In Ethiopia, after months of denials, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed acknowledged that the Eritrean army was participating in the fighting in Tigray against the TPLF. Today, the veil is beginning to lift over the reality of Asmara’s soldiers, including minors, being sent to fight in Ethiopia. Like the story of Rodanim, a high school student forcibly recruited and now a prisoner of the Tigrayan uprising.
It was with surprise that Rozit Yemane found the traces of his little brother. She watched Dimtsi Weyane’s news on TPLF television on March 23 newspaper presenter named Rodanim Yemane among Eritrean prisoners of war captured in the fighting.
Since her Swedish exile, she now tells the story of the youngest in her family to RFI: Rodanim had just celebrated her 16th birthday in November; he was still an eighth-grade high school student. On December 15, he was forcibly recruited by the army in front of his home in his Asmara neighborhood, during a “giffa”, these rallies regularly organized by the Eritrean regime. He was then sent to the Himbirti training camp, then to the Kormenae barracks, near Barentu. In late February, after maintaining a telephone connection with him, his family lost contact.
Rodanim is therefore now a prisoner of TPLF, somewhere in the mountains of Tigray. According to information disseminated by Dimtsi Weyane, Rodanim said today that his mission, he believed, was to “capture Debretsion” Gebremichael, the leader of the uprising. “It’s awful and heartbreaking,” laments his sister Rozit. They armed him and forced him to fight. Upset, she said she hoped the Red Cross could take care of her case.
The Eritrean regime’s conscription for child soldiers “is illegal, but not new”, explains the director of the NGO’s Human Rights Concern-Eritrea, Elizabeth Chyrum. However, sending 16-year-olds to a deadly battle is another step in child abuse, she says. This creates a precedent that even Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki has not dared to openly open before. ”
2015, a commission of inquiry of the UN Human Rights Council had previously condemned the recruitment of conscripts in the Eritrean armies. All high school students in the country really have to spend their final year studying at the Sawa camp, a huge military complex not far from the Sudanese border, after which they are kept in the army or sent to improve their skills in a technical institute, and on behalf of the Ministry of Defense For an indefinite period.
.
