Eritrea's Blue Revolution: Inside the movement challenging one of Africa's longest-serving rulers

In a side street in south Tel Aviv, there sits a small office where a group of men is hard at work. Most of that work concerns a country none of them has seen for years, but which remains present in almost everything they do.

The office is part political headquarters, part community organization, and part meeting place for Eritreans who believe their time in Israel should eventually come to an end.

Their days are spent speaking with members of their community, dealing with Israeli police and politicians, organizing activities for children, and maintaining contact with a much larger opposition network stretching across Europe, North America, and Africa.

They speak about football pitches and computer courses alongside political prisoners, military service, and an Eritrean opposition movement attempting to reinvent itself. Phones appear throughout the conversation, photographs are pulled up and passed across the table, and names of friends still inside Eritrea are treated with caution.

For most Israelis, the Eritrean community has entered the national conversation through a familiar set of arguments. “Asylum seekers” to some, “infiltrators” to others, Eritreans are a population concentrated heavily in south Tel Aviv whose presence has produced years of political battles.

Immigration, refugee status, crime, deportation, and the responsibility Israel bears toward people who crossed its border after fleeing Africa are all aspects pertaining to these political battles.

The men in the office approach the issue from another direction. They have built lives in Israel, some have raised children in Israel, and all speak warmly about the country that gave them refuge. Yet when Michael is asked what he actually wants for his future, he answers almost immediately.

“If the regime falls tomorrow, tomorrow we go home.”

It is a useful starting point for understanding almost everything else happening in the room.

The organization they represent is today called the Eritrean Blue Revolution Front (EBRF), an international opposition movement that emerged from Brigade N’Hamedu. This blue-clad grassroots movement began organizing Eritrean government opponents across the diaspora several years ago.

In Israel, the work has a distinctly local character. The movement holds regular meetings and stays in touch with parts of the Eritrean community around the country.

Hagos and the others speak proudly of soccer programs they say now involve hundreds of Eritrean children, as well as computer courses and other activities intended to give teenagers somewhere to go and something to belong to. A recent EBRF Congress in Israel attracted 1,300 people.

The problem becomes more pronounced as those children get older. Many were born in Israel or arrived at such a young age that Hebrew became one of their first languages. They attend Israeli schools, follow Israeli football clubs, have Israeli friends, and know Eritrea largely through their parents.

Mulue later returned to the subject in a voice message because, he says, he felt it was important enough to add even after the interview had ended.

“We have many children who have studied in the State of Israel,” he says. “They feel Israeli. They don’t really know Eritrea; they only know that they have a country.”

Michael’s own relationship with Eritrea is considerably more immediate. He says he entered the military system in November 1997 at the age of 14 and remained there until 2011. Some of the young men who entered alongside him, he says, were still trapped within the system long after he had escaped.

“I came here so that I could speak like a human being, so that I could write like a human being,” he notes. “In my country, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t speak about the dictator.”

“We didn’t come here to work,” Michael says. “We came to save our lives.”

Over a decade later, he now spends much of his time helping run an organization whose declared ambition is to make that refuge unnecessary.

To understand why, one must go back to the extraordinary promise with which modern Eritrea began.

Few countries entered independence with as much reason to celebrate as Eritrea.

The struggle that produced the modern state had lasted roughly three decades, beginning in 1961 after years of growing resistance to Ethiopian rule. By the time Eritrean guerrillas entered the capital Asmara in 1991, generations had grown up knowing little other than war.

On April 27, following the referendum result, Eritrea declared itself an independent and sovereign state.

At the center of the victory stood Isaias Afwerki, one of the principal leaders of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. This movement had fought a much larger Ethiopian military and now had to transform itself from a revolutionary army into a state government.

For a time, there were reasons for optimism.

Eritrea had emerged from one of Africa’s longest wars with a powerful sense of national identity and a leadership that enjoyed enormous prestige for defeating successive Ethiopian governments.

Work began on a constitution, and in 1997 a new document was adopted that promised civil rights, political institutions, and limits on executive power.

It never came into force, and the young state soon found itself at war again.

In May 1998, a border dispute between Eritrea and Ethiopia erupted into a devastating interstate conflict. Trenches and massed infantry and artillery returned to a frontier that had only recently become an international boundary.

Fighting continued, with interruptions, until 2000, displacing vast numbers of people on both sides before the two governments agreed to a cessation of hostilities and later signed the Algiers Agreement in December that year.

