Eritrea

I've been meaning to write about Eritrea for some time.

On 3 Oct., a boat carrying migrants sank off Lampedusa with the loss of hundreds of lives. Migrants attempting to reach Europe are said to come from Somalia (which has been much in the news recently, following the attack on the shopping-mall in Nairobi), from Syria (of which again much has been written, not least by me) and from Eritrea.

But who knows or cares much about Eritrea? As Léonard Vincent said in an interview on RFI, ça ne mobilise pas les foules (24/5/2013, 18:47). This was on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of its independence from Ethiopia. There was great joy at first, but its seems Eritrea has turned into one big prison camp. Its leader, Issayas Afeworki, learned his authoritarian methods from Mao Zedong.

This view does not go unchallenged, though. Strangely enough, some of the dissenters appear to be the same as those who deny that the Bashar al-Assad regime carried out the chemical weapons attack on Ghouta on 21 August. The problem, apparently, is that all the accounts come from Eritrean refugees, who are biased (Intervention in the name of human rights is the emerging tool of imperialism,  Sharmine Narwani ‏@snarwani ).

L'Erythrée a vingt ans, comme ceux qui la fuient -- Érythrée: un système pénitentiaire «d'une cruauté inimaginable» - In English, Amnesty International report --