I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  If Ethiopia’s grand gesture had taken the edge off the Eritreans’ victory, the EPLF had won the battle. Nadew’s remaining commanders tried to stop the retreat, shooting mutinous soldiers on the spot, but to no avail. This was a rout, and the EPLF needed to move its mechanized division into Afabet before the Ethiopians could regroup. At Ad Shirum the charred convoy firmly blocked the way. ‘Our commanders were saying, “Try to push the burning trucks to one side,”’ remembers Solomon. ‘We had to tell them, “We wouldn’t be able to do it in one month, let alone in one night.”’ Instead, the tanks went the long way round. Racing back up the valley to Kamchiwa, they traced a loop east along the Red Sea sands, around the mountain range and inland once again. After 12 hours of continuous driving, Solomon and his colleagues rolled into Afabet on the morning of March 19th. The garrison had collapsed. On the plains, Ethiopian soldiers were surrendering in their hundreds, or quietly disappearing into the bushes to blow out their brains. ‘We entered easily, with only a little small arms fire. The people came out cheering from their houses, the women were wailing. They gave us water and kissed us.’

  Mesfin Hagos had stuck with almost mathematical precision to his deadline for smashing one of Ethiopia’s most powerful garrisons. And just as he had predicted, the battle marked a tipping point. Two Ethiopian division commanders had been killed, two-thirds of the army’s forces slaughtered and–notwithstanding the convoy’s destruction–a vast amount of heavy weaponry seized, equipment that would later enable the EPLF to stage on Massawa’s outskirts the biggest tank battle seen in Africa since the Second World War. The road to Eritrea’s southern towns had been opened and within a week the Ethiopian army, surrendering one key garrison after another, would be pushed out of north-western Eritrea. ‘We moved from defending to continuous attacking. From that moment on, the enemy never recaptured anything of any significance,’ says Solomon.

  The death knell for the Derg regime had sounded and, for once, the outside world heard it clanging. Basil Davidson, the veteran Africa historian, witnessed the battle as a guest of the EPLF. Carried away, he hailed it as the most significant victory by a liberation movement since the Viet Minh humiliated the French at Dien Bien Phu. For years, EPLF Fighters had scoured the airwaves, waiting in vain to hear the simple fact of their existence acknowledged. ‘I can still remember the day we heard the battle of Afabet reported on the BBC,’ a former EPLF woman doctor told me. ‘That was it. I switched off my radio and never listened again.’ Accustomed to blank faces and closed doors on their trips to the West, EPLF delegations suddenly found venues being made available for press conferences, journalists returning their calls. From one day to the next, everything had changed. ‘After Afabet, the Ethiopians realized the Eritreans were capable of extraordinary things,’ says Robel Mockonen, a young Fighter who took part in the Afabet campaign. ‘And the Eritreans also realized they were capable of extraordinary things. From then on, it seemed, we could not lose.’

  Like an earthquake under the sea, Afabet’s shudder reverberated across continents, rumbling all the way to the Kremlin. The spasm of alarm it triggered in the Soviet Union was prompted by more than mere concern for its Ethiopian ally. While the battle was still raging, word reached Moscow that a dozen Soviet military advisers had been encircled by the EPLF in the mountains. They had hidden in a cave along with a clutch of Ethiopian soldiers, but faced imminent capture.

  It was a scenario the Kremlin had long dreaded. During all the years of cooperation, the average Soviet citizen had been kept blissfully unaware of his government’s muscular involvement in Ethiopia’s war machine. Apart from an occasional mention of ‘anti-revolutionary groups’ fighting the ‘progressive government’ in Addis, the Soviet state media, attention focused on Afghanistan, barely covered the Eritrean conflict. While Moscow acknowledged it had experts stationed inside the Ethiopian army, it always defined them as ‘advisers’, indicating they kept well away from the frontline. If Soviet ‘advisers’ were taken prisoner by the EPLF, their hands-on role would become impossible to deny. When the battle of Afabet began, Moscow had ordered all its advisers to pull back, in the hope of preventing precisely such an outcome. But the order was issued late and had, in any case, been ignored by at least one foolhardy Soviet officer, itching to play the hero.

