The arms race with the US was placing a crippling, unsustainable burden on the Soviet economy. But as long as Moscow continued to fund proxy wars in the Middle East, Africa and south-west Asia, as long as President Ronald Reagan’s label of ‘the Evil Empire’ held resonance in a frightened West, there could be little hope of mutual disarmament. The veteran Gromyko was replaced by Eduard Shevardnadze, one of Gorbachev’s most radical supporters, and around the new foreign minister clustered a generation of iconoclasts who believed détente, rather than confrontation, was the only answer. Breaking with the ‘geometer’s approach to strategy’, men like Adamishin decided that Africa was peripheral to Moscow’s concerns. Looking at Ethiopia with fresh, sceptical eyes, they rejected the rigid ideological interpretations of old. ‘This was a fight between ethnically-based cliques which had been transformed by the Soviet Union, on the one side, and America, on the other, into a historic struggle between old capitalism and new socialism. It never really was that and it wasn’t in Angola, Mozambique or Afghanistan either,’ says Adamishin.
Diplomatic feelers were put out to the Somali regime and Mengistu was strongly advised to improve relations with both his neighbours and the Eritrean rebels. In Moscow, anyone interested in Africa would have noticed a telling change in media coverage of the continent. ‘The idea that Africa was an intolerable burden on the Soviet Union spread. I was amazed at how far some of our publications went,’ says Sinitsyn, who did not share the new, heretical way of thinking. ‘There was nothing spontaneous about these articles. This was political manipulation. The public was being prepared for our withdrawal.’ One Soviet official, writing in Pravda in July 1987, denounced the export of world revolution as an outdated concept. Another floated the idea of a ‘Frank Sinatra’ policy in Eastern Europe, letting the countries Moscow had once kept on the shortest of leashes do it ‘their way’.
The reformists were giving up on Ethiopia. But they were not free to dictate strategy as they pleased. Gorbachev’s foreign policy was always a tricky balancing act, in which he struggled to effect radical change while placating uneasy hardliners in the military apparatus and Politburo. Ethiopia, in his view, was hardly worth a showdown with the traditionalists, when there were so many more crucial ideological battles to be staged in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. ‘Gorbachev and Shevardnadze could not permit themselves to be accused of betrayal on every front: Afghanistan, Angola, Cuba and now Ethiopia as well,’ says Adamishin. ‘They did not want to open another front in the battle against orthodoxy.’
And so Soviet policy came to bear an uncanny resemblance to US policy in the first years of the Derg: its heart was no longer in it, but the military supply machine had acquired its own momentum. Easy to start, it seemed impossible to stop. Even when the time lag involved in closing off previously-agreed contracts is taken into account, what Soviet politicians said in public and what the military delivered often appeared in schizophrenic contradiction. In 1987, a leading member of the Central Committee announced that Moscow was resolutely opposed to ‘the transformation of Africa into an arena of confrontation’ and pledged his country’s commitment to the political settlement of conflicts.14 That same year, the Derg signed a new $2 billion arms supply agreement with the Soviet Union. Between 1987 and 1991, as Gorbachev issued ever louder warnings of aid cut-offs and Soviet newspapers denounced parasitic African states, Moscow actually sent Ethiopia $2.9 billion in weaponry.15
Seemingly oblivious to the tug-of-war over policy taking place above Red Square, Mengistu announced that perestroika and glasnost were irrelevant to Ethiopia and called for more weapons. His warehouses were emptying, his stocks were low, he complained, how could he fight when he was only receiving bullets and caterpillar treads, not the heavy armament he needed? Like a junkie begging his dealer for one last fix, he pleaded with Moscow: if Soviet officials would only meet this one last request, provide this final arms consignment, it would tip the balance in the war. ‘He kept telling us that if we helped him he could achieve this military victory,’ remembers Adamishin, with real bitterness. ‘I remember how he told me, with tears in his eyes: “We may have to sell our last shirt, but we will pay you back. We Ethiopians are a proud people, we settle our debts.” Looking back, I almost feel I hate him. Because I believed that what mattered to him was what was best for the country. While really all that mattered to him was his own survival.’
