On the memory of the twenty fourth of May:

Eritrea: an independent state … an oppressed people

The extended and costly struggle for national independence has led to an independent state, however, the newly born state has fallen under the grip of a small political sect that has abducted the citizens’ of their rights to choose their rulers, change or even criticize them. The sect has striped the Eritrean citizens of their civil rights and restricted public freedoms. Since independence, this sect has put the citizens under pitiless varieties of oppression, repression, violence and has practised extreme brutality, and all that for the sake of extending its illegal grip on the nation and its resources.

The Eritrean government keeps  arbitrary in its prisons, that are spread all over the country, thousands of citizens among them hundreds of  heroes of the national struggle for independence, they are kept under very miserable conditions where they suffer torture and have no right to be visited.

The regime’s security apparatus use deadly force without objective justifications and unlawfully. The death penalty has been exercised in several occasions, for instance, in the 13^th of March 2006, two young men who allegedly helped dodgers, from the “national service”, to cross the borders to the Sudan, were publicly executed in the main square of Tessenai town.

Eritrean citizens, whose two thirds depends on humanitarian aids, suffer living hardships that are partially caused by natural drought and mainly by mismanagement of state resources, lack of transparency, lack of accountability and redirecting the human resources to projects that has nothing to do with development and production.

The regime uses the obligation for “national services” as a pretext to keep, for long years, young citizens under forced labour. It monopolizes the whole economy and chokes the private sector. The country lacks primary health care services and has one of the highest records of malnutrition and child and mother mortality in the world. Most school age children in the country have no chances to get into school.

The hideous and extensive carnage committed by the Eritrean government, especially in imposing the “national service”, caused thousands of the Eritrean youth to flee the country and seek refuge in the neighbouring countries, exposing themselves to death from thirsty or been hunted by border guards or been blown up into pieces by land mines.

Eritreans won independent country, nevertheless, they have not yet won their freedom; they do not own their destiny; only a small vindictive sect decides on their fate. The sect regime brutalizes the citizens and dissipates the country’s scarce resources in vain.

A national independence in which human rights are not respected, and citizens are deprived of their natural rights to administer their own affairs, indeed, is uncompleted independence.

Suwera Centre for human Rights

2006/5/24