Time to step up the international effort on Eritrea’s human rights’ situation

Abraham Yemane

06/30/14

The repressive regime in Eritrea has long used its foreign relation problems as a smoke screen and diversion from the deteriorating human rights situation in that country. It had even succeeded in misleading some commentators that the situation is a result of Eritrea’s status as an international pariah.

For example, months ago, Messrs Cohen and Shinn made that kind of suggestion. Another writer made similar suggestion claiming that: ”Finding ways to engage Eritrea by creating more linkages between its government, economy and the outside world will be crucial to establishing the counter-incentives needed to draw it out of a narrow rhetorical focus on the border. The deeper Eritrea’s linkages outside of the region are, the more secure its position relative to Ethiopia will become (much as Ethiopia has managed its external linkages). Having both countries, and particularly Eritrea, more secure in their own international and regional positions could help move them towards a more realistic set of expectations for the eventual normalization of relations.”

The entire idea was not only a misguided notion that rewarding belligerency could be a solution, but it was also a failure to notice that Eritrea’s problem with her neighbors are a direct result of its repressive domestic policy.

As one US diplomat said, referring to Stalin’s policies after the Second World War: “A hostile international environment is the breath of life for the prevailing internal system…”. President Isaias’ is practices that Stalinist tactic. The Eritrean regime’s hostility to the outside world, the US and everybody else, is not caused by insecurity in the face of a continued threat posed by Ethiopia and the US.

Rather, the anti-Ethiopia, Anti-America rhetoric is the standard official line is a deliberate excuse for keeping national conscripts mobilized for more than a decade, and postponing the implementation of a constitutional order for since 2003. The excuses for the increasing sacrifices demanded of the population is provided by the threat of the “evil, hostile, menace of Ethiopia,” or by the machinations of the US and its control of the UN and indeed almost everybody else, as one writer observed.

However, it seems the international community is finally noticing the scale of abuse in Eritrea and the irrelevance of the excuses given so far. The UN Human Rights Council decided last week, ”to establish, for a period of one year, a commission of inquiry comprising three members, one of whom should be the Special Rapporteur, with the other two members appointed by the President of the Human Rights Council”. According to the resolution of the Council, the commission of inquiry will investigate all alleged violations of human rights in Eritrea, as outlined in the reports of the Special Rapporteur.

The UN Human Rights Council started taking a strong stand on Eritrea two years ago. It was on July 5, 2012 that the Human Rights Council appointed a Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea and adopted a resolution that ”strongly condemned the continued widespread and systematic violations of human rights committed by the Eritrean authorities, the severe restrictions on freedom of opinion and expression, and the forced conscription of citizens for indefinite periods.”

The 2012 resolution underlined that:

”the Council strongly condemns the continued widespread and systematic violations of human rights committed by the Eritrean authorities, including arbitrary executions, enforced disappearances and systematic use of torture; the severe restrictions on freedom of opinion and expression; the forced conscription of citizens for indefinite periods and the shoot-to-kill practice employed on the borders of Eritrea to stop Eritrean citizens seeking to flee their country.

The Council calls upon the Government of Eritrea to end its use of arbitrary detention and torture; to release all political prisoners, including the “G-11”; to allow regular access to all prisoners; to put an end to the policy of indefinite military service; to allow humanitarian organizations to operate; to end ‘guilt-by-association’ policies that target family members of those who evade national service or seek to flee Eritrea; to cooperate fully with the United Nations, in accordance to international human rights obligations; urges Eritrea to make available information pertaining to Djiboutian combatants missing in action since the clashes of 10 to 12 June 2008 so that those concerned may ascertain the presence and condition of Djiboutian prisoners of war. 

The Council decides to appoint a Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea, to report to the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly; and requests the Secretary-General to provide the Special Rapporteur with the resources necessary to fulfil the mandate.”

However, Eritrea’s response to that resolution was denial, denial and denial. It also tried to divert and confuse the issue by raising conspiracy theories.

In her response at the time, Eritrea claimed:

”As a small, least developed country, Eritrea had a limited capacity and faced protracted hostilities aimed at destabilizing its Government.  It believed that the international community had failed to contribute to the peace and stability of Eritrea.  Despite facing significant challenges, there were no human rights violations in Eritrea.”

