CHAPTER 17
A Village of No Interest
All the presidents of the world have died and gone to Hell. As they sit roasting in the flames, they ask the Devil if they can call home. ‘OK,’ says the Devil, ‘but it’ll cost you.’ First Bush calls his family in Washington, and they chat away. ‘That will be $200,’ says the Devil. Then Chirac calls Paris. ‘That will be 100 euros,’ says the Devil. Finally, it’s Isaias’ turn. ‘That’ll be 5 nakfa,’ says the Devil. ‘How come he gets to pay so little?’ wail the others. ‘Oh,’ says the Devil. ‘It’s only a local call.’
Eritrean joke doing the rounds in 2004
It was June 1993, and in the Cairo press centre, gathered around the closed-circuit television relaying events from the main chamber, a group of African journalists burst into a surprised cheer.
They had all been assigned to cover one of the most cynicism-inducing of events: the summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), that yearly get-together where insincere handshakes were exchanged, 29-year-old coup leaders got their first chance to play the international statesman, and the patriarchs of African politics politely glossed over the rigged elections, financial scandals and bloody atrocities perpetrated by their peers across the table. So entrenched was the OAU’s image as a complacent club of sclerotic dictators and psychopathic warlords, few Western newspapers bothered to send reporters to the event. But the speaker who opened this particular conference had been worth turning up for. The man did not appear to know the language of diplomacy. He had just said the unsayable, publicly articulating the private exasperation felt by every journalist covering the OAU’s 30th anniversary reunion in Egypt.
Looking around a hall that held the likes of Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi, Isaias Afwerki, president of Africa’s newest state, confessed his ‘boundless’ pleasure at being able to take his seat at the table. But his joy at ‘rejoining the family from which we have been left out for so long’ was not prompted by respect for an organization which had betrayed its founding principles, he made clear. The OAU, he told a hushed hall, had failed to deliver on its brave pronouncements on human rights and economic development. Africa remained a marginalized continent, scorned by its partners, whose citizens could not walk with their heads held high. ‘We have sought membership in the organization not because we have been impressed by its achievements but, as a local proverb goes, in the spirit of familial obligation, because we are keenly aware that what is ours is ours.’ Surveying the crush of Parisian designer suits and ceremonial robes, the jaded faces to left and right, the soberly-dressed former Fighter delivered a final rebuke: ‘We do not find membership in this organization, under the present circumstances, spiritually gratifying or politically challenging.’
It was as though a bracing wind had swept through the hall. ‘He seemed,’ recalls journalist Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, who covered the event for the BBC, ‘like a leader from a completely different era. Here were all these old dinosaurs, patting him on the back and saying, “Well done, young man” and he was saying, “It wasn’t thanks to you.” He was the hero of the day. I remember thinking: “Maybe Eritrea has got off to a good start.”’1
It was a speech that effectively set the tone of the new nation’s relationship with the outside world. ‘I didn’t do it for you, nigger’, had been the pitiless message of Eritrea’s British occupiers. The refrain had been taken up by the Americans who ran Kagnew, the Soviets who funded the Derg and the Israelis who armed Mengistu. Now Eritrea was repaying the compliment. A veteran diplomat might have warned Isaias that telling the OAU to go to hell, on the very day his month-old state took up its longed-for seat, might be a move Eritrea would come to regret. Isaias did not care. His population would never forget the solitude in which it waged its liberation campaign. No one had helped, yet Eritrea had won anyway. So why, now, should it mince its words? ‘I didn’t fight for 30 years to brown-nose the African leaders who betrayed us,’ ran the silent refrain. A few months later, Isaias did it again, castigating the UN in his first speech before the General Assembly. The new kid on the block had delivered his message loud and clear: Eritrea’s dealings with the world would be strictly on its own terms.
