Eritrean Refugees at Risk, Visiting Researcher Dan Connell

Eritrean refugees face human trafficking, exploitation, and hostility throughout North Africa and the Sahel.

Hundreds of thousands of Eritreans have fled a repressive dictatorship since 2001. Their small northeast African country, which has a population 4-5 million and was once touted as part of an African “renaissance,” is one of the largest per-capita producers of asylum seekers in the world.

Many languish in desert camps. Some have been kidnapped, tortured, and ransomed—or killed—in the Sinai. Others have been left to die in the Sahara or drowned in the Mediterranean. Still others have been attacked as foreigners in South Africa, threatened with mass detention in Israel, or refused entry to the United States and Canada under post-9/11 “terrorism bars” based on their past association with an armed liberation movement—the one they are now fleeing.

It’s not easy being Eritrean. More.