Domestic Politics

The political system retained its autocratic character. In a speech on the occasion of Independence Day on 24 May, President Isaias Afewerki announced the launch of a constitution drafting process, disregarding the fact that the implementation of Eritrea’s ratified constitution of 1997 was still pending. At the end of the year, Isaias declared the existing constitution null and void, claiming on EriTV that “as everybody knows, there is no constitution”. He said that a body had been formed to draft a new constitution.

The prominent Muslim political and military figures who had been detained in the aftermath of the January 2013 military mutiny remained in prison without charge. Long-term minister of defence General Sebhat Ephrem was removed from his post and appointed minister of energy and mines, replacing Ahmed Hadj Ali, one of the detainees. No new defence minister was appointed, but General Philippos Weldeyohannes was apparently in charge of handling the ministry’s business. The post of minister of information had remained vacant since the defection in 2012 of former minister Ali Abdu, who had requested asylum in Australia. In mid-year, Woldenkiel Abraha, a long-term member of the central committee of the ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice ( pfdj ) and a former minister of transport and communication was appointed to the post of minister of local government. According to the unimplemented constitution, this post went along with the vice-presidency. Tesfaselassie Berhane, formerly general manager of EriTel, became the new minister of transport and communication. Nesredin Bekit, who had formerly worked for the pfdj-owned Red Sea Trading Corporation, was appointed minister of trade and industry. He was known for his involvement in the contraband trade and the establishment of smuggling hubs in the border towns of Tessenei and Girmaika.

On 14 March, the remnants of the pfdj’s central committee met for the first time after the crackdown on pfdj reformists in 2001. State media reported a meeting of the ‘central office’, a term that had not previously been used. About two-thirds of the 37 former central committee members were either in jail or had been forced into exile. The cabinet of ministers met twice during the year, in April and October.

On 6 March, Major General Gebregziabher ‘Wuchu’ Andemariam died, only shortly after having been appointed chief-of-staff of the defence forces. On the occasion of his funeral, the restructuring of the military operational command zones and the reallocation of several posts were made public. The eastern operational command zone was now headed by Brigadier General Musa Raba, while General Teklai Kifle ‘Manjus’ retained command of the western zone. The central operational command zone was headed by Brigadier General Simon Okbe and the command of the militias was awarded to Brigadier General Gebrehiwet Zemichael; neither of the last two had played a prominent military leadership role before. Philipos Weldeyohannes established himself as the strongman among the military leadership; he was promoted to the rank of full general and appointed as the new chief-of-staff of the army. He also headed the sprinter operational command, an emergency standby force. About 7,000 soldiers of the Tigray People’s Democratic Movement, an Ethiopian opposition group based in Eritrea, were deployed near Asmara, reportedly with the task of protecting President Isaias. Major General Haile Samuel ‘China’ seemed to have fallen out of favour and lost his post as a military operational zone commander. Rifts within the military leadership became manifest when Teklai ‘Manjus’ was apparently put under house arrest for several weeks in June and had several of his personal staff arrested by General Philipos in October.

The mass exodus of the younger generation to avoid conscription or to flee the potentially unlimited national service accelerated sharply during the year and the number of new arrivals of Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia and Sudan increased markedly. The total number of Eritreans in both countries rose to 216,000 registered refugees, plus substantial numbers who preferred to stay out of refugee camps and so were not registered. In October alone, 5,000 Eritreans crossed the border into Ethiopia. People smuggling and trafficking of Eritreans carried out by the Rashaida tribe and Sinai Bedouins with the complicity of Eritrean, Sudanese and Egyptian officials continued and many refugees were abducted in Eastern Sudanese refugee camps. An estimated 1,000 refugees, mostly Eritreans, remained trapped in trafficking compounds on the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. From 13 to 16 October the au, unhcr, iom and the Sudanese government held a joint conference with the aim of tackling people trafficking and smuggling in the Horn of Africa. On this occasion, Eritrea’s ambassador to the au claimed that the generous asylum policies of various Western countries were the main push factor for Eritrean refugees.

