RIGHTS: EU CAUTIONED OVER AID TO ERITREA
David Cronin
BRUSSELS (IPS) - - Aid given by the European Union to Eritrea may be helping to prop up a hugely repressive regime, human rights activists have claimed.
Led by President Isaias Afewerki since gaining independence from Ethiopia in the early 1990s, Eritrea has, by some indicators, one of the worst human rights records in the world. The organisation Reporters Without Borders (known by its French acronym RSF), for example, has documented how dozens of journalists have been detained incommunicado since 2001, with several of those believed to have died in custody. According to RSF's latest annual report, Eritrea "deserves to be at the bottom" of a league table for press freedom.
While Afewerki's despotism has provoked the ire of the U.S. government, he enjoys cordial relations with the EU.
The Union's executive, the European Commission, is putting the final touches to a strategy under which the country would be given more than 115 million euros (181 million dollars) between now and 2013.
With non-governmental organisations (NGOs) prohibited from working in Eritrea, human rights campaigners say there is a lack of transparency about how aid given to the country is used. Some fear that Afewerki's henchmen may be using the assistance to keep Eritrea on a permanent war footing.
Locked in a protracted border dispute with Ethiopia, Eritrea is third only to North Korea and Angola as the world's biggest military spender -- relative to population size. Data released from its capital Asmara in 2000 stated that its army had 300,000 soldiers, with some estimates indicating it has doubled since then, largely as a result of conscription.
"In the Eritrean community, the EU is viewed as supporting the present regime," said Kassahun Checole, an Eritrean expatriate based in the U.S. "This has become a cause for hopelessness and despair."
Checole, who has a long history both of campaigning for Eritrean independence and of opposing apartheid in South Africa, complained about how Louis Michel, the European commissioner for development aid, visited Afewerki in Asmara last month for talks that took place behind closed doors. "We have no knowledge of what was discussed between the two of them," Checole said. "There is no awareness about whether Louis Michel raised issues of human rights, the economic conditions in the country, and its relationship with its neighbours."
A year earlier Michel offered no public criticism of the human rights situation in Eritrea when he held a joint press conference with Afewerki in Brussels.
Although Zimbabwe has been the African country to have received the most international attention recently -- with Robert Mugabe accused of 'stealing' the recent presidential election after his supporters unleashed a wave of violence and intimidation against opponents -- Checole argued that "the Eritrean situation is much worse than Zimbabwe.
"In Zimbabwe, there is a pretence of a democracy. The opposition party is legitimate there. In the case of Eritrea, there is no pretence about there being a democratic process. And yet the world, including the EU, exerts direct pressure on Mugabe, while it has kept its hands off Afewerki."
Meron Estefanos, a South Africa-based campaigner with the Eritrean Movement for Democracy and Human Rights, said that Eritrea's youth are being coerced into joining the army and that military commanders who have committed such crimes as rape have gone unpunished.
"The consequence of the increasing militarisation of Eritrea has been the suppression of the most dynamic section of the society," said Estefanos. "It continues to be a major cause for massive human rights abuses and the chronic poverty and backwardness prevailing in our society. It is only serving the interests of the political and military elite by providing them enough leverage to effectively suppress any kind of dissent."
A European Commission spokesman said that unlike most countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, Eritrea's government does not receive aid directly from the EU. "The lack of transparency by the Eritrean government closes this option completely," the spokesman said.
Instead, EU-funded projects in the country are directly managed by the Commission's office in Asmara and are subjected to financial controls, according to the spokesman. It is "simply not the case" that the EU is helping to prop up Afewerki, he said. "The reality is that the Commission supports the country and not the government or any political party for that matter. We offer our support to the country through development cooperation and through a robust dialogue with the government, which covers all issues including human rights and democracy."
Glenys Kinnock, a Welsh member of the European Parliament who has been monitoring the situation in Eritrea since the 1980s, said she has made a formal request for details on how EU aid to Eritrea is used.
"Nobody has ever argued that it isn't necessary for us to provide humanitarian aid and support for education and healthcare," she said. "But clearly there are huge difficulties in monitoring and controlling what the Commission is doing. There are no NGOs in Eritrea. So who is distributing the aid? Who is ensuring that it doesn't go into the wrong hands?" (END)
