The following short essay describes about the experiences of EMDHR members in South Africa. It appears in one of the chapters of a book, titled Old Wrongs, New Rights, (pages 29-33) produced by the students of Simmons College and edited by Dan Connell. The book is release on 14 April 2008, contains candid personal essays by Simmons students about the "new South Africa," based on their visits and interviews with a cross-section of South Africans living in the post-apartheid country. The book is published by African World Press, Inc.

By Christina Lenis

Cape Town, South Africa

Four neatly dressed African men sit patiently in soft chairs on the seventh floor of a posh downtown hotel overlooking the boutiques and upscale restaurants that dot the Victoria and Albert Waterfront. But none of them is here as a tourist. 

They are members of the Eritrean Movement for Democracy and Human Rights (EMDHR), an organization of refugees and exiles from the small northeast African state of Eritrea, formed in 2003, whose mission is to raise public awareness about the extensive human rights violations in their troubled homeland. 

In 2000, they came to South Africa as students along with 600 other Eritreans on scholarships from the World Bank. Seven years later, they are still here, now seeking political asylum. They say their country – Africa’s newest nation – is slipping deeper and deeper into despotism under a ruthless dictator who has kept Eritrea in a state of constant conflict with its neighbors while brutally cracking down on dissent, all in the name of “national security.” 

The EMDHR now plays a leading role among Eritrea refugees and exiles around the world by means of print publications, a Web site (www.emdhr.org), and radio programs in the Tigrinya language that they relay to listeners by satellite. They also run workshops for Eritreans in South Africa, and they attend human rights conferences elsewhere in Africa and in Europe, according to the spokesperson for the group.

But it is the newly secured rights to free speech and unfettered political activity here in South Africa – unique on the continent – that inspired this work even as they make it possible. 

Eritrea a former Italian colony with a 600-mile coastline on the Red Sea, was swallowed up by landlocked Ethiopia in the 1060s. Eritrean nationalists fought a thirty-year war for independence against successive U.S. - and Soviet-backed Ethiopian regimes before winning it in 1991 and installing the former liberation movement commander, Isaias Afewerki, as the country’s new president. But Eritrea went back to war with Ethiopia in 1998 over border issues and has remained in active confrontation ever since, with United Nations troops keeping the two sides apart but with the prospect of renewed war never far away.

The year after these men came to South Africa, they say, their government rounded up hundreds of protesting university students and sent them to a desert work camp where several died of the heat. Soon afterward, the government, facing criticism for refusing to implement a constitution ratified in 1997, shut down the independent press and began arresting all its critics, including government ministries and former independence army veterans. 

Today, the example of South Africa’s long and difficult fight for democracy gives these men hope – as well as a base of operations for waging their own fight to change things at home. 

South Africa is the best place to do this, according to Emanuel Tesfayesus, who says he can experience here what he can only dimly imagine anywhere else he has been. He also gets to meet people from all over the world, which is very different from what he experienced at home as his country became more and more isolated and inhospitable to foreign visitors, and he can organize his compatriots with no fear of retribution. 

“You experience a bite of the whole world in South Africa,” adds Buruk Tekle, who says there are now thousands of Eritrean refugees here and more coming on a daily bases to escape the deteriorating political situation at home. 

 
However, they face new problems once in South Africa where they may wait years for work permits, even as they encounter resentment from some South Africans who accuse them of taking their jobs. Many refugees set up informal businesses in order to survive, selling cheap consumer goods in the streets and hoping to avoid getting robbed or mugged by the army of criminals that operate there. 

“As a refugee, you have to put a lot of efforts to get a small change in your life as compared to the citizens living here,” says Tekle. 

Tekle says he is now engaged in a complicated process to become a recognized refugee with defined rights under South African law. As a registered asylum seeker, he says he is granted the right to work and to study. But he quickly adds that in the workforce, xenophobia thrives. 