The war left a deep imprint on Eritrea’s political system. National service, introduced earlier in the decade and legally limited to 18 months, became effectively indefinite after the 1998 emergency. The country remained heavily militarized even after the guns fell silent.

The political opening that many Eritreans had expected after independence narrowed further.

In 2001, senior figures from within the ruling movement itself – the group that became known as the G-15 – publicly demanded reform, an implementation of the constitution, and greater accountability from Afwerki.

The response was comprehensive. Reformist officials were detained, privately owned newspapers were closed, and journalists were arrested.

On September 18, 2001, Eritrea shut down its independent press. Several of the journalists arrested during the crackdown have never been seen publicly again.

Twenty-five years later, the basic political structure remains largely unchanged. Eritrea has held no national elections since independence, the 1997 constitution remains unimplemented, the legislature has not met since 2010, and no political party other than the ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice is permitted to operate.

Human Rights Watch continues to document arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, and restrictions on religion, expression, and association.

National service remains one of the defining institutions of Eritrean life.

Legally, it should end after 18 months. In practice, Human Rights Watch reported again this year that Eritreans continue to serve for years and sometimes decades, often for little pay and with no clear end-of-service date.

Since 2003, thousands of secondary school pupils have been required to complete their final year at a military training camp in Sawa, which combines education with army practice and political instruction.

When Michael talks about entering the system as a teenager and watching years disappear, his story fits into a much larger national experience.

Mulue argues that the consequences are now returning to haunt the government.

“Many people, women and men, were in the army for decades,” he says. “They have experience in all kinds of roles.”

Large numbers of Eritreans who escaped the system eventually found themselves scattered across Sudan, Ethiopia, Israel, Europe and North America. Many carried their military training with them, along with anger at the state that had kept them in uniform.

“If there is a place to organize and begin fighting,” Mulue said, “we don’t need much time to learn military things. We already have people who are ready.”

It is one of the stranger legacies of post-independence Eritrea. A government that spent decades keeping much of its population under arms has helped create a diaspora in which thousands of people already know how to use them.

For many years, however, the opposition abroad remained notoriously divided. Groups split along political, generational, ethnic, and religious lines; older organizations carried baggage from arguments stretching back into the liberation struggle, while younger Eritreans often had little interest in joining them.

Brigade N’Hamedu emerged from a different generation and through a different type of politics.

Its activists appeared in blue at demonstrations against festivals associated with Eritrean embassies and government supporters abroad.

What began as a protest movement grew quickly, especially among younger diaspora members, and confrontations with regime supporters began spreading across Europe and North America.

Eventually, its leaders decided street protests had taken them as far as they could.

The next stage would be much more ambitious.

Dawit Teferi, EBRF’s director of finance and a member of its diplomatic team, describes it as an attempt to turn a movement capable of filling streets into one capable of wielding political power.

Brigade N’Hamedu had succeeded in attracting attention and mobilizing Eritreans who had previously remained outside established opposition structures.

Demonstrations outside regime-linked festivals generated international headlines, but they also increasingly produced violence, arrests and police investigations.

Teferi argues that continuing down that path risked letting the movement be defined by clashes in European cities rather than by what it wanted to achieve inside Eritrea.

“We have precisely cut down on our activities internationally in terms of protest,” he said, “and we’re focusing on building the operational side and the diplomatic side.”

EBRF now describes itself as a front rather than a conventional political party. Its leaders speak of a council meant to represent different branches and participating groups, a central committee that functions as an executive body, and a smaller leadership nucleus at the center.

Teferi cites an official estimate of around 100,000 supporters worldwide and at least 30,000 active members, figures that cannot currently be independently verified.

Publicly, the movement appears to be expanding well beyond the demonstrations from which it emerged. EBRF has developed an operation in Washington and retained professional representation in the United States.

US Justice Department filings under the Foreign Agents Registration Act identify EBRF representatives, including Teferi and Gerezgher, and list the organization’s address in Addis Ababa.

Teferi speaks about cultivating support across party lines and says EBRF has held discussions with members of Congress and their offices.

He wants American policymakers to view Eritrea through strategic as well as human-rights considerations: a country stretching along the Red Sea, facing Yemen and positioned close to one of the world’s most important maritime arteries.

Ethiopia, however, is where the most sensitive part of the project is taking shape.

“The operational side is based in Ethiopia,” Teferi says. “And it has its own command structure as well.”

For Eritreans, that sentence would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, since Eritrean nationalism was forged in resistance to Ethiopian rule and given that independence came only after a 30-year war, with the two states then returning to combat within five years of separating.

