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On Monday, the United Nations released the results of a year-long investigation into human rights in Eritrea. What it found was horrific. Detailing ”systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations,” the U.N. commission of inquiry argued that Eritrea was operating a totalitarian government with no accountability and no rule of law.

”The commission also finds that the violations in the areas of extrajudicial executions, torture (including sexual torture), national service and forced labor may constitute crimes against humanity,” the report said.

However, it appears the report failed to produce any mainstream outrage. Unlike similar U.N. reports on alleged crimes against humanity in North Korea, or online criticism of human rights abuses in places such as Saudi Arabia or Qatar, the horrific accusations against Eritrea didn’t produce a viral outcry.

Why not? It certainly doesn’t seem to be because of the severity of the accusations. Crimes against humanity are pretty much as serious as you can get, and it’s hard to read the United Nations’ full report and not be shocked.

It’s hard to imagine now, but hopes were initially high for Eritrea in 1993 after it gained independence from Ethiopia after 30 years of civil war. Since then, however, President Isaias Afwerki has clamped down and allowed no room for an opposition. The U.N. report described a Stasi-like police state that leaves Eritreans in constant fear that they are being monitored.

“When I am in Eritrea, I feel that I cannot even think because I am afraid that people can read my thoughts and I am scared,” one witness told the U.N. inquiry.

The system leads to arbitrary arrests and detention, with torture and even enforced disappearances a part of life in Eritrea, the U.N. probe found, and even those who commit no perceived crime often end up in arduous and indefinite national service that may amount to forced labor. Escape is not a realistic option for many: Those who attempt to flee the country are considered ”traitors,” and there is a shoot-to-kill policy on the border, the report said.

It’s also worth noting the significant effort and risk put into creating the report: The Eritrean government refused to allow the United Nations access to the country to investigate, so the U.N. team interviewed more than 550 witnesses in third countries and accepted 160 written submissions. Many approached by the United Nations declined to give testimony, even anonymously, citing a justifiable fear of reprisal.

Still, experts don’t seem too surprised at the lack of outrage generated by the report. ”Clearly, Eritrea doesn’t capture the imagination, or rouse the conscience of Americans, much in the way North Korea does,” Jeffrey Smith, an advocacy officer at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, explained. ”President Afwerki, while unquestionably a chronic human rights abuser and eccentric despot, isn’t portrayed by the American media in the same way that Kim Jong Un is.”

”North Korea also makes headlines for other reasons — namely its nuclear ambitions and the ongoing threat it poses to regional stability in East Asia,” he added. ”Similarly, while Eritrea is certainly a police state similar to North Korea in many ways, it’s largely kept out of the headlines because Africa in general doesn’t feature highly on the agenda of policymakers here in the United States.”

The fact is, while the scope and authority of the U.N. report lent its allegations an added weight, academics and human rights researchers had long written similar things about the Eritrean state without a significant mainstream response in America or Europe.

In 2014, for instance Human Rights Watch called Eritrea ”among the most closed countries in the world” and pointed to ”indefinite military service, torture, arbitrary detention, and severe restrictions on freedoms of expression, association, and religion.” Reporters Without Borders has repeatedly ranked it as the worst country in the world for press freedom — worse even than North Korea.

”The U.N. report? We knew it already,” said Ismail Einashe, a Somali-British journalist who works with Eritrean migrants. ”Too little, too late.”

Despite this, some reports on the country ignore this and focus on another aspect of Eritrea: Its unlikely tourism sector. International isolation, a history as an Italian colony and reported Qatari investment may have made Eritrea a unique if distasteful vacation destination: As one travel blogger put it last year, the capital of ”Asmara felt much more like Naples than North Korea.”

Sara Dorman, an expert in African politics at Edinburgh University, doesn’t think much of either comparison.

”I don’t think it’s particularly helpful,” she said of the country’s reputation as the ”North Korea of Africa.” At the same time, she stressed that Eritrea really does deserve to be seen as a special case. ”As somebody who studies authoritarian regimes elsewhere in Africa, the Eritrean regime’s control over its population is qualitatively different than other African states,” Dorman said, before pointing to features such as the scale of Eritrea’s intelligence service and the practice of punishing entire families for the crimes of one member.

