An African gulag so ghastly that inmates risk death to escape

Eritrea is riddled with an appalling variety of prisons: Underground cells of crumbling concrete, and sweltering jails fashioned from converted metal cargo containers. Cages crammed with hundreds of men who must sleep on their sides like sardines, as their cellmates wearily stand to make room, and shallow holes scraped from the earth with log and dirt ceilings so low that inmates cannot stand up.

Unlike in many other authoritarian countries, where people can frequently avoid prison by keeping their heads down and steering clear of politics, most Eritreans face the inevitability of detention if they refuse mandatory national service that can stretch for decades, mostly in a military infamous for leaving conscripts impoverished and brutalized.

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In interviews, 42 Eritreans who have been in prison, in some cases only weeks ago, described the conditions in the country’s sprawling detention network. These Eritreans, who were contacted in six different countries — some mired in refugee camps outside Eritrea or hiding in secret safe houses in African cities, and a few now living as fugitives in the West — told of beatings, stress positions and other torture, and of hunger and deaths from suffocation and gunshots, providing a rare look inside the prisons of the secretive country that has been described as “the North Korea of Africa.”

Although Eritrea has long been highly repressive, the prison population has swollen within the past three years. After Eritrea sent troops to help the Ethiopian government battle rebels in the Tigray region, Eritrea intensified its aggressive conscription campaign — sweeping up men and women, young and old. Evasion meant jail.