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A service has been held in London to protest against the treatment of the head of the Eritrean orthodox church.

Patriarch Antonious is the head of two million orthodox believers and is a high-profile prisoner of conscience.

He was removed from his position earlier this year, after criticising the Eritrean government for interference in church activities.

Amnesty International says Eritrea displays one of the most extreme forms of religious persecution in the world.

The meeting heard that this was only the latest example of religious repression.

Health fears

In 1994, followers of Jehovah's Witness - who refused military service on religious grounds - were stripped of all rights, including citizenship.

Then in 2002 the crackdown was extended to the evangelical churches.

And now the patriarch of the orthodox church, to which most Eritrean Christians belong, has been removed from his post and imprisoned after objecting to Eritrean government attempts to stop a bible-reading group.

The head of the British Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Seraphim, told the BBC he was very worried about his health.

"He's 79. He is known to have diabetes. And he's been kept in a darkened room in his residence and he complained on one occasion he was unable to even read his Bible."

Eritrea has a history of considerable religious tolerance between its Muslim and Christian communities, but the government comes from a Marxist-Leninist tradition.

The church says it believes quiet pressure has failed, and it will now take the issue of Patriarch Antonios to the British government.

They locked up a 79 year old man... Over a Bible reading group. That's a fucking nightmare.

So, uh, where is this country?

The Cleric wrote:So, uh, where is this country?

It's a break away province of Ethiopia. It is currently independent after a long and nasty civil war.

Technically speaking, Eritrea was a separate region that was absorbed into Ethiopia after colonization ended which then fought a long and nasty civil war to get independence from Ethiopia again. Doesn't make it any less of a shithole or its conduct any less excusable, though.

Mayabird wrote:Technically speaking, Eritrea was a separate region that was absorbed into Ethiopia after colonization ended which then fought a long and nasty civil war to get independence from Ethiopia again. Doesn't make it any less of a shithole or its conduct any less excusable, though.

If we want to crank it back a bit further, modern Eritrea is actually partially Tigray--to the tune of about 50% of the population--including the majority of Orthodox believers. This area was conquered from Ethiopia in the 1880s before the battle of Adowa preserved Ethiopia from further losses at the hands of Italian colonialism.

Before the early 1880s and the intervention into Egypt by the British, Eritrea was part of Egypt (A part of it, Assab, was purchased from the local Sultan in 1869, but this was very small). It consisted at the time only a narrow coastal strip including the fortifications at the port of Massawa which had been built by Suleiman the Lawgiver in the 16th century when he had intervened in the region to fight the Ethiopians, who had been equipped with modern weapons by the Portuguese and so had been dominating the Muslims of the area who previously had been in a dominating position themselves. Since the 1550s up unil the 1880s, the coastal plain of Eritrea was therefore administered through Ottoman Egypt, ultimately part of the Khedivate.

Eritrea is a very unique state in Africa for being highly nationalistic. It's 50% Muslim and 50% Christian and has no problems there whatsoever; it allows women to serve in the military enmasse, and they're utterly ferocious fighters, the Prussia of the Horn of Africa. They currently have a dictatorship whose origins are founded in the Cult of National Resistance against Ethiopia, and the largest military budget in the world in ratio to their per capita GDP that's officially reported--the average daily salary is about $2.56 and the average percentage of that spent on the military by the government is 42 cents--the DPRK's is of course higher in reality, but not in state figures.

The downside of this, is, of course, any opposition whatsoever to the government or even any alternate source of power, including religion, is completely suppressed and must be suppressed. Eritrea is essentially a garrison state with the one goal of surviving against the vastly larger and more prosperous Ethiopia at all costs, with its nationalism based around a state myth of resistance.

I had been told Eritrea was majority Muslim?

How devoted is Ethiopia to reconqearing Eritrea?

frigidmagi wrote:I had been told Eritrea was majority Muslim?

That's not true; it's simply bullshit. The two populations are equal. For that matter a lot of people claim that Muslims make up almost half the population of Ethiopia, but that's also bullshit. The Ethiopian government figures are 61% Christian, 33% Islam, 5% traditional animist, and 1% agnostic/atheistic. The US State Department insists that Islam is the most widely practiced religion in Ethiopia because they're a bunch of Muslim ass-lickers, in direct contravention of the Ethiopian government's own surveys. In general the world tends to massively overestimate Islamic populations because of efforts by Islamic lobbyist groups to make them seem larger than they actually are. Ethiopia is a Christian State which holds the Ark of the Covenant, enough said, as they amply proved themselves by the Somalian Crusade.

How devoted is Ethiopia to reconqearing Eritrea?

Not very. They willing accepted a cease-fire after the Third Badme Offensive in 2000, in which six Ethiopian infantry divisions (about 66,000 men with Soviet-style formations) had attacked along a 10km front (Yes, they had a density of 6,600 men per kilometre) around the village of Badme supported by 350 tanks, while diversionary assaults were conducted along another, incredible, 90km of attack frontage.

There were around 24,000 Eritrean defenders around Badme proper, so the Ethiopians had 3-to-1 numerical superiourity when one counts the paratroop regiment they deployed to cut off the Eritrean retreat once their front lines had been broken by the infantry assault. The tanks were then used to exploit the gap and a significant portion of the Eritrean army was almost surrounded and cut off--there was talk that the Ethiopians would drive to Asmara almost unopposed at that time, but the UN stepped in, demanded a cease-fire, and the Ethiopians accepted. The UN proceeded to completely assrape them and side with the Eritreans, of course, so they're quite bitter about that now.

Just to give you an idea of the scale of this, 20,000 soldiers were killed during the Badme offensive on both sides of the conflict. This of course counts those killed in the diversionary actions on the other 90km of attack frontage in addition to the main 10km of the actual attack, and includes both sides' killed and MIA, but it does give you an idea of the sheer magnitude of the bloodletting. There was another battle about a year earlier in the war where the Ethiopians alone suffered 40,000 killed and wounded. It was literally World War One happening all over again in the Horn of Africa, and most of the world just ignored it.