Erena is a radio station based in Paris, founded in 2010 on the initiative of Reporters Without Borders and Eritrean journalists in exile. It broadcasts news, analysis and music, as well as giving the floor to the audience through “Open Mic” programmes. Amanual Ghirmai, Erena’s director, has been living in exile for 15 years.

“Living in exile is exhausting. Reporting in exile is exhausting, as Eritrea is far away, and it’s a very closed country. You cannot get information easily, it takes a long time and requires lots of effort. Our journalists cannot work and be identified as such in the country. And Internet doesn’t work in Eritrea, or very poorly and only in public places so that we cannot have safe private communication with anyone. Furthermore, people are afraid to talk to us: they know the government could harass them. All that means we cannot get trusted information instantly from our home country. We mainly work in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Sudan, where we can get good information from recently arrived Eritrean refugees. To confirm the information we have, we have developed a solid network of informants or so-called “citizen journalists”, people who have an opportunity to visit the country as traders or NGO workers.

We also cover news of the diaspora, with a network of correspondents in all countries where there is a strong Eritrean community, such as Germany, the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan. We open our microphones to our audience outside Eritrea, so as to make their voice heard back home. We are willing to create more links between Eritreans inside and outside the country.

In Eritrea, our programmes are broadcast by satellite. Anyone can receive them with a simple satellite-TV set, or by transistor radio on short wave. It is not formally forbidden to listen to Erena, but people try to do it discreetly. It’s difficult to collect precise data on our audience inside the country. Our last audience survey was made in 2017, mainly with data collected in refugee camps. Results concluded that we are followed mostly in Eritrean cities, where 500,000 people listen to Erena weekly, which is a lot for a country with 3.5 million inhabitants.

Fifteen years of exile is a long time. When Erena was created, we would have preferred to be closer to our country, in Djibouti, Ethiopia or Sudan. But that was not possible for safety reasons. And it is still not possible today. My dream is that some day Erena will be based in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, and will be run by a young generation of Eritrean journalists.”

This extract is taken from the 13th issue of Mediation, entitled ‘Structuring exiled journalism in a more authoritarian world’, which you can find here.