Isaias Afwerki, the man & the dictator

Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s president, has never faced an election in the three decades he’s led his country. He tends not to mince words about why this is the case. Isaias rejects the idea of seeking a mandate from the people, seeing it as a constraint on his power. He believes his stewardship is necessary to safeguard the integrity of the young republic. He also believes he led the country to independence and feels entitled to rule as a result.

Isaias doesn’t do it for fun or glory, as he explained in a rare personal interview in 1996. He said he “dislikes” politics but views it as a sacred “duty.” “Whenever justice is missing in a society, it always grates on you,” he said.

This calling, he explained, has come at tremendous personal sacrifice, forcing him to set aside his artistic and literary pursuits in order to lead his nation. “I do not like the life of a politician,” he continued. “I don’t even like to live like a president.” Given how he feels, it should come as no surprise that by most common understandings of what these roles entail, he doesn’t practise politics, nor does he live like your typical president.

“The mere suggestion that he needed a mandate from the Eritrean people appeared to catch him off guard when an Al Jazeera journalist asked about when polls might be held in the country. ‘What elections?’ Afwerki responded brusquely...”

At the age of 62, Isaias told a visiting German parliamentarian in late 2008 that he is healthy and expects to live another 40 or 50 years, during which he hopes to continue to lead his country. The mere suggestion that he needed a mandate from the Eritrean people appeared to catch him off guard when an Al Jazeera journalist asked about when polls might be held in the country. “What elections?” Afwerki responded brusquely, before launching into a seemingly unrelated diatribe against the United States. “We will see what the elections in the United States will bring, and we will wait about three or four decades until we see genuine, natural situations emerge.”

“Maybe more, maybe more – who knows,” he added, with a chillingly straight face.

His style of engagement with the media – oscillating between reclusive aloofness and combative outbursts – is refracted through his regime’s foreign policy. Eritrea had a thorny baptism in regional geopolitics in the 1990s, going to war with all of its neighbours (and Yemen), and extending its influence as far as Congo, where Eritrean forces helped bring Laurent Kabila to power in 1997.

His three-decade-old vendetta with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) put at the table among the architects of Ethiopia’s war with the organization in Tigray. The US re-imposed sanctions on the country for its role in Ethiopia’s war, where Eritrean forces are accused of gross human rights abuses & war crimes, ending a brief four-year interlude where Eritrea was sanctions-free.

Like his old friend Gaddafi, Isaias revels in the anti-American tough-guybrand he’s now cultivated, although he once supported the US war in Iraq, offering it a base. He more recently sealed his position among an isolated club of states including Iran, North Korea, Russia and Syria when Eritrea voted against a UNGA resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This didn’t surprise observers of Eritrea as its foreign minister visited South Ossetia and Crimea after Russia occupied both territories.

But ultimately, Eritrea was never big enough for Isaias, and he was always too aloof to engage with bodies that might curtail and bound his influence. When he attended his first continental summit in 1993 with the AU’s predecessor, the Organization for African Unity, he viewed the AU as a tool for American hegemony – calling the organization an abject failure. Eritrea only joined “in the spirit of familial obligation”. He held East Africa’s regional body IGAD in similar contempt. He also worked with Gaddafi, an old ally, on an ambitious bid to form an alternative body to the African Union called the Community of Sahel-Saharan States in 1998 to no avail.

Early life & the guerrilla years

Few have remained as resistant to change throughout their lives, despite dramatic shifts in fortune, as Isaias. He has always been notoriously brutal, hot-tempered, secretive, and unwilling to tolerate any opposition. He created and lived through history, betrayed and was betrayed, and made and broke lives with the same demeanour he had as an adolescent revolutionary, according to former colleagues we interviewed.

“The jaded emotional view,” he said in a 1996 interview, was “fostered with time and loss of colleagues.” “You then ask yourself, am I not human?” he added.

