[LINK] "Exodus from Eritrea after independence dream became a nightmare"

[rfmcdonald]

Al Jazeera America's Dan McLaughlin reports on the ongoing exodus from Eritrea. The dream of independence has curdled, leaving flight the only option.

In the brutal misery driving an exodus of Eritreans to Europe, Feruz Werede sees both a national tragedy and a very personal betrayal.

Werede’s parents belonged to a guerrilla movement that spent 30 years fighting for Eritrean independence from Ethiopia, finally defeating one of Africa’s strongest armies in 1993 and propelling charismatic rebel leader Isaias Afwerki to power.

Since then, Eritrea has had no other president, held no national elections, and Afwerki has gone from being described by then-President Bill Clinton as a “renaissance leader,” to being called an “unhinged dictator” by Washington’s envoy to a country now dubbed the “North Korea of Africa.”

The United Nations refugee agency says that some 5,000 Eritreans are fleeing the former Italian colony each month, and outnumber other nationalities on the Mediterranean Sea crossings that have claimed more than 3,000 lives this year.

On a chilly autumn evening in a London café, Werede searched her phone for a photograph of a very different time and place: her parents’ 1980 wedding party in what was then a rebel-held region of Ethiopia.