Rome also briefly enjoyed the support of the Soviet Union. Convinced it was owed territorial compensation for the huge losses sustained in the Second World War, Moscow dithered over whether to push for a trusteeship in Eritrea, Tripolitania or the Dodecanese, before plumping for a pro-Italian position when it looked as though Communists were about to seize power in Rome and then, just as abruptly, opting for Eritrean independence after all. There Moscow joined the Middle East states, which viewed anything short of total independence as part of an anti-Islamic conspiracy by a coalition of Christian states.
Initially, Britain viewed Eritrea through the prism of its traditional African and Middle Eastern interests. At one stage, London considered using Eritrea, rather than Palestine, as a haven for Europe’s dispossessed Jews. Then it came up with its ingenious Greater Somalia scenario, a plan that depended on splitting Eritrea down the middle and giving half to Ethiopia in exchange for the Ogaden. But by the time Eritrea’s partition was definitively rejected by the UN’s General Assembly, London too was looking at the world in a new light, registering the need to form a common front with the US against the growling Soviet bear. What was good for Washington was good for London, and for the US Eritrea’s highland plateau held–as we will see–enormous Cold War importance. There was a top-secret, hush-hush factor at play that ensured Eritrean independence did not gel with Washington’s evolving plans.
Struggling to be heard above the jabber was Ethiopia. Addis Ababa used the powerful weapon provided by collective guilt to whittle away at international indifference. ‘You owe us,’ was the essence of the message repeated by Spencer and Aklilou. ‘Remember how you stood by and did nothing when Italy gassed our villages? Remember how our Emperor spoke so movingly before the League of Nations, yet you ignored him?’ Twice in its history, they pointed out, Ethiopia had been invaded from Eritrean soil. It was time to put paid to that threat by ‘restoring’ Eritrea with what Haile Selassie liked to refer to as ‘the Motherland’.
Given such shifting, self-serving agendas, a unanimous Four Powers ruling was never going to be likely. Throwing up their hands in despair, the Four Powers handed the matter over to the UN, which dispatched a second investigative committee to Eritrea. But Ethiopia had already won a major concession. When the Four Powers team went to Eritrea in 1947, its delegates undertook to reach their judgements on the basis of the ‘wishes and welfare of the inhabitants and the interests of peace and security’. When the UN’s new Commission set out for Asmara two years later, its delegates pledged to defend Eritrean wishes while taking into account ‘the rights and claims of Ethiopia based on geographical, historical, ethnic or economic reasons, including in particular Ethiopia’s legitimate need for adequate access to the sea’.5 It seems to have occurred to no one that the two issues–what the Eritreans themselves hoped for and what the Ethiopians wanted–might be mutually exclusive. In theory, the UN was committed to self-determination, a principle enshrined in its founding charter. In practice, Spencer and company had ensured that the Queen of Sheba vision of history was tacitly accepted as valid by the international community, whatever the implications for ordinary Eritreans.
The story of the UN Commission for Eritrea was to prove, in its way, a microcosm of the UN, with what seems at times its systemic incapacity to deliver on well-meaning promises. Democracy is all very well on paper. But as any member of a tenants’ association or parents’ committee knows, when put into practice it has all the smooth fluidity of a ragged fingernail being scraped along a blackboard.
Clashing egos, personal foibles, carefully-nursed grudges, a tendency to lose sight of the main issue in the pursuit of petty vendettas: every international meeting suffers from them. The UN Commission, however, possessed these characteristics to a degree out of all proportion to its size and task. With only five members and the wishes of less than one million souls–Eritrea’s population at the time–to be established, the extent to which delegates managed to disagree seems, in retrospect, nothing short of extraordinary. The account of this key body’s internecine squabbles, published here for the first time, would seem comic, if one could only forget the terrible consequences.