As would be expected, Eritrea continued to act in total disregard of the Council’s concerns and recommendations.

One of those areas was the coercive collection money from the Eritrean diaspora. Irrespective of the way the tax is collected, the collection of the Diaspora tax and its extortion from Eritreans in the Diaspora is in clear violation of the UN Resolution 2023 of May 2011. This was an extension of an earlier Security Council UN resolution 1907 of 2009 which condemned the usage of the Diaspora tax for acts of destabilization including support and arming of the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al-Shabaab in Somalia. As would be recalled, Resolution 2023 went further, condemning the use of the Diaspora Tax collected from the Eritrean Diaspora by the Eritrean Government to destabilize the Horn of Africa region or violate other relevant resolutions, including 1844 (2008), 1862 (2009) and 1907 (2009). In this context it noted that possible purposes included “procuring arms and related materiel for transfer to armed opposition groups or providing any services or financial transfers provided directly or indirectly to such groups”, as outlined in the findings of the Somalia/Eritrea Monitoring Group in its 18 July 2011 report (S/2011/433). It called on Eritrea to cease all such practices.

Resolution 2023 also “decides that Eritrea shall cease using extortion, threats of violence, fraud and other illicit means to collect taxes outside of Eritrea from its nationals or other individuals of Eritrean descent, decides further that States shall undertake appropriate measures to hold accountable, consistent with international law, those individuals on their territory who are acting, officially or unofficially, on behalf of the Eritrean government or the PFDJ…”

However, Eritrea’s Ambassadors continued money extortion and, as a result, it has been reprimanded for in several countries.

For example: In Canada, a leaked audio recording revealed that the Embassy continued to undertake money extortion by holding unofficial meeting with the diaspora and saying (as CBS reported): “What we are saying is that you have to fulfill the law of the country to be an investor because you are a citizen of the country. Therefore, since what it comes down to is national honour and law, any service that requires a permit will have to remit two per cent.” An Eritrean told CBS that: “You have to go to the consulate and they arrange how you have to pay the money. They want two per cent … they don’t give you a reason. You have to pay the money. My family [in Eritrea] would get in trouble if I don’t pay.”

In consequence, the Foreign Affairs Minister of Canada expelled the chief Eritrean diplomat and issued a statement noting that:

“Canada has taken steps to expel (declare persona non grata) Mr. Semere Ghebremariam O. Micael, consul and head of the Eritrean Consulate General in Toronto, effective immediately. Mr. O. Micael must leave Canada no later than noon Eastern time on June 5, 2013. Today’s actions speak for themselves. Canada has repeatedly made clear to Eritrea to respect international sanctions and Canadian law. The Eritrean government is welcome to propose another candidate to represent it in Canada, but that person must be prepared to play by the rules. Our resolve on this matter should not be further tested.”

Nonetheless, the diplomats of Eritrea still continued money extortion in several western countries.

In Feb. 2014, the Guardian reported that:

The diaspora tax was banned by the UN security council in 2011 (pdf). Resolution 2023, supported by the UK, condemned the tax because it was being used to fund ”arms and related material” for rebel groups across the Horn of Africa. These included the Somali militant group al-Shabaab, an al-Qaida affiliate. Eritrea supported al-Shabaab as an indirect means of attacking Ethiopia, its long-standing enemy.

In May 2011 the Foreign Office notified the Eritrean authorities that ”aspects of the collection of a tax levied by the Eritrean government on Eritreans living in the UK may be unlawful and in breach of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations. The ambassador was told that until it was demonstrated otherwise the embassy should suspend, immediately and in full, all activities relating to the collection of the tax.”

Despite this warning, the Foreign Office is aware that pressure on British Eritreans to pay the tax has continued. Lady Warsi, the senior minister of state at the Foreign Office, confirmed in a written reply to Lady Kinnockthat the Eritrean ambassador had been warned he must comply with the resolution to desist from illicit means of collecting revenue from members of the Eritrean diaspora in the UK.

Similarly, Canada media reported this month that:

A year after Ottawa expelled the consul-general of Eritrea to put a stop to a money-making scheme his regime had set up in Canada, the dubious “diaspora tax” program appears to be continuing undeterred.

Under the system, the Eritrean consulate in Toronto tells expatriates they must hand 2% of their wages to the repressive African regime. The setup is part of a strategy that “routinely involves threats, harassment and intimidation,” according to a United Nations report.

