The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 24

  Those who graduate college have little assurance of working in the area that they studied; most seem to end up back in national service. One afternoon, at a breezy, secluded café in Asmara, I had tea with a young woman who had gone to Sawa and then completed a degree in engineering. The government assigned her to teach English at a school in Asmara for three years, with the understanding, she said, that “after that maybe they can put you in your field.” She now worked part-time at a restaurant; other graduates she knew were working in kindergartens. “You try to be flexible,” she said, laughing. “You have to, in order to live. You can even clean the streets.” She went on, “Just waiting to be an engineer is losing time. I have to do my duty to my family.”

  Outside Asmara, I drove past a guard post manned by soldiers. There was a cluster of zinc shacks serving as a residence, but there was nothing to guard: no ammunitions depot, no intelligence post, nothing. “If you are not on a farming or a construction project, breaking stones, it’s about keeping you in check,” Ghebremeskel, the activist, said. In Asmara, a man who had worked for decades in the civil service told me that he was sometimes assigned to duty as a prison guard. “What’s frustrating to the youth is that there is no end to national service,” Woldemariam, the professor, said. “The suspense—you can’t plan your life.”

  Because Arefaine was a gifted athlete, the Eritrean Sport and Culture Commission offered a deal: if he went to a remote camp in the east, called Wi’a, he would be allowed to leave after just six months and play for a club team in Asmara. He packed jam and peanut butter, a sorghum drink, a little money, a blanket, and a few changes of clothes. He felt ready to go.

  To get to Wi’a, he and about 150 other recruits rode for three hours in the back of a giant truck, so crammed together that they could barely find room to stand. When they arrived, Arefaine was stunned. The camp is in a volcanic area on the Red Sea coast, a sun-blasted expanse of white sand. “There is just plain ground,” he recalled. “There is no housing except for small shelters made out of sticks.” Soldiers hustled the recruits out of the truck and told them to kneel, then divided them into groups. In a long shelter covered with branches and leaves, they dropped their things. A soldier was serving stale bread and watery lentil soup, ladled out from a cavernous pot. “You could barely see the lentils,” Arefaine said. He ate some of the food he had brought from home, already regretting the decision to come.

  That evening, the commander, a man named Jamal, laid out the rules: trainees had to obey whatever instructions their superiors gave them, and they would be shot if they tried to escape. “Immediately after the meeting, people started running,” Arefaine said. Soldiers swarmed the remaining recruits, telling them to kneel. Arefaine could hear vehicles moving over the sand and guns firing into the air. No one knew if any of the runners were caught. If they were, they would be put in the camp prison, a hole in the ground that felt like a coffin.

  At night, the recruits slept in the open, surrounded by a ring of sleeping soldiers. Arefaine poured water on the sandy ground to cool it, and then laid down his blanket. Each day, he and the other trainees had to wake up at 4:00 a.m., quickly stow their bedding and change clothes, and then jog to a clearing a mile away, where they could relieve themselves, under close watch by the guards. For the remainder of the day, they marched and had target practice, with a rest in the early afternoon to avoid the high sun. Every thirty minutes, a whistle shrieked, and everyone had to line up in formation. Their superiors were checking to make sure that no one had escaped.

  The recruits were beaten for failing to show up on time, or for falling out of formation, or for stealing water. “You were treated like an animal,” Arefaine said. At breakfast, they were given a cup of black tea, six rolls, and five liters of water to last the day. Lunch and dinner were more lentil soup. There were about 2,000 men in the camp, and every Wednesday afternoon they all went to the river to bathe. (The women went on Tuesdays.) People unfailingly tried to escape across the river, and Arefaine watched as they were shot down, their legs collapsing beneath them in the water. The ones who made it disappeared into the scrubland. Later, when soldiers dumped corpses on the ground in front of the recruits, Arefaine saw that many of them had been mauled by hyenas.

