The national service/Warsai-Yikealo Development Campaign and forced migration in post-independence Eritrea

When the Eritrean war of independence (1961–1991) that forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee in search of international protection came to a victorious end in May 1991, the general expectation was that this would decisively eliminate the factors that prompt people to flee in search of international protection. Paradoxically, the achievement of independence has failed to stem the flow. Since 2002, hundreds of thousands of young men and women have been fleeing the country to seek asylum first in Sudan and Ethiopia and subsequently in the rest of the world. The data on which the study is based is gathered using snowball sampling, focus group interviews and key informants in Sudan, Ethiopia, the UK, Switzerland, Norway, South Africa, Kenya and Sweden, and supplemented by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other secondary sources. Although it is acknowledged that forced migration is the result of inextricably entwined multiple factors, the question addressed in the article is the extent to which the large-scale displacement that has been taking place in the post-independence period is the consequence of the detrimental effects of the universal, compulsory and indefinite national service (NS) and its concomitant, the Warsai-Yikealo Development Campaign (WYDC) on the agelglot (servers) and their families. It is argued that the most important drivers of forced migration in post-independence Eritrea have been the harmful effects of the universal and the indefinite NS and the WYDC on the livelihoods and well being of servers and their families.