I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  It was Wauchope’s job to report to the US embassy in Addis on local conditions and report back he dutifully did, but he noticed that his superiors were growing increasingly unhappy with the recommendations made in his outspoken telegrams. Organizations facing the prospect of their own sidelining rarely want to look reality in the face. Large projects, once launched, develop a momentum all their own. The Derg moderates on whom Washington had pinned its hopes were being shot, one by one, as Mengistu saw off a succession of challenges from rivals alarmed by his hard-line tactics. Mengistu, who had put exploratory feelers out to Moscow, was adopting an ever more pronounced anti-Western stance, histrionically smashing a Coca Cola bottle full of blood on the pavement at one rally and promising to spill the blood of ‘American imperialism’. Hatred of the regime was spreading: rebels in northern Tigray announced the formation of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), dedicated to Mengistu’s overthrow. Yet the embassy in Addis balked at reaching a conclusion that would lead to a once-key mission being downgraded, while the defence establishment choked on an admission that would mean budgets were slashed. ‘The Department of Defence simply wasn’t seeing this as a problem. The message was: “Let’s keep it going, let’s keep it going,”’ remembers Wauchope.

  The strains were becoming unbearable, especially once Jimmy Carter, a Democrat who had campaigned for an ‘ethical’ foreign policy, moved into the White House. ‘We are very much concerned by the use of American military equipment in suppressing indigenous movements inside Ethiopia,’ the deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs told a Congressional committee. ‘We would be reluctant to abandon Ethiopia to total Soviet domination. On the other hand,’ he confessed, ‘we do not want to see our weapons used in this fashion.’8

  One wonders just how long, if left purely to its own devices, Washington would have continued to deny the blindingly obvious: that American military aid was being channelled, as the Cold War raged, to a brutally-repressive Marxist African regime whose values were anathema to ordinary Americans. Western accounts of this period have been kind to the Americans, with some attributing the eventual break in relations to a supposedly high-minded decision by the US to ‘sacrifice’ a client that failed to meet Carter’s moral standards.9 If only it were true. As Mengistu revealed his true nature, Washington certainly voiced increasing concerns about Ethiopia’s appalling human rights record. It dragged its feet over pre-agreed arms deliveries–a backtracking that drove Addis wild–and served notice that Kagnew would soon close. But it was Ethiopia that finally brought the jarring ideological and moral contradictions to an end, pushing the relationship to collapse and formalizing the break.

  By early 1977, Washington was receiving horrifying reports of purges in Addis. In what would later be dubbed the Red Terror, revolutionary squads armed by Mengistu were massacring the very student leaders and educated Ethiopians who had propagated the ideals of the socialist revolution. Mengistu chose this moment to make his move, putting in an arms request so large he must have known it would be rejected. With Somalia looking ever more threatening, it was time for America to show its mettle. ‘It may have been a test,’ says Wauchope. ‘Washington felt very unhappy with it–was the maintenance of a traditional relationship worth supporting a movement of this kind? We came back with a feeble counter-offer, full of caveats and strings attached. Maybe we could provide a third of what they were asking for, we told them. The next thing we know, they’ve gone to the Soviets, who had no hesitations.’

  It was a moment replete with historical irony. For decades the US had poured money into Ethiopia, helping a leader regarded as a bulwark against Communism to pummel an Eritrean rebel movement regarded as a likely route for Soviet infiltration of the Horn. By propping up the Emperor, Washington had ensured the US was indelibly associated with all that was corrupt and outdated in the minds of Ethiopia’s new rulers, who now wanted nothing more to do with the West. When it came to Communist penetration, trusted, cosseted Ethiopia, rather than the despised Eritrean liberation movement, had proved the weakest link. The US had contributed not only to the downfall of its champion Haile Selassie but, by building up the organization that destroyed him, had also enthusiastically armed a government bent on spreading Marxist ideology across the region. Measured by even its own self-interested standards, US policy had backfired. Looked at from the viewpoint of ordinary Eritreans, the judgement was far harsher. ‘The Americans had no idea what they were doing,’ scoffs Dr Aba Isaak, an Eritrean historian. ‘They were like the elephant–when it treads on small creatures, it doesn’t even notice. It just goes, and goes, and goes along its way.’10

