{"id":11253,"date":"2024-08-22T11:29:48","date_gmt":"2024-08-22T09:29:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/collecting-reliable-information-from-eritrea-is-exhausting"},"modified":"2024-08-22T11:29:48","modified_gmt":"2024-08-22T09:29:48","slug":"collecting-reliable-information-from-eritrea-is-exhausting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/collecting-reliable-information-from-eritrea-is-exhausting","title":{"rendered":"“COLLECTING RELIABLE INFORMATION FROM ERITREA IS EXHAUSTING”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Erena is a radio station based in Paris,\u00a0founded in 2010 on the initiative of\u00a0Reporters Without Borders and Eritrean\u00a0journalists in exile. It broadcasts news,\u00a0analysis and music, as well as giving the\u00a0floor to the audience through \u201cOpen\u00a0Mic\u201d programmes. Amanual Ghirmai,\u00a0Erena\u2019s director, has been living in exile\u00a0for 15 years.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cLiving in exile is exhausting. Reporting in exile is\u00a0exhausting, as Eritrea is far away, and it\u2019s a very\u00a0closed country. You cannot get information easily, it takes a long time and requires lots of effort.\u00a0Our journalists cannot work and be identified as\u00a0such in the country. And Internet doesn\u2019t work in\u00a0Eritrea, or very poorly and only in public places so\u00a0that we cannot have safe private communication\u00a0with anyone. Furthermore, people are afraid to\u00a0talk to us: they know the government could harass them. All that means we cannot get trusted\u00a0information instantly from our home country. We\u00a0mainly work in refugee camps in Ethiopia and\u00a0Sudan, where we can get good information from\u00a0recently arrived Eritrean refugees. To confirm the\u00a0information we have, we have developed a solid\u00a0network of informants or so-called \u201ccitizen journalists\u201d, people who have an opportunity to visit\u00a0the country as traders or NGO workers.<\/p>\n

We also cover news of the diaspora, with a network of correspondents in all countries where\u00a0there is a strong Eritrean community, such as\u00a0Germany, the United Kingdom, United States,\u00a0Canada, Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan. We open\u00a0our microphones to our audience outside Eritrea,\u00a0so as to make their voice heard back home. We\u00a0are willing to create more links between Eritreans\u00a0inside and outside the country.<\/p>\n

In Eritrea, our programmes are broadcast by satellite. Anyone can receive them with a simple\u00a0satellite-TV set, or by transistor radio on short\u00a0wave. It is not formally forbidden to listen to\u00a0Erena, but people try to do it discreetly. It\u2019s difficult to collect precise data on our audience\u00a0inside the country. Our last audience survey was\u00a0made in 2017, mainly with data collected in refugee camps. Results concluded that we are followed mostly in Eritrean cities, where 500,000\u00a0people listen to Erena weekly, which is a lot for a\u00a0country with 3.5 million inhabitants.<\/p>\n

Fifteen years of exile is a long time. When Erena\u00a0was created, we would have preferred to be\u00a0closer to our country, in Djibouti, Ethiopia or\u00a0Sudan. But that was not possible for safety reasons. And it is still not possible today. My dream\u00a0is that some day Erena will be based in Asmara,\u00a0the capital of Eritrea, and will be run by a young\u00a0generation of Eritrean journalists.\u201d<\/p>\n

This extract is taken from the 13th issue of Mediation, entitled \u2018Structuring exiled journalism in a more authoritarian world\u2019, which you can find here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Erena is a radio station based in Paris,\u00a0founded in 2010 on the initiative of\u00a0Reporters Without Borders and Eritrean\u00a0journalists in exile. It broadcasts news,\u00a0analysis and music, as well as giving the\u00a0floor to the audience through \u201cOpen\u00a0Mic\u201d programmes. Amanual Ghirmai,\u00a0Erena\u2019s director, has been living in exile\u00a0for 15 years. \u201cLiving in exile is exhausting. Reporting in exile is\u00a0exhausting, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":11254,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[196],"tags":[239],"class_list":["post-11253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-our-news","tag-how-we-work-information-dialogue"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-06 23:24:42","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}