By Aaron Abraha and Ghidewon Abay Asmerom

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Part I

Eritrea : The Genesis of a Western Smear

Before a country is sanctioned, isolated, investigated, and condemned, it is first named. The label comes before the verdict. The slogan comes before the evidence. In Eritrea’s case, that slogan was “the North Korea of Africa”, a phrase engineered not to explain the country, but to make explanation unnecessary.

It is a smear built for speed. It is short enough for a headline, frightening enough for a policy brief, and lazy enough for journalists who prefer recycled clichés to historical context. Once Eritrea was placed inside the North Korea frame, its own history disappeared. Its thirty-year liberation struggle, its security concerns, its insistence on sovereignty, its rejection of foreign dependency, its religious complexity, its globally connected diaspora, and its social achievements were all flattened into a single caricature: isolated, irrational, sealed, and sinister.

That was the purpose. The phrase was never meant to illuminate Eritrea. It was meant to discredit it.

The Missionary Origins of a Smear

The label “North Korea of Africa” did not emerge from careful scholarship or serious field-based study. It came from a network of Western advocacy groups, missionary organizations, religious-freedom lobbies, human rights campaigners, and media outlets that needed a dramatic, emotionally charged phrase to demonize a country that refused to submit to their preferred model of “openness.”

Eritrea’s refusal to become a playground for foreign-funded NGOs, intelligence-linked organizations, missionary adventurism, hostile journalism, and donor-driven political engineering was recast as proof of total closure. A sovereign decision to regulate outside influence was turned into an accusation of isolation.

In other words, Eritrea was not called the “North Korea of Africa” because it became North Korea. It was called the “North Korea of Africa” because it refused to become manageable.

To date, there appears to be no reliably dated public reference to Eritrea as the “North Korea of Africa” before the early 2005 statements associated with Kevin Turner of Strategic World Impact. In January 2005, Turner reportedly compared Eritrea’s policies to North Korea. In May of the same year, Mission Network News quoted him saying that the situation in Eritrea was becoming “eerily like North Korea and Saudi Arabia,” while also claiming that Eritrea had consulted such governments on how to control churches.

Kevin Turner, 25 January 2005 Radio interview, with Grand Rapids, Michigan, based Missionary News Network (MNN). To our knowledge he is the first person to associate Eritrea with North Korea as early as January of 2005. The full transcript of his interview is attached below but here is an excerpt:

“The government here is pursuing a nationalistic almost communist agenda and part of that agenda is just like North Korea, who by the way mentors Eritrea, is to stomp out Christianity.”

In May of that same year he is being quoted by MNN saying

“The situation is getting eerily like North Korea and Saudi Arabia. Turner says, “They’ve actually consulted with some of these other governments for those very issues of how to contain or control the church.” 

From that point onward, the analogy became a convenient propaganda device. Once repeated by advocacy groups, journalists, religious lobbies, and Western officials, it hardened into cliché. But clichés are not truth. Labels are not evidence. And repetition is not scholarship.

A Label Born from Resentment

Eritrea’s real “crime” was not that it became North Korea. Its real offense, in the eyes of many Western actors, was that it refused to open itself to every outside force operating under the language of human rights, religion, democracy, aid, journalism, or civil society.

Eritrea refused to become a laboratory for foreign-funded NGOs. It refused to allow intelligence-linked organizations to operate freely under humanitarian cover. It refused to allow destabilizing religious networks to use faith as a political instrument. It refused to become another African state where foreign embassies, donor agencies, activist groups, and media organizations dictate the limits of national sovereignty. In 2005, Eritrea expelled USAID, a decision that further intensified Western hostility. For this refusal, Eritrea was punished with a label.

The country was not examined on its own terms. It was compared to North Korea because the comparison was useful. It was dramatic, frightening, and easy to repeat. It allowed Eritrea’s critics to bypass history, security context, social achievements, regional threats, and the long legacy of foreign interference in the Horn of Africa. Once Eritrea was branded “North Korea,” no further thinking was required.

CSW has been another key voice campaigning against Eritrea.  Christian Solidarity Worldwide publicly acknowledged its role in campaigning for the 2012 UN Human Rights Council resolution on Eritrea, calling it “proof of our advocacy bearing fruit” and saying the resolution resulted from “many years of work by CSW.” The UN Human Rights Council then created the Special Rapporteur mandate on Eritrea in 2012 through Resolution 20/20 and later established the Commission of Inquiry through Resolution 26/24 in 2014.

This matters because CSW’s own language reveals the machinery behind the campaign. Matthew Jones of CSW stated that the organization looked back to its earlier work on North Korea and believed that approach could be replicated with respect to Eritrea. That admission is revealing. It shows that Eritrea was not approached as a unique society with its own history, security threats, religious traditions, social priorities, and post-war challenges. Instead, a North Korea template was imported and applied.

