Since the border war with Ethiopia in the late 1990s, Eritrea’s President Isaias Afewerki and the ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) have used indefinite national service to control the Eritrean population. Human Rights Watch research finds that many Eritreans have spent their entire working lives at the service of the government in either a military or civilian capacity. This indefinite national service has had a visible and lasting impact on the rights, freedom, and lives of Eritreans.
Beginning in 2003, the Eritrean government has forced thousands of young people—male and female—each year to undergo military training before they completed secondary school, with many being conscripted directly from secondary school into national service. At the same time, instead of developing a pool of well-trained, committed, career secondary school teachers who voluntarily choose to teach, the government has relied on national service conscripts who have little to no say in their assignment and no end in sight to their conscription.
The system of conscription has driven thousands of young Eritreans each year into exile: an estimated 507,300 Eritreans live in exile out of an estimated population of around five million. Many of those fleeing are aged 18 to 24. Thousands, including unaccompanied children, take the perilous journey toward Europe.
President Isaias has repeatedly defended this repressive system, which the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Eritrea has labeled “slavery-like,” by arguing that the country and population should remain on a “war-footing” because of the conflict with Ethiopia. The government has also justified linking education and mandatory military service in the last year of secondary school as a way to cultivate an ethic of hard work and nationalism, and, more recently, justified indefinite national service as a means of providing jobs for the country’s youth in the absence of a functional economy.
But the signing of a peace agreement with Ethiopia in July 2018 and the lifting of United Nations sanctions in October removed the government’s excuse for maintaining the national service system indefinitely. It should have encouraged the government to offer its youth real employment opportunities of their choosing afforded by peace and the possible economic development that an opening up of Eritrea can bring. However, at time of writing, the government had not made any meaningful changes to national service or to its system of repression generally.
Based on 73 interviews with former secondary school students and national service teachers who attended or taught in secondary school in Eritrea between 2014 and late 2018, and who have since fled Eritrea, as well as 18 interviews with Eritrean and international experts, this report examines how national service violates young people’s rights and restricts their access to quality secondary education.
“Sawa” as a Recruitment Channel
After the two years of deadly fighting between Ethiopia and Eritrea ended in 2000, Ethiopia rejected an international border demarcation decision, which gave the disputed territory of Badme to Eritrea. The Eritrean government then used this an excuse to effectively turn secondary school into a channel of conscription by forcing all secondary school students, girls and boys, to complete their final year at the Warsai Yekalo Secondary School, located in the Sawa military camp, an isolated location in the west of the country near the border with Sudan, and to undertake mandatory military training for approximately five months of their final secondary school year.
Each year, thousands of youth are forcefully bused from their homes all over the country to Sawa. Students spend one year in Sawa and follow a schedule that combines secondary school exam preparation classes with mandatory military training. While most students are over 18 when they enroll in Grade 12, some are still children and are being forcibly conscripted in violation of international standards. At Sawa, students are under military command throughout their final year, including during their study time, and military officials subject students to ill-treatment and harsh punishments for minor infractions, military-style discipline, and forced labor, which at times violates their basic rights and cuts into students’ study and rest time. “They are making us into slaves, not educating us,” one former student said.
After one year at Sawa, youth are, largely based on how well they do in their exams, either forced to join the army, or channeled into vocational training programs or into further education and later conscripted to work for the government in a civilian capacity.
Military training and national service are compulsory for all Eritreans, male and female, and it is often indefinite, despite provisions in Eritrean law limiting national service to 18 months. It is almost impossible for young Eritreans, particularly boys and men, to avoid conscription. Some secondary school students take drastic measures to evade Sawa and conscription—purposefully failing classes to stay in the lower grades or dropping out of school altogether—only to live in fear of the government’s notorious roundups in which youth not enrolled in secondary school are routinely caught and sent directly into the military. Many girls and young women opt for early marriage and motherhood as a means of evading Sawa and conscription.
Conscription of Teachers
The government relies on national service conscripts assigned as teachers to teach in secondary schools across the country. National service teachers have no choice in their assignment as a teacher, location of their deployment or the subject they teach, and they are often forced to be in the government’s service for years. “It’s unlimited service,” said a 25-year-old assigned to teach before fleeing in 2018. “If you are sent with the national service to teach physics, you will be a physics teacher for life.” Some teachers who have tried to leave their national service jobs have faced reprisals, including having their already meagre wages cut and, especially if caught fleeing, imprisonment. While teachers’ salaries have increased since 2015, national service teachers told Human Rights Watch that they still struggle to meet basic financial needs.
Many students experience poor quality of instruction due to an unmotivated or often absent teaching corps—with teachers skipping lessons and many teachers fleeing abroad—resulting in an unconducive learning environment. As a result, students miss lectures and units as there is no one to teach them, or classes are merged. On occasion, students are without any teacher at all for weeks on end.
Rare protests over government education policies, or even questioning them publicly, have resulted in heavy-handed responses, including security forces using live ammunition to disperse protests and conducting mass arrests. There is simply no recourse for teachers, students, or others to express grievances over the education system or find an alternative path other than to flee. Flight also comes with significant risks of violence both inside Eritrea—with students, including children, and teachers risking imprisonment in dire conditions and mistreatment, including torture, if caught—and along the migration routes.
The Eritrean government has acknowledged many of the problems hampering access to education in its Education Sector Development Plans introduced in 2013. Yet nowhere do these plans, or donor support to the education system, mention or acknowledge the impact that national service, and the use of Grade 12 as a recruitment channel, have on the rights of students and teachers and on the chronic education challenges limiting access to quality secondary education.
Necessary Steps
Eritrea should take urgent steps to end the system of indefinite national service and ensure that young Eritreans’ right to education is respected, especially now that the primary excuse for prolonged service—the “no peace, no war” situation with Ethiopia—has disappeared.
The government should ensure that Grade 12 education does not incorporate compulsory military training and that Grade 12 students have the option of completing secondary education at other public secondary schools.
The Eritrean government should immediately announce a timetable for the rapid demobilization of national service conscripts. This could start by immediately demobilizing individuals who have spent more than five years in service, given the length of their service,andtaking speedy andconcrete measures to ensure that the 18-month statutory service limit is respectedfor all recruits, including those who have served less than five years and all new recruits. The government should also take steps to ensure all national service conscripts, including teachers, receive an adequate wage and that teachers have a say regarding where they are assigned and what they teach.
Teachers who have served their statutory 18-months term but who have not yet been released should be allowed to decide if they want to continue teaching, and if they do, should receive adequate training.
Eritrea’s few partners and donors, including the African Development Bank, Finland, the Global Partnership for Education, a funding platform supported by multiple donors, and the European Union should make clear that ongoing support to education and vocational training will require concrete efforts by the government to limit the duration of national service, disassociate secondary education from conscription into the military, and create a cohort of well-trained, committed, career secondary school teachers who voluntarily choose to teach. They should also call on the government to establish independent, credible complaints mechanisms to investigate allegations of abuse of trainees and conscripts.
