Africa's North Korea

on November 17th 1869 this small Peninsula suddenly became a new Global Hot Spot why because a long ditch was dug through it allowing ships to sail through this route instead of all the way around Africa almost overnight the Red Sea became one of the most strategic regions on Earth to control or at least have a presence in one Italian navigation company did just that they bought the port of assab from local sultants just 2 days before the grand opening of the canal talk about good timing and today well assab is just a small City in

the much larger country of erria sometimes called Africa's North Korea erria is an impoverished highly militarized one- party state it has been led by a single leader since Independence in 1991 and has often been one of the bottom nations in terms of human development not only does it have the second highest amount of active military reserves per capita the country has mandatory conscription for both both men and women starting from your last year of high school until whenever you're dismissed sometimes when you're 40 sometimes in your 50s take that in that's basically your entire working

Life as a conscript in the military although many of them don't fight because of the unique way arria's government commands its economy conscripts are not just used for war they are quite literally the backbone of everything in the country they build the country run the services administer it and and of course defend erria all for very little pay suffering abuse and harsh conditions in what is essentially a mass system of forced labor it's no surprise then that irraa is also called the world's fastest emptying country because of how many citizens run away from it around

800,000 by 2023 that's in comparison to a home population of only 3.7 million meaning almost 1/5 of all people born in this land have left it really attractive but is erria actually like North Korea that crazy hermit Kingdom I don't know there is some key differences for one nukes arria does not have a nuclear weapons program and thus is much less of a threat than North Korea is they don't have the capability to straight up destroy their neighbors if the military just feels like it one day if you were to leave arria you could come

back one day although with some difficulties whereas if you leave North Korea you're dead to them errans have a lot more exposure to the outside world through TV and the internet although the majority still don't have access to them yet and both are still heavily monitored and regulated by the government and lastly aitran loyalty is meant to be to the nationalistic triumphant aitran State and Military not to the family that runs it still there are plenty of similarities we'll run through four that I think give you a good picture on The house's and the wise

of Africa's North Korea first militarism look at this fun parade all the soldiers marching as one what do you think they might do invade Ethiopia maybe even jibuti um I'm not sure but I can say that erria was a country made by War even back in the Italian times originally the Italians did not try to grow this dry and rocky colony that much they wanted control over the fertile interior mountains in East Africa but were defeated by Ethiopian armies in the 1890s the land they did keep in erria wasn't all that interesting to them despite

the prime Seaside location interest came back with a change in government though the new fascist Italy was obsessed with trying to reconquer Ethiopia and where was their starting block to invade right here in erria suddenly investment infantry and Italians flooded in the new Italians brought workers to build up Urban infrastructure and Industry that's why asara still looks so Italian today and heavily subsidized the colon bringing in the foreign goods and food they needed but the let's say more conservative-minded fascist Italians also brought new laws with them the New Towns they built were built to be

segregated they limited air train education to only up to the fourth grade confiscated aitran cash crop farms and conscripted and trained many citizens to help the fight against Ethiopia this obviously didn't go over too well with the people and it created an identity through a shared enemy otherwise this linguistically religiously ethnically and geographically diverse Nation probably never would have come together the newly trained aitran soldiers never rebelled against the Italians though because the colony was taken over by the British in World War II the Brits also weren't really interested in administering arria especially when their

empire was in the middle of collapsing the most they really did was strip italian-made assets and Deport many of the fascist administrators who ran the colony many Italians left the col colony in this period so in the end the UK and un came to an agreement in 1952 to just make erria an autonomous region of neighboring Ethiopia funny they did that even funnier when they were slowly annexed by the Ethiopian Empire officially voting erria out of existence in 1962 eritreans became second class citizens in the Empire Independence leaders were harassed or killed and political parties

the press and unions were crushed under Ethiopian rule so if youth thought the rebellious military culture was made under fascist Italy you were wrong a 30-year War followed this 30 years yes three decades the final straw being the fact that they would no longer teach the majority language to Gia in school instead opting for amhar the language of the Ethiopian government resistance started off as a Muslim movement but then spread to workers and spread even further to a general nationalist movement eventually this movement split up with the most successful success being the arrian people's Liberation