  A man in the camp was tattooing recruits, using a thorn and kohl, and although religious practices were forbidden, Arefaine had a cross imprinted on his right forearm. “We were stressed and worried, and we wanted to think of our God,” he said. When the tattoo became infected, he went to a medic to have it treated. The medic scolded him: “Why did you do this?” When Arefaine came for follow-up treatments, the medic beat him with a stick.

  After six months, it was clear that Arefaine wasn’t going to be allowed to leave early. Around that time, his parents were permitted to make a one-hour visit. His mother looked at the camp and at Arefaine, who was frighteningly thin, and sobbed uncontrollably. “I was telling her not to cry,” he recalled. “From then on, whatever happened to me I kept to myself.”

  When his year of training was done, he was assigned to a military base in the village of Gelalo, in the south. He was often on the move, sent to man checkpoints or guard telecommunications infrastructure, or, worse, to carry out roundups. He and his platoon were dropped off in surrounding villages to look for evaders, grabbing boys who didn’t have permits off the streets or from their homes. They searched under beds, in cupboards, and even took girls, herding them into a prison or a stadium for questioning. If someone resisted, Arefaine could end up having to shoot him. “I felt very bad,” he said. “No one wanted to do it.” He knew that, if he protested, his treatment would worsen.

  Like many men in national service, Arefaine hoped that soccer would provide a way out. The club teams are owned by the military, the ruling party, and state companies, so coaches can recruit anyone they want. When he joined the service, he wrote on his entrance forms that he was a soccer player, but nothing had come of it. At last, three years into his service, he got a call telling him to come to the city of Assab to try out for a military-sponsored club team.

  Arefaine wanted to play, but he was desperate to get home. If he tried out for the team and didn’t make it, he knew, he’d have to go back into national service. Instead, he sought out a relative who lived in town and, with his help, bought a forged permit that said he was on medical leave. Early one morning, he heaved himself into the back of a transport truck, and, sitting on top of the cargo, rode north. When the truck reached its destination, several hours later, he got on another one, and then another, paying the drivers small bribes. At checkpoints, he showed the fake permit. When he got home, his family greeted him with happiness and surprise; he didn’t tell them that his papers had been forged. He put his belongings down in his familiar bedroom, with posters of the Barcelona soccer team. He took a bath.

  On Harnet Avenue, I visited an ornate, four-level theater called Cinema Impero, where people often gather to watch soccer games. In midafternoon, fans were scattered across the seats, engrossed in an English Premier League match that played on the giant screen. The fans sat in rapt silence, periodically bursting into shouts and cheers. Soccer is immensely popular in Eritrea, featured prominently on state media and dominating the discussion in public spaces. “It is a way of escape from the frustrating reality,” Zere, the exiled journalist, said, “and a refuge to discuss safe issues that will not draw attention from state security.”

  In Asmara, there is much that critics can’t comment on. The streets are filled with decades-old bicycles and cars, and the electricity goes out frequently. The state-run mobile-phone network is spotty, and people resort to pay phones. The ruling party’s company, Red Sea Trading Corporation, is the country’s primary legal importer, but most of what’s for sale in Eritrea’s small shops is smuggled into the country in giant suitcases—a practice that is tolerated, perhaps even sanctioned, by the government. On the outskirts of the city, police cars driving to Adi Abeto prison pass a thriving black market for diesel.
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  According to the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, PFDJ officials skim millions of dollars a year from party-run companies, but the charges are difficult to investigate because the government never discloses its budget. Eritreans joke that Afewerki runs the country as if it were a small grocery store. Hagos Ghebrehiwet, the president’s economic adviser, told me that the budget had to be kept secret, to protect against “economic sabotage” by Ethiopia and its supporters. A former treasury chief, quoted in Martin Plaut’s book Understanding Eritrea, gave a simpler explanation: no budget has ever been committed to paper.

