Alex Hamilton
Lots of people get upset about asylum seekers. "They're after our health service they're economic migrants they're rich enough to pay people-smugglers they're potential terrorists."

But who are they really?

According to the Home Office, in 2006, the latest full year available, 10% of asylum seekers to the UK (2400 people) came from Afghanistan, with 2375 people from Iran; there are certainly major and well-known issues in these countries, but the single biggest source - with 11% (2585) was Eritrea.

Blessed and cursed Eritrea, with a population smaller than Scotland, lies between Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti and the Red Sea. I had the great privilege and pleasure to spend nine years living in such a humane and fascinating civilisation. And that despite the murderous and unjust war with Ethiopia that overwhelmed the country in 1998. The guns fell almost silent in 2000 but justice did not return. The International Court awarded disputed territory to Eritrea and that should have settled the matter, yet Ethiopia still occupies Eritrean land. Semi-desert Eritrea doesn't have the strategic weight - economic or military - to interest the world's movers and shakers, and no decisive effort was made to resolve the injustice. And injustice reproduces and spreads like the most rapacious cancer. It has taken over the body politic of Eritrea. A friend, Dawit Habtemichael, was one of the brightest and best in Eritrea. Charming and intelligent, he was the 30-year-old acting editor of the newspaper Meqaleh. Along with 14 journalists in Eritrea, he was arrested in 2001 when the world was preoccupied with events in New York.

Since then there has been no official news of him. There was an unofficial and uncorroborated report in August 2006 that Dawit and 30 other journalists and former government ministers were in prison and that another nine had died. Three months later, a report from the writers' fellowship English PEN said Dawit was dead and now, 15 months later, Dawit's family and friends still do not know if he is alive. I wish Dawit's case could create the interest generated when Alan Johnston was taken in Gaza.

Last year, my friend Ghirmai spent six months in prison lowlands before escaping with a guard to Sudan. In the jail he met Isaac Mogos, Negede Teklemariam and Paulos Eyassu who have been incarcerated for 14 years solely because of their religious beliefs. After Dawit's arrest in 2001, the political situation in Eritrea continued to deteriorate. Government suspicion focused on all minority Christian groups. There are now about 2000 Christian evangelicals in the gulag. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the cancer developed and the government targeted the Eritrean Orthodox Church. In August 2005, its head, Patriarch Antonius, was stripped of his position and placed under house arrest. So he remains with his job filled by a government-approved appointee.

The government became fearful not only of journalists and Christian activists: everyone was under suspicion. In Scotland, if I ask people I meet: "Have you been arrested or in prison?" this would be taken by most as rude and insulting. In Eritrea, the majority of people I know have been held. And when, after nine years of being a devoted and loyal acolyte of the Eritrean cause, I was arrested, an Eritrean friend embraced me and said: "Now you are a true Eritrean." But I had the British ambassador to speak up on my behalf.

There are now reportedly 314 "prison centres" in Eritrea, and tens of thousands of young Eritreans want to escape their native land. According to UNHCR, 22,000 Eritreans have fled to Sudan in the past five years, with a similar number crossing into Ethiopia.

Home Office statistics for the first quarter of 2007 show a fall from the previous year of 43% of Eritreans seeking asylum in the UK.

In that quarter, 340 Eritreans sought asylum, behind Afghanistan (755), Iran (600), China (480) and Somalia (395), but ahead of Zimbabwe on 325. However, before you think that this is a sign that the Eritrean human rights situation has improved, causing the number of escapees to decline, sneak a look behind the huge military cordon that was strung round Eritrea's main international airport last week: military flights from Libya, the land of Colonel Gaddafi, brought 700 Eritrean refugees arrested in Libya to disappear like Dawit into the gulag.

This is undoubtedly seen as a success for the British government in its efforts to reduce the number of asylum seekers, scroungers, trouble-makers, damned foreigners it's better that they go to the gulag than to Glasgow.

Is there anyone left to speak out for Dawit?


Alex Hamilton spent nine years living and working in Eritrea.

Ron Ferguson is away.