co-founder Dawit Isaac, a
Swedish citizen who was freed
in 2005 but thrown
back into prison two days later, are in pitiful physical and mental health.
Habtemariam claimed he last saw the prisoners in January of this year, prior to
his own escape.
Is this information accurate? After all, it’s being
broadcast by an opposition station so there is plenty of reason to question
both motives and accuracy.
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.
Oh my God. I just don't know how long the world can tolerate these creatures exterminating the innocent and abusing the peace-loving people of Eritrea.