http://eritrean-smart.org/content/ncea-deplores-us-government%E2%80%99s-june-10-statement-coi-eritrea
NCEA Deplores the US Government’s June 10 Statement on the COI-Eritrea
Submitted by esmart on Mon, 06/13/2016 - 15:27
June 13, 2016
NCEA Deplores the US Government’s June 10 Statement on the COI-Eritrea
________________________________
The National Council of Eritrean Americans (NCEA) in strongest terms
deplores the recent statement issued by the US Department of State on
the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Human Rights Situation in Eritrea.
As Americans of Eritrean origin we expect a fair and balanced response
than what we read. Neither the politically motivated mandate of the
Commission of inquiry nor the US lead campaign to isolate Eritrea
serves the cause of human right in Eritrea; in fact we believe it is a
prescription for yet another war in the Horn of Africa, as Ethiopia,
sensing it got a green light from Washington, has embarked on another
path of aggression by attacking Eritrea a mere hours after the
Department of State’s wholesale “endorsement” of the COI's faulty
findings.
We were expecting better from the Department of States which knows
well that the Commission’s findings, particularly its allegations that
it “finds that there are reasonable grounds to believe that crimes
against humanity have been committed in Eritrea since 1991” are
patently false and an utter fabrication. As various sources have been
reporting, fair-minded foreign diplomats based in Eritrea do not agree
with the COI’s findings. As evidenced in the June 8 press conference
of the Chair of the Commission, the image the COI tried to present was
in clear contradiction with what the foreign journalists who had
recently visited Eritrea witnessed. As we will try to show below,
experts that have been studying Eritrea are also voicing their strong
disagreements with the Commission’s findings and its faulty
methodology.
The State Department in its Press Release from June 10, 2016 stated
that: “United States takes note of the recently issued report by the
UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Eritrea, in particular its
conclusion that there are reasonable grounds to believe that crimes
against humanity have been committed in Eritrea. We have repeatedly
expressed grave concern about the human rights situation in Eritrea,
and that concern has been reinforced by the COI’s findings” is beyond
the pale. As Americans of Eritrean origin we find this US rush
statement designed to influence the Geneva Process reckless and
offensive. As a community with an intimate knowledge of the reality on
the grounds in Eritrea we had submitted to the Commission thousands of
our written testimonials along with scores of thousands of other
Eritreans in the Diaspora; none of which was taken into consideration.
Not only was our testimony neglected, according to Atlantic Council’s
Bronwyn Bruton, the Commission has also “refused to consider the
academic literature on Eritrea; refused to use press reports; refused
to speak with experts who’d traveled recently to the country; refused
to speak to UN staff and Western diplomats inside the country.” [1]
Instead, as Tanja R. Müller of the University of Manchester stated,
many people “who live, have lived or continue to visit Eritrea, have
multiple connections within the country and could have contributed to
the COI’s understanding. They were deliberately ignored, and the
result is a document that describes a country many Eritreans do not
recognise.”
Müller adds that the COI’s report was “predominately based on
interviewees with self-nominated participants in the diaspora [who] in
different ways left Eritrea, often experiencing abuse on their
journeys, and have learned to navigate international refugee law and
asylum systems. This does not make their testimonies wrong, but would
call for a nuanced understanding or interpretation in any social
science discipline. Human rights advocacy might not be social science,
but one would at least expect inconsistencies to be followed up.” As
she tries to underline how the COI wholesale accepted a fabrication
she mentions the following: “A prime example of those has travelled
the internet widely, when a representative of Canadian mining company
Nevsun, accused in the 2015 COI report to use slave labour to dig
underground tunnels at Bisha mine in Eritrea, made the point that
Bisha is in fact an open-pit mine.”[2] Louis Mazel had also testified
that the Bisha mining is indeed a “huge open pit-mine”, without any
underground tunnels. Not only this, Müller also states that the
findings of the COI are based on testimonies of witnesses “recruited
by human rights activists who have their own means of advocacy and
persistence, and for example hire public lobbying companies in order
to spread their narrative of Eritrea (I was for a while bombarded by
emails from such a company with sensational news until I contacted
them and asked to be removed from their list). … What is harder to
justify and exemplifies the flaws in the COI report is the fact that
all additional experts that were consulted came from the spectrum of
human rights advocates in a broad sense, and included hardly anybody
with recent first-hand experience of Eritrea.” [3] Bronwyn Bruton
rejects the Commission’s substandard investigation using these words:
“the team was only able to do field research in Ethiopia, which is
effectively at war with Eritrea. Obviously, this is shockingly poor
scholarship—if a college undergrad tried to ignore all academic
scholarship and spoke only to people who agreed with him, he’d get
flunked out of school.” [4]
The COI’s faulty conclusion is based on at least three faulty
premises. As any student of elementary logic would agree, all those
who start with false premises can easily imply any conclusion they
wish to get at. These false premises include:
“All those that leave Eritrea are leaving for political reasons”.