To be fair to the judges and military men who made up the Commission, they were never operating as free agents. Assigning a new body to decide Eritrea’s future did nothing to remove the pressures that had originally made agreement by the Four Powers delegation impossible. Each Commission member, under instructions from headquarters to engineer the required result, brought his country’s national agenda with him to Asmara. Yet each managed to add a new, personal and vindictive ingredient to the mix. Like recruits for a reality television show picked for their likelihood to rub each other up the wrong way, the delegates moved from indifference to mutual loathing in the course of a few weeks. Resenting the UN bureaucrats assigned to help them, irritated by the Eritreans, loathing one another, they were to demonstrate the eternal truth of Jean Paul Sartre’s maxim: ‘Hell is other people’.
The new Commission was appointed in November 1949 and it soon became clear this was going to be no walkover. ‘I regret to say that the work of the Commission during the first six meetings has been entirely unsatisfactory,’ Petrus Schmidt, who headed the 20-man secretariat appointed to smooth the Commission’s path, admitted in the first of many candid confidential reports sent back to Trygve Lie, UN Secretary-General of the day.6 As the group travelled from New York to Cairo and on to Asmara, a potential troublemaker emerged: Guatemalan delegate Carlos Garcia Bauer, who prevented any real work being done with his ‘persistent obstructionist tactics’. Despite speaking excellent English, Garcia Bauer had gone in to battle on the language issue, threatening at one point to storm out unless the Secretariat agreed to translate all documents into Spanish. This was a man who thrived on the tedium of protocol, wasting the first five meetings ‘with purely formal questions, such as rules of procedure, credentials, points of order, roll-call votes, corrections of summary records, language questions, etc.’ The other delegates were already wondering what lay behind such tactics. ‘They all agree that the Guatemalan representative is an over-ambitious man, who wants his name on every page of every summary record, that he has at the same time a very obvious and very deep-rooted inferiority complex,’ said Schmidt. UN headquarters did its best to soothe ruffled feathers. ‘It is clear…that you and the other members of the Secretariat are doing an excellent job under very trying circumstances,’ replied Andrew Cordier, Executive Assistant to the Secretary-General.7 The British Foreign Office, being kept abreast of Garcia Bauer’s activities by Frank Stafford, its liaison officer in Asmara, was more forthright in its assessment. ‘Native dishonesty,’ scribbled an Africa Department official on Stafford’s report. ‘People like Bauer’–presumably he meant shifty, unreliable, greasy Latinos–‘have an ineradicable dislike of facts.’8
The Commission landed in a country rent by banditry and bubbling with political skulduggery. By fair means or foul, the countries most directly affected by the Eritrean question were determined to bring about their preferred outcomes. Having surrendered its hopes of winning a UN trusteeship, Italy decided total Eritrean independence was the next best option–anything, so long as Ethiopia remained out of the picture. Rome was pumping thousands of pounds worth of bribes into Eritrea. Its representative in Asmara, Count Gropello, was paying members of the Unionist party, which favoured a merger with Ethiopia, to surrender their cards and join the Independence bloc.9 Ethiopia, for its part, was subsidizing the Unionist movement, with the Orthodox Church lending a helping hand by threatening independence supporters with excommunication. There were widespread reports of Ethiopians crossing into Eritrea where, dressed as Moslem lowlanders, they loudly denounced the idea of independence. In addition, British officials were convinced that a dramatic rise in shifta activity, which claimed the lives of scores of Italian settlers and members of the separatist Moslem League, was being funded by Addis. Gangs of armed bandits were killing pro-independence campaigners, s
hooting up buses and raiding Italian farms, then escaping into Ethiopia’s Tigray province. The aim was to terrorize the pro-independence vote into silence, but the murders had another useful effect, for those who believed in the joys of Union. The deliberate impression was being created of an ungovernable territory, which would descend into anarchy unless it was placed in Ethiopia’s strong, capable hands.10
As for Britain, it was busy moulding Eritrea’s political scene into a shape that fitted its Greater Somalia partition plan. In a breathtakingly honest letter to the Foreign Office marked ‘secret and personal’, Frank Stafford gleefully logged the progress he had made, by dint of persuasion and promise, in sabotaging Eritrea’s budding independence movement. ‘The important thing is that we have now substantially reduced the number of Christian non-unionists on the Plateau. Following this I have returned to the task of persuading the Moslem leaders on the Plateau at least to break away from the Independence bloc.’11 Stafford had also got to work on leaders in Eritrea’s Western Province, which London wanted to attach to Sudan. ‘I have set in train movements which will lead to a breakaway of a large proportion of the influential Chiefs in the Western Province from the Muslim League.’ He was even franker about his hopes of influencing the UN Commission’s findings. ‘I have made other contacts with wobblers in the opposition, which are promising. The next step is to ensure that the people in the country who follow the true cause are properly primed in the right answers to give to the Commission when it gets down to the job of ascertaining the wishes of the population.’
