Soon, his reputation spread. Tilahun had long since been abandoned in favour of ‘The Man’. John was The Man who, if you were getting married, could be relied on to make the open-air banquet a success. He was The Man who could work wonders with a sack of lentils, jerry can of oil and some onions. He was The Man who could be trusted to make sure guests attending a conference on child poverty did not leave grumbling. Life in Nakfa and Orota was not without its frenetic social whirl. War or no war, the workshops and symposiums must go ahead, and it was obvious who could be trusted with the catering: The Man. ‘One time I slaughtered 76 goats and 9 cows. The biggest conference I ever catered for was the 25th anniversary of the Revolution, when we had 6,000 delegates,’ remembers John. ‘People came from all over and slept under the stars.’
He had learnt a few little tricks to tempt appetites. On a really good day, he’d be given a couple of bulls to slaughter and guests would dine on steaks basted in garlic and butter, roasted under the trees on large metal trays. But you can’t feed a multitude on steaks, so John became a master of the stew. Even that presented an occasional challenge. People, he had discovered, liked their stews dark in colour. But with wine an unattainable luxury and tomatoes in short supply, this sometimes presented a problem. ‘If the sauce was white, people would refuse to eat it. So we would slaughter a goat, drain its blood, mix it with salt to stop it coagulating, and use that as colouring. We’d say it was tomato salsa and then everybody would eat it.’
The limitations of this dour lifestyle must have been exasperating, but John never appears to have experienced second thoughts, not even when concerned relatives arranged a Swedish visa or set up a lucrative job in Hawaii. He had made his decision at the age of 25, and that was that. Not for him the self-interrogation of Kagnew’s Vietnam-dodgers, uneasily aware they had ducked their generation’s greatest challenge. ‘A promise is a promise. You cannot go back on it.’ He had quietly calculated the odds and worked out that he was unlikely to see independence. But he had no doubts liberation would come, for others if not for him. ‘Once you’ve done your training and you’ve been politicized, and you’ve studied Mao and the struggle of the masses, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, then you know that eventually, you must win. It may not happen in your own lifetime, but eventually, you will win.’ Sometimes, he allowed himself the occasional daydream. If–it seemed a very big if–he ever made it through, then he would open his own restaurant and hotel school, training young Fighters to be chefs and waiters, hotel receptionists and chambermaids.
He had expected to die, but his luck held. With the liberation of Asmara–a city he had never set foot in before entering it as part of a conquering force–he was given the job of running the canteens at the old Kagnew base. Then he demobilized and took over responsibility for four UN kitchens and the UN’s water bottling plant. A tiny business empire is being created, but John–who rises at 4.00 am each morning to ferry his workers from site to site–gloats not over his profits, but the contribution he is making to Eritrea’s new state. ‘I have 150 people working for me and each supports a family, each pays his taxes. That thought gives me a lot of satisfaction.’ The shelves of his office hold glossy cookery books written by Madhur Jaffrey and Robert Carrier. But pride of place still goes to a pair of well-thumbed hotel management guides, published by a 1970s Nairobi business school, rescued long ago from a garbage dump in the Sahel.
Peopled by such driven citizens, Nakfa represented Eritrea at its best. But as I spoke to ex-Fighters, I began to wonder if it had also contained the seeds of Eritrea at its worst.
What appears to the individual as admirable clarity of thought can seem to the outsider dangerous simplification, a vision stripped of the messy contradictions that mean a situation is rarely as straightforward as it first appears. Isolation allowed the Fighters to hone a steely resolve that enabled them to achieve the seemingly impossible. But if the hermit’s life shields you from temptation, it can also stunt your intellectual growth. Rejecting capitalism, with all its vices, came easily to those who had never been exposed to its virtues. ‘Had I known about all of this,’ exclaimed a high-ranking veteran of the Struggle, absorbing the bustle of a Western city on his first visit to London, ‘I would never have fought so long in the bush.’ Insulated from Africa’s contemporary reality, it was easy for the Eritreans to make the mistake of assuming they knew all the answers. The awareness of how poorly the colonialists and superpowers had behaved, the bitterness of seeing their natural ally opt for Ethiopia, the knowledge of the continent’s casual indifference: it all encouraged the belief that the Movement had nothing to learn from its critics, whether black or white. Like every rejected minority before it, the EPLF convinced itself its very solitude was proof of moral superiority. ‘We are certain’ was more than just the name of a punishingly steep mountainside, it was the Movement’s unstated leitmotif. A leitmotif that hardened like rock during the Nakfa years.