But it would be wrong to present the Eritrean mood in this period as one of scolding antagonism. A chippiness was certainly there, but it was balanced by bubbling, irrepressible confidence. The long years of solitary confinement, Eritrea’s leaders believed, had granted the Movement a unique opportunity to tease out the factors behind Africa’s post-colonial slide. Learning from the continent’s mistakes, Eritrea could leapfrog the hurdles that had tripped up other developing states and sprint towards the future. ‘We have to avoid being influenced by the politics of this region,’ Isaias told an interviewer. ‘There is nothing positive in the region for us.’2 If Eritrea refused to resort to mealy-mouthed euphemism, it was not merely because it wanted to remind Africa of past treachery. Buoyed by self-belief, Eritrea was convinced it could serve as an inspirational model: it would show the continent the way ahead. Given that the EPLF had made a fool of every diplomat and historian who ever predicted its obliteration, a little intoxication was perhaps understandable. A thousand Hollywood movies tell the tale of the band of puny no-hopers who take on the mighty bully and confound the sceptics. This David-and-Goliath story was the stuff of dreams.
‘You cannot have a society of angels except in heaven,’3 Isaias warned a journalist who asked about his vision of the future. But in their heart of hearts, every Eritrean in those heady days believed he had been given a chance to do just that: to create the perfect state. The years that elapsed between 1991 and 1998–although few appreciated it at the time–were to be Eritrea’s golden era, when everything seemed possible. In April 1993, the referendum Eritrea had waited so long to see was staged. Only a people raised in knowledge of the UN’s shameful record on Eritrea could appreciate the symbolic significance of the fact that when Isaias cast his vote, the UN’s special representative was standing at his side as witness and guarantor. The result was a foregone conclusion: 99.8 per cent of Eritreans opted for independence.
As Eritrean academics began drafting a multiparty constitution and the EPLF dissolved itself to form a new political movement–the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ)–construction started. It seemed at times that Asmara and Massawa had become little more than massive building sites. It was not just a question of repairing the damage done by Ethiopian bombers. During the struggle, 750,000 citizens had fled abroad. The diaspora was coming home, bringing its savings and its aspirations. Peasants from the dusty refugee camps of Sudan, oil engineers from Texas, dentists from Scandinavia, labourers from Saudi Arabia: they all needed affordable housing, schools for their children, hospitals for their sick. Asmara’s creaking Italian factories were crying out for modernization and its demobilized Fighters–men and women who knew only the skills of war–were desperate for work. The task facing the EPLF was daunting. But with the population solidly behind it, the international community falling over itself to make up for past mistakes and a friendly government across the border, what could go wrong?
In May 1998, the halcyon days came to an abrupt end. The national character traits forged during a century of colonial and superpower exploitation were about to blow up in Eritrea’s face. Curiously, the spot where Eritrea tragically fumbled its recovery could not have been more nondescript.
Sitting in the Ethiopian government helicopter, I grabbed hold of the hard bench and squeezed with both hands. ‘Up,’ I muttered to myself, trying to ignore the large yellow tank vibrating a few feet away, sloshing with the fuel that would burn us to cinders if this ageing Russian-made aircraft fell out of the sky. ‘Up, up, up. Stay up.’ Below us, a grey mountain range curved across the plains like a dinosaur’s backbone. Gazing through the porthole at the cement-coloured valley floor and the rills of dried-up streams, curled like bacon rinds under the grill, a lazy thought passed throug
h my mind: ‘No one could survive here.’ Then I noticed the terracing, standing out on the muscle of the foothills like veins on a bodybuilder, and the green and brown coronas that signalled a tree-circled monastery here, a stockade there, and realized how wrong I was. Tiny metal rectangles, corrugated-iron roofs, flashed the sunlight back up at us as we clattered over the mountains, our toy helicopter’s shadow bouncing off the reddish crags. If you lifted your gaze to the southern horizon, the plains of Ethiopia’s Tigray province seemed to have been scattered with diamonds, glistening and winking in the sun. People not only survived here, they nurtured every inch of usable land; had done so, in fact, for generations, defying gravity, trapping water, challenging the eroding winds.
