Escaping Eritrea (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

[Music] we just slept on the floor that was our space right there that was it [Music] sound more desperate all were desperate [Music] it was rough the interrogations that's the first time i saw a dead body i was trying to hang in there as time went by i started slowly to deteriorate the only thing that helped me was to avoid thinking about anything and everything just take it a day at a time because if you stop to think it's it's too much to bear over the past two decades more than half a million eritreans have fled their home country they say they are escaping one of the most repressive and secretive dictatorships in the world the country's led on fear everybody is afraid for their safety eritrean officials have committed crimes against humanity filming and reporting in eritrea is almost impossible but for more than five years we've been gathering secretly shot footage from inside the country and interviewing people who've escaped are angry in every district in every zone in every area there is a prisoner [Music] them tigre northern ethiopia our investigation began here in the winter of 2016. [Music] a group of refugees had just escaped neighboring eritrea they were part of a mass exodus half a million and counting thousands of them unaccompanied children [Music] my the children told us they were fleeing repression imprisonment and forced conscription into the eritrean military [Music] foreign foreign [Music] foreign [Music] eritrea is often described as africa's north korea it's been ruled by one man isaias afwarkee since 1991 when it won a war of independence from ethiopia there are no national elections no parliament no independent judiciary no free press amid ongoing conflict with ethiopia the president imposed mandatory national service for all eritreans it's not our own making it's not ever it's not been our own choice we never wanted to go this way but it's been imposed upon us and we have to survive and live with it it's not a question of national service or avoiding the national service you aspire to become someone in this society and have good quality life you work for that you don't get it free people learn it either the easy way or the hard way critics accuse a regime of locking up anyone who opposes it anyone who tries to flee the country and anyone who avoids conscription the president has always publicly denied those charges in a safe house in ethiopia's capital we met a man named michael he just escaped from eritrea and smuggled out something remarkable secretly shot footage from inside one of the country's military-run prisons s [Music] foreign michael told us he was arrested in 2011 for trying to avoid military service [Music] he was then held here in adiabato prison just outside the capital asmara for more than four years he said a sympathetic guard helped him smuggle and he worked with one other trusted prisoner foreign the other inmates were not aware michael was filming the prisoners can be seen packed into large holding rooms according to michael they can be held like this for years without trials foreign michael said many of his fellow inmates were there for avoiding conscription like him or attempting to escape the country or helping family members flee foreign you [Music] michael was one of more than 30 eritrean refugees we interviewed over the course of our investigation for their safety we agreed to conceal many of their identities [Music] we also reviewed and verified more than 10 hours of secretly shot footage from inside the country eritrean government would not speak to us about what we'd found other than to say the allegations were astounding and that they'd seen many fabricated stories before [Music] foreign [Music] hello [Music] shortly after meeting michael we made contact with a secret group of eritrean activists we met them in a cafe in the ethiopian capital they told us they were in touch with a network of fellow activists in eritrea who could provide us with more undercover footage from inside the country they said it was dangerous and would take time we would have to wait human rights groups accuse eritrea of running a national network of jails and detention facilities like the one michael filmed [Music] for two years a united nations team tried to investigate this network they were forbidden from entering the country what we did at the commission of inquiry was to use satellite imagery to be able to identify a certain number of detention centers but anything to do with facts and figures and the actual statistics is very difficult to get in eritrea it all goes to the opaqueness of the system there is no audit or real figure of the number of prisoners this is very worrying because any prison system official prison system should be in fact in a position to have a list of all those in their custody and this is not possible to get in eritrea lots of people when they're taken in do not even know why they have been arrested they have no clue once they're in there when they will get out they don't have legal representation they're not taken to a court many have been held in communication there is no rhyme or reason as to how long somebody would be in detention we were being constantly beaten for not working hard or fast enough in many of the prisons and farms i was detained we never had shelter as part of its inquiry the un collected testimony from more than 800 eritreans one of those who gave evidence was hannah petra solomon every eritrean has been scarred by the self-proclaimed president isaiah and all i am asking of you today is to bear witness to these scars and do what is just look through the facade and grant freedom justice to the eritrean people hannah now lives in the united states in 2009 she had tried to flee eritrea to avoid military service we got caught and then we were taken to prison we were interrogated we were brought in one by one they would ask us questions who do we replant it with what's the name who else knows and throughout the night they would take in one of the smugglers and they would start beating them up so we could hear them screaming throughout the night there were a lot of cargo containers and prisoners were kept in there one day someone was kept banging but the guards didn't listen they didn't go over the check it was in the summer and can get really hot in summer so they kept banging to ask them to let them know but they completely