“We will not have any trial and we will not free him. We know how to handle his kind.”
—Isaias Afwerki, President of Eritrea, speaking in 2009 about writer Dawit Isaak

The last time Amnesty International mentioned the case of the imprisoned Eritrean writer Dawit Isaak, it was in its 2011 annual report about Eritrea. Amnesty reported what it believed to be safe to report: that Isaak “remained in detention, allegedly in Eiraeiro Prison. He was reportedly in poor mental and physical health.”

It is possible that Dawit Isaak is no longer alive, and it is possible that he is alive but in poor mental health after nearly 15 years in prison. He is one of several journalists who were arrested in September 2001 in Eritrea. On September 18, 2001, precisely one week after the 9/11 attacks in the U.S., (thus, under the cover of attention being directed elsewhere), Isaias Afewerki closed all independent newspapers, rounded up the owners and writers (always the writers!), and outlawed the independent media, a ban that remains to this day.

Since 2001, Eritrea has annually been ranked by human rights groups as among the worst nations in the world for human rights. To that nation’s credit, it has outlawed the practice of female genital mutilation, but that may be a good thing to deflect from its secret prisons and practice of torture as a response to free expression and an independent media. In 2014, Reporters Without Borders ranked the media environment in Eritrea in last place on a list of 178 countries, just below North Korea.

None of those arrested in 2001 were tried in a court of law. None were sentenced. All were unofficially “disappeared.” Several of those arrested are reported to have died in the years since, from the combination of harsh prison conditions and torture. A cemetery is reported to have been seen behind Eiraeiro Prison.

Eiraeiro Prison, located near the village of Gahtelay, is a high-security and secret facility in which prisoners are kept in solitary confinement in tiny, windowless cells, and in which they receive one liter of water per day, some food (a porridge of lentils, usually), and in which running water is turned on by the administrator once a week for a total of 20 minutes. (Details from a 2008 article by Reporters Without Borders.)

It is always striking when one is researching cases of human rights violations that one may learn certain details and find these details reported with a remarkable precision. On a range from terrible to tolerable, the above paragraph might actually describe a really good day for inmates at Eiraeiro Prison. There is one fact missing in all the reports: where is Dawit Isaak?

It is believed that Isaak is at Eiraeiro, but he might also be at Adi Abeito, a military prison near Asmara, or at Carchele, in Asmara. Anonymous Sweden reports that in 2013, “A former prison officer confirmed for the Swedish newspaper Expressen that Dawit Isaak ‘Is Okay.'”

Everything that is known about the journalists comes from a handful of semi-verified rumors: they were first held in a police station is Asmara, but when they started a hunger strike as part of a demand for due process and also successfully smuggled a message out to the world in March 2002, they were promptly denied due process and relocated to secret prisons.

The Committee to Protect Journalists reported in 2015:

Over the years, Eritrean officials have offered vague and inconsistent explanations for the arrests: accusing the journalists of involvement in anti-state conspiracies in connection with foreign intelligence, of skirting military service, and of violating press regulations. Officials, at times, even denied that the journalists existed. [Emphasis mine.] Meanwhile, shreds of often unverifiable, second- or third-hand information smuggled out of the country by people fleeing into exile have suggested the deaths of as many as five journalists in custody.

The journalists who are believed to have died include Dawit Habtemichael, whose end is described by Reporters Without Borders with some specificity: he suffered a mental breakdown in 2007 from the torture and inhumane conditions, then “he became schizophrenic and finally lost all contact with reality in 2010. The failure to treat his steadily worsening mental condition is thought to have been the cause of his death in the second half of 2010. He was prisoner No. 12 at Eiraeiro.”

Among these unique stories, Dawit Isaak’s case is even more unique: he is an international citizen. In the 1980s, as the Eritrean War for Independence from Ethiopia raged on, Isaak moved to Gothenburg, Sweden, and he became a Swedish citizen. When Eritrea voted for independence, with Ethiopia’s permission, and the new nation was born in 1993, Isaak returned to his home country, where he got married and started a family and continued working as a journalist until the fall of 2001.

Sweden has pursued a policy of “quiet diplomacy” with Eritrea over Isaak’s case. Some have sarcastically dubbed this “silent diplomacy.”

In 2009, Swedish journalists attempted to bring attention to Dawit Isaak’s long detention, and journalist Donald Boström interviewed president Afwerki. His replies included the ominous quote with which I led this article. Afwerki told Boström, “We will not have any trial and we will not release him (meaning Dawit Isaak). We know how to handle him and others like him.”

Afwerki said that he “believes that the pressure put on his country, together with all opposition against the regime, is part of a conspiracy against Eritrea, lead by the US intelligence agency CIA.” (Eritrea and the United States maintain open bilateral relations. The link is to a photograph of Afwerki with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from 2002.)

Continuing:

Afwerki fully brushes aside the attempts from the Swedish Government to get Dawit Isaak released. “Sweden is irrelevant to me. The Swedish Government has no relevance in our lives. The Swedish population should not be deluded by the acts taken by single persons in the Swedish Government.”
 
Isaias Afwerki says that he doesn’t know the whereabouts of Dawit Isaak and that he doesn’t care about it: “I do not even care where he is or what he does. He made a big mistake and is responsible for what he has done. I do not waste time trying to find out where he is or what he does.”

Afwerki’s 2009 comments, bizarre and petulant, remain Eritrea’s most recent official or semi-official statements about Dawit Isaak.

PEN International wrote last year about Isaak: “According to the limited information available, Isaak—co-owner of the weekly newspaper Setit, playwright and writer, born 1964—has spent half of his time in detention in solitary confinement, has been tortured and is in very poor physical and mental health. He and the other inmates are not allowed any contact with the outside world, and the little information that has escaped the prison walls has suggested that they have been routinely shackled and have received almost no medical care.”

The poet David Berridge rendered much of the above far more plainly and movingly in a poem he read last month at the Modern Literature Festival hosted by English PEN:

 
Anonymous Sweden published a moving video to accompany a “Tweet Storm” engineered to bring international attention to Dawit Isaak’s unbearably sad story this afternoon and beyond:

* * * *
The above is my small contribution to the Tweet Storm.

____________________________________________
Follow The Gad About Town on Facebook! Subscribe today for daily facts (well, trivia) about literature and history, plus links to other writers on Facebook.

Follow The Gad About Town on Instagram!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.