Armed and insecure

6. Eritrea
The nation of Eritrea—fewer than six million inhabitants, in terms of area a bit smaller
than Greece and one of Africa’s poorest nations—was quite literally born from violence.
The separatist struggle to split from Ethiopia, in which the Eritrean People’s Liberation
Front took control of the capital Asmara in 1991 after years of clashes, set the stage
for its independence in 1993, but the deadly tensions were not left behind. A border dispute in
1998 over the village of Badme led to a vicious conflict between the two rivals, which raged for
two years and may have killed up to 100,000 people. 479
The costs of that war continue to be paid today, not in lives, but in the form of a highly secretive
and repressive government that forces a breath-taking lack of freedom on its citizenry in the
name of post-war reconstruction. It could be dubbed ‘Africa’s North Korea’: a one-party state
bereft of a working constitution and led by President Isaias Afewerki since independence in
1993, and the continent’s only country without an independent or private media, ranked last
in the world for press freedom by Reporters Without Borders for the last eight years. 480 Even
though public health improvements have been reported, this ‘information black hole’ also makes
it difficult to understand the scope of Eritrea’s humanitarian challenges—due to reoccurring
479 BBC, ‘Eritrean football players seek asylum in Botswana’, October 2015, www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-34534975.
480 BBC, ‘Eritrea country profile’, May 2016, www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13349078; Reporters without Borders, ‘A dictatorship in which the media have no
rights’, http://rsf.org/en/eritrea: “At least 15 journalists are currently detained, some of them held incommunicado. Like everything else in Eritrea, the media are
totally subject to the whim of President Issayas Afeworki, a predator of press freedom who has no plans to relax his grip.”
110 PAX ! Armed and insecure