The helicopter descended, whipping the red dust into a whirlwind, and then fell quiet, spilling journalists from its belly for a brief walkabout. Back in Addis, rumours had circulated of mineral riches hidden in this land. Only deposits of gold and uranium, surely, could explain what had occurred here. But now that we could see this clump of straw tukuls and thorn-bush compounds for ourselves, none of that made sense. This was the kind of one-hotel, two-bar village in which yellow-eyed goats wandered through front rooms; over-excited urchins, their heads shaved save for one dark lock of hair, ran after new arrivals shouting ‘You! You! You!’ and the local policeman snored on a trestle bed under a tree. Dazed by the heat, a donkey stood stock-still in the middle of the only street, smiling in that infinitely benevolent way donkeys have. This place was just a pause on the way to somewhere more interesting. Given the choice, any sensible traveller would stop here only long enough to stretch their legs and have a drink, before hitting the road once again.
Only the road no longer led anywhere. Once busy with traders bringing plastic sandals and cheap clothing south and farmers taking grain and livestock north, the track stretched silent and deserted. Events had drawn an invisible, impenetrable barrier across the scrubby landscape. Shambuko, the Eritrean town at the other end of that road, was as inaccessible as if it had been on another planet. This seemed a village of no interest, yet it was a village of terrible, tragic interest. For this was Badme, claimed by both Eritrea and Ethiopia as their own, a border settlement whose contested destiny had cost more than 80,000 lives and destroyed a dream of Utopia.
Travelling between Asmara and Addis, I often used to think, was like stepping through the surface of a mirror. In Eritrea you would hear one version of events, argued with heartfelt passion and unfailing logic, and come away won over. But fly to Addis, walk through the rippling mercury, and you would hear the same events recounted from an Ethiopian perspective: internally consistent, vigorously argued, also totally convincing. Each version of reality, of course, jarred with its mirror-image on the other side of the looking glass. And so the mind struggled to balance two mutually-exclusive visions of the world until, weary of ping-ponging from one side to the other, tired of trying to be scrupulously even-handed, it barked ‘Enough!’ And you were left in a sulky grey fug of ambiguity, sure of only one thing: everyone had behaved badly, everyone was to blame.
Nowhere was this truer than with the war that began in Badme in 1998, erupting in an area whose confines had been agreed between Menelik II and the Italians at the turn of the century but had become muddied over time, administrative arrangements on the ground rarely matching what was stipulated in the treaties. From the original trigger incident to the two governments’ subsequent handling of the crisis, each country’s account of what happened makes perfect internal sense. Unfortunately, each also clashes head on with the other side’s version.
According to Ethiopia, a resident was collecting firewood outside Badme on May 6 when he was detained briefly by a group of Eritrean soldiers. When the Ethiopian authorities sent local policemen to discover why Eritrean forces had strayed onto their territory, they were fired on. This incident could and should have been dealt with by a commission the two countries had already set up to deal with precisely such trifling frontier incidents. Instead, Eritrean officials attending talks in Addis slunk back to Asmara without warning and Eritrea launched an unprovoked offensive on Badme on May 12, rolling its tanks into the area in a display of gratuitous aggression.
According to Eritrea, the trouble began when Ethiopian militiamen started setting fire to huts in the Eritrean village of Geza Chi’a, north of Badme. Heading to Shambuko to lodge a complaint, the villagers met an Eritrean army unit, which agreed to send a delegation to discuss the incident with Ethiopian security forces. Instead, the Ethiopians opened fire. When the shooting stopped, an Eritrean major, lieutenant and several others lay dead: the negotiators had been murdered. Far from scurrying away from Addis, Eritrean delegates tried without success to persuade their Ethiopian counterparts the matter needed to be urgently addressed. It was Addis that fatally upped the ante, its parliament declaring war on Eritrea on May 13.
Whatever caused the clash, which escalated with terrifying speed, there was a fundamental difference between this conflict and the one that preceded it. The Armed Struggle, as far as Eritrea was concerned, had been waged against a succession of alien regimes based in distant Addis. At the heart of this new war lay a falling-out between the EPLF and TPLF: former rebel allies, comrades-in-arms from adjacent territories. The two leaderships spoke the same Tigrinya language, shared the same ethnic origins and had survived the same ordeals of famine and military occupation. Their forefathers had worshipped the same Christian God, their women braided their hair in similar ways, they had attended each other’s weddings. The war against the Woyane, the Eritreans called it, the war against the Shabia, Ethiopians said, pronouncing terms which had once been semi-affectionate with startling venom.4 This was a family quarrel, with all the vindictiveness that implied. And, as with all domestic disputes, the parties to the quarrel showed an almost pathological desire to keep the matter private. The build-up to the May hostilities actually coincided with a visit to the region by Kofi Annan. Yet neither Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, nor Isaias saw any need to draw the UN Secretary-General’s attention to their little fracas. The quietism of the highlands carried the day.
