http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2014/04/24/how-an-african-kidnapping-crisis-has-terrorized-d-c-s-eritrean-immigrants/
How an African Kidnapping Crisis Has Terrorized D.C.'s Eritrean Immigrants
Posted by Ben Gittleson on Apr. 24, 2014 at 9:57 am
Lawyer Michael Andegeorgis has helped Eritreans whose relatives have been
held for ransom.
The phone call came from eastern Sudan, just as the grocer reached the
corner of U and 9th streets NW on a spring day three years ago.
The man spoke clearly in Mebrahtialem Gebrekidan's mother tongue, Tigrinya,
the language of his native Eritrea. Your nephew is being held captive, the
voice told him. Pay us $7,000 and we'll release him. "I just opened my door
and stopped driving," says Gebrekidan, who lives in Columbia Heights.
Gebrekidan, 37, immigrated to the United States seven years ago, part of an
Eritrean diaspora that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. After a short
time in New Jersey, he moved to the D.C. area, where his sister also now
lives, and eventually took over ownership of Greenway Market, a grocery on
East Capitol Street that he sold last year. But he left behind family
members who he says struggle under oppressive political conditions in one
of the poorest countries on Earth.
Haben, Gebrekidan's nephew, had fled Eritrea, fearing harsh imprisonment
for skipping out on mandatory military service, and was taken by captors
almost immediately after crossing the border into Sudan. Gebrekidan
negotiated the ransom down to $4,000; he sent it to friends in Sudan who
traded the cash for his nephew, who made his way to the Sudanese capital,
Khartoum. But just three months after he was released, the nephew, then
around 20 years old, was kidnapped again by tribesmen in the area, called
Rashaida, after he was betrayed by smugglers he'd enlisted to bring him to
Israel. They kept him in Egypt's Sinai peninsula and demanded $33,000,
according to his uncle.
Gebrekidan reached out to family and friends in England and Israel, who
struggled to come up with the cash as his nephew was beaten, electrocuted,
and hung upside down "like Jesus Christ," Gebrekidan says, his arms
outstretched as he recalls the story in an Ethiopian bar in Bailey's
Crossroads. It took three weeks to gather the money, after which the
traffickers brought the young man to the Israeli border. He crossed and was
picked up by Israeli soldiers, then was released and has been living in Tel
Aviv since, according to Gebrekidan.
Gebrekidan is one of the thousands of Eritreans across the globe whose life
has been touched by torture and extortion. Preying on Eritreans'
vulnerability--they lack help from their own government, which has been
accused of complicity in the kidnappings--the hostage-takers have benefitted
from chaos in a region whose poor aren't among the top priorities of
humanitarian organizations or international bodies.
Because of its sizable population, the Eritrean immigrant community in the
D.C. area has been particularly affected by this crisis. Worries about
kidnappings often dominate discussions in businesses around the U Street NW
corridor, a center of Eritrean émigré culture in the region, and East
African bars and shops in Springfield and Silver Spring. Last May, hundreds
turned out for a march across Washington hoping to raise awareness of
Eritrean refugees' hardships, and a conference in Alexandria brought
experts and advocates together to discuss the human trafficking. From cab
drivers to lawyers, a large number of Eritreans in the region--a population
that could be as large as 50,000 people, according to Tricia Redeker
Hepner, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of
Tennessee who has researched the Eritrean diaspora, although that's an
educated guess--seem to have been affected. Their home country has long
suffered from poverty and political oppression, but the kidnappings are
relatively new, intensifying in frequency over the last few years and
gaining occasional media attention.
Still, many Eritreans in the D.C. area who have had relatives or friends
kidnapped are afraid to speak up, worried about reprisal from the regime or
afraid to confront the issue, according to Solomon Sengal, 53, an Eritrean
human rights activist in Springfield.
"There are a lot in this area, but they don't talk, they don't want to
talk," Sengal, an electrical engineer, says. "They just quietly pay the
ransom and keep it quiet."
