Government calls up graduates for national service

The Eritrean government has called up more than 350 recent graduates of the University of Asmara to report this coming Friday, 15 November for compulsory national service. The call-up notice for the graduates of 2002 was carried by the state-run Hadas Eritrea newspaper on Tuesday. It was the first time that students who had not reported for national service were specifically named, listing them by gender and the courses of studies they had completed. The notice also pointed out that by not reporting, the students had failed to perform their national duty and were accordingly in violation of the law. "I’m so upset, I can’t even explain it," said one of the students listed. She added that most students were no longer willing to do national service, because they did not know its duration, or what the punishment might be if they refused. All Eritreans are required to perform 18 months' national service on completion of their secondary school studies. However, students who score highly in an extremely competitive nationwide examination and gain entry to the University of Asmara, the country’s only four-year university, are allowed to postpone performance of national service until after they graduate. Students at the university and recent graduates have become increasingly resistant to performing national service, some say partly because its duration has become indefinite. In recent years, thousands of university students have been forcibly rounded up and sent to remote parts of the country to participate in summer work programmes. A handful of student leaders have been jailed for speaking out against such roundups. Since the end of the war with Ethiopia, the Eritrean government has repeatedly pledged to demobilise tens of thousands of its soldiers. But as recently as mid-October, the president announced in an interview on state-controlled Eritrean Television that anyone who had not performed national service would be called up soon.