Foreign Affairs officials have repeatedly warned Eritrea to end the practice. Last month, as a condition for maintaining a diplomatic post in Toronto, Eritrea agreed the consulate would not have any role in the solicitation and collection of taxes.

But several Eritreans who recently phoned the Toronto consulate said they were told they would have to pay the tax. They tape-recorded the conversations as evidence the consulate was still an active player in the taxation scheme.

These and other violations are re-confirmed in the report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea, Sheila B. Keetharuth.

In a section of the report titled ”Brief update on the situation of human rights in Eritrea”, Mrs. Sheila B. Keetharuth stated that:

20. In her first report, the Special Rapporteur endeavoured to corroborate patterns of human rights violations through the gathering of first-hand information. She confirmed that violations of human rights in Eritrea included indefinite national service; arbitrary arrests and detention, including incommunicado detention; extrajudicial killings; torture; inhumane prison conditions; infringement to freedoms of movement, expression and opinion, assembly, association and religious belief; sexual and gender-based violence; and violations of children’s rights. Information gathered for the present report confirms that the above- mentioned violations continue unabated.

21. Arbitrary arrests and incommunicado detentions were carried out in the aftermath of the attempted coup d’état on 21 January 2013, dubbed the “Forto incident”. Over 50 people, including public figures were arrested and detained, with no information as to their whereabouts, nor have they appeared before any court of law.

22. There is still no information regarding the 11 members of the G-15, nor the 10 independent journalists who were arrested in 2001. The Special Rapporteur reiterates her request for specific information on their whereabouts and their state of health, especially in the context where some of them may have died in custody.

23. While freedom of the press and the media has been repressed, an underground newspaper, The Echoes of Forto, has been in circulation in Asmara, since September 2013, the anniversary of the 2001 arrests of the journalists from the independent press.

24. Guilt by association continued, with parents asked to pay substantial fines of 50,000 Nafka (ERN) for each family member who has left the country, although the parents often have no knowledge of their children’s plans. In the high-profile case, in which the former Minister of Information failed to return to Eritrea after a trip abroad, his elderly father, his 15-year-old daughter and his brother were arrested and detained; they remain in detention to date.

As a result, the UN Human Rights Council decided last week, ”to establish, for a period of one year, a commission of inquiry comprising three members”, which will ”investigate all alleged violations of human rights in Eritrea, as outlined in the reports of the Special Rapporteur”.

The resolution also stated that the Council:

Calls upon the Government of Eritrea to cooperate fully with the Special Rapporteur and the commission of inquiry, to permit them and their staff members unrestricted access to visit the country, to give due consideration to the recommendations contained in the reports of the Special Rapporteur, and to provide them with the information necessary for the fulfilment of their mandates, and underlines the importance for all States to lend their support to the Special Rapporteur and the commission of inquiry for the discharge of their mandates;

Urges the international community to cooperate fully with the Special Rapporteur and the commission of inquiry;

Also urges the international community to strengthen efforts to ensure the protection of those fleeing from Eritrea, in particular the increasing number of unaccompanied children; A/HRC/26/L.6

Requests the Secretary-General to provide the Special Rapporteur and the commission of inquiry with all information and the resources necessary to fulfil their mandates;

Requests the commission of inquiry to present an oral update to the Human Rights Council at its twenty-seventh session and to the General Assembly at its sixty-ninth session, and a written report to the Council at its twenty-eighth session;

Decides to transmit all reports of the commission of inquiry to all relevant bodies of the United Nations and to the Secretary-General for appropriate action;

It is to be expected that Eritrea’s response will be nothing but, as usual, belittling the resolution and the council. After all, that is what President Isaias does best.

Indeed, President Isaias’ appears addicted to the belittlement of multi-state cooperation platforms, whether the African Union, the United Nations or IGAD. His equally shamelessly ridicule of other sovereign states and their leaders also found expression in many his interviews. For example, recently he ridiculed IGAD’s efforts to mediate South Sudan’s groups. According to the President, IGAD’s widely recognized and supported efforts at mediation were a waste of time which could be dismissed as merely unimportant “business”.

