Daughter of journalist held for 23 years urges world to 'wake up' on Eritrea

By AFP/Nina LARSON

The daughter of a journalist held incommunicado in Eritrea for more than 23 years insists it is past time for the world to address the horrific abuses happening in the country.

"We need the international community to wake up," Betlehem Isaak told AFP in an interview this week.

"We need your help," she said, on the sidelines of the annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy.

Her father Dawit Isaak, she said, was "a symbol" of the brutality in Eritrea, ruled with an iron fist by autocrat Isaias Afwerki for more than three decades.

Isaak has never been charged and has been held incommunicado for nearly the entire time since his September 2001 arrest, "all for the simple crime of being a journalist", she said.

Isaak was among around two dozen people -- including senior cabinet ministers, members of parliament and independent journalists -- who were seized in a purge of Afwerki's critics.

Amnesty International considers Isaak a prisoner of conscience, and press freedom group Reporters Without Borders says he and his detained colleagues are the longest-held journalists in the world.

'Tortured'

Isaak, now 60, fled to Sweden in 1987 during Eritrea's struggle against Ethiopia, but returned after Eritrea won its independence in 1993.

He co-founded Setit, the country's first independent newspaper, which in 2001 began reporting on a group of ministers and politicians known as the G-15, who were criticising President Afwerki and demanding elections.

Daughter Betlehem, now a 31-year-old writer, remembers the day men came to the family's home in Eritrea to pick up her father, when she was seven.

"They ate breakfast with us, and then they said: 'We have to go'. They handcuffed him, and they left," she recalls.

Then, "when our mother looked for him, they told her 'he doesn't exist. You must be crazy'."

During the first year of his detention, the family was permitted to visit him a few times. The last visit Betlehem remembers was at a hospital.

"He had been tortured," she said.

"I didn't really understand what had happened to him, (but) I saw that he couldn't really walk."

He told her mother: "'You have to leave. Take the kids and just get out of here'."

'In limbo'

The family, which had already obtained Swedish citizenship, left for Sweden, where they still live.

They had no contact with Dawit Isaak until he was suddenly released in November 2005, only to be arrested again the next day and thrown back into prison.

Betlehem's younger sister Danait, 26, told AFP she had no memories of her father from before he was first arrested, when she was three.

But she remembers his voice from the call he made home during his brief liberation.

"He said: I'm free! I'm coming home," she said.

The family has had no word from him since.

"They say he is alive, but we don't have any proof," Betlehem said.

Asmara has provided no information about his whereabouts or health over the years, which UN experts in 2021 deemed "extremely concerning".

The experts said a credible source had indicated Isaak was still alive in September 2020.

The uncertainty is the most difficult thing, Betlehem said.

"We’re living in limbo."