Eritrea retaliated by sending its jets screaming over Mekelle, where they struck the military airport but also dropped cluster bombs near a school, killing 12 children. Eritrean officials later said the school strike was a mistake, the work of a pilot with no previous experience of live combat. But Isaias did not do the diplomatically astute thing and issue a hand-wringing apology. Expressions of regret are not an Eritrean forte. (‘I didn’t spend 30 years at the Front to apologize.’) ‘It was a terrible accident,’ acknowledged this stiff-backed president. ‘But this is war.’ Mourning a massacre of innocents, appalled Ethiopians were left with the triumphant words of the Eritrean air force chief ringing in their ears: ‘They hit us once, I hit them twice.’
It was a revealing comment. The image of a stinging slap kept surfacing in conversations with Eritreans in those tense days. Justifying the Badme operation, a senior Eritrean diplomat likened his country to a man being pinched repeatedly under a table until he smacks his opponent. ‘Everyone sees the slap in the face, but no one knows about the pinching that preceded it.’6 I spoke to an Eritrean merchant with three children waiting to be called up. ‘Jesus may have said, “If someone slaps your face, turn the other cheek,”’ he told me. ‘But here in Eritrea we have our own version. It goes: “Slap my face and I’ll hit you back so hard you’ll never dream of trying it again.”’ It was the rationale of a country brutalized into knee-jerk belligerence, the reasoning of a small, threatened society that had concluded, on the basis of hard experience, that violence was the only message outsiders would ever understand. Israel and Rwanda would have understood such thinking perfectly. It was an early hint that Eritrea was destined by its history to bungle the subtle challenges of peace.
A strange fatalism had descended on Eritrea. Gripped by a sensation of déjà vu, residents noted, with resigned impassivity, the fact that Western embassies started evacuating their nationals from Asmara just before the first raid on the airport, a timing that not only suggested a helpful tip-off from the Ethiopians, but spelt out an all-too-familiar message. The going had got tough and Eritrea’s newest buddies–the diplomats, aid workers and businessmen who had rushed to promise partnerships and investment after independence–had scarpered. Just as in the old days, Eritrea was on its own. The realization that the outside world had also labelled Eritrea the aggressor prompted the same shrug of the shoulders: what else was to be expected from the international community that had tolerated the Federation’s abrogation, ignored the EPLF’s existence and armed the Derg?
There was a feeling of vast sorrow at the thought that, after a brief seven years in which Fighters had exchanged their camouflage for civvies, they were being asked once again to make the ultimate sacrifice. The Nakfa trenches had been tolerable because Fighters had always believed their offspring would eventually inherit the deep peace that went with unchallenged sovereignty. They had suffered to ensure the next generation would not. Now ageing tegadelti dispatched their children to the new front, sick to their stomachs at the sight of the open trucks packed full of tense young faces, trundling west.
But the grief went hand-in-hand with what, to outsiders, seemed a baffling self-confidence. This war would be nasty, but the Eritreans knew they were destined to triumph. The EPLF legend of plucky solitude had them in its seductive grip: how could a people that had bested Haile Selassie and Mengistu, despite the best efforts of the US and Soviet Union, ever lose? Of course, Ethiopia, with its 70 million strong population to draw on for recruits, dwarfed Eritrea, with 4.5 million. But those ratios had held true before and had always proved ultimately irrelevant. It was the EPLF, after all, which had taught the TPLF the secrets of guerrilla warfare and provided the tanks that rolled into Addis. Africa’s Sparta knew its own violent origins: no people did warfare better than the Eritreans. ‘We will win,’ my old friend John Berakis told me with mournful certainty. Grizzled as he was, he stood ready to take up the gun again if his government needed him. ‘We have always won. What can the Ethiopians teach us about fighting? We had to teach them how to get rid of their dictator.’ A government minister told the same story: ‘We could walk through Tigray if we wanted,’ he assured me. ‘But we’re in a dilemma over what to do–do you finish off your friends?’
