2009

It feels like it happened just yesterday. It was 7 a.m. on an average day in September in Asmara, Eritrea. My brain was still reshuffling the information I had gathered about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center a week earlier. I was writing an article on it for the next issue of Setit,…

Articles published in Eritrea’s now-banned private newspapers are at the center of a mock political trial being filmed as an educational documentary this week at Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. Inside a courtroom on the sprawling Tempe, Ariz., campus, a judge of the High Court of Eritrea presides dispassionately, international observers lean into translation…

Last week, President Isaias Afeworki of Eritrea, Africa’s leading jailer of journalists, discussed press freedom during an extensive interview with Swedish broadcaster TV4. Afeworki, a revered guerrilla commander who led this Red Sea country to nationhood in 1993, banned Eritrea’s budding private media in 2001 and threw journalists in secret prisons without charge or trial.…