The open-mouthed astonishment the conflict triggered amongst Western allies was misplaced. The relationship between the EPLF and TPLF, in truth, had never been quite as cosy as foreigners had liked to believe. Italy’s colonial occupation of Eritrea had marked a parting of the ways for communities on both sides of the frontier. Inhabitants of Ethiopia’s underdeveloped Tigray migrated north in search of work, supplying sophisticated Asmara with its unskilled labour. Eritrean urbanites who had grown up associating Tigray exclusively with maids, street-sweepers and janitors, tended to look down on their neighbours. That Eritrean sense of superiority had been reinforced during the Struggle, in which the longer-established EPLF played the role of mentor and guide to the inexperienced TPLF. In the field, the two movements had squabbled over military practice, relations with the Soviet Union and their vision of the future. They were brothers, certainly, but a touchy younger brother can easily come to hate a patronizing older sibling.
Long before Badme erupted, trouble had been brewing. There had been other clashes, including exchanges of fire, in disputed border areas–Bure and Bada were two examples–during which the Ethiopians had burned Eritrean villages and ousted administrators. Spotting what looked like a pattern of creeping territorial encroachment, Asmara suspected the TPLF leadership of trying to redraw the map. Hated in Addis, the Tigrayans–Eritrean officials argued–were bent on carving out a Greater Tigray in preparation for the day Ethiopia’s majority ethnic groups ejected this minority from power. They brandished a 1997 map of Tigray which seemed to confirm their fears: funded by a German charity, it drew a meandering, curving frontier in the west that took a large bite out of Eritrean territory, ignoring the sharp diagonal shown on every other commercial map. If Eritrea surrendered its claim to Badme, everyone would want a piece of it, and the land its Fighters had died to win would be nibbled away, kilometre by
kilometre. Ethiopia’s leadership met rhetoric with rhetoric. ‘Since independence, Eritrea has picked a fight with every one of its neighbours,’ Ethiopian officials said, citing a series of disputes with Sudan, Yemen and Djibouti. ‘This is a police state, run by a Fascist president, that only knows how to make war.’
Land was not the only issue–economic relations between the two neighbours had also curdled. Chafing over its unfamiliar landlocked status, Addis complained that its goods were being held up at Assab and it was being ripped off by sharp-elbowed Eritrean businessmen selling Ethiopian coffee on international markets. Asmara, for its part, had watched the establishment of giant factories in the Tigrayan capital of Mekelle with a jaundiced eye, suspecting the TPLF of planning to supplant Eritrea as Ethiopia’s supplier of manufactured goods. The final blow had been Eritrea’s insistence on introducing its own currency, in the teeth of Ethiopian resistance. When the nakfa was launched in 1997, a furious Addis decreed that future trade would have to be conducted in hard currency, requiring Eritrean merchants to take out letters of credit with Ethiopian banks. The fact went virtually unnoticed abroad in all the excitement, but when the fighting broke out in Badme, trade along the once-busy border had already petered away to a mere trickle.
Within weeks, deeds were being committed that could never be forgiven. At the beginning of June, Ethiopia dramatically escalated the conflict by sending the air force to bomb and napalm Asmara airport. When Eritrean gunners shot down one of the jets, they discovered the man at its controls was none other than Bezabeh Petros, an Ethiopian pilot who had been captured by the EPLF during the Struggle and sent home. Returned prisoners, according to the conventions of war, must not go back into battle, yet here was Bezabeh, attacking Eritrea once again.5 Unable to believe the news, Asmarinos flocked to the airport to see for themselves. ‘For 30 years we’ve been bombed, gassed and murdered by the Ethiopians. They only just stopped blooding us. Now the same pilots, the men who flattened Massawa, are back bombing Asmara. And it’s our friends who send them. It’s just unthinkable,’ a government minister told me, trembling with rage.
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