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Abinet spent six years completing her national service in one of Eritrea’s ministries, but when she joined a banned Pentecostal church, she was arrested, interrogated, threatened, released and then shadowed in a clumsy attempt to identify other congregants. She arranged to be smuggled out of the country in 2013 and is now in a graduate programme in human rights in Oslo.

Like Abinet, hundreds of Eritrean asylum seekers are landing on the shores of Italy. Eritreans are second only to Syrians in the number of boat arrivals, though the country is a fraction of Syria’s size and there’s no live civil war there.

Many Eritreans are feared to have drowned in Sunday’s shipwreck in the Mediterranean, from which the death toll could reach 950, with more migrant vessels reported in distress on Monday – the weekend’s incident has caused EU ministers to hold emergency talks on the growing migration crisis.

The reason most Eritreans cite for leaving is conscription for national service of indefinite duration, with pay so low their parents have to subsidise them.

There were other reasons I heard during the hundreds of interviews I conducted over the past year with Eritrean refugees in North America, Europe, Israel, Africa and Central America.

Refugees cited unrelenting abuse and humiliation, constant threat of imprisonment or torture for offending someone in authority, often without even realising how they had done this, or for abetting someone else’s escape or practising a banned religious faith.

The EU and a number of its member states are responding to this crisis by offering aid to Eritrea with the aim of reinvigorating its stagnant economy based on unofficial assurances that national service will be scaled back in the future. But they are missing an essential point: the crushing repression of Eritrea’s citizens, especially its youth, is as much a driver of the outflow of people as the lack of economic prospects. Nor are they separate, as the economy is almost completely dominated by the state and ruling party. Money alone will not change this.

However, despite the country’s belligerent behaviour in the region and its egregious human rights record, which have long left it isolated, there is an opportunity for engagement given that prominent regime officials have indicated a willingness to reform.

But if the EU and individual states jump too rashly and simply throw money at Eritrea, they risk entrenching the very practices that lie behind much of the exodus, while doing precious little to stem it.

Eritrea is dominated by its self-appointed president, Isaias Afwerki. He has surrounded himself with weak institutions, and there is no viable successor. Although the three branches of government – cabinet, national assembly and high court – provide a facade of institutional governance, real power is exercised through informal networks that shift and change at the president’s discretion. Theassembly has not met in a decade, and there is no published national budget. Every important decision is made in secret.

Under these circumstances, taking private pledges of reform at face value is a risky proposition. As a minimum, a date for an end to the practice of indefinite national service should be announced, along with a plan for a rolling demobilisation of those who have already served longer than the 18 months designated when the programme was set up in the 1990s.

Making this public would make it difficult – not impossible, but harder – for the government to renege on a promise it is quietly making to visiting delegations but not telling its own conscripts. Given President Afwerki’s unbending resistance to such moves in the past, there is reason to be sceptical. Such an announcement would be likely to slow the migration rate of those in military service, and preparing to be called up for it, but more is needed to stem the flow.

When I’ve asked refugees, especially recent arrivals, what it would take to get them to go back, there are two things they mention right away: the release of political prisoners, including those jailed for their religious convictions, and the implementation of the constitution, which was ratified in 1997 but has sat on a shelf in the president’s office ever since. It is deeply flawed and needs revision, but it would be a start.

Many also talk about the need for basic freedoms – of press, of speech, of movement, of religion – but the rule of law tops the list, as everyone wants to know what the rules are and that those in power have to play by them, too. Without this, few are likely to take promises of reform seriously.

Those policymakers in other countries inclined to re-engage with this regime and offer aid need to use this opportunity to demand hard evidence that change is coming and that it’s more than cosmetic.

There are more steps needed to ensure that Eritrea is really on a path from dictatorship to some form of nascent democracy with increased transparency in state affairs, reform of the deeply flawed judicial and penal system, and the nurturing of a political culture in which stable political institutions can take root.

