THE BLACK NORKS OF ERITREA

Asmara, Eritrea.  I came here to see if the rumor is true, that Eritrea is the North Korea of Africa. 

Strategically situated at the entrance to Red Sea, it’s ruled by Isaias Afewerki (ah-for-key), ranked by international agencies as one of the world’s worst dictators, in the same league as Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong-il, and the Castro brothers.

The Heritage Foundation’s Index of World Freedom ranks Eritrea #176 out of 179 countries.  Transparency International’s Index of Corruption ranks it as one of the world’s most corrupt countries.  Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index ranks it as having the least press freedom on earth along with North Korea.

It’s common knowledge among Western intelligence agencies that Afewerki supports Moslem jihadi terrorists in Somalia with arms and money.  Yet he’s no Moslem – he was raised a Christian, became a Marxist, and has adopted a North Korean isolationist totalitarianism shut off from the world

Which is why the place is not easy to get to.  You cannot drive to it, because all roads from its three neighbors – Sudan, Ethiopia, and Djibouti – are closed.  Occasional freighters dock at the Red Sea port of Massawa but no passenger ships.  The only operational airport, at the capital of Asmara, has a once-weekly flight from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and twice-weekly flights from Sanaa, Yemen (how I got here).

Once you’re here, it’s not easy to communicate with the outside world.  Cell or landline phone service is only in-country – you cannot make an international call.  Internet service is weak, sporadic, so slow it makes dial-up look blindingly fast, and so prohibitively expensive only the government-favored elite can afford it.

There no independent newspapers, magazines, radio or television stations of any kind – all forms of communication and media are government-owned organs of propaganda.  Eritrea is the only African country without any privately-owned news media.

No foreign investment is allowed.  The entire economy is controlled by the state, with only a few small private businesses allowed.  Almost no international trade is allowed, neither imports nor exports.  Total value of all exports from Eritrea last year was less than $20 million – mostly live sheep, goats and cattle, or their tanned skins.

Total GDP last year was some $800 million.  Divided among Eritrea’s 5 million people, that’s an annual per capita income of $160, or 43 cents a day.

The country is the most militarized on earth.  Every 18 year-old – male and female – is drafted into the army, and remains in the army indefinitely:  the men until they are at least 40 and the women until they have a baby.  Their pay is 400 "naqfa," the local currency, or about $12 a month.

And yet you never see a soldier, except at checkpoints where they wear flip-flop sandals, cammie pants and a t-shirt.  You never see a uniformed, armed policeman.  Unlike North Korea, where soldiers in uniform are everywhere and the personality cult of Kim Jong-il is suffocatingly ubiquitous, the secret police are "in the crowd" incognito, while the dictator Afewerki is invisible – there are no pictures of him anywhere.

In the face of all this, the people are intensely patriotic, friendly, and always have a smile for you – even when you tell them you’re from America which Afewerki has demonized.  Asmara, a city of some 500,000, is arguably the safest capital city in Africa.  Street crime is so unknown that folks feel confident they can go anywhere at any time of day or night without any harm.

I have been to many remote villages out in the bush of over two dozen African countries, and found the villagers of the Eritrean highlands the friendliest.  Instead of always holding their hands out begging, the kids in villages like Himberti want to hold your hand in theirs.  I have never experienced that anywhere else in Africa.

These kids had never even heard of America.  Their name for white people is "Italian," as Italians created their country.  

The southwest coast of what the Ancient Greeks called the Erythra thalassa   and the Romans the Mare Erythraeum (literally "Red Sea") has always been thinly populated and of peripheral interest to empires only for a couple of harbors on the way to someplace else.  In 1869, an Italian shipping company bought one of them, the bay of Assab, for a coaling station.  A few years later, they made a similar deal for the harbor of Massawa.

When Italian explorers climbed the escarpment above miserably hot Massawa, they discovered a fertile plateau 7,000 feet high with a delightful climate and few villages.  Word got out and Italian settlers flocked to the area.  By 1889, the Kingdom of Italy declared the coast and the highlands to be its colony of Eritrea after the Latin name, with the capital of newly-built Asmara.

After an initial duke-out with the expanding empire of Abyssinia (what was to become Ethiopia), a treaty was signed in which the Ethiopian king, Menelik II declared Eritrea to be a "foreign land" not part of his rule, for it was "not peopled by Abysinnians."

The Italians built ports, roads, railroads, schools, hospitals, and churches – lots of Catholic churches, such as the Cathedral of Asmara:

The highland villagers embraced Christianity, while those on the coast stayed Moslem.  They weren’t enslaved, but hired to develop the industries of increasingly prosperous Eritrea.

By the 1930s, some 80,000 Italians made Eritrea their home and the place was booming.  Then a shadow began to loom over the land, that of Benito Mussolini.  Determined to create an Italian African Empire, he ordered the brutal conquest of Ethiopia with a half-million soldiers, then joined Hitler in World War II.

