RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
| Subject: The price of life in that hellhole Eritrea Sat Jun 15, 2013 3:56 am | |
| They emerge from a house in a remote desert village in the North Sinai, their long, thin legs barely able to carry them. That they can stand at all is a miracle. It is just a few days since the two young men escaped months of torture at the hands of human traffickers and their physical and emotional frailty is palpable. Twenty-two-year-old Tesfalem and 21-year-old Frezgi were held in two separate torture camps in the Sinai - Frezgi for 15 months and Tesfalem for seven months. To see their bodies is to witness the most gruesome abuse: Frezgi's back is covered with irregular, raised scars - wounds caused when melted plastic is dripped onto bare skin. Tesfalem's feet have been burned with cigarettes and anxiety now visibly vibrates through his painfully thin body. These are injuries I will see again and again as I meet more Eritreans who have survived the torture camps of the Sinai.
Tesfalem and Frezgi spoke of being chained together with their fellow captives in small, dark, airless rooms; of pain, sleep deprivation and unrelenting fear; of not being able to wash for months and endless infestations with lice. They only met after each managed to break free from their respective desert prisons and make it to the safety of the local mosque. It was here they were discovered by the local sheikh, who took them to the safety of his home just a few hundred metres away in the village of Sheikh Zuweid. Even now, as we sit in Sheikh Mohammed Ali Hassan Awad's house drinking sweet Bedouin tea, the young Eritreans keep a watchful eye on the door. Outside, the Sinai stretches towards the Israel-Egypt border, a beautiful but lawless land ruled by the gun and a handful of Bedouin tribes.
Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/the-price-of-life-20130610-2nyxc.html#ixzz2WGlvb6p5
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