All beautiful people, and yet we heard nothing about it
A little context on what they were fleeing from:
Eritrea is one of the most repressive countries on earth, regularly referred to as Africa’s North Korea. Reporters Without Borders ranks it 179th among 179 countries when it comes to freedom of expression, lower than North Korea itself.
Barely anyone is allowed a mobile phone. You need a permit to host a dinner party. A permit to travel to an adjacent village. Writing down a song or poem on a piece of paper could see you jailed for producing anti-government propaganda. Even reporters for state-run outlets live in constant fear of arrest.
The UN, in a report last year, concluded the population is kept in “a permanent state of anxiety”.
Extra-judicial killings, torture, enforced disappearances and arbitrary arrest are commonplace. There are at least 10,000 political prisoners in jail to silence political dissent (x)
There is mandatory indefinite military conscription from ages 18 through to 55 (in a country where life expectancy is 61) where 1 in 20 of the population currently serve. The regime keeps the state on a war footing so it can conscript citizens into a form of forced labour, spending more time building homes for officials and officers than defending the country. There is also systematic sexual abuse of women in the military and pregnancies are banned.
One soldier complained about lack of vacation time and was jailed for two years, where he got one meal a day and one shower a month.
He said “Hell is better” than Eritrea (x). Prisoners are regularly and systematically beaten, bound and tortured.
It accounts for less than 0.1 per cent of its continent’s people, yet last year there were more Eritreans arriving in Europe than from any other nation apart from refugees escaping war-torn Syria.
Every month about 5,000 people flee the repressive nation.
I FINALLY DID IT. I FEEL COMFORTABLE TO DO COMMISSIONS. The money from these will go torwards commissioning other artists. and college. I do not NEED the money. but I felt like it would be cool to open this.
Here’s a thing: there’s nothing sacred about callout posts. Anyone can make one. This includes abusive people.
In fact, given the common abuser tactic of isolating their victim from any possible support networks, I think it’s actually MORE likely for abusers to make callout posts about their targets than vice versa.
If you see a callout post on your dash that makes no effort to back up its claims, and you don’t know the poster? Don’t spread it. There is an extremely high chance you’d be doing an abuser’s work for them.
And if they DO provide links to back up their claims? READ THEM. Don’t just assume those links say what the poster claims they do. I have seen SO MANY callout posts cross my dash, where the descriptions of their “receipts” were just blatant misrepresentations of what happened– sometimes even outright lies– and the few that have checked out don’t REMOTELY make up for the many that started baseless witch hunts.
this is especially used against trans women, since transphobic ideas about them make it really easy for people to believe they’re sexual predators etc
This is SO real I cannot adequately convey.
It’s like that “list of problematic artists” from a while back.
Someone actually broke it down and discovered there was only a couple legit entries and the rest was of a combination of unfounded rumors, misrepresentation, and even downright lies.
Yet, some of the people listed like Zamii got harassed over it.
I couldn’t find the line but she’s said something along those lines before a few matches and one of my friends commented “she says right before she attack boosts the bastion”
