Enduring Abductions, Torture, and Tangled Asylum Laws, Eritrean Refugees’ Stories Still Go Unheard
Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku. On December 31, 2015, a small group of activists and refugees from Eritrea gathered for a New Year’s Eve party in snowy Stockholm. In a cozy apartment decorated with balloons, lights, and candles, the friends joked, reminisced, and sang, eating injera, traditional Eritrean bread, with zigni, a spicy curry and meat dish.
Meron Estefanos, an Eritrean-Swedish radio activist, had organized the celebration. Among the guests were Daniel Eyosab, Filmon Debru, and Robel Kelete. For them, the party was a rare chance to step back, for a moment, from the harrowing circumstances under which their lives had intersected. One year before, these young Eritrean men had stayed togetafteher at a refugee center in northern Sweden. Estefanos had recounted their stories of fleeing Eritrea on her weekly radio show, and had helped them navigate their new existences in Europe.
She had also invited Hagos Hadgu, whom she’d interviewed when he arrived in Sweden a few months before, but he’d declined to come. He had no desire to mingle and celebrate. “I’m alone and I want to be alone,” he had said, lying on a narrow bed in a small dark room in a refugee center in Hållsta, west of Stockholm. The scars of his trip were still fresh.
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Hadgu fled his native Eritrea for Ethiopia with his wife in September 2014, after seven years of imprisonment, torture, and forced labor. He’s not sure why he was held for so long. All he was told was that as a university student, he was a “troublemaker,” despite never having participated in student protests. Once viewed as a promising “African Renaissance” state, Eritrea under strongman leader Isaias Afwerki is considered one of today’s most brutal and secretive in the world, labeled by some as the North Korea of Africa. Hadgu had succeeded in escaping from a well-guarded prison in the city of Assab to reach his village. He took his wife, Natsnet Tesfealem, and headed across the border to Ethiopia. There, the couple stayed in a refugee camp for seven months, planning their next moves to reach Europe through a network of paid smugglers. First, they went to neighboring Sudan. They stayed for one month in the capital, Khartoum, with relatives. Smugglers had told Hadgu and Tesfealem to wait in the early morning hours for a minibus that would take them to a market area on the outskirts of town. Along with nearly one hundred and fifty Eritrean men and women, they mounted a lorry, but not before they were stripped naked. The armed smugglers took all their valuables— jewelry, watches, and cash. On the road to Libya, the lorry broke down three times. During breaks, in the middle of the desert, the smugglers pulled away three young women and raped them. Rape is common during these trips. Women know this and take birth control pills before the trek. Tesfealem, who was five months pregnant at the time and didn’t know how else to protect herself, had innocently brought along condoms.
At the Sudanese-Libyan border, the men handed Hadgu, Tesfealem, and the others to a band of Libyan smugglers. After being held for five days in a compound in the eastern Libyan town of Ajdabiya, where they were repeatedly beaten, the couple got on a semi-trailer truck carrying more than a hundred Eritreans and Egyptians. The truck was to take them to Tripoli, in the west, where they would board a Europe-bound boat. But on the way, near the town of Ben Jawad, Hadgu saw a Toyota pickup truck drive toward the traifler with a mounted gun. Behind it were some twenty more trucks in a column, each baring a tall black flag. Many on the trailer began to cry. Others started to pray. “I saw the flags and said to myself, ‘I’m dead,’” Hadgu recalled.
They were the flags of the Islamic State, or . The extremist group’s members had beheaded twenty Eritrean and Ethiopian Christians two months earlier on the coast, recorded the execution in a cinematic video, and posted it online. The ISIS fighters separated the refugees by religion, releasing the Muslim ones. They then mounted the lorry, separated the remaining refugees into men and women,
