Choosing its sites close to the border and the vital access routes to Sudan–a neighbour whose cooperation could never be taken for granted–the EPLF dug in. As the realization set in that the guerrilla movement was in for the long haul, the structures grew ever more complex, ghostly echoes of the institutions and organizations the Movement hoped one day to establish in peace-time Eritrea, a practice run at administering a state.
Up in the north at Orota, the EPLF built an underground hospital in whose white-washed rooms most major operations, short of heart surgery, could be staged. Sprawling for 5 km along a valley, equipped with 3,000 beds, it was known as ‘the longest hospital in the world’. Learning that survival rates depended on the time it took a wounded Fighter to receive emergency treatment, EPLF doctors took huge pride in the speed with which the injured were tended by frontline medical units and then whipped, tier by tier, to hospitals whose sophistication was in inverse proportion to their distance from the battlefield. At the very most, it was decreed, no Fighter should be more than two hours’ distance from a surgeon.
In Orota too, a small pharmaceutical plant turned out essential drugs, bandages, even sanitary pads for the women Fighters. In other workshops, Fighters manufactured bullets and repaired the damaged trucks, tanks and radio sets captured from the Ethiopians. Once the supply of arms from Arab countries dried up–former supporters belatedly realizing they were dealing with a secular Marxist movement, rather than an Islamic revolt–the EPLF was forced to rely on theft, careful recycling and mechanical cannibalization for most of its weaponry. Orota was also the location of the famous Zero School, where the children dubbed ‘Red Flowers’ were taught. The logistics and military base–the EPLF’s de facto citadel–lay further south at Nakfa, where, in 1976, its Fighters occupied a small settlement on the high plateau enjoying panoramic views down to the bleak Naro plains and the distant haze of the Red Sea.
Talking about these installations is always confusing, because the EPLF deliberately muddied the water in an attempt to protect their bases from bombardment. Sensitive sites were often given the same names as villages in the lowlands, or identified by code words, stripped of associations which could give Ethiopian strategists helpful clues. Even today, if you present a former Fighter with a map he will struggle to place them, brows puckered, fingers wandering lost and uncertain across the grid.
The same deliberate confusion surrounded the Fighters themselves. Adopting nicknames is a very Eritrean habit, perhaps because the fund of traditional local names is so limited, it’s easy to get confused. But the practice was taken to new extremes at the Front, a form of initiation ceremony that underlined each individual’s entry into a testing new existence where no one could afford the luxury of homesickness or regret. You arrived an ordinary civilian, with your own petty, small-minded concerns and were reborn a warrior, or tegadlai, dedicated to the Cause. If a Fighter was stocky, he would be known as ‘The Body’ or ‘Sack’, if he was thin and ascetic, he became ‘The Priest’. A veteran activist was baptized ‘The Movement’, a macho man reborn as ‘Rambo’, a campaigner who sported a moustache became ‘Charlie’ (as in ‘Chaplin’) and, with the thumping inevitability of a group of British squaddies dubbing the giant amongst them ‘Titch’, a particularly dark-complexioned Fighter would be known as ‘Tilian’ (‘Italian’).
A jokey form of shorthand, the nicknames not only made things simpler, they served as a security precaution. In a nation of less than 4 million people, where names usually tell the world whose son you are, it was alarmingly easy to track down a Fighter’s village and extended family, vulnerable in Ethiopian-controlled territory. If a Fighter was stripped of his ancestral identity, known only by his nickname even to his rebel comrades, then his relatives were protected from retribution. For the same reason, Fighters were encouraged not to discuss religion or tribal affiliations: such differences, which had done so much to deliver Eritrea into Ethiopia’s hands, should in any case be put aside in the fight for a united, independent Eritrea. The result was intense friendships based on the here and now. ‘When my best friend was killed, a man I had fought alongside for years, a man I really loved, I buried him without knowing where he came from,’ remembers one ex-Fighter.1 ‘Today I would like to go and see his mother and tell her what a hero her son was. But I don’t know who she is. He was my brother, but I knew next to nothing about him.’
