When Challenged, The Gov of Eritrea’s First Instinct Is To Lie

Almost everything in this article published by State website shabait.com is wrong, misleading or false.

This would be beginning with the byline: the ministry it is attributed to, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Everyone knows, or should know, that any statement addressed to foreign governments or agencies is penned by only three people: President Isaias Afwerki, PFDJ Political Director Yemane Gebreab, and Presidential Office chief of staff (and pretend Minister of Information), Yemane Gebremeskel. The Minister of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Osman Saleh, is lucky if he saw what was published ahead of whom it addressed.

On second thought, it is so bad, even by PFDJ standards, maybe he wrote it.

Next to the byline is the date, which is designed to confuse.  There is no date.  There is a Ref OM/043/18 in the letter, which may be referencing March 4, 2018, but that is an odd way of dating a document. But there are reasons to doubt it does because of the first paragraph in the statement:

I refer to a rather curious communication (Ref. AL ERI 2/2017) that was sent to me jointly by your good selves on 17 January last month.

Consider the shoddy diplomacy: the “good selves” referred to in the statement are Mr Ahmed Shaheed, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief (on whom the Gov of Eritrea hasn’t declared war—yet) and Ms. Sheila Keetharuth, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Eritrea. But because the Government of Eritrea is still having a temper tantrum about the fact that the UN keeps renewing her mandate, she is not addressed by name, thus displaying the PFDJ’s lack of professionalism and class.  But clearly, the “jointly” and “good selves” suggests that she was a co-writer of what the Ministry is responding to.

Back to the date: what does “17 January last month” mean? Is the Ministry trying to pretend that it wrote the reply in February but just couldn’t quite fudge the date? Did it receive whatever it is replying to in February and confuse it with January? Wouldn’t 17 January 2018 be clearer if the whole purpose of the communique is to clarify things? Unless the purpose is to obfuscate, of course.

And all of this is before we even get to the actual content! It must be a chore for the UN to even continue reading after they have been insulted (Keetharuth not addressed by name) and lied to (fake/confused date) in the first paragraph.  But let’s dive in:

On the early afternoon of 31 October 2017 around 100 youth (students from the Al Diaa Private School and others in the neighborhood) marched from Akheria [sic], a neighborhood in the northern periphery of Asmara to the al-Khulafa’ ar-Rashidun Mosque in the center of the city. After the prayers, the unruly group, who were chanting sectarian and inflammatory slogans all the way, proceeded to Liberation Avenue and the Ministry of Education. At this stage, they began to throw stones and to attack the Police. In the circumstances, the Police fired warning shots into the air and dispersed the crowd before they could incur damage to lives and property.

Is saying “Allahu Akber” (God Is Great!) in Eritrea “sectarian and inflammatory”? This in a country where the phrase is uttered 5 times a day by dozens of mosques? Or is chanting it in the streets that is inflammatory?  If that is the case, why does the government allow these guys to do it every year? Twice, in fact.

Moving on: there have been several videos sneaked out of the country from those who recorded the protest and there is no evidence for the claim that the children who were marching to protest the arrest of a 93 year old man “began to throw stones and to attack the police.” No wonder it took the Government of Eritrea two months to respond: it was making up a story.

The Police subsequently detained, for questioning, several people involved in illicit acts of vandalism as well as principal culprits behind the whole episode. These are indeed normative measures that the police in any country would take to ensure public safety by, in part, dispersing and apprehending people who have willingly engaged themselves in offences including the public disturbance of an otherwise peaceful city.

There is nothing “normative” about arresting citizens, including the underage, and denying their parents and their family visitation rights. There is nothing “normative” about denying them their constitutional right to defend themselves in a court of law. There is nothing “normative” about making people disappear and warning those who inquire on their whereabouts (mothers!) that they, too, could join them in prison. There is nothing to indicate that those imprisoned are 100 or 1,000 as the Government of Eritrea operates with total impunity and doesn’t have independent media or civil society or opposition parties to challenge its claims. Nor does it allow people like those addressed in the letter, Sheila Keetharuth and Ahmed Shaheed, access to independently verify the claims. Occasionally, it invites sympathetic “journalists,” fanboys and fangirls, and individuals who share its ideology to propagate its views, but none of these could seriously be considered impartial witnesses.

