EU accused of funding regime that has forced 120,000 to flee

FOR years they have come in their thousands, fleeing a merciless despot accused of turning his country into a vast repository of slave labour.

In the deserts of North Africa, they were preyed upon by kidnapping gangs who filmed their torture to induce relatives to pay up more quickly and left the corpses of those whose families could not pay to rot. Not even the terrifying crossing of the Mediterranean, where thousands drown, has been enough to deter them.

No country has dominated the African Scramble for Europe as much as Eritrea, the isolated and secretive state in the continent’s horn that has been ruled for all its 24-year history by one man, Isaias Afwerki.

Presiding over a country that is consistently ranked among the poorest and least free in the world, he has also turned Eritrea into one of the fastest emptying. By some counts one in 10 Eritreans has fled abroad, 120,000 have come to Europe since 2010.

In 2015, more Eritreans reached Europe by sea than any other nationality and accounted for the largest number of asylum applications made in the UK. However, the EU ignored protests from human rights groups by offering €200million (£176million) in aid.

The EU has been accused of letting itself be hoodwinked into paying a regime that is tacitly encouraging its people to leave, as some diplomats privately concede.

Eritrea is not at war, but remains in a state of mobilisation after a brutal border conflict with Ethiopia between 1998 and 2000. The majority leave to escape universal conscription, which in Eritrea can last up to two decades with little pay and brutal conditions.

Eritreans living and working in the West are estimated to send more than £500 million a year to relatives, accounting for a third of the country’s economy. President Afwerki has blocked their distribution until the sender has paid a 2per cent annual tax to the Eritrean treasury.

“It is basically a ransom, but if we don’t pay it our families would starve,” says one Eritrean national living in London.

Even so, the EU funds continued to flow, despite any sign of real democratic progress in a country that has never had an election.

Last month, protesters angry at government attempts to curtail independent education by closing Christian and Muslim schools marched on the centre of the capital, Asmara. Yet any talk of a revolution, which analysts say is premature, brings with it the likelihood of more Eritreans fleeing their country.