I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  Eleven members of the G-15 languish in detention, their whereabouts unknown. Denied access to lawyers and family, the men and women who formed the EPLF’s intellectual core are unlikely ever to face trial. They have already been effectively prosecuted and found guilty of passing military information to the enemy–what else could explain the Eritrean army’s defeat?–and of plotting with the CIA to oust Isaias. ‘These are not politicians, these are people who betrayed their nation in difficult times,’ the president told the BBC. ‘A general who betrays his country to the enemy in difficult times is a traitor, not a politician.’ Whatever lies behind this hackneyed tale of conspiracies and fifth columnists, external events fuel a widespread view that Eritrea, at this moment of its history, can ill afford the luxury of dissent.

  After 12 months of deliberation, in which experts in international law pored over colonial maps, a commission set up in The Hague to settle the border question came up with its decision. Badme, it announced in April 2002, lay in Eritrea, just as Asmara had always insisted. Both governments had agreed the finding would be ‘final and binding’, but the surrender of this totemic village was too much for Addis to bear. Denouncing the result as ‘unacceptable’, Meles called on the Security Council to set up an ‘alternative mechanism’ to decide the border, effectively demanding a second opinion. Ethiopia’s forces remain in occupation of Badme and its surrounds and behind a cordon sanitaire erected by the UN, two tense armies bristle at one another in a nervy standoff which carries the constant risk of another flare-up9.

  The UN, which is spending $220m a year keeping its troops deployed in the area, is a guarantor of the peace process and theoretically obliged to enforce the Boundary Commission’s findings. By remaining on Eritrean soil, the Ethiopian government is defying international law. Since Addis Ababa relies on injections of foreign aid to feed its population, in theory donor nations enjoy huge leverage over its actions. But just as in the days of Haile Selassie and the Derg, realpolitik carries the day.10 Given the choice between championing a tiny Red Sea nation with a dodgy human rights record and prickly leader, and maintaining cordial relations with Ethiopia, a regional giant regarded as an ally in Washington’s War on Terror, few foreign governments can muster much enthusiasm for the Eritrean cause. For a West applying Bush’s simplistic ‘You’re either for us or against us’ criterion, Eritrea is no more than an irritant, just as it was during the Cold War.

  Asmara finds itself in a position with horribly familiar echoes. On paper, the legal argument over Badme has been won, just as on paper, Ethiopia’s 1962 abrogation of the Federation broke the law. What happens in practice is quite another matter. The limpness of the international community’s attempt to persuade Ethiopia to accept the border ruling feels like the last in a long series of betrayals. ‘What we cannot understand,’ a politician told me in bafflement on my last visit to Asmara, ‘is why no one wants us to survive.’

  Eritrea languishes in a no-peace, no-war limbo, worst of all possible worlds. Ethiopia seems bent on throttling the economic life out of its neighbour, even if its own Tigray province suffocates in the process. ‘The sad thing is that Ethiopia can strangle Eritrea to death without lifting a finger,’ a British official told me. While Meles still maintains he has no designs on the coast, his people are less restrained. The curse of the Queen of Sheba has returned with a vengeance in Ethiopia, with opposition parties, civic groups and independent newspapers all arguing that Eritrea’s duplicity has proved Ethiopia must secure its own port. ‘The arithmetic is irresistible,’ argues former attorney-general Teshome Gabre Mariam, a politically-active barrister in Addis. ‘A nation of 4m cannot deny 70m people access to the sea. It is a matter of time, but another war is inevitable.’ The terrible lessons of the 30-year Struggle, driven by just such a sense of Ethiopian entitlement, appear to have left little trace: a wilful, angry amnesia has set in. Two of the world’s poorest nations, whose malnourished people face the constant threat of famine, are quietly restocking their armouries.