Front fighting lasted through the cold war with all of its Shenanigans it was decades of fighting massacres raisings Mass burnings sometimes even between atrians and as time went on the atrians continued fighting in a way that the Ethiopians were getting tired of fighting alongside the te plf funds and Equipment dropping off at the end of the Cold War and battles won in the mountains led to arrian Victory and a declaration of independence in 1991 and now everyone's happy and peaceful the Revolutionary Fighters could now focus on governing their newly made country the eplf became the

pfdj The People's Front for democracy and Justice what a that would be so did the fighting stop after Independence no this is when they made their mandatory conscription although for the time it was only 18 months long and didn't control their entire Society most new government officials were commanders and officers in the fight for independence they knew how to run an army but not a country after Independence arria was involved in a small war with Yemen the first Congo War the Second Sudanese Civil War a war in Djibouti got sanctioned after that one and a

real doozy in Ethiopia from 1998 to 2000 you see the tplf eventually installed a government in Ethiopia and even though they fought with the air TRS for Independence the two movements did did not get along the government has always had this idea that the tplf is trying to destabilize arria and remove them from power so relations between the countries soured throughout the '90s the two countries stopped trading had border skirmishes and an outright war broke out in 1998 over the Tiny Village of bod although it only lasted for 2 years conflict between them was on

and off for two decades until a formal peace treaty was signed with the new Ethiopian government in 2018 hope hope not for long though in 2020 they joined the Ethiopia te Civil War fighting once again with their compatriots just kidding they were fighting with Ethiopia against the tplf again they blocked food shipments from the sea pillaged Villages murdered citizens and even did this to their own aitran refugee camps all in an effort to officially crush the tplf so if you were to add up all the Wars all the people affected moved or killed by constant

Warfare in the tiny country uh it would be a lot of people arria was made by War second is power I should tell you more about the government in general I guess you could call them paranoid isolationist and brutal with their punishments particularly this guy is isas aarki he's been leader for he's been leader for he's been man at least as long as I can remember as long as anyone can remember that's because if we're going off the perspective of the arrian nation he's been president forever for 100% of the independent history you don't rule

a country since 1991 without having some typical dictatorial characteristics he was a through and through military commander who became president he spearheaded the war efforts was paranoid about foreign powers arrested opposition leaders and arrested many of his own citizens for arbitrary and unknown reasons one of the most common ways to do this was to detain dozens of people at a time inside of these shipping containers better pray it doesn't get too hot outside damn these metal prisons get hot we're talking potentially up to the 60s or 70s de C and this barely scratches the surface

of all the torture and abuse the soldiers face Maybe AAS isn't a great dude so if there is any point where all hope of a reasonable development plan was lost it was definitely 1998 the militarization of society the ongoing war with Ethiopia was an excuse to extend conscription from 18 months to well they just say indefinitely but it's usually around 25 to 30 years of service AKA your whole working career in forc labor slowly the government eroded the powers of society and the people elections in 1997 were postponed to 2001 due to the war and

then postponed again because part of the country was occupied at the time I guess we're still waiting for this one to happen because there have been no elections since Independence even in local elections the last ones took place in 2003 the pfdj doesn't even trust small town Mayors newspapers were shut down in 2001 and yes journalists have of course been high on the list of citizens arrested and detained for challenging Isaias the list that also includes many entrepreneurs and business owners those that ran shops that weren't pfdj owned and operated yep into the shipping containers

they went there have even been reports of soldiers going door to door under the pretext of data collection or asking how service is going for the family but is really to identify draft Dodgers and those who fled the country and to flee the country you have to get through heavily guarded borders either through bribery or gunfire or just see where the ocean takes you many times if they catch you doing this they'll get a family member to replace you in conscription or just arrest a family member as punishment so I don't know personally to me

isaas doesn't really seem like a stable guy I might even go as far to say that he and the pfdj have ruined the nation but hey not everything is politics there's always the economy right so third command how is that economy well it's a little different to how it works in the US or Europe or India or even China which claims to be what erria actually is and that's a command economy almost everything at least in the cities is run by the pfdj and the conscripts working for them I said say in the cities because

more accurately it's a dual economy one based on government command and the other on subsistence farming so this GDP per capita number might not be too accurate when talking about the eritreans in cities like Asmara Karen and assab the pfj rules all I mean all private business is outlawed in the nation instead many farms businesses Administration and services are run by yes you guessed it the conscripts for example all private construction companies were banned in 2006 and the government even went so far to demolish already built homes because they were financed from foreign money by