Bruton has this to say on this one: “The mere fact that 60,000 people
are leaving Eritrea isn’t necessarily proof of a massive human rights
crisis. … Eritreans have until extremely recently, been granted
automatic asylum rights in Europe. There are push and pull factors at
play.”
Furthermore, the President of the United State’s in his 2012 address
to the Clinton Global Initiative of September 25, 2012 had admitted
that his government has a direct and active hand in the pull factors
that are making people to leave Eritrea and other African countries
pretending to be Eritreans. The President’s words were: “I recently
renewed sanctions on some of the worst abusers, including North Korea
and Eritrea. We’re partnering with groups that help women and children
escape from the grip of their abusers. We’re helping other countries
step up their own efforts. And we’re seeing results.” The results he
is seeing is not only the flooding of Europe with African impostors
who claim Eritrean identity falsely but also the suffering of women
and children in the hands of human traffickers in North Africa and the
death of hundreds of innocent Africans by drowning in the high waters
of the Mediterranean Sea hopping the paradise that was promised to
them by the US President and his agents.
Wikileaks documents [5] also show how US diplomats are willing to bend
and out right violate US visa laws in order to encourage Eritrean
“regime opponents” to flow to the US. Again innocent youth falsely
promised a paradise and free education are perishing in the Sahara
Desert. The New York Times [6] also reported in 2010 how some Asmara
based American diplomats were among those facilitating the exodus of
youth from Eritrea. It is ignoring these facts the State Department
issued its statement on June 10.
“All those that claim to be ‘Eritreans’ are Eritreans”. Every East
African, Ethiopian, Somali or Sudanese for that matter even a West
African knows that the easiest ticket a political asylum in Europe,
Canada or the USA is to claim he or she is an Eritrean. It is
Ethiopians, with the help of the minority regime in Ethiopia who are
taking advantage this blanket preferential treatment of “Eritreans”,
as a result every 4 out of 5 of those who have been resettled in the
US are actually non Eritreans who falsely claimed Eritrean identity.
Müller states that “In contrast to citizens from a different African
country, the Gambia, who top the list of those having entered Italy
illegally this year, Eritreans are predominately given asylum and thus
it pays to be Eritrean or rather pose as such. There are multiple
reasons to leave Eritrea – or any other African country for that
matter.” The BBC’s Mary Harper in her recent report from within
Eritrea puts it this way: “Western and other diplomats based in Asmara
tell me the Commission of Inquiry's report is "unhelpful" and does not
reflect accurately the current situation in Eritrea. [They] describe
as "absurd" descriptions in the media and elsewhere of Eritrea as
"Africa's North Korea". An international human rights worker I meet
outside the country says an estimated 30% of people who claim to be
Eritrean for asylum purposes actually come from Ethiopia. I'm told
others are Sudanese. Some Ethiopians and Sudanese share languages,
physical characteristics and cultures with Eritreans, and it is
significantly easier to obtain asylum as an Eritrean.” Andreas Melan,
Austria’s Ambassador to Ethiopia corroborates Harper’s report for he
is quoted to have admitted that “30 to 40%” of those who claim to be
“Eritreans” when they reach Europe are actually “Ethiopians”. What
these means is the Commission is falsifying numbers to reach its
desired conclusion.
Trying to underscore how numbers are being cooked at will by the
Commission, Müller draws a parallel between the number of people that
were claimed to being killed every month in Darfur and the number of
Eritreans that are leaving their country every month by saying: “Maybe
5000 has become a magic figure in relation to when to trigger a
‘crimes against humanity’ claim?”
"All those that the COI interviewed will tell anything that jeopardize
their pending political asylum cases or recent approved cases". This
premise is best debunked by what an Israeli investigative Journalist
of Ethiopian origin, Dabby Adeno Abebe, found in 2012. “My cover story
has not been finalized yet, but luckily I run into Jeremiah, who’s
been in Israel for three years now. ‘What do I tell those who ask how
I got into Israel?’ I ask him. ‘Lie,’ he says. ‘Don’t tell the whole
story. The Israelis, and mostly the non-profit groups working with the
infiltrators here, like to be lied to. Say you were a soldier, and
that if you return to Eritrea you’ll get a death sentence. Keep in
mind that you must be consistent with your story. The bottom line is
that everyone uses the story I’m telling you here, and this way they
fool everybody,’ he says. ‘Almost none of them arrived on foot from
Egypt to Israel. None of us crossed any deserts…it’s all nonsense.’”