CSW openly admits the appointment of the Special Rapporteur is its own work. We read them boasting with these words 

“This is an amazing proof of our advocacy bearing fruit! The landmark UN resolution is the result of many years of work by CSW, presenting compelling evidence to persuade the UN that the way human rights are violated in Eritrea is utterly horrific, and must be investigated.”

The most revealing part of the campaign is that CSW and some advocates openly looked to North Korea as a model for what they wanted to reproduce against Eritrea at the United Nations. It shows that Eritrea was targeted through a pre-existing template designed for maximum political effect.

The comparison did not arise organically from Eritrean reality. It was cultivated, repeated, and laundered through NGO reports, media articles, parliamentary briefings, UN side events, and diplomatic lobbying. Eventually, it became a phrase that journalists could insert without investigation.

Here is CSW’s own admission.

“Particularly we referred back to the work we had done on North Korea a number of years ago, and since that was quite pivotal, and getting a new mandate and new UN mandate on North Korea and we felt this may be possible to replicate with respect to Eritrea and certainly the situation deserved it. So we set about from that point and enacting a strategy at the UN, and raising Eritrea and that consisted of, making speeches, directly at the Human Rights Council, we organized and spoke at side meetings at the Human Rights Council, myself and colleagues, have spoken to diplomats from literally with dozens of state delegations from countries.”

Clear evidence of this template-driven approach appeared when North Korea-specific accusation pages were mixed into an Eritrea-related UN Human Rights Council allegations file in Geneva and distributed online. This was more than a clerical mistake. It exposed the underlying method: methodological borrowing, advocacy by analogy, and the recycling of a pre-existing North Korea framework for use against Eritrea.

The broader point is unmistakable. North Korea had become the lens through which Eritrea was increasingly interpreted. Eritrea was no longer being examined on its own history, conditions, security environment, or political realities. It was being forced into a ready-made template. This was not independent investigation. It was advocacy by cut-and-paste.

Once North Korea became the model, Eritrea’s realities were forced into that frame. National service became “slave labor.” Regulation of foreign-funded religious groups became “religious persecution.” Restrictions on hostile foreign journalists became “total closure.” A sovereign state’s refusal to host destabilizing external networks became proof of isolation. In this framework, Eritrea could never win. Every act of self-protection was reinterpreted as evidence of guilt.

“North Korea of Africa” became shorthand for everything Eritrea’s opponents wanted the world to believe: isolated, irrational, sealed, fanatical, unknowable, and beyond redemption. But Eritrea is not unknowable. It is simply not obedient.

Much of the early campaign against Eritrea came through Western evangelical and religious-freedom networks. Their argument was simple: Eritrea was persecuting Christianity.

But this claim collapses under scrutiny. Eritrea is not closed to Christianity. It is one of the oldest Christian lands in the world. It is home to Orthodox Tewahedo Christians, Catholics, Lutherans, and Muslims who have lived together for generations. Eritrean society is not anti-Christian or anti-Muslim. It is deeply religious, culturally conservative, and historically plural.

The issue was never whether Eritreans could worship God. The issue was whether foreign-financed religious organizations could operate inside Eritrea without transparency, accountability, or concern for national security. That is a very different matter.

Eritrea’s concern was not theology. It was sovereignty. Who funds these groups? What agenda do they carry? Are they churches, or are they channels of foreign influence? Are they serving believers, or are they serving external political and intelligence interests? As the old saying goes, whoever pays the piper chooses the tune. Eritrea has every right to ask who is paying the piper.

Far from Closed

The claim that Eritrea is a “closed society” also collapses when tested against the movement of Eritreans themselves. In 2024, a reported 591,518 travelers visited Eritrea, including 552,000 members of the Eritrean diaspora and 39,518 foreign visitors. More than half a million diaspora Eritreans returning home in one year is not the profile of a sealed country.

There is no ideological litmus test imposed on diaspora Eritreans returning home. Eritreans come from the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, and beyond. They bring different opinions, experiences, political views, religious backgrounds, and social habits. Yet every May, every July, every holiday season, every February, and during countless family occasions, they return home.

They return for Independence Day. They return for festivals. They return for weddings, funerals, baptisms, family reunions, religious events, business, land, memory, and belonging. They return because Eritrea is not a prison in their imagination. It is home.

A country visited by hundreds of thousands of its diaspora is not North Korea. A country whose people abroad maintain such a strong emotional, cultural, and physical connection to the homeland is not sealed off from the world.