Even today, Addis Ababa’s renewed discussion of access to the Red Sea can raise immediate suspicions in Eritrea.

EBRF has chosen to engage with the issue rather than dismiss it.

Gerezgher, who works on the movement’s political and diplomatic affairs, says the Addis Ababa operation gives EBRF access to Eritrean refugees, as well as the wider diplomatic world centered on the African Union, Western embassies, and international organizations.

He insists the movement has no authority to sign away Eritrean interests or promise access to its coastline while it remains an opposition organization.

Any agreement involving Ethiopian use of Eritrean ports, he says, would have to be negotiated by a future constitutional government with the legal authority to do so.

At the same time, he acknowledges that EBRF’s presence in Ethiopia depends upon a political environment that allows it to operate.

“We are operating from here,” he says, “but for sure, we are protected by the Ethiopians.”

The relationship is one of the ways EBRF is attempting to break with older Eritrean opposition politics. Teferi argued that endless suspicion of Ethiopia has helped trap Eritreans inside the political worldview created by Afwerki himself.

If a future government can negotiate mutually beneficial arrangements while protecting Eritrean sovereignty, he sees little reason why old enemies must remain enemies forever.

Israel fits into the same line of thinking.

When Teferi discusses how the EBRF decides which other opposition groups it can work with, he says their attitude toward Ethiopia provides one test.

Then comes another: “Israel is the litmus test.”

He argues that groups incapable of discussing cooperation with Israel without immediately retreating into older ideological arguments are unlikely to fit within EBRF’s coalition.

The front, he says, is intended to be broad enough to include people from very different political backgrounds. Gerezgher speaks of civic organizations, women’s groups, academics, investors, political organizations, and members of Eritrea’s various communities all operating within the same structure.

Yet there are boundaries. Teferi says he would oppose the participation of groups he regards as Muslim Brotherhood-aligned or extreme Christian political movements, arguing that a future Eritrean state should remain secular.

Those limitations raise questions that any movement promising democracy eventually has to answer: Where does protection of a secular political order end and exclusion of political opponents begin?

The larger unanswered question concerns force.

“When we say regime change, it doesn’t mean a war or violence,” Gerezgher says. “There are a lot of mechanisms to bring change into Eritrea.”

Eritrea provides almost no space to measure public opinion, let alone a place where a clandestine opposition network can operate openly. EBRF’s assessment that large parts of the population and military are waiting for an opportunity to turn against the government remains just that: the movement’s assessment.

Teferi nevertheless has little doubt about the workforce he believes could be mobilized.

“I have thousands and thousands of people who are willing to fight for the country.”

The emphasis on military capability is accompanied by a surprisingly detailed discussion about what would happen if Afwerki’s system actually collapsed.

This is an important question for an Eritrean opposition movement because the current president was once a revolutionary leader himself.

Afwerki and many of his generation spent decades fighting a government they regarded as oppressive. However, victory did not ultimately produce the constitutional system many Eritreans had expected.

Gerezgher says EBRF envisages a transitional government lasting roughly two or three years, during which the country would stabilize and move toward constitutional rule.

“We will have an interim government for two or three years,” he says.

Teferi speaks of presidential term limits, a legislature, and competitive politics, while drawing on aspects of the unimplemented 1997 constitution and studying constitutional arrangements elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the first challenge would be far more immediate than writing a constitution.

Eritrea contains a huge population of armed or recently armed conscripts. If central authority simply disappeared, thousands of men with weapons and little money could suddenly find themselves outside the system that had controlled them for decades.

“The first thing we’re going to do is not go after justice,” Teferi says.

His idea is to seek international financial help to pay soldiers and conscripts to return home, surrender weapons, and begin civilian lives while new institutions establish control.

Only then, he says, should the country begin dealing comprehensively with crimes committed under the old system.

“The regime makes everybody a spy,” he says. “You can’t go after everybody.”

The movement therefore talks about concentrating first on senior security and intelligence figures capable of threatening a transition, while eventually establishing a mechanism to investigate serious abuses.

All of that remains theoretical. EBRF controls no Eritrean city and governs no population. Afwerki has remained in Asmara for more than three decades after independence.

Yet the movement is growing, and it is transforming itself into a legitimate movement.

A diaspora protest movement that once made its name confronting government festivals abroad is now hiring lobbyists in Washington, organizing from Ethiopia, drafting political road maps, talking about contacts inside Eritrea, and debating how to demobilize soldiers after a government it has not yet removed.

