An unprecedented undercover investigation into one of the world’s most repressive regimes. Exclusive secret footage and testimony shed new light on shocking allegations of torture, arbitrary detention and indefinite forced conscription.
The United Nations estimates that Eritrea is among the top three countries, alongside Syria and South Sudan, with the greatest proportion of their citizens who have become refugees with 12,500 refugees per 100,000 people.
According to the U.N.’s last available estimates, released in mid-2020, more than half a million Eritreans have become refugees.
In FRONTLINE’s latest documentary,
Escaping Eritrea, producer Evan Williams set out to learn what was driving so many Eritreans from their homeland. He talked to FRONTLINE about his investigative journey, which stretched across five years, as he found people who were trying to smuggle secret footage out of the country and worked to corroborate their findings.
Isolated from the world by President Isaias Afwerki’s 30-year authoritarian rule, the east African nation of Eritrea remains intentionally unknown.
“It’s impossible, or very difficult, to get an accurate picture, because the government has closed the country so effectively that even those who have successfully fled the country are afraid to speak publicly, out of fear for what could happen to their families,” said Adotei Akwei, an Amnesty International deputy director who specializes in sub-Saharan Africa.
In the new FRONTLINE documentary
Escaping Eritrea, filmmaker Evan Williams explores the human rights landscape of one of the world’s most repressive regimes, from compulsory conscription to the ongoing exodus of refugees. The Eritrean government declined to respond to FRONTLINE, other than to say they’d seen many fabricated stories before. Here is an introduction to five of Eritrea’s biggest human rights crises.
In the more than four years he was detained in a military-run Eritrean prison, Michael said he never lost hope.
Speaking with FRONTLINE in 2016, in an early stage of what would be a multiyear investigation, Michael said he saw and experienced many abuses while imprisoned: months of brutal interrogations. Masses of fellow detainees packed into large, overcrowded holding rooms, many confined for years without trial. People driven out of their minds by the conditions in which they were being held.
But he was determined to escape one day and to bring a secretly filmed record of what he had endured with him when he did.