Forced Recruitment into the EPLF - not a new phenomenon

Kjetil Tronvoll, a Norwegian anthropologist, spent two years living in the village of Mai Weini

From the book: Mai Weini, A Highland Village in Eritrea by Kjetil Tronvoll (1998)

Recently, a Reuters correspondent in Asmara witnessed the roundup of young Eritreans being forced into the military. Some of the Eritrean students were screaming as they were being dragged away. (April 19, 1999: Eritrea sweeps capital for draft dodgers)

This forced recruitment is nothing new for the EPLF, which has made Eritrea a one-party state and declared itself to be the sole legal party. Below is an excerpt from a book written by Kjetil Tronvoll in 1998.

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"It is well known that the EPLF employed coercion against the peasants in cases of political collaboration with the Ethiopians, which is quite rational in context of war. That they also used coercion in relation to peasant recruitment to the liberation army, on the other hand, is something very few observers of the Eritrean liberation war have recorded. This is probably because no researcher, to my knowledge, has lived among civilian peasants outside the EPLF base areas without any EPLF guide/interpreter. All field research has been carried out within the EPLF dominated/liberated areas, or with EPLF guides interpreters."

"Thus, methodically, my research is unique in an Eritrean context, in the sense that I worked in an area where the EPLF only had nighttime control during the final years of the struggle, and most importantly, I was assisted by a civilian interpreter. Together with the mutual trust through long-term fieldwork, this facilitated an environment within which some villagers dared to speak about coercion from the EPLF, and criticize the EPLF's politics and strategies."

"Let me here quote the words of a villager in his 30s, about his experiences with forced recruitment to the EPLF:"

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    I have been taken forcefully twice by the tegadelti when they wanted me to become one of them [a fighter]. The first time I was on my way to Saudi looking for work. At the coast, a small group of us were waiting for a boat to pick us up when we were taken by surprise by a small group of fighters. Since we did not carry any ID-cards saying that we belonged to the area, they brought us to an EPLF training camp in the northern mountains. They did not believe our explanations, and that we were trying to get work to feed our families back home in the village. After some weeks in the camp, however, I and one other man managed to escape, and I ran back to Mai Weini.

    The second time the tegadelti took me was a couple of years later, when I was home in Mai Weini eating. At that time some front-line fighters were passing through the village at night and forcefully took three of us with them. We tried to explain to them that we were needed in the village to take care of our families, but they did not listen. After seven days of walking, we were near Keren, I managed to escape from them during night-time, and return safely to my family in Mai Weini.


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