And yet one of the events that pushed the movement toward that transformation did not happen in Asmara or Addis Ababa. It happened on the streets of Tel Aviv.

On September 2, 2023, south Tel Aviv erupted.

Hundreds of Eritreans opposed to Afwerki’s government gathered to protest an event connected to the Eritrean embassy. Supporters of the government were also present, and what followed developed into hours of fighting between rival groups and clashes with Israeli police.

Stones, pieces of wood, metal bars and other improvised weapons appeared on the streets. Police used stun grenades, tear gas and, when officers said they believed their lives were in danger, live fire.

More than 100 people were wounded, including around 30 police officers, and dozens were arrested.

The images shocked Israelis who had paid little attention to the politics inside the Eritrean community. Men dressed in the blue associated with opponents of Afwerki fought supporters of the government – both groups that were ostensibly thought to have been left behind.

From Michael’s and the men in the Tel Aviv office’s perspective, the violence had a history.

For years, opposition activists had protested embassy-linked festivals and events marking Eritrean national occasions. They viewed such gatherings as an extension of the regime’s political activity abroad and resented Eritreans who claimed asylum while openly supporting the government.

“If you celebrate together with the Eritrean ambassador,” Michael says, “that means you don’t have a political problem” with the regime.

They also allege that pro-government networks intimidate opponents, pressure families, and maintain links to institutions in Eritrea. Human-rights organizations have documented Eritrean government intimidation of diaspora communities abroad, although individual allegations made by EBRF members in Israel are often difficult to verify.

The violence, however, did not end on September 2.

Further clashes between Eritrean government supporters and opponents broke out elsewhere in Israel during the weeks and months that followed, including fatal incidents in Netanya and Tel Aviv.

Michael says four members of the anti-government community and four regime supporters were ultimately killed across subsequent episodes of violence.

He returns repeatedly to the deaths of men from the opposition community, some of whom were buried in Jerusalem.

Michael says their families could not safely return the bodies to Eritrea because the dead were known opponents of the government. Supporters of Afwerki who died abroad, he argues, faced no such problem and could be repatriated.

The violence also created a political opening inside Israel.

One of the lawmakers who became closely involved was Yisrael Beytenu MK Yulia Malinovsky.

Malinovsky does not present herself as an expert on the internal factions of the Eritrean opposition.

She encountered government opponents during a tour of south Tel Aviv and later in Knesset committee hearings, particularly while advancing legislation dealing with Eritreans who support the government they claim to have fled.

Her conclusions about what was happening on the streets were considerably firmer.

“Reality proves that every time there is an event such as Revolution Day or Eritrean Independence Day, there is a pogrom carried out mainly by regime supporters,” she says, adding that Israeli civilians and security personnel have also been caught up in the violence.

“From the impression I received during my tour of south Tel Aviv, there is harassment of regime opponents by regime supporters.”

“Pogrom” is Malinovsky’s description, and a strong one.

The September 2023 violence involved participants from opposing camps, and anti-government Eritreans were themselves involved in attacks on police and pro-regime activists. Her argument is that much of the organized intimidation stems from supporters of Afwerki.

After those riots, she says, the idea behind her legislation began to take shape.

During a Knesset Internal Affairs Committee discussion attended by a representative of the UN Refugee Agency, Malinovsky asked what she regards as a basic question.

“If asylum-seeker status comes from the danger to asylum seekers in their country, then what do infiltrators who openly declare themselves supporters of the regime have to look for here?” she recalls. “After all, their lives are not in danger in their homeland.”

According to Malinovsky, the UN representative accepted the logic of the question and told the committee that regime supporters were damaging the reputation of other Eritreans seeking protection.

The legislation that followed passed its final Knesset readings in June 2025. It allows the interior minister, after receiving an opinion from the Population and Immigration Authority and giving the person concerned an opportunity to respond, to revoke the residency permit of an infiltrator identified as a supporter of their country’s regime when the presumption that return would be dangerous has not been established.

Malinovsky stresses that the law is broader than the shorthand often used to describe it. It also addresses infiltrators who have committed serious criminal offenses, irrespective of their position toward their home government.

What frustrates her now is implementation.

“The law is absolutely not being implemented as I would like, and that is because of the government’s failure,” she says.

According to information Malinovsky said she received from the Israel Police, one person identified as both a regime supporter and criminal offender has so far been deported.

Seven others, she says, are currently candidates for removal but remain in Israel because the authority needed to approve the deportations has not been exercised.