In May, the country’s four Catholic bishops published a Pastoral Letter titled “Where is Your Brother”, in which they deplored the mass exodus of the young and middle-aged and pointed out that this was due to the imposition of indefinite periods of conscription. They stated that current living conditions were unbearable and that the youth would not leave a country in which it was possible to make a living and where peace, justice and freedom of expression prevailed. They openly criticised the pfdj’s ideology of national sacrifice, stating that the country was made for the people and not the people for the country. They concluded that “the pillar that holds our social life is been uprooted and . . . we are heading towards utter collapse”. The letter was widely distributed in secret throughout the country. The government did not retaliate against the bishops, who were backed by the Vatican, but on 20 September the commander of the Eritrean Police Force held a meeting with 150 religious leaders and warned them not to interfere in political issues.

Religious freedom remained severely restricted. Patriarch Antonios of the Orthodox Church, who had been replaced by Bishop Dioscoros in 2007 after having criticised government interference in religious affairs, remained under house arrest. An estimated 1,500 Christians and similar numbers of Muslims were in detention for their faith. Sunni Islam and Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran Christianity were the only permitted religions, while adherents of Pentecostal churches, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims opposed to the government-appointed mufti were considered as ‘radicals’ and faced persecution. In April, police forces arrested four Lutheran Christians who were to be ordained to pastoral ministry. The government did not accept the holding of a clerical post as justifying exemption from military service. Freedom of the press was non-existent, and Eritrea continued to be ranked last worldwide in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.

The Warsay-Yikealo Development Campaign, which forced all Eritreans of working age (18 to over 40) to serve in the military or do national service for unlimited periods, continued. The conscripts worked for pocket money in infrastructure projects, on military-owned agricultural enterprises, in the administration and in public services. According to state media, 500,000 people had so far been trained at the Sawa military training camp, which also served as a boarding school for the twelfth and final school year. About 6,000 mostly female conscripts who had gone through military training earlier had been held at Heday military camp near the town of Afabet without any work assignments and with little food for more than a year. Their fate contributed to growing passive resistance against forced conscription, and increasing numbers of young people who were supposed to report for military training or national service refused to do so and went into hiding or fled the country. Similarly, members of the ‘people militias’, elderly citizens aged between 50 and over 80 years who had been forced since 2012 to undergo military training and to patrol their neighbourhoods carrying guns, increasingly refused to perform their duties and to attend training sessions. The resistance group Arbi Harnet (‘Freedom Friday’), which had been founded in the diaspora, strengthened its base inside Eritrea and was involved in several acts of civil disobedience. It published an underground magazine called ‘MeqaleH Forto’ (Echoes of Forto), a reference to the failed military uprising of January 2013. In August, members of the group distributed about 5,000 nakfa notes carrying the message “exodus is not the solution, rise up” during the annual festival at the Expo compound in Asmara. Diaspora members of the movement made telephone calls to Eritrea, encouraging parents not to send their children back to the Sawa military training camp after the summer break.

Eritrea’s judicial system remained in disarray, with a poorly organised formal court system that often suffered from government interference. Imprisonment for political reasons as well as arrests for alleged criminal offences mostly took place without respect for legal process, and those affected were arbitrarily kept in prison and subsequently released without having been brought before a court of law. Civil cases were handled by traditional elders and mediators on the basis of customary law or by community courts headed by government-picked lay judges. Corruption was endemic and practised by military officers, pfdj cadres and state employees with little government interference. ti’s Corruption Perception Index ranked Eritrea as ‘highly corrupt’ (166th out of 174 countries). The surviving members of the G15, a group of prominent pfdj members who had demanded political reforms and were detained in September 2001, remained in custody without charge. The same applied to the journalists of the free press who had been arrested along with them, including Dawid Issak, a Swedish-Eritrean national. On 15 April, 17 Muslims from the Keren area who had previously served as local administrators, security officers or doctors were released after several years’ imprisonment. They had been neither accused of a specific crime nor brought before a court of law.