American journalist Robert Kaplan first met Isaias in the mid-1980s, during the heady days of Eritrea’s independence war. Isaias’s moustache—clipped perfectly then as now—sat above a mouth which, when opened in public, delivered, Kaplan said, “a cold, authoritative style of speech.”

In his book Surrender or Starve, Kaplan observed that Isaias had “affected a military disposition”, marked by rock-hard stubbornness and indifference to how he achieved his goals. This trait would both serve and undermine him throughout his stormy political career.

The second eldest in a family of eight, Isaias was born in Asmara under British rule in 1946. He was never one to play second fiddle, and according to those who grew up with him, this trait had been a defining part of his character since childhood. He wanted to captain all his neighbourhood football teams and always insisted on sitting in the best seat available at home. He reportedly slapped an American high school physics teacher who gave him a bad grade. But it was in Eritrea’s independence movement where Isaias made his name.

He first joined Eritrea’s independence movement through the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). Unlike most of his comrades, who joined the armed struggle after leaving their studies in good standing, he left Haile Selassie University after failing his first-year exams. This may partly explain Isaias’s inferiority complex towards his comrades (whom he eventually sidelined or eliminated), and why he later sought to assume the mantle of an intellectual.

Kaplan believed Isaias was the most “intellectually interesting politician in the history of postcolonial Africa”. Clinton similarly extolled him as a “renaissance African leader”. Though he presides annually over military graduations at Sawa, he has never attended a university graduation ceremony of his own.

After returning from China—where the ELF had sent him for military and ideological training during Mao’s now-infamous Cultural Revolution—Isaias’s return proved decisive for the future of the Eritrean liberation movement.

Michael Gabr, who was part of an ELF cell with Isaias in Addis Ababa, feared that Isaias would form his own power centre within the organisation. According to Haile Durue, Isaias joined the ELF with the intention of splitting it and forming his own organisation. While Gabr wasn’t wrong about Isaias’s intentions, he certainly underestimated his ambition.

Isaias could not accept being just a member of the ELF leadership. He needed an organisation where he held absolute authority. After returning from China—where the ELF had sent him for military and ideological training during Mao’s now-infamous Cultural Revolution—Isaias’s return proved decisive for the future of the Eritrean liberation movement.

US diplomatic notes recorded that he “was turned off by the cult of personality surrounding Mao” but nevertheless internalised the need to eliminate political opponents, a strategy that propelled him to the summit of Eritrea’s liberation movement.

The first challenge to his leadership after splitting from the ELF came in 1973. Some of his former colleagues and classmates called for democratic decision-making and greater accountability from the leadership. The dissidents were labelled “menkae” Tigrinya word for bat (meaning those who moved at night). The ring leaders were executed, and others imprisoned for years.

The US ambassador to Eritrea quoted his Chinese counterpart, who said that Isaias “learned all the wrong things” during his stint in their country. All decisions were his alone; there was no room for alternative views.

This challenge led to the formation of a notorious and highly feared security apparatus, Halewa Sowra, a Tigrinya term meaning “guardians of the revolution”. This apparatus proved a crucial tool for Isaias to consolidate his grip over the EPLF and its successor, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), which has existed in name only since 2001. The US ambassador to Eritrea quoted his Chinese counterpart, who said that Isaias “learned all the wrong things” during his stint in their country. All decisions were his alone; there was no room for alternative views.

Eritrea’s former central bank governor and diplomat, Andebrhan Welde Giorgis, whom the president dismissed for refusing an order to transfer funds illicitly, said the “air vibrated with tension” during their meeting on the issue. “He became so furious and agitated that his neck veins seemed about to burst,” Giorgis wrote. His temperamental unwillingness to accept anything but his view was also displayed when he hosted a dinner for US embassy officials in 2008, where he became involved in a heated discussion about tomatoes. Isaias complained that, despite his wife’s efforts, some tomatoes she was growing came out too small, to which a legal adviser replied that cherry tomatoes are meant to be small. Afwerki stormed out of the room, surprising even his security detail.

