In the labor camps in Eritrea, nightly torture and horrific conditions

Eritrea is filled with a horrific array of prisons: underground cells made of crumbling concrete, and sweltering prisons made from converted metal shipping containers. Cages packed with hundreds of men who must sleep on their sides like sardines, while their cellmates stand wearily to make room, and shallow holes dug into the ground with wooden and dirt ceilings so low that the prisoners cannot stand.

Former prisoners have recounted that conditions are often so horrific and prison sentences are so open that desperate prisoners often try to escape, but those who try are often shot dead.

Unlike many other authoritarian countries, where people can often avoid imprisonment by keeping their heads down and staying out of politics, most Eritreans face the inevitability of detention if they refuse mandatory national service that can span decades, mostly in an army notorious for leaving. The country. Poor and brutal recruits.

Prison terms are so ubiquitous that one former detainee, Mulu Zerzege, who was detained for five years without ever knowing why, said in an interview: “You know how you all talk about where I went to college in America? And in Eritrea.” We do this in prisons.

In interviews, 42 Eritreans who had been in prison, in some cases for only weeks, described conditions in the country's sprawling detention network. These Eritreans, contacted in six different countries — some mired in refugee camps outside Eritrea or hiding in secret safe houses in African cities, a few now living as fugitives in the West — spoke of beatings, stressful conditions and other forms of torture, from Starvation, suffocation and gunshot deaths, providing a rare look inside the secret prisons of the country described as “Africa’s North Korea.”

Although Eritrea has long been highly repressive, the prison population has swelled over the past three years. After sending troops to help the Ethiopian government fight rebels in the Tigray region, Eritrea intensified its aggressive recruitment campaign, sweeping away men and women, young and old. Escape means imprisonment.

The scope of Eritrea's prison system is well known. But the testimony of former detainees provides new, previously unreported, details about prison conditions and the desperate life inside.

Eritrea, a country with a population of 3.7 million according to World Bank statistics, has never seen national elections, a constitution or a transfer of power. President Isaias Afwerki had ruled the country for three decades, and his party, backed by Russia and enriched by Chinese mining revenues, was tightening its stranglehold.

Under these circumstances, it can be difficult to even glimpse the conditions of daily life, especially for those locked behind prison doors. Foreign journalists are rarely allowed into Eritrea, and the local press is completely controlled. Cell phones are monitored and internet access is scarce, making it difficult to contact Eritreans, who are usually too afraid to speak.

Most of the former prisoners interviewed for this article were initially reluctant to speak, and almost all did so on condition of anonymity. Their testimonies were verified, including by comparing multiple accounts about specific prisons and comparing accounts about different prisons to identify common practices.

Eritrea's Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel did not respond to detailed requests for comment. The Eritrean mission to the United Nations also did not respond to a similar request. The Eritrean government has previously rejected criticism of its human rights record.

The first time Giorgio was imprisoned, he said he was imprisoned in a stifling hole in the ground covered with wood and mud. The prisoners were unable to stand, and there was no light. There were about 30 people in the hole. Some of them were there for two years, he recalls.

He was arrested after fleeing to neighboring Sudan in 2014, when he was there His early twenties. Sudanese soldiers arrested him and returned him to the Eritreans, who put him in a prison in the town of Tisseny commonly called “under Tisseny.”

“Sometimes people would faint from the heat. People got sick a lot. The chief prisoner, the commandant, would report to the guards, and people would pick the man up by his hands and feet and carry him outside,” said Giorgio, a tall man with a moustache. Without permission, they will shoot you.”

Georgiou spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his middle name for fear that he might be arrested by Eritrean authorities again. He recently fled Eritrea after fleeing military service, which he was forced to join after his release from detention.

A week after being placed in Tissini prison, he was transferred to Hashvray, an underground prison located in the western Gash Barka district. Georgiou described it as a concrete trench, where about 100 prisoners were crammed into a room roughly 16 by 13 feet.

When Giorgio arrived, he said he recognized a childhood friend in the dim light. The friend was about 16 years old when he was arrested. He has been in prison for seven years.

He had to sleep in shifts

Georgiou spent three weeks underground in Hashvere before being imprisoned for a year in Adi Abeto, a large prison complex outside the capital, Asmara. He said the main detention center consisted of two large cells crowded with hundreds of prisoners and a row of much smaller cells, too small to stand or lie in, where men could suffer for months until they “confessed.”

After his release, Georgiou fled again, this time to Ethiopia, where he lived for six years until Eritrean forces arrived during the Ethiopian Civil War and forced him and thousands of others to return home. He said that within a month the police came after him and accused him of anti-government activities. He was among dozens of Eritreans repatriated from Ethiopia and imprisoned.

