Hanna Petros Solomon was ten years old the last time she saw her father. He left for his usual morning jog in a tracksuit, a towel slung over his shoulder. He never came back.
That was September 18, 2001, in Asmara. Her father, Petros Solomon, had been one of Eritrea’s most senior independence-war commanders and later served as the country’s defence and foreign minister. On that morning, security agents picked him up off the street. He was one of eleven officials, collectively known as the G-15, arrested within a 48-hour sweep after they signed an open letter demanding that President Isaias Afwerki implement the country’s long-ratified constitution and hold overdue elections.
Twenty-five years later, none of them has ever been charged, tried, or seen again.
The G-15 letter, circulated in May 2001, was a modest ask by most democratic standards: convene the national assembly, apply the 1997 constitution, allow the courts their independence. Isaias’s government answered with mass arrest. Alongside the politicians, ten independent journalists were detained the same week, and every private newspaper in the country was shut down. Eritrea has not had an independent press since.
For the children left behind, the anniversary is not a historical marker. It is an open wound. Hanna, now a trauma specialist living in the United States, still keeps her father’s old photographs, worried the memories will fade before he does. Her mother, Aster Yohannes, flew back to Eritrea in 2003 after officials personally assured her she would be safe — and was detained the moment she stepped off the plane at Asmara airport. Neither parent has been heard from since.
Ibrahim Sherifo was thirteen when his mother, Aster Fissehatsion, was taken from her sister’s home in her pyjamas. His father, Mahmoud Ahmed Sherifo, a former vice-president, was arrested the same morning after returning from his own run. Ibrahim, now completing a master’s degree in political science in the Netherlands, says the family deserves at minimum to know whether his parents are alive.
That basic question — alive or dead — has never been answered by Asmara. Human Rights Watch has documented credible reports that several of the eleven died years ago from untreated illness and heat exposure in Eiraeiro, a secret desert prison built to hold them. The government has never confirmed or denied any of it. When a Qatari journalist asked President Isaias directly about the prisoners in a 2010 interview, his answer was that the matter “can be forgotten.”
It has not been forgotten by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which ruled as early as 2003 that the detentions breached the African Charter and demanded the group’s immediate release. Eritrea has never complied. Amnesty International has named all eleven prisoners of conscience and renewed its call for their release on every major anniversary since, without a single response from the government.
The G-15’s disappearance matters well beyond Eritrea’s borders. It has become a reference point across the continent for how quickly a liberation movement’s own leadership can turn on the people who built it, and for how little recourse citizens have when a government simply stops answering. Eritrea’s president has now ruled for over three decades without a single election, the country still has no functioning constitution, and it remains one of the only nations in the world with no independent media at all. For African institutions built to prevent exactly this kind of impunity, the G-15 case is now a 25-year test of whether those mechanisms carry any weight.
Diaspora communities have kept the case alive largely on their own. Hanna and Ibrahim both continue to speak publicly, hoping pressure from outside will eventually force answers that thousands of Eritrean families are still waiting for. For now, the only message either of them can send their parents is the one Hanna repeats every September: that wherever they are, their children have not stopped waiting.
Afrikeye continues to track the legacy of Eritrea’s independence struggle and its unresolved political aftermath as part of our ongoing Politics coverage.
