Day 340 - Eritrea, In The Beginning

by  e r j k p r u n c z y k 

My acquaintance with Eritrea goes back to my first assignment with the State Department in Stuttgart. A young woman from Eritrea who had somehow gotten to Germany applied for a visitor visa to the United States while I was working in the Visa Section of the Consulate. Eritrea was still part of Ethiopia at that time, but she made it clear that she was not Ethiopian. She was Eritrean. Eritrea was fighting a civil war with Ethiopia and did not gain its independence from Ethiopia until 1993.

She didn't have a residence permit for Germany, so it appeared that her goal was to get to the U.S. permanently. For that, she needed an immigrant visa. But even if she had a family member who could sponsor her application for an immigrant visa, it was unclear just how long she would be able to remain in Germany. It was unlikely that she would get permission to stay in Germany, so I asked when she planned to return to Eritrea. It was clear she did not plan to return, but it wasn't clear how she got out as her passport did not have exit and entrance stamps that showed the whole story. So I asked her, but at that point she just stopped talking. She seemed frightened. No amount of reassurance that I would not report what she said to anyone else, that I just needed to understand her situation, could convince her to tell me.

I declined her visa application. But that wasn't the last time I saw her. The next time she appeared, she applied for a fiancee visa. A fiancee visa is almost the same as an immigrant visa, but is issued before the marriage. When a fiancee visa is issued, the wedding must take place within 90 days, after which the fiancee visa recipient could apply for permanent residency. It would have been a very quick solution to getting her to the United States.  However, the applicant had never met the American who had petitioned for her to come to the U.S. so I could not issue the fiancee visa.

But she came back again. It was a few months later, and this time she brought in the American who had petitioned for her fiancee visa to prove that they had since met. Fortunately for her, they hadn't just rushed off to get married in Germany because if they had, she would have had to remain in Germany while he returned to the U.S. to petition for her to join him on an immigrant visa, a process that would have taken many months. 

From that story, I learned only that one person was desperate to get out of Eritrea and perhaps equally desperate to get into the U.S. But I was pretty certain others from Eritrea were equally desperate because of the civil war.

By the time I landed in Eritrrea, the country had been independent for more than 10 years. I naively thought that independence meant freedom. Maybe it did for the political leaders, but the people of Eritrea still lived under an autocratic ruler, just a different one.

Eritrea had been independent at an earlier time, although it also had been subject to Italian and British rule before it was absorbed into Ethiopia in 1951. The fact that the United States played a role in getting the United Nations Resolution that led to the federation of Eritrea into Ethiopia at that time has often been cited by the Eritrean government in its many complaints against the U.S.

Independence definitely does not equal freedom. I was about to see just how far from freedom life in Eritrea was.