* * *
Life in the D.C. area is idyllic compared to the years of warfare and
political oppression many émigrés experienced in Eritrea, a small nation in
the Horn of Africa that gained independence from Ethiopia 21 years ago. But
in recent years, Eritreans' lives have been frequently interrupted by
frantic phone calls from the deserts of Sudan and Sinai, a troubled
territory populated by Bedouin tribesmen that provides a refuge for jihadi
militants.
"If you go out to some of the coffee shops where Eritreans gather, you hear
all these stories," says Michael Andegeorgis, executive director of the
Alexandria-based Eritrean Law Society and an immigration attorney. Everyone
seems to know someone who has contributed to a ransom payment, if they
haven't themselves--by dipping into savings, responding to pleas on
Facebook, and rallying community members at churches and cafes.
"You just receive a phone call out of nowhere, like a distant cousin,"
Andegeorgis says. "You didn't even know this kid left the country. But you
receive the phone call telling you, he's in the Sinai desert, please help
him."
Andegeorgis, 40, moved to the United States from Eritrea 12 years ago to
attend graduate school, got married, and stayed. He says Eritrean culture
emphasizes helping community members when they're in financial need.
Andegeorgis once chipped in money for a kidnapping victim--the relative of a
friend in Oakland, Calif., he says.
"Clients bring it to my attention in my office," he says. "We hear it quite
frequently."
Eritreans began migrating to the U.S. in small numbers in the 1960s, when
the country was still part of Ethiopia, according to Hepner. Subsequent
waves in the 1980s and over the past five years brought thousands more,
mainly as part of refugee resettlement programs, and the D.C. area has long
been home to one of the largest communities in the country, Hepner says.
Spread out across northern Virginia, the District, and the Maryland
suburbs, many Eritreans frequent the same cafés, groceries, and
hairdressers as members of the region's sizable Ethiopian community,
scattered in strip malls and storefronts from Falls Church to Silver
Spring. Despite political differences, Eritrea and Ethiopia share many
cultural, religious, and culinary traditions. Around U Street NW,
restaurants like Keren, Dahlak, and Selam serve Ethiopian and Eritrean
fare. An Eritrean cultural and community center is located at 6th and L
streets NW.
The Eritreans in the D.C. region are among the luckier ones. Fleeing
persecution at home, hundreds of thousands of Eritreans have become
refugees over the last several decades. Poverty, political repression, and
a dictatorial regime that requires indefinite conscription have pushed many
into Sudan, Ethiopia, and Israel. They often pay smugglers thousands of
dollars to reach Israel or Europe, but in the last several years, more and
more Eritreans have instead ended up as hostages in Sinai after their
smugglers sold them to Bedouin tribesmen, many of whom live just miles from
the Israeli border.
The kidnappers beat, rape, and kill many of the hostages, often as they
plead on the phone with relatives to pay ransoms that can reach as high as
$50,000. Former hostages and human rights activists tell stories of
abductors chaining the hostages to one another, beating them with rods,
dripping molten plastic onto their backsides, and electrocuting them. Men
and women are sexually abused and threatened with organ harvesting. Some
are killed as a warning to others to pay up.
The traffickers steal hostages' phones and look for information about
relatives in the West, who can pay higher ransoms, sometimes by wiring the
money via Western Union or MoneyGram. Little has been done to track the
money transfers, largely since no international body has seriously taken up
the issue. More than 1,000 people, the vast majority Eritreans, were being
held hostage in Sinai as recently as last spring after a peak of more than
2,000 was hit in 2012, according to Meron Estefanos, an Eritrean activist
and radio host in Sweden who has spoken with hundreds of kidnapped people
in the region and written reports on the subject.
The flow of sub-Saharan Africans into the territory virtually stopped when
the Egyptian military stepped up a campaign against militants in northern
Sinai last summer, but it picked up again in November, and there are now
between 100 and 150 migrants being held there, Estefanos says. Between
4,000 and 10,000 Africans have died or gone missing in Sinai, while around
20,000 survivors of torture in the peninsula now live elsewhere, she says.