Poor Eritrea. With so many clever, ruthless bullies whispering in its citizens’ ears, telling them what they wanted and what they felt, it was a wonder they could think at all.
By March 1950, when Schmidt penned his fourth report back to headquarters, 47 people had died in Asmara in six days of rioting between the Moslem League and the Unionist party, brutally highlighting the need for a swift settlement. But relations between Commission members had only deteriorated, as Garcia Bauer flexed his talent for filibustering. ‘You should know that the Commission is far from being a happy party. Not only are the delegates at sixes and sevens amongst themselves, but they are all or nearly all at cross purposes with the Secretariat,’ British officials in Asmara reported. Schmidt, they noticed, ‘does not conceal his contempt for the Commission as a whole’.12 The Principal Secretary, in his own report, recounted how, while Eritrean organizations waited to put their case, the Commission became locked in a two-hour wrangle over procedure. ‘Concessions, politeness, friendly appeals, did not help. On the contrary, it is now obvious that Mr Garcia Bauer explains such gestures as signs of weakness.’13 Garcia Bauer had not only insulted the Secretariat by accusing officials of tampering with records, he was picking fights with the weak Commission chairman, Norwegian Justice Erling Qvale. ‘Mr Qvale is a charming, be it rather vain, old gentleman, with very little knowledge of procedural matters. Consequently, he is an easy prey for Mr Garcia Bauer, who continually shouts his “points of order” at him before he even has a chance to discover what it is all about.’ But Qvale himself was no angel. He could show exasperating obtuseness when the Commission was in the field. ‘He often shouts at witnesses and puts questions which are either irrelevant or irritating. At some occasions he acted like a colonial official of the old school shouting at his “native subjects”’ reported Schmidt.14 Qvale had managed to offend the Pakistani representative, Mian Ziaud Din, who had penned a long-winded complaint. As for the Pakistani delegate, while professing particular concern for the rights of Eritrea’s fellow Moslems, Mian Ziaud Din seemed to share many of Qvale’s racist attitudes. Even British officials had been taken aback by his reaction after seeing the primitive conditions in which Eritrean highlanders lived. ‘Why don’t we ask the baboons what they want?’ he was heard to remark.15
Quite apart from all this bad blood, the Commission was wasting huge amounts of time going over ground that had already been covered by the Four Powers Commission that had preceded it. True, the Commissioners had spotted the Unionist party’s clumsy ploy of moving its supporters from one public meeting to another to create an inflated impression of support. But they persisted in putting questions to which answers were already known, while failing to probe the only issue that mattered–Eritrea’s fast-evolving political situation. ‘They work on no system as far as I know…Nearly all that they have done in the field could have been done by one man sitting in Guatemala City with a copy of the Four Power Commission Report in front of him,’ Stafford sneered.16 Schmidt’s assessment was even more damning: ‘The officers of the Secretariat are disappointed and appalled by the shocking waste of United Nations time and money.’17
The Commission’s mood improved slightly during a series of field trips into rural Eritrea, but when it returned to Asmara in April, it curdled once again. The Guatemalan was now not the only rebel, he had been joined by his Pakistani colleague and the men banded together to launch a putsch, forcing the Norwegian to stand down as chairman. Despite Qvale’s sidelining, the atmosphere remained poisonous. ‘The feelings of mutual distrust and bitterness have increased rather than diminished,’ reported Schmidt.18 The Commission’s quarrels were no secret in Asmara, nor–given its members’ indiscretion–was much else. ‘Most of the representatives, if not all, talk far too much to any outsider who is willing to listen,’ sighed Schmidt.