For years, Moscow had thrown hardware at the Eritrean problem. With its help, Mengistu had expanded the regular army from 45,000 to 250,000, militiamen adding another 200,000 to the bloated total. Yet this enormous, well-equipped force of nearly 500,000 could not bring the Eritreans to heel. It baffled the Soviet generals in Moscow, comparing their delivery invoices to the disappointing reports from the field. It made no sense. ‘There was this abscess in the north that would not heal,’ remembers General Valentin Ivanovich Varennikov, deputy defence minister under Gorbachev. ‘We sent weapons and equipment, we sent officers and trained specialists. Yet it never got any better. It seemed intractable.’16
What the Kremlin failed to grasp was that there was an element of theatrical posturing to Mengistu’s demands. By constantly lamenting a shortage of hardware–in jaw-dropping defiance of the evidence on the ground–the Ethiopian leader was in part addressing his public, providing a convenient scapegoat for the long-running failure to end the Eritrean crisis. But the obsessive harping on a theme also betrayed a dangerously stunted imagination. What Mengistu could not understand, would not understand, was that the reasons for the Derg’s military discomfiture had nothing to do with a lack of weaponry, and everything to do with loss of morale, fifth column activity and his own chronic mismanagement. ‘No nation ever benefited from a long war,’ the 19th-century Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz once wrote. The same warning applies to an army. Unable to pull off a decisive victory, unable to make peace, Ethiopia’s army was rotting from the inside. A battle in north-west Eritrea was about to prove, to anyone who cared to learn the lesson, that the weapons that matter most never come off a factory conveyor belt. They are to be found inside the convoluted whorls of the human brain: a sense of destiny, a momentary forgetfulness of individual needs, the belief a cause is worth dying for.
CHAPTER 16
‘Where are our socks?’
‘In war, three-quarters turns on questions of personal character and relations; the actual balance of forces counts for only the remaining quarter.’
Napoleon
If you take a map of Eritrea and draw a line from Nakfa to the town of Afabet, the pencil traces the path of the Hidai river, which meanders down a broad valley separating the high plateau from the lowland flats. In peacetime, the dry river bed serves as a highway for turbaned nomads who thwack their moaning troupes of camels along in languid search of water. Vehicles jiggle their teeth-juddering way across the powdery white boulders deposited by rushing torrents, or churn their wheels in hidden sand pits, flailing like waders who have lost their footing. Startled flocks of goats sheer away from spinning front wheels, their white flanks catching the sun. The little boys tending them while away the hours by knocking tiny orange berries from the trees, which they dangle in plastic bags in front of passing cars. Buy these offerings and you will find that the wrinkled fruits do, just, have a discernible flavour of toffee, but not a drop of juice. There is an occasional searing flash of hot colour–the jewel-green flutter of a pair of lovebirds, perhaps, or the yellow chiffon wrap flapping around a Tigre woman who, when she turns to stare at the noise of an engine, reveals a large, intricately-carved gold crescent piercing one nostril. But, for the most part, this is a landscape painted in various shades of dun, a world whose colours have been bleached away by the punishing light.
At the northern end of the valley, the old Italian-built road executes a series of switchbacks and hairpin bends, taking on the challenge of the Roras, cutting through concentric rings of Ethiopian and Eritrean trenches to surface on Nakfa’s bomb-blasted plateau. T
he southern end of the Hidai valley is pinched off by a narrow, V-shaped pass, a natural bottleneck. If you stop your car here to stretch your legs and peel the sweaty T-shirt from your back, you will notice, below you, a brown ribbon threading its intermittent way along the valley floor. Look closer and you will see that the ribbon is made up of individual shapes and that those shapes are, in fact, the rusting skeletons of dozens of trucks, tanks and armoured personnel carriers. Carapaces submerged in a sea of sand, guns askew, they bristle like angry cockroaches.