  Aghast, Moscow scrambled a team of KGB special forces, an elite unit of parachutists, marksmen and scuba-divers trained in hostage-recovery, assassination and the capture of enemy facilities. The unit flew to Addis, then on to Asmara, where the Soviet version of the SAS piled into two Aeroflot civilian helicopters. The choppers set off for the Roras, with two Ethiopian military helicopters flying escort. ‘Those disappeared as soon as they were shot at from the ground,’ Yevgeny Sokurov, a major in the KGB unit, remembers with a sardonic laugh. Setting down near the cave, the Soviet parachutists began loading up the wounded, many so dehydrated they could no longer walk. The evacuation turned into a frenzied, fear-fuelled scramble as the EPLF, realizing what was afoot, opened fire. ‘The helicopter was overloaded and at that altitude, in the rarefied air, it was having problems taking off. The Ethiopian soldiers were in a panic, running towards us, desperate not to be left behind. We had to shoot at their legs to prevent them boarding.’4

  It was only when the overweight helicopters flopped into Keren that the Soviet crack team learnt the truth. While they had succeeded in airlifting the errant dozen, elsewhere in the war zone three other Soviet advisers had fallen into EPLF hands. They would spend the next few years as guests of the EPLF, and Sokurov would spend much of that time trying, without success, to track them down.5 ‘It was an embarrassment for Moscow, to say the least,’ he acknowledges.

  These days, Sokurov, a chain-smoking, ferret-slim, tattooed 52-year-old, works in the Russian film industry as a stunt director. As lean and toned as on the day he flew to Afabet, he drives to film sets in the silver birch woods outside Moscow in a purring black BMW, evidence of how well life in the private sector has treated him. The only member of his unit to break out of the security business, his finely-honed skills are now applied to coordinating battle scenes and staging explosions, talking actors through interrogation scenes and plotting the choreography of hand-to-hand combat. Being his own boss has freed his tongue–‘I answer to no one, so I can say what I like’–and there seems no end to the hair-raising tales he could tell. For, in his prime, Sokurov served in Hungary, Angola and Mozambique and took part in the bloody storming of the presidential palace in Afghanistan, one of Moscow’s most infamous foreign interventions. Looking back on his larger-than-life adventures, he sometimes has the surreal feeling they happened to someone else, a simple man of action who trusted his superiors to do the right thing and believed the larger questions were not for the likes of him. ‘I’m a product of my time and my country. I come from a military dynasty. I was a military cadet at the age of 10 and I always knew who I would become, I always knew I must serve the state. The important thing was to do my job well.’ The pride in professionalism remains, but a yellow miasma of moral doubt now hangs over the question of the service to which his unusual talents were put. ‘Helping Mengistu, that arrogant monkey, was pointless–I’m certain of that,’ he says, with a quiet passion. ‘In Moscow there was a pathological desire to support these thieving, savage, African dictatorships. It was a waste of time.’

  For Sokurov, the helicopter escapade marked the beginning of a three-year stint in Ethiopia, a time commemorated by the gold Ethiopian cross that dangles around his neck. Ordered to stay on, he was given the task of training a group of commandos in the hills outside Asmara, a secret unit designed to operate behind EPLF lines. ‘They were trained to a very high level. They could cover 70 km in mountainous terrain in 24 hours, stage an operation and return without anyone spotting them,’ he boasts. ‘They moved just like ghosts.’ It was while he was carrying out these duties that he began to grasp why Ethiopia’s superior numbers and Moscow’s endless supplies had counted for so little at the battle of
Afabet and would count for even less in future. ‘When I was sent to Afabet, I didn’t think the war was a lost cause. But I soon did.’

  One of the reasons why Mengistu needed such elite units, it became clear, was because morale in Ethiopia’s regular forces was disastrously low, ground down by the conflict’s sheer longevity. ‘The troops were tired. They didn’t see any prospects for peace. They had spent 14 years in the trenches being promised the war would soon be over. Everyone was fed up with the arrogance and stupidity of the Ethiopian commanders, who took on the worst mannerisms of the American sergeants who had gone out to Ethiopia in the 1960s. They walked very slowly, surrounded themselves with bodyguards, treated all army equipment–whether it was a store of petrol or a television set–as their personal property, and didn’t have to think at all. From a military standpoint, they were absolutely gormless.’