In a country infatuated with its own history, this is the episode Eritrea loves the most; it is remembered with the same perverse nostalgia British veterans reserve for the Blitz. A tribute to pigheaded determination and endurance, Nakfa was so integral to the Eritrean experience it seemed only natural, when the post-independence government launched a national currency, that it should be baptized the Nakfa. During the decade the EPLF spent in Nakfa, the Ethiopian army launched eight large-scale offensives in a vain attempt to break the rebel movement’s hold on the plateau. A journalist visiting the front once counted 240 bombing sorties by enemy aircraft in a day, with one shell landing every minute. Even today, when a new Nakfa is rising from the ruins, much of the plateau remains an ugly moonscape, each acne scar on its pitted face representing a massive explosion. The original town was reduced to rubble, its simple white mosque the only piece of masonry extending higher than waist level. Some say the pilots who flew the MiGs and Antonovs spared the mosque because it served as a useful compass point, allowing them to establish their bearings above the escarpment before releasing their bombs. Others say they tried to hit it but always failed, a sign, perhaps, that the town held a special place in Allah’s affections. A victory for sheer obstinacy, constructed on a military rout, Nakfa was Eritrea’s Verdun. It would never fall into Ethiopian hands, and the failure to capture the EPLF’s de facto capital would prove the Mengistu regime’s ultimate undoing.
The Eritreans survived by moving underground. Hospitals, technical colleges, theatres, guest rooms for visiting VIPs, parking places for the camouflage-painted jeeps, offices where young leaders like Isaias Afwerki, Petros Solomon, Ibrahim Afa, Ali Sayyid Abdallah, Mesfin Hagos and Sebhat Ephrem planned military strategy: they were all painstakingly dug into the rock and carved into the sides of valleys, the narrow entrances then covered by screens of undergrowth and foliage. From the air, they were virtually invisible. The Fighters became creatures of the penumbra, for it was best to go about your business in the hours of dusk when pilots found it hard to focus in the half-light, and during the chill of night. ‘When I think of my visits to the front in the 1970s, all I remember is darkness, darkness, darkness,’ says Koert Lindyer, a veteran Dutch journalist.
The tentacles of their underground network extended far beyond Nakfa itself. In a giant semi-circle that swept 240 km from Karora on the Sudanese border, down to Nakfa and south to Halhal, north of Keren, the Fighters dug parallel lines of trenches. It was backbreaking work. But, as the Fighters said, whipping themselves on to greater efforts: ‘Better to sweat than bleed.’ In a conflict in which Ethiopians usually outnumbered Eritreans 10 to 1, and the enemy tapped a seemingly unlimited supply of weapons, the contours of the land were the one obvious advantage the Eritreans enjoyed. If they were forced to surrender one position, there would be another trench line to fall behind, and then another, and another.
If an ex-Fighter shows you how to pick your way through the uncleared minefields, marked with a grinning skull and crossbones, it is possible today to walk the trenches, which trail across Nakfa’s slopes like worm casts on a sea-washed rock face. The camouflaged screen roofs are gone now, burnt as firewood by local shepherds. But the thick stone walls, rising higher than a man’s head, still stand proud. They are interspersed with pokey underground antechambers where meals were eaten, classes held, sleep snatched and marriages consummated. The slabs of stone fit together with a neatness any Yorkshire dry-stonewaller would admire–the knowledge that a crack could let a bullet through encouraged a certain mathematical precision. At regular intervals there are neat gun-sights. If you peer thro
ugh one of these slits, you will be brought up short by the sudden, seemingly magnified glimpse of what kept the Fighters on their toes. Across the valley, with its own gun-sight trained precisely upon you, sits an Ethiopian position. As I knelt in the dust and imagined what it must be like to stare at your would-be executioner every day, I was reminded of the brown line of dirt that marked my T-shirt every time I belted up in a friend’s car. Seat belts are always either filthy or broken in Eritrea. Having already braved death in so many more obvious ways, no one fusses over the dangers of flying through a windscreen.