The Commission moved to Ethiopia, where they were meant to tour the countryside in an attempt to establish whether Haile Selassie’s government was up to the task of administering Eritrea. A first-hand glimpse of the terrible hunger in Ethiopia’s Welo and Tigray provinces might have stopped them in their tracks. But by arranging a busy schedule of receptions and urging the Commissioners not to waste their time on an arduous road trip, Ethiopian and British officials between them managed to ensure the Commission never ventured beyond Addis. The British Minister in Ethiopia struggled unsuccessfully to silence his conscience. ‘I myself have been rather torn between the feeling that the Commission ought to see how bad things are in Ethiopia before deciding whether she should acquire any further territory, and the knowledge that if it did so this would tend to diminish the chances for the solution advocated by His Majesty’s Government,’ Daniel Lascelles privately confessed. ‘The fact of the matter is that Ethiopia is not in the least worthy to acquire Eritrea or any part of it.’19
The Commission’s final report, drafted in June, faithfully reflected all the antagonisms and interference that had dogged its investigations. Its various factions not only failed to agree a solution, their interpretations of the facts on the ground jarred so wildly Commission members might have been visiting entirely different territories.
For the delegates of Norway, South Africa and Burma, swallowing the British version of Eritrea as a ‘bankrupt semi-desert’, the colony was simply too backward and politically immature to stand alone. ‘Political and economic association’ with Ethiopia was the only answer. Even in this majority group there was a divide. Burma and South Africa, worried about the rights of Eritrea’s Moslem community, favoured federation, while Norway argued for total union. The minority report filed by the troublesome delegates of Guatemala and Pakistan warned that the annexation of Eritrea to Ethiopia would cause ‘constant internal friction’. Impressed by Eritrea’s economic potential, they recommended complete independence after a 10-year period of UN trusteeship.20
Five men had somehow managed to come up with three separate answers to the question of what should be done with Eritrea. The UN General Assembly had travelled full circle, returning to its point of departure. Whatever gloss was put on the situation in public, UN officials did not mince their words in private. ‘Without a doubt, the Report of the Eritrean Commission can be considered a failure,’ Cordier informed the Secretary-General. ‘The level of the Delegations was, to say the least, not equal to their task.’21
In light of such fundamental disagreements, what, concretely, was to be done? A middle way must be found. I
n December 1950, after months of intense behind-the-scenes negotiations between the foreign ministers and ambassadors of interested nations,22 the UN General Assembly ruled that Eritrea should become ‘an autonomous unit federated with Ethiopia under the sovereignty of the Ethiopian Crown’–a phrase that in itself contained a world of potential ambiguity and internal contradiction. Resolution 390 A (V)–a number engraved on the heart of any Eritrean patriot–was passed and a special Commissioner appointed to oversee its implementation. It was, as the man chosen for the Commissioner’s post himself acknowledged, ‘essentially a middle-of-the-road formula…the best possible compromise’.23 While Eritrea’s political parties had campaigned passionately for either annexation or independence, not one had ever called for federation. Nevertheless, that was what the international community, after years of fidgeting, about-turns and second thoughts, had determined they should have.
The new UN Commissioner for Eritrea, Bolivian Eduardo Anze Matienzo, arrived in Asmara in February 1951. A well-meaning, podgy diplomat with receding, curly hair, Matienzo had been appointed in the teeth of fierce opposition from Britain, which had ‘a jolly, fat Burmese’ judge lined up for the job and feared a Latin American would work in Italy’s interests. Eritrea, in the opinion of the British delegation at the UN, was once again hardly getting the cream of the crop. ‘He is an amiable but idle South American, quite friendly to us, but lacking in guts, commonsense, any knowledge of the position in Eritrea or indeed any of the required qualifications,’ it reported. The British embassy in La Paz was a little kinder. ‘Reported honest and competent diplomatist, though conceited’ it telegrammed London.24
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