I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  The Kagnew authorities did not encourage curiosity over the bigger political picture. They knew the inflammatory impact half-digested information could have on a claustrophobic, navel-gazing community. ‘A word or two on the subject of RUMORS,’ reads a warning published in the ‘Kagnew Gazelle’, the base circular. ‘These can be very dangerous. They can hurt you, your buddies, your unit and your families if they are not stopped. On a small post like this, rumors start very easily. If you are not sure of something that was said, find out the truth, if it is wrong, get the rumor stopped as quickly as possible.’ Arrivals were obliged to sign a ‘statement of non-involvement’ pledging no contact with dissident elements and no political discussions with ‘foreigners’. But for those who cared to look, the grim realities of Ethiopian rule in those years were always on display.

  Growing Eritrean anger at the imposition of the Amharic language, the Federation’s suppression, and the brutal crushing of dissent had given birth to a lively rural guerrilla movement, which staged hit-and-run raids on police stations and garrisons–symbols of Ethiopian authority and useful sources of weaponry–sabotaged bridges and targeted high-ranking Eritrean ‘collaborators’. Initially set up by Moslem lowlanders with strong links to the Arab world, the ELF’s ranks were gradually swelled by hundreds of well-educated young Christians who had distanced themselves from Unionism, spoke the language of Marx and Mao, and wanted to fight. The Ethiopian army responded to their activities with predictable heavy-handedness.

  You would never get an inkling of it from reading the entries on either the official Kagnew website7 or Zazz’s irreverent alternative, but 1967, the year Zazz started his tour, witnessed three devastating offensives in Eritrea. Drawing on counterinsurgency training provided by the US and Israel, the Ethiopian army attempted to starve out resistance by displacing the rural communities on which the rebels depended for sustenance. Over 300 settlements were burned, tens of thousands of farm animals slaughtered and hundreds of villagers killed. During one incident in the eastern lowlands of Semhar, 30 young men were burned alive inside a house. In the villages of Kuhul and Amadi, the Ethiopians, using what would become a favourite technique, ordered the locals to collect in one place, then called in the air force to bomb the site. These ‘pacification campaigns’ were horribly reminiscent of American tactics in Vietnam, and their outcome was just as disastrously self-defeating when it came to winning hearts and minds. ‘The Second Division is very efficient in killing innocent people,’ an Israeli adviser wearily noted in his diary. ‘They are alienating the Eritrean and deepening the hatred that already exists. Their commander took his aides to a spot near the Sudanese border and ordered them: “From here to the north–clear the area.” Many innocent people were massacred and nothing of substance was achieved.’8

  At regular intervals, Kagnew men who strayed off the beaten track, venturing out without their assigned escorts, would stumble into ‘the shifties’–an ELF patrol–who, perhaps realizing that these noisy, spoilt Westerners were ignorant rather than malevolent, would undertake a crash-course in political awareness. ‘They were always very good to us. They would stop people and say: “This is our flag, this is our anthem, this is our policy,” and then they would let them go. ELF activity was an issue all the time we were there, but you had to find out about things for yourself, no one would tell you,’ remembers Metras. On occasions, Kagnew Station would be closed and security tightened when one of these polite outlaws was publicly executed by the Ethiopians. Even in the cultural bubble behind the clock tower, word occasionally filtered through of atrocities downtown, of how the Ethiopian army had strung bodies of captured Eritrean rebels from the lamp-posts of Keren and left them to rot as a warning to others. The party line from the station authorities was that the rebels were the ‘bad guys’, but Kagnew’s inmates were too bright not to entertain doubts or draw their own historic analogies. ‘I always used to think that this was probably what we Americans were like before we threw you Brits out,’ says Dymond.

  But for most Kagnew men, the political situation was confined to the subconscious, a shadow that only solidified and made full sense in later years. ‘We realized the role Kagnew played for our government and we saw some hatred because we were seen as puppets of Haile Selassie,’ acknowledges Zazz. ‘But we dismissed it. The prevailing mood was that we were in the army, we weren’t there to make choices. Vietnam was foremost in our minds, not Eritrea and Ethiopia.’ Disassociation came easy–it was, after all, the unstated aim of all the leisure facilities laid on in this home away from home. ‘We were living in our own little world,’ says Indelicato, ‘it was going on all around us, but didn’t have anything to do with us.’ When His Imperial Majesty (HIM) came to Kagnew Station for his free dental check-ups, the servicemen would make their truculent dislike for the man they dubbed ‘Lord of the Flies’, in recognition of the vibrant insect life that started just outside Kagnew’s sprayed confines, as obvious as circumstances allowed. ‘They’d make us turn out for him and the resentment in the ranks was palpable. Everyone was aghast at what the Ethiopian government was doing–but we were in service. In theory we could have stood up and rebelled but, well, we were callow youth,’ says Strand. Protest never rose above the strictly puerile. ‘Let’s sing a hymn for HIM,’ a GI would suggest when servicemen marched into base under the eyes of the Ethiopian guards. And the chorus would rise up: ‘We like it here, we like it here. Fuckin’ A, we like it here; HIM, HIM, FUCK HIM.’

