Detention of Muslims
Muslims, especially in the western areas bordering Sudan, have often been suspected of links with predominantly-Muslim armed Eritrean political opposition organizations based in Sudan which have received support from Sudan’s National Islamic Front government and the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood. In particular, the Sudan-based Eritrean National Islamic Salvation Front (formerly the Eritrean Islamic Jihad Movement, EIJM) advocates an Islamic state and is part of the Eritrean National Alliance (ENA). According to reports, this Islamist group has been responsible for some violent incidents in Eritrea. Like the ELF, it has recruited fighters and supporters among Eritrean Muslim refugees in Sudan who had fled there many years previously but refused to return after independence when there was no reconciliation with the EPLF.
As a consequence of this armed conflict, the Eritrean security forces have conducted military operations in western Eritrea since the early 1990s and seem to have often profiled practising and activist Muslims as potential or suspected Islamist or ELF opposition members. Hundreds of suspected supporters of these two groups have been arbitrarily detained, tortured and "disappeared", with some feared to have been extra-judicially executed. Some fighters may also have been captured and detained or extra-judicially executed.
Currently there are hundreds of long-term Muslim detainees in Eritrea who may be prisoners of conscience, arrested on suspicion of links with Islamist or ELF opposition forces but never charged or taken to court. Some may have been arrested simply because of their religion or for complaining against religious discrimination – being treated less fairly than Christians, for example in regard to permits to build religious buildings or raise funds for Muslim welfare or religious education.
Hundreds of young teachers were arrested in Keren and elsewhere on 5 December 1994 when Eritrea broke off diplomatic relations with Sudan. They were detained on suspicion of having links with Sudan, through the Muslim Brotherhood, or with the Eritrean Islamist opposition supported by Sudan’s Islamist government – many had trained there as Quranic, Arabic or ordinary teachers in Sudanese educational institutions.
Source :
‘You have no right to ask’
Government resists scrutiny
on human rights