During the last months the UN Mission (UNMEE) in charge of monitoring the area has been strongly limited in its free circulation across the country by Eritrean authorities.
This authoritarian drift leaded to the imprisonment without trial of the opposers, mostly journalists and clericals. The “state of war” is used as an excuse to cut civil liberties and co-opt the whole population between 18 and 40 years old in a hard, long and punitive military service. Soldiers are a zero cost workforce used by the state to built the infrastructures and try to modernize the country. To the three thousand UN soldiers in the western part of the country the use of helicopters has been forbidden; to them even street circulation after sunset was denied.