  The Kagnew boys eventually followed their various routes out of Africa, some of them discovering on arrival in the West that they had developed drink problems they would need to shed to enter conventional careers. The legendary Spook left the ASA when his boozing finally became an issue and now works in a Colorado Springs motel. His memory fuddled by all the years of bourbon and zibib, he retains almost nothing of his Kagnew days. Dave Strand runs a telecommunications business, while Bob Dymond has become a network engineer. Tom Indelicato joined the police and at weekends dons camouflage to train with the National Guard. He readily admits that it is his convoluted way of trying to make up for the REMF role played in Kagnew, which left him with an still unsatisfied need to prove qualities never put to the test in Asmara. ‘If you were in the army between 1965 and 1972 and you didn’t do Vietnam, then a lot of people will wonder what the hell was wrong with you. That was easy to live with when the Vietnam war wasn’t popular, when it was “LBJ’s war”. But now that it’s being romanticized, the attitude is “why weren’t you there?”

  ‘Am I rare in being haunted by Kagnew? Maybe I’m rare in being able to admit it. The fact remains that Vietnam was the war that defined our generation. There are 58,000 names engraved on that memorial wall in Washington, and some of those names were friends of mine.’

  The birth of the internet has allowed old friendships to resume and every year a group of Kagnew veterans stages an informal dinner reunion. Most prefer not to invite their wives. Poignantly, a light-skinned Eritrean youth made a surprise appearance at a recent such get-together, clutching a picture of his bar whore mother and looking for the GI father he had never met. He left with the long-nursed question unanswered. ‘It could have been a number of us,’ says Zazz, with a shake of the head. ‘His mother went with a lot of the guys.’

  Pulled out in 1968, the irrepressible Zazz headed back to college, entered the restaurant business and tried teaching. Now 57, he lives on a sultry stretch of Florida coastline trawled by Hell’s Angels and holidaymakers, where the waving palm trees offer the only echo of Eritrea. He works behind the bar in an up-market restaurant where, on Saturday nights, middle-aged blondes with big hair and shiny red talons prowl in search of new husbands. Looking surprisingly spry for someone who has submitted his body to such unremitting abuse, he smokes three packets a day, wakes at the ‘crack of noon’ and on busy nights, stumbles to bed at 6.00 am–an appropriate lifestyle, one can’t help feeling, for one of Spook’s acolytes. Sometimes, he fantasizes about returning to Asmara
. ‘There was something about the air there. I can’t define it, but it smelled different. I’d like to smell that again.’

  Boarding his flight out of Asmara, Zazz, one of the last representatives of the once-great Gross Guys, remembers that he turned, raised his arms to heaven and swept them down to point at his crotch in the ‘on your root’ gesture that was born and died at Kagnew. Seen from one angle, a mischievous young man was having a final bit of innocent fun, keeping faith with a circle of friends that had already splintered into fragments. Seen from the angle of a jaundiced Eritrean, the departing GI had summarized the underlying theme of America’s role in Eritrean affairs–the equivalent of ‘suck my dick’–with uncanny accuracy.

  CHAPTER 11

  Death of the Lion

  ‘A house built on granite and strong foundations, not even the onslaught of pouring rain, gushing torrents, and strong winds will be able to pull down.’

  Haile Selassie, writing in his autobiography

  Something terrible happened on November 30, 1970 in Besik-Dira1. And perhaps the worst thing about the entire episode was that it was really nothing out of the ordinary.

  For months, residents of the tiny village, a community 14 km north-east of Keren which included both Christian and Moslem members of the Bilin tribe, had watched with growing anxiety as Ethiopian troops destroyed scores of settlements in the area suspected of ferrying food and messages to ELF guerrillas in the mountains. The Ethiopian plan, it was clear, was to resettle the peasants in conveniently-located hamlets which could be easily patrolled. On November 21, the situation had taken an ominous turn: Major-General Teshome Ergetu, chief of Ethiopian forces in Eritrea and the man spearheading the scorched earth policy, was ambushed and killed by the ELF on the road to Asmara. Revenge was in the air, and Ethiopian planes flew low over the valleys, warning villagers to move to Ona, a designated ‘safe’ village on Keren’s outskirts. Yet the residents of Besik-Dira stayed put. The decision was not taken lightly. The rains had been good that year and it was time to bring the harvest in: moving now might mean starvation later. Looking round, they noted that the Ethiopians tended to target villages which had been abandoned–it made burning them easier. If Besik-Dira handled the situation carefully, residents agreed amongst themselves, they might come through the crisis unscathed. The women buried their jewellery beneath their huts and the fearful village waited, hoping for the best.

  When the Ethiopian soldiers finally arrived, they were met by ululating and clapping villagers, who presented them with a gift of cattle. The soldiers were unimpressed. Routinely issued with only a few days’ rations, they were already accustomed to ‘living off the land’, that old military euphemism for plunder. What did two paltry cows matter to men who slaughtered livestock when they grew peckish and searched huts when they needed pocket money? As far as these angry, nervy men were concerned, Besik-Dira was a nest of sympathizers: an outbreak of shooting from the ELF in the hills merely seemed to prove the point. They herded the villagers into a valley, shot the livestock and set fire to the huts. Then, acting on the simple premise that being Moslem meant being pro-guerrilla and being Christian meant supporting Ethiopia, they ordered residents to divide on religious lines.

