Forgotten

From the reception centre at Endabaguna, it is on to the camps.

Opened in 2004, Shimelba was the first Ethiopian camp for Eritrean refugees. Residents are allowed to construct their own dwellings here and now it looks like a small town. It is home to more than 6,000 people, mostly from the Kunama ethnic group, one of nine in Eritrea and historically the most marginalised.

Asked whether she would like to be resettled outside Ethiopia, Nagazeuelle, a Kunama who has been here for 17 years, tells IRIN: “I have no interest in going to other countries… My interest is in my country [Eritrea].

“I need my country,” she repeats. “We had rich and fertile land, but the government took it. We weren’t an educated people, so they picked on us. I am an example of the first refugees from Eritrea, but now people from all nine ethnic groups are coming.”

Haile, a Tigrayan Eritrean in his fifties who has been a refugee for five years, tells IRIN his father and brother died in prison in Eritrea.

“The world has forgotten us, apart from the US, Canada and Ethiopia,” he says. “The United Nations is too tolerant of Isaias. What is happening is beyond [words]. It is a deep crisis. So why is the international community silent?”

About 50 kilometres south of Shimelba lies Hitsats, the newest and largest of the four camps. It has 11,000 refugees and four in five of them are under the age of 35.

Outside camp coordinator Haftam Telemickael’s office, a group of Eritreans is meeting a staff member to renew ration cards. Each month, every Hitsats resident is entitled to 10kg of wheat, 1kg of palm oil, 1kg of protein powder, a quarter kilogramme of salt and sugar each, one piece of soap, and 60 Ethiopian birr ($2.75) spending money.

“At least here they get permission to move freely and visit family in places like Addis Ababa,” says Tesfaye, a refugee who also works as a camp social worker. “In Eritrea there are six zones and you can’t move to another zone without permission. Even in Asmara you have to get permission to move to different parts of the city.”

Sudan is the other main overland option for Eritrean asylum seekers. But around and even inside the refugee camps there, Eritreans are particularly vulnerable targets for gangs who kidnap migrants for ransom, often torturing them during phone calls to relatives to persuade them to send money.

“In Sudan, there are more problems. We can sleep peacefully here,” says 32-year-old Ariam, who came to Hitsats four years ago with her two children after spending four years in a Sudanese camp.

Ariam owned a small hotel in Asmara but couldn’t sell it before she left as that would have aroused government suspicion. She lost about 80,000 nakfa ($5,000) on it. Now she survives on rations and by making and selling flatbread injera, generating about 3,000 Ethiopian birr ($136) a month.

The common thread to everyone’s story here is the hardship they experienced in Eritrea, a country under semi-autocratic rule that is all but cut off to journalists.

“It was difficult to live in Eritrea because of my small salary,” says 23-year-old Samrawit after entering Ariam’s home for coffee. “My husband is in prison because he tried to cross the border. I want to go to another country. I don’t dislike it here, but from Ethiopia it’s difficult to communicate with my family. From other countries it would be easier.”

Worst of neighbours

Relations between Addis Ababa and Asmara soured not long after Eritrea regained independence and in 1998 degenerated into a two-year border war that cost thousands of lives. The neighbours remain bitter enemies to this day and their shared border is highly militarised.

One of the entry points is in the town of Badme, the war’s flashpoint, in a region still occupied by Ethiopia in defiance of an international adjudication attributing it to Eritrea.

“I crossed after hearing they were about to round people up for the military,” says 20-year-old Gebre. “I wasn’t going to go through that –you’re hungry, there’s no salary, you’re not doing anything to help your country; you’re just serving officials.”

With Gebre are another 14 young men ranging in age from 16 to 20 who also crossed to avoid military service, but there are plenty of young mothers too.

“Life was getting worse,” says 34-year-old Samrawit. “I had no work to earn money to feed my children.” Only her two youngest children are with her. “I would like to make sure coming here is worth it before the elder two come,” she explains.

She travelled with 22-year-old mother-of-two Yordanos, having met her at the Eritrean town of Barentua, about 50 kilometres north of the border – their rendezvous point with their smuggler. He took them by car to the Mereb River, where they crossed into Ethiopia.

Neither knows how much the smuggler was paid, payment having been organised by their husbands who now live in Switzerland and Holland.

An army truck pulls up while the women and young men are waiting at the Badme entry point. It hasn’t come to take them to the screening centre, rather to deposit another eight refugees picked up at the border.

“Our soldiers don’t get any sleep they are so busy at night collecting refugees,” says an Ethiopian major.

(TOP PHOTO: The rugged landscape of northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region, which lies on the Eritrean border. James Jeffrey/IRIN)

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