Eritrea Open Letter Answered With Arrests and Silence
A Letter, and Then a Knock
September in the Asmara highlands comes with the tail of the rains and with three major Orthodox Christian festivals, among them the Geez New Year, which Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox Christians observe — a season of processions and of a year turning over. For one family, that month has been the month of rupture for twenty-five years. The rupture has a starting point, and the starting point is a document. In May 2001, fifteen high-profile politicians put their names to an open letter addressed to President Isaias Afewerki. The letter asked for two things: that the constitution ratified in 1997, after independence, be implemented, and that national elections be held. The signatories became known as the G-15. Among them was Petros Solomon, a serving minister at the time. Isaias, who had led the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front — the rebel movement that fought Ethiopia and later formed the government — through the war, answered the letter with arrests.
Petros Solomon belonged to the generation that had earned the standing to sign such a letter: he had fought in the long liberation war that ended with Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia in 1993, and he was one of its senior leaders. Many Eritreans regarded him as a national hero for the critical role he played in that struggle. His wife, Aster Yohannes, fought in it as well; that is where the two met. After independence he served as defence minister, then as foreign minister, and he was heading the fisheries ministry when his troubles began. The constitution the G-15 wanted implemented had been ratified in 1997 by the government that came out of that war.
By the middle of 2001 he had been dismissed as a minister, though his family did not know it, and he still went out early each morning to get some exercise. In the early hours of 18 September 2001, security forces took up positions outside the homes of eleven senior government officials in Asmara, acting on the president’s orders. Petros Solomon was picked up by security agents as he left the house in his tracksuit. The arrests came days after al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, at a moment when the world’s attention was fixed elsewhere. Hanna was ten years old. She and her three siblings went to stay with their paternal grandmother, because their mother was away studying in the United States. For some days, none of them knew what had happened to him. The last time she had seen her father, she recalls, he had a towel on his shoulders like a sportsman, on his way out for a run; he worked out every morning. Then her schoolmates told her that her father had sold out his country. “That is when I understood how serious the situation was, and how people framed my dad and his colleagues who fought for the independence of their country,” she says. [2] “I was hurt.”
What Fifteen Signatures Paid and Bought
All of them are accused of treason, the crime of betraying one’s own country. Not one of them has been brought to trial, and not one has been allowed to see a relative. No word has come out of that place since. An accusation that is never tested in a courtroom never becomes a verdict, and it never produces a release date either. What the families live with instead is a legal limbo: a person who is neither convicted nor free. Twenty-five years is long enough for a charge to be proven or dropped many times over.
The same weeks produced a second set of removals, aimed at the press. In September 2001, the government shut down all of the country’s fledgling independent newspapers and detained their editors and journalists. The effect was twofold: the men who had put a request in writing were gone, and so were the publications that might have printed it. What stands against those removals is a single page: an open letter dated May 2001, signed by fifteen politicians, asking that the rules they had fought under be applied. It has produced no hearing, no visit and no answer. It is not justice, but it is a record, and it is the part that has not been taken away.
Aster Yohannes was in the United States, studying, when her husband was arrested. She asked whether the children could be issued passports; the officials refused and told her to come home. Her children wanted her back and were frightened for her at the same time. Hanna remembers asking her on the phone: “What if they arrest you?” Her mother insisted nothing would happen to her, saying: “I haven’t done anything wrong, and am only coming to raise my children.” Hanna says she later learned that President Isaias himself had promised Aster that she would be safe. On 11 December 2003 the family waited at Asmara International Airport with flowers. She did not emerge through arrivals with the other passengers. The wait was long, the flowers wilted, and eventually they gave up and went home. Friends and relatives in the United States told them they had seen her off at the airport; then an official telephoned from the airport asking Aster to collect her luggage. That was the moment they realised she had reached the country but would not be coming home. Pleas and requests for information went unanswered; Hanna’s grandmother was warned by the authorities to stop asking.
A second household in Asmara was emptied on the same mornings. Ibrahim Sherifo was thirteen and staying at his aunt’s house with his mother when security agents knocked early in the morning and took her away in her pyjamas. His mother, Aster Fissehatsion, and his father, Mahmoud Ahmed Sherifo, were both senior members of the ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice. His father had been the local government minister and the de facto deputy president before his detention. Worried, Ibrahim ran to his father’s nearby house and was told that he too had already been picked up, when he had gone out for exercise.
The Children Who Kept Asking
Hanna left Eritrea the way many thousands of young Eritreans have left: secretly, over the border, without a passport, fleeing indefinite conscription and in search of better opportunities. She is 35 now, married, living in the United States and working as a trauma specialist, and she still describes herself as traumatised by the way she lost her parents. What she guards is the ordinary. Her father always wanted people gathered in the house, and she calls those the good days: the laughter, the family gatherings, the birthday parties. She misses her mother’s egg and potato sandwiches, which she rates as unmatched. On trips down to the coast, back when her father was minister of fisheries, he organised singing competitions in the car, one child at a time, with a present for whoever won. One of his favourite songs carried the line “I had a sweater, a blue sweater, that my sister took” — it reminded him of his own sister, also a freedom fighter, who was killed in the war. Her mother loved music as well, and played and sang hits by Abba, Dolly Parton and Whitney Houston. September used to be full of hope for Hanna; now it brings her no joy. As she looks at old pictures, she worries that these memories will fade.
Ibrahim Sherifo is 38 now, living in exile in the Netherlands, where he was granted asylum, and studying for an MA in political science — following in his father’s footsteps. Both he and Hanna say they are forever grateful to the friends and family who offered them care and supported them as they grew up without their parents, despite the risks. They are proud of what their parents stood for, and of their parents’ daring to call for reforms. “They had conscience and couldn’t observe idly while what they fought for had been hijacked by Isaias and his coterie,” Ibrahim says.
What both families are asking for now is not a trial and not an apology; it is information. “As a family, we should be informed whether they are alive or not,” Ibrahim says, accusing the government of wanting to erase all memory of the political prisoners. [2] The Eritrean government, including its embassy in the United Kingdom, did not respond to a request for comment on where the prisoners are held or whether they are alive. Hanna wants the plight of the many others whose relatives have disappeared over the years to be heard as well. She describes the sorrow as sometimes calm, so that it lets a person float, and sometimes a wave that comes back and drowns them.
The nearest thing this case has produced to a finding is not a document but a voice. Ibrahim Sherifo, the son of two of the G-15, states the result of 18 September 2001 on the record: “For me 18 September 2001 is a dark day, but not only for me, it is a dark day for Eritrea and its people, because it is the day when law and democracy was detained.” [2]