Those who call Eritrea “closed” often misunderstand Eritrean political culture. Eritreans do not live outside politics. Few societies debate politics more intensely than Eritreans do. Inside the country and across the diaspora, Eritreans discuss history, sovereignty, war, development, religion, foreign policy, sacrifice, betrayal, sanctions, regional threats, and the future of the nation with extraordinary passion.

The idea that Eritreans are politically lifeless is a foreign fantasy. Eritrean society is saturated with political memory. It is a society shaped by struggle, survival, and national purpose. Its politics may not take the Western NGO form of donor-funded civil society and opposition theater, but it is not empty of public consciousness. The West often mistakes the absence of its preferred political format for the absence of politics itself.

Why Eritrea Refused the Open-Door Trap

Eritrea’s modern political posture cannot be understood outside its history. This is a country born through a thirty-year liberation war, forced federation, illegal annexation, mass sacrifice, and repeated foreign-backed attempts to undermine its sovereignty. After independence, it faced war, occupation of its territory, sanctions, isolation campaigns, and continuous pressure from powers that preferred Eritrea weak, dependent, and penetrable.

In that context, Eritrea chose self-reliance, social justice, dignity, national security, peace, and public safety over dependency. It chose to build clinics, schools, roads, dams, agricultural programs, ports, and national institutions under difficult conditions. It chose not to mortgage its sovereignty to donors. It chose not to allow every organization carrying the language of religion, aid, democracy, or human rights to operate as a parallel authority inside the country. That choice angered many outside actors. But it was a sovereign choice.

When Western governments and NGOs call Eritrea “closed,” what they often mean is that Eritrea is closed to them. Closed to their intelligence networks. Closed to their political engineering. Closed to their missionary adventurism. Closed to journalists who arrive with conclusions already written. Closed to NGOs whose funding, reporting, and advocacy align too neatly with Western strategic interests. But being closed to manipulation is not the same as being closed to the world.

Eritrea maintains diplomatic relations. Eritreans travel. Diaspora communities return in large numbers. Foreigners visit. Religious communities worship. Political debate flourishes among Eritreans worldwide. The country participates in regional and international affairs on its own terms. It does not lack contact with the world; it rejects subordination to it. That is the distinction the “North Korea of Africa” label tries to erase.

Eritrea’s refusal to surrender its sovereignty has been rebranded as isolation. Its regulation of foreign-funded religious activity has been rebranded as religious persecution. Its insistence on national security has been rebranded as paranoia. Its social discipline has been rebranded as totalitarianism. Its rejection of dependency has been rebranded as closure. This is how narrative warfare works.

First, a country refuses to submit. Then it is called secretive. Then it is called closed. Then it is compared to North Korea. Then sanctions, mandates, hostile reports, and diplomatic pressure are presented as moral necessity. The label comes first. The verdict follows.

Eritrea is not the “North Korea of Africa.” It is Eritrea: a post-liberation African state shaped by war, sacrifice, sovereignty, self-reliance, regional hostility, and a fierce determination not to be recolonized through softer instruments.

It is a country that chose social cohesion over imported chaos, self-reliance over dependency, dignity over donor tutelage, security over foreign penetration, and national survival over Western approval.

That does not mean Eritrea is beyond criticism. No country is. But criticism is one thing; demonization is another. The “North Korea of Africa” label was never meant to understand Eritrea. It was meant to isolate it, stigmatize it, and make its sovereignty appear illegitimate. The phrase should be retired. It is not a serious description. It is a political weapon.

Eritrea’s story cannot be reduced to a slogan invented by those angry that the country refused to open its doors to every foreign handler, missionary operator, intelligence-linked NGO, and hostile journalist who demanded access in the name of freedom. The truth is simpler: Eritrea is not closed to the world. It is closed to domination.

The key argument is this: Western and NGO classifications of “open” and “closed” states often present themselves as neutral measurements, but they are built on historically loaded assumptions, selective metrics, and political blind spots. They judge the rest of the world through standards defined by the very powers whose own histories include slavery, colonialism, genocide, apartheid support, illegal wars, sanctions regimes, coups, and ongoing complicity in mass violence.

The Empty Phrase: “The World’s Most Closed State”

The phrase “the world’s most closed state” operates much like the phrase “North Korea of Africa.” It sounds authoritative, but it is mostly a conclusion masquerading as analysis. It is repeated so often that it becomes a substitute for evidence. Once the label is applied, the country no longer has to be studied; it only has to be condemned.

But Eritrea is not a sealed fortress, nor is it a political anomaly. It is a post-liberation state shaped by a singular historical experience, a harsh regional environment, and a deeply internalized ethic of sovereignty. To understand Eritrea requires patience, context, and a willingness to step outside the ready-made categories of Western political discourse. Those are precisely the qualities missing from much of the writing that casually calls Eritrea “closed.”