  Ethiopia had swapped sides in the Cold War and the consequences for Kagnew were immediate. On April 17, the Derg gave the US just four days to close five facilities in the country, including the communications base. The defence agreement signed in 1953–the most astute piece of diplomacy Haile Selassie ever negotiated–was to be terminated a year ahead of schedule, Addis decreed. The news was delivered on a Saturday, timing designed to make the pullout as practically difficult as possible for Ethiopia’s erstwhile friends. Amazing as it may seem in retrospect, the Derg’s decision hit US officials in Addis and Asmara like a thunderclap. ‘We’d thought things had stabilized, we didn’t expect the Ethiopians to make the break that radically,’ says Wauchope. ‘They had been adept at playing the superpowers off against each other. The Ethiopian government still had links, don’t forget, with Yale, the Ford Foundation, TWA. To suddenly opt for one side was quite a jump.’

  Wauchope found himself in command of an emergency operation to ensure nothing of any strategic interest–no coding information, no classified circuit boards, no transmitting or receiving equipment–remained intact for the East bloc experts he knew would be invited to pick over the site by the Ethiopians once the Americans left. ‘It was an exciting, hair-raising time. We had to scramble like hell, but by Monday we’d worked out how to destroy or dismantle everything of strategic value. I tried to organize the closure with a maximum of dignity, but while I was out loading the transport plane we heard that Ethiopian soldiers had attempted to storm the consulate. The marines were put on alert and the Ethiopians were told this was a violation of the Vienna Convention. Then they demanded a tour of the Kagnew facilities and we had to conceal the backup machines that were still in use. The Ethiopians were telling us we couldn’t remove any hardware, so we destroyed the classified circuit boards by slipping them into the water collection point. In the end, they got nothing. When we left the consulate, we placed the instructions to the game Dungeons and Dragons amongst the procedural papers, just to sow confusion, and we left the calling cards of prominent people in government we had no use for lying around, to give them something to think about.’

  International pressure on the Addis government secured the Americans an extra two days’ grace. On the last day, the Stars and Stripes were ceremoniously lowered at the consulate and staff joined a convoy of vehicles from Kagnew Station which threaded its way through Asmara to the airport. Many of Asmara’s residents lined the streets to watch the convoy pass and some, Wauchope remembers, were weeping. The grief was prompted not so much by fondness for foreign guests whose role had been, at best, contentious, but by fear of what the future held. ‘All the other Western consulates in Asmara had been ordered to close at the same time. They felt that the last international witnesses to their sufferings were leaving and now there would be massive ethnic cleansing by the Ethiopian army.’ At the airport, the Ethiopian military was waiting and a last attempt was made to board the American flight and inspect what was on board. ‘We faced them down, told them they were violating international law, and then we were out of there.’ If Wauchope, who won an award for the role he played, felt more than a pang at abandoning the Eritreans, there was no doubt in his mind that Kagnew’s closure was overdue. A morally untenable partnership had been brought to an appropriate end. ‘It was what we had been lobbying the embassy in Addis for. We had l
ived in that country and we had understood what the Eritreans felt.’

  America’s need for terrestrial spy stations did not disappear with Kagnew. Washington had had a backup ready since 1974, having signed an agreement with Britain to set up a communications facility on the coral atoll of Diego Garcia, a remote former dependency of Mauritius. Diego Garcia was never going to be able to rival Asmara for reception, but it was ideally placed for the US fleet operating in the Indian Ocean, and monitoring equipment from Kagnew was transferred there. In retrospect the entire Kagnew operation, unknown to most Americans today, barely mentioned in writings on the topic, would seem blessed with a miraculously low public profile. Washington proved far less lucky with Diego Garcia. There, islanders evicted by the British government to make way for the American military waged a vociferous legal campaign, ensuring that while Diego Garcia remains in operation as a logistics, military and communications base, a key part of America’s ‘war on terror’, no one has ever been left in any doubt as to its role.

