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AbyssiniaLady
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Comparing Eritrea to North Korea is an insult to North Korea

Post by AbyssiniaLady » 15 Jun 2021, 11:51

The ‘North Korea of Africa’: Going undercover in the prisons of Eritrea

The director of ‘Undercover in Africa’s Secret State’ on the extraordinary risks his sources took to obtain footage of torture in the inhumane jails of the East African nation


Footage of Adi Abeto prison in Eritrea from ‘Undercover In Africa’s Secret State: Dispatches’

By Evan Williams June 15, 2021 7:00 am(Updated 9:55 am)

I was inspired to make a documentary about the East African country of Eritrea after researching the horrific human rights violations with a commissioner at Channel 4.

More than half a million Eritreans have left since the country gained independence from Ethiopia in 1991 – with many seeking exile in the UK.

Coming from a population of about three million, that’s an extraordinary exodus. In the course of making Undercover in Africa’s Secret State, I learned that there’s mandatory national service inside the country from the age of 18. It can go on for years without end, and those who attempt to flee are often caught and imprisoned. There’s testimony from former prisoners of being tied up and held upside down on frames, legs and arms bound, their feet, legs and [deleted] beaten with sticks or wire.

ometimes interrogators use gunpowder on them, burn them and repeatedly beat them, leaving permanent physical injuries.

Those who attempt to flee military service can be kept in prisons in very small rooms – basically holes – underground. One man I spoke with said that he was held in a cell two metres by one-and-a-half, that he couldn’t stand up in, with seven or eight people, for two years.

Nobody knows for sure on numbers kept in prisons, but human rights groups estimate at least several thousand at any one time. The production team and I heard repeated testimony of this torture from different sources during the five years we spent researching the documentary.

To give some context, Eritrea is a one-party state. Ruled by The People’s Front for Democracy and Justice, the only party legally permitted to exist, there is no freedom of speech, no parliament and no elections. Eritrea can be called Africa’s North Korea because what other system can you compare it with? There are very few other countries with controls this tight.

During my research, I started to build contacts with people who were in the Eritrean refugee community in Ethiopia, and connections with people inside Eritrea.

We found a man who had secretly filmed inside an Eritrean prison with a small camera while he was a prisoner. We talked to him about what he experienced. But we needed more evidence to verify what he described, and it took a number of years to actually find and contact the people who were trying to get information out to the world. Inside Eritrea the government controls all the information access, so people are terrified. Our sources took extraordinary risks to obtain the footage – if they had been caught they would have been severely tortured and possibly executed.

Eventually, we found a group who were trying to get the information out, particularly the younger generation who saw what happened to their parents and are saying that they want a different way of living, a different opportunity. I provided them with a secret camera – hidden inside a jacket – so that material could be filmed in the jail, with one prison guard agreeing to secretly film for us. This was after the peace deal between Eritrea and Ethiopia in 2018, so the footage brought us up to date.

The fact the two nations were at peace raises more questions – why continue the system of mandatory national service, why keep incarcerating people?

We approached the Eritrean government several times, first of all to try and enter the country. We tried several times to obtain its participation in the film so it could respond to our allegations, but it decided not to take part or respond to the claims.

Many of the Eritrean people involved in our film want a greater understanding of the situation inside their country – a greater understanding of why people leave their homes and take huge risks to escape repression.


The last time Hanna saw her father

Hanna Petros Solomon is the daughter of Petros Solomon, the former defence minister of Eritrea who was a key figure in the independence struggle alongside the current president.

But in 2001, he and 14 other senior officials and ministers wrote an open letter saying they thought the president was going too far down an authoritarian path. Swiftly afterwards, he was arrested. In our documentary, Hanna tells her story in a very moving way, recounting how one morning he left to go for a jog, and it was the last time she saw him.

Her mother, Aster Yohannes, came back from studying in the US in 2003 to try and free him, but she never made it from the plane to the airport reception hall – authorities picked her up.


Former minister Petros Solomon with his daughter Hanna, before he was imprisoned

Hanna has had no information about her parents since, except from one person who got out of prison and said they had seen her mother, who was being held in isolation. That’s the only piece of information Hanna had in 20 years. She escaped Eritrea in 2011 and has since spoken out about the human rights crimes happening in her native country.

Most of Eritrea wants an end to the repressive system that leads to so many people being jailed and tortured. That doesn’t necessarily mean regime change but proper reforms that spell more freedom.

In terms of the UK Government, it’s shocking that Eritreans are being deported from Britain – you would never imagine North Koreans being deported in the same way.

Is there an aspect of this which can be reformed or changed, and does the regime really need to keep doing this? If there is a possibility of it listening to its own people and reviewing the system, that would be a fantastic result. As told to Adam Bloodworth

‘Undercover in Africa’s Secret State: Dispatches’ airs on Wednesday 16 June on Channel 4 at 11.05pm. Evan Williams is a London-based filmmaker. Another of his documentaries, ‘Myanmar’s Killing Fields’, won a Bafta in the Current Affairs category in 2019

https://inews.co.uk/news/world/channel- ... te-1051575

TesfaNews
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Re: Comparing Eritrea to North Korea is an insult to North Korea

Post by TesfaNews » 15 Jun 2021, 11:52

Stay mad Eden! Eritrea is a republic not democracy 8)

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
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kerenite
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Re: Comparing Eritrea to North Korea is an insult to North Korea

Post by kerenite » 15 Jun 2021, 14:26

AbyssiniaLady wrote:
15 Jun 2021, 11:51
The ‘North Korea of Africa’: Going undercover in the prisons of Eritrea

The director of ‘Undercover in Africa’s Secret State’ on the extraordinary risks his sources took to obtain footage of torture in the inhumane jails of the East African nation


Footage of Adi Abeto prison in Eritrea from ‘Undercover In Africa’s Secret State: Dispatches’

By Evan Williams June 15, 2021 7:00 am(Updated 9:55 am)

I was inspired to make a documentary about the East African country of Eritrea after researching the horrific human rights violations with a commissioner at Channel 4.