In the spring of 1941, the British Army invaded Eritrea, wreaking enormous damage, then proceeded to strip the place of every vestige of modernity, even to dismantling the Eritrean railway, and carting it off to the Brits’ colony of Kenya.

At the end of WWII, Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, restored to power, demanded that now-British administered Eritrea be ceded to him, for with it, land-locked Ethiopia would finally have access to the sea.  Most all Eritreans, Italians and native, vehemently objected and demanded independence.

A UN-brokered compromise was a federation, where Eritrea was incorporated within Ethiopia but given autonomy over its domestic affairs including police and taxation.  Once in place, Selassie ignored it and imposed his dictatorial rule. 

By the late 50s, revolts broke out, were crushed, and broke out again, continuing through the 60s.  A leader of the revolts emerged, Isaias Afewerki, who formed the Marxist EPLF (Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front) with the assistance of a small group of KGB agents in 1972.

By then, Selassie was 80 and senile.  The Soviets smelled a much bigger prize than little Eritrea.  They engineered a military coup in 1974 and placed a monster in charge, a young ordinance officer named Mengistu Haile Mariam, who instated full-on Communist oppression backed by massive Soviet arms shipments and aid.

Sold out, Afewerki and the EPLF retreated into the bush and continued to fight.  As the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, so did the Mengistu regime, with the monster fleeing to Zimbabwe where Mugabe gave him asylum (he’s still there to this day).  Eritrea became de facto independent, and formally so in 1993. 

Afewerki declared that the perfidy and failure of the Soviet Union cured him of Marxism, that he was committed to free market democracy and human rights.  He changed the EPLF into a political party, the PFDJ (the Peoples Front for Democracy and Justice), and promised elections and a constitution. 

The former were never held, the latter never written.  No other political party has ever been permitted to form.  When a group of 15 prominent citizens demanded their right to do so, they were promptly arrested and have not been heard of since.

In 1998, Afewerki ordered his troops to, unprovoked, attack a garrison of Ethiopian soldiers in the border town of Badme.  An utterly asinine war ensued over a border area of mostly uninhabited desert wasteland that lasted two years and 100,000 soldiers’ lives on both sides.

Ever since, Afewerki has used the war and the Ethiopian bogeyman to continually tighten the totalitarian screws on his people.  Since Ethiopia supports any attempt to establish a normal government in Mogadishu, Somalia, Afewerki supports any group, no matter how Moslem terrorist crazy, that will fight against it.

Thanks to WikiLeaks, we are privy to the classified assessment of Afewerki by now-former US Ambassador to Eritrea, Ronald McMullen,  cabled on March 5, 2009.

Noting that Eritrea has a "Leninist economy" and is "one bullet away from implosion," the regime is likely to remain in power.  The only hope McMullen has is a military coup.

In an update nine months later (12/09), McMullen says things are getting worse, that Afewerki is mentally ill, and it all doesn’t matter as the dictator is really good at operational security.

There are a number of exile opposition groups, in Europe, the US, and elsewhere in Africa that are clamoring and hoping for a Tunis or Cairo in Asmara – a popular revolution that will do to Afewerki what happened to Ben Ali and Mubarak.

Possible but exceedingly improbable.  This place is locked down tight and rebellion is simply not in the air.  Most dictators die in power and in bed.  As of last month, Fidel Castro has been dictator of Cuba for 52 years.  Why someone hasn’t put a bullet in his brain, or Robert Mugabe’s, or Hugo Chavez’s by now is to me a total mystery.

Maybe it isn’t to someone who has mastered human psychology with its seemingly bottomless acceptance of subservience.  Over half of Eritreans, especially the ones with any education and work ethic, are Christians (the other half are Moslems who live along the coast and in the lowlands along the Sudan border where I wasn’t allowed to go).  They are friendly, good people who intensely love their country and are proud of its independence.

Yet they show little desire to be independent themselves.  Why?  I’m hoping the question engenders a lively discussion on the Forum.

These are exciting, thrilling times, with dictators like Mubarak being thrown overboard, and the chance that the dictatorship of the Democrat Party and the Federal Bureaucracy over our own lives just might be thrown overboard by the House Pubs.

But it’s good to soberly remind ourselves that Mubarak’s fate is the rare exception to the rule.  And even when those exceptions do happen, it is even rarer – much rarer – when what comes after it is better, not worse, than before.

America is one of those incredible doubly-rare exceptions to history.  That’s our legacy and our guide.  That gives us a far better chance at recapturing the freedoms we once had.  Eritrea – a Black Norkland in Africa – has far less of a chance. 

We all should take a deep breath now and then, and take a moment to appreciate that we have a chance at freedom that other countries don’t.  Our freedom is in grave jeopardy.  Americans have the chance to rescue and reclaim it.  It’s a chance we’ve all got to take.