It was here, at the pass called Ad Shirum, that the outcome of Eritrea’s 30-year war of liberation was decided in March 1988. This was not to be the last battle–that would have to wait another three years–nor was it the biggest. But the battle of Afabet was the moment when the war’s ending became clear and tangible to both sides, a sudden understanding as unquantifiable as it was undeniable.
The plan was collectively agreed by the EPLF leadership, with Mesfin Hagos, one of Isaias’ most trusted military commanders, given responsibility for its successful execution. The EPLF had been pondering the best time to break the stranglehold established by Ethiopia’s Second Revolutionary Army. For 10 years, the Nadew Front, strongest of the four Ethiopian commands stationed in Eritrea, had attempted to capture Nakfa. From Kamchiwa, a base at the foot of the Roras, an Ethiopian tank brigade rained its fire up across the trenches and into Nakfa itself, keeping the guerrillas penned inside their mountain stronghold.
Rebel forces at that time numbered only slightly more than half the 15,000–20,000 Ethiopian troops stationed in the area, but the figures did not tell the full story. After a two-year break in major hostilities, a pause the EPLF had used to learn how to operate a haul of captured heavy guns, the guerrilla movement was in prime condition, chafing for action. Now, the EPLF was convinced, would be a propitious time to attempt something it usually carefully avoided: a full-frontal attack against superior forces. Mesfin was convinced the operation, set to begin on March 17, could alter the balance of the war. But he hedged his bets, setting himself a strict 48-hour deadline for the push. ‘We should be at Afabet on the morning of the 19th,’ Mesfin told a reporter who had been assigned to cover the campaign by the EPLF’s magazine.1 ‘If we are not, then we will abandon the whole operation and make a try another time.’
With their divisions positioned in readiness, EPLF commanders gathered their Fighters together and told them of the impending attack. The reaction was one of boisterous jubilation, almost relief. ‘It was a great moment,’ says Solomon Berhe. Today editor-in-chief of Eritrea’s Tigrinya-language newspaper, he was a 24-year-old tank commander at the time. ‘We had rested for two years, our firing power was high and we had new artillery. We were missing a war.’2 If Mesfin’s plans proved successful, the claustrophobic existence of trench duty and furtive night-time sorties would be over, the door to the rat’s trap sprung. ‘People were firing into the sky, women ululated and everyone was feeling very cheerful.’ The cheering should have set warning bells ringing on the Ethiopian side. But the EPLF had arranged one of its sports contests in Nakfa the week before. Accustomed to the sight of EPLF units coming and going, and the sound of applause from enemy trenches, the Ethiopians suspected nothing.
The attack began at 5.00 am and was staged simultaneously on three fronts. While its infantry leapt over the parapets, fighting hand-to-hand in the narrow trenches for control of the steep slopes below Nakfa, the EPLF sent its captured tanks and armoured personnel carriers roaring in from the plains to the east in a flanking manoeuvre aimed at putting maximum pressure on the Ethiopian tank brigade at Kamchiwa. For 16 hours, the surprised Ethiopians resisted with extraordinary tenacity. Worried by the number of tegadelti the EPLF was losing, a twitchy high command radioed Mesfin to tell him to pull back. Normally the rebels used code to avoid eavesdropping but now, when seconds counted, such stratagems were abandoned. ‘I’m in the midst of it, and I can tell you: there’s no need to worry,’ Mesfin reassured his colleagues. The third time he was told to order a withdrawal, he switched the radio off. Success, he sensed, was within his grasp. As the EPLF infantry reached the valley floor, where the Fighters were almost impossible to pick out amongst the boulders and trees, the position at Kamchiwa became untenable. Ethiopian commanders made a strategic decision to pull back to the garrison at Afabet. Reinforcements and fresh supplies were waiting there and on those open plains, the big guns could be put to effective use. If the brigade could only make it through the pass at Ad Shirum, all would be well, they calculated. They had just taken the worst decision of their military careers.
