Eritrea, “Escape to victory”, football serves to escape from the dictatorship

Overlooking the sea, at the far end of the Horn of Africa, there is a country where sport has become over the years a way to change one’s life. It seems the classic story of the athlete who, thanks to his talent, manages to redeem himself from a difficult childhood, made up of poverty, destitution, difficulty. This is not the case in Eritrea. Here sport is used to literally escape from a dictatorship. Here we are not talking about guys capable of doing magic with the ball between their feet or extraordinary runners who destroy records over and over again, but of simple people who through sport have tried, sometimes succeeding – and not in the way you imagine – to give a cut to a life of hunger and dust. This is the case of the five girls of the under 20 national football team, who on Tuesday 2 November disappeared from the hotel in Jinja, in Uganda, a country where they were supposed to play the Czechfa 2020 tournament dedicated to the national youth teams, initially postponed for Covid. On this disappearance hovers once again the suspicion of an escape from the regime of Isaias Afewerki, Eritrean dictator in power since 1993. The last episode dates back to 2019 – when during an under 20 men’s tournament 5 other boys fled from a hotel without a trace – just before the pandemic made travel impossible.

La Cecafa Cup

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Every two years (and annually before) the oldest tournament on the continent is held: the Czechfa Cup, which still sees the national teams of Central and East Africa clash and plays a key role in this story, because it is the main opportunity to escape. from the country of the players of the Eritrean national team. If the qualifiers for the Africa Cup of Nations and the World Cup (which in any case have offered and offer opportunities) allow you to stay away only for a few days, a tournament of this type – which lasts 15 days – becomes too good an opportunity to let it slip away. Between 2005 and 2013, 77 members of the national team escaped, including the coach of the 2013 edition.

The regime and sport

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Logically, the most obvious thing would have been to ban the Eritrean national team from participating in the aforementioned tournament and the various qualifiers. Yet sport, as in any regime, is too important a component of propaganda to be deprived of. In 2008, in fact, the government did not send the team to the Czechfa Cup, but the following year he was already forced to change his mind, and the escapes immediately began again: this time 12 athletes left the national team retirement. They found refuge in a refugee camp in Nairobi, and then emigrated to Australia. Some of these have changed their lives, others – such as those who took advantage of the Cup in Tanzania in 2010 – moved to the USA, where they continued their sports career. The change in the cadence of the tournament, which became biennial, drastically reduced the chances of the players to escape, and the simultaneous tightening of relations with neighboring Ethiopia prevented participation in the 2015 and 2017 Czechfa Cup. The only opportunities therefore came from the world qualifiers, and in 2015 another 10 players took advantage of a trip to Botswana to never return to Eritrea.

The 2012 Odyssey

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What happened in the 2012 edition approaches the boundaries of the epic. During the Czechfa Cup held in Uganda, 17 players from the Eritrean national team and the team doctor managed to get a free day to “go shopping”. As soon as they set foot outside the hotel, they rushed to the UN office for political refugees in Kampala. There they applied for political asylum, and were then transferred to Romania, in Timisoara, to a center for high-risk refugees. After 6 months, they settled in Gorinchem, a Dutch town of 35,000 inhabitants. Eventually, after months of living in the terror of being sent back to Eritrea, everything turned out for the best.

Not just football

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The “flight for victory” from Eritrea did not concern only the world of football. Just four days after the 10 footballers disappeared in Botswana in 2015, 7 of the main Eritrean cyclists – as well as candidates for the national team – pretended to make a rather wide lap at the borders of the country, to then take advantage of the right moment to evade safety and enter Ethiopia, in the neighboring region of Tigrai. Despite this episode, for many years cycling has been one of the flagships of the regime’s propaganda: this happened thanks to Daniel Teklehaimanot, who in July 2015 became the first African athlete to wear the polka dot jersey of the Tour de France. , gaining incredible popularity and – unwittingly – giving a big hand to the regime.