At what point does such purity of purpose cross the line into oppressive authoritarianism? Even those who today pine for a lost golden age acknowledge that individualism was not a quality valued by the EPLF. This was a military organization, after all, and true democracy, with its tolerance of mavericks and loudmouths, is not suited to waging war. At daily meetings, Fighters would publicly pick over each other’s revolutionary failings, ‘self-criticism’ was strongly encouraged. ‘There were spies in the Movement who would befriend you, listen to your ideas, pretend to sympathize with your complaints and then, during a meeting, denounce you as “petit-bourgeois” or accuse you of being a “regionalist”,’ remembers an ex-Fighter. ‘People who had taken degrees were made to apologize to the peasantry for their education and privileges.’ Such obligatory abnegation fitted in well with the Eritrean national character, the tendency, developed through decades of colonial occupation, to sit in impenetrable silence, accept authority–at least on the surface–and keep one’s thoughts to oneself. ‘A lot of people thought it was bullshit. The EPLF had been set up by “petit bourgeois” people, after all, most of the leaders had been students at Addis University. But we were taught that the whole world would soon become socialist, so it was up to you to adapt. You learnt to say the right things, keep a low profile and play the game. I went along with it, because I had joined to free my country, and this seemed a price worth paying. But there were some who couldn’t stand it, and they deliberately martyred themselves in battle.’
This was the dark side of all the dogged determination, but it was a darkness visiting Westerners were reluctant to recognize. ‘At the time one was just swept away by the hard work and efficiency and self-sacrifice of it all. But looking back, you do wonder if there wasn’t something rather disturbing about a movement that exercised that level of control,’ says Trish Silkin, who visited the front as an anthropologist and aid worker in the 1970s. Dissent, especially dissent that crystallized into direct challenges to Isaias’ burgeoning control, was ruthlessly smothered. Even today, ex-Fighters close down whenever the question arises of what happened to the ringleaders of these internal challenges, made to ‘disappear’ with typical Eritrean quietness.
Once, on the long trip back from Nakfa, I got to exchanging metaphors with two former Fighters. Our banter was prompted by what is popularly known as the Heart of Tigray, an infamous stretch of road between Keren and Asmara. The nausea-inducing road, as twisted and torturous–so the proverb goes–as the hearts of Eritrea’s treacherous neighbours in Ethiopian Tigray, winds its way through bulbous rock formations and the giant candelabra of euphorbia cactus. ‘So, if there was a road that symbolized the Eritrean heart, how would it be?’ I teased. ‘Absolutely straight,’ came the cheerful chorus. ‘What do you think?’ ‘I think it would be dark, hidden, and very mysterious.’
Yet perhaps Nakfa’s most dangerous legacy was not the EPLF’s indomitable self-belief, its profound distrust of outsiders or its iron control, but the impossibly high expectations raised in a generation of Eritreans.
Duri
ng their lessons in the trenches, EPLF ideologues conjured up a vision of Free Eritrea, a prosperous land in which farmers tilled fertile fields, fishermen trawled teeming waters and industrialists tapped long-neglected deposits of gold, potash–even, perhaps, oil. If Eritrea was barren and denuded, they taught their classes, it was only because its forests had been systematically stripped by first Italian developers and then the marauding Ethiopian army. Independent Eritrea would blossom anew. Saplings would be planted, rivers dammed, terraces built. Gazing across what resembled the surface of an asteroid, the Fighters dreamt, like the dying Falstaff, of lush pastures and green bowers, where knobbly trees of uncertain age cast their cool shade. It was a landscape, they came to believe, that had been stolen from them–just like everything else.
That glowing dream of paradise is still captured today in the most everyday of items, all the more poignant for their functional banality. Walk into any Eritrean roadside restaurant, where Christmas tinsel serves as year-round decoration, and you will find yourself sitting at a table decorated with grape clusters and shiny red apples, tumbling alpine torrents and dewy lawns. Perhaps these made-in-Taiwan wax tablecloths are simply the cheapest things on the market. But, like the glossy calendars on the walls, like the murals lovingly painted on the walls of Eritrea’s coffee bars–all green glades, quiet pools and rolling meadows–they express Eritrea’s vision of Heaven, its Elysian Fields.
