Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

Dan Connell

Dan Connell, the author of numerous books and articles on Eritrea, is a contributing editor of Middle East Report and a visiting researcher at Boston University’s African Studies Center. He is currently working on a book on the Eritrean refugee

MER Article

Caught in the Crossfire of Climate and Politics

Conscription into the army or other government service for years on end, fear of detention and torture for real or imagined transgressions with no legal recourse, no prospect of schooling or meaningful work, and no personal freedom: The reasons Afar refugees in eastern Ethiopia gave for fleeing thei

Dan Connell • 12 min read

MER Article

Tolan, Children of the Stone

Sandy Tolan, Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Two stories, two dreams: one realized, the other dashed. A boy born to a fragmented, impoverished refugee family living under harsh military rule is mesmerized by the sound of a violin and vows not

Dan Connell • 8 min read

MER Article

Eritrean Afars

Ahmed, a 25-year old Afar who served eight years in the Eritrean infantry, fled his country in 2006. He went first to Djibouti, and then to neighboring Ethiopia but, finding no work and fearing the risks of crossing the Mediterranean Sea, he went back to his first place of refuge. I met him in Djibo

Dan Connell • 14 min read

MER Article

Eritrean Refugees' Trek Through the Americas

TAPACHULA, MEXICO—It is not hard to find the Eritreans in this low-key town near the Pacific coast a few miles north of the Guatemalan border. They gather on the front steps of the Palafox Hotel with the only other Africans here—Somalis, Ethiopians, a handful of Ghanaians, all of them migrants—or th

Dan Connell • 9 min read

MER Article

The Rerouted Trafficking in Eritrean Refugees

When Sheikh Muhammad ‘Ali Hasan ‘Awad learned that nine kidnapped “Africans” -- eight Eritreans and one Ethiopian -- were being beaten, raped and starved in a compound in Sheikh Zuwayd, a Sinai village near the Israeli border, he wasted little time. Firing AK-47s in the air, the sheikh and his Bedou

Dan Connell • 13 min read

MER Article

Refugees, Ransoms and Revolt

Filmon, a 28-year-old computer engineer, fled Eritrea in March 2012 to escape political repression. Several weeks later, he was kidnapped from Sudan’s Shagara refugee camp, taken with a truckload of others to a Bedouin outpost in the Sinai, not far from Egypt’s border with Israel, and ordered to cal

Dan Connell • 13 min read

MER Article

Escaping Eritrea

Said Ibrahim, 21, orphaned and blind, was making a living as a singer in Adi Quala bars when a member of Eritrea’s national security force claimed one of his songs had “political” content and detained him at the Adi Abieto prison. After a month Said was released, but he was stripped of his monthly d

Dan Connell • 22 min read

MER Article

He Didn't Do It For Them

Michela Wrong, I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation (New York: Harper Collins, 2005). When I first encountered Eritrea in 1976, I was deeply impressed with the movement heading up the former Italian colony’s 30-year war for independence from Ethiopia. During those

Dan Connell • 11 min read

MER Article

Peace in Sudan

When negotiations in July 2002 at Machakos, Kenya between the Islamist government of Sudan and rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) produced a "framework agreement" of shared ideas on the future of the country, Assistant Secretary of State Walter Kansteiner touted the possibility

Dan Connell • 12 min read

MER Article

The Importance of Self-Reliance

Shortly before Eritrea's declaration of independence from Ethiopia in May 1993, members of the Eritrean security forces arrived on the doorstep of the Regional Center for Human Rights and Development (RCHRD) in downtown Asmara, the capital. The center's director knew precisely why they had come -- t

Dan Connell • 16 min read

MER Article

What's New in the New Sudan?

The hum of approaching aircraft sends residents of this dusty rebel outpost scurrying for cover. The over-flights may be the United Nations planes from Operation Lifeline Sudan carrying famine relief -- or Sudanese Air Force Antonov-27s searching for signs of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (

Dan Connell • 6 min read

MER Article

Shootout in the Horn of Africa

A second round of fighting between Eritrea and Ethiopia in February found the political positions of the former allies little changed from their opening salvos the previous June, but overwhelming Ethiopian numbers -- troops and arms -- finally forced the Eritreans to accept an American-backed “peace

Dan Connell • 6 min read