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It has been about 15 years in Eritrea since an experimentation of Khmer Rouge like proportion has been undergoing under the misleading name of “national service”. It is to be remembered that the first thing the Khmer Rouge did when they “liberated” Cambodia was to empty its towns and cities of its inhabitants and drive them to the jungle to make better Khmer out of them – one that ended in a tragedy of epic proportion. In Eritrea, in a similar experimentation, villages, towns and cities have been emptied of their adult and most productive population and cordoned off in the wilderness in their hundreds of thousands. As in the case of Khmer Rouge, this experimentation is meant to create “better Eritreans” in the image of the guerrilla fighters that “liberated” the nation. The only reason why this experiment has not ended in Khmer Rouge like tragedy of genocide is that Eritrea has very porous borders and these modern-day slaves have been successfully escaping to neighboring countries in their hundreds of thousands.
This totalitarian experimentation is designed to achieve three things: to create a formidable war machine to counter Ethiopia’s hegemony in the region, quixotic as it may seem; to provide endless source of free labor for governmental projects; and to control a population group deemed to be dangerous to the survival of the regime. Emboldened by this foolish experiment, a war that was instigated by the leader of the nation has already resulted in tens of thousands dead and tens of thousands maimed. Ever since then, the whole nation has been at war footing for more than a decade. While keeping them cordoned off in the wilderness under the pretext of “national security”, this bottomless pool of workforce has been the main source for the Sisyphean projects that the regime has been undertaking. Given the indefinite nature of the national service, this has directly translated into endless form of slavery.
It is important for outsiders to know the extent (the number of slave laborers) and the years involved in this totalitarian experimentation of epic proportion. Right now, there are about 300, 000 slave laborers in active “military service”, with hundreds of thousands more in reserve. All of those in reserve have already gone through the grueling years of service and are frequently called back to fill in gaps left by ever-deserting recruits. If we take only those in active service, all of which have been slave laborers for all the years they have been serving in the military, they would make up about 6% of the entire 5 million population. Think now of the US having 6% of its population in active military service doubling as slave laborers: about 18 million of them! And this doesn’t tell the whole story, for every adult person has to pass through that grueling experimentation before he or she is sent back to civilian life or escapes to one of the neighboring nations. This has been going on for about 15 years straight. There are tens of thousands that have wasted their entire adult lives on these slave camps hauling stones, and still remain trapped there. No wonder that Eritrea, despite its small population, has been identified as a nation that has generated the highest number of refugees seeking asylum in the world last year.
Exiles in their own land
The main purpose for quarantining hundreds of thousands of adults (mostly young men and women) in the wilderness for more than a decade has been that of totalitarian control. Once identified as the number one internal enemy of “Eritrea”, this young population group has to be contained by whatever means necessary. As a result, those in national service have acquired all the characteristics of the classical exile. That is to say, “national service” is just an Orwellian name given to “internal exile”. Some of these exile characteristics are [for a more extensive look at the nature of the national service, please read my Sealing off Eritrea: Domestic Terrorism ]:
Where do the slave laborers work?
The slave laborers are all made to work in government projects. Two types need to be mentioned here: agricultural and construction projects. The first one is motivated by two needs: to feed a huge army and to grow cash crops for hard currency. In its effort to feed a huge mass of ever-moving humanity, the government has been expropriating fertile farmlands from pastoralists and peasants at an alarming rate. But what is more is that it is using the very manpower needed in the villages to tend their land as slave labor in its own farms. No wonder the villages, strapped both of manpower and land, have been facing one famine after another. The other consequence of the regime’s farming policy is that, given its use of free slave labor in its farms, almost all private commercial farming has been bankrupted. The result is total government monopoly. Now all the big farms are owned by the PFDJ (the ruling party), the army or directly by the government itself [don’t get fooled, they all amount to the same thing]. Government-owned companies running these farms include: Afhimbol Agricultural Project, Alebu Dairy Farm, Gash-Setit Agricultural Project, Homib Agricultural Establishment, Sawa Agricultural Industry, etc.