It was dangerous, delusional folly, not only because the Eritrean army of 1998 was a far flabbier entity than the lean fighting machine constructed during the Struggle, nor because the task of defending a 1,000-km border differed substantially from holding the mountain fortress that was Nakfa. Nations that believe they cannot lose slide into war more easily than states that suspect the contest will be close. When victory seems assured, opportunities for negotiation are neglected; the blurred fudges that allow faces to be saved and compromises struck regarded as beneath contempt. ‘I didn’t spend 30 years in the bush to compromise.’ Below the overweening confidence lay something more ominous in its implications, whose outlines the TPLF had sensed. The EPLF had forced Eritrean sovereignty down the gullet of a wriggling international community by being ready to fight harder, suffer more intensely, hold out longer than its enemy. Modern Eritrea had conjured itself into existence through war; the notion it would have to continue asserting its identity through combat seemed unexceptional. ‘We fought the forgotten war, everyone was against us,’ an ex-Fighter told me. ‘Winning that war meant we came to exist as a nation, we came to be known. So now it’s a question of not losing our identity. First we will go to war, then we will negotiate from a position of strength.’
A peace plan put forward by the US and Rwanda in June quickly foundered. In Eritrean eyes, Ethiopia’s readiness to launch an air campaign made a mockery of the entire process, which was passed to the OAU, most of whose Addis-based delegates shared the Ethiopian view of Eritrea as hot-tempered regional bully. In retrospect, Isaias’ defiant speech at the Cairo summit was beginning to look like a very poor investment.
After a lull in which two of Africa’s most famine-prone countries indulged in a multimillion-dollar arms shopping spree, pumped tens of thousands of barely-trained recruits into their armies and signed up Ukrainian mercenaries to fly their planes, fighting resumed in earnest in February 1999. Eritrean predictions that the rest of Ethiopia would leave the Tigrayans to fight alone proved disastrously off-key. Tapping into brooding public resentment over the surrender of Ethiopia’s coastline, Meles rallied the nation behind him. His commanders opened a new front on the outskirts of Assab and then sent wave upon wave of soldiers crashing against dug-in Eritrean positions in Badme. With Badme lost, Eritrea’s central and eastern fronts under attack and the prospect of recolonization–or at the very least, the instalment of a puppet government in Asmara–looking a distinct possibility, Isaias accepted the OAU’s peace terms. Eritrea, the nation that prided itself on needing no one, now looked to the despised UN for its salvation, blue-helmeted peace monitors deploying along the contested border in September 2000.
Engaging over 500,000 troops and displacing 600,000 people, the Badme war won the dubious honour of being not only the worst conflict ever staged between two armies in Africa, but the biggest war in the world at the time, more devastating than the rather better-publicized Kosovo crisis. It created a level of hatred unparalleled even during the Struggle, which found particularly mean-spirited expression. Even under the repressive Derg, Eritreans with no interest in politics and families of mixed origin had been able to earn a living and put down roots in Ethiopia. No longer: Ethiopia loaded more than 70,000 men, women and children–many holding Ethiopian passports–onto buses and dumped them across the border. There was something of a spurned lover’s fury behind this mass deportation: ‘You want independence? Here, take it, and get out.’ In Eritrea, thousands of Ethiopians were made to feel so unwelcome they left of their own accord.7
The detail that sticks in my mind, evidence of what miserably petty acts wounded pride can push us to perform, emerged during a UN briefing in a compound outside Assab. The UN unit in the area had been trying to arrange the m
ost basic and humane of services: burying those killed during Ethiopia’s abortive push on the port. Nearly a year after the war’s end, the bodies still lay baking in the sun. Neither Eritrea nor Ethiopia was ready to lose face by acknowledging the corpses as their own. The UN had been reduced to identifying the dead by their footwear: boots for the Ethiopians, black plastic sandals for the Eritreans.