There is, however, a clear limit to how far Malinovsky is willing to follow EBRF.

Asked whether Israel should begin treating the organization as a political interlocutor and engage with its plans for a post-Afwerki Eritrea, she is unequivocal.

“The State of Israel has enough problems of its own,” she says. “We cannot deal with all the world’s problems and intervene in regimes in other countries.”

Her position is considerably narrower than the one EBRF would like Israel eventually to adopt. Israel can decide whom it protects inside its borders, how it handles violence, and whether people who openly support the government from which they claim asylum should continue to receive that protection.

Regime change in Asmara, in Malinovsky’s view, remains Eritrea’s business.

“We have enough problems of our own,” she says. “It is not our place to intervene in other regimes, however problematic they may be.”

For EBRF, convincing Israelis that Eritrea should matter strategically is part of a much longer-term project.

Teferi readily talks about agriculture, technology, investment, and security, areas in which he believes a future Eritrean government could learn from Israel and cooperate closely with it.

Gerezgher is prepared to contemplate an even deeper future relationship. Discussing the difficulty a relatively small Eritrean state would face securing such a long and strategically important coastline, he raises the possibility of allowing partners such as Israel or the United States to maintain military facilities there.

“We could have their own military base there in order to secure their benefits,” he says.

The proposal comes from an opposition figure discussing a government that does not yet exist, and no agreement of this kind is currently on offer.

But its relevance lies more in what it says about the foreign policy EBRF imagines: an Eritrea closely connected to Western and regional partners rather than defined by decades of suspicion and isolation.

The relationship EBRF’s Israel branch talks about is also more personal.

When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, Michael says members of the Eritrean opposition community began volunteering within days. They helped at the L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir alongside the Brothers in Arms organization, later worked at Expo Tel Aviv, and assisted in agriculture at a time when farms across Israel were struggling with severe labor shortages.

Michael says that on some days, around 150 Eritreans took part, while community members later visited Golani Brigade soldiers and prepared food for them. They asked whether they could serve more directly, he says, but volunteering was where they could be useful immediately.

For Michael, the war never belonged solely to the Israelis around him.

“The missiles that come here don’t only come for Israelis. They come for us too,” he explains, stating that friends from the Eritrean community were murdered in Netivot on October 7.

“What happens here happens to all of us, together.”

The experience of watching Israeli reservists leave their families and return to uniform inevitably struck men whose own understanding of military service had been formed in Eritrea.

Michael describes the contrast almost ruefully. Israelis are mobilized when war comes and eventually return to normal life – to jobs, studies, and families. In Eritrea, he says, people enter the military system and sometimes disappear into it for years.

Yet the deepest connection to Israel may eventually belong to the generation that never experienced Eritrea at all.

Mulue thinks often about the children who have grown up around them.

“They have love for their friends, their teachers, Israeli citizens,” he says. “They have a very good connection, and they feel Israeli.”

If a political change eventually allows their parents to return, he believes many of those children will follow, carrying Hebrew, friendships, and years of Israeli life with them.

“They will feel that Israel is their second country.”

There is something almost paradoxical in an opposition movement spending years building a community in Israel while defining success as the moment that community can begin to leave. But the men do not appear troubled by it.

Israel gave them somewhere to build families while they waited. They now want to create an Eritrea to which those families could return without fear.

Near the end of the conversation in south Tel Aviv, Michael picks up his phone again.

This time he shows photographs of graves in Jerusalem.

They belong, he says, to friends from the anti-regime community who died during the violence that has accompanied the political split among Eritreans in Israel. Their bodies remained in the country because returning them home was considered impossible while Afwerki remains in power.

For Michael, that fact carries an emotional weight almost separate from the politics that produced it.

The men had left Eritrea because they believed they could not live there freely. Some, he says, could not even return there after death.

He does not believe they will remain in Jerusalem forever.

“Our friends will remain here until we remove the dictator,” Michael says. “The moment we remove him, we will take our friends back to our country, to their own soil.”

The living are waiting for the same journey.

EBRF’s leaders can talk for hours about operational structures, constitutional transitions, lobbying in Washington, diplomacy in Addis Ababa, and the strategic value of the Red Sea. In Tel Aviv, those ambitions eventually return to something considerably simpler.

Michael wants to go home.

Mulue wants children raised in Israel to be able to discover the country their parents left and still carry Israel with them when they do. And somewhere in Jerusalem are men whose friends believe they, too, are waiting for the road back to Eritrea.