LAT:
ASMARA, Eritrea — This struggling, low-profile nation is doing something virtually unheard of in Africa. It’s turning down foreign aid.
With a president who vows not to lead another “spoon-fed” African country “enslaved” by international donors, Eritrea, a small, secretive nation on the Horn of Africa, has walked away from more than $200 million in aid in the last year alone, including food from the United Nations, development loans from the World Bank and grants from international charities to build roads and deliver healthcare.
Eritrea can scarcely afford to say no. As one of the world’s poorest nations, it has struggled to feed its people.
But President Isaias Afwerki, a former Marxist rebel who has led Eritrea since its independence from Ethiopia in 1993, defends the nation’s exercise in self-reliance, even if it results in short-term hardships. He says it is crucial not only to the long-term survival of his country, but also to that of his continent.
“We need this country to stand on its two feet,” Isaias said in an interview. Fifty years and billions of dollars in post-colonial international aid have done little to lift Africa from chronic poverty, he said.
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The self-reliance program began a decade ago but accelerated sharply in 2005. Relying on its meager budget and the conscription of about 800,000 of the country’s citizens, the program so far has shown promising results. Measured on a variety of U.N. health indicators, including life expectancy, immunizations and malaria prevention, Eritrea scores as high, and often higher, than its neighbors, including Ethiopia and Kenya.
It might be one of the most ambitious social and economic experiments underway in Africa. But Eritrea isn’t getting much credit. Instead, the government increasingly finds itself in the international doghouse, largely because of its poor human rights record, isolationism and belligerent stance toward its neighbors and the West.
In a world moving toward globalization, Eritrea is turning inward. The government has sealed its borders and halted most imports, expelled several diplomats and aid groups, and withdrawn from the leading East African intergovernmental alliance.
“It’s like they have self-imposed sanctions,” said one diplomat, who like many interviewed feared government retribution if identified. “They’re turning into an Albania or North Korea.”
NYT:
ASMARA, Eritrea, Oct. 9 — The first thing you notice about Eritrea is that no one ever locks up a bike.
It is one of the poorest countries on the planet, situated in one of the world’s most reliably violent regions, the Horn of Africa, yet Eritrea is virtually crime-free.
Anytime, day or night, young couples stroll freely down the palm-lined avenues of Asmara, the capital. Old men in tweed jackets and vintage Ray-Bans park themselves at the 1930s chrome-trimmed Art Deco cafes and soak up the scene.
But beneath the peace, harmony and South Beach style that once made Eritrea the little gem of Africa, cracks are beginning to show. There are bread lines, milk lines and lines for rationed cooking gas. At night, dissidents meet on dark streets to chat secretly in parked cars.
Because of the rising prospects of war with Ethiopia, essentially Round 2 of a border conflict that has already killed 100,000 people, tens of thousands of Eritrean students have been conscripted into the army.
Relations with the West, especially the United States, have deteriorated to a historic low point, with the State Department threatening to designate Eritrea, a tiny country on the Red Sea that most Americans have never heard of, as a terrorist state for its support of Islamist rebels in Somalia.