On 13 May, the un Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea, Sheila Keetaruth, presented a report in which she spoke of rampant human rights violations related to the indefinite national service and unlawful arrest and detention. As a consequence, the un Human Rights Council established a Mission of Inquiry on 27 June with a mandate to further investigate human rights violations in Eritrea. On 25 September, Eritrea became a signatory to the un Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, possibly as a reaction to the un’s scrutiny. However, in the absence of any human rights monitoring mechanisms in the country, it was highly doubtful that this step would bring an improvement in the prevailing human rights situation.

The political opposition parties in the diaspora remained fractured and generally inactive throughout the year. The National Council of the Eritrean National Conference for Democratic Change ( encdc ), an umbrella organisation of the political opposition and some civic society groups, met in Bishoftu (Ethiopia) on 17 December to address the current encdc impasse and to prepare a congress for the following year. Human Rights Concern Eritrea lobbied for the rights of Eritrean refugees around the globe, and in April the organisation’s director, Elsa Chyrum, went on a three-day hunger strike in Geneva in support of 267 Eritreans who were being held in Djibouti in prison-like conditions. The Djiboutian government consequently handed them over to the Red Cross. On 3 February, a group of prominent pfdj dissidents, among them ambassadors Andeberhan Wolde Giorgis and Abdela Adem, launched a Forum for National Dialogue in London with the aims of serving as a catalyst for pro-democracy Eritreans and preparing a political programme for the post-Isaias era. In April, the Eritrean Lowlanders League was founded in London as a forum to articulate the interests of the various lowland societies, who comprised the majority of the non-Tigrinya groups in the country.

Foreign Affairs

The targeted sanctions imposed on Eritrea by the unsc in December 2009 (resolution 1907/2009) and December 2011 (resolution 2023/2011) remained in place. In a letter dated 13 October, the un Somalia Eritrea Monitoring Group stated that it had found no further evidence that Eritrea supported the al-Shabaab militias in Somalia. However, the group asserted that Eritrea had imported weapons and ammunition from South Sudan, and that these activities had been coordinated by Nusredin Ali Bekit, the manager of the Tessenei branch of the pfdj-owned Red Sea Corporation, who was promoted to minister of trade and industry in mid-2014. Furthermore, Eritrea continued to support armed Ethiopian opposition groups, namely the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the Tigray People’s Democratic Movement (based inside Eritrea) and Ginbot Sebat. The un monitoring group confirmed that Eritrea was still holding 17 Djiboutian prisoners of war and that the conflict between the two countries remained unresolved. In addition, the Eritrean government continued to coerce Eritreans and persons of Eritrean origin in the diaspora to pay a 2% income tax, contrary to the provisions of the 2011 sanctions resolution.

Relations between the Eritrean government and Qatar cooled significantly after the abdication of Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani in 2013, because Eritrea constantly undermined Qatari efforts to mediate in its conflict with Djibouti. When President Isaias visited Qatar on 2 March, he was not received by Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, but only by the minister of municipality and urban planning. In early August, the Eritrean military detained a Djiboutian officer who had accompanied a Qatari military contingent in the demilitarised zone between the two countries; Qatar was monitoring the contested territory under a 2010 tripartite agreement between Djibouti, Eritrea and Qatar. The officer was released later in the year, but Eritrea continued to refuse to hand over Djiboutian pows.