I only registered the Utopian quality of that vision one day in a library in Rome. Leafing through some old Italian encyclopedias, I came across photographs of late 19th-century Eritrea, taken before the saw mills and napalm had done their worst. The black-and-white photographs certainly showed thicker tree cover than I was used to seeing. But this was nothing like the green haven lovingly described by my Eritrean friends. Even before the colonial depredations, before the Ethiopian army had got to work, much of the country, it was clear, had already been a dry scrubland of punishing harshness. The realization came as a shock to me. How much more of a shock would it prove for the thousands of Fighters who risked their lives fighting for a land of lost content, a country that had, it seemed, existed largely in their imaginations?
CHAPTER 15
Arms and the Man
‘Ethiopia will be destroyed by the very thing that seems her strength and glory: arms.’
Ferdinando Martini
In Eritrea, history always comes tightly compressed, physical evidence of just how many turbulent, world-shaking events have been squeezed into a few narrow centuries. To the west of Asmara, the gates of the 19th-century Italian cemetery which holds the bones of Martini’s settlers virtually rub shoulders with the walls of Kagnew Station. And just behind Kagnew stretches a large patch of wasteland which stands as testimony to the last, most lavishly destructive, phase of superpower involvement in the Horn of Africa.
Locals call these abandoned acres ‘Tank Graveyard’ and at first glance this looks like the scene of some apocalyptic clash, a giant confrontation into which every weapon known to 20th-century military technology was successively hurled. Upturned green jeeps lie on their backs, displaying their axles to the skies as shamelessly as a drunk old woman exposing her knickers. Scores of armoured personnel carriers crouch like brown crabs in the weeds, white butterflies fluttering through their blank view holes. Tanks and cranes, amphibious vehicles and anti-aircraft guns, petrol tankers and mortar launchers–even the odd fighter plane–all lie tumbled in a mess of rusting metal. But, for the most part, the Tank Graveyard holds the remains of hundreds of heavy duty trucks, the basic working tool of any army. Crumpled by explosions, dented by impacts, they have been stacked like airline dinners, five-deep to save space. The highlands wind thrums through the towers built from their twisted chassis, while brown kites shrill their cool, haunting lament from an impossibly blue sky.
The Tank Graveyard is not, as one guidebook to Eritrea claims, a spillover from Kagnew Station. Most of the machinery here is of Soviet make, not American. As the war in Eritrea escalated, and the number of disabled trucks, tanks and personnel carriers littering the province rose, the Derg dragged the damaged hardware donated by its Soviet friends here for dumping. At best, the carcasses could be tinkered with and sent back into battle, although, to be honest, Ethiopian technicians never proved particularly adept at repairs. At the very least, depositing them here would keep them out of the hands of the guerrillas, who were quick to teach themselves the operating principles of captured machinery and then turn it on its former owners. When the Struggle ended, the EPLF completed what its enemy had begun, removing the debris that was cluttering Eritrea’s scarce agricultural land.
