The appointment of Sophia Tesfamariam, Eritrean ambassador and apologist for a regime that has violated children’s rights in a widespread and systematic manner, to one of the most senior roles in the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is an outrage. It’s an opportunity to shine a light on the sufferings of children in Eritrea and Tigray at the hands of the Eritrean regime, and to challenge UNICEF to speak and act on behalf of those children.
Created in 1946 in the aftermath of the Second World War by the Security Council of the fledgling UN with the motto ‘The hope of the world lies in future generations’, UNICEF prides itself on being ‘the world’s leading organization for children and respect for their rights’.
At the heart of UNICEF’s work is the protection and physical and moral wellbeing of children, as well as the promotion of education for all of them. UNICEF also champions children’s rights and the right to childhood, and act as a shield against abuses such as gender-based violence and the recruitment of young people into armed groups.
An aspiration that contrasts with the appointment of Ambassador Tesfamariam.
Sophia Tesfamariam, Eritrea’s Permanent Representative to the UN, is a pillar of the single party that has ruled Eritrea since its de facto independence in 1991 (de jure 1993), the Popular Front for Democracy and Justice, formerly known as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front.
Nicknamed the ‘Gulag State’ or the ‘North Korea of Africa’, Eritrea is the small state that stretches along the shores of the Red Sea. It has no constitution, has never held free elections and is at the bottom of the league table for all individual freedoms (expression, press, religion, association, trade), not to mention ongoing human rights violations (disappearances, arbitrary detentions, torture) by the state, embodied by omnipresident Isayas Afewerki, of whom Sophia Tesfamariam is an open and ardent supporter.
National service, an open-ended compulsory conscription imposed since 1995, is the most striking feature of the system imposed by the PFDJ, as it shapes the entire life of Eritreans. Technically, Eritrea is a nation in arms.
This system has been fiercely defended by Sophia Tesfamariam for years. It is a system for the militarization of education. Indeed, all children must finish their schooling by passing through the Sawa camp to undergo military training in order to join the national service. Significantly, this ‘educational’ program, known as Warsay Yekalo, is placed under the authority of the Minister of Defense.
Reports by the UN Group of Experts have highlighted the institutionalized ill-treatment of adolescents in Sawa, including torture and punishment, as well as the systematic sexual abuse of young girls. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recounts this every single year, as do human rights organizations. For example, in 2019 Human Rights Watch published a report entitled “They Are Making Us into Slaves, Not Educating Us” How Indefinite Conscription Restricts Young People’s Rights, Access to Education in Eritrea. The champion of a regime that militarizes the education of its young people has just been appointed to one of UNICEF’s highest positions.
Conscription terrifies young Eritreans to the point where roundups — the dreaded giffas — have to be organized to bring them back to Sawa. In the face of the predicted hell, many have no choice but to flee and put their lives on the line across the Sahara and the Mediterranean. At a time when Europe is tearing itself apart over the migration crisis, it would be appropriate to face the reality: it’s Sawa and the PFDJ that are pushing thousands of Eritreans to find every possible way to leave their country. Many are trafficked through Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt and Libya. And when a skiff sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2013, drowning 360 Eritrean children and young people with it, Sophia Tesfamariam had not a word of compassion. On the contrary, she added insult to injury, dismissing them as ‘rich kids with a lot of money from the cities of Eritrea.’
Is this how UNICEF’s new Vice-President will defend the organization’s values of solidarity and unconditional protection for all children?
In the PFDJ system, the individual does not belong to him/herself, everyone belongs to the party. This is from birth. At international festivals promoting the regime, children are frequently shown with dummy weapons, mimicking the war against the Ethiopian neighbors, particularly the Tigrayans, against a background of hate-speech. Sophia Tesfamariam is no stranger to such events. She has distinguished herself by appearing with PFDJ youths in British Columbia, Canada, where the Nevsun mining company, financier of the regime and its lobbyists, is headquartered.
