Waiting for War

Though it may be better than sitting in a trench waiting for an Ethiopian attack, refugee life has been hard. The Ethiopian government doesn't permit Abraham and other refugees to work outside the camp, and there is little to do inside but sit around. "We are prisoners," says Abraham. "Only God knows what the future will bring." In these conditions, tensions inevitably are rising inside the camp as much as outside. "Men beat us," says Asmara Zewere, a refugee who says a man threw stones at her after she rejected his advances. "When a guy asks you for sex, if you say OK, he will leave you after he enjoys himself. If you say no, he's going to stone you."

Men outnumber women three to one at Shimelba. But as so many of the men are army defectors and former university students, the ratio of young men to young women is closer to eight to one, says Lula Kahassa, 20. "We encounter sexual harassment," she says. "There's also a lot of unwanted pregnancy." Sexually transmitted diseases have become a problem. An HIV/AIDS counselor at the camp says that one in eight women refugees is HIV-positive. And there is little health treatment for women, says Terhasse Tesfo, a 22-year-old woman who fled Eritrea after 12th grade to avoid conscription in a country that drafts both men and women into the military. "Men want casual sex," she says. "The major problem is we are living together with [so many] men."

Ethiopia itself is hardly a model of democracy and good governance. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has held a tight grip on the country since seizing power in 1991. Following the country's disputed elections in 2005, government security forces killed 193 protesters. Opposition leaders, activists and journalists were rounded up and jailed. The few local news outlets not controlled by the government operate only with a high degree of self-censorship. In addition, human rights groups and aid organizations have accused Ethiopia of widespread atrocities in its eastern Ogaden region, where its army is battling ethnic Somali separatists. This year alone, four foreign journalists have been arrested by the Ethiopian government for reporting on the conflict.

But for those in the camps, Eritrea's government may be even worse. As a result of the country's increasing isolation from the West (due to its support of rebel movements in Somalia and Sudan), bread lines have become common on the streets of Asmara. Refugees say opponents of the regime often "disappear," never to be heard from again, and that landholdings are sometimes confiscated and given to Afwerki loyalists. While Ethiopia's economy has grown nearly 11 percent a year for the past year, according to the IMF, private industry in impoverished Eritrea—which became independent from Ethiopia in 1993—has dwindled, and the private press is nonexistent. Eritrea's ministry of information, which controls the media, has taken to issuing press releases with titles like "Better to Be Seen Proudly Standing in Respectable Homegrown Queue Lines."

Those in the camps aren't so sure. Samson Afewarkei, a refugee at Shimelba whose father died in the 1970s fighting for a rebel group headed by Eritrea's current president, says that after four years of sitting behind Shimelba's fence he's begun to lose hope. "There is no future in this camp," he says. A successful singer in Asmara before fleeing to Ethiopia, Afewarkei sits on a stool in a Shimelba tea shop singing a few bars of "Niei Tello" ("Please Come Quickly"), a political song that drew the ire of the Eritrean government. "Please come quickly, peace and democracy," he sings a cappella, as a half dozen bored-looking refugees look on. "Please come quickly." That's not a plea that's likely to be heeded anytime soon.

© 2007