Published 2009-04-20 09:22
Eritrean view outliers that Dawit Isaak may expect to be branded as enemies of the regime and tortured in the dungeons.
When the Semret Eritrean journalist Seyoum in early 2002 to the prison camp Hadish-Me-Asker, this was not much to the institution. Therefore he was placed and some fellow in underground bunkers, barely larger than a single bed, with no light penetrated.
It spent Semret Seyom several months, lying on the bunker floor and with tied hands. Only when he has to do their needs, he was coming out, and when he got to eat the only law that banned prisoners: a bowl of water-soaked lentils.
Description of the prison stay Semret Seyom gives fits well with the explanation given in the Human Rights Watch thick report on the oppression and abuse in Eritrea, which was published the other day. To lock up prisoners in the soil is extremely common in Eritrea - a legacy after the long struggle for liberation in 1970 - and 80-speeds where the guerrillas hid in buried bunkers which today is used as dungeons.
Semret Seyoum is close friend and former Journal colleague Dawit Isaak. Both were arrested in connection with the Eritrean regime's massive strikes against opposition politicians and independent journalists in the international media the shade after September 11 disaster in 2001. Semret Seyom managed to keep hidden a few months but was arrested by soldiers when he tried to flee to Sudan.
Dawit Isaak is sitting still, seven and a half years later, in a dungeon somewhere where no outsiders know anything about him.
Semret Seyoum was "lucky": after a year in the unconstitutional conditions in Hadish-Me-Ashker and another prison, he suddenly released and put into forced labor without pay. Other half years later, he managed to flee from Eritrea and was later to Sweden.
Why were you free?
- I have no idea. I do not know why I was arrested and imprisoned. No indictment was ever for me, says to DN in the days of Swedish-speaking Semret Seyoum who now lives in Farsta and apply for a job.
Fixed a kind of allegations are made all the time in the prison camp to Semret Seyoum: that he was a "zumbul". The name is perhaps the worst one can get in the totalitarian drive Eritrea today is ruled by the same Marxist-Leninist minted elite kader party that once led the guerrilla struggle for national liberation. Semret Seyoum explains:
- The word "zumbul" literally means only something as innocuous as "tendency" or "liking". However, in Eritrea, the offensive and threatening against those deemed to be democratic, liberal reform trends. It began to be used during Liberation struggle, and it was called the "zumbul" became an outcast from the Community and ended sooner or later in a secret prison for likely never come back.
- This was the underlying meaning of the term "zumbul" that got my blood to congeal, each time it was directed against me. I feared for my life. I began to wonder if this was the last chapter of my shift rich life - to die without any witness who could tell of the end for me, "says Semret Seyoum seriously.
The parallels with the seemingly innocent Anyway in other totalitarian systems than Eritreas is obvious. For example, in Lenin and the Bolsheviks Soviet Communist Party members were accused of "fraktionalism" (in order to divide the party). In Maos Communist China stamped dissidents as "outliers" (from the Chairman Maos line). In the Islamic Republic of Iran Ayatollah denigrate the regime's arch enemy as "hypocrites" (one who pretends, but is not, faithful and loyal to Islam). In all cases, the penalty was about the same as in Eritrea.
Under both Semret Seyoum which Human Rights Watch can it declared to be "zumbul" count on the violent treatment. One wonders with horror what and how many treatments Dawit Isaak has been the victim of.
Some examples, including several by name from the period when Eritrea was an Italian colony:
• helicopter: the victim's hands and feet are tied crosswise.
• Otto (means of eight Italian): hands pinion and the victim must be on my stomach on the ground - it was so Semret Seyoum was forced to spend time in the underground cell.
• Ferro (iron in Italian): hands coated with handcuffs, after which the victim is suspended on an a rod or a tree branch.
• Goma: the victim is pressed on the inside of a reinforced truck tires after that rolled on the ground, sometimes for many hours.
• Jesus Christ: the victim was crucified on a tree or cross of wood and left to hang there in solgasset.
• Likboja: they tie in to a corpse of a dead prisoner or other person.
And then of course bogus drowning, that is to say that the victim's head held under water so that the prisoner believe they soon drown.
For at least the last point, there is some similarity between the dictatorship in Eritrea and the Bush administration / CIA's "war on terrorism" after the September 11 disaster.
Per Jönsson
per.jonsson @ dn.se
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