Hate-speech and war choreography morphed into bloody reality four years ago. Isayas Afewerki was one of the main architects of the Tigray war (November 2020-November 2022). According to an agreement with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Eritrean troops (former Sawa recruits, recall) entered Tigray territory. They are accused of having committed countless war crimes, including mass murder of civilians, the use of rape as a weapon of war, and the systematic looting and destruction of the population’s means of subsistence, as well as of essential infrastructure, including schools, which were looted and burned. Knowledge-brokers, teachers and clerics were especially targeted during the war. According to the Tigray Education Bureau, 88% of classrooms, 96% of desks, 97% of blackboards, 85% of computers and 63% of textbooks were damaged. Tigray’s education system was destroyed materially and its human capital killed or dispersed and has not been restored today. As I write, 60% of Tigrayan children are still deprived of schooling.
To defend this war, Sophia Tesfamariam wrote a letter to the Security Council on April 16, 2021, in her capacity as Permanent Representative to the UN. While the Eritrean government had previously denied the presence of its soldiers on Tigrayan soil, she de facto confirmed what had become self-evident by declaring that Eritrean troops would soon withdraw (meaning that they were in fact present). Hers was a false promise since they are still deployed today. She also denied all allegations of sexual violence.
And yet these rapes, particularly committed on children, have been widely documented, and even acknowledged by UNICEF in a press release on April 20, 2021, just four days after Sophia’s letter:
‘The personal statements I received from children who had been raped or testimonies of women who were victims of sexual violence were harrowing. You will all be aware that the President of Ethiopia, the Minister of Women, Children and Youth, the IASC Principals and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) have spoken against multiple cases of rape and sexual violence. I heard traumatic stories from survivors, one as young as 14. I heard reports of gang rapes. The level of cruelty described in these attacks was bewildering. This year, from the 1st January to 16 April, just one centre that UNICEF supports has received an average of three reports of cases of gender-based violence per day.’
The time arc stops precisely at April 16, the day of Sophia Tesfamariam’s statement on the Eritrean presence, but the spokesperson James Elder doesn’t explicitly mention Eritrean soldiers even though he knows they are the ones responsible. He can’t name the perpetrators, because that would have legal implications, but he does quote Ethiopian President Zewde Sahle-Worq, who denounced the war rapes, while another woman, Eritrea’s permanent representative to the UN, denies everything. At the same time, UNICEF reported on a sense of tension and even fear for the field teams:
‘But again, even for these brave and frontline mobile health and nutrition teams, security remains an issue. I spoke with one team leader who explained how his team had their ambulance stolen, and had to walk three days back to their health clinic. And as of right before this briefing, UNICEF has received credible reports of at least 16 incidents that impacted the activities of these mobile health and nutrition teams … in just the last two weeks. Nine were reported in the Eastern Region where the health workers had to leave the location due to fighting and direct threat from armed forces. The staff members were denied access to the programme locations and in some cases were threatened with death. In three locations the teams were forcibly relocated to other locations.’
But for Sophia Tesfamariam, these are just ‘allegations’. She now exercises responsibility over the very teams whose claims she denied just three years ago. Can they trust her? Or will they have to rely on her empty promises?
Despite the signing of a Cessation of Hostilities Agreement on November 2, 2022, which provides for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Tigray, the Eritrean army still occupies large swathes of territory, including the Irob region. The eponymous population, who live in a mountainous area of Tigray bordering Eritrea and have their own language and traditions, paid a heavy price during the war. They are now under the domination of the Eritrean army. The PFDJ has begun to educate young Irobs in an attempt to turn them into soldiers of the regime, and panic has gripped the community, which fears that its children will be rounded up and sent to Sawa. The regime is withholding aid and essential services to enforce its writ.
The destruction of the Eritrean and Tigrayan education systems, and the consequent attack on the childhood of all these little Eritreans and Tigrayans, are not the consequences of poverty or of some natural disaster. It is a deliberate, conscious policy announced by the PFDJ, of which Sophia Tesfamariam is an executive and active supporter.
And now the UN, through the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), has placed Sophia Tesfamariam at the head of its Child Protection Fund, UNICEF. This is not the only case of strategic entryism by the PFDJ and its allies into international institutions such as the UN and its agencies, and the European Union. But it the appointment of Sophia Tesfamariam is a particularly shocking case that warrants unreserved condemnation.