It must be underlined that this particular incident had nothing to do with freedom of expression or freedom of faith. Eritrea is a secular State where the freedom of religion is fully and solemnly enshrined in its laws. Furthermore, it has a fine and exemplary tradition of religious tolerance and co-existence nurtured over centuries.

The Ministry can underline all it wants but the detained were arrested for expressing their view that the government should not have arrested a senior school official. That is, by definition, freedom of expression. To summon the strength to do that in a police state which has no rule of law, they chanted “Allahu Akber” — that there is something more powerful than even a predatory government. Again, that is the very definition of faith, and they had that freedom, very briefly, before their detention. Furthermore, freedom of religion is neither fully nor solemnly enshrined into laws: additional proclamations have made all but Sunni Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Tewhado Christianity illegal in Eritrea. The “fine and exemplary tradition of religious tolerance and co-existence” owes its long presence to the people who existed in the country for centuries before the PFDJ existed.

In this perspective, Proclamation 73/1995, issued to “Clarify and Regulate Religions and Religious Institutions”, enshrines the principle of secularism by limiting government activities to the political administration of the country and religions/religious institutions to religious matters; without one crossing into the mandate of the other.

Eritrea’s education policy reflects, in part, this law by limiting religious institutions to providing religious education with the freedom to implement their curricula in accordance with the dictates of the respective faiths – and all non-religious schools, whether private or public, to providing education in secular fashion as required by the guidelines of the Ministry of Education.

Now, we are getting somewhere. This is Proclamation 73/1995. Can the ministry tell the world what specifically in the Proclamation empowers it to do what it did and which clause or statement prevents the school from doing what it is falsely accused of doing?  The problem has always been the government’s refusal to specifically cite articles within laws, statues, regulations that were violated. Instead, it makes a blanket reference to a document–including the Constitution of Eritrea, long shelved– as if merely mentioning it gives the government absolute power to do anything including overthrowing a duly appointed patriarch, arresting him and replacing him with someone more compliant to its dictates.  Can the ministry tell us which article in Proclamation 73/1995 allows it to do that?

Accordingly, all the faiths enjoy unrestricted rights to run and administer religious schools in their respective religious institutions and premises. They have unfettered rights to establish and operate purely religious schools at all levels; including at the tertiary level. Along the same line, religious teachings and/or exclusivist religious attires are not permitted in secular schools. Discriminatory or segregationist practices of refusing access and enrollment to individuals on the basis of their gender, religion or background are also prohibited in secular schools.

Since “religious institutions” have “unfettered rights to establish and operate purely religious schools at all levels” can the Ministry give us an example or two of such institutions?

Al Diaa is a private school that falls within the administrative jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education. It is not an Islamic School, as your letter insinuates, affiliated in administrative and policy respects to the Muslim Faith in the country. (Indeed, it was first established in 1969 as “Berhan Elementary School” open to all inhabitants of the Akheria [sic] community without discrimination on the basis of religion or ethnicity)

There is so much to unravel here. First of all, “Al Diaa” (in Arabic) and “Berhan” (in Tigrinya) mean the exact same thing: “light.” Since its inception, the school was always (ALWAYS) known by both. The statement insinuates that if a school uses its Tigrinya name it is secular and if it uses its Arabic name it is religious. This is wrong and part of the rotten campaign the regime has used in its efforts to ensure that this rebellion by Eritreans to assert their rights is pigeonholed into a “Muslim” issue and, further an Akhria (or Akheria as they weirdly keep calling it) issue where there is a preponderance of a minority ethnic group.