  Eritrea has resources—gold, copper, zinc, and potash—but the majority of the population depends on subsistence farming. Ghebrehiwet told me that the problem was a limited workforce: “A small country with a lot of resources in agriculture, mining, and fisheries—I don’t think we will have enough manpower to be able to exploit the potential here.” Bronwyn Bruton, the deputy director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, was more direct. “The government is broke,” she said. “They can’t pay people to do jobs that would normally be civil-service posts. So what they’re doing is conscripting people.” In 2016, the government increased the monthly pay to between 2,000 and 5,000 nakfa. But Eritreans are not allowed to withdraw more than 5,000 nakfa a month from a bank without approval. “You take it to the market and it’s gone in five days,” an Eritrean in Asmara told me.

  Eritrean officials insist that the threat from Ethiopia forces them to divert resources to the military. Berhane G. Solomon, the chargé d’affaires at the Eritrean embassy in Washington, D.C., complained that the international community has done nothing to compel Ethiopia to withdraw its troops. “It has put the burden on us to protect our independence,” he said. “Eritrea is only twenty-five years old. We are just crawling, trying to stand on our own feet.”

  Publicly, the U.S. has hesitated to criticize Ethiopia, a key ally in regional anti-terror efforts. Between 2006 and 2009, Ethiopia sent troops into Somalia to fight Islamists, including the terror group al-Shabaab. In 2009, the UN placed sanctions on Eritrea, for allegedly supporting al-Shabaab in order to undermine Ethiopia. But the UN’s own Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea has found no evidence to support that claim. (The group does say that Eritrea has ties to Somali arms traffickers.) When a UN report alleged persistent human-rights abuses, the government called the claims “an unwarranted attack not only against Eritrea, but also Africa and developing nations.” Amid the continuing dispute, Afewerki has barred the monitoring group from the country since 2013.

  Eritrea and the United States are in a kind of standoff: a Western diplomat whom I spoke to acknowledged that Ethiopia is behaving thuggishly, but thought that the onus is on Eritrea to allow the monitoring group to inspect again. If the country were cleared of the allegations raised by the UN, the international community would be more amenable to helping resolve the border issue. Eritrean officials regard the U.S.’s reasoning as nearsighted. “Why should good relations with Ethiopia mean hostility toward Eritrea?” Yemane Gebreab, the PFDJ’s head of political affairs, said.

  In Asmara, Arefaine knew that he had to protect himself from informants, so he went to see Saada, the neighborhood spy, and told her that he was on medical leave and going to a military hospital in town for treatment. Without release papers from the military, he couldn’t join a club team, so he got a job at a shop in the city. When he wasn’t working, he stayed indoors to avoid the military’s sweeps for evaders. After a few months, though, he reconnected with a high school friend, Mikal, and started going with her to Harnet Avenue at night, strolling from café to café or going to Cinema Hamsien, where they could watch Indian movies for a few nakfa.

  Late one night, about a year later, he heard his father shouting for him to wake up. A contingent of soldiers had jumped the gate of their house and announced that they were looking for him. Arefaine recognized the men: three were platoon mates from Gelalo, and the fourth was the platoon leader. All were holding guns. They handcuffed him and led him out of the house, as his mother and sisters cried.

  Arefaine spent the night in a local police station, and then was taken to a prison near his old base in Gelalo. He was confined, along with some sixty other men, to a cell where the only light came from small, high windows. The men weren’t allowed out, so they had to relieve themselves in a corner. They all became infested with fleas. “I was about to lose my mind,” Arefaine said. “You think about the way you’ve been taken from home. You think about your mom, your dad, how they feel.”

  After six months, prison authorities told Arefaine that he was being released: the military wanted him to play soccer again. It was true that he had briefly evaded service, but so did many other men. Evasion was normal, almost expected—and Arefaine was unusually talented. Arefaine immediately called his parents, who thought he had been killed, and told them that he was free. He cut his hair to get rid of the fleas.

  Back in Asmara, he practiced with the team in the mornings, went to a mandatory political-education center in the afternoons, and worked as a guard at a national-service office on some nights. He made 450 nakfa, about $28, a month. “Once you go to the camp, you are the property of the government,” a former journalist in Asmara told me. “Whether you work in a highly professional position or as a security guard, everybody gets 400 for life.” On nights off, Arefaine bribed his commanders to let him broker houses and cars on the informal market, so that he could make ends meet.

