Journalist and Eritrean refugee rights activist Meron Estefanos has a huge impact on Eritrean exiles

From the Young Turks:

Eritrea has been called the North Korea of Africa, the country is in the midst of a refugee crisis and some are standing up to fight back. John Iadarola (Host of ThinkTank), discusses the refugee crisis in Eritrea with Meron Estefanos (Journalist, Eritrean Refugee Rights Activist) at the 2017 Oslo Freedom Forum.

Here is more on Meron Estefanos from an great article in the Toronto Star:

Estefanos’s day job is with Radio Erena, a Paris-based station. Her kitchen in Stockholm serves as the studio: There she sits every Thursday at midday with a headset and a notebook for the program “Voices of Eritrean Refugees.” While Estefanos speaks into the microphone, 5,000 kilometres away thousands of people listen to their radios in Eritrea. They do it secretly, because the Eritrean regime is trying to prohibit Radio Erena broadcasts.

Eritrea — approximately half the size of the United Kingdom — is often dubbed “the North Korea of Africa.” The secretive country on the Horn of Africa, which gained its independence from Ethiopia in 1993, is ruled by President Isaias Afwerki with “ruthless repression” and human rights violations “on a scope and scale seldom witnessed elsewhere,” as the UN concluded in its current report.

About 5,000 Eritreans are fleeing every month, despite knowing they can be shot to death on the border by their own army for treason. If they make it to neighbouring Sudan and further on to Libya, the next round of Russian roulette awaits them: the journey across the Mediterranean to Europe. And here the circle closes with Estefanos and her white cellphone.