Unsafe to Return, Dangerous to Stay: Eritrean Refugees Trapped Between Home and a Hard Place

Abstract

Warsan Shire’s phrase ‘no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark’ is a staggering reminder that under normal circumstances, people would prefer home to alien lands and uncertain futures. Those driven out of their countries by war and persecution are also keen to return to their homeland as soon as the political situations in their country of origin change, and they tend to do so with little or no assistance from repatriation schemes. With repatriation in mind, Eritrean refugees had accepted the refugee camps in Sudan for its true meaning-temporary waiting place. But that was before the beginning of the Mediterranean Sea journey, which is relatively a new phenomenon. This paper intends to explore the reasons behind the re-emigration of Eritrean refugees from their countries of first asylum, and the practicality of EU’s reactive measures of deterrence without addressing the underlying problems that led refugees to Libya and the Mediterranean Sea. The European Union is adopting severe measures and questionable deals that largely focuses on keeping the crisis away, and less on the origin and solution of the problem. Therefore, this paper argues that the strategies of endless confinement in the countries of first asylum, premature repatriation to their country of origin, the relocation to less stable African countries and the policy of interception, return to and torture in the country of transit can only create secondary and circular migration that compromises protection and complicates the situation, thereby further exposing the vulnerable refugees to more vulnerabilities.