It is easy to miss when confronted with so many thousands of metal corpses, but the Tank Graveyard has been quietly shrinking as the years go by. Unable to afford the price being asked on the international arms market for new tanks, Eritrea’s armed forces have been resurrecting the classics, tapping the pile for old T54s, T55s and T62s. Underneath the brown layer of rust, the thick metal carapaces hold true. The simple Soviet mechanical systems have weathered the passage of time with an ease no state-of-the-art weapons system could match. In three weeks, the 50-year-old Soviet models can be refitted, ready once again to fend off the latest threat from Ethiopia. ‘New clothes are obviously better than old clothes. But if you don’t buy new, you use the old. This is not just scrap, it’s our stock,’ says Colonel Woldu Ghebreyesus, the former EPLF Fighter who now heads the army’s tank department. He’s an unabashed aficionado. ‘I’ve been using these captured tanks for the last 30 years and I’ve come to really appreciate Soviet technology. I have no criticisms at all.’1
The fresh uses to which the contents of Tank Graveyard are still being put underline the bleak message of this stretch of wasteland. Here sits a monument to military oversupply, testimony to excess. Generous to a fault when it came to military hardware, the Soviet Union was to end up sending enough weaponry to the Horn of Africa for not one, not two, but five separate conflicts: Somalia’s war on Ethiopia, Ethiopia’s war on Somalia, the Derg’s battle against the Eritrean rebels, the Eritreans’ campaign–using stolen machinery–against the Derg and, finally, most recently, independent Eritrea’s two-year border war with Ethiopia. ‘Of course, now it is possible to say it was too much,’ reluctantly acknowledges Sergei Sinitsyn, who served at the Soviet embassy in Addis in the 1950s and 1970s. ‘But in time of war you are swept away by immediate needs and requests. In any case,’ he adds, almost as an afterthought, ‘if it had not been us supplying, it would have been the Americans.’2
Most countries in Africa have been traumatized by the dance of the Cold War, that brutally simplistic era in which what mattered, for any African nation hoping to be picked as partner by a superpower, was never good government, financial transparency or enlightened agricultural reform, but whether the leadership concerned chose to mouth the platitudes of Communist orthodoxy or free-market capitalism–each, in its own way, equally out of step with African reality. What made the Horn unique, and left it uniquely damaged, was that midway through the Cold War tango, the two dancing couples–Somalia and the Soviet Union in one corner, Ethiopia and the United States in the other–separated, strode past each other on the ballroom floor, and swapped partners. The fact that such a swap could take place at all exposed the moral vacuity of the pairings. But it also had terrible implications for the nations concerned, where the military stakes were ratcheted to ever giddier heights. During the years in which Washington funded Haile Selassie’s military expansion programme, the Soviets dispatched up to $1 billion3 in weapons and military know-how to Somalia’s President Siad Barre, desperate to keep pace with his neighbour. When Moscow suddenly became Ethiopia’s new best friend in the late 1970s, its military advisers, ejected by the furious Siad Barre, found themselves facing black Africa’s fourth most heavily-armed state–the state they themselves had equipped. There could only be one answer: yet more arms deliveries, aimed at neutralizing the impact of Moscow’s previous largesse
. The Soviet Union almost fell over itself in its determination to make up for its strategic gaffe. For three months between 1977 and 1978, 225 Soviet transport planes–15 per cent of Moscow’s air force–ferried 60,000 tonnes of hardware to Ethiopia for the war over the Ogaden, one aircraft landing every 20 minutes.4 The Eritrean front, former EPLF commanders estimate, was destined to receive 800–1,000 tanks, 2–3,000 trucks and an untold number of machine guns, heavy artillery, mortars and the multiple rocket launchers known as ‘Stalin’s organs’. By the end of its 14-year relationship with the Derg, Moscow had poured nearly $9 billion in military hardware into Ethiopia, working out, at the roughest of estimates, at over $5,400 in weaponry for every Ethiopian man, woman and child.5 For a developing African nation experiencing one superpower-funded arms race might be regarded as bad enough. Two really verged on the excessive.
Today, many former Soviet policymakers have the grace to feel embarrassed about this deadly double crescendo. ‘It was our usual trouble,’ ruminates Vladimir Shubin, deputy director of the dilapidated Institute for African Studies in Moscow. ‘Whether it is building a hospital or a conference hall, we always tend to do things big, too big.’6 But like their American counterparts, they still view the Cold War era from what, to the outsider, seems a bizarrely skewed angle. Superpower manipulation? What superpower manipulation? To hear this disingenuous generation of Moscow insiders tell it, the behemoth that saturated the Horn in weaponry was never more than a submissive junior partner in its African relationships, responding to, while never dictating, moves made by unreliable domestic leaders. It was all Siad Barre’s fault. He had taken advantage of Soviet naivety, a naivety so deep the Soviets convinced themselves briefly after the Derg veered left that a Marxist Somalia, Marxist Ethiopia and Marxist South Yemen might bury their differences to form a federation of like-minded African states. ‘The Somalis fooled us,’ says Sinitsyn. ‘Siad Barre had promised our ambassador, just a few days before he invaded the Ogaden, that no Somali soldier would ever cross the border. We were interested in both countries, Ethiopia and Somalia. Then the Somalis invaded, and we found ourselves squeezed between two friends. When we decided to come to Ethiopia’s support, it was on moral grounds. Ethiopia had been the victim of an act of sheer aggression by a country we supported. We simply had to act.’
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