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Berhane Abrehe, Eritrea’s former finance minister and a fierce critic of the country’s president, has died in prison, his family says.
The 79-year-old minister was Eritrea’s longest-serving finance minister but was removed from office in 2012 following a conflict with President Isaias Afwerki.
Six years later, he was jailed for publishing a book in which he described the president as a “dictator” who needed to resign.
His family told the BBC that authorities rarely confirm deaths in custody of senior officials, but they had been informed of Mr Berhane’s death.
The government also rarely reveals where remains will be buried, but Mr. Berhane’s family has heard that it plans to bury him in the Patriots Cemetery in Asmara, where only veterans of the Eritrean War of Independence or national service personnel like Mr. Berhane can be buried.
His family said his body has not yet been returned and it is not yet clear when or exactly how Mr. Berhane died.
He was never tried in court.
President Isaias has ruled the East African country since winning its war of independence against Ethiopia in 1991, without holding national elections.
Political parties, civic organizations and independent media are banned.
The United Nations and human rights groups have long accused the Eritrean government of serious human rights violations, including torture, enforced disappearances and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of people in inhumane conditions.
Berhane’s dispute with President Isaias began during his 12-year tenure as finance minister, when he urged the president to ensure transparency in the state budget, which remains inaccessible to the public to this day.
In 2012, Mr Berhane was removed from office and retired from politics.
Three years later, he secretly wrote the two-volume “My Motherland” and sent it abroad for publication.
Besides calling his former boss a dictator and demanding his resignation, Berhane used the book to challenge Isaias to a debate on national television.
He also called for the restoration of the National Assembly, the Parliament of Eritrea, which was dissolved by the president in 2002. To this day, there is still no legislative body to hold the government accountable.
In 2018, Mr. Berhane was detained and imprisoned in an unknown location after publishing My Country.
By this time, his wife had been jailed, although no reason was given. She was released in 2019.
One of Berhane’s sons was detained at the same time as his mother and previously described his family’s ordeal to the BBC.
“I hold onto a faint hope that my father, who is in poor health, will be released from prison one day,” Efrem Berhane said in 2020.
The 31-year-old, who lives in the United States after fleeing Eritrea, asked: “How can people be kidnapped by the government and disappear for years? Why do people show such cruelty to their fellow human beings?”
But some have been incarcerated for even longer.
In September 2001, 11 senior ministers and generals were arrested for criticizing the president. They were part of a group known as the “G-15”, which included three former foreign ministers, an education minister and a former armed forces chief of staff and has not been seen since.
In Eritrea, political prisoners are often held incommunicado.
In February, Ilze Brands-Kehris, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, said human rights violations in Eritrea “continue to go unpunished.”
“Our office continues to receive credible reports of torture, arbitrary detention, inhumane detention conditions, enforced disappearances, and restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly,” she said.
Mr. Berhane was born in Eritrea in 1945 and earned a master’s degree in economics from a university in the United States before joining Ethiopia’s independence struggle.
He is the father of four children.
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
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