North Korea of Africa.”
When Isaias Afewerki led his freedom fighters to military victory in 1991, he was lionized as a hero of the common man for finally ending a bloody thirty-year conflict that claimed many tens of thousands of lives. As their soon-to-be democratically elected leader, he promised to guide the newly independent nation along a progressive and pragmatic path toward modernization. For a populace eager to shrug off the mantle of foreign occupation and take its long-sought place on the world stage, these were welcome words indeed. Instead, the so-called “Abraham Lincoln of Africa” delivered the exact opposite: forced militarization of the populace, the consolidation of nearly all private enterprise under the watchful eye of the Party, widespread corruption, severe poverty, global isolation, lies, and oppression.
None of this happened overnight, but rather in the insidious manner most often employed by aspiring dictators. Eritrean citizens were like the proverbial frog in the stew pot, oblivious to their fate, either too complacent, too forgiving, or too hopeful of positive change, that they failed to notice the gentle touch of progress stiffening into the regressive claw of totalitarianism until it was far too late to alter their course. More than a quarter century after he helped liberate his people from an oppressive foreign regime, President Isaias — Eritreans are known by their first names — revisits the very same tyrannical horrors perpetrated upon the Eritrean people by their former foreign oppressors. He has never allowed a political referendum on his leadership, despite his many promises to hold democratic elections for his position. Instead, he appears to be grooming his eldest son, Abraham, as his heir apparent.
Many Eritrean youth, both male and female, are forced into compulsory military service before they finish high school. There, separated from their families, they train under the most inhumane of conditions, then continue to toil for the state for untold years. Their pay cannot support a single individual, let alone an entire family. This effectively perpetuates a cycle of poverty and dependence from one generation to the next. Eritrea’s disproportionate military force is deployed to the borders to prevent people from leaving. It is used in the cities to quash dissent, to spy on others, to detain and force even more people into compulsory servitude, and to inflict torture on those taken to their many prisons.
President Isaias is the sole decision maker in his government, and his edicts are frequently erratic and abusive. He imposes his “reign of fear through systematic and extreme abuses of the population,” which the United Nations characterizes as crimes against humanity.[1] These abuses include the imprisonment of more than ten thousand political prisoners, many of whom are never charged or formally tried in a court and are instead subjected to torture for reasons of punishment, interrogation, and coercion.[2] Many of these prisoners eventually die while incarcerated. In 2016, a UN Commission of Inquiry found that the government’s totalitarian practices and disrespect for the rule of law manifested “wholesale disregard for the liberty” of Eritrea’s citizens.[3] Yet despite international pressure to change, human rights violations continue unabated.[4]
The effects of such despotic rule on the citizenry are entirely predictable. Those desperate enough and capable enough to escape the country do so by any means possible. And they do it knowing full well the terrible risks they will encounter, both natural and man-made. They do it with full understanding that they will very likely fail. This is how driven they are to escape. So pervasive is the abuse that even the president’s younger son, Berhane, tried to flee the country in 2015, but he was caught illegally crossing over the border in Tessenei, the same border town where the author made his own crossing into Sudan in 2009. Many of those caught while attempting to escape are shot on sight. Some who make it out end up becoming victims of sexual abuse in the hundreds of refugee camps scattered throughout the region. Some are caught up in human trafficking. Too few make it to Europe, far fewer to the Americas. And of those who do find a place outside of the camps, too many are marginalized, criminalized, and forcibly repatriated to a country that will punish them as traitors. Sadly, the fates of too many remain a mystery.
No one becomes a refugee by choice, whether out of convenience or laziness or a shortage of patriotism. No one leaves home if their basic human needs are already being met. No one risks the often treacherous journey to a foreign land, where they know they will almost certainly face racism and other forms of persecution. Where they will spend the rest of their days as second-class citizens. Or worse.
One of the best descriptions I know of for the utter desperation that must be felt by refugees is encapsulated within the poem “Home,” by the Kenyan-born British-Somali writer, Warsan Shire:
i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home tells you to
leave what you could not behind,
even if it was human.
no one leaves home until home
is a damp voice in your ear saying
leave, run now, i don’t know what
i’ve become.
It is true that Eritrea doesn’t know what it has become, other than the mouth of a shark. It is why so many of its nationals have fled.