There are plenty of historical arguments for why the world should pay more attention to what’s happening in Eritrea. Former colonial rulers Italy and Britain have an obvious legacy there, and so does the United States, which allowed Ethiopia to incorporate Eritrea with the aim of keeping the U.S. Kagnew Station military base in the country. In addition, Eritrea has a difficult recent history with its East African neighbors: It’s currently under U.N. sanctions for supporting al-Shabab, the Somali Islamist group, and others in the region.

But one important reason to pay attention has become an unavoidable reality for Europe. Eritreans make up a large share of the migrants crossing the Mediterranean in flimsy boats to seek asylum in Europe: More than 22 percent of those who made the journey in 2014 were from the country, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, second only to Syrians. They flee not because of a civil war like that in Syria, but because of the immense restrictions the Eritrean state puts on their lives. As one escaped Eritrean put it, life there is a ”psychological prison.”

The Washington Post

In recent years, Eritrea has been the country with the most asylum seekers to Norway. Many have fled from the very repressive regime. Several of them said, however, that there are people who support the Eritrean regime, which has been granted asylum in Norway. What do they do here?

Eritrea may have committed crimes against humanity, a year-long UN human rights inquiry said in a report published yesterday (8 June) describing extrajudicial killings, widespread torture, sexual slavery and enforced labour.

Eritrea – no other country in Africa and more people to flee to Germany. But even here it is possible the dictatorship, to force them to pay taxes. The money stabilized a brutal system.

No African country has in the Mediterranean to complain more deaths than Eritrea. In the biggest shipwreck off Lampedusa in April came almost every second of the 900 drowned from the military dictatorship in the northeast of Africa.

Up to a quarter of the population should be already emigrated, 70,000 to Germany. Last year alone, 13,253 Eritreans sought asylum in this country. So that the country was behind Syria and Serbia to third countries of origin, a year earlier led the list at even. Most Eritreans received a protection status, no one will be deported to the one-party state in the Horn of Africa.

”If you are young and can bear the costs, who flees,” says the 45-year-old Eritrean Yohannis Salomon * from Frankfurt am Main, who was sent in 1992 provided his parents with a plane ticket and a visa for 4,000 German marks to Germany now works for a major German car manufacturer.

”Without money you can not escape the government,” said Solomon, who meets weekly with newly arriving Eritreans and helps them to gain a foothold in Hessen. ”Who needs a visa today, employees of the German embassy in the neighboring country Ethiopia needs to bribe the demand now between 20,000 and 30,000 Euros,” says Solomon. From the Foreign Office states: ”The Embassy Addis Ababa goes together with the Foreign Ministry expressed any suspicion of irregularities by In recent years, however, not a single such suspicion has been confirmed..”

Because of the visa difficult to obtain, says Solomon, would become the most not by plane, but over the Mediterranean Sea. The neighboring country Sudan to gelange relatively easy walk, but there would be up to 5,000 euros due to breakneck ride on the back of a Toyota pick-ups in the ravaged by Islamist militias Libya. ”For the crossing Libya-Lampedusa my little sister I paid 1800 Euros”, reports the dissident Eritreans who a half years ago also brought his parents to Frankfurt – a tourist visa.

The dictator demanded taxes from the refugees

Blame for the exodus from the narrow strip of land on the Red Sea is the brutal dictatorship of former President Isaias Afwerki’s Liberation Army of the profits from the mass emigration.

The Eritreans leave the country, but then many of them will help to stabilize the military regime not only because a substantial part of the capital, there is, as in many other developing countries, remittances from the emigrants to their families.

But also because the government of the 5.2-million-inhabitant country one rubs a so-called construction tax of two percent of the income of the emigrants. Salomon refuses to pay this tax, but other Eritreans report to the ”world” as brazenly abzockt the military regime the exiles away from home.