‘Whatever it costs’ runs the motto on an Italian bridge erected on the plains outside Massawa. It could have served as the EPLF’s maxim, and now the unflinching message had acquired a bitter resonance. It was not so much a question of the numbers of Eritrean dead, although the figure the government eventually announced–19,000 in just two years–seemed almost unbearably high compared to the 65,000 lost during the Armed Struggle’s 30 years. Eritrea had lost the sympathy of its foreign friends, aghast at the shattering of their dream of an African Renaissance. Its economic take-off had belly-flopped. As long as Isaias was in control, Addis made clear it would have no dealings–trade or otherwise–with its neighbour. The Ethiopian market, which had accounted for two-thirds of Eritrean output before the war, vanished. With Addis redirecting its exports to Djibouti and Berbera, Assab became a sun-baked ghost town, the cawing of crows reverberating around the once-bustling port. Eritrea’s newly-renovated hotels lay empty: tourism is always the first casualty of war. The ever-loyal diaspora had been squeezed dry during the fighting, digging deep into its pockets to pay for new weaponry. Sighing over a botched opportunity, foreign entrepreneurs put their plans for Eritrea on indefinite hold and looked elsewhere. Even if anyone felt ready to shoulder the risk of investing in Eritrea, they would struggle to find the staff–the nation’s brightest and best had been dragooned into a 300,000-strong standing army Isaias was in no hurry to demobilize.
During the fighting, the nation had formed a common front, the Nakfa spirit taking over as a new generation of Fighters suddenly understood what their parents had endured in the Sahel. But now that peace had come, and such a poisonous peace at that, Eritreans looked back over events with critical eyes. Although the government’s inner circle would never dream of admitting it in public, where the phrase ‘strategic withdrawal’ was once more being put to euphemistic use, invincible Eritrea had clearly lost the war. Had the government really explored every diplomatic avenue before sending tanks into Badme? Had that response been proportionate? Why had Eritrea’s army been repeatedly caught by surprise during the war, failures of intelligence that played disastrously into Ethiopian hands? The peace deal signed in Algiers in 2000 bore a striking resemblance to the US–Rwanda plan which Eritrea had allowed to slip through its fingers. Had presidential pride cost thousands of lives?
Such questions highlighted another nagging concern: the political status quo. Even before the war’s outbreak, Isaias had shown signs of cooling enthusiasm for multiparty democracy. The PFDJ still enjoyed a stranglehold on power and, through its affiliated corporations and banks, what remained of the economy. Those who have risked their lives for their country tend to nurse merciless expectations. When would the promised constitution be adopted? What about elections? Was Eritrea destined, just as the rest of the continent embraced multipartyism, to become a one-party state of the old, discredited variety?
At the centre of this swirling debate stood Isaias. Imposingly tall, fiercely intelligent, naturally austere, he had chosen his path early in life, rebelling against a father who was a committed Unionist. A ringleader amongst the bolshie Eritrean students attending Addis Ababa University, he joined the ELF but lost faith in its capacity to liberate Eritrea. His upper arm bore a scar in the shape of an ‘E’, carved at a meeting at which three disaffected young ELF members swore to create an effective revolutionary movement. Since the Struggle, in which he manoeuvred his way to the position of secretary-general with Machiavellian skill, he had enjoyed almost saint-like status in the eyes of ordinary Eritreans. When, in the early 1990s, he caught cerebral malaria and was flown to Israel in a coma, an anguished nation held his breath. His return, wasted but alive, became a triumphal procession through Asmara as residents, tears of relief in their eyes, lined Liberation Avenue. ‘We allowed ourselves to be misled by the lack of photographs on display, by the president’s modest lifestyle,’ a woman Fighter who fled into exile later acknowledged. ‘Looking back, it’s clear that Eritrea did have a personality cult, just like any other African nation.’ To a besotted public, Isaias’ qualities seemed the quintessence of the Eritrean national character, he was Eritrea Plus. ‘The PFDJ is Eritrea and I am the PFDJ,’ he once famously pronounced, echoing Martini’s vainglorious ‘I am the colony’. To an outsider, the president epitomized what made Eritrea as maddening as it was magnificent. He was a leader who kept his counsel and nursed his grudges long and hard. Given a chance to ingratiate himself, he could be gruff to the point of rudeness, even at a time when Eritrea needed every friend it could get. An ambassador who delicately reminded Isaias that his country had stood by Eritrea, continuing to supply aid when others faltered, emerged from his tête-à-tête steaming. ‘I suppose I should thank you for that,’ had been the graceless response. Nothing seemed to dent his belief that he knew what was best for the nation. His critics were dismissed as irritating irrelevancies: ‘The dogs bark, but the camel continues to march,’ he liked to say.