  Another Soviet adviser who registered the morose, mutinous mood in the ranks was Sergei Berets. Now a journalist with the BBC in Moscow, Berets spent two years in the early 1980s working as an army translator near Afabet. ‘On the anniversary of the October Revolution, the troops were gathered together and the Russian political officer delivered a long speech about Lenin, Communism, the liberation of the working people and the prospects of world revolution. I translated his words into English and an Ethiopian officer then translated them into Amharic. These speeches could go on for hours. At the end he asked: “Any questions?” and several soldiers shot their hands up. They spoke very passionately for 10 minutes. All I could make out was the word calze–Italian for “socks”. They wanted to know when they would be getting a new delivery.’6

  Many soldiers had been press-ganged into service, rounded up in market places during the forced relocations at the heart of Mengistu’s agricultural programme. Some were no more than teenagers, barely tall enough to carry a rifle. Depressed by open-ended stints in the foxholes of the Sahel, the troops had asked repeatedly for a rotation system to be introduced, but the request had gone ignored. The EPLF used loudspeakers to bombard them with propaganda, and EPLF leaflets circulated freely in the ranks, drumming in a numbing message of looming defeat. While the Ethiopians bombed EPLF prisoner-of-war camps, it was common knowledge that the rebels, who took the view that the Ethiopian footsoldier was as much a victim of a totalitarian regime as any Eritrean, treated their captives with humanity. The effect was insidious. Despite regular executions and jailings, army headquarters could not halt a steady flow of Ethiopian soldiers to the rebel side. Remembering their behaviour in the heat of battle, Sokurov drips sarcasm. ‘Ethiopian tank crews had a peculiarity. If their tanks were shot at, even if it was only small arms fire, they would get out of the tanks and run for it, although they would have been safer staying put. The troops’ favourite command was “disperse”, which meant “run in all directions and meet up in Addis”. Then they would be gathered up and sent back to the front. As for the pilots, they were too scared to do any targeting and would just drop their bombs any old how. I was not impressed.’

  The conflict in Eritrea had lasted so long, the smallest of structural weaknesses had widened to form crippling handicaps. Under Haile Selassie, the military chain of command had been a clear, top-to-bottom affair. In contrast, the structure the Derg copied off the Soviet Red Army was multi-layered and confused. Each military commander was shadowed by a political cadre and a security officer, who sent their findings, recommendations and unflattering opinions of fellow officers separately back to headquarters. It was a recipe for friction between headquarters and commanders, commanders and cadres, officers and rank and file, with suspicions running so deep that at times effective decision-making seemed impossible.

  A retired Ethiopian general I interviewed in Addis, who did not want to be identified, paints a picture of a force on the verge of implosion. ‘The higher echelons were fighting the cadres. In principle, we military commanders made the decisions. In practice, the political and security officers had the government’s ear. Their reports often did not reflect the reality on the ground, but were given much more importance in Addis than what we said.’ If Sokurov has little respect for men like him, the dislike was entirely mutual–in the general’s view the presence of Russian advisers only made a disastrous situation even worse. ‘The Russian advisers were nothing but troublemakers. They would give instructions without knowing the area, forgetting that perhaps there was no water there, or no road the tanks could use.’

  Both the general and Soviet adviser agree, however, on the impact of another morale-sapping phenomenon: the ‘honey pot’ problem. Any force left in the field long enough will take girlfriends and mistresses, forming complex local bonds. In Eritrea, the beautiful bar girls and waitresses who became intimate with Ethiopian commanders usually worked for the EPLF, passing on careless gossip and boastful pillow talk. ‘The Eritreans were very good at using their women,’ remembers the general. ‘There was a huge amount of infiltration. The infiltrators kept telling the Ethiopian soldiers: “This is not your land, your place, your country”, and the soldiers listened.’

  Mengistu did not seem to recognize the damage the internecine wrangling and leakage was doing. Instead, in the run-up to Afabet, he made a series of false moves that virtually handed the rebels victory.

