Do we like them?

Do we like Isaias Afwerki?

Our score: 1 out of 10. Decades of rule with no national election, indefinite national service and jailed critics, and the real good on the record is thin.

Isaias was born in Asmara in February 1946 into an Orthodox Christian family. He went off to study engineering in Addis Ababa, then left at about 20 to join the independence rebels and trained in China. He led the rebels into Asmara on 24 May 1991, and has been president since formal independence two years later.

That liberation hero story is half the picture. Eritrea has held no national election since 1993, the 1997 constitution was never put into effect, there is one party, and there has been no independent press since 2001. Human Rights Watch calls him “an unelected dictator”, and a UN Commission of Inquiry found reasonable grounds to believe officials committed crimes against humanity, including enslavement, imprisonment, enforced disappearances and torture.

The way critics are treated tells you a lot. Berhane Abrehe, a former finance minister, was jailed after publishing a book calling the president a dictator. His family said he died in detention in 2024, about six months after being taken, never charged or brought before a court. Garowe Online reported no statement from the government.

Then there's Tigray. In late 2020 he sent troops into Ethiopia to back Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed against the Tigrayan leadership, and the US sanctioned Eritrea's military and ruling party over alleged severe abuses by those troops. In 2023 he dismissed the allegations as a “fantasy”. The war ended in 2022 after killing more than 100,000 people.

On the harm check, the trouble is what his government does, not culture-war talk. We found no words of his about LGBTQ+ people in the pages we read, so we can't pin anything there on him personally. What we did find is indefinite national service that Amnesty is cited as calling modern-day slavery, and a vote in March 2022 against a UN resolution condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, alongside Russia and Belarus.

The latest is a diplomatic thaw. After secret talks reported by Semafor between him and a senior Trump adviser, brokered by Egypt, Washington let the 2021 sanctions lapse. In a January state-media interview he said Eritrea has “no appetite for war” while accusing Ethiopia of a war agenda, and Ethiopia and Eritrea are trading accusations of troop buildups.