Eritrea's National Service: 28 Years, No Discharge, No Appeal

The man sitting across from me in the Khartoum safe house is thirty-nine years old. He has spent twenty-one of those years in military uniform. His name is Dawit, and he crossed the border from Eritrea into Sudan three months ago, walking at night through terrain that has killed others who tried the same journey. He shows me his hands. The calluses are from digging trenches along the Tigray border. The burn scars are from a cooking accident in a military camp in 2019. He has not seen his mother since 2005.

Dawit is not unusual. He is the system working as designed.

Eritrea's national service programme was established in 1995 under Proclamation 82/1995, two years after independence from Ethiopia. The law stipulated eighteen months of service: six months of military training, twelve months of deployment. It was presented as nation-building, a civic duty for a young country that had fought three decades for liberation. By 2002, the eighteen-month limit had been quietly abandoned. Today, there is no discharge. You serve until the government decides you are done. For many, that decision never comes.

What the Law Says, What the State Does

Eritrean men and women are conscripted at eighteen. Some are taken younger. A 2023 report by the Danish Refugee Council documented cases of conscription at sixteen. The recruits are sent to Sawa Military Training Centre, a sprawling base in the western lowlands near the Sudanese border, where temperatures in summer reach 45 degrees Celsius. They sleep in tin-roofed barracks. They train with Kalashnikovs manufactured in the 1980s. After six months, they are deployed.

Some are assigned to military units along the borders with Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Sudan. Others are sent to state-owned construction projects, agricultural schemes, or mining operations. They are paid 500 nakfa per month — approximately 33 US dollars at the official exchange rate, less than 10 dollars at the black-market rate that reflects the currency's real value. There is no legal avenue to appeal assignment, request discharge, or refuse orders. Desertion is punishable by imprisonment, often in underground cells where temperatures fluctuate between freezing at night and over 40 degrees during the day.

President Isaias Afwerki has ruled Eritrea since independence in 1993. There has been one presidential election, in 1993, and no others since. There is no functioning legislature. The constitution drafted in 1997 has never been implemented. National service, originally justified as a temporary measure during the 1998–2000 border war with Ethiopia, has outlasted the war by more than two decades. When Ethiopia and Eritrea signed a peace agreement in July 2018, there was speculation that demobilisation might follow. It did not.

The Economics of Conscription

National service conscripts are not only soldiers. They are also labourers in a state-controlled economy where private enterprise barely exists. Conscripts build roads, dig irrigation canals, harvest crops, and work in mines extracting copper, zinc, and gold. The largest gold mine in Eritrea, Bisha, is operated by a Canadian-Chinese joint venture. Human Rights Watch documented in 2021 that national service conscripts were used as labour at Bisha and other mining sites, paid the standard 500 nakfa monthly wage while the state collected revenues from mineral exports.

The system functions as a form of debt bondage. Young Eritreans owe the state their labour, indefinitely, in exchange for the security the state claims to provide. The threat is explicit: Eritrea is surrounded by hostile neighbours, the government says, and only total mobilisation can protect the nation. The reality is that Eritrea has not fought a war since 2000, yet the wartime apparatus has never been dismantled. Instead, it has been repurposed as the primary mechanism of economic production and social control.

What Happens to Those Who Leave

Eritrea has one of the highest rates of emigration per capita in the world. Between 2015 and 2025, an estimated 500,000 Eritreans fled the country, out of a population of approximately 3.6 million. Most are young. Most cite national service as the reason they left. The journeys are deadly. The route north through Sudan to Libya and across the Mediterranean has killed thousands. The route south through Ethiopia to Kenya is controlled by smugglers who demand payments families cannot afford. Those caught attempting to flee are imprisoned. Conditions in Eritrean detention facilities have been documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch: overcrowding, torture, deaths from heat and disease.

In Europe, Eritrean asylum seekers have historically been granted refugee status at high rates. Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands have all recognised that indefinite conscription constitutes persecution. But European asylum policies have tightened. In 2024, the European Union signed a memorandum of understanding with Eritrea aimed at 'managing migration flows.' The agreement included funding for development projects inside Eritrea. Human rights organisations criticised it as a deal that legitimised the government responsible for driving people to flee.

The Regional Implications

Eritrea's conscription system has consequences beyond its borders. During the Tigray war in Ethiopia, which began in November 2020, Eritrean forces crossed into Tigray and fought alongside Ethiopian federal troops. Witnesses and survivors documented atrocities committed by Eritrean soldiers: mass killings in Axum in November 2020, widespread sexual violence, looting of hospitals and homes. Many of the soldiers were national service conscripts, deployed without public acknowledgment by the Eritrean government.

Eritrea has never published casualty figures from the Tigray war. Families of conscripts killed in Ethiopia received no official notification, no body, no compensation. In interviews conducted by the Eritrean diaspora media outlet Eritrea Focus, relatives described waiting months for word of missing sons, only to learn through informal networks that they had been killed in battles the Eritrean government denied participating in.

What the Government Says

The Eritrean government's position is consistent: national service is a patriotic duty, necessary for national defence, and complaints about its duration are exaggerated by foreign enemies seeking to destabilise the country. In a 2021 interview with Eritrean state television, President Isaias dismissed reports of indefinite service as 'fabrications' and said demobilisation would occur 'when conditions allow.' He did not specify what those conditions might be.

The government points to the peace agreement with Ethiopia as evidence of Eritrea's constructive regional role. It notes that the United Nations lifted arms embargo sanctions on Eritrea in 2018. It argues that Western criticism is rooted in neocolonial bias. When pressed on specific cases of abuses in national service, officials deny access to independent monitors. Eritrea has not permitted a visit by the UN Special Rapporteur on Eritrea since the position was established in 2012. It withdrew from the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights in 2021.

What Nobody Is Saying

The international community has known about indefinite conscription in Eritrea for two decades. The UN Commission of Inquiry declared it a crime against humanity in 2016. Yet Eritrea remains a member in good standing of the African Union. It participates in regional forums. It receives development aid from the European Union and China. Western governments criticise the conscription system when discussing asylum policy, then engage the same government on counterterrorism and migration control.

There is no appetite for sanctions. Eritrea is strategically located on the Red Sea, opposite Yemen and Saudi Arabia. It hosts a UAE military base in Assab, established during the Yemen war. China has explored the possibility of a naval facility on Eritrea's coast. Eritrea provides troops and intelligence to regional partners, including during the Tigray war. The government understands its leverage. It can maintain indefinite conscription because no major power considers it a priority to stop.

What Comes Next

Dawit, the defector in Khartoum, is waiting for resettlement. He has applied for refugee status with UNHCR. The process takes years. In the meantime, he lives in a city where he cannot work legally and where Eritrean intelligence operates with impunity. He knows others who fled and were found dead in Khartoum under suspicious circumstances. He sleeps in different places. He does not use his real name outside the safe house.

His younger brother is still in Eritrea, still in uniform, assigned to a construction battalion near the port of Massawa. Dawit has not been able to contact him since he left. The risk is too great. If the government discovers communication with a defector, the family pays the price: arrest, interrogation, fines that can bankrupt a household. So Dawit waits, and his brother serves, and the system continues.

There is no indication that Eritrea will reform national service. President Isaias is seventy-eight years old. He has no designated successor. The military and security apparatus that enforce conscription are the same structures that keep him in power. Ending indefinite service would require dismantling the system that sustains the state. So the young continue to serve, and the young continue to flee, and the border patrols continue to shoot those who try to cross at night.

By the time you read this, another cohort of eighteen-year-olds will have arrived at Sawa. They will be told they are serving for eighteen months. Some of them will still be in uniform in 2050.