By Mya Guarnieri
Tesfu Atsbha, 35, stands in the alley behind an unmarked Eritrean community center in south Tel Aviv, just blocks away from the park where a memorial service was held for Habtom Zerhum a few days before. Zerhum, an Eritrean asylum seeker, was killed when he was mistaken for a Palestinian terrorist during an attack on the Beer Sheva bus station. He was shot by an Israeli security guard, and as he lay bleeding on the ground, he was beaten by onlookers. One of them picked up a bench and dropped it on Zerhum’s head.
Atsbha is the chairperson of the Eritrean Solidarity Movement for National Salvation, one of the biggest diaspora-based opposition parties seeking to depose Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki. The group’s headquarters are in Ethiopia, where Atsbha lives. He landed in Israel in late October to find its community of 45,000 asylum seekers—most of whom are from Eritrea—in mourning and shock.
Not that things have ever been easy here. When African asylum seekers cross the border from Egypt to Israel, they are imprisoned. After they get out of jail, they are not allowed to work legally. So they take black-market jobs, where they are subject to exploitation. Israeli politicians and the mainstream media call them “infiltrators”—a loaded term that, for many Israelis, is associated with Palestinians. The Prevention of Infiltration Law, which Israel drafted in the early 1950s to stop Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes inside the newly created Jewish state, has been broadened so that the state can use it to detain African asylum seekers as well.
And for many years, the Israeli government refused to process their requests for refuge. Now officials take the paperwork and don’t reply. Or they summarily reject applications for asylum without thoroughly investigating claims, human-rights groups say.
It all stems from the state’s goal to “make their lives miserable”—the laws and policies are meant to deter African asylum seekers from coming, while pressuring those who are here already to leave. So far, it has worked. Several years ago, the community numbered 60,000. The South Sudanese who lived in Israel were deported in 2012; others who faced indefinite detention versus “voluntary deportation” chose to leave. Some who left Israel have tried to go on to Europe; a number drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. A handful were killed by ISIS.
Despite the immense pressure they face in Israel, many Eritreans were surprised by what happened to Zerhum, an event that the Israeli media called a “lynching.” During the interviews I conducted in the wake of his death, some told me that it pointed to how dire their situation is in Israel. Others remarked that it’s yet another tragic reminder of how urgent it is to stop the repression in Eritrea.
That’s why Atsbha’s here.
While he supports asylum seekers’ rights, he doesn’t believe that absorbing Eritreans and those fleeing other repressive regimes is a sustainable answer to Europe or Israel’s migrant crises.
“To accept thousands of refugees is not an easy task. It costs millions of dollars.… It’s not sustainable. The solution is to get rid of the system,” Atsbha says, referring to Afwerki and his regime.
A crowd of about 200 Eritrean asylum seekers, donning white jerseys emblazoned with the Eritrean Solidarity Movement for National Salvation logo, have gathered in the community center. Every chair is full. In the back, rows of men stand. They crowd around a pool table, the game they’d been playing moments before forgotten. All eyes are trained on Atsbha, whose story is not unlike their own.
Atsbha had only heard about prisons and torture in history class, when he’d studied the Ethiopian occupation of his homeland, Eritrea. But that changed in 2001, when he found himself detained without charge or trial.
Atsbha was a student at Asmara University then. He was in his final year, working toward a degree in public administration, when 20 people—11 high-ranking government officials and 10 journalists, a group that Eritreans call the G-15—disappeared.
Students, including Atsbha, started asking questions about the G-15, about “starting a democratic process, and [the] implementation of the constitution that was ratified in 1997,” he recalls. The head of the student council made a little too much noise and was arrested; Atsbha and others went to the courthouse in a show of solidarity. But justice was nowhere to be found—the group, which numbered in the hundreds, was rounded up and taken to jail.
Or something like it. They were held in an outdoor pen—300 people, Atsbha estimates, crammed into a 100 meter by 50 meter space. They were surrounded by a fence and armed guards. There was nowhere to bathe or go to the bathroom; the soldiers took them out once a day so that the prisoners could relieve themselves. Meals consisted of little more than bread and small amounts of water. There was no roof or shade of any kind, nothing to guard them from the searing heat.
Three of the students died from heat stroke while they were detained.
During the day, soldiers marched Atsbha and the other prisoners out of the pen to collect stones. Many Eritreans who have been detained or imprisoned speak of forced labor; other interviewees have told me that they were taken outside mid-day to dig ditches. Atsbha’s story is unusual in that he and the other students were held outdoors. Most Eritrean asylum seekers I’ve spoken to who have been detained describe dark underground prisons.
After 45 days, Atsbha was released. The experience, he believes, was meant to break any glimmerings of resistance. Instead, it planted the seed of revolution in his heart.
Read more: How to End the Eritrean Refugee Crisis
Source; The Nation