More than half a million Eritreans have left since the country gained independence from Ethiopia in 1991 – with many seeking exile in the UK.

Coming from a population of about three million, that’s an extraordinary exodus. In the course of making Undercover in Africa’s Secret State, I learned that there’s mandatory national service inside the country from the age of 18. It can go on for years without end, and those who attempt to flee are often caught and imprisoned. There’s testimony from former prisoners of being tied up and held upside down on frames, legs and arms bound, their feet, legs and [deleted] beaten with sticks or wire.

ometimes interrogators use gunpowder on them, burn them and repeatedly beat them, leaving permanent physical injuries.

Those who attempt to flee military service can be kept in prisons in very small rooms – basically holes – underground. One man I spoke with said that he was held in a cell two metres by one-and-a-half, that he couldn’t stand up in, with seven or eight people, for two years.

Nobody knows for sure on numbers kept in prisons, but human rights groups estimate at least several thousand at any one time. The production team and I heard repeated testimony of this torture from different sources during the five years we spent researching the documentary.

To give some context, Eritrea is a one-party state. Ruled by The People’s Front for Democracy and Justice, the only party legally permitted to exist, there is no freedom of speech, no parliament and no elections. Eritrea can be called Africa’s North Korea because what other system can you compare it with? There are very few other countries with controls this tight.

During my research, I started to build contacts with people who were in the Eritrean refugee community in Ethiopia, and connections with people inside Eritrea.

We found a man who had secretly filmed inside an Eritrean prison with a small camera while he was a prisoner. We talked to him about what he experienced. But we needed more evidence to verify what he described, and it took a number of years to actually find and contact the people who were trying to get information out to the world. Inside Eritrea the government controls all the information access, so people are terrified. Our sources took extraordinary risks to obtain the footage – if they had been caught they would have been severely tortured and possibly executed.

Eventually, we found a group who were trying to get the information out, particularly the younger generation who saw what happened to their parents and are saying that they want a different way of living, a different opportunity. I provided them with a secret camera – hidden inside a jacket – so that material could be filmed in the jail, with one prison guard agreeing to secretly film for us. This was after the peace deal between Eritrea and Ethiopia in 2018, so the footage brought us up to date.

The fact the two nations were at peace raises more questions – why continue the system of mandatory national service, why keep incarcerating people?

We approached the Eritrean government several times, first of all to try and enter the country. We tried several times to obtain its participation in the film so it could respond to our allegations, but it decided not to take part or respond to the claims.

Many of the Eritrean people involved in our film want a greater understanding of the situation inside their country – a greater understanding of why people leave their homes and take huge risks to escape repression.


The last time Hanna saw her father

Hanna Petros Solomon is the daughter of Petros Solomon, the former defence minister of Eritrea who was a key figure in the independence struggle alongside the current president.

But in 2001, he and 14 other senior officials and ministers wrote an open letter saying they thought the president was going too far down an authoritarian path. Swiftly afterwards, he was arrested. In our documentary, Hanna tells her story in a very moving way, recounting how one morning he left to go for a jog, and it was the last time she saw him.

Her mother, Aster Yohannes, came back from studying in the US in 2003 to try and free him, but she never made it from the plane to the airport reception hall – authorities picked her up.


Former minister Petros Solomon with his daughter Hanna, before he was imprisoned

Hanna has had no information about her parents since, except from one person who got out of prison and said they had seen her mother, who was being held in isolation. That’s the only piece of information Hanna had in 20 years. She escaped Eritrea in 2011 and has since spoken out about the human rights crimes happening in her native country.

Most of Eritrea wants an end to the repressive system that leads to so many people being jailed and tortured. That doesn’t necessarily mean regime change but proper reforms that spell more freedom.

In terms of the UK Government, it’s shocking that Eritreans are being deported from Britain – you would never imagine North Koreans being deported in the same way.

Is there an aspect of this which can be reformed or changed, and does the regime really need to keep doing this? If there is a possibility of it listening to its own people and reviewing the system, that would be a fantastic result. As told to Adam Bloodworth

‘Undercover in Africa’s Secret State: Dispatches’ airs on Wednesday 16 June on Channel 4 at 11.05pm. Evan Williams is a London-based filmmaker. Another of his documentaries, ‘Myanmar’s Killing Fields’, won a Bafta in the Current Affairs category in 2019

https://inews.co.uk/news/world/channel- ... te-1051575
AbyssiniaLady,

The footage or image of adi abeito prison which you shared with is a sort of 2 star hotel compared to the 20ft or 40ft containers which are accommodating thousands of innocent eritreans. I hope your Qaliti prison is much better than that comparatively.

Having said that,

I believe your are genuinely worried about the plight of eritreans and hopefully it is not ill-motivated.

Finally, we are in the same situation. We have a brutal dictator in Eritrea and you have a mini-dictator a would-be neo-dergist in your abyssinya. Dear abyssinya-Lady :-)

AbyssiniaLady
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Posts: 5498
Joined: 04 Feb 2007, 05:44

Re: Comparing Eritrea to North Korea is an insult to North Korea

Post by AbyssiniaLady » 15 Jun 2021, 18:57

What matters most is Afars liberation, independent Afar state with its capital city Assab.



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