The numbers are simply staggering. While no reliable census data is available, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that by the end of 2015, nearly half a million Eritreans have ended up as global refugees and asylum seekers— roughly twelve percent of the country’s “official” population estimate.[5] That’s one in every eight Eritreans. But even that number is almost certainly underestimated by a considerable amount, since so many more Eritreans end up displaced from their homes and separated from their families for reasons of poverty, drought, violence, religious persecution, and disease. It is likely that as many as one in three Eritreans have been uprooted. How can a country survive — how can it grow, advance, and prosper — when so many of its citizens remain unsettled?
The truth of what is happening to these people remains largely hidden from the wider world. Within Eritrea, free speech is aggressively suppressed. There is no independent media inside the country to ensure objective reporting; it has been completely abolished since 2001, when President Isaias expelled or imprisoned dozens of journalists. Eritrea’s state-owned news agency censors local and global events, keeping its citizens — and the rest of the world — largely uninformed or intentionally misinformed. In fact, since Reporters Without Borders first began publishing its annual Press Freedom Index in 2005, Eritrea has consistently ranked at or near the very bottom of the list; only North Korea has ranked worst, edging Eritrea out for the bottom spot in the past two years.[6] The only independent and politically non-partisan source of freely reported news and information focused on Eritrea is Paris-based Radio Erena, which is run by exiled journalists. The signal is often electronically jammed inside Eritrea.
Outside its borders, anyone who succeeds in escaping is typically reluctant to speak out about their experiences for fear the government will retaliate against family members and friends they left behind.
For these reasons and more, the scale and scope of Eritrea’s plight remain largely underappreciated and badly misunderstood. But word is slowly and steadily getting out. People are starting to take notice, to heed the struggle of the Eritrean people and diaspora, almost solely as a result of the few brave expatriates who managed to escape the government’s tyranny and are putting their safety on the line to speak out about it. They want the world to know what is happening behind the iron veil surrounding this isolated nation— the nation for which they still hold a deep and unshakable love. They refuse to give up hope that conditions will one day improve enough for them to return home— that is, when home is no longer the barrel of a gun. It helps that international pressure is increasingly being exerted on the country’s leaders to change, even as pressures continue to mount from within. But will President Isaias heed these signals?
There may be, at long last, the faintest glimmer of hope. Just in the few weeks leading up to the publication of this book, tensions between Eritrea and their largest foe in the region, Ethiopia, have eased. This has been brought about entirely by peace gestures from Ethiopia’s newly elected prime minister, Abiy Ahmed Ali. Just days ago, in fact, the two nations signed a fresh peace accord in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.[7] But will this finally end the perpetual state of war between them? More importantly, will President Isaias Afewerki, now in his mid-seventies and suffering from health problems, or his descendant, take the opportunity to loosen the government’s chokehold on a people who simply want to breathe free?
Time will certainly tell. But Eritreans aren't collectively holding their breath. In the month since the border between the two countries was reopened, nearly ten thousand fled over it into Ethiopia, and they say they won't return until there are clear signs of reform. The skepticism is well-founded. When the president's own son is in attendance during the secretive peace treaty negotiation, what hope do the people have for regime change? And so far, Afewerki still hasn't released anyone from their National Service commitments or freed any of his political foes from prison. This is what he has cost his people: the loss of their national pride and trust. It will take more than signatures and empty promises to recover them.
~K.J.H.
October 22, 2018
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REFERENCES
[1] Nick Cumming-Bruce, “Torture and Other Rights Abuses Are Widespread in Eritrea, U.N. Panel Says,” The New York Times (8 Jun 2015)
[2] Amnesty International, “Eritrea: Rampant Repression 20 years After Independence,” (9 May 2013)
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/05/eritrea-rampant-repression-years-after-independence/
[3] Human Rights Watch, “World Report - 2017,” (20 Jan 2017)
https://www.ecoi.net/en/document/1173976.html
[4] Human Rights Watch, “ Eritrea: Rights Abuses Continue Unabated,” (12 Mar 2018)
https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/03/12/eritrea-rights-abuses-continue-unabated
[5] Human Rights Watch, “World Report - 2017,” (20 Jan 2017)
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/eritrea
[6] Reporters Without Borders, “RSF Index 2018: Hatred of journalism threatens democracies,” (2018) https://rsf.org/en/ranking/2018
[7] Aaron Brooks, “Eritrea and Ethiopia sign fresh peace accord in Saudi Arabia,” The East Africa Monitor (20 Sep 2018) https://eastafricamonitor.com/eritrea-and-ethiopia-sign-fresh-peace-accord-in-saudi-arabi