  The December before the battle, the EPLF launched a canny strike on Nadew’s 22nd Division, where relations between the military commander and his political cadre were so bad that soldiers loyal to the one were refusing to obey orders given by the other. The attack left nearly 500 Ethiopians dead and up to $3.3m of military equipment either destroyed or in rebel hands. Appalled by what he saw as an entirely unnecessary reverse, a raging Mengistu flew to the battlefront to hear the explanations of the Nadew Front’s commander, General Tariku Ayne, a popular officer with a reputation for speaking his mind. Tariku was clearly a little too frank: he was summoned to Asmara and executed a day later.

  If the execution of one of the army’s most respected generals was intended to spur his men into action, Mengistu had blundered disastrously, as the delighted EPLF–almost as shocked as Nadew’s soldiers–immediately understood. ‘The Derg has cut off its right hand with its left,’ rejoiced rebel radio. The bitching inside Ethiopian forces continued. Tariku’s replacement struggled to establish his authority over the division’s commanders. The heads of the 14th and 19th divisions were so busy arguing that when headquarters warned them the rebels had been seen moving weapons around by camel and ordered them to close off a 5-km gap between their forces, they ignored the command. Lost in their hatred for one another, Ethiopia’s commanders virtually forgot to hate the enemy.7

  The government army was sick, and the sickness had turned the steady stream of Soviet supplies into a curse rather than a blessing. Gradually, Sokurov registered what should have been clear to his colleagues back in Moscow years earlier: Soviet deliveries were merely exacerbating the problem, because the more equipment the Ethiopians were sent, the more fell into rebel control. ‘We were supplying both sides. The separatists wore our uniforms and used our weapons. The stuff wasn’t even being captured–it was being abandoned by Ethiopian commanders after the briefest of skirmishes. I’m not just talking about a few tanks. Entire divisions were being allowed to fall into separatist hands.’ Disillusioned members of the Second Revolutionary Army’s high command, he concluded, were deliberately sabotaging the war effort. ‘No matter how secret the operation, it was becoming known to the separatists. The commanders were supplying the separatists with information about their activities because they wanted to damage Mengistu’s regime, even if it meant the slaughter of their subordinates.’

  In the wake of the battle of Afabet, Mengistu appeared on national television and publicly admitted, for the first time in a decade, that a war was being waged in the country’s northern province. The money spent each year fighting the EPLF could, he acknowledged, have funded 4 universities or 10 large hospitals. Ranked the poorest nation on the globe by the World Bank, Ethiopia was none
theless spending more than half its government revenue on arms.8 But Mengistu’s message to viewers was the opposite of what his restive generals had hoped: ‘From now on,’ he declared, ‘everything to the battlefront!’ Like the doomed Macbeth, halfway across a river of blood, wading back seemed harder than striding forwards. Questioning the foundation on which his power had been built risked bringing the whole structure crashing to the ground.

  He signed a peace agreement with Somalia which, by calming the Ogaden front, allowed him to shift reinforcements to Eritrea. In July, he flew to Moscow, begging bowl in hand. The response was one he must have dreaded. If the Kremlin balked at cutting Mengistu off without a penny, it nonetheless slashed his expectations down to size, hinting heavily that it was time to fundamentally rethink his alliances. ‘The word in diplomatic circles, which included many of the Communist country emissaries, was that Moscow told Mengistu at that meeting: “We have our own problems and you had better start making other friends,” remembers Robert Houdek, posted to Addis as US chargé d’affaires.9

  Mengistu was running out of time. In early 1989, the Ethiopians suffered an even more humiliating defeat than Afabet when the TPLF, with EPLF support, captured the northern town of Inda Silase. The rebellion had spread beyond Tigray province to embrace disaffected Amharas and Oromos in central and southern Ethiopia, their movements uniting to form the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), bent on regime change. The army was being pushed southwards, entire units defecting as it retreated. Sensing the ground shifting beneath their feet, generals in Asmara and Addis staged a concerted coup attempt in May, minutes after Mengistu had left for East Germany, one of the countries he hoped might be persuaded to fill the vacuum left by a withdrawing Soviet Union.