The African national team has not played a match for almost 4 years. The government decided this to prevent players from using away trips to escape
The Eritrea national football team has raised the white flag and will not participate in the 2026 World Cup qualifiers, as announced by FIFA in a joint statement with Caf, the Confederation of African Football. The reason for the withdrawal? The government’s fear that players will take advantage of international trips to escape and ask for political asylum abroad, far from the oppressive regime of the dictator Isaias Afwerki, president of Eritrea since 1993, the year in which the independence of this former colony was recognized Italian on the shores of the Red Sea.
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Group E of the African qualifiers, made up of Morocco, Zambia, Congo, Tanzania and Niger, will therefore be played without Eritrea, who do not even appear in the FIFA world rankings, given that they have not played an official match for 48 months: the last match dates back to January 2020, against Sudan in a friendly. As reported by the Guardian, the local government has put pressure on the Eritrean Football Federation to withdraw from the race for the next World Cup, scheduled for 2026 in Canada, Mexico and the United States. And again based on information gathered by the British newspaper, from 2009 to today, as many as 60 Eritrean players have used international matches to ask for political asylum abroad. The most recent case, in November 2021, involved five athletes who disappeared a few hours before the match against Uganda for the Central and East Africa Under-20 championships. The Human Rights Watch, an international non-governmental organization that deals with the defense of human rights, described the situation in the Horn of Africa country thus: “The government of Eritrea subjects its population to widespread repression, including the forced labor and conscription, severe restrictions on freedom of expression, opinion and faith and the limitation of independent monitoring by international observers – we read on the Human Rights Watch website -. It also collectively punishes the relatives of alleged draft dodgers and deserters. As a personalist dictatorship, under President Isaias Afewerki, Eritrea has no parliament, no independent civil society organizations or media, nor an independent judiciary. Finally, throughout 2022, Eritrean forces remained in parts of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, where they continued to commit serious violations, including killing, looting and rape.”