The political stalemate and the no-war-no-peace situation between Eritrea and Ethiopia continued. During Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s visit to Asmara in mid-January, the Sudanese ambassador to Eritrea announced that al-Bashir had begun to hold indirect talks with President Isaias and Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn in the hope of bringing them to the negotiation table at a later stage. However, these efforts did not produce any results. Both governments retained their respective positions, Asmara insisting on the implementation of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission’s 2002 decision, according to which the contested border area around Badme had been awarded to Eritrea, and Ethiopia insisting on the need for dialogue prior to the demarcation of the border. There were no military incursions from Ethiopia into Eritrean territory, with the exception of one assault carried out by two Ethiopia-based Eritrean opposition groups, the Red Sea Afar Democratic Organization and the Democratic Front for Eritrean Unity, who attacked a military base in the Adi Quala subzone on 22 December, reportedly killing seven Eritrean intelligence agents.

Relations with Sudan remained close. On 5 April, presidential advisor Yemane Gebreab travelled to Khartoum to deliver a message from Isaias. President al-Bashir visited Isaias for a second time on 22 June to discuss regional issues, including relations between Sudan and South Sudan. During al-Bashir’s January visit to Asmara, he and his Eritrean counterpart had announced their support for the South Sudanese government, but there were unconfirmed allegations by us human rights activist John Pendergast that both Eritrea and Sudan were clandestinely supporting South Sudanese opposition forces.

The Eritrean government tried to establish close relations with Egypt’s new president, Abdelfattah al-Sisi, and on 9 September President Isaias, Foreign Minister Osman Saleh and presidential adviser Yemane Gebreab travelled to Cairo to hold talks with al-Sisi and various high-level government officials. The Eritrean regime considered Egypt a valuable ally due to its conflict with Ethiopia over the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and its share of the Nile water.

In another attempt to overcome its international isolation, the government tried to improve its relations with Russia. On 17 February, Foreign Minister Osman Saleh visited Moscow and both parties signed a cooperation agreement on trade and investment. On 5 June, an Eritrean delegation headed by the foreign minister and Yemane Gebreab visited the Crimea Peninsula at the invitation of the Russian Federation, purportedly to attend celebrations marking 215 years since the birth of Alexander Pushkin, who was believed to have Eritrean ancestors. The Ukrainian ministry of foreign affairs criticised the visit, calling it “an unfriendly step” and “blatant disrespect of international law” and a violation of Ukrainian sovereignty.

Israel continued its hostile policy towards Eritrean refugees, and in late August about 2,000 Eritreans and Sudanese were held in the Holot facility in the Negev desert in prison-like conditions. According to hrw, 367 Eritreans had been coerced to return home as of March; their fate upon reaching Eritrea was unknown.

Eritrean embassies, consulates and government middlemen around the globe continued to collect a 2% diaspora tax levied by the regime on diaspora Eritreans’ incomes from either work or social welfare. There were no further attempts by host countries to stop these activities, which were restricted under the 2011 sanctions regime. Throughout the year, large numbers of Eritrean refugees reached Europe via the Mediterranean on boats provided by people-smuggling rings. On 2 July, Italy’s Deputy Foreign Minister Lapo Pistelli met Isaias in Asmara, stating that it was time for a new beginning in relations between the two countries. The reported aim of the visit was to encourage Eritrea to enter into constructive regional relations, to boost economic cooperation with Italy and to enter into a shared commitment to human rights. It seemed that the Italian government implicitly hoped that this policy shift would reduce the numbers of Eritreans fleeing their country. On 14 November, a unhcr spokesperson reported that the number of Eritreans arriving in Europe had nearly tripled in 2014 and amounted to 37,000 individuals, 34,000 of whom had arrived by boat, the second-largest group after Syrians. The increase was partially facilitated by Italy’s ‘Mare Nostrum’ operation, which increased the chance of reaching Europe safely by boat from Libya. The majority of the refugees filed asylum claims in Sweden, Switzerland and Germany, but other countries were affected as well. The rising numbers of Eritrean asylum seekers provoked discussions in several European countries, questioning the practice of granting automatic protection to those who left Eritrea illegally in order to escape national service. On 25 November, the Danish Immigration Service published a report largely based on a short mission to Eritrea and on talks with various diplomats and international ngo representatives, which concluded that the situation on the ground had improved and collective protection was no longer necessary. However, the report was heavily criticised by hrw and the unhcr.