  Vertical antenna poles–the debris left behind by the ASA–are still scattered around Asmara. Not far from the airport, where young boys tend their goats, a round golf ball of a building rises incongruously from the grassy plains–a giant receiver built by the Americans, now used by the Eritrean military. Kagnew’s Tract E, with its solid bungalows, sports facilities and central location, was too good a site to allow to go to waste. It was used as a garrison by the Ethiopian army and, after independence, the EPLF moved its Fighters in. When I visited what is now known as Den Den Camp, baptized after the mountain peak the Ethiopians never managed to wrest from EPLF control, the giant dry-cleaning unit vaunted in the US army brochures was working full blast, processing dirty laundry for UN troops in town. But the clock tower was telling a time of its own making, washing was draped over fences, and the once-neat lawns were littered with rusting containers, temporary homes for soldiers too poor to afford lodgings in town.

  Perhaps the Gross Guys would have recognized the atmosphere in the two clubs, where the Melotti beer and zibib start flowing early in the morning, a cheap anaesthetic for the frustrated and bored. It is ordered by Eritrean paraplegics of both sexes, wounded in both the new war against Ethiopia and the conflict Kagnew’s servicemen were determined to ignore. Wheelchairs crunch along the walkways where young GIs once strolled and the bars in which Spook and his acolytes staged their silly pranks are now run by young ex-Fighters with pinned-back trouser legs, survivors of a series of wasteful wars.

  ‘Come, we should go,’ my Eritrean friend told me, as we watched a young amputee in what was once the Oasis Club pick a fight with a barmaid who thought he had already had too much to drink. ‘Otherwise you will see something you should not.’ Not state secrets, but a spectacle he wanted no foreign visitor to witness: Eritreans behaving badly.

  For the Eritrean rebels, who by late 1977 controlled 95 per cent of Eritrea, nothing could have been more disastrous than the Derg’s formal entry into the Communist camp.

  The banal rules of the Cold War dictated that the Soviet Union backed Marxist rebel movements fighting right-wing governments supported by the US. Here, thanks to Ethiopia’s ideological flip-flop, was a Marxist rebel movement fighting for independence from a Marxist government. For Soviet strategists, it made no sense: national frontiers and ethnic hostilities were surely destined to fade into insignificance once scientific socialism conquered the world. Previously sympathetic to the Eritrean cause, Moscow decided it had no time for a rebellion that refused to fit its ideological paradigm. ‘There is no insurgency in Ethiopia,’ declared one Soviet observer11–obliterating Eritrean history with the same breathtaking highhandedness once demonstrated by the UN’s bored bureaucrats. If the US eventually decided to return to the Horn on Somalia’s side,12 no one wanted to touch the Eritrean rebels. Rejected by the East bloc, spurned by the West, they were on their own.

  Mengistu made his first trip to Moscow in May 1977, returning in a state of near-euphoria. Unfazed by their long-standing role as Somalia’s military supplier, the Soviets had offered Mengistu the weaponry that would allow him to wage ‘total war’ on Ethiopia’s enemies. ‘He was absolutely ecstatic,’ remembers Ayalew Mandefro, defence minister of the day.13 ‘He told me: “We are going to need large warehouses and a big storage capacity.”’ In the middle of the year, Somalia launched a concerted grab for Ethiopia’s eastern Ogaden and Somali President Siad Barre, exasperated by Moscow’s clumsy attempts to back both horses in the same race, moved to expel 1,700 Soviet advisers. The Soviet Union was free to make good its promises to Ethiopia, ferrying in $1–2 billion of armaments, 12,000 Cuban combat troops and 1,500 military advisers during a six-week air and sea lift. The value of Moscow’s arms deliveries outstripped in a matter of months what the US had supplied during all its dealings with Ethiopia.

  The oversized delivery changed everything in both the Ogaden and Eritrea. The turning point in the north came in Massawa in December, when the EPLF’s seemingly unstoppable advance ground to a sudden halt. As Soviet ships moored offshore opened fire and Soviet advisers took the controls of Ethiopia’s spanking new artillery, hundreds of Fighters were mowed down or drowned on the flooded salt pans. The EPLF was no longer fighting a panicking African army, it was pitted against a superpower boasting seemingly inexhaustible resources. By July 1978, after a campaign of saturation bombing by the freshly-equipped Ethiopian air force, all the towns the ELF and EPLF had won in southern and central Eritrea had been recaptured. Forced to accept the inevitable, the EPLF pulled out of Keren, its Fighters stripping the town of every object of potential use as they headed up into the only area that now seemed safe: the mountains of the Sahel, where they would spend the next 10 years.