  The threat from across the border gives Isaias a perfect excuse for his failure to demobilize an oversized army. The requirement to do military service–which keeps 1 in 14 Eritreans in uniform–doubles as a handy instrument of social control. Instead of gossiping in cafés, the nation’s restive youth is kept busy terracing mountain slopes or laying new roads in the Danakil. Describing Isaias’ hold on the country, foreign officials instinctively clench their hands into the fists of a horse rider pulling in the reins: ‘He holds this country tight, very tight.’ Occasionally the army stages a raid in Asmara, loading youths who cannot prove they have done their duty onto trucks bound for the bleak training camp in Sawa. Those without military papers are barred from university, have trouble finding jobs, and are denied exit visas. ‘Eritrea has become one big land prison,’ a former Red Flower told me. The leader who freed Eritrea now holds it captive.

  Despite the government’s best efforts, people still manage to slip away. Soldiers drive to the border with Sudan and walk, helicopter pilots set course for Saudi Arabia, students at Western colleges extend their foreign residence permits. One group of would-be asylum seekers, being forcibly returned from Libya, became so hysterical at the thought of returning to Eritrea, they actually hijacked the plane taking them home. The shoulder-knocking Eritrean salute–tell-tale sign of a former Fighter–is increasingly to be seen on the streets of London’s Camden Town and Washington DC’s Adams-Morgan. ‘Eritreans have always had two ways of killing something,’ an Eritrean scholar told me. ‘They never challenge things openly. Either they retire into themselves and say nothing. Or they just leave–go into exile, join the shifta, go to the Front. In my family there isn’t a single young person who wants to stay in Eritrea, and that’s tragic.’ This quiet abandonment is the hardest thing for the regime to swallow. For decades, the diaspora dreamt of the day they could return to independent Eritrea. Now those trapped at home jeeringly nickname those with foreign papers ‘beles’, or fig cactus, because like that seasonal delicacy ‘they come just once a year, and only in summer’. Eritreans are in flight again–not from the Derg, but from their own liberation movement.

  The crackdown has taught a nation never prone to chattiness to watch its tongue. I used to come away from Asmara with my notebooks scrawled with names and addresses; asking an Eritrean whether he minded speaking on the record almost felt like an insult. Now acquaintances mutter under their breath, or suggest a drive to Durfo to watch the clouds swirling in over the valleys. There, in the privacy of their cars, they open their hearts. My notebooks are blotched with scribbled-out names and when I write my articles, I resort to the anonymous labels of journalism conducted in a police state: ‘an official’, ‘a former Fighter’, ‘a minister’. Identities, along with Eritrea’s sense of certainty, have swirled away, like ink dropped in flowing water.

  Personal opinions have been replaced by jokes, not something I ever associated with Eritrea. Losing most of their impact in translation, they poke fun at Isaias and his remaining cronies with a scornful irreverence unthinkable 10 years ago. One runs as follows: ‘An international conference is being staged and every delegation starts boasting about their country. “We have the best engineers,” say the Americans, “we can take a man and put him on the moon.” “We have the best surgeons,” say the Germans, “we can take out a heart and transplant it.” “Ah yes,” say the Eritreans, “but we have the best doctors. We can replace a man’s brain with a coconut and call him president.”’

  Chillingly, I have begun hearing a refrain I first heard in Bucharest, in the days that followed the dictator Ceau escu’s toppling. ‘Whenever more than five of us were gathered together,’ a Romanian paterfamilias told me, looking across a crowded lunch table, ‘we knew there was a member of the Securitate in our midst.’ Eritreans, mindful of the informer network that operated under the Derg, distrust even their nearest and dearest. ‘I’m telling you this because you are a foreigner,’ an ex-Fighter told me on my last visit, ‘
but I would not say this in front of an Eritrean, not even my closest friend.’ He had only been discussing the mundane problems of adjusting to civilian life, yet even that felt potentially seditious. ‘There are many informers inside Eritrea,’ says Dr Bereket Selassie, the US-based academic who drafted Eritrea’s never-implemented constitution, now in opposition. ‘We can tell how effective they are from the way the e-mails from Asmara are drying up.’

