I samband med internationella dagen för mänskliga rättigheter uppmärksammas Dawit Isaak stort i Österrike med tvådagars-manifestation, nyskriven teaterpjäs och tidningsartikel i landets största dagstidning av Reportrar utan gränsers Björn Tunbäck. Pjäsen ”Dawit oder Jedes Jahrhundert hat seine Fratze” av författaren Wolfgang Martin Roth, PEN ,har premiär på Schauspielhaus i Wien i kväll. Nedan följer Björn Tunbäcks text, ursprungligen publicerad på tyska i Der Standard.
The day of human rights day on 10 december: In Eritrea, the author and journalist DI, a Swedish citizen, has been in prison for 23 years. The EU and Sweden are passive. An art project in Vienna commemorates Isaak and his fellow travellers.
His 7-year-old daughter opened the door in Asmara that morning.The two men were invited to join the family for breakfast. Then they brought her father away. I wasn’t aware. I lived in Sweden and didn’t know him. 23 years have passed. During those decades I have spent endless hours talking, writing and thinking about him. But I still have never met him. And he hasn’t come back.
When Dawit Isaak was arrested he was 36. A month ago, he turned 60. His daughter has a child of her own. She lives in Sweden. He remains in detention in his native Eritrea. By now, Dawit and his few surviving colleagues are the longest detained journalists in the world. Their families and friends are scattered. The family of Seyoum Tsehaye, once the head of national TV in Eritrea, live in France. Poet and editor of Zemen, Amanuel Asrat, became a mentor for the young poet Yirgalem Fisseha, who is now in exile in Germany. Both Seyoum and Amanuel were arrested in September 2001, just like Dawit. None of them have been tried in court. They are held in isolation. The Eritrean regime will not even disclose where in the brutal Eritrean Gulag they are detained.
A price is paid here in Europe too, by wives, children, grandchildren, siblings and friends. But this is all curiously unknown here. Dawit Isaak is the only journalist and EU citizen adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. Still, his cause has never been in focus in the European Union. His case was not brought up when EU negotiated development agreements with Eritrea. Not even by Sweden where he is a citizen.
Why? I have had to ask myself that more than once. Dawit Isaak came to Sweden as a refugee in the 1980ies during Eritrea’s liberation war against neighbouring Ethiopia. Eritrea was an Italian colony until World War II. You still find Italian traces in the architecture. Dawit’s father spoke Italian as well as Tigrinya. The family ran the deli Casa del Formaggio in Asmara.
After the World War Eritrea was promised independence, guaranteed by the United Nation. Instead, Ethiopia took control. When Dawit Isaak was born in 1964, the Ethiopians controlled the police and the security machinery. His language, Tigrinya, was suppressed. There were no independent Eritrean newspapers. I have been told that Dawit always carried pen and paper as a youngster. His mother was a poet, and he was introduced to books at an early age. He wrote plays in school. Already then, he encountered censorship by the Ethiopians.
The escape to Sweden
Dawit fled to Sweden in 1986. He came to Lerum, a locality just outside of Gothenburg. There, his younger brother Esayas lived in the family of Leif and Elisabeth Öbrink. Esayas was more into football, but his older brother made him learn Tigrinya. Also, the Öbrinks helped Dawit set up a computer with Tigrinya. Thus, in 1988, the 24-year-old Dawit was able to publish his first book in Tigrinya, in Sweden. He called it Bana (Hope). Thanks to the computer he could type the script himself. I was of course unaware, but 30 years later got a glimpse of his debut. As it happened the mother of one of my colleagues was Dawit’s maths teacher in Lerum. Now I learned he came knocking on her door back in 1988, beaming. She didn’t know a word of Tigrinya but he absolutely wanted his teacher to have copy. He was so proud.
Bana is a love story and a tale conflict between generations. The Asmara teenagers Moses and Manna are in love, but her parents are against their relation. The two start doing homework together to be able to meet innocently. And Moses creates a part for Manna in one of his plays. But it does not end well. Tradition and her parents keep them apart.
In 1993 Eritrea became independent, after 30 years of liberation struggle. By then, Dawit Isaak was a Swedish citizen, but he returned to help build a new Eritrea. He set up a children’s theatre group. He wrote plays which were awarded internationally. He started a family. His daughter and her twin-brother were born in the independence year. Later he had a second daughter. Still, I had never heard of him. We had walked the same streets. Dawit had worked as a janitor in the Gothenburg cathedral. Maybe we met without knowing. I also had children. I didn’t write plays but worked as a radio journalist. In the optimism after the Cold War defending press freedom was not so high up on the agenda. But when Reporters without Borders (RSF) formed a Swedish section in 1994, I became a member. Little did I know how much I would work for RSF later.
While Dawit continued his theatre work Eritrea adopted a new press law 1996. Young Aaron Berhane was intrigued. He had tried to send letters to the editor of Eritrea’s official newspaper, but they were never printed. Now, Aaron discussed at length with his wife. They poured over the new law; how much freedom would the rules grant? Aaron’s father said that the people in power might not be ready for open discussions and criticism, and would people buy a newspaper? It was risky, but in the end Aaron’s father granted him a small loan. Aaron and three friends founded Setit, Eritrea’s first independent paper. 21 August 1997 they printed their first issue. 5000 copies. There were no newspaper stands, no traditions to fall back on. Aaron and his friends had contacted schoolchildren to sell Setit. They were nervous, but soon the kids came back for more. And more. Aaron had thought the copies would last at least a week. They sold out within hours.
Later, Setit would reach 40 000 copies. Other papers followed, Tiganay, Meqale, Zemen, Keste Debena etc. Aaron Berhane didn’t know Dawit, but he had heard his plays on the radio and was impressed. He convinced Dawit to start working for Setit. Eventually Dawit also became a co-owner.
