Shallow Graves: A Memoir of the Ethiopia-Eritrea War 1787383288, 9781787383289

Citation preview

SHALLOW GRAVES

RICHARD REID

Shallow Graves A Memoir of the Ethiopia–Eritrea War

3

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America © Richard Reid, 2020 First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd All rights reserved. No part of Publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer A copy of this book’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress. ISBN 9781787383289

For ‘Danny’ and ‘Ermias’, and also Amanuel, in memoriam

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix Glossary x Preface xiii 1. Children of the Sixties, 1 1 2. Fragments of a War 47 3. Dreams of Abyssinia 75 4. The Emperor 99 5. Children of the Sixties, 2 127 6. The Upside Down 157 7. Moving Time 175 Postscript 197 A Bibliographical Note 211 Notes 215



vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In normal circumstances, the list of people to whom I owe profound thanks would be a long one. Issues of privacy and security are paramount, however, and so I must be brief. To a multitude of Eritrean friends and colleagues over many years, I wish to offer my humble, heartfelt gratitude—for their support and companionship, and for the education they have given me. I hope you know who you are. In Ethiopia, too, many people were generous with time and opinion. Not everyone will appreciate, or agree with, the account that follows but in the Horn of Africa, alas, that’s par for the course.   I would like to record a note of thanks to Michael Dwyer, who has been patience personified; to readers of an earlier draft, including Christopher Clapham, for their helpful comments; and of course to Anna, who didn’t ask for the role of chief sounding board but who performed it with greater levels of resilience and forbearance than I deserved. Oxford, January 2019

ix

GLOSSARY

adi

village, home community, ancestral land agalay specialised detachment with the Ethiopian army, charged with burying the dead Ameche nickname for Eritreans born or raised in Ethiopia, after a type of car built by an Italian company in Ethiopia and sold in Eritrea araki potent alcoholic drink, aniseed-based, common across the region Asmarino people who live in Asmara awet n’hafash! ‘Victory to the masses!’; one of the rallying cries of the EPLF bet shai tea shop bun coffee Derg lit., ‘committee’, the term commonly used for the Marxist regime in power in Ethiopia between 1974 and 1991 ferenji foreigner, usually Westerner

x

GLOSSARY

Field, the

Shorthand for the armed struggle, as in ‘when we were in the Field …’ G15 the group of senior political figures who, from within the ruling party, initiated a trenchant critique of Isaias Afewerki in 2001 Habesha general term for highland peoples of Eritrea and Ethiopia; the root of ‘Abyssinia’ Jebha nickname for the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF); from Arabic for ‘Front’ Kebessa the highland plateau of Eritrea Sha’abiyya nickname for the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF); mostly pejorative, but could be used affectionately. Derived from the Arabic, meaning ‘popular’ or ‘of the people’ tegadelay ex-fighters from the liberation struggle era tej honey wine, mostly associated with Ethiopia warsai yikealo lit., ‘those who follow the great’; term for those who have done military service since independence Woyane nickname, usually pejorative, for Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF); lit., ‘uprising’ xi

© S.Ballard (2016)

N

S A U D I A R A B I A

SUDAN 0

75

km

Red Sea

Jazan

Nafka

ERITREA Dahlak Archipelago

Keren

Massawa

Agordat

Kassala

ASMARA

Barentu Teseney

Mendefera Badme

Himora

YEMEN

Dekemhare

Tserona Aksum

Al Hudaydah

Adil Keyh Ti’o Adigrat

Mek’ele

Mocha Assab

E T H I O P I A

Gondor Claim by Ethiopia but awarded to Eritrea

Claim by Eritrea but awarded to Ethiopia

DJIBOUTI

PREFACE

The war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and its long, grisly afterlife, is at the heart of the account that follows. While the exact details remain unclear, the consensus is that there was an exchange of gunfire on 6 May 1998 between Tigrayan militia and some Eritrean soldiers in the Badme area, the latter counting senior commanders in their number. Several Eritreans were killed. The Eritrean army immediately sent a large armed contingent into the area, thus escalating the situation dramatically. Eritrean troops occupied Badme and expelled the Ethiopian administration. The Ethiopian government regarded this as a flagrant and unnecessary act of aggression, and within days the Ethiopian parliament declared war on Eritrea. The conflict escalated quickly. Troop mobilisation and deployment proceeded apace, and there were several weeks of intense fighting around Badme and sections of the central and southern border, involving infantry alongside tanks and artillery. In early June, the Ethiopian air force bombed the outskirts of Asmara, and hours later the Eritrean air force retaliated,  



xiii

PREFACE

bombing the Tigrayan town of Mekele. At that point, against a backdrop of rising numbers of civilian casualties and internally displaced people, the two governments agreed in principle to a moratorium on air strikes. While the actual fighting had subsided substantially by the end of June, the ensuing months of lull simply allowed for extensive reconnoitring, the gathering of intelligence, and the stepping-up of mobilisation programmes in both countries.   Meanwhile, a new front opened up in the form of mass deportations. From June 1998 onwards, the Ethiopian government deported tens of thousands of Eritreans and Ethiopians of Eritrean descent from Ethiopia, including the sizeable and well-established Eritrean business community which had been based in Addis Ababa for many years. Eritrea initially sought to demonstrate restraint, but in time large numbers of Ethiopians were expelled from Eritrea. It was a poignant reminder of how interconnected the two countries had been, but it was also a brutal demonstration of the deepseated animosity that had developed between the two governments, if not necessarily between the peoples themselves, although there was certainly plenty of visceral anger in the border areas. It was one of the earliest indications that this war was not actually about the location of parts of the border.   In February 1999, fighting re-erupted. The Ethiopians launched a major assault on Badme and, after several xiv