His was a single-minded, driven personality perfectly fitted to the role of running a guerrilla organization. But Isaias’ closest colleagues had started wondering, well before Badme, whether, like Winston Churchill, this was a leader unsuited to the demands of peace. Nominally, a system of executive checks and balances existed. In reality, Isaias had concentrated power in his own hands, shuffling portfolios to prevent ministers forming power bases, duplicating departments until it became unclear where real authority lay. He had squeezed the Front’s heavyweights off the ruling party’s executive committee in 1994 on the grounds that the PFDJ needed an injection of new blood. He had set up a Special Court, which issued judgements against which there was no appeal. And when Badme erupted, Isaias had neither formed a war council, called a meeting of the party leadership nor summoned the national assembly. The collective approach to decision-making that had characterized the EPLF was abandoned. He kept all the key decisions to himself and, in retrospect, they looked like all the wrong decisions. As for the disarray in army ranks, insiders said, Isaias was to blame. He had undermined his own generals and defence minister by telephoning commanders in the field to receive briefings and issue orders direct.
Former EPLF cadres will one day have to explain why they failed to rein in Isaias when the first signs of authoritarianism made themselves manifest, why they did so little, during the 1998–2000 war, to voice their unease. One factor–however strange it may sound when talking about battle-scarred warriors–was basic physical fear. Standing well over 6 ft, Isaias, the indomitable Alpha Male, towered over his cabinet colleagues, built in the small and wiry Eritrean mould. He was a hard, dogged drinker and when he lost his temper, he became physical. ‘In the EPLF, policy would initially be batted about very informally, over a few drinks. I’ve seen him head-butt colleagues during those discussions because they wouldn’t agree with him,’ remembers Paulos Tesfagiorgis, a veteran EPLF activist.8 The president once brought a whisky bottle crashing down on a cabinet minister’s head, and the man sported a plaster for days. As any battered wife can attest, the threat of potential violence works its insidious effect, even when not put into practice. Flinching aides tend to ration their spontaneity. If Gordon Brown knew he risked a black eye when discussing monetary policy with Tony Blair, if Donald Rumsfeld occasionally emerged from George Bush’s office nursing a split lip, politics in both countries might take a very different course.
During the Badme war, all had rallied round–Eritrea’s survival demanded it. Now the critics put an end to their self-censorship. A group of academics and professionals met in Germany to compile what became known as the Berlin Manifesto, calling for the constitution to be implement
ed and democratic government restored. In May 2001, 15 high-ranking members of the PFDJ’s central council–including such respected figures as Mesfin Hagos, Petros Solomon, Mahmoud Sherifo and Haile Woldensae–wrote to the president, asking him to convene the council and National Assembly to discuss the crisis. The president’s response was quietly ominous. ‘This morning you sent me a letter with signatures. If it is for my information, I have seen it. In general, I only want to say that you all are making a mistake.’ The Group of 15, as they became known, pressed on, publishing their concerns about the slide to one-man rule in an open letter. Asmara’s cafés were abuzz; student leaders, dismissed ministers, even the Chief Justice spoke out, and Eritrea’s new private press gleefully printed it all. Taciturn Eritrea had never known such openness.
It was to be the briefest of Prague Springs. In an April interview, Isaias assured me he was committed to political pluralism. ‘I’ve been a proponent for the last 15 years. I have lived and fought for these values all my life.’ On September 18, he made his move, ordering dawn raids on the homes of the men who had once fought by his side. Only those travelling at the time escaped the police roundup. Eritrea’s private newspapers were closed, its most outspoken journalists arrested. The crackdown went virtually unnoticed in the West, its attention fixed on the rubble of the World Trade Towers. But the conclusion the media reached over 9/11–‘The world will never be the same again’–aptly described what a generation of shocked Eritreans was feeling, for very different reasons.
The Eritrea I visit these days is not the country I knew.
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