At a Glance
Asmara, the ELF, and the Formation of a Liberation Commander
Isaias Afwerki grew up in Asmara in the years when Eritrea moved from Italian colonial rule through British administration to Ethiopian federation and ultimately Ethiopian annexation — a compressed political history that gave the city's educated young population an acute awareness of colonialism's mechanisms and a clear understanding of what was being done to Eritrea under Haile Selassie's systematic dismantling of the federation's autonomy provisions. He enrolled at Haile Selassie I University in Addis Ababa in the early 1960s, where exposure to Ethiopian student politics and to the political movements reshaping Africa and the Third World in the era of decolonisation deepened his political consciousness. When the ELF began its armed resistance in 1961, the political logic of joining was compelling for a young Eritrean man who had absorbed the period's liberation politics.
His training in China in 1967 exposed him to the Maoist model of people's war — to the theory of guerrilla struggle as a political as much as military process, of the liberation movement as simultaneously an armed force and a mobiliser of popular consciousness, of the guerrilla as a fish swimming in the sea of the people. This Maoist influence shaped his understanding of what the EPLF needed to be: not merely a military organisation fighting Ethiopian forces but a movement that was building the political consciousness and the social institutions of the Eritrean nation it was fighting to create. The EPLF's programmes in education, healthcare, and women's equality within the liberated zones were expressions of this vision — the movement as a state-in-formation, building the institutions of independence while simultaneously fighting the war that would make independence possible.
His role in the EPLF's founding break from the ELF in 1972 placed him among the reformist young fighters who believed the ELF's factional politics and regional divisions were incompatible with an effective liberation movement. The ELF-EPLF split was itself a moment of significant internal conflict within the Eritrean liberation movement — the two organisations fought each other as well as Ethiopian forces in the late 1970s, before the EPLF eventually established its dominance. Isaias's rise through the EPLF's structures to Secretary-General reflected both his organisational ability and his political acumen in navigating the movement's internal dynamics — a skill that would later manifest, in a far more sinister form, in his ability to neutralise the senior colleagues who might have challenged his authority in post-independence Eritrea.
The Military Victory and the Moment of Liberation
The EPLF's military victory of 1991 was an achievement of the first order — one of the most complete military defeats of an African government army by a liberation movement in the history of the continent. The sequence of events that produced it, from the Battle of Afabet in 1988 through the capture of Massawa in February 1990 to the final advance on Asmara in May 1991, represented the culmination of three decades of armed struggle and the vindication of a military strategy that had appeared, to outside observers, to be facing insuperable odds for much of its duration.
Isaias's personal role in the military victory was significant: as Secretary-General of the EPLF from 1987, he was the movement's supreme political and military authority in the crucial final years of the war, responsible for the strategic decisions that shaped the final campaigns and for maintaining the political coherence of a movement that was simultaneously fighting a war and preparing to become a government. His authority within the EPLF in this period rested on his organisational intelligence, his political acumen, and the personal relationships he had built across three decades of shared struggle — relationships that were, in the post-independence period, to be transformed into instruments of political control rather than foundations of democratic governance.
The liberation moment — the entry of EPLF forces into Asmara on 24 May 1991, the celebration of a population that had lived under occupation for thirty years, the establishment of a Provisional Government with Isaias as its head — was genuine and it was historic. The joy of Eritrean independence was real, and Isaias Afwerki was the person most responsible for achieving it. This fact does not redeem what followed, but it must be stated as clearly as what followed, because the distortion of suppressing either the achievement or the subsequent catastrophe produces a false account of one of Africa's most important political stories.
The Turn: Constitution, Democracy, and the Road Not Taken
The years between independence in 1993 and the September 2001 crackdown were years of ambiguous political development in Eritrea — years in which the democratic trajectory of the new state was unclear and in which the choices made by Isaias and his government determined that trajectory in ways that were not immediately apparent to outside observers. A constitutional commission was established and conducted extensive public consultations; the constitution it produced and that the National Assembly ratified in 1997 was a genuinely democratic document, providing for multiparty elections, an independent judiciary, and the protection of fundamental rights. The international community watched with cautious optimism.
What the international community did not fully appreciate was that the constitutional process was parallel to rather than integrated with the exercise of actual governing power — that Isaias was permitting the constitutional exercise to proceed while retaining all real authority in his own hands and in the PFDJ, the successor organisation to the EPLF, whose party structures were coextensive with the state apparatus in ways that made the constitution's provisions for independent institutions effectively meaningless unless Isaias chose to implement them. He did not choose to implement them. The constitution was ratified in 1997 and has never been put into effect. It remains, as of this writing, a document that describes a country that does not exist.