”By 2011, we have delivered the tax once a year directly to the Eritrean Consulate in Germany,” said Avet Bisrat *, who works in a West German city as a social worker. Ever since the Eritrean diplomats to pressure the federal government ended this practice, however, the tax was never abolished. ”Anyone who someday want to do anything in Eritrea must continue to pay,” says Bisrat. ”When I start a legacy, a land buy, a birth certificate would -. I always need the certificate that I paid the two percent of my annual income”

Two percent of net income will be due

Whoever fails to deliver the sum, gets no more services from the Eritrean government. The tax rip-off has been running since 2011 on detours, Eritreans report: ”They do it now so if I fly to Eritrea, I have to deliver the money to the local government – then I get my certificate,” says Bisrat. If he even fly, he’ll take the tax money from compatriots in the old country and bring their certificate back to Germany. Conversely, would take over family or friends his payments, if he is not travel one year after Africa. Last submitted research by NDR, SWR and ”Süddeutsche Zeitung” suggests that many Eritreans in Europe the building control must even pay their benefits.

From the Foreign Office states: ”The Federal Government has the foreign representatives of Eritrea in Germany as early as 2011. asked not to carry out the recovery of the construction control over foreign missions insights into a collection of the tax by illegal means on German territory are not in front of the Foreign Office..”

The question of what undertake the Federal Republic against the foreign tax, does not answer the office. 2013 informed but with a Question Time in parliament that since 1995 ”All Eritreans living abroad pay two percent of their net income received in that country on the Eritrean government” must. He continued: ”After the appropriate legislative provision the Eritrean Ministry of Foreign Affairs in cooperation with its foreign representatives and agents has the world’s responsibility to ensure that the ’building control’ shall be referred to the relevant tax authorities in Eritrea The taxation itself is not contrary to rules of international law.. ”

How strong the dictatorship and their army depend on the structure of control, can only be guessed – the government published in principle no budget and no economic data. According to World Bank estimates, GDP amounted in 2013 approximately 3.4 billion US dollars.

East Africa expert Annette Weber from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin (SWP) says: ”The Eritrean regime is existentially dependent on the income from the construction of control”. Nevertheless, one must be cautious in all estimates to Eritrea because vorlägen no safe numbers. ”There are no surveys and no census. Nor do we know for sure how many refugees who were registered as Eritreans, actually come from the country. Senior diplomats in Western countries believe that many Ethiopians as Eritreans, because after Eritrea may not be deported, ”said Weber.

Detention, forced labor, torture

And indeed, hardly provides a country to its citizens so many good reasons for flight. The regime is obsessed with the fear that Eritrea could be conquered back from Ethiopia, from which after a decade-long war of liberation it successfully fought independence until 1993. Any opposition is nipped in the bud. Arbitrary detentions in prison camps, even in burrows or shipping containers are documented by the United Nations. A considerable part of the population has for many years under arms, until the age of 50 years, all men are regarded as reservists who can be withdrawn at any time and committed as militiamen or forced laborers for state enterprises.

Also Salomon reported that his last still remaining in Eritrea brother was currently detained because he was trying to flee when he had toiled for months without pay for a general of the army in a mine.

Suppression fearing Ethiopian invasion

What is the fear of the original socialist regime motivated before an invasion of Ethiopia, is reflected in the support for the Sunni militia al-Shabab. Although the Dictator suppressed the Islamist movement in their own country, the Eritrean army, according to a report by the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea from October 2014 for years trained Al-Shabaab fighters and equipped with arms and ammunition to hurt the common enemy Ethiopia ,

This conflict situation meets a group particularly hard: Christians who do not belong to the traditional Eritrean Orthodox Church. They are perceived by the government and of the Islamic part of the population as a threat. Another reason why most Christians flee from the half Muslim, half Christian populated country, the International Society for Human Rights informs (ISHR). The human rights organization Open Doors warns that it ”can lead to a bleeding of the Christian communities, as we have seen it about in Iraq” in Eritrea.

Yohannis Salomon currently has quite different problems in Frankfurt. He wants his many years also fled from Eritrea partner to marry, but the registry office requires her birth certificate. But the dictator with the pair a score to settle.

Det Welt