A Way Forward for Eritrea

On 24 and 25 April 2019  a conference at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICWS) brought scholars and activists from around the world to discuss the future of Eritrea. Around 70 people attended, coming from Botswana, Kenya, the USA and across Europe.

The conference – entitled ‘Building Democracy in Eritrea’ – reviewed the current situation and looked to the future. Eritrea remains one of the most repressive countries in Africa, with the UN Human Rights Council having published a report accusing the government of involvement in “crimes against humanity, namely, enslavement, imprisonment, enforced disappearance, torture, other inhumane acts, persecution, rape and murder”.

Ambassador Haile Menkerios, one of the continent’s most senior diplomats, was unable to attend. The former Special Representative of the Secretary-General to the African Union and Special Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan, Ambassador Menkerios is still involved in regional mediation efforts. He was Eritrean ambassador to Ethiopia and the African Union (1991 to 2000) and Ambassador Menkerios kindly sent a supportive message to the conference. He laid out his country’s complex history which was shaped by its fight for independence from Ethiopia (1961 – 1991). Faced with a far larger enemy, backed first by the USA and then by the USSR, Eritreans accepted an authoritarian (Isaias Afwerki) to lead their movement – the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF).

In Ambassador Menkerios’s view this had severe consequences: “The enemy we had to fight was so formidable that getting rid of it consumed the major part of our energy, and we did not exert much effort to adequately plan and prepare for what and how to build once our enemy was defeated. Indeed we built a very efficient fighting machine in the EPLF with absolute discipline and hierarchical system as an effective military. Despite the prevailing rhetoric during the struggle, the EPLF did not encourage debate and discussion to develop concrete ideas about our future after independence and establish institutions or safeguards to ensure their implementation.”

In his view the only way to resolve the autocratic rule that this has led to is to is to hold a national dialogue. “I would suggest that in thinking about how to move, we consider going back to what we could and should have been done in 1991 immediately after liberation: Call for a national conference of representatives of the Eritrean people that would decide on a transitional arrangement to ensure an inclusive process of building participatory democracy in the country. I believe only such a process can prevent violence.”