The accusation collapses under modest scrutiny. Eritrea maintains diplomatic relations across continents. It receives delegations. It participates in regional and international forums. It engages in security discussions. It sustains one of the most globally connected diasporas in Africa. A genuinely sealed state does not receive hundreds of thousands of returnees from every corner of the world.

The caricature persists not because it is accurate, but because it is useful. It allows critics to dismiss Eritrea’s political choices without engaging the historical and geopolitical pressures that shaped them.

Those pressures are not abstract. Eritrea emerged from a thirty-year war for independence, one of the longest and most disciplined liberation struggles of the twentieth century. Its institutions were forged in conditions of scarcity, siege, sacrifice, and existential threat. The country entered independence without a reconstruction honeymoon, without a Marshall Plan, and without insulation from regional hostility. It soon faced war, occupation of its territory, sanctions, proxy pressure, diplomatic isolation, and repeated efforts to weaken its sovereignty.

Under such circumstances, states do not adopt the governance models preferred by think tanks in Washington, Brussels, or London. They adopt the models they believe will keep them alive.

This is why the charge of “hyper-centralization” is often intellectually lazy. It describes a structure without explaining the conditions that produced it. Many states that later became celebrated development stories passed through periods of intense centralization during insecurity, institutional infancy, or post-war reconstruction. South Korea, Singapore, and Rwanda are frequently praised today, yet each relied on strong central authority during crucial phases of state-building. Eritrea’s trajectory is not incomprehensible. What distinguishes Eritrea is its refusal to outsource its political evolution to external actors. That refusal is often called secrecy. In reality, it is sovereignty.

The friction between Eritrea and Western institutions stems from this very point. International organizations accustomed to shaping policy in developing countries often find Eritrea’s insistence on self-determination frustrating. Reports are written with limited direct access. 

Testimonies are collected from politically coached asylum seeking circles. Assumptions are imported from governance models with little relevance to the Horn of Africa. The result is a narrative architecture built less on observation than on inference. Eritrea becomes a projection screen for external anxieties.

Yet the lived reality of Eritrean society contradicts the closed-state caricature. This is a country with one of the strongest national identities on the continent, a society that has resisted the sectarian fractures that have torn apart many of its neighbors. Its social cohesion is rooted not merely in state policy, but in shared struggle, shared sacrifice, and a shared understanding of what sovereignty means in a region where sovereignty is often fragile.

Nor is Eritrea’s public sphere silent. It simply does not always resemble the donor-funded NGO model familiar to Western observers. Eritrean civic life operates through community networks, local institutions, national associations, religious communities, neighborhood structures, diaspora ties, cultural obligations, and informal political debate. Western analysts often miss these forms of social organization because they are looking for replicas of their own institutions.

The deeper issue is that Eritrea does not fit the mold. It rejects aid dependency. It resists externally imposed political timelines. It prioritizes long-term nation-building over short-term political performance. It insists on charting its own course, even when that course is difficult. In a global system that rewards compliance and punishes deviation, this posture is recast as defiance.

That is the real function of the label “closed state.” It is not merely descriptive. It is disciplinary. It signals that Eritrea has stepped outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior for a small post-colonial nation. It tells Eritrea that sovereignty is acceptable only when it remains compatible with Western access, Western funding, Western NGOs, Western journalists, Western religious networks, and Western strategic expectations.

But Eritrea’s story cannot be reduced to a slogan. It is a nation still navigating the legacies of war and the demands of peace, still balancing security with development, and still defending the principle that sovereignty is not granted by outsiders. It is defended.

That does not mean Eritrea is beyond criticism. No country is. But criticism requires honesty. It requires context. It requires evidence. It requires the humility to admit that a country may refuse external domination without being sealed from the world.

Eritrea is not the world’s most closed state. It is one of the world’s most mischaracterized states. And until the discourse moves from slogans to substance, the gap between perception and reality will remain wide.

The “North Korea of Africa” and “Closed State” smear is therefore not an isolated insult. It is part of a much larger Western habit: naming, grading, ranking, and condemning the rest of the world through categories invented in Western capitals, funded by Western institutions, and enforced through Western media. As Eritrea is forced into the North Korea template; the same machinery places most of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America on a moral color chart as “repressed,” “closed,” or “unfree,” while the very powers that enslaved, colonized, invaded, sanctioned, occupied, and destabilized others conveniently reserved the word “open” for themselves. This is where the Eritrean case becomes bigger than Eritrea. It exposes the fraud behind the so-called open West and the allegedly closed rest.