It’s life in a dystopian novel: spies everywhere, citizens recruited to the military, forced to labour in slavelike conditions, arbitrarily arrested, tortured and barred from travelling. Some are raped, disappeared and summarily executed.

This all-too-real sci-fi scenario explains why some 400,000 Eritreans are living outside their country after risking their lives to flee — 5,000 a month heading for the promised lands of Europe and the West.

“Eritrea’s many violations are of a scope and scale seldom seen anywhere else in today’s world,” says Australian counterterrorism expert Mike Smith, chairman of a UN commission on human rights in the east African country. “Hundreds of thousands have simply lost hope.”

The desperation has reached Europe’s doorstep. Eritreans are the second largest group to land in southern Italy, after asylum seekers from war-ravaged Syria. But although Eritrea is officially at peace, its citizens endure lives of oppression and torment — with no end in sight.

“It’s a problem for Europe, but a huge problem for Eritrea itself,” Smith said in an interview from Geneva, after tabling a report drawn from 550 interviews of Eritreans who fled. “The best and brightest are leaving the country, and it has to cope with an enormous loss and waste of the people it needs most.”

Eritrea’s story began with hope for a bright future after independence from Ethiopian occupation in 1993, but ended in a dark place where a dictator — President Isaias Afwerki — rules through fear, pervasive surveillance and iron control.

Under deepening repression, soaring living costs, collapsing infrastructure and the shadow of renewed war, Eritrea’s population of 6 million is dwindling by the month as young people flee.

Parents and children live in fear of the 18th birthday that signals conscription. So many have fled that numbers of recruits have reportedly plummeted and those who would otherwise be unfit for service are drafted.

For those who are conscripted, said Smith, “the vast majority go on to military units where there is no demobilization. They work on farms, public projects and construction as forced labour.”

Conscript labour is also used to exploit Eritrea’s mineral wealth, including gold, copper and potash, according to human rights reports. While state owned and foreign companies profit, the workers toil in near starvation conditions.

Afwerki’s security services have spun an all-enveloping network of repression and surveillance that keeps servicemen, as well as other Eritreans, prisoners. Even children are recruited as spies, and “your own neighbours report you to the authorities,” one witness told the UN panel.

Some families marry their daughters off early to avoid the draft, often to young servicemen who seldom have leave to visit their families and no money to send to wives and children. Women who have not served in the military have no documents to qualify for social services. Some are forced into prostitution.

Although the regime treats desertion harshly, says the International Crisis Group, it tacitly accepts that “educated, urbanized youths” who resist its demands “are less troublesome and more useful outside the country,” sending back tax money and aiding destitute families.

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Opposition in Eritrea has been crushed, says Eritrean-born Yohannes Woldemariam of Fort Lewis College in Colorado, and the outlook for political change is dim. Political parties have been banned.

“(Afwerki) has a group around him who are very loyal because their survival depends on him,” he adds. Inside the country, “any alternatives have been eliminated.”

The ongoing repression is prompting more and more young people to make risky, sometimes fatal, journeys to the West. The European Union talks of destroying smuggling ships before they sail from Libya, and countries have tightened border controls. Still the numbers of migrants are swelling.

Facing international outrage and internal dissent, Eritrea has announced it would cut national service to 18 months. But, said Smith, “You have to take it with a grain of salt. If they were to demobilize people they would suddenly have a whole lot of people without jobs on the market.”

Meanwhile, a generation that has lost hope for the future inside Eritrea’s prisonlike frontiers is continuing its perilous bid for freedom across Europe’s borders.