The 1998–2000 border war with Ethiopia provided the justification — or the pretext — for indefinite postponement of the constitutional order. The emergency conditions of the war, Isaias argued, required the maintenance of national unity and the suspension of normal political processes; once the war was resolved, democratic governance would follow. The war ended in 2000, but the democratic governance did not follow. Instead, as the border demarcation process stalled with Ethiopia refusing to implement the Boundary Commission's ruling, Isaias maintained the state of emergency and the indefinite conscription, and the political space for democratic expression continued to narrow.
September 2001: The Point of No Return
The G-15 letter of September 2001 and Isaias's response to it was the moment that definitively ended any ambiguity about the nature of his government. The letter's authors — Haile Woldetensae, Petros Solomon, Mesfin Hagos, and eleven other senior EPLF veterans — had liberation credentials equal to or exceeding Isaias's own; they were the people who had built the movement and the state alongside him; and they were asking, in measured constitutional language, for the democratic institutions that the movement had promised. His response — mass arrest, media shutdown, indefinite incommunicado detention — demonstrated that he understood constitutional governance as a threat to his authority rather than a commitment of the liberation movement he had led.
The simultaneity of the G-15 arrests and the press shutdown was deliberate and instructive. By eliminating both the institutional critics and the media that might have reported their criticism, Isaias ensured that the Eritrean public had no independent information about what had happened and no institutional channel through which to organise a response. The completeness of the information blackout — in a country that had already had limited press freedom — was the model for the comprehensive information control that has characterised Eritrean governance ever since.
The international context of September 2001 — the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, which dominated global attention in the days following the G-15 arrests and the press shutdown — provided Isaias with a degree of international inattention that he exploited effectively. The world was focused elsewhere, and the crackdown in Asmara received far less international attention than it would have in a different moment. By the time international human rights organisations had fully documented what had happened, the detainees had vanished into the security apparatus and the moment for immediate international pressure had passed.
The Eritrean State Under Isaias: A Reckoning
The Eritrea that Isaias has governed since independence is, by the measures of democratic governance and human rights, one of the most repressive states in the world. Freedom House has consistently ranked it among the world's least free countries. Reporters Without Borders places it at or near the bottom of its World Press Freedom Index. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Eritrea has documented systematic torture, arbitrary imprisonment, forced labour under the indefinite national service system, and the use of collective punishment against the families of those who flee the country or refuse to serve. The scale of the flight from Eritrea — a country of approximately three to four million people that has produced hundreds of thousands of refugees, including a disproportionate share of the migrants who have attempted the dangerous Mediterranean crossing to Europe — is itself evidence of the conditions inside the country that cannot be explained by poverty alone.
The Tigray conflict of 2020–2022 added a new dimension to Isaias's human rights record. Eritrean forces deployed in support of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's military campaign against the Tigray People's Liberation Front were accused by UN investigators, journalists, and survivors of widespread atrocities against the Tigrayan civilian population — killings, sexual violence, and looting on a scale that the UN described as potentially constituting crimes against humanity. Isaias denied Eritrean forces' involvement for months despite extensive evidence to the contrary, and no Eritrean officials have been held accountable for the atrocities.
The Insoluble Problem of the Liberation Tyrant
Isaias Afwerki presents, in its most extreme form, the problem that runs through the history of African liberation: the liberation leader who, having achieved the freedom he fought for, refuses to share it with the people for whom he claimed to be fighting. This is not a uniquely African problem — the history of revolutionary movements globally is full of figures who led their people to freedom and then imprisoned that freedom in authoritarian structures — but it is a problem that the African liberation movement's history confronts with particular frequency and particular acuity, because the moral authority generated by the anti-colonial struggle was so great and so genuinely deserved that its subsequent abuse carries a particular weight of betrayal.
Isaias liberated Eritrea from Ethiopian occupation. That is a fact of the first historical importance, and it required three decades of extraordinary commitment, courage, and organisational intelligence to achieve. He has since constructed a state that denies the Eritrean people the freedom for which that struggle was fought. That, too, is a fact of the first historical importance, and it represents one of the most complete betrayals of liberation's promise in the contemporary world. Both facts must be held simultaneously, without allowing the first to excuse the second or the second to erase the first. Eritrea's liberation and Eritrea's subsequent imprisonment are inseparable parts of the same story, and Isaias Afwerki is the person who made both of them happen.