The United Nations refugee agency has just announced that more people are on the move – driven from their homes by conflict and human rights abuses – than at any other time in history: 59.5 million to be precise. Yet governments all over the globe contend that most of these people, who risk their lives on the high seas or trek for weeks or months across deserts with often abusive smugglers or traffickers, are just looking for a job.
Eritrea is one such government. Responding to media questions on a June 8 UN report on Eritrea’s atrocious human rights record, and the resulting mass exodus from the country since 2004, Eritrea’s ambassador to France said, “Let me tell you, all those ‘refugees’ are economic migrants.”
But the UN’s damning 500-page report on Eritrea tells a different story, one of extrajudicial killings, widespread torture and arbitrary detention in inhuman conditions, forced disappearances, and forcing men and women into decades of abusive military service for slave-like wages. The UN says some of these abuses may amount to crimes against humanity.
The report echoes dozens of human rights reports on Eritrea over the past decade. It also resonates with stories Human Rights Watch colleagues and I heard from Eritreans arriving in Italy by boat in May from Libya. An 18-year-old man called Tadesse, who tried to escape lifelong military service in Eritrea only to be caught at the border, told us, “I was thrown in a shipping container for five months. They used to tie us up and leave us in the hot sun for days on end as punishment.”
The UN report is based on hundreds of interviews with Eritrean asylum seekers and refugees across the globe but doesn’t include a single interview with Eritreans living in their own country. Why? Because repeated UN requests for its human rights experts to visit Eritrea were met with a deafening silence.
Putting aside the plethora of evidence from Eritrean refugees, the answer to this “debate” is quite simple. If Eritrea is so confident that hundreds of thousands of its citizens abroad are lying about why they left their country, why not fling open the doors and allow the UN and the rest of the world to see for itself?
With World Refugee Day coming up on June 20, as Eritrea continues to hemorrhage thousands of its citizens each month, it seems that’s the easiest way for the authorities to prove their spurious claim that Eritreans should not be part of the latest shocking global refugee statistics.