  Arefaine was sitting in a café when he got the news that he had been called to try out for the national team. He shouted so loudly that he startled the other customers. “It was a dream come true,” he said. “One day, I would be able to leave the country.” When he told his parents he wanted to escape, they were against it. The government has sometimes required families of national-team players to turn over the deeds to their houses as a guarantee in case their sons fled, and if Arefaine defected his family could lose their home. He assured them he wouldn’t leave. But, he said, “I made up my mind—I would do it anyway.”

  The team members based abroad—in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and elsewhere—were flown in and put up in a five-star hotel. The local athletes moved into a guesthouse with no electricity and no running water, where they slept four to a room. While the foreign-based players were paid in dollars, the rest were told that they would receive nakfa—and then were given nothing. They trained for two months, and, as Arefaine and his teammates watched the coaches lavish praise on their foreign-based counterparts, they grew resentful. “There was a double standard,” Minasie Solomon, the goalkeeper, said. Solomon, the oldest member of the team, had loved his country enough to volunteer for the war effort against Ethiopia, but now he was disillusioned. By the time the team got to the airport in Nairobi, nearly everyone was ready to join Arefaine’s attempt to defect. “Samson is brave and smart,” Yohhanes, the midfielder, said. “He knows what he’s doing.”

  The night of their escape, after the players left the hotel, they walked for half an hour down a wide avenue called Marimavu Road. A police car drove up to them; a policewoman had recognized them from coverage of the match. “Are you okay, guys?” she asked. “What are you doing?” Semere spoke first. “We are refusing to go home because we don’t have human rights,” he said. All around him, his teammates began talking at once in Tigrinya, asking him to translate. “I told them, ‘Keep quiet, please—give me time to think!’” he recalled. Semere asked the officer if it was safe for them to stay in Botswana. “Yes, it’s safe—don’t worry,” she said, and then drove away.

  Not long after, several police cars pulled up to the group, and officials from the team stepped out. The players backed up as if they were going to run. “Where are you going?” a coach said. “Please don’t do this.” The players shook their heads. “We said we are not going back—we have decided,” Semere recalled. “We have been waiting for this time.” As the police discussed the situation with the team officials in English, s
everal of the players tried to convey their desperation without words. They mimed guns and made shooting sounds and grabbed the necks of their shirts.

  Finally, the officers told everyone to go to the police station, a few minutes away. The Eritrean ambassador to Southern Africa, Saleh Omar, who had come to Francistown for the game, met them there. In a holding room, he pleaded with the players to return to Asmara, promising that he would protect them. “I’ll take you home myself,” he said. “Nothing will happen to you.” When they didn’t answer, he threatened that the Botswana police would arrest them if they stayed.

  Filmon Berhe, another midfielder, had been quiet, listening as his teammates did the explaining. Bearded, with wary eyes, he was usually not much of a talker. But he was getting frustrated. The ambassador didn’t understand what they were telling him. “Where are your children?” Berhe asked.

  Omar paused. “They are living with me at the moment,” he said.

  “That is why you don’t feel for us,” Berhe said. “You don’t understand what we are going through.”

  Omar angrily left the room and destroyed their passports. When he returned, he said, “I’m not responsible for you. You’re on your own.”

  The mass defection was a humiliation for the government, and if the players were deported back to Asmara they could face severe punishment. (Refugees who have been forced to return speak of being tortured, and of being held for years in windowless shipping containers with little food and water.) Gebreab, the PFDJ official, suggested that the soccer team had been deliberately lured away. “How about our runners and our cyclists who compete and come back?” he said. “For me, this is cherry-picking. In Botswana, they were given cause—they said if they stay there they will be given green cards and they will be going to the United States, so most of them decided to stay. It shows that there are certain people in this country who will take any opportunity to leave.”