“Discrimination is always on the menu in South Africa,” says Yared Tseguy. “They have this race issue that is still living.” 

Tseguy says that South Africans treat other Africans differently, stereotyping them according to where they are from just as others did this to them under apartheid, when race and ethnicity determined everything from where people lived and worked to whom they could date and what beaches they could use. And, he adds, the bureaucracy is so elaborate that it must have been set up to stop people from getting refugees status. 

South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs tells him that, as an asylum seeker, he does not need a special work permit, he says, and that the basic working papers they give him will be sufficient when applying for a job. However, when he has tried to do so, he says that employers invariably ask to see a proper work permit. 

The Equal Employment Act, designed to help South Africans disadvantaged under apartheid, discriminates against foreigners, he says. Individuals are hired based on the principle of “reparation” for past wrongs, giving blacks, “coloreds” and woman an edge, but other Africans fend for whatever jobs are left – if any. 

With a constitution that promises basic human rights to all its people, South Africa has become a model of democracy and an inspiration for him and for thousands of other Eritreans, says Tekle. But he wishes these principles would be applied to everyone in South Africa today, regardless of their national origins. 

Meanwhile, he hastens to add, the situation is far worse where he came from. 

“No new fresh ideas are accepted, and there is no room for negotiation on any issue,” says Tekle, who insists that this makes democratic change impossible in Eritrea. “We are not free because we are not guaranteed [any] rights that are taken for granted in other parts of the world.” 

Tekle compares Eritrea to the darkest days of apartheid. He says his government not only denies people freedoms of speech, press and assembly, making protest impossible; it sharply limits what religion they can practice, and it restricts all movement inside the country, as well as travel in or out of it. It also requires all unmarried women and men up to age forty-five to participate in an open-ended “national service,” which can mean military duty but also places thousands of conscripts in unpaid jobs for business owned by the government or the ruling party. 

In 2005, the U.S. named Eritrea a “country of particular concern” because of its religious freedom violations. Religion, however, is just one aspect of the country controlled by the government. “You have no control of your life,” says Tekle. “You grow-up and you have to fit wherever the government tells you.” 

The EMDHR started by publicizing human rights violations in Eritrea. Members moved on to describe the experience of refugees – why they were leaving their country and what they faced once they were out. Today, they are a civic movement with the goal of raising awareness of and respect for human rights principles among Eritreans at home and throughout the world. 

EMDHR members say they want the atrocities in Eritrea to end, but in a peaceful way. “We don’t want to change things with force,” says Tekle. “We are a non-violent civic movement.” 

Through their educational projects, they say that such awareness is steadily growing. And they say they are free to do all this because of the right they enjoy in South Africa.

Satellite-based radio programming is listened to throughout Eritrea and is the most difficult form of communication for the Eritrean government to control, according to Tekle, who says that EMDHR’s broadcasts have a large following. 

“Our radio is mainly a civil action,” says Tekle, who hopes this will inspire his beleaguered sisters and brothers at home to take action for their rights, much as South Africa has inspired him. 

“Let’s rise and say, ‘No we don’t want this anymore, we have to change the country,’” he says. 

The Cape Town chapter of EMDHR is trying to get a book published in their national language, Tigriniya, on the stories of political prisoners in Eritrea. In 2005 they helped other EMDHR chapters create the magazine Meseley, which promotes non-violent action against the government in order to get back their rights. 

“We want to educate the people. We don’t want to paint political ideas on anyone because the paint might go off the next summer. We don’t want to do that – we want some permanent solution to the problem,” says Tekle.

“If the people understand what’s going on, change will come, because it will come from within everyone, from within all Eritreans, and I wish the impact could hit all of Africa because other African brothers and sisters are also experiencing the same problems,” saya Tekle with a gleam in his eye. 

“We wish that everyone in Africa could think about rights. We believe that the will of the people is the most powerful thing – that is what we are trying to achieve,” says Tekle. “We have this opportunity, and we want to use this opportunity.”