The conscripts become not just soldiers, but an army of cheap labor,
forced to work for years for little pay, according to the United
Nations.
We were forced to work for Western-run mine, say migrants who fled Eritrea
Bemnet Negash
never got to say a proper goodbye to his family. In February 2006,
government officials arrived at his school in the highlands of Eritrea
and put him and his classmates on a bus to a military training camp. He
was 20 years old, and still at school because a childhood illness had
interrupted his education.
Bemnet's father heard what was happening and rushed to the school. "He
tried to pass to me my medication and some money through a window of
the bus on which I was being taken away, but it was not possible," said Bemnet in an affidavit filed with a Canadian court last year.
For
much of the next five years, Bemnet toiled for the Eritrean national
service, a massive conscription program instituted by the country's
autocratic ruler in the mid-1990s. The conscripts become not just
soldiers, but an army of cheap labor, forced to work for years for
little pay, according to the United Nations. The U.N. has said the
program is "similar to slavery in its effects" – a claim the Eritrean government rejects.
Bemnet,
who slipped out of Eritrea in 2011, did not work just for the
government when he was a conscript: In his legal filing he says he
helped build a mine for Nevsun Resources, a Canadian company headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, and listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
His story illustrates the challenges for foreign investors operating in this overlooked part of Africa.
The Eritrean government says national service is necessary to protect
and build the impoverished country. The risk for foreign companies is
that while they may bring jobs and infrastructure, they could become
entangled with a state where conscript labor is pervasive.
Nevsun
says its investment in Eritrea brings social and economic benefits that
mitigate the pressure for emigration. Even so, the number of Eritreans
seeking refuge in Europe has increased about five-fold since 2008,
according to Eurostat. In 2015, more than 45,000 Eritreans applied for
asylum there.
Bemnet's affidavit is part of a
lawsuit filed in 2014 by a team of Canadian lawyers on behalf of
Eritreans who allege that between 2008 and 2012 they were forced to work
at Bisha, a mine operated and majority-owned by Nevsun. Lodged with
five similar accounts from other workers, the affidavit says Bemnet was
forced to work for about a dollar a day in harsh conditions.
Bemnet and other workers want to claim compensation from Nevsun for "severe physical and mental pain and suffering." In the next few months the Supreme Court of British Columbia is expected to decide whether the legal case can continue.
Nevsun,
which had revenues of $357 million in 2015, denies the allegations and
touts its mine as a model of responsible development. In its own legal
filings, it says the Eritrean military never provided labor to the mine.
Even if it did, the company argues, Nevsun was not directly responsible
for employing the workers.
The Canadian company
owns 60 percent of the Bisha Mining Share Company (BMSC), which owns and
operates the mine, and the Eritrean state owns the remaining 40
percent. BMSC in turn hired Segen, an Eritrean government firm, to do
construction work at the mine.
Bemnet says he
worked for Segen, not Nevsun. But his lawyers say Nevsun should be held
responsible for what happened at the mine, alleging Nevsun had authority
over Segen and did not take reasonable steps to prevent mistreatment of
workers.
Todd Romaine, Nevsun's vice president of
corporate social responsibility, denied the allegations and said in a
written statement that the company "will vigorously defend itself in court." He said BMSC is "an employer of choice" in Eritrea and provides "well-paying,
intrinsically rewarding jobs for local people ... The company has made a
significant financial contribution to the country in terms of taxation,
royalties, local employment (and) supply chain."
Romaine said Nevsun has a screening process to ensure that no conscripts work at the mine. "Nevsun is a force for good in Eritrea," he said.
Nevsun
also says that if its prohibition against the use of conscripts was
ever breached, state-controlled Segen was to blame. It says that it had
been obliged by the Eritrean government to use Segen to build the mine,
and that Nevsun had no control over Segen. Reuters tried to contact
Segen via telephone and email, but received no comment.
Alem
Kibreab, director-general of Eritrea's Department of Mines, said no
conscripts worked at Bisha, and that some migrants made up stories of
mistreatment in the hope of gaining permission to stay in Europe.
In
affidavits filed with the Canadian court, several workers from the mine
have backed up Nevsun. Kahsay Gebremichael, a foreman with Segen, said
that he had worked at Bisha for seven years, by choice. "I was not forced to work at the Bisha Mine by anyone. I can quit my job if I want to," he said in an affidavit filed in November 2015.
Bemnet
and the other former workers involved in the lawsuit were living in
Ethiopia, Germany, Denmark and Switzerland when they swore affidavits in
2014 and 2015. Reuters was unable to contact them and their lawyers
declined to make them available for interviews, citing the ongoing legal
proceedings.
