Secretive leader is a ruthless and paranoid brute
There are few leaders as enigmatic as Eritrea’s president, Isaias Afwerki.
In my book, Understanding Eritrea: Inside Africa’s Most Repressive State, I profile the president who led the country as it fought for 30 years for its freedom from Ethiopia, only to then turn on his own people.
Eritrea has been independent since 1993 but has no constitution and no parliament. Elections have never been held, no budget ever published and Afwerki ’s opponents are in jail.
Afwerki was born in Asmara in 1942. In 1965 he left to study engineering in Addis Ababa. In October 1966 he joined the Eritrean Liberation Front, which was fighting for the territory’s independence.
He soon began plotting against its leaders. He declared the organisation was dominated by Muslims and participated in a series of splits that created the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front in 1974-75.
In May 1991 his fighters ended the 30-year war of independence by capturing Eritrea’s capital, Asmara. Afwerki still leads both the country and his party, which became the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice in February 1994.
Eritrea is among the most repressive states in Africa; its human rights abuses are well documented.
Afwerki expects the same unquestioning obedience from the population that he expected of his troops. Control is enforced through indefinite conscription which the UN has declared a form of slavery.
Part of how all this came about lies in Afwerki ’s personality: an intelligent, secretive man, he has a highly developed sense of insecurity. In a leaked assessment from the American ambassador to Asmara in 2008, he was described as “paranoid”. He also believed that Ethiopia and the United States were attempting to kill him. He was reported to switch plates with subordinates, apparently to avoid being poisoned, and to sleep in different locations to foil a coup or assassination attempt.
Afwerki established a secret, controlling “party within a party” — the Eritrean People’s Revolutionary Party and used it to crush his rivals. He has not hesitated to use force to end any signs of opposition — as happened in 2001 with the arrest and incarceration without trial of senior liberation front leaders and journalists, some of whom have not been seen since.
Yet Afwerki has not survived by brute force alone. Sections of the population still revere him as the leader who brought about independence. He is also a skilled regional tactician and has cemented relations with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed with whom a peace agreement was signed in Saudi Arabia.
The peace agreement confirmed relations between Eritrea, the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates, both of which have bases in Eritrea from where they conduct their wars in Yemen and Libya. Eritreans have seen few benefits from the agreement. Food and even water are scarce, electricity is intermittent and the land border with Ethiopia is closed.
This is an edited excerpt from an article in The Conversation. The full version is online