Since last Spring,
when the army started to instruct conscripts returning to their units to stay
at home until further notice, the Eritrean government has been facing
difficulties in maintaining a properly manned army. A conscript who has escaped
Eritrea informed Gedab News,
“the government can’t feed the army, so they
told us to stay at home to mend for ourselves. The conscript had stayed in
his village for five months with his parents before escaping to Sudan and is
now planning the second leg of his journey to make it to Europe. He said,
“I
can’t stay with my ailing parents who depend on a small farm to feed themselves
… hardly enough to feed them, my handicapped brother, and my widowed aunt.”
Several units of the Eritrean army are hallow and exist only in name, and
often, “
you find a squad guarding the installations of a camp that used to
house a battalion.” Many conscripts have taken advantage of the extended
leave and left the country; the army is now facing difficulties in recalling
them. In what appears as an attempt to control the situation, the Eritrean
immigration department has suspended the issuing of exit visas, but that hasn’t
stopped the flocking of people who are crossing the borders of the country. Insiders
say,
“the regime thought it could simply declare them AWOL and like the old
times sweep the streets to forcefully return every missing conscript.” Only
a little over a third of the twenty-thousand senior-year high school students
who were supposed to report for the last round of training in the Sawa military
camp did so. The rest simply ignored the call and either left the country or
went into hiding. Around the country, some youngsters have resorted to
brigandage and several mugging incidents by “youth holding sticks” were
reported in Asmara. Residents in poorly lighted neighborhoods with narrow
alleys
“are so terrified of the situation they do not move alone at night.”
In order to ameliorate the shortage of soldiers, and keep order, the government
has been trying to assemble the militia who were supposed to report to several
localities, but the calls to report for “training” were largely ignored. In
urban centers,
“very few militia reported, particularly in towns like
Keren, Adi Kieh and Ghindae … only one person reported from Edaga Hamus”
neighborhood of Asmara. It is worse in the countryside where citizens in many
villages defiantly refused to report. In many places the dateline for reporting
has been postponed for a second time. Reports indicate that Ethiopia has
deployed its forces on the South and Southwest of the Eritrean borders and its
reconnaissance scouts are monitoring the region. A teacher from southern
Eritrean told Gedab News, “
The regime is acting as if these are signs of an
imminent Ethiopian incursion into Eritrea, and this has added to the anxiety of
the population.”
Adding to the already building tension,
on October 16, 2014, Sendek, an
Ethiopian Amharic newspaper quoting official sources stated that the federal
prosecutor has charged six residents of the Beni Shangul-Gumuz region for
receiving political and military training in Eritrea. One of the charges is an
attempt to disrupt the Ethiopian renaissance dam.
In March, 2012 Ethiopian Forces attacked the
camps of Ethiopian rebels group trained and hosted by the Eritrean government.
The attack was believed to be retaliation for “terrorist acts the groups
carried out in Ethiopia.”
Ethiopia has a
long standing policy, which was repeated by its prime minister in New York
recently, that it will retaliate if it ever catches any of its Eritrean based opposition
conducting “an act of terrorism in Ethiopia.”
Source (Awate.com)
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