After all, Eritrea’s long-held and repeated policy of rejection of any rule-based engagement with neighbors or the international community. The international community has long observed Eritrea’s endless denial, diversion and confusion tactics. It has become evident that, like any bully, Eritrea rapidly backs down when faced by firm action. Indeed, it is clear from past experience that the government in Asmara only responds to the threat of superior strength. Nothing less will produce change.

After all, several analysts often drawn comparisons between Eritrea and North Korea not least from its firm determination to remain a one party system with no room whatever for alternative political opinion or dissent. The idea of building a democratic order, with free elections and other necessary institutions, has always been no more than a topic to provide the President and others in his regime with the opportunity to cry out the rhetoric of ‘imperialist fouls’.

The President of Eritrea made this clear in one of his recent interviews, when he said that to think there would be ‘‘democracy and a multi-party system in Eritrea” would be a delusion that belongs in outer space and that people who thought there could be an alternative to his Peoples Front for Democracy and Justice were wasting their time. He made it quite clear the PFDJ would remain the only party in Eritrea, saying “we do not want to see any parties exist here other than the PFDJ…they do not exist…it is unthinkable”. He added: “if there are parties who wish to operate in this country, there is no place for them; they can go elsewhere, either in the moon or another planet.”

It is not a secret that President Isaias views those Eritreans who have fled from the misery of their own country to face problems and persecution as refugees elsewhere as if ”they are no more than thieves who have not paid their dues to their people and government” and that he believes the country will not suffer from their absence or be affected by their departure.

These are clear indicators of just how repressive and detached the regime has become and indeed of how increasingly disillusioned the people of Eritrea have become with a government that merely treats them as no more than inanimate objects.

It is high time the international community steps up the pressure on the tyrannical regime in Eritrea. The establishment of a commission of inquiry is a long overdue step to mitigate the suffering of Eritreans and advance a transition into a democratic and responsible regime in Asmara.

Swedish law firm reports Isaias Afewerki and several ministers to the police for crimes against humanity.

Several top Eritrean leaders have been reported to the police for crimes against humanity by a Swedish law firm, as a new law took effect enabling such crimes committed anywhere else in the world to be prosecuted in Sweden.

The report lists a series of alleged crimes including torture and kidnapping, and targets Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki and several of his ministers by name.

There is a lot of evidence from human rights groups, particularly about indefinite imprisonment without trial (in Eritrea). Percy Bratt, human rights lawyer

”This is not only symbolic. We believe there are legal grounds to prosecute the people we have named,” human rights lawyer Percy Bratt told the AFP news agency on Tuesday.

The legal move, the first of its kind in Sweden, was filed the same day that crimes against humanity were introduced into the Swedish penal code.

The code enables judges to prosecute crimes regardless of where they have been committed or by whom.

”There is a lot of evidence from human rights groups, particularly about indefinite imprisonment without trial (in Eritrea),” Bratt said.

”There are also many Eritreans in Sweden who could give information about the conditions in the country in general.”

According to the latest figures, 12,800 Eritreans live in Sweden, and the number of asylum seekers from the country keeps growing.

Swedish-Eritrean journalist Dawit Isaak has been imprisoned in Eritrea since 2001, and 13 years on little is known of his fate.

Bratt said that even if the case was taken on by the prosecutors, it could take years before criminal charges were laid, given the complexity of the allegations.

Eritrea, with a population of five million and a size about the same as Britain, is one of the most isolated and secretive countries in the world.

According to the United Nations, 4,000 Eritreans flee the country every year to escape ruthless repression, including unlimited forced labour for the government.

By Aljazeera:

UN Human Rights Council should do a study on human rights in Eritrea, similar to the surveys conducted around Syria, North Korea and Sri Lanka.

It condemned what they said was massive and systematic violations that the Eritrean government was behind, among other things, it is about arbitrary executions, journalists being imprisoned and the people trying to cross the border shot dead.

Yusuf Mohamed Ismail who is ambassador to Somalia and the underlying requirement of the investigation said the UN Council to violations of human rights in Eritrea is unparalleled and that Eritrea is one of the worst examples in terms of human rights.

UN Human Rights Council consists of 47 countries. The Council decided on the investigation without a vote, but China, Pakistan, Venezuela and Russia said they had reservations, but they did not try to block the investigation.