a private firm so infrastructure is weak only a fifth of the country's roads are paved industry hasn't made people richer property rights are borderline non-existence but hey at least forcing people to learn how to read does actually improve the literacy rate so that's one good thing they've done the pfj and Military essentially have a monopoly on all trade construction markets Mining and cash crops in arria in fact most of the trade leaving is from government-owned mines selling to China and the Emirates most of the stuff coming into Atria is a little more essential to life

especially this category food although the country claims to be self-reliant in food production often rejecting Aid their Imports clearly suggest otherwise forcing people to run Farms they don't want to is one way to curb food production but it might not be entirely their fault arria is a dry country with a very little amount of arable land most of the food going out of the nation is a small amount of cash crops like bananas and peppers but most of the food coming in are staple foods eaten every day when you zoom in most of the food

production seems to be for smallscale domestic eating almost on a subsistence level which is where most people work most atrians do not live in urban Urban centers they live on small farms or Pastor land small villages that depend on family units instead of the pfdj for welfare of course when drought and soil erosion hits these are the people most affected by food and water shortages but they're also often the ones least affected by the business band setting up what are called micro businesses in small towns in the cities basically just Market stands of their crop

making ends meet in the cash-based informal economy so besides The Market vendors working for cash what do the conscripts work for I'll let General sabat FM minister of defense and Mining explain it for me even though each of the conscripts has between two and three children they only receive 500 navka per month how do they do it the reward is not a salary because the amount they receive is insignificant instead patriotism is the driving force if a private firm were to take over it would be solely driven by pecuniary interest rather than by patriotism in

the beginning the conscript will be happy to receive 100 navka but soon after he will demand more in the end money will dictate everything nothing can be accomplished in this way patriotism will drive the country all while the ones who own the mines and businesses make a fortune off of free labor and won't reinvest the profits back into infrastructure or the people maybe patriotism will drive the people to work for only $30 a month but it also seems to drive them out of the country in Mass numbers which has led erria to for isolation a

lot of aerotrans live outside of their closed borders one thing that means is that a lot of aeratr send money back home to their families called remittances despite the whole self-reliance thing it's estimated that around 20 to 40% of the GDP comes from these remittances in a country with a large level of poverty little to no pay low for foreign reserves and food insecurity remittances are a way for many to keep their heads above water maybe even to build up some savings too I don't know flee themselves one day the government does try to restrict

them though a family can only withdraw up to 5,000 nafka in cash every month around $330 that's not a whole lot to subsist with so some argue remittances have not helped to develop arria they've just stabilized an unstable economy built off of forced labor pretty ironic for a country so insistent on its self-reliance from the outside world another irony the diaspora attacks every aitran Refugee is supposed to pay 2% of the money they make outside of the country back to the aitran government it's one of only a few countries on Earth to tax their citizens

living outside of the nation I'm looking at you America considering how many refugees there are that's got to be a pretty big portion of the government's Revenue right maybe the government does not share their income or budget the hdri trust fund controls all state Enterprises although no external monitoring is allowed of it so not even the Ministry of Finance knows where the money goes still we could assume this tax picks up a pretty big chunk of the budget pfj run businesses don't pay tax and neither do they hard to reach rural populations but 60% of

outside air trains report at least sometimes paying the 2% tax and almost all said they send remittances to their families smallscale family financing likely has a bigger impact than the government's tax collection and payments it's a confusing system I can't tell you everything about the economy but I think this quote from a fled Minister sums it up pretty well in the beginning I thought the diaspora tax was justified but over the past 20 years there has not been a visible thing done in erria we don't know where the money goes when I worked at the

Ministry of Finance I was involved in diaspora tax issues the Ministry of Finance has no control over the spending of the money it also does not control the mining income in the end it is the president's office and the head of pfj's financial affairs that control everything the pfj has a lot of companies they don't pay tax they are like the private property of the ruling Elite does it raise questions that most of the info we get about these systems are from those who clearly didn't like the country enough to run away sure I'm sure

there are some that exaggerate how bad a TR is to get more attention than trying to be totally honest but doesn't it raise more questions when there is barely any information coming out of the country in the first place maybe it's just me but I think I'm more inclined to believe the refugees' stories stories of conscription War command power held by a few and self-reliance that's what makes people call arria Africa's North Korea shout out to Yao for inspiring this video if you like to read about economics he writes a pretty good newsletter with a

particular focus on African economies check them out if you're interested I mean you're already done this video so might as well