Truth about jailed journalists is locked away in Eritrea

CPJ called Eritrean officials in Asmara for comment about the allegations. Emmanuel Hadgo, a public relations officer of the Eritrean Information Ministry denied that Eyob Bahta Habtemariam ever worked for the government and rejected the contents of the interview. Hadgo also denied the existence of prisons with such conditions.

But what about the journalists? Are they OK? The spokesman, taking the government’s long-time stance, disavowed any knowledge whatsoever about the imprisoned editors. By the government’s accounting, these human beings have disappeared.

True or not, the newest grim report hit friends and families of the journalists very hard. “This is really painful you know. What can I say? It’s really terrible,” said Yohannes’ friend and the former editor-in-chief of Setit, Aaron Berhane, who narrowly escaped arrest and lives in exile. For Esayas Isaac, Dawit Isaac’s brother living in Sweden, the government’s refusal to provide any information about the conditions of the jailed journalists compounds the anguish. “It’s very difficult to speak to people from the regime. They tell us we’re CIA, we’re sent by the Americans.” During an interview last summer, in response to a question about which “crime” Dawit Isaac had committed, Afeworki declared “I don’t know” but added without elaboration that the journalist had made “a big mistake.”

“If he says Dawit made a ‘mistake’, then he should please let us know what it is. What we’re asking is give him a trial or release him,” Esayas Isaac said. For Afeworki, who indefinitely suspended the country’s constitution after the 2001 crackdown, such legalities do not seem to apply. Speaking of Dawit Isaac in the same June 2009 interview, he declared: “No, we don't release him. We don't take [him] to trial. We know how to deal with him and others like him and we have our own ways of dealing with that.”

In fact, among the top nations worldwide whose jails are filled with the most journalists (Eritrea trails only Iran, China and Cuba), Eritrea is the only place where absolutely none of those being held have been charged with a crime, subjected to legal action, or granted visits. As brutal as Iran’s ongoing post-election press crackdown  has been, some of the jailed journalists and writers were granted short-term furloughs recently. In China, with a few exceptions, journalists are consistently taken to court. All the Cuban journalists rounded up in a 2003 government crackdown were tried, albeit in summary proceedings. Even North Korea recently gave American journalists their day in court.

Over the years, Eritrean officials have given inconsistent justifications for the September 2001 media crackdown. Officials have variously accused the journalists, many of them former guerilla fighters with Afeworki’s Eritrean Peoples’ Liberation Front, with violating media law regulations, evading mandatory national service, engaging in antistate activities or links with foreign intelligence. At times, officials even sought to erase the jailed journalists from collective memory as when President Isaias responded to a question about Yohannes in a 2004 interview with: “I don’t know him.”

With the president’s absolute grip on state media and the memory of the jailed journalists fading, the government has started rewriting history. In November 2009 for instance, in response to a CPJ inquiry about jailed journalists, Hadgo of the Information Ministry, told the following to CPJ: “I am not aware of any imprisoned journalists in our country. Eritrea is very small and the names you have called I would have known if they were in our prisons, you have wrong information.”

Hadgo went on to say that the only imprisoned Eritrean journalists he was aware of were held in Ethiopia, referring to state TV staffers who have been in Ethiopian custody since 2006.  “I am not aware whether they are a live or dead. We heard the whole thing from the news,” he said. It sounds familiar.