UN special rapporteur on human rights in Eritrea, Sheila B. Keetharuth said in a report to the Council to conscription in Eritrea could lead to forced labor for an indefinite period. People who resist can be executed on the spot.

Because of this, Eritrea is the country with the highest number of people fleeing across the Mediterranean to Europe.

Eritrea has refused to cooperate with Keetharuth and deny that they have committed crimes against humanity.

Eritrea’s representative at the meeting said that Keetharuths report was biased and unfounded and Eritrea rejected entirely the call to start an investigation. Eritrea’s representative argued that the fictional image of Eritrea had become the basis for a false crisis and blamed its neighbor Ethiopia.

He also said that it is obvious that the investigation was part of Ethiopia’s attempt to enforce UN sanctions against Eritrea. The investigation will be done by Sheila B. Keetharuth and two experts from Africa and Europe.

GENEVA, Friday

The UN’s top human rights body launched an investigation on Friday into widespread abuses in Eritrea, including extrajudicial executions, torture and forced military conscription that can last decades.

“The human rights crisis in Eritrea has been forgotten for too long and the scale of violations is unparalleled, putting the country among the worst human rights situations worldwide,” Somalia’s representative to the UN in Geneva, Yusuf Mohamed Ismail Bari-Bari, told the council.

The UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution tabled by Somalia and France establishing a one-year special commission of inquiry into the situation in the autocratic Horn of Africa state.

China, Pakistan, Venezuela and Russia refused to join the consensus, but the resolution passed without a vote, calling for the creation of a three-member investigation team to probe “all alleged violations of human rights in Eritrea.”

RESOLUTION SLAMMED

The team will include the UN’s current monitor on the rights situation in the country, Sheila Keetharuth, and is set to present its findings to the 47-member council during its February-March session next year.

Eritrea’s representative on the council, Teestamicael Gehrahtu, slammed the resolution which he said was made up of “fabrications, wrong perceptions and baseless assumptions” used to create the illusion of a “fake crisis.”

He accused Eritrea’s arch-enemy Ethiopia of orchestrating the resolution in a bid to raise international pressure on his country.

Keetharuth told the council last week that brutal government repression and Eritrea’s system of open-ended conscription of all men and women at the age of 18 was driving nearly 4,000 Eritreans to flee the country every month.

She told reporters that many in Eritrea are forced to toil for hardly any pay in the military and other state jobs, including in ministries and schools, until retirement age.

MILITARY TRAINING CAMPS

Friday’s resolution equated the system with “forced labour.”

It said children are forced to complete their final year of school in military training camps, and deplored the “intimidation and detention of those suspected of evading national service in Eritrea and their family members.”

Friday’s resolution also strongly condemned other serious rights violations committed under the iron-grip rule of President Issaias Afeworki, including “cases of arbitrary and extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, the use of torture, arbitrary and incommunicado detention without recourse to justice, and detention in inhumane and degrading conditions.”

Eritrea is also ranked last in the world for press freedom by the rights group Reporters Without Borders.

Three years ago, a ship carrying African migrants sank off the coast of Libya. More than 200 drowned, including dozens of young people fleeing their repressive, impoverished home country of Eritrea. Few noticed. “The accident wasn’t broadcast at all,” says Selam Kidane, a human-rights activist and Eritrean expatriate in London. At that time, all eyes were on the Arab Spring; after the ship disaster, Kidane and other expats resolved to try to change the status quo in their homeland, too. “We were trying to look at ways of giving that kind of revolution a chance in Eritrea,” she says. “Then we realized that we were lacking the infrastructure that was in Egypt or Libya. Or anywhere.”

Most of Eritrea’s citizens had no idea the regimes of nearby countries were crumbling—or that a ship full of their countrymen had gone under. That’s because Eritrea, a Pennsylvania-size nation of 6 million, is the least connected country on earth, according to data compiled by the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union (ITU). For the past six years, Reporters Without Borders has ranked Eritrea the world’s worst in terms of press freedom. During the Arab Spring, Kidane and other activists began using radio signals to broadcast news into Eritrea. Libyan President Muammar “Qaddafi was one of Eritrea’s most loyal supporters, and [the government] still hasn’t reported on his death,” she says.

