Eritrea: Letter of Appeal to the Italian Government

 

To prof. Mario Draghi,

 

Prime Minister

 

p.c. on. Luigi Di Maio,

 

Foreign Minister

 

Dear President,

 

let's write to you again, on behalf of the Habeshia agency, after the appeal letter we sent to your predecessor on the eve of his trip to Asmara three years ago. This year 30th anniversary of independence, but another year of severe suffering and abuse suffered by the Eritrean people. And of great disappointment - yet another disappointment - for those who hoped that the signing of the peace treaty with Ethiopia, after twenty years of war, would finally set our country on the road to freedom and democracy.

We want to start from an episode that happened just in these days. As you certainly know, the regime has closed and taken possession of nine schools, plus seven schools already taken in 2019 run by religious organizations, mostly Catholics but also Protestant and Islamic Christians. Completely free schools, attended by children from the poorest and most marginalized families and who operated in different cities, chosen with the criterion of intervening where the need is greatest. The Government justified the provision with the 1995 law which assigns all forms of social activity and assistance to the exclusive competence of the State. But that this law is only a pretext emerges from the fact that in reality those institutes have operated for years, without the state ever interfering. It is therefore to be believed that this is a retaliation against the Eritrean Catholic Church which, through its bishops, has called for a concrete policy of reforms, the implementation of the Constitution approved in 1997 but never entered into force, the calling of free elections.

It is - this of the schools - only the last link in a long chain of events that show that from the signing of the peace onwards, in July 2018, nothing has actually changed in Eritrea. Even before the schools, in the month of July, 21 hospitals or medical centers were progressively closed, these too managed by religious organizations, also completely free, also the only, essential point of reference for thousands of people from the most disadvantaged classes. These too are located in areas where need, hardship and poverty are more evident. And these bullying, while actually striking, in the first place, the very people in the name of which the dictatorship claims to govern, in some ways are still the least, because much more direct persecutions, made up of the suppression of all forms, have never ceased. of dissent, arrests, forced disappearances, imprisonment without any charge, jail, harassment and threats also against dissidents of the diaspora who try to fight or in any case do not hesitate to denounce the regime from exile.

The reality in Eritrea crystallized three years or more ago: not just one of the thousands of political prisoners (held in inhuman conditions and almost always in secret and inaccessible locations) was released, but more were added; the 1997 Constitution, "frozen" even before it entered into force under the pretext of the war against Ethiopia, remains a dead letter; the total militarization of the population continues, despite the fact that there is no longer even the pretext of the "enemy at the gates", through that indefinite military service that has transformed the country into a huge barracks / prison, providing the regime with both armed soldiers and very cheap labor for a job that borders on slavery.

That nothing has changed is shown not only by the voices of the thousands of young people who continue to flee, emptying Eritrea of ​​its best energies, but also the recent report by Human Rights Watch and above all the UN report that in July 2019 (a exactly one year after the "peace") confirmed the mandate to the Commission of Inquiry into the violation of human rights. Or, worse, if something is new, this "new" is the ongoing war in Tigray, an incredible strengthening of the dictatorship, thanks to the opening of credit "in the dark" granted to the regime by the international community and, in particular, precisely from Italy, in the aftermath of reconciliation with Ethiopia. A strengthening, that is, of what is the crucial issue: Eritrea is what it has been all these years and still is - forcing hundreds of thousands of people to abandon it - not only because there is war in Tigray to the north. of Ethiopia, but also because one of the most ferocious dictatorships in the world is in power in Asmara.

Three years ago, leaving for Asmara, the then Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte repeatedly stressed the fact that Italy was the first Western state to go on an official visit to Eritrea after the peace was signed. A visit that - he told himself - would inaugurate a sort of "new course". That trip of your predecessor was followed by several other important "openings", such as the mission to Asmara of the then Deputy Foreign Minister Emanuela Del Re, with dozens of Italian entrepreneurs in tow, or the commitment to finance a series of works and infrastructure in the country. Here, three years later, we reiterate with even more force the appeal we launched then. We understand well that a government, a state, must also have relations with dictatorships such as that of Asmara. It is in the logical order of international politics. The point, however, is "how" these relationships are set up. You can ignore it, closing your eyes to reality, in the name of geopolitical-strategic and economic interests. Or you can start from that reality, to set up and open relations by placing precise preliminary conditions: that is, keeping firmly on the question of respect for human rights as an inalienable and insurmountable requirement, preceded by any other kind of interest. At the conclusion of the G7 she herself said no discount on human rights violations. For 25 years, Eritrea has systematically violated the human rights of the Eritrean people, of religious institutions, civil rights.

The so-called "realpolitik" liquidates or even boils the type of choice that we suggest as entirely theoretical and not viable. In a word, “idealistic dreamer stuff”. We limit ourselves to remembering that the countless crisis situations that have been upsetting in recent months in Tigray, and the whole Horn of Africa and more generally the South of the world, are almost always the result of "realpolitik". And that the real challenge, if we want to find a solution to these disastrous "crises" that fuel the flight of millions of people, is to have the courage to adopt a different policy, closer to the true interests of the populations and more attentive to rights and to the realities in which you find yourself operating.

This also applies to Eritrea, where it is "realpolitik", in fact, that helps to keep the dictatorship that has been in power for thirty years against its own people. In setting up the new executive, you wished to specify that it will be "a government attentive to human rights". Here, in the light of what Eritrea has turned out to be even in the last year, we ask you and the foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, to mark an immediate, decisive discontinuity in the relations established by Italy towards Asmara . A clear change, indeed, the abandonment, in essence, of that policy of progressive rapprochement and "recovery" or even re-evaluation of the dictatorship of Isaias Afewerki, which began at the end of 2013 but which has progressively marked an acceleration in the last years, until it reaches its peak in the last months of the previous government.

It is a question of choosing between the current system of power and the vast majority of the Eritrean people who are enslaved by it. And the peoples never forget who is on their side. More: with this choice, Italy can send an important signal to the European Union, inaugurating and guiding a different way of approaching the North towards the South of the world. Affirming that the right of the most vulnerable and weakest is not a weak right.

We trust that you will take these considerations into account and in any case thank you for the attention you will dedicate to us, we send you our best regards.

Fr. Mussie Zerai Dr. Theol. H.C