In a February report, Human Rights Watch blasted the Egyptian and Sudanese
governments for not doing more to stop trafficking. Keeping the victims
coming is "hugely profitable" for the traffickers, according to Claire
Beston, the Eritrea and Ethiopia researcher for Amnesty International.
"There must be some kind of justice for those who were lost in Sinai,"
Estefanos says. "It is really sad."
* * *
The hostage crisis, of course, doesn't just impact Eritreans abroad.
Hostages in Sinai have reported their families in Eritrea selling off all
their property and possessions to come up with amounts of money
unfathomable in a country where the per capita gross domestic product last
year was $1,200. "No one in Eritrea can afford that much," says Alem
Zewoldai, 64, an Eritrean opposition political activist in Arlington who
has contributed to a ransom payment. "So what they do is call relatives
over here or in Europe, and they ask for help so their child can be saved."
The U.S. embassy in Eritrea's capital, Asmara, sometimes hears from
concerned relatives or friends, and officials there direct them to
appropriate law enforcement agencies, according to an official from the
Office of East African Affairs in the State Department's Bureau of African
Affairs.
But some family members take a more direct approach. When Tesfu Teckle, 57,
a bus and taxi driver from Takoma Park, received a call in 2009 from people
who were holding his 17-year-old nephew in Sudan, he recognized the
language the kidnappers spoke. "I said, 'I know you are Eritreans. If you
kill that child, I promise someone from your family will get killed,'" says
Teckle, a pro-democracy activist who is on the board of the America Team
for Displaced Eritreans, a Pennsylvania-based refugee assistance
organization. His nephew was held in isolation until Teckle could wire the
$3,000 the hostage-takers demanded to Sudan, where a friend made the
exchange.
Sinai remains a largely lawless area. For Egyptian leaders struggling with
domestic tumult, East African hostages remain a low priority. Meanwhile, a
U.N. Security Council report in 2012 linked senior Eritrean military
officials to the trafficking. "There are clear signs that the Eritrean
government is aware of it and involved with some of the details of the
kidnapping and extortion," John Stauffer, the president of the America Team
for Displaced Eritreans, says.
In a statement, Eritrea's chargé d'affaires in Washington, Berhane Solomon,
calls the U.N. report's accusations "baseless" and says the Eritrean
government and military have actually tried to combat trafficking. The
army, he says, "has been registering substantial achievements in bringing
individuals and groups to justice."
Sengal, the human rights activist in Springfield, says Eritreans feel
helpless when the countries that can act have not done so or have even
encouraged the kidnappings. Over a lunch of stews and injera, Sengal
explained how his brother and sister-in-law, as well as their two small
children, were tricked and held by the Rashaida in Kassala, Sudan, at the
end of 2011.
Sudanese security officials eventually freed them, but only after the
captors beat his brother and demanded $9,000 for the family's release.
"They are cattle," Sengal says, calling these initial payments "appetizers"
since the traffickers often take the money, then sell their human cargo to
others who ask for even more. "They bring them to one place until they send
them to the slaughterhouse."
Ocbai Kifle, who sells half-smokes and drinks at his food cart near
Judiciary Square, moved to the U.S. from Eritrea in the mid-1980s. Three of
his relatives have been kidnapped in Sudan, including one who was taken to
Sinai.
Right from the start, says Kifle, 61, he decided not to let the traffickers
push him around. The first time he got a call about a kidnapping, of his
brother in 2011, he became incensed when he learned the young man had
disregarded his warnings about trafficking.
Kifle refused to pay the $7,000 the hostage-takers wanted, although his
sister and another brother did eventually hand over a smaller amount of
money.
"The whole world knows," Kifle says of his countrymen's travails. "I'm not
saying the world is not helping us, but it's not enough."
Photo by Darrow Montgomery
Received on Thu Apr 24 2014 - 10:21:12 EDT