Development policies

Some observers and UN officials applaud Isaias’s development and self-reliance policies. The Eritrean regime prides itself on achieving the Millennium Development Goals, particularly in the health sector, such as reducing maternity child mortality, improving maternal health, and combating diseases like malaria and HIV.

In Eritrea’s response to the Universal Periodic Review of the UN’s Human Rights Council of 2014, the government stated that its key national priorities are creating and enhancing a conducive environment for its citizens to exercise their fundamental human rights in the “broadest definition of the term.” But the EUindicates that the country is facing considerable challenges: ensuring food security, providing and updating essential social services, and combatting youth unemployment. Regarding health services in the country, it is worth noting that Eritrea is the only country in Africa that has denied its population Covid-19 vaccines without any explanation.

Eritreans we speak to inside Eritrea, and recent visitors to the country, paint a gloomy picture. There is an acute shortage of essential medicines. Despite the need for health services, the government closed 22 health clinicsoperated by the Eritrean Catholic Church in 2019 because of the church’s criticism of the government.

Poorly paid doctors are not allowed to use private clinics after government work hours, thus overloading the services in hospitals. Dr Futsum Ghebrenegus, Eritrea’s only psychiatrist in a traumatized country, has been in prison since 2004 for his religious views, and his whereabouts are still unknown.

Isaias prides himself on self-reliance, but the country doesn’t publicize its loans and development aid. It has never published a budget since independence. In Eritrea, everything is confidential, but lenders are transparent. Eritrea has borrowed 631 million US dollars from China from 2000-to 2018. World Bank data indicates that Eritrea received 4.36 billion US dollars in net official development assistance and official aid from 1992-to 2019. A US Bankruptcy Court ruled Eritrea pay $286m loans to Qatar National Bank (QNB).

QNB can search anywhere the government may hold assets and retrieve them to satisfy its debt. Although Eritrea has taken baby steps in the right direction on health, the drawbacks of the country’s governance structure have undermined further progress.

Isaias and former Ethiopian PM Meles Zenawi reportedly lived together in North Mogadishu, where both were provided Somali passports and given a radio frequency to broadcast in Tigrinya and Arabic.

“In Isaias, time stopped”

Eritrea has fought both offensive and defensive wars with its neighbours and has harboured simmering grudges against them. It has been both a victim of international intrigue and a perpetrator of elaborate plots. It has armed and faced down rebel groups. Its borders have been contested, and it has contested those of its neighbours. Nowhere have these dynamics played out more intensely than in Isaias’s turbulent relationship with his old friends in Eritrea’s parent state, Ethiopia.

Isaias and former Ethiopian PM Meles Zenawi reportedly lived together in north Mogadishu, where both were provided Somali passports and given a radio frequency to broadcast in Tigrinya and Arabic. Their movements would eventually bring an end to President Mengistu Haile Mariam’s reign, with the TPLF serving as the battering ram—triumphantly marching on Addis Ababa and installing a new regime.

It was a remarkable achievement. “It is as though Soviet Communism had been overthrown not by Russians but by Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians had taken power in Moscow,” read one letter to the New Yorker.

Immediately after Eritrea’s independence, Isaias and Meles were on good terms. According to a senior Eritrean official, both worked together to influence Somalia by supporting warlord Farah Aideed following the fall of President Siad Barre. Meles, however, was always uneasy about his relationship with Isaias, whom he tended to view as a ruthless and volatile figure.

Isaias’ suspicions arose when he believed Zenawi attempted to kill him in a plane he arranged for Isaias, which caught fire but landed safely in 1996. Isaias rarely forgets and doesn’t tend to forgive betrayal, as with the case of former information minister Niazghi Kiflu, once a close ally who left the country for medical help to London and was denied burial in Eritrea after they fell out despite pleas for clemency.

However, with Meles, the stakes were higher, and the hostility ran deeper. These dynamics took a deadly turn when a border dispute erupted into full-scale war in 1998, confirming Isaias’s fears about his big neighbour.