The two main rooms at Adi Abeto were so crowded that the only way the men could sleep was to pile on their sides, while others stood waiting for their turn, according to Georgiou and two others detained there. Numbers fluctuated, but he estimated that as many as 1,500 men were held in two rooms, each about 20 feet by 40 feet.

Some prisoners had tuberculosis or bronchitis. He added that others were paralyzed by beatings with sticks, electric cables, or bicycle chains. Many former detainees described being subjected to similar beatings.

“When they beat you, you can hear screaming all day long. If they move you, they do it at night. When people went for interrogation and came back bleeding, we comforted them.”

Georgiou said the prisoners are so desperate that some prisoners are trying to escape en masse. To make running more difficult, prison authorities banned closed shoes and ordered the heel straps of sandals to be cut. He added that if about 15 people tried to escape, only two of them might be able to reach freedom.

“Some were shot while trying to escape. Some died while being interrogated by beatings. Some died by execution. Most of them were arrested, beaten and sent back to prison.”

Many Eritrean prisoners are sentenced to death.

Two former prisoners held underground in a prison called “Tract B,” a converted storage facility near Asmara airport, described seeing several of their inmates die of suffocation before the net was put in place.

Four other former detainees described another prison with underground cells so small that inmates could not lie down or stand upright. One of these men said he was detained there for four months. He said the prisoners were allowed to go to the bathroom twice a day, but otherwise lived in the dark. Biting insects littered her limbs. His chest still bore a deep hole from something that bit him in his first week.

This former prisoner, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to prevent retaliation against his brothers, said he was first recruited when he was 16 years old. Two years later, he fled to Ethiopia and was a refugee there when war broke out. He recounted that Eritrean soldiers blindfolded him and returned him, along with several other people, to a prison in the town of Barentu, western Eritrea.

When the beatings began, the guards accused him of treason by exposing conditions in Eritrea to the world. Talking to foreigners – who had applied to the United Nations for resettlement – was considered evidence of treason.

Sounds of torture at night

This former prisoner's cell was close to the interrogation rooms. He said that every evening was interrupted by screaming. Sometimes people are tied up and left overnight in a “helicopter position” with their arms painfully pinned behind them and skin on their ankles. He said that sometimes people get pistol-whipped. Their arms were sometimes broken.

“Sometimes people would cry for their mothers or say they were going to die. You could hear every sound, the sound of stick on flesh. We used to knock on the walls just to say: ‘Are you okay? Do you hear this?’” recalls the former prisoner, who is now In his mid-thirties. He said that when he was finally moved from his small cell, he was placed in a larger cell with a man who had spent seven years in different prisons. The man was almost blind from being underground for so long and was limping from being shot in the leg while trying to escape.

Cellmates exchanged information about Eritrean labor camps, including information about a secret prison hidden in a residential neighborhood near the heart of the city, and a military barracks and prisons dug into a cliff near the Enda Jimbar detention center in Barentu, where scorpions littered the floor. During their detention, they located at least five prisons around the small town of Barentu. Since his release, he has heard from four others.

Molu Zerzgi, a nurse practitioner, remembers when men came to Keren Hospital in civilian clothes looking for him. He remembers that they took him out of a meeting, handcuffed him, and took him away. More than a decade later, he still doesn't know why.

“When I was six or seven years old, I realized that some people disappear forever,” he said. “If you live in Eritrea, this is always on your mind. And one day I was the one who disappeared.”

Zerezji, now 38, said he was arrested in 2011. Initially, he was transferred to the main security office in Keren city, where he spent two months in a small cell before being transferred to Karsheli Prison in Asmara.

That facility was home to many former politicians, priests, doctors and military officials. Zerezji said many of the prisoners had been there for decades. No one was charged. Lawyers or family members were not allowed to visit.

“No one questioned me or interrogated me. Sometimes they would just say: ‘Tell us what we did wrong.’ Tell us the truth, and you will leave. If you don’t, you will stay,” he said.

Other prisoners include the wife of former minister Petros Solomon, who was arrested in 2001 for demanding government reforms. She was arrested after returning to Eritrea from the United States, where she was studying. “She was alone in her cell,” Zerezji said, adding: “I could hear her crying.”

Fitsum Birhane, a rare psychiatrist in the country, was in the next cell. Zarizji said that he heard of his wife's death from cancer on the radio in prison, and he began praying for her and their son.

“I dreamed every day that someone would come to save us. I dreamed of him every night and every day for five years.”

In May 2016, he was suddenly released without any explanation. “One of the security men came and asked me: When did you come to prison?” I told him on 3/30/2011. He said: Are you detained until today? Well, you're free now.”

Zerzgi left Eritrea during a brief political thaw in 2018, when border restrictions were eased. He made his way to Los Angeles, where he now works as a nurse and says he attends protests against the Eritrean government for those left behind.