On Africa’s east coast, bordered by Sudan, Djibouti, and Ethiopia—from which it declared independence in 1993—Eritrea is a preindustrial country run by a 21-year-old dictatorship. Holding its citizenry like hostages, it’s known in the international press as the North Korea of Africa. Officials at the Eritrean Embassy in Washington and the president’s office in Asmara declined to comment for this story.

Story: Eritrea’s National Soccer Team, the World Leader in Defections

By some measures, Eritrea’s technology is worse than that of Kim Jong Un’s benighted fiefdom. Eritreans are permitted to place international calls and to access the Internet, uncommon privileges in Pyongyang. But only 1 percent of Eritrea’s population have a landline, according to ITU data, and only 5.6 percent have a mobile phone—the lowest share in the world. In North Korea, 4.7 percent of people have a landline, and 9.7 percent have a cell phone, not counting phones capable of making international calls that have been smuggled in from China.

Eritrea’s sole telecommunications provider, Eritrea Telecommunication Services (EriTel), is a government-controlled entity that can be difficult to deal with. To obtain a mobile phone, customers must pay 200 nakfa ($13.29) to apply for permission from the local authorities. They then pay EriTel $33.60 to get up and running, plus at least $3.65 every time they add talk credits to their SIM card. In a country where the average annual per-capita income is about $504, the fees add up fast. Those Eritreans who are fulfilling compulsory national service aren’t allowed to own cell phones.

The country’s first unofficial e-mail service was set up in the mid-1990s by Robert Van Buskirk, an American Fulbright scholar determined to stay in touch with his girlfriend back in the States. With help from Craig Harmer, an old high school friend, he connected a computer at the University of Asmara to one in California, using international phone calls to pass along e-mail messages. “For a couple years, we were running the whole country’s e-mail through Craig’s little private domain name: punchdown.org,” recounts Van Buskirk, now a program manager at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Today, fewer than 1 percent of Eritreans go online, according to ITU. The Internet is available in a handful of places, including Asmara, the capital—but it’s almost always via dial-up and requires Zen-like patience. “Even after waiting half an hour, you might not get to the page you want,” says Salem Solomon, an Eritrean-American journalist who attended college and worked as a reporter in Asmara. “Connectivity is very, very, very, very bad.” Eritrea was the last country in Africa to get a V-SAT (very small aperture terminal) connection linking it to the World Wide Web and remains one of the continent’s only two coastal nations without fiber-optic connections. There are only 146 fixed-line broadband subscriptions in the entire country. A handful of residents get dial-up connections at home for about $200 per month, says Tes Meharenna, who runs the diaspora site asmarino.com.

Eritrea has roughly 100 Internet cafes, Meharenna says. Most have 10 or fewer computers and are outfitted with waiting rooms. A typical hour of use costs $1.34, the equivalent of seven loaves of bread. At night, when the shops are closed and online traffic is down, some cafe owners download American movies and TV shows, such as Prison Break and Grey’s Anatomy, which they screen for a fee.

There’s little evidence Eritrean officials censor the Internet, perhaps because high costs and inefficiency have hamstrung its use as a tool of dissent. In an effort to reduce load times, some early political sites omitted videos, images, and ads so that “people with outdated hardware and software and limited bandwidth [would be] able to have access,” says Victoria Bernal, a professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of the forthcoming book Nation as Network: Diaspora, Cyberspace, and Citizenship. One Eritrean, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his family, says smugglers who help citizens flee the country often coordinate with low-bandwidth Yahoo! (YHOO) Chat.

Using an Eritrean phone book, the expat Kidane and her diaspora group began robo-calling Eritreans in 2012, telling them to protest the government by staying home on Fridays. They converted the contact numbers into a spreadsheet and raised $33,600 to finance a series of calls. “We would tell them we’re worried about them, worried about what’s happening in the country, and that we wanted people to start resisting the government,” Kidane says. Many were receptive. Some were afraid simply receiving the call could put them in danger. In May, the government blocked a batch of calls scheduled to coincide with Eritrea’s independence day celebrations, she says.

Kidane’s group has also started an online antigovernment newsletter, which in-country contacts help print and distribute. “We know it will take time, but we want to keep the spirit of resistance alive,” she says. The economically struggling government, she says, has incentives to strengthen communications technology: “The government wants the economy to improve. They want mining to improve and tourism to improve. For that to happen, they’ll have to create infrastructure.”

By Businessweek: