The UN special rapporteur on the situation in Eritrea has presented his annual report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. As since the creation of this function in 2012, no progress has been observed in this small, very closed country in the Horn of Africa, one of the largest providers of refugees on the continent. Because of the war in neighboring Ethiopia, in which Eritrea was involved, the situation ” has deteriorated markedly for young conscripts, he wrote.
Roundups aimed at the forced recruitment of soldiers, a practice feared by Eritreans for years, “ have multiplied during the war in Ethiopia, says UN special rapporteur Mohamed Babiker. ” They go from house to house and take everyone, leaving only the mothers behind says an Eritrean who recently returned from Asmara. Another, whose family was rounded up in a village, explained that after ” all the men were arrested, only a 70-year-old man was released. The others, he says, were all sent to Tigray “.
These raids, called “giffa” in Tigrinya, did not only concern Eritrean residents, he explains. Hundreds of refugee men and women captured in Ethiopia’s Hitsats and Shimelba camps during the war were “ kept in detention and forced to return to fight », in the company of high school students who have completed their training at the Sawa military camp where the last year of secondary education takes place.
Among the combatants, the special rapporteur also identified children 16 or 17 years old “, summarily trained and killed in combat. Mohamed Babiker even mentions “ roundups of children of 14 years, without their parents having ever been informed.
The Eritrean ambassador again this year denied all this information, which he described as ” unfounded ” and ” from selected, anonymous and dubious sources “. Neither Eritrea nor Ethiopia authorized the special rapporteur to go there.