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On Saturday, September 16, 228 people were arrested by police in Stuttgart, southwest Germany, over violent clashes between the community of Eritrean origin, in which 27 police officers and six other people were injured. Clashes broke out between opponents and supporters of the authoritarian regime ruling in Eritrea, which has been led by President Isaias Afwerki since 1993: several hundred opponents of the regime had gathered around the area where an Eritrean cultural festival was to take place in order to prevent the takeover of power and clashed with both police and Afwerki supporters.
Similar incidents have already occurred in recent months in other cities around the world where there are communities of Eritrean origin. During the thirty years of the Afwerki regime, numerous celebratory events were organized – including in Rome and Milan – which resulted in large-scale clashes on several occasions: in August in Stockholm, Sweden, more than 50 people were injured and serious clashes broke out in dozens arrests; On September 2, more than a hundred people were injured in Tel Aviv, Israel, and there were also clashes near Zurich, Switzerland, on the same day.
Afwerki has been in power since Eritrea’s war of independence from Ethiopia in 1993: the country has not held elections since then and there is no free press. According to various international organizations, Eritrea is one of the countries on the African continent where respect for human rights is the worst: compulsory military service has no set duration and some young Eritreans are forced into lifelong military service in conditions of semi-slavery; Anyone who deserts risks arrest and torture. All this and the terrible economic conditions in which a large part of the population lives have led to a large exodus from Eritrea.
In Stuttgart only six people were so injured that they had to be taken to hospital, all of them police officers. According to police, between 80 and 90 people attended the festival, while several hundred demonstrators protested against the event. Authorities had approved the protest in a certain area of the city, but then Afwerki opponents advanced towards the site where the festival was taking place and attacked participants, using stones and sticks against the police.
Around 300 police officers were on site in anticipation of possible clashes. They used pepper spray and batons against the protesting crowd and escorted participants in the cultural festival, which was interrupted after two hours. The arrested people – Eritrean citizens or those with German citizenship but of Eritrean origin – had come to Stuttgart from various German towns in the area surrounding the city; These included 63 people from Switzerland, where there is a large Eritrean diaspora community.
According to Afwerki’s opponents, Eritrean cultural festivals organized in Europe are propaganda events aimed at raising funds for the regime, especially when organized by Eritrean embassies.
In Germany, the clashes in Stuttgart were widely commented on by right-wing extremist politicians, who attributed the violence in the city to the presence of foreign people of African descent.
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