Like the British squaddies at Keren, the Fighters came to know every inch of their natural fortress. Facing Nakfa to the south was Den Den, the mountain the Ethiopians struggled most fiercely to capture, as controlling it would have allowed them to turn their artillery directly onto the plateau. The place where Eritrean and Ethiopian lines lay barely 50 m apart–so close that Eritrean Fighters could hear the news being announced on Ethiopian radio sets–was known as Testa a Testa (‘head to head’). Fornello (‘oven’) was the area behind Den Den which saw the heaviest bombardment, volleyball the sport which involved Eritrean Fighters scrambling to lob Ethiopian grenades back over the parapets before they exploded. To the east rose Sulphur Mountain, regularly doused in flaming napalm. The winding track up from the valley was known as Teamamen (‘We are certain’)–Eritrea’s equivalent of ‘No Pasaran’. No Ethiopian force, the EPLF decided, would ever be allowed to breast its hairpin turns. Upturned in the ravines, the rusting Soviet trucks and tanks show it was a promise they kept.
What is it like to live a subterranean existence, one eye always on the sky for possible danger? You learn to merge with your surroundings as swiftly as a chameleon. Put yourself in the mind of an Ethiopian pilot, and see what he sees, roaring by so fast in a MiG his eyes can hardly fix on objects on the ground. High above you, scouring these drab expanses of rock and scrub, he is wondering how anyone can survive in this dry landscape. He is looking for something out of the ordinary–a sudden movement that is more than a baboon or a goat, a bright flash of colour, swirling tyre tracks in the sand, some clue that there are humans below. So do nothing to attract his attention. Wash and dry your clothes indoors–a flapping shirt will draw him to you. If you must light a fire, remember that dry wood gives off little smoke, but damp wood is dangerous. If a truck comes to your area, sweep away the tracks immediately. Bury food tins–they can catch the sun and flash up a deadly signal. Before you go out, make sure you turn your watchstrap so the face points towards your body, not outwards, or pull down your sleeves and tuck them in to cover the glass. Forget about rings and jewellery–they glint too. Never wear white, or red, they are visible a long way off. Choose khaki, grey, anything dull. Avoid unnecessary large gatherings, that way, if a bomb hits home, the casualty toll will be lower. And if you’re unlucky enough to be caught outside when a plane appears, then do as the rabbit, lizard and snake: freeze in your tracks, hold yourself as still as stone, so still you become part of the landscape, impossible to distinguish from the boulders and bushes, until the plane has gone beyond the horizon and the sinister game of Grandmother’s Footsteps can resume. It can drive you close to madness, all that time in the sweltering darkness under the rock, like an antlion in its hole. When the bombing starts and you feel each boom vibrate through the earth’s bowels, you want to break out of your living tomb and take a deep breath, because it feels better to see death coming out in the open, than to sit silently and wait. But this way you get to outsmart him, that Ethiopian pilot who wants to kill you. This way you get to live.
There was a seductive simplicity to this existence, for the knowledge of your own righteousness brings with it a deep sense of peace. For the 30,000–40,000 students and school graduates who became Fighters in the 1970s, the hardest step was deciding to join. But once that route had been chosen, everything acquired the clarity of absolutism. Choosing the hero’s path not only snuffed out the existential questions that torture young people, it put paid to the humdrum tribulations of daily life. The Movement expected you to be ready to die for it, but if you happened not to, it took good care of you. Financial worries became a thing of the past, for Fighters, while never paid, were fed, watered and issued with sandals and uniforms. Anything they owned, or were given, was handed in to central stores for general distribution. Commerce was to become such an alien concept that, on walking into bars in Sudan when on leave, Fighters would be nonplussed when they were asked to pay.