Democracy and justice
In the beginning Dawit wrote about culture and literature. Later he began covering other subjects. He wrote about AIDS, asking the authorities to be more open about it to raise awareness. He went to the countryside where two country hamlets were in conflict over a parcel of land once owned by Italians. He talked to leaders in both villages and described the rising tension. There was even fear of violence. In his series of articles Dawit ends with an appeal to the central authorities to step in which was also what the villagers wanted.
The ruling PFDJ, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice, promised elections and that a new Constitution was to be implemented. Eritrea’s President Isaias Afewerki had led the liberation movement EPLF now transformed into PFDJ. A new war broke out with Ethiopia in 1998. When it was over old comrades in arms of President Afwerki wanted the promises of elections and the new constitution to be fulfilled. They tried the internal party channels to no avail. In the spring of 2001, they finally decided to write him an open letter. It was signed by fifteen of his ministers, military leaders and even the vice-president. They were called G-15, the Group of fifteen.
5 June 2001 Setit printed the open letter. Aaron Berhane would later describe how pressure mounted that summer. As editor-in-chief he was regularly called in for questioning. The security apparatus wanted him to reveal his sources, but he kept quiet. The members of G-15 found that they were frozen out. They went to their offices but had nothing to do. My focus was elsewhere these years. I did radio documentaries both about racial biology in Sweden and the Holocaust. My children started school. So did Dawit’s. His oldest daughter Betlehem – who is a writer too now, describes how her father would fetch her after class. She liked to ride with him in his car. Once she had been beaten by her teacher. In the car she told Dawit. He immediately went back and said the teacher should not beat children. Both Betlehem and others describe Dawit as a calm and thoughtful person, someone you listen to when he speaks. The teacher never beat Betlehem again. Aaron Berhane describes how Dawit after finishing his own work helped the secretaries at Setit type the texts from reporters who could not handle the computers. He says Dawit often brought up Sweden. Dawit pointed to the openness and Swedish democracy.
18 September 2001 hardly anyone noticed what happened in Eritrea. The world’s focus lay on 9/11. It was a Tuesday. The morning show on Eritrean radio was interrupted and the newsreader ordered to read a bulletin from the Information Ministry. Members of G-15 had been arrested and all independent papers banned. The staff members of Setit gathered. Aaron Berhane was worried. Dawit less so. He and Fessehaye Yohannes, the oldest in the newsroom a well-known poet, believed things would return to normal after a rough period. Aaron was more sceptical. He stopped sleeping at home.
So, when they came for Dawit, Joshua and the others on September 23, Aaron was not at home. His wife could honestly say to the officers that she had no idea where he was. While I was still unaware the long struggle began for Dawit’s brother Esayas in Sweden. At the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Stockholm they were not so interested, when he called. Was Dawit really a Swedish citizen? The nonchalant attitude did not stop there. In 2001 Sweden had an Honorary Consul in Asmara. In October she bounced into Dawit when visiting a police station. She reported it to Stockholm.
So, in the fall of 2001 the MFA knew that Dawit was imprisoned, both from his brother and their own source. Still, half a year later it was news to the Stockholm based Swedish Ambassador to Eritrea when visited the Horn of Africa. No one in the Ministry had bothered to tell him that a Swedish citizen was in detention in Eritrea. Yet it is often during the first period it is easiest to solve such cases, before too much prestige has been invested. I find this hard to forgive.
The fight for freedom
Since his arrest Sweden has had seven ambassadors to Eritrea and eight Ministers for Foreign Affairs, both Social Democrats and Conservatives. Of course, many of them have tried their best. That Dawit and his colleagues are the longest detained journalists in the world is the fault of the regime in Eritrea. But neither Sweden nor Europe has stood up enough in a case that has become a global symbol for the fight for press freedom. Dawit has been awarded the UNESCO Press Freedom Prize, the Golden Pen by WAN-IFRA, PEN’s Tucholsky Prize. And when RSF/Sweden created a Press Freedom Prize in 2003, we gave it to him. By now I cannot even remember when I first heard of Dawit and got in touch with Esayas. Was it in 2001? Or early 2002? Esayas has become a friend.
The first years when we were out talking about his brother’s plight, we often met scepticism. Not even Swedish media cared a lot during the first years. When Esayas contacted the regional paper about his brother’s arrest in 2001 they said they ‘had already written about Eritrea that year’. It has been a long fight. When we had Bana translated to Swedish 2010 at least the argument that he was not a real writer died away. It has since been published in both English, French and German.
We have tried many paths. One strategy used by the regime is ignore his Swedish citizenship. In 2010 Esayas and I contacted a Swedish human rights lawyer who wrote a Legal opinion, showing that according to international law Sweden not only has a right but a duty to act for Dawit. We turned to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights which said Eritrea violates the African Charter and demanded the release of him and his colleagues. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has rebuked Eritrea. We have filed repeated complaints with the Swedish Prosecution Authority, even though they have found reason to suspect crimes against humanity in Dawit’s case they do not open a criminal investigation for fear of risking the Foreign Ministry’s negotiations for his release. Really, after two decades?
Why has it been so hard? Well, it has not helped that Dawit is black and born in a country far away. We fear for Dawit’s life. Several of his colleagues have succumbed in prison. Numerous times Esayas and I have stood before audiences in public meetings and said we hope never to have to come back. But we have had to come back because Dawit has not come back to his family, to his wife, his daughters, his son, his brothers, his friends. And, still, I have never met him.
Text: Björn Tunbäck
Bild från schauspielhaus.at
Foto: Kalle Ahlsén