Eritrea also needs a structured process of truth and reconciliation to give people back their history and start a process of healing on which this once promising new nation can build a future. And there has to be movement toward normalising relations with its neighbours, including Ethiopia. But one step at a time.

One thing is certain: if the wrong steps are taken at the outset – or false hope is raised and no steps taken – what little hope still flickers within the younger generation inside Eritrea will be further dimmed, more will flee, and it will be much, much harder to convince any of them to go back soon.

• Dan Connell is a visiting researcher at the Boston University African Studies Centre, who has been writing about Eritrea for nearly 40 years

The Guardian

Hundreds of people are feared to have drowned after a boat carrying up to 700 migrants capsized in the Mediterranean Sea, the Italian coastguard says.

The vessel, thought to be just 20m (70ft) long, capsized at midnight local time in Libyan waters south of the Italian island of Lampedusa.

So far only 28 people have been rescued and 24 bodies retrieved.

Italy’s PM said it was a European tragedy and called for an extraordinary EU summit on the migrants issue.

Matteo Renzi said he could not verify the number of deaths, but that it would be a ”dramatic amount”.

Live: Follow the latest developments

Former member of the League and the National Alliance was accused of illegal export of armaments to Eritrea and tax evasion. In 2009 he was arrested for bribery

The former regional Lombard Piergianni Flournoy was sentenced to four years imprisonment in the process Milan where he was accused of illegal export of armaments to Eritrea and tax evasion. This was decided by the Fourth Criminal Division of the Court of Milan, who has acquitted former political Lombard another accusation: the ’willful failure to execute the order of a judge’.

Flournoy, who in the past has already had several legal problems, was sentenced in particular for having taken part in the transfer to the African country of ”ten telescopes night of the third generation” for sniper rifles. In the process two other defendants were sentenced to suspended sentences and other persons accused in various ways, corruption and fraud have been acquitted instead. According to the hypothesis accusatory (substantially sustained by the tribunal) Prosperini would receive in black sums of money that had been recognized as a percentage for his role of mediator between some Italian companies and the Eritrean government.

Flournoy sentenced to 4 years for arms exports in Eritrea

This is not the first legal entanglement for the politician grew up in the Northern League and then passed to the National Alliance. Flournoy was already jailed in 2009, when he was Minister of Tourism of Pirelli, on charges of having received a bribe of 230 thousand euro on a contract for the television commercials worth over 7 million. He had been released from prison only after reaching a plea bargain agreement for years to three years and five months. Finished again under house arrest in spring 2010, had attempted suicide.

For 40-year-old Bereket Al-Azar, hearing of the atrocities in his birth country Eritrea is sometimes too difficult to stomach.

After immigrating to Canada at the age of 17, Al-Azar said he hasn’t returned to the Horn of Africa country since 2004, because he’s become critical of his government and it’s become too dangerous.

“I do not agree with what they’re doing,” he said.

Despite his reservations, Al-Azar is joining other members of Edmonton’s large Eritrean community Tuesday night to preview Sound of Torture, a documentary highlighting the struggle Eritrean refugees face as they flee their country and are targeted by human traffickers in Egypt.

“I’ve heard of this horrific story of what’s happening to Eritrean immigrants when they cross the Sinai Desert,” he said.

“The fact that others will be beside me, it will actually force me to watch it and then (hopefully) take action.”

Ghelle Berhe, a member Eritrean Justice and Human Rights Advocacy Association of Edmonton, said he hopes the film will shed light on the struggles of the Eritrean people for not just members of the local community, but for others as well.

The screening gets underway at the Citadel Theatre at 7 p.m.

By: Metro

Italian ship picked up on Saturday, nearly 700 migrants who crossed the Mediterranean in seven overflowing dinghies, according to the Italian Coast Guard.

Favorable weather has increased the number of people trying to get from Africa to Europe in the perilously small boats, and last Friday was rescued around 1000 migrants in similar circumstances, most of them from Somalia or Eritrea.