  Eritrea’s leadership is more isolated now than ever it was during the Struggle, for the True Believers have distanced themselves.11 Those who once marvelled at plucky little Eritrea’s iconoclasm now shrug it off as a ‘pariah state’. Bent on proving he cares not a jot for the international community’s disapproval, Isaias has grown ever more heavy-handed in his dealings. When Italy’s ambassador protested at the jailing of G-15 members on behalf of the European Union, he was expelled: Eritrea was not about to take lessons in democracy from its former colonial master. When Washington, worried about Islamic fundamentalism, was looking for a site for a new military base to police the Red Sea, Eritrea seemed the obvious choice. A US presence would have nipped any Ethiopian designs on Assab in the bud. But Isaias refused on principle to release two American embassy employees arrested during his crackdown and a miffed Washington built its base–a muscular version of Kagnew–in Djibouti instead.

  I registered how far the line separating healthy feistiness from self-destructive bloodymindedness had been crossed one torpid day, walking through the alleys of Massawa. Neatly parked by the roadside sat 18 SUVs, covered in a gathering blanket of red dust. Lip-smacking assets in a country with few tarmac roads, the jeeps had been imported as part of a Danish-funded mine-clearing programme and Denmark had always planned to leave them behind as a gift when the job was done. But the government, with its customary lack of tact, had told Copenhagen it had no need of its services. Furious at its brusque treatment, the Danes were making a point of shipping the jeeps out. Denmark didn’t need them, but Eritrea would not, now, be getting them either.

  With foreign friends gratuitously alienated, its youth in military training and business interest at rock bottom, Asmara seems stuck in one long Sunday afternoon. Since Ethiopian Airlines suspended its services, it has become one of Africa’s least accessible capitals, a city whose residents prick up their ears when a flight roars overhead and pinpoint the airline–there are so few–with impressive accuracy. ‘This is a good place for old people to retire to,’ a frail old Italian, puzzled by my interest in the place, gently told me. ‘But there is nothing here for the young.’ In a humiliating echo of the past, Eritrea once again plays host to foreign troops: a UN intervention force this time, rather than Kagnew Station. Locals who tuttutted at the sight of Eritrean girls on the arms of drunk GIs now wince at the louche goings-on in the bars near the UN base. They hate this dependency, but need these visitors both to shield them from the Ethiopians and keep their stagnating economy afloat.

  The taxi driver’s dirge, that staple of African travels, has finally come to Asmara. The last driver who picked me up at the airport, in that predawn chill when the barks of waking dogs are relayed from one sleepy district to another, drove with the infinite slowness of a man counting every drop of petrol. He would be selling his taxi soon, the old man muttered from a tumbled swathe of turban and shawl. Business had evaporated and the car was costing more to run than he earned. Then he pronounced the words I had heard said about the Belgians in Congo, Portuguese in Angola and British in Zambia, but never dreamed I would hear in Eritrea–all the more heart-rending for being said with such quiet resignation.

  ‘Things were better under the Italians.’

  CHAPTER 18

  ‘It’s good to be normal’

  ‘When dreams are shattered, they itch like scabies on the buttocks.’

  Eritrean proverb

  One Saturday morning a small group gathered near London’s Gower Street, taking their seats in a room off one of the slightly dilapidated Victorian halls, bequeathed to the nation by high-minded philanthropists, that cluster around Bloomsbury. The meeting’s chairman, an exile with an intense, intelligent face, introduced the guest speaker with obvious affection. The white-haired academic talked softly about the efforts opposition movements were making to unite, the need to rally the diaspora and efforts to lobby Western governments. In the audience, human rights campaigners nodded sympathetically, offering information on the latest repressive measures introduced by the authorities. The perennial question of how to grab the attention of a fickle foreign media was raised, and journalists present made a few tentative suggestions.

  A sense of terrible poignancy seeped in with the thin winter light, unacknowledged but inescapable. For this meeting on Eritrea, actually called in autumn 2003, could have been staged at almost any time in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s. The Britons there–many former True Believers–had attended scores of such get-togethers in their day, to discuss identical problems. The speaker, Dr Bereket Selassie, had denounced a government’s illegality not once, but a hundred times, in similar gloomy rooms. And the Eritrean chairman, Paulos Tesfagiorgis, had known exile before, when he had been based in Khartoum raising funds for Eritrean refugees in the 1970s and 1980s. First time round, the meeting’s participants had been blessed with the energy and optimism of youth, and they had been fighting an alien force, the Ethiopian regime. Now they were past middle age, and the adversary was a system they themselves had helped create: the Eritrean government. Yet here they were, launching themselves once again into the grind of campaign meetings and focus groups, lobbying and leafleting, that constitutes long-distance dissidence. Like a boomerang, history had executed one long ironic arc, returning to knock them off their feet.