ignored them because even we could hear him from inside and then when they opened the door someone had died in there this area right here is where nava base is zoom in so i remember vividly we were kept in this hangar right here um it's actually two different spaces so this space was filled with inmates and you could hear them screaming and this is where they interrogated us and there was another room they kept some inmates here i remember there was one um eritrean smuggler who had burnt skin who was held here so they would let us out use the beach over here um to defecate or whatever for the morning and then we would go back to that spot right there after nine months in prison hannah said she was sent here to sauer military training base where all eritreans start their mandatory national service is depicted as a happy place where citizens become good patriotic soldiers hannah told us the reality for her was very different we're supposed to be military trained officially anyway so they took us to sawa but after two days in sawa they were gathering up women from everywhere they took us to farms so i went to three or four different farms just working the fields we would plant weed do a bit of everything and throughout our work our guards would make deals with other generals who had farms nearby so they would take us there do the work and take the money i guess throughout our stay and these different farms there were many many um women who were either threatened or were asked for sexual favors in exchange for cell phones a phone call in exchange for water in exchange for pads measurable pads for anything some were desperate all were desperate and i guess when in situations when you didn't have anything and you were kept half starving those favors were something to consider hannah's story mirrored the accounts of many other refugees we met in camps along the border with ethiopia saram told us he just recently escaped from eritrea [Music] m in his first attempt to escape saram said he was shot in the arm and leg while trying to cross the border and taken straight to prison with untreated wounds [Music] in our interviews with refugees one prison kept coming up we're camp foreign foreign daniel a christian pastor and kiros a soldier were also detained in wear prison camp they say that they too were held in the underground cell known as the oven foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] in june 2016 the un investigators were ready to announce their findings [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] supporters of the eritrean government staged a protest in geneva accusing the un of bias the un report recommended eritrea be referred to the international criminal court eritrean officials have committed crimes against humanity the crimes of enslavement imprisonment enforced disappearance torture persecution rape murder and other inhumane acts have been committed as part of a widespread and systematic campaign against the civilian population since 1991. the aim of the campaign has been to maintain control over the population and perpetuate the leadership's role in eritrea in response the eritrean government said the accusations were politically motivated groundless and an unwarranted attack stepping way over its minded the commission has made the incredible judgment that the human rights situation in eritrea constitutes a threat to international peace and security as a pretext to send yet another african country to the international criminal court the commission has not presented evidence support its accusations it fails to prove that the alleged crimes were indeed persistent widespread and systematic for opponents of the regime the um report was a moment of hope [Applause] [Music] but for reasons that had never been explained publicly senior un authorities took no further action they declined to speak to us about it by now it had been more than a year since we'd made contact with the activists trying to get undercover footage out of eritrea we'd received a few clips from them nothing more we were told two had been arrested some had sent messages back to us saying it was too dangerous to film others had broken off all contact [Music] in the meantime we continue to gather first-hand accounts from eritreans who'd escaped think about it you put these people in a physically difficult position for a long period of time it's now we're not talking about a day or two days this goes for months they will be delirious they will be paranoid they will be depressed [Music] there is a sleep deprivation which is insomnia and some people just lose their mind they were sane and they lose their sanity solomon was a doctor in asmara this is the hospital and this is prisoner's ward which is outside of the hospital premises it had all involved 24 beds he told us he regularly treated inmates who had been tortured in adiabato prison as well as another military prison maiserwa [Music] somebody would be interrogated and then would sustain severe trauma inability to move inability to walk fractures sometimes or just loss of consciousness from severe pain and then we would get patients like that could only imagine that this person has been tortured repeatedly we heard similar accounts of torture from michael the former inmate who filmed undercover in adebato prison he told us that prisoners were interrogated and tortured in a room here just above the main courtyard he said that when he was first imprisoned he was subject to months of brutal interrogations that everything is very sadistic it's meant to put people down it's meant to hurt people not just physically but psychologically as well now thinking about it calmly i would say that the same guards that made our lives miserable were miserable themselves i think the eritrean people are the perpetrators and the victims themselves it's the system itself it's it's it's the system in eritrea hannah told us anyone can become a victim her father petra solomon was once one of the most powerful people in the country the minister of defense it was a happy home yeah it was good times i knew him as the playful father i didn't know that serious side of him or that other political side of him that i have come to read and know about later on in 2001 hannah's father wrote an open letter with 14 other officials criticizing the president's increasingly authoritarian rule hannah was 10 years old at the time the night before he got arrested my mom was away so