The other part that “employs” a huge number of slave laborers is construction: of roads, bridges, micro-dams, housing, etc. Many of these projects are either meant to occupy the hands of Warsai or to generate hard currency for the regime. The government has, step by step, systematically killed all private-owned construction companies. Now, all the construction companies working in the nation are owned by the government. Again, one of the effective ways it did to kill private companies was by availing itself of free labor from the huge pool of slave laborers in the national service. Remember that it pays a worker a measly 500 Nakfa ($12). No company would be able to compete with that. To mention some of the government owned construction companies: giant national ones like Asbeco, Bidho, Ghedem, Rodaab and Segen and smaller ones such as Badme, Haben, Mereb, Musa Ali and Sawa.
Now add all the banks (National Bank of Eritrea, Commercial Bank of Eritrea, Housing and Commerce Bank of Eritrea, etc.), the only insurance company (National Insurance Company of Eritrea), most of transportation companies and whatever is left of that most foolish of all its endeavors – Eritrean Airlines – to the government’s ownership list to see how thorough and pervasive this monopolization has become. You could also easily see that whatever is deemed to be a good source of hard currency for the money strapped regime is given priority. Export-oriented agricultural projects and housing projects entirely oriented to the Diaspora community are two such examples. But now the mining projects have come to overshadow these other projects in terms of importance to the survival of this brutal regime and, understandably, slave labor has come to occupy central role in them.
Mining companies and slave labor
Where do the mining companies come into this web of conspiracy against the Eritrean people? The “slavery” link could throw light on the nature of their involvement.
Since Nevsun is the first mining company to go fully operational, one need only examine its project at Bisha to see the extent of slave labor used there – a trend that every other mining company will have to follow. We need to look both at those directly hired by Nevsun and those indirectly hired by the subcontracted local companies to get the full picture. A look at the history of PFDJ’s dealings with local and foreign companies will be essential in figuring out what is going on in Nevsun’s mining project.
National service to the PFDJ’s rescue
As the government keeps expanding national service to include every adult in the country and for as many years as possible, many companies have been facing dire shortages of workers. If a company (or any other workplace) wants to keep a worker considered too indispensable, the government relents under one condition: that the worker does his national service while working in the company. All that this says is that worker will get only 500 Nakfa ($12) to the duration of his/her service, which goes indefinitely for years, while the company pays the rest of the money to the government. At its most bizarre, the government used to do that to its own employees in various ministries. First, it would declare some workers to be too valuable in their workplace to do national service in the army, and then it cuts off their salaries for years, pretending that they were in extended national service. The case of teachers is a notable one. Considered to be indispensable in their task as educators, many were pauperized by the meager salary they were getting for the duration of their service.
Knowing this lucrative business of selling slaves, the government used to target organizations with big monies in the pipeline like the UN, UNMEE, NGOs and foreign companies. The case of HALO Trust comes easy to mind. The aftermath of the war left Eritrea with a huge part of its land planted with tens of thousands of landmines. One of the companies employed to do the clearing of landmines by the UN was HALO Trust, the largest NGO of its kind in the world. Locals were trained to do the actual demining process, mostly from the national service. Given that they were involved in a very high risk job, they were initially paid relatively high wages. As usual, the government protested, and allowed them to be paid meager salary and wanted to pocket the difference. This maltreatment of employees by the government was one of the main contentions between the regime and the company. In the end, the regime, typical of its handling NGOs and other foreign entities that didn’t go along with its various schemes to rob its own subjects, expelled the company from Eritrea.
The regime abhors any substantial amount of money without passing through its hands. The main reason why the regime didn’t want the NGOs in the land was because it felt they were blocking the money from the donor community from reaching its hands. That is why, after expelling them, it championed cash-for-work policy only – a scheme that the EU easily fell into. Given that most of the work was done by slave laborers, most of that cash donated by the donor community went directly to the regime’s coffers.
What we need to know now is whether the mining companies are entering the kind of deals mentioned above with the regime where they allow the government to exploit the laborers working for them and pocket a disproportionate amount of their salaries. What we know now is that when Nevsun Resources Ltd. began directly hiring locals, the median salary was about $300 a month, undoubtedly considered to be better-off salary when compared with the national one for similar jobs. Not surprisingly, the government strongly protested; it wanted the wages to be drastically cut to resemble the local ones. The company reluctantly cut it into half. No one knows for sure if the government is pocketing the difference. Given the track record of the regime in similar dealings, as pointed above, the latter possibility is not pure speculation. But even if this is going on, it would still remain a small part of the story, for the majority of the employees are not directly employed by the companies.