  Their leaders called it ‘strategic withdrawal’, but to those who took part in it, this had the metallic taste of defeat. ‘It was our Dunkirk,’ acknowledges Zemehret Yohannes, today a leading member of Eritrea’s ruling party. ‘It was a defining moment. The biggest army in black Africa, with modern equipment and Soviet help, had pushed us out of the territory we’d been holding. Every expert was saying, “This fight is hopeless, it’s a dead movement.” In retrospect, it baffles me–how, in those circumstances, we could say: “We can prevail.” It seemed a kind of stupidity.’14

  CHAPTER 14

  The Green, Green Grass of Home

  ‘They were madmen, but they had in them that little flame which is not to be snuffed out.’

  the painter Renoir, remembering the French commune

  Towards the end of the eighth century BC in Ancient Greece, a revolutionary society was born where the limestone fingers of the Peloponnese mainland reach into the blue Aegean. It was founded by the Spartans, who had invaded neighbouring Messenia in search of fertile land. Sparta had won the territory it coveted, but with it came a population of rebellious subjects who outnumbered their new masters and did not take kindly to being used as forced labour to work the fields. To protect themselves against the helots, or serfs, the Spartans came up with the concept of the military state.

  Not for them the dissolute habits of the Athenians and soft comforts of family life–Spartan men prided themselves on their self-denial and iron discipline. They lived in barracks, their closest comrades were fellow fighters. Sent as children to run barefoot on the chilly mountainsides, they learnt to bear pain without a whimper. Warriors until the age of 60, their greatest ambition was to achieve ‘a beautiful death’ on the battlefield, defending the Spartan state. Women were no exception: they too were expected to espouse the Spartan virtues of simplicity, moral rigour and extraordinary physical toughness. Feminists before their time, they enjoyed, in the absence of their menfolk, levels of freedom unheard of in the Ancient world. The other Greek city-states scorned the Spartan model, regarding it as totalitarian and brutalizing. But when Ancient Greece was invaded by the Persian army in 480 BC, it was a group of 300 Spartan warriors, embracing their fate in a doomed last stand at Thermopylae, who showed their effete fell
ow Greeks what it meant to die for a cause.

  There was something very Spartan about the society that took shape in the late-1970s in the Rora mountain range that rises from the plains north of Keren and runs north-west to the border with Sudan. The Spartans built their militaristic state on a victory: they had subjugated the Messenians but knew they would not remain forever supine. The EPLF, which emerged as the only viable rebel movement after a final clash with the ELF, built its society on defeat: with Moscow’s entry into the war, it had gone from holding independence in the palm of its hands to confronting total annihilation. Like the Spartans, the fighters of the EPLF adopted a rigidly puritanical lifestyle. The need to create a lean fighting machine meant that conventional family structures were rejected, traditional roles recast. Not only was the Eritrean woman Fighter, accounting for 30 per cent of rebel forces, often as deadly as the male, their children–separated early from their warrior parents and inculcated with the Movement’s dour values at the Revolution, or Zero, School–would grow up to outstrip them both.

  Their kingdom was what was loosely known as the Sahel and its contours were dictated by the gradient, for the mountains form a more effective barrier against an advancing army than anything man could contrive. This was the part of Eritrea no one really wanted–most of it too steep even for Eritrean farmers, adept at tilling the narrowest highland ledge. The first foothills erupt from the dun-coloured plains around the town of Afabet like whale humps breaking through the surface of a calm sea. Strange stone excrescences form impossibly perky breasts. Then the Rora escarpment starts in earnest, the peaks–giant slabs of brown rock–crowding in upon the dry water-courses. The only fruits that grow here are the fig cactus and fleshy green pods of Sodom’s Apple, which give nothing, when you tear them open, but a cobweb of poisonous white sap, said to be strong enough to stop a man’s heart. It is a landscape of scrawny thorn trees and spiky pink baobabs that gesticulate nightmarishly across the narrow valleys, like witches crazed with grief. Baboons thrive, gambolling along the ravines in thuggish packs of 40 and 50, red in face and rear. So do foxes, which hunt hares with long, white-tufted ears. But few humans would want to set up base here, unless they had no choice.