The Daily Mail Online reported yesterday, 17 November 2024, that the majority of those granted asylum as “Eritreans” by the UK government between 2018 and 2024 were actually Ethiopians posing as Eritreans. According to the “exclusive,” at least 5,222 Ethiopian applicants deceived the UK authorities by pretending to be under 18, acting like children, growing long hair to obscure their faces, and wrapping themselves in blankets to appear smaller. These ‘tricks’ allegedly went unnoticed by British intelligence—until Daily Mail Online uncovered them!
How gullible would one have to be to believe such nonsense? This story is clearly a concoction of half-truths and half-lies. While it is true that many of those granted asylum as “Eritreans” were, in fact, Ethiopians or nationals of other countries, it is not true that they managed to fool UK authorities. This was not a failure of detection but rather a deliberate strategy.
For years, the Eritrean government has raised concerns about non-Eritreans masquerading as Eritreans. For example, attacks on Eritrean diaspora events across Europe in 2023 were proven to involve non-Eritreans coordinated by foreign intelligence agencies to tarnish Eritrea’s global image. Authentic Eritrean nationals in the diaspora also spoke out against the theft and weaponization of Eritrean identity in Western countries.
Moreover, the number of Eritrean asylum seekers reported by Western governments has frequently exceeded plausible limits, hinting at inflated figures designed to perpetuate a narrative of mass exodus from Eritrea. At one point, these numbers were so exaggerated that they almost matched Eritrea’s entire population of approximately 3.6 million. By such counts, one got the impression that all Eritreans had fled to Europe, leaving their country empty! How come none of these glaring contradictions was sufficient to raise red flags within UK intelligence?
The only logical conclusion is that the UK’s asylum system—which maintains a 99 percent success rate for Eritrean applicants, as confirmed by Daily Mail Online—is deliberately designed to encourage, facilitate, and sustain the narrative of Eritreans fleeing their country en masse. To therefore suggest that British intelligence or immigration authorities were oblivious to this deception is disingenuous. On the contrary, they were aware of it and orchestrated it for clear geopolitical reasons.
Ethiopians who believed they had outsmarted the UK authorities and asylum system were, in reality, pawns in a larger geopolitical scheme. They were permitted—indeed, encouraged—to think they had “gamed” UK immigration. Some of them went on TikTok, flaunting their Ethiopian identity while boasting about gaining asylum by posing as Eritreans. They even shared tutorials on how others could replicate their actions. Were they merely naïve? Perhaps. But that naïve? To go on record in the UK—under the nose of one of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence apparatuses— to openly admit to identity theft and even teach others how to commit the same fraud?
The most plausible explanation is that these Ethiopians were agents, tools of UK intelligence. It is conceivable that they were instructed to act as they did to serve two primary objectives. First, to popularize how UK’s asylum policy guarantees a 99 percent success rate for Eritrean applicants, thereby encouraging genuine Eritreans to leave their country and orchestrating an exodus. Second, to ensure that if genuine Eritreans did not leave in sufficient numbers to sustain the desired narrative, non-Eritreans would fill the gap, bolstering statistics to maintain the illusion of a mass flight from Eritrea.
This strategy is neither new nor exclusive to the UK. It is part of a well-coordinated, well-funded, two-decade-long policy of “strategic depopulation” targeting Eritrea, orchestrated by Western countries with organizations like the UNHCR as complicit tools. For instance, the UNHCR’s “Eligibility Guidelines” from 2009 and 2011 effectively granted automatic asylum rights to Eritrean youth in all Western countries, incentivizing and facilitating their exodus.
The government of Eritrea has repeatedly condemned these policies. Writing on the social platform X, Mr. Yemane G. Meskel, the Minister of information revealed that recommendations to revise such guidelines—proposed by joint foreign office and immigration missions from the UK, Denmark, and other European countries after visiting Eritrea in 2013–14—were deliberately overruled to further an overarching policy of hostility and “regime change” against Eritrea.
Western countries, including UK, have thus actively orchestrated mass migration from Eritrea. When the exodus failed to materialize, they inflated migration statistics by including non-Eritreans for several ulterior motives. They hoped to undermine Eritrea’s economy and labor force by draining its youth, particularly skilled workers; to create instability in Eritrea by depleting the human resources essential for governance, development, and security; to weaken Eritrea’s resilience to external pressures and interventions, delegitimizing the Eritrean government by portraying it as incapable of providing for its citizens, eroding its authority at home and abroad, and, when convenient, enabling adversarial neighboring states to claim Eritrean territory and resources left underpopulated.
There is no alternative explanation. Thus, the West’s policy of strategic depopulation remains relentless, designed to cripple Eritrea socially, economically, and politically while sustaining a distorted narrative to justify its interference. At no point, should Eritreans and all peace-loving people worldwide, fall for the swindle that those masquerading as Eritreans in the UK, and indeed, across most Western countries, are unknown to the UK authorities.
