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Eritrea’s football team seeks asylum
By Barney Jopson in Kampala

Published: December 17 2009 16:10 | Last updated: December 17 2009 16:10

Eritrea’s entire national football team is seeking asylum in Kenya, joining tens of thousands of their compatriots who have already fled one of Africa’s most repressive regimes.

The team absconded after travelling to Nairobi for a regional tournament. Eritrea, with only 4m people, was the second biggest source of asylum seekers in the world last year and the missing players are probably the highest-profile defectors since it won independence in 1993.

The 11 players and one substitute were reported missing at the weekend when the team plane returned to Eritrea without them after they were defeated 4-0 by Tanzania.

After going into hiding, the players contacted the United Nations refugee agency in Nairobi, which directed them to file asylum applications at Kenya’s immigration ministry.

Nicholas Musonye, a Kenyan football official who first alerted the authorities to the missing players, said: “I have been informed by the tour guide who was with them that they are in Nairobi and have been seeking political asylum.”

A police official was quoted by Reuters saying the players’ cases were being assessed by the authorities. But an immigration official involved in handling refugees told the Financial Times that he had not yet received any information about them.

The total number of Eritrean asylum seekers worldwide last year was second only to that from Zimbabwe, according to the UN. People are fleeing a combination of political repression, food shortages, open-ended military service and a moribund economy.

Over half of them, some 34,000, fled overland to Sudan, braving harsh terrain and army shoot-to-kill orders. But many more are likely to have escaped without registering with the UN’s refugee agency.

Mr Musonye, the general secretary of the Council of East and Central Africa Football Associations, said he had spoken to officials at the Eritrean National Football Federation who were “a bit upset”.

“The federation has a responsibility to bring the players home, so they have a lot to explain,” he said.

Individual players have gone missing from the Eritrean national team before. Mr Musonye said six absconded three years ago after a match in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The repeated disappearance of the country’s best players could hamper Eritrea’s chances of qualifying for international competitions such as the World Cup.

Ali Abdu, Eritrea’s information minister, told the BBC that the players would get a “good welcome” if they returned home in spite of “betraying” their country.

Human rights groups say that failed defectors and critics of President Isaias Afewerki’s dictatorial regime are often tortured and confined to shipping-container prisons in the desert. The government denies this.

Mr Isaias, a former guerrilla fighter who led a war for liberation from Ethiopian rule, told the Financial Times this year that Eritreans fleeing the country had been duped by gangs of human traffickers.

“They will say, ‘Oh, Europe is heaven … Life is better there. You can clothe better, you can eat better, you can have a better shelter, you can do this and that’,” he said. “[But] they end up in concentration camps. That heaven is a concentration camp.”

cabdallah252 wrote:“They will say, ‘Oh, Europe is heaven … Life is better there. You can clothe better, you can eat better, you can have a better shelter, you can do this and that’,” he said. “[But] they end up in concentration camps. That heaven is a concentration camp.”