Eritrea’s relations with the usa remained poor. On 29 January, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a press release in which it summarised all the usa’s alleged wrongdoings against Eritrea and stated that “us hostility not Eritrean rigidity” were responsible for sour relations. Neither the us embassy in Asmara nor the Eritrean embassy in Washington dc had ambassadors assigned.

Socioeconomic Developments

Eritrea’s faltering command economy remained under the firm control of the ruling pfdj and the high-ranking military. The exchange rate to the dollar remained fixed at a severely overvalued rate of 15 Eritrean nakfa (ern) to $ 1. The black market therefore continued to thrive, and diaspora Eritreans who changed hard currency during a visit to the homeland received a black market change rate of about 55 ern:$ 1, while money sent through the informal hawala system was changed at a rate of about 50 nrn:$ 1. Black market activities were under the control of government agents. Regular electricity blackouts continued and Asmara had no electricity supply for extended periods throughout July and August; fuel was only available on the black market. No investments were made in Asmara’s deteriorating infrastructure, including the sewerage system, and running water was hardly available.

Chronic food insecurity continued in spite of good rains in the highlands. A potential bumper harvest was wasted since large amounts of ripe crops could not be gathered because older farmers were called to participate in military training during harvest time, while younger Eritreans were absent from their villages on national service. unicef published no updated nutrition data for 2014 but indicated that malnutrition rates had increased during the past years in four of the six Eritrean regions, namely Anseba, Gash-Barka, Southern Red Sea and Ma’ekel (Central Region). The Global Hunger Index rated the nutritional situation as ‘extremely alarming’, Eritrea and Burundi being the only remaining countries worldwide in that category. In September, the undp and the government published a report related to the health-related mdgs, which stated that mdgs 4 to 6 had been achieved. According to the report, under-five mortality had fallen to 50 per 1,000 live births and maternal mortality to 380 per 100,000 births, while mortality due to malaria had been reduced by 90% and hiv/aids had almost been eradicated. However, it was unclear whether these data were accurate, since non-governmental organisations had no access to the countryside and an independent assessment of data accuracy was impossible. There were no reports concerning the remaining five mdgs, none of which was likely to be achieved. Hunger and extreme poverty (mdg 1) had only been reduced by 13% since 1990 and, according to the 2014 Africa mdg Report, Eritrea had the lowest school enrolment in Africa (38% in 2011) and the second-lowest primary school completion rate, at 33%.

Reliable economic and financial data were hard to come by due to the government’s constant lack of transparency. The authorities did not publish a state budget and nothing was known about the use of revenues from the mining sector, estimated at $ 1 bn since 2011. The inflation rate remained stable at 12.3% and the current-account balance was estimated at 0.3% of gdp. The African Economic Outlook (AfDB, oecd) corrected its earlier estimate for 2013 and stated that economic growth in that year had been only 1.1% instead of an assumed 7%, and estimated the 2014 growth rate at 1.9%. This was due to shrinking economic activity in all sectors, with the exception of the mining industry. Growth was largely driven by copper production at the Bisha mine, a joint venture of the Canadian Nevsun Mining Corporation and the Eritrean National Mining Corporation (enamco). On 20 November, three Eritrean individuals who had fled to Canada sued Nevsun for complicity in the use of forced labour under its local sub-contractor, the pfdj-owned Segen construction company. The plaintiffs stated they had been forced to work at the Bisha mine against their will and that they had been subjected to cruel and degrading treatment.

According to the AfDB, the influx of remittances gathered through the 2% diaspora tax levied by the government had declined sharply to about 10% of gdp due to the implementation of the 2011 un sanctions, which required diaspora host countries to scrutinise the methods by which the tax was collected.

While Lufthansa did not resume flights to Eritrea, Turkish Airlines launched a route from Istanbul to Asmara on 19 August and Qatar Airways commenced flights from Doha on 5 December.