The Eritrean “Refugee” Scam–Eritrea Is Not That Bad

**wvwvw** · 11-04-2017, 11:39 PM

Eritrea is an interesting little country in northeast Africa, north of its archenemy Ethiopia, but like Ethiopia in being mostly a higher altitude place with a mixed race and mixed religion population and a leftist-nationalist government.

Eritrea’s capital of Asmara has some of the wildest 1930s Italian architecture in the world. Not that much was built during the Depression, but there was lots of talent putting designs on paper in the 1930s. For reasons of Mussolini’s whim, Eritrea happens to be one of the few places where 1930s designs got built in profusion.

The average high temperature in Asmara at 7,600 feet elevation during the warmest month of the year (April) is 77 degrees. Humidity is moderate, rainfall is 20 inches per year. The climate resembles Santa Barbara.

The Eritrean economy is largely propped up by remittances earned by Eritreans abroad. (For example, Eritreans appear to dominate the parking lot attendant gig in Los Angeles.)

The Eritrean government appears to have come up with a brilliant scam for getting Eritreans to the head of the line for immigrating into wealthy white countries. Eritrea nominally has a law making it illegal to leave Eritrea, so all Eritreans who do leave aren’t immigrants, they are refugees!

Plus, the government of Eritrea is not accommodating of letting foreign journalists visit Eritrea, allowing horror stories told by purported refugees to circulate unchecked in the West. Finally, a reporter from Der Spiegel has visited Eritrea and discovered its clean little secret: it’s not so bad.

It’s not so good, either, of course. It’s run by elderly war heroes long past their primes and terrified of being overthrown. But by African standards, it’s more orderly than most countries.

A Visit to ‘Africa’s North Korea’

After Syrians, refugees from Eritrea have the best chance of gaining asylum in Germany. But are conditions in the isolated one-party state really so brutal?

By Bartholomäus Grill

November 02, 2017 09:39 AM

The woman smiles as she looks out the window, happy to be returning home. She is about to arrive in the Eritrean capital Asmara, a city in a valley surrounded by verdant mountains, having flown in from Frankfurt, with a stopover in Dubai. She is a middle-aged Eritrean woman who was granted political asylum in Germany, a woman who fled her country but is now returning voluntarily. She chooses to remain anonymous, because in Eritrea, illegally leaving the country is a jailable offense.

She is traveling to Eritrea as if she were a tourist. Everything proceeds normally as she passes through passport control, baggage claim and customs. She is planning to visit her family, and has brought along gifts and money for them, before boarding her return flight to Germany in two weeks. “Many are doing this,” she says, getting into a taxi. But how is it possible that people can travel unobstructed back to their native country, one decried as an evil dictatorship and accused of brutally oppressing its citizens?

Similarly, lots of Persian Jews in Beverly Hills take annual vacations back home in Iran, which can be puzzling to the more true believer neocons.

According to the government, 116,000 Eritrean refugees visited their native country last year alone. But can the figures of a regime that manipulates statistics be trusted? And what explains the visits by Eritrean expatriates? An aid worker from Finland provides an answer: The government tolerates the returnees because they bring foreign currency to the impoverished nation and are also a source of income in the form of the so-called “development tax.”

Eritrea is still run by aging national liberation warriors who won independence from Ethiopia in 1991. They conscript all young people and put many to work on labor projects for years.

Indeed, in some months it is thought that up to 5,000 young men and women flee the country. In late 2015, the UN Refugee Agency counted 474,296 refugees from Eritrea, or 10 percent of the country’s population of 5 million. Some 92 percent of the Eritreans who applied for asylum in Germany in 2016 were recognized, while 81 percent were recognized in 2017. Syrian refugees were the only group with a higher acceptance rate.

Eritrean refugees base their asylum applications on human rights violations, which are sharply criticized by the United Nations. The UN report soberly concludes that the regime in Eritrea employs “totalitarian practices” that instill a constant state of fear in its citizens.

At first glance, there is no evidence of this fear in Asmara. People go about their business in the city’s markets, young women wearing jeans walk along the streets and men sit chatting in the cafes.

Eritrea is one of the last Bonapartist-Nasserite regimes run by secular modernizing military men. They figure if they stepped down, the Muslims and Christian would be at each other’s throats in a few minutes.

Or maybe they just like being in power.

Anyway, it’s in the interest of both the regime and the emigres for stories to circulate about how horrible things are back in Eritrea so the Eritreans get refugee status and can send money home

**wvwvw** · 11-04-2017, 11:56 PM

Some interesting facts about Eritrea:

Eritrea capital city Asmara is also called the "Italy's African City" or "New Rome". This, due to the distinctive Italian touch it exudes.

The port city of Adulis is one of Africa’s most ancient cities. The Greeks founded it in 600.

This is probably one of the very few countries in the world that has only one political party- People's Front for Democracy and Justice.

Over the years, this is one country in the world where elections have been regularly scheduled and cancelled but none have actually ever been held.

It is the world’s first country to allocate an entire coastline as a reserve. The Dahlak group of islands is world-renowned for their pearl production and are largely uninhabited.

Eritrea literally means "red", and gets its name after the Red Sea.

"Sinus Erythraeus was the name the Greek settlers in Egypt (Ptolemaic dynasty) of the third century B.C labeled the body of water between the Arab peninsula and the African continent. Later the Romans adopted the same name, calling it Mare Erythraeum-Literary meaning the Red Sea. From This, "Eritrean sea" the country has got its name." (1998, Kjetil Tronvoll, p.21)

Greek influence on Aksumite kingdom was so strong that nearly all inscription uptill the 4th century A.D. was made in Greek.

Although it is not clear what role the Ptolemies played in Axum, there is sufficient evidence that Hellenic influences on Axum were so great that virtually all inscriptions until the early forth century A.D. were made in Greek.

"In 1980, there were at least 3500 Cubans in Eritrea fighting alongside the Ethiopians.45 During the 1982 so-called red star mopping-up operations against the nationalists, a strong Cuban infantry battalion shored up the 120000 Ethiopian troops.." (1991, Okbazghi Yohannes, p. 256)

In Pre-Islamic and Pre-Christian Eritrea, most Eritreans worshiped pantheon of gods derived from Yemen

Astar, Mahrem, Baher and Almaqh were the names of the God's the ancestors of most Eritreans worshiped

"The Aksumites, prior to the coming of the Christianity, had a pantheon of gods, derived from South Arabia, which they equated in their inscriptions with the gods of the ancient Greeks. The principal early Aksumite deities thus comprised Astar, who corresponded to Zeus, the Greek King of the Gods; Mahrem, the equivalent of Ares, the Greek god of war, and Baher, who was equated with Poseidon, the Greek god of the Sea. Aksum, as we shall see, later adopted Christianity, which became the official state religion in the early fourth century, after which the old gods were forgotten." (1991, Richard Pankhurst, p.24)