Eritrea defends conscription as thousands flee

NAIROBI // Eritrea has defended its controversial policy of decades-long national service from which some 5,000 people flee each month.

The government said it had “no other choice” due to threats from long-standing enemy Ethiopia.

Dismissing a United Nations commission of inquiry on the human rights situation in Eritrea – which said the government is responsible for systematic and widespread human rights abuses on an almost unprecedented scale – Asmara justified the mass, open-ended conscription of its people.

Eritreans make up the second-largest number of people risking the dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea, after Syrians, running the gauntlet of ruthless people smugglers and dangerous waters in the hope of reaching the European Union.

But Asmara said UN criticism of the national service “is effectively denying the Eritrean people the right to defend themselves in an existential crisis against a foe 15 to 20 times their total population size”, said the foreign ministry at the weekend.

The UN report described horrific torture, including electric shock, near drowning and sexual abuse. Its nearly 500-page report released in early June details how the country, under Isaias Afwerki’s iron-fisted regime for the past 22 years, has created a repressive system in which people are routinely arrested at whim, detained, tortured, killed or go missing.

Asmara said the report was filled with “bias, errors, unsubstantiated and illogical claims, misrepresentations and evidentiary weaknesses”.

* Agence France-Presse