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Berhane Abrehe – a former Eritrean finance minister and fierce critic of the nation’s president – has died in jail, his household say.
The 79-year-old was Eritrea’s longest serving minister of finance, however he was faraway from his function in 2012 following clashes with President Isaias Afwerki.
Six years later, he was jailed after releasing a guide the place he described the president as a “dictator” who wanted to resign.
His household advised the BBC that the authorities, who hardly ever affirm the deaths of senior officers in custody, had notified them of Mr Berhane’s loss of life.
The authorities additionally hardly ever shares the place the our bodies are buried however Mr Berhane’s household have heard there’s a plan to bury him in Asmara Patriots Cemetery. Only veterans of the Eritrean independence warfare, like Mr Berhane, or members of the nationwide service may be buried there.
His physique has not but been launched, his household stated, and it’s not clear when and precisely how Mr Berhane died.
He was by no means introduced earlier than a courtroom of legislation.
President Isaias has dominated the East African nation, with out holding nationwide elections, since profitable the independence warfare in opposition to Ethiopia in 1991.
Political events, civic organisation and unbiased media are all banned.
The UN and human rights teams have lengthy accused the Eritrean authorities of gross human rights violations, together with torture, compelled disappearance and the imprisonment of tens of hundreds of individuals in inhumane circumstances.
Mr Berhane’s fall-out with President Isaias started in the course of the former’s 12-year tenure as finance minister, by which he urged Mr Isaias for transparency on the nation’s finances. The finances remains to be inaccessible to the general public at the moment.
In 2012, Mr Berhane was faraway from his put up and sidelined from politics.
Three years later he secretly wrote a two-volume guide named My Country, and despatched it overseas to be revealed.
Alongside calling his outdated boss a dictator and demanding he resign, Mr Berhane used the guide to problem Mr Isaias to a debate on nationwide tv.
He additionally referred to as for the reinstatement of the nationwide meeting – Eritrea’s parliament – which had been dissolved by the president in 2002. To at the present time, there’s nonetheless no legislative physique to carry the federal government accountable.
In 2018, after Mr Berhane had revealed My Country, he was detained and imprisoned in an unknown location.
By this time his spouse was already in jail, though no motive was given. She was launched in 2019.
One of Mr Berhane’s sons, who was additionally detained throughout the identical interval as his mom, beforehand described his household’s ordeal to the BBC.
“I’m residing with a dim glimmer of hope that my father who has well being points [will be out of prison one day],” Efrem Berhane stated in 2020.
The 31-year-old, who lives within the US after fleeing Eritrea, requested: “How can individuals be kidnapped by a authorities and disappear for years? Why do individuals present such cruelty on a fellow human like this?”
But some individuals have been imprisoned for even longer.
In September 2001, 11 senior ministers and generals who have been a part of a bunch often called the “G-15” have been arrested after they criticised the president. The collective – which included three former overseas ministers, an schooling minister and a former armed forces chief of employees – haven’t been seen since.
In Eritrea, political prisoners are sometimes prohibited from contact with the skin world.
In February, Ilze Brands-Kehris, United Nations Assistant Secretary General for Human Rights stated “impunity persists” for human rights violations in Eritrea.
“Our workplace continues to obtain credible reviews of torture; arbitrary detention; inhumane circumstances of detention; enforced disappearances; restrictions of the rights to freedoms of expression, of affiliation, and of peaceable meeting,” she stated.
Born in Eritrea in 1945, Mr Berhane earned an MA diploma in economics from a US college earlier than becoming a member of the wrestle for independence from Ethiopia.
He is the daddy of 4 youngsters.
