Dear Mattewos Hebteab,

I do not know how to write this letter to you. I sit down to my breakfast of fresh coffee and yogurt and think of you. I go up to my studio with its sun and fresh air and mementoes lining the bookshelves and think of you. I see the last picture of you at age thirty, so handsome, in sunglasses, with a look of such defiance that I long to know you, then. For co-founding your own newspaper Echo, and writing as an independent journalist, you were disappeared from the world. Everything taken from you – your family, your work, your dreams gone, your body impossibly violated in secret prisons that do not officially exist. No privacy, no rights to the autonomy human beings take for granted, not even a trial to identify the accusations made by the state against you. Are you one of those held in a metal container or an underground cell? Ten long years. My mind cannot enter that number. How have you found the courage to crawl into that small space within yourself where you keep yourself alive and refuse to be defeated? 3,650 days of resistance, 88 thousand hours, each hour to be got through, feeling like the slow drip of water eroding rock. What must you look like now? It cannot be hope that sustains you since the world has not succeeded in helping you in ten long years. It can only be outrage that human beings can do this to each other.

W.H. Auden was right:

"About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along."

A man named Mattewos Hebteab falls out of the sky, but the world has somewhere to get to and moves calmly on.

What will it take to free you? The government of Eritrea uses every lie to deny their crime – and the lies keep changing. When 15 members of the National Parliament of Eritrea appeal for accountability and themselves are imprisoned, when the African Commission on Human and People's Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights, demand your release and compensation and you are not freed, when Reporters without Borders, and PEN international, in Sweden, the US, Finland, Canada, and elsewhere, are stonewalled. Words, which you believed in and lived by, fail. And most of the world turns its back on a small country where totalitarian terror reigns. Who knows what foreign interests are served by this indifference?

But perhaps there is something called hope. Will it be possible that the change will come from within your country itself? We have seen it in Chile, in South Africa, in Libya, in Egypt, in Syria-will that moment come when Eritreans themselves will pick up their fear and throw it into the streets and, outraged, say this is enough. If so, their courage will be fuelled by the example of heroic survivors like you.

Mattewos, in 1985 in Chile I met one of your colleagues, a journalist named Fernando Paulson. It was twelve long years into Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. I knew Fernando’s editor had been killed in a car bomb. I asked him how he lived with his fear. I wrote this poem for him.

It’s Almost Over

For Fernando Paulson

I met a man here
who walks to death like an office.
Every day. He does not call this
courage. Fear is his habit.
He walks it casually.

He tells me there's a trick about fear.

At first you think you’re a room,
locked and creaky. You dare not look
through the keyhole. At the door of yourself
you keep your silent vigil.
After years you get lonely.
One day you open the door.
The fear is pacing inside you.
You see it is human. It has your face.
You pick it up and walk it into sunlight.
You're no longer alone.
There are thousands on this street.
(1985)

Four years later, Chileans did pick up their fear and walked into the streets in the hundreds of thousands and defeated the dictatorship.

It must seem to you that you wait, so bleakly, alone. But the world is moving, even if with Leviathan slowness, towards accountability under international law and human rights. And all the time, organizations like PEN and Reporters without Borders and many others keep the faith. They will not give up. We are looking for you. Mattewos Hebteab you are not forgotten.

Rosemary Sullivan