When Isaias said the injustice “grates” him, he wasn’t kidding, but his predictable responses were violence and silence. For good reason, he was furious when the UN awarded Eritrea control over Badme, a small town on their shared border, but Ethiopia refused to relinquish it, further souring relations between the leaderships of both countries.

The unresolved border dispute which his much larger neighbour gave Isaias justification to create a political vacuum domestically, put his country on a permanent war footing, and engage in a regional proxy conflict with Ethiopia. He would not accept the humiliation of defeat again and began biding his time before settling the score.

Isaias’s sense of unfairness was further provoked when he was singled out with sanctions for playing spoiler to the groups across the region he supported (allegedly including Al-Shabab). TPLF-dominated Ethiopia, which did the same, got away scot-free. Ethiopia engaged the international community, whilst Eritrea claimed it did nothing wrong and retreated into itself. “The regime virtually dared the UN security council by insisting on its blanket denial,” Giorgis, former president of the Bank of Eritrea and its EU ambassador, observed in his book.

This insistence on denial when caught, and silence when speech is required, is a trademark of Isaias’s character and regime.

Isaias is a cunning manipulator and a determined survivor. By 2018, he had emerged as the elder statesman of East African politics. Zenawi was gone, Ethiopian and Kenyan leaders had come and gone, Somalia had imploded, and Sudan had split, with a coup toppling its long-time leader, Omar Bashir.

In 2012, Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi, Isaias’s long-time foe, died. The TPLF experienced a fall from grace in Ethiopian politics—a decline that continued until Abiy Ahmed took up the mantle and set about dismantling the TPLF and its networks within the Ethiopian state. The TPLF’s leadership generally held Ahmed’s new administration in contempt, with its head Debtresion Gebremichael calling the new PM “immature”.

Isaias saw an opportunity to break out of his isolation amid Ethiopia’s shifting political tides and warmly embraced the young prime minister, with whom he concluded a peace deal—the details of which remain obscure—that won Abiy Ahmed the Nobel Peace Prize.

Isaias is a cunning manipulator and a determined survivor. By 2018, he had emerged as the elder statesman of East African politics. Zenawi was gone, Ethiopian and Kenyan leaders had come and gone, Somalia had imploded, and Sudan had split, with a coup toppling its long-time leader, Omar Bashir. Isaias, however, remained—having changed little about his government. According to one analyst, regional leaders today seek his advice, likely impressed by his remarkable longevity despite his isolation.

Just as he had taunted the ELF after defeating them during the independence war, mere victory over the TPLF would not suffice—he had to rub it in. The day before Abiy Ahmed launched his campaign against the TPLF, with Isaias’s support, in November 2020, the Eritrean embassy in Addis Ababa posted a cryptic message on its Facebook page, ending ominously with: “Game Over!”

The differences between Isaias and the TPLF were not merely personal. Isaias profoundly disagreed with the way Meles reorganised the Ethiopian state along ethnic lines. He has always regarded ethnic and religious sectarianism as a blight, and his party rejected this doctrine much earlier. For him, a federal state, with more power clusters, is far more difficult to influence—or manipulate—than a centralised one. He never talks about his Tigrayan ethnic background nor makes it a vehicle for his brand of politics. However, its institutionalisation in Ethiopia threatened Eritrea’s own more centralised and tightly controlled regime.

As he confronts that threat, and Eritrean troops occupy parts of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, it is difficult not to reflect on the last time Isaias found himself in a similar role—as Ethiopia’s kingmaker—almost three decades ago, when he was still a young rebel. He worked to undermine one rebel group and form another. That group went on to overthrow one of Africa’s most capable governments and to separate itself from it, creating a new state and a new society.

Whilst many struggle to break with their pasts, imprisoned by the circumstances they inherit, Isaias has always been a leader who plays for high stakes and insists on looking forward. His great vice, in many ways, is not that he was chained to the past, but that he chained himself to it—and dragged it into the present like a wrecking ball.

• This article first appeared on Democracy in Africa and has been republished by Geeska.