  It must have been at this stage that the villagers realized they had made a mistake most would not live to regret. They took the hardest of decisions. Presented with a choice between individual survival and group solidarity, they opted for the latter. Whether Moslem or Christian, no one in Besik-Dira, they told the soldiers, knew anything about the ELF. The soldiers ordered everyone into the mosque. ‘Start clapping,’ they said, ‘the army commander is on his way and should be welcomed.’ As the villagers obeyed, hands shaking with fear, the soldiers positioned themselves at the mosque’s six windows and only door. There was a chorus of ratcheting as the men released their safety catches, cocked their weapons and took aim.

  The massacre was carried out with systematic thoroughness. On a signal, the soldiers opened fire, paused to see if anyone was left standing, then launched another volley. Every few minutes there would be a terrible silence as the soldiers listened for signs of life and, buried deep inside the pile of bleeding bodies that had once been a community, the wounded bit their lips. Then the shooting resumed. Meskela Berk, a local woman, spotted her eldest daughter lying, alive, below a mound of corpses. ‘She was about to die of suffocation. I removed the bodies from her and put them over one another to shield her. I did the same for my second daughter. My third was too young, so I lay over her to protect her.’

  When the soldiers finally left Besik-Dira, over 200 of Meskela’s neighbours and friends lay dead. Even then, the ordeal was not over. Many of the survivors fled to Ona. The following day, the Ethiopian army encircled this supposedly ‘safe’ village and opened fire with its heavy artillery. More than 700 people–most of them women, children and the elderly–died in the shelling. A few days later, the soldiers covered Ona with earth and sand, so that it merged seamlessly into the landscape, a village that had never been.

  Besik-Dira and Ona were not dreadful aberrations, the work of army units which momentarily lost control. This was policy. Eilet and Gumhot, Kuhul and Amadi, Asmat and Melefso, Om-Hager, Woki-Diba, Agordat: the list of Eritrean villages and towns where massacres were staged and atrocities committed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, while Kagnew’s embarrassed authorities looked the other way, runs on and on. The Ethiopian military, in attempting to bring an obstinate Eritrea to heel, fell into the trap that awaits any army sent to subjugate a land where every rebel looks like a peasant farmer, any street urchin could be an informer and the friendliest of housewives is probably cooking stew for the boys in the hills. ‘If you wish to kill the fish, first you must dry the sea,’ an Ethiopian brigadier-general who had absorbed something of Mao’s teachings told foreign journalists. But how do you drain the sea without creating, in the process, a new generation of hate-filled fighters haunted by the memory of their hanged brothers, raped mothers, and charred homes? How do you crush a secession movement without doing the guerrillas’ recruitment work for them? The Americans failed to find an answer in Vietnam, the French fluffed it in Algeria, the question baffles coalition forces in Iraq today. It would always flummox the Ethiopians. The survivors of Besik-Dira, Ona, and every other massacre fled into the mountains, and membership of the Eritrean guerrilla movement soared.

  By the early 1970s, the leader who had once looked ahead of his time was beginning himself to seem atrophied and out-of-date. Now in his eighties, Haile Selassie had succeeded in dragging Ethiopia out of the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment, era of the absolute monarch, but that still left his empire lagging a few centuries behind the developed world.

  In their telegrams home, foreign diplomats noted that the Emperor was fond of quoting from Rudyard Kipling’s tub-thumbing poem ‘If’ at the end of his speeches. Its Boy Scout exhortations must have echoed through his mind as, for the first time since the 1960 coup attempt, he began confronting serious challenges to his rule. ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you… [army bogged down in Eritrea, Oromos in revolt, Somalia being militarized by the Soviets]…If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you [drought in the north, thousands starving to death] but make allowance for their doubting too…[soaring food prices, students demonstrating, teachers on strike]…If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew, to serve your turn long after they are gone [army officers demanding pay increases, cabinet ministers manoeuvring for greater powers]…Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, and–which is more–you’ll be a man, my son!’

  The radiant charisma Spencer had once remarked upon had evaporated, leaving behind a very small old man in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. The first symptom of this demeaning disease aides registered was the Emperor’s disconcerting tendency to change topics in mid-discussion, swerving off down lost, overgrown conversational by-ways where a confused retinue could not follow him. As h
is brain cells withered and died, the Emperor’s speech became less and less articulate. Information sluiced through his mind like water, leaving no residue behind. He was having difficulty recognizing his own ministers and Aklilou, who now held the post of Prime Minister, found himself repeatedly briefing and rebriefing the man whose memory had once been so impressive. When Zaire’s President Mobutu was invited to a state dinner, Haile Selassie had to summon a lackey to ask who was sitting alongside him. On his only trip to China, he was afflicted by an overpowering sense of déjà vu, repeatedly claiming to recognize places he was visiting for the first time.2 ‘He became disreputable and somehow undistinguished at the end,’ Spencer told me. ‘What brought that about, I don’t know.’