  Around the world, Eritreans who played a key role in the EPLF, whether as Fighters, activists or merely supportive civilians, are trying to understand what went wrong. Did they, however inadvertently, contribute to the betrayal of the Eritrean revolution? What could, and should, they have done differently?

  For Paulos, a small, articulate man with the notched eyebrows of a Christian highlander, the interrogation is particularly severe. In 1974, when still a law student at the University of Wisconsin, he became an actor in what remains a rarely-acknowledged episode in rebel history. The large Eritrean community based in the US, in spasmodic contact with the rebel movement back home, had heard reports of a purge in the factions that would eventually coalesce to form the EPLF.1 Some Fighters who objected to Isaias’ style of leadership had formed a movement dubbed manqa (‘bat’) after its habit of meeting at night. These were the rough and ready days of a movement still finding its feet, and manqa complained about poor coordination, supply shortages and the fact that Fighters who dared challenge Isaias’ views were often given a good hiding. It wanted greater accountability, increased power-sharing. Many of the suggestions made by manqa’s members would later be put into effect, as the Front became better organized. But its ringleaders did not live to see that day. After a year of febrile debate, they were shot by the EPLF.

  ‘People we knew, people who had attended Addis University and had played a key role mustering support for the Movement, had been killed. It raised a lot of questions,’ remembers Paulos. ‘The discussion kept festering, it would not go away, it was creating a lot of disunity.’ The diaspora decided to settle the question for good by dispatching Paulos and another young Eritrean to the Sahel. The future goodwill–and sizeable financial contributions–of the North American community would depend on the account the two envoys brought back.

  It was Paulos’ first visit to the Front and he found it psychologically overwhelming. The purge had created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion he could feel but barely understand. In daytime he was kept under strict escort, but at night manqa sympathizers sidled up to him to mutter: ‘Don’t believe everything you hear.’ He was awed by the austerity of life at the Front, humbled by the Fighters’ sense of purpose. Above all, he was agonizingly aware that while he–a spoilt member of
the educated bourgeoisie–was free to return to a cushioned existence in the West, former classmates who possessed no more than the clothes on their backs were staying behind. To question it all would have felt like gross disloyalty.

  ‘In our report we said: “Those executed were guilty of incitement, indiscipline and creating division,”’ remembers Paulos. ‘Our report created a calmness. We were the first people from the North American community who had been there, so no one could challenge us. Our word was the word. Single-handed, we made the Front look fantastic.’

  Today, Paulos tortures himself with the thought that he was responsible for what amounted to a whitewash, a ringing endorsement delivered at a time when the young Isaias, facing his most serious challenge to date, might have been either reined in or sidelined. ‘We did it completely in good faith. We felt it was vital to maintain unity and we placed our trust in the leadership. But, looking back, we made a mistake.’ Fate has exacted a high personal price for his error. In his fifties, at a time when most men feel they have earned the right to job security, status in the community, a home of their own, Paulos has become an asylum-seeker, doomed to a rootless existence spent sleeping on other people’s sofas, negotiating the maze of foreign bureaucracies, dependent on the generosity of friends-of-friends.

  It would be heartening to think the foreign powers that meddled in Eritrea with such devastating results might occasionally examine their consciences and records with equal rigour. For while ordinary Eritreans have lessons to learn about how and why their revolution was betrayed, so does the West. If Eritrea today so often comes across as dangerously impervious to criticism and bafflingly quick to anger, she is largely that way because colonial masters and superpowers made her so. An entire society is suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Her history of cynical abuse–shared by so many small nations whose gripes prompt irritated yawns in Washington, Moscow and London–should serve as warning as the campaign against Islamic extremism recasts Western foreign policy in brash interventionist mould. If determined enough, guerrillas in plastic sandals can bring down a modern army. A capacity for taking infinite pains can force the most sophisticated occupying power to its knees. When you don’t know what you’re doing, can’t grasp who you are dealing with, best leave well alone.