What is the difference between a “private school” and an “Islamic school” if the private school has always, since its inception in the 1960s always taught Koran as a subject? Has the school ever enrolled non-Muslims into its schools? If it has, do they have the right to opt-out from the Koran classes? If so, does it affect their grades? The Ministry knows the answers to all these questions but caught breaking the law and, worse, shocked by actual resistance to its violation of law, it is making stuff up as it goes.

In subsequent years, and especially after independence, Al Diaa School began to gradually introduce practices that were in breach of the country’s secular education policy. Among other things: access to the school was restricted to followers of the Islamic faith only; it introduced segregation of classes on the basis of gender; it stopped teaching on Fridays; and it breached national school guidelines on dress code and school uniforms; and it hired foreign nationals without valid permits and approval of the Ministry of Education regarding their qualifications.

The problem with the Government of Eritrea, and why its statements fail to register with anyone but its faithful, is that it always assumes that just because it monopolizes the media in Eritrea, its narrative is the single truth. The Diaspora is full of alumni of the school who can speak to: whether the school totally or almost totally enrolled Muslim students since the 1960s; at what age were classes segregated into boys and girls and since when; what was the school uniform and since when?

It must be borne in mind that the transgression of Eritrea’s secular education policy and the inflammatory words and deeds of the School principal, and others implicated in the act, were wayward practices that merited appropriate action. The popular sentiment was perhaps better captured in the words of Sheikh Salim Ibrahim Al-Muktar, the Managing Director of Eritrea’s Mufti Office, who stated during the public celebrations of Mewlid Al-Nabi on 30 November 2017 that “Islam and Christianity have co-existed in harmony in Eritrea since ancient times. As such, externally induced religious extremism has no space in our country”

This is perhaps the most telling paragraph. The key difference between “the school principal” (Haji Musa Mohammed Nur) and the Managing Director of Eritrea’s Mufti Office (Sheikh Salim Ibrahim Al-Mukhtar) is that the former owes his position to the parents of the students and the Akhria community (the people) and the latter is appointed by the ruling party of Eritrea (the government.)  This was a case of a power center being created outside the absolute control of the control-freak government, which controls even those advertised as “civil society”: the youth groups, workers group, and women group. Otherwise, the former (Haji Musa Mohammed Nur), by virtue of his age and very public life, has a much longer track record of not just espousing but living the life of a patriotic man who truly believed in, and practiced, harmonious co-existence.

For reasons that defy explanation, external media reaction to this singular incident was mind boggling. A sinister story that originated from a subversive Ethiopia• based armed group, the so-called Eritrean Red Sea Afar Organization (RASDO)[sic], alleging “the killing of 28 civilians and wounding of 100 others”, went viral with prestigious media outlets gullibly recycling the story without minimum verification. Weeks later, some media outlets, including the ZDF TV Channel in Germany, retracted the story even if they have not apologized to Eritrea for their defamatory news coverage.

What defies explanation is not that people with minimal or no access to the country may have gotten the story wrong. It is that the State media (EriTV, shabait, Hadas Ertra and its satellites) had complete news blackout, as is the norm in Eritrea until the government decides what the spin is. In keeping with that tradition, neither the speech of the “school principal” (Mr Musa Mohammed Nur), nor his arrest, nor his death in prison, nor his burial ceremony, nor the arrest of hundreds of Eritrean youth, including youth as young as 9 years old following the burial ceremony, has been reported by the State media. To this date.

The lesson that the Government of Eritrea refuses to learn is that the days of a single narrative because you have total domination of media–as was the case when it was a guerrilla force in the field–are gone. In the age of satellites and encrypted media, it can still keep almost everything hidden. But not everything.

The world should not be surprised when it witnesses underage (not conscription-age) Eritreans  escaping the country: the predatory government of Eritrea has shown that there is no limit to its shameful behavior as it has arrested hundreds of children, some as young as 9 years old, for simply acting like 9 year olds anywhere in the world and forgetting that they are subjects of the self-declared rulers.