Sex was initially taboo–no Kagnew debauchery here–and men caught breaking the celibacy rule were sent to collect salt in the white heat of the Red Sea shoreline, while the handful of women Fighters who made the mistake of falling pregnant were ostracized. But as the campaign stretched on, the Movement accepted the principle of relationships so long as Fighters submitted them for prior approval to their commanders, who decided whether to issue the woman with the pill. Those bent on marriage were obliged to complete a long form showing they had thought through their choice of partner; the Head of Department retained the right to defer a marriage application. Even in this most intimate of areas, nothing was left to chance, and since the Zero School took care of any resulting offspring, Fighters were spared the domestic strains that usually go with parenthood.
Whether you were a Moslem or Christian, middle-class professional or illiterate peasant was deemed irrelevant, so there was no room for snobbery or prejudice. All were equal, and if a relative sent a packet of cigarettes, a bag of sugar or tea, it was automatically shared around. Prior claims of parents, fiancées and children gradually faded, as trench companions came to play the roles of friend and confidant, protector and brother. Life at the Front would be hard in terms of physical suffering, loss and privation. But, for the average Fighter, it would not be plagued by squabbles over promotion, worries about school fees, or the pressure to keep up with the Joneses. ‘In a way, we were not fully human,’ one former Fighter later ruminated, ‘because all the things you associate with being human–setting up a home, bringing up children, holding down a job–we did none of that.’
There was an androgynous sameness about the Fighters which reflected the Front’s rejection of sexual stereotypes. With no time or money to waste on the frivolity of hair-straightening, the women, like the men, let their hair grow into wild Afros. They dressed not to impress, for in the era of chastity any hint of flirtatiousness–an undone shirt button, for example–was viewed with disapproval. This egalitarian army, which prided itself on its collective leadership and absence of ranks, adopted the most utilitarian of wardrobes. Each Fighter was issued with a Kalashnikov and a belt with three pockets: one held a Chinese grenade, the second a handful of bullets and the third a folded netsela, a thin cotton cloth which served as blanket, shawl, towel, rope and carrier bag. The EPLF could not afford more. Once it lost its Arab backing, the Movement depended on the Eritrean diaspora, exiled professionals in Italy, Sweden, Canada and Washington, to cover its running costs. From shabby offices in Western capitals, EPLF members coordinated the fund-raising, one of the most efficient and sustained tithing operations ever set up by a rebel movement. This was insurrection on a shoestring, and the Front quite literally cut its cloth to meet its limited budget.
I used to puzzle over the detail of a famous photo taken during the Nakfa years, showing a group of young tegadelti striding towards a mountain summit, the EPLF’s green and red insignia billowing behind them. The image has become iconic, gracing the walls of Eritrean embassies, stamped on coins, reproduced on posters. In it, the Fighters’ shorts end at about the level of a pair of 1960s hot pants, exposing a generous expanse of rippling brown thigh. ‘Why are their shorts so short?’ queried a friend. ‘I’ve never seen any other African force with shorts that length.’ Even the British army, which complained of the impracticality of its uniform in Eritrea, wore shorts that fell to the knees. The truth, I discovered, was that the Fighters had made a virtue out of necessity. If shorts were cut high on the leg,
EPLF tailors could get that many more pairs out of a length of cloth. In the same spirit, a Fighter sent a pair of long trousers by his relatives was expected to sacrifice them to the Cause. ‘They’d cut off the legs and give you back a pair of shorts, then use the rest to make more,’ recalled a former Red Flower. ‘At first it made my heart bleed, to see the nice new trousers my mother had sent me on the backsides of other Fighters, people I didn’t even like. When I went home I’d hide indoors, just so that I could feel material on my legs without anyone making fun of me. But then it became a sort of competition, to see who could wear the shortest shorts.’ The skimpier the shorts, the braver the Fighter. Ethiopian troops, it was said, paled with fear when they saw the physiques of slain Eritreans, displayed in all their muscular glory. And so the tailors wielded their scissors, and hems inched upwards.
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