i was sleeping with my dad and when he woke up in the morning he pulled my leg so i woke up like where are you going um he said i'll be right back man you promise sure um and that's the last i remember him sorry i thought it would be easier by now he left the house but the military caught him right outside our door he disappeared we just didn't hear from him anymore president isaias accused hannah's father and the others of trying to seize power and had 11 of them arrested it's thought most of them were imprisoned here at a top security facility called ira ero specially built for high-profile political prisoners the president went on to shut down the free press and jail many journalists hannah's mother astor was studying in the united states when her husband was locked up she returned to eritrea to seek his release we all went to to the airport we waited for her at the airport we had flowers um and we waited for hours we worked for two three hours there and then eventually we went back home and called her friends in the states and they're like no she made it to the plane she she left and that's when we found out that they had taken her away eventually i think someone that got out of prison contacted my grandmother in secret and they told her we saw her from afar she's being kept by herself um but that's about it no one talks to her she's not allowed to talk to anyone we just don't have any clue now as to how she's doing or what's going on there hasn't been any official response from the government as to the whereabouts of my parents or their well-being in our requests to the eritrean government we asked about hannah's parents and other political prisoners but they would not provide any details two years into our investigation we'd heard nothing more from the undercover activists but new footage had emerged on the internet of something almost unheard of in eritrea a public protest it shows a crowd gathering in asmara then gunfire [Applause] the crowd flees in one of the refugee camps along the border we found two young men who said they were there that day oman and redwan they told us they were protesting at the education ministry because an islamic school was being put under government control and a religious leader had been arrested some of the protesters were filming on their phones oman and redwan told us that when the video was published on the internet the authorities used it to identify and arrest anyone who was there foreign [Music] today some good news out of the horn of africa ethiopia has agreed to end a two decade long view with eritrea in july 2018 eritrea's president and a new ethiopian leader abi ahmed announced a surprise peace deal so this is a major major development in east africa not only in terms of establishing peace but hopefully over time bringing some sort of democracy and liberalization the border was briefly opened and families separated by years of hostilities between the two countries were at last reunited jubilant eritreans hoped that peace would mean the end of compulsory national service the end of mass imprisonment and a new dawn for their country [Music] [Music] foreign in the months after the peace deal the border closed again and we started to hear reports that little had changed then we were finally contacted by one of the activists working to smuggle out undercover footage he was a prison guard who asked to be called dester [Music] tahani [Music] foreign foreign [Music] quality desta told us he was a guard at adiabato prison shortly after the peace deal he started filming with a secret camera that we'd sent to him even got he filmed new arrivals some appear to be no more than teenagers foreign foreign foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] confirmed what we'd heard from the former inmate michael about the torture room [Music] um [Music] foreign [Music] desta then took his secret camera to one of the prison's main detention halls the conditions looked very similar to the video that michael had shared with us four years earlier [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign in late 2020 we tried to return to the refugee camps into grey but journalists were now barred from the region amid an armed conflict between ethiopia and rebel forces eritrea had joined the fight and we'd heard reports that the refugee camps had come under attack in an audio interview with us an eyewitness said he's seen eritrean soldiers sweep through hitsat's [Music] element [Music] the eritrean government said in a statement that its troops never attacked the camps but widely published satellite images show several buildings destroyed and burning at hitsats and other refugee camps [Music] and the us state department says it has received credible reports that eritrean soldiers engaged in looting sexual violence and assaults on refugees in the camps [Music] the eyewitness told us he knows of several refugees who had taken back to eritrea and locked up in adiabatic prison [Music] foreign by it's now almost five years since the un commission of inquiry accused eritrean officials of crimes against humanity despite all these years of documentation and scrutiny at the international level it continues the patterns continue nothing has changed in terms of human rights arbitrary detention custody of people without any rule of law it continues there still is no constitution in the country there's no free press there is no independent judiciary national service remains involuntary indefinite and is still there it's still forced labor and enslavement of a whole [Music] population [Music] when the peace deal was happening a lot of my friends eritreans we gathered we talked and they're like oh finally peace is here and i kept saying no let's wait and see what's happening and most of my friends thought i was being pessimistic or i was being angry but now do you see what i was talking about prisoners are still prisoners hannah's parents have now been in prison for almost 20 years [Laughter] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] for more on this and other frontline programs visit our website at pbs.org frontline [Music] frontline's escaping eritrea is available on amazon prime video [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

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Id: jquCbpLYw7Q

Length: 53min 16sec (3196 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021

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