A convoy of 70 Ethiopian tanks, armoured personnel carriers and trucks loaded with munitions, equipment and men assembled at Kamchiwa. Soon it was trundling south along the sandy river bed, with the EPLF’s mechanized division in hot pursuit on one flank and EPLF infantry running alongside on the other. The two armies raced each other to Ad Shirum and there, as the Ethiopian drivers noisily revved their engines for the steep final climb that would take them over the pass, an EPLF tank opened fire, hitting a lorry at the head of the convoy. Another volley, and this time an Ethiopian tank went up in orange flames.3 And now the contours of the landscape played wonderfully into EPLF hands. For in that natural bottleneck, with the peaks crowding in on three sides, there was no room for manoeuvre, no space for the tanks and trucks behind to circumnavigate the destroyed vehicles. Cursing Ethiopian drivers hit the brakes, twitchy officers shouted warnings down the line to avert a pile-up. The convoy was stuck, a sitting duck. The tegadelti licked lips at the quantity of Soviet hardware about to fall into their hands.
It was at this point that what seems, to the outsider at least, the most remarkable event of the Afabet campaign occurred. As news reached headquarters in Asmara that the EPLF was on the verge of claiming a delectable prize–a 70-vehicle convoy–Ethiopian army commanders ordered their jets to take off and head for Ad Shirum. Did the panicking Ethiopians in the convoy look up when they heard the scream of MiGs overhead and think, ‘Thank God, we’re going to make it after all’? Or did they know enough about their own army, about national honour, the horror of humiliation and their superiors’ capacity for hard decisions to sense what was coming? One can’t help suspecting that the first the average footsoldier knew of the terrible decision taken at the top was when a well-aimed missile slammed into the column in which they sat.
Ethiopia’s bombardment of its own men went on for two solid hours. ‘They bombed continuously,’ remembers Solomon. ‘There were soldiers milling around the tanks and trucks but the pilots didn’t care. The flames were rising high and in the trucks the ammunition and missiles kept exploding. Some Ethiopians ran out and were captured by our fighters. But many Ethiopian soldiers burned to death inside. They knew they were surrounded and decided it was better to burn. It was an inferno, a Biblical scene.’
As the smell of roasting human flesh, scorched rubber and melting paint wafted across the valley, a vast ball of grey and black smoke churned and tumbled over the column of frazzled metal, blanking out the sun like an eclipse. In the sudden darkness, Solomon and his fellow Fighters could do little more than gape, aware that the enemy, with this act of defiant self-destruction, had robbed them of a military climax. ‘It was a strange feeling. We’d developed a lot of respect for the brigade in the 16 hours it had defended itself, a lot of admiration. We had followed them along the river bed and now this powerful brigade had been destroyed but not through our doing, they were destroyed by their own. For a soldier, it was a very strange end.’ Western reporters shown around the site by the EPLF the following day photographed curious patches of black cinders on the ground, some with boots still attached. The Ethiopian soldiers had literally been burnt to a crisp.
It was an ending that highlighted some of the fundamental differences between the two forces. Small, reliant on volunteer enthusiasm, required to ration both its supplies and casualties, the EPLF was incapable of applying such cold-blooded logic. ‘The EPLF would have o
rdered the men in the convoy to do their best to escape,’ says Solomon. ‘It would never have acted as the Ethiopians did. I met Ethiopian prisoners-of-war afterwards and they told me, “Addis betrayed us.”’ Ethiopia’s top commanders, in contrast, knew they had at their disposal a vast resource of conscripts, whose support for the conflict was considered irrelevant. For these men, the US military motto of ‘Leave No Man Behind’ would have seemed self-indulgent nonsense, ‘Leave No Working Tank Behind’ captured their priorities rather better. ‘When you lose an area you destroy your equipment–it’s a principle of war,’ was the matter-of-fact explanation a retired Ethiopian general gave me. ‘If you cannot separate your men from their equipment, then you bomb them both together.’
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