But Reuters has reviewed the former
workers' detailed allegations and, while their case is not new, this
article draws on court records that have not been previously reported,
including Bemnet's affidavit. It also draws on accounts of two former
foreign workers who helped build the mine: One said employees of Segen
endured tough conditions in 2009 and 2010, working without adequate
food, water or shelter.
The Eritrean government
dismisses criticism of its national service program as politically
motivated and biased. Government officials deny that national service
involves forced labor and say a program to improve pay began in
mid-2015. They insist conscription remains vital for the security of the
nation, which only secured independence from Ethiopia in 1991 after
decades of conflict.
NATION BUILDING
Bemnet
spent his first weeks of military training at a camp called Wia, near
the Red Sea, where he slept on the ground in the open, according to his
affidavit. Next he was moved to a desolate stretch of coastline, where
he worked seven days a week, completing more training, gathering large
stones and building houses. He was still there in September 2006, when,
halfway around the world, then Nevsun Chief Executive John Clarke
pitched Eritrea to mining investors at one of the industry's top
conferences, the Denver Gold Forum.
Canada is home
to hundreds of small mining companies, many exploring for gold both in
Canada and around the world. Staffed by a few executives and a small
board of directors, these companies buy mineral claims and raise a few
million dollars at a time to pay for exploratory drilling. One strategy
is to focus on countries where poor infrastructure, skill shortages or
political unrest have made mining difficult, leaving rich deposits
untouched.
Clarke's presentation focused on Gash
Barka, a region in western Eritrea where gold was mined during the
colonial era. No one had built or operated a mine in the country for
decades because of the risk of conflict and fears the government might
expropriate assets. So Clarke promoted the project, which he called
Bisha, by emphasising Eritrea's good roads and well-educated people.
"Given
that it is a poor country, they're just using their resources extremely
well, including their youngsters, who do a couple years national
service after university, everybody contributing to nation building," he said, in a presentation that until recently was available online.
Clarke, who is no longer with Nevsun, did not respond to requests for comment.
National
service in Eritrea, which still fears attack from its far larger
neighbor Ethiopia, has no set length, according to the government. The
country has been ruled by former Marxist guerrilla leader Isaias Afwerki
since independence. In 1998, in the midst of a border war with
Ethiopia, Isaias declared a state of emergency and extended national
service.
Eritrea's Information Minister, Yemane
Ghebremeskel, told Reuters that the length of national service had
originally been 18 months, but that it had been "prolonged" because of
border tensions with Ethiopia. He did not specify how long national
service now lasts.
A U.N. commission charged with
investigating human rights abuses in Eritrea said in a June 2015 report
that all sectors of the Eritrean economy rely on conscripts. Most
citizens are conscripted before they finish high school, and undergo
limited military training before being assigned to jobs. Some are sent
to work in construction or farming, or as civil servants or engineers.
In a statement, Eritrea said the allegations of human rights abuses are
"totally unfounded and devoid of all merit."
"CONTINUOUSLY HUNGRY"
By
September 2008, the Bisha mine had its permits and work was underway at
the site. As mining companies often do, Nevsun hired an engineering,
procurement and construction management firm to run construction,
selecting a South African company called Senet. One of Senet's employees
was Mike Goosen, a civil construction supervisor who arrived in 2009.
Day
to day, Goosen and other Senet staff supervised Segen, the Eritrean
government-owned contractor brought in to do construction work. While
Senet declined to comment on its work at Bisha, citing the ongoing legal
action, Goosen told Reuters he became friendly with some Segen workers,
though they lived some distance from the main camp. He visited their
camp and was alarmed by the conditions he found. None of the buildings
had proper windows or doors. Workers slept on the floor, with no
mosquito nets. "We had a lot of them going down with malaria," he told
Reuters.
The workers were "continuously hungry,"
he said, and subsisted on lentil soup and bread. Drinking water was left
in the hot sun all day. Goosen said he asked cooks at the main camp to
set aside leftover food for Segen workers but Segen managers told him to
stop.
In affidavits filed to support the lawsuit
against Nevsun, former Eritrean workers described rations of lentil soup
and bread. "We were always tired and hungry, and fell ill very often,"
reads the affidavit of Mihretab Yemane Tekle, who said he worked at the
Bisha mine from February to October 2010, and now has refugee status in
Ethiopia. "Many conscripts caught malaria at Bisha."
