by Ermias Yemane

What is a country without its people? What is a church without the congregation? Sadly both are subjugated and missing in Eritrea. Our people have no freedom, no democracy and no justice. Our churches are empty with most of their worshippers languishing in nationwide secret prisons. Just last week, hundreds of Christians from around the world spent days praying for the jailed and tortured Christians in Eritrea.

While it was pleasant that so many people were praying for our suffering country, what is hidden from the world is that thousands of Evangelical Christians in Eritrea are suffering not because of accident but because of state terrorism. How? The Eritrean Orthodox Church Patriarch is detained, various religions are outlawed and the sizable Eritrean Evangelical Christians are constitutionally illegal - entirely prohibited from breathing air in Eritrea!

Today, our land, the soil and the ground might be celebrating the 16th Eritrean Independence Day, but our people have nothing to celebrate about. Maybe only the close supporters of the Eritrean dictatorship will celebrate but the brave people of Eritrea have no reason to celebrate anymore and they are seeking liberation: real independence.

Just yesterday, the Paris-based Reporters without Borders called on the EU to take strong measures against our government. It urged the European Union to impose sanctions on Dictator Isaias Afeworki by describing him as "one of Africa's most brutal dictators." They finished their accusations reminding the world about the sad state of our country which is one of the world's few countries without any privately-owned media. Still they forgot to mention the rest of our misery.

We can't control our destiny. We can have neither multi-party elections nor parliament. And it is not because we are robots blindly supporting a dictator, but it is because our real leaders are either jailed or killed. And opposition is de facto outlawed. During his interview with Al-Arabiya satellite TV, like it is something to be proud of, our dictator last month barked that there is "no political opposition" in Eritrea. If his boasting doesn't indicate pure dictatorship with impunity, we don’t know what will. Despite our government being one of the worst, if not the worst, in the world, the international community is just waking up and just beginning to lay accusations. It is new to them but we say to them WELCOME to the hell we have endured for 16 years.

Most Eritreans would love to disagree with all of these accusations from the international community because we love our nation which we liberated from the oppressive Ethiopian Empire in 1991, but we can not deny the reality of our current position. We will have to act like robots disguised under silent & acute patriotism to ignore the depressing state of our country. So we can't keep ignoring it.

Recently, media from the international community have been exposing the plight in our country. Our government told us it will carry national elections but it suspended it indefinitely. Even after the futile district elections held, the whole oppositions and leaders are locked up; some are already dead and generally the entire opposition is now illegal. Thus we continue to have a one party state, but it is more like a one man state. Dictator Isaias is the foreign ministry, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Defense, the Executive and the Judiciary: even what the world reads on the Ministry of Information site is directed and co-edited by Mr. Isaias himself.

Our misery is endless but remembering our past triumphs keeps us going and hopeful. The only University in our country is closed and only our military college operates by conscripting hundreds of thousands of our youth (Even under 18.)

BBC reports that more than 800 of our people escape from our government and find refugee in Sudan and Ethiopia. But even such BBC reports always underestimate our plight because they highly depend on the regimes sympathizers for information. When the BBC report said Eritreans choose Sudan refugee camps instead of living in Eritrea, it was speaking the wish and the desire of many of our people suffering in Eritrea.

Most Eritreans are trying to escape. But the price of running away is expensive for our relatives because they have to pay enormous amount of money (50,000 Nakfas {cash}) as compensation or just get arrested: putting them in deeper deprivation. So most of us have no choice and we have to stay in the military camps.

According to data from 2007, our country has the highest proportion of a nation's population in military service in the entire world, this number is worse than North Korea. But only those who did time in Eritrea or have lived in it know the true meaning of our despair. Furthermore, while our government feeds the massive army, the rest of our people are suffering in poverty. Of course, we have more than our army.

Our government also entertains and feeds foreign militant groups that are fighting against many other countries. What is the purpose of a government that cares about feeding foreign insurgents while our people are in poverty? It is a question we already know the answer for since our government has already fought small & big wars with Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia and the transitional Somalia government. Our country fought all of these bloody wars and battles in just 16 years but we are not proud for breaking world records as warmongers.

16 years after our independence, today, the main question is what the definition of independence is. Does independence mean just about the soil or about the people? Ethnically and culturally most Eritreans are not different from some of our neighbors like Ethiopia. We also share the same history and background. So why did we separate? Wasn't the endless oppression, poverty and tyranny some of the main reasons we separated from Ethiopia? Yet, the situation we have endured during the last 16 years has been even worse than ever before. The misery of our country is endless. Only our land, the soil, has gained independence the last 16 years and not our people.

The author can be reached at: eryemane6@yahoo.com

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