[7]
Since the mid 1940s Eritrea and Eritreans have been victims of
numerous politically-motivated unjust policies orchestrated by few
vengeful diplomats who chose to place their own ego and interest above
of that of the people of the United States and the Eritrean people.
Individuals who used and abused their position in the Department of
State or the White House to frustrate the Eritrea people’s aspiration
for independence and after a hard won independence to undermine the
independent government of Eritrea to promote their sinister agendas of
regime change. In the words of a British historian: “Eritrea was seen
as a bunker state; they were less easy to control. Ethiopia had a more
reliable military perhaps. Their policy was more directable and
perhaps predictable. Whereas Eritrea, from the mid 1990s, it was
clearly seen unpredictable and couldn’t be relied upon to do certain
things that Washington might wanted to do....” [8]
The numerous “Unprovoked US Hostilities Against Eritrea” [9] are well
documented and one can find them in the reference given below. For now
it suffices to list the following egregious offenses we witnessed
since 1998:
A botched US mediation process and escalating the 1998-2000 border war
by giving Ethiopia a green light to bomb Asmara, Eritrea’s capital,
June of 1998;
Purposely looking the other way when the minority government in
Ethiopia was violating the human rights of 76,000 Ethiopians of
Eritrean origin through the heinous act of ethnic cleansing and
deporting them by arrogantly saying it had the right to do so even for
not liking the “color of their eyes.”
Coaching and encouraging the minority government of Ethiopia not to
accept or implement the final and binding decision of the Eritrea
Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC).
Abusing their influence in the UN Security Council to protect Ethiopia
when it was in clear breach of international law and attempting to
create alternative mechanism to violate the “final and binding” EEBC
decision so as to award Eritrea’s sovereign territories to Ethiopia.
Serving as the architects and surrogates of the illegal sanctions that
were imposed on Eritrea in 2009 and of all the blatant fabrications
that accompanied it and arm-twisting members of the Security members,
particularly the African members.
Serving as lead lobbyists at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to
create the illegal mandates of the Special Rapporteur and Commission
of Inquiry as they saw the 2009 sanctions were being discredited and
all other members of the Security Council were asking for their
lifting.
Given all these, the statement of June 10, 2016 seems to be designed
to restore credit to an otherwise discredited report by the COI. Any
attempt designed to support a fraudulent COI findings reached through
a fraudulent methodology is a disservice to the Eritrean people’s
attempt to live in dignity and liberty and is ultimately against the
interest of the United States. The US State Department should refrain
from being influenced by people who have an axe to grind against
Eritrea. As Eritrean Americans we would like to see a US policy based
on a far-sighted analysis that creates and nurtures friendship rather
than being influenced by egotistic personalities who use their high
offices to block and frustrate experts' recommendations for positive
US/Eritrea engagement. Once more the NCEA would like to say “enough is
enough”!
________________________________
Ashish Kumar Sen: What the UN Gets Wrong About Rights in Eritrea: A
finding of crimes against humanity would be indefensible, said the
Atlantic Council’s Bronwyn Bruton
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/what-the-un-gets-wr...
June 7, 2016. (Last Accessed June 12, 2016)
Tanja R. Müller, Human rights as a political tool: Eritrea and the
‘crimes against humanity’ narrative, June 10,
2016.
https://tanjarmueller.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/human-rights-as-a-politic...
(Last Accessed June 12, 2016)
ibid
Ashish Kumar Sen: What the UN Gets Wrong About Rights in Eritrea: A
finding of crimes against humanity would be indefensible, said the
Atlantic Council’s Bronwyn Bruton
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/what-the-un-gets-wr...
June 7, 2016. (Last Accessed June 12, 2016)
https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09ASMARA146_a.html (Last
Accessed June 12, 2016)
Jeffrey Gettleman, In Eritrea, the Young Dream of Leaving, June 19,
2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/world/africa/20eritrea.html?_r=0
(Last Accessed June 12, 2016)
Dabby Adeno Abebe, The dark side of Tel Aviv: Journalist poses as
African infiltrator, spends week in Tel Aviv’s most volatile
neighborhood
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4239481,00.html
(Last Accessed June 12, 2016)
Richard Reid, Eritrea’s External Relations,
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/eritreas-external-relations (Last
Accessed June 12, 2016)
Research and Documentation Department. People's Front for Democracy
and Justice. Asmara, July
2012
http://www.dehai.org/archives/semg-12/att-0560/UNPROVOKED_US_HOSTILITIES...
(Last Accessed June 12, 2016)
Received on Mon Jun 13 2016 - 12:05:49 EDT