Reporters Without Borders has learned from local sources that
Tura Kubaba
, a journalist with the Kunama-language service of state-owned
Radio Dimtsi Hafash
(“Voice of the Masses”), has been detained in Ethiopia since the second
half of 2006 and disappeared last year within the country’s prison
system.
“Amid
general silence, a new name has been added to the list of journalists
who have disappeared in Eritrea’s jails,” the press freedom
organisation said. “This tragedy is all the more shocking for the fact
that we have learned about this man’s disappearance only two years
after the event, because of the wall of terror which the government has
built around the country.”
Reporters
Without Borders added: “The international community’s lack of resolve
means that free Eritreans and their friends are reduced to impotently
counting the victims of the despotic policies imposed by the man who
likes to pose as their liberator, President Issaias Afeworki.”
Reporters Without Borders
Arrested
some time between August and December 2006, Kubaba was initially
incarcerated in “Track-B,” a military prison in a western suburb of
Asmara. Run by an officer known as “Colonel Berhane,” this centre
consists of undergrounds cells and metal containers holding a total of
about 2,000 detainees.
In the course of 2007, Kubaba was transferred from there to an unknown place of detention.
Aged
about 40, Kubaba is a member of the Kunama, a minority ethnic group in
western Eritrea. A local source said he was accused of having “contacts
with Kunama organisations.”
Kubaba’s
case brings to 16 the number of Eritrean journalists whose imprisonment
can be confirmed. According to the information obtained by Reporters
Without Borders, at least four of the 10 journalists who were arrested
in the September 2001 round-ups – including the well-known co-founder
of the weekly
Setit
,
Fessehaye “Joshua” Yohannes
– died in the top-security Eiraeiro prison camp in the northeast of the country.