In
an affidavit filed in June 2014, Segen manager Abadi Gebremeskel
Alemayo described the death of a worker named Berhane, who he said was a
conscript.
"One day, he was building partitions
in the residences for the foreign workers, and he just collapsed," he
said. "In his report, the doctor said it was heat stroke. I buried him
myself – I took his body to his village and buried it."
Abadi,
a safety officer at Bisha, said in his affidavit that he knew some of
the workers were conscripts because he attended a Segen meeting in
mid-2009 at which the use of conscripts was discussed. Reuters was
unable to contact Abadi for comment.
ESCAPE
Segen
workers were on site in significant numbers during the mine's initial
construction from 2008 to 2011. In February 2009, for example, more than
half the workers on site were from Segen, according to a Senet progress
report filed with the Canadian court.
In a 2013
press release, Nevsun said it first heard allegations that conscripts
were working at Bisha in early 2009. In response, Nevsun instructed
Senet to change Segen's contracts to explicitly prohibit the use of
national service members. Nevsun also told Senet to start screening
workers to ensure there were no conscripts at the mine. Court filings
from Senet say screening began in May 2009; the system involved workers
providing certificates to show they had finished national service.
It
is unclear how effective the screening was, said a foreign worker who
was on site at the time and spoke on condition of anonymity. Segen would
put off filing paperwork, telling Senet that its workers were no one
else's business. When papers did arrive, they were photocopies of
Eritrean documents that no one outside Segen understood because they
were written in the local language of Tigrinya, the foreign worker said.
In
an affidavit for the court case, Senet project director Pieter Theron
described the screening process, and said that as far as he knew, the
Eritrean military was not involved in building Bisha. Theron declined
requests for comment. In his affidavit, he said allegations about harsh
working conditions were not consistent with his observations: "It is
simply not the case that individuals worked in dangerous conditions and
were often injured or ill."
Bemnet arrived at
Bisha with the rest of his military unit in February 2010, according to
his affidavit. He was told to take off his military uniform, and given
grey coveralls to wear, with "Segen" across the back. An officer laid
out some rules for his time at Bisha. He was not to tell anyone that he
was a national service member. If asked about his pay he should say he
was being paid $21 to $22 per day. He would actually be paid 450 nakfa
per month, about $1 a day, according to the legal claim.
Bemnet
and other conscripts were sometimes allowed to spend time in a nearby
town. One Sunday in July 2010, he stayed late in town, eating and
drinking with a friend, according to his affidavit. In the early hours, a
group of military men came to retrieve him. Bemnet said they accused
him of trying to desert and leave Eritrea. He was tied up with his
friend, he said, with only short breaks for five days, and then sent to
prison.
Bemnet said he was not sent back to Bisha
after his release in November 2010, but remained in national service. In
2011, stationed near the Ethiopian border, he saw a chance to escape
and swam across a river with two other men. From Ethiopia, Bemnet
traveled to Sudan, Libya and across the Mediterranean to Italy. Like
thousands of other Eritreans, he applied for asylum in Germany.
Many
Eritreans aiming for Europe cross the Sahara into Libya, risking death
by dehydration, starvation and violence in the desert. In Libya, some
are kidnapped by Islamic State, and executed or enslaved before they can
attempt to cross the Mediterranean. The United Nations refugee agency
reported that 11,564 Eritreans made it to Italy in the first seven
months of 2016. That was more than from any country other than Nigeria.
REGRET
In
2013, Human Rights Watch published a report about the alleged use of
conscripts at Bisha. Anticipating the report, Nevsun sent out a press
release that expressed "regret if certain employees of Segen were
conscripts ... in the early part of the Bisha mine's construction
phase." It hired Lloyd Lipsett, a Canadian human rights lawyer, to
assess the mine.
Lipsett's reports have focused on
the period since he was hired. In a 2015 report he said he had found
nothing to corroborate allegations against the company, but that it was
difficult to draw conclusions about anything before 2013.
In an interview, Lipsett said there were limits to what he could do and how reliable witnesses were. "It's
hard in a country like Eritrea where there is, I think, a plausible and
potential risk that people may feel intimidated or be threatened with
reprisal," he said. "I think you just have to work at it, and
see what the weight of the evidence points to ... If someone is directly
lying, I can't say that I will always catch that."
In
February, Nevsun invited Reuters to visit the mine and interview
managers and government officials on site and in Eritrea's capital,
Asmara. During that tour, Romaine, the company's vice president for
corporate social responsibility, said: "We take all allegations very
seriously, but to date, based on all our extensive investigations, we
have not found any corroborating evidence to support the allegations
being made."