Eritrean police have launched raids against Christians across the country, rounding up more than 100 men, women and children. If you lived in Eritrea, the chances are you would be sharing a cell with some of them. Baptists are banned.

If they caught you worshipping illegally you could face torture to try to make you renounce your faith. Refugees have shown Release International their scars. The mass arrests, over November and December, have swollen the prison population of believers in this Horn of Africa nation to more than 2000.

In 1993 Eritrea emerged from a bloody 30-year battle for independence from neighbouring Ethiopia. It emerged as Marxist single-party state with forced conscription and a terror of enemies both within and without that observers describe as ‘paranoia’.

That paranoia extends to religion. Some years ago, a government minister confided to me his frustration with Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to join the military. And he spelled out his concern about Eritrean Christians who seemed to be dancing to the beat of a different drum.

The authorities fear that the drummer behind that beat is the USA. Eritrea is suspicious towards the USA for failing to press a border settlement on Ethiopia. And the US accuses Eritrea of destabilising the region by supplying Somalian warlords with weapons to fight Ethiopian troops there.

Pentecostal Christianity is spreading. Pentecostal Christians have been interrogated about possible links with the USA. A former intelligence chief described Pentecostals as a ‘destabilising influence’ who were ‘proselytising in Muslim areas’. And the authorities have long been concerned about the spread of Christianity among conscripts in the army.

The sum of these fears erupted in 2002, when the state banned all religious groups except the Orthodox Church, Sunni Muslims, Roman Catholics and Lutheran Evangelicals.

Since then the repression has grown increasingly brutal, even for state-sanctioned churches. The legitimate head of the Orthodox Church is under house arrest. And Release International’s partner in Eritrea says police raids across the country have pulled in prominent evangelicals and Christian teachers. According to reports, some have been beaten to death.

But the harshest persecution seems to be reserved for military conscripts. Those found praying or reading their Bibles are thrown into steel shipping containers. In the desert.

That means gasping in an airless oven by day, and shivering in a freezer by night. No windows. No sanitation. And brutal beatings.

Christian refugees tell their stories in the Release International DVD Remember Eritrea, available from the Release International website: www.releaseinternational.org 

Release is supporting Christians in the refugee camps and pressing the Eritrean government to restore the freedom that Christians used to enjoy – and still deserve. Please help us to help them.