PREFACE

days’ fighting, seized control of the area and pushed several miles into Eritrean territory. At this point, the Eritrean government accepted an Organisation of African Unity (OAU) peace plan which it had rejected several months earlier. Its acceptance was partly forced by military losses, but also represented an attempt to regain diplomatic poise and traction with external actors. Regardless, the war continued, and fighting was especially intense on parts of the central front—at Tsorona and Zalambessa—between April and June 1999, while there was also fighting on the Assab (Bure) front further south.   May 2000 saw the denouement, the final act in the war ‘proper’. Months in the planning, and after the failure of ‘proximity talks’, the Ethiopian army launched a massive offensive in the west, breaking through the Eritrean lines. It was a crushing defeat: the Eritreans were compelled to abandon the western third of the country, withdrawing their forces to more easily defensible positions on the highland plateau. Meanwhile Ethiopia launched further offensives on the central front. At one point in May, the Ethiopian army was a single further breakthrough away from marching directly on Asmara, and rumours circulated of an attempt to remove President Isaias Afewerki from within the Eritrean government. But the Eritrean army held its position—at Adi Begio on the southern border, and at Areza to the west of Mendefera—at great cost to both sides, espe xv

PREFACE

cially the Ethiopians who were frequently attacking uphill. It was certainly a feature of the war that while Eritrea tended to entrench and sit back, the Ethiopian army had the manpower to launch sustained ‘human wave’ attacks in a manner that was frequently described by foreign journalists as akin to ‘First World War’ tactics. Nonetheless, while the two sides fought one another to a standstill, it was Eritrea that was most bloodied.   A ceasefire was agreed in June, and further negotiations, under the auspices of the OAU, led to the signing of the Algiers Agreement in December 2000. Under the terms of Algiers, Eritrea and Ethiopia agreed, among other things, to binding arbitration of the dispute, particularly with regard to a Boundary Commission, and to the creation of a Temporary Security Zone (TSZ) twenty-five kilometres wide on the Eritrean side of the de facto border. There is no agreement on exact numbers of war dead and displaced, but most accounts place the total killed on both sides at between 70,000 and 100,000, with more than half a million people displaced on both sides of the border.   In the years that followed—until 2018, that is—there was entrenchment on both sides of the border, politically and militarily. The 2002 Boundary Commission awarded Badme to Eritrea but Ethiopia refused to vacate it and, from Asmara’s perspective, came under very little international pressure to do so. The impact of entrenchment was felt much more severely in Eritrea, the focus of the xvi

PREFACE

account which follows. Military service was expanded and became indefinite for hundreds of thousands of Eritreans; Isaias Afewerki and his circle clamped down on all dissent, especially after September 2001, and a brutal authoritarianism was implemented which shows little sign of abating, whatever has been agreed with the Ethiopians. Eritrea withdrew increasingly into paranoid militarism, blighting the lives of millions, and from 2009 was placed under UN sanctions for its alleged support for the al-Shabaab insurgency in Somalia. Ever larger numbers of Eritreans sought to escape this prison-like state, with often tragic consequences. * * * I started writing this book some months before Abiy Ahmed, the recently anointed Ethiopian prime minister, made his visit to Asmara in July 2018 to end the war and normalise relations between the two countries. It was a startling moment: just a few months earlier, such a development would have seemed unthinkable. It never really occurred to me that the no-war, no-peace situation with which we had all become so familiar would end so abruptly; but then events in the Horn of Africa have the capacity to leave the most self-assured and seasoned analysts scratching their heads. Still, it seemed apposite: from a purely selfish point of view, the 2018 agreement has certainly put a neat bookend to the ‘narrative’ of this book, such as it is. xvii

PREFACE

  Yet the war itself is a strangely forgotten affair. Perhaps it has gone the way of many such conflicts, in Africa especially, flaring up on the horizon of visibility only to fade rapidly as the world’s diplomatic and media attention flits to the ‘next thing’. It has certainly been subsumed within the larger drama that is politics in the Horn, and in particular the gloomy theatre that is Eritrea. The war has become but one chapter in a larger tale, which is striking, given that the war itself was in many ways the root of much that happened subsequently; we pass over it at our peril. A small body of work has grown up around the conflict. In the twenty years after the outbreak of fighting in May 1998, it has episodically been the focus of policy-oriented analysis, though there has been rather less in the way of in-depth scholarship.1 It has inspired very little in the way of art or literature, and not much deeper reflection on the part of either protagonists or external observers. Even within the African context, the war and its impact have received scant attention when compared, for example, to eastern Congo or Somalia. It seems to reinforce the idea, often the subject of dark humour among Eritreans themselves, that anything involving Eritrea has never been terribly fashionable in the faddish world of the Africanist academy. It is a joke, but like the best jokes, it has an edge— namely that Eritreans frequently feel ignored and misunderstood, and certainly did so during the war and in the years that followed. That is the intangible price for xviii

PREFACE

going to war with a neighbour with such a continental, indeed global, presence.   Perhaps that will change in time; I hope it will. In the meantime, what follows is a modest contribution to an understanding of the impact and experience of the war in Eritrea. But it is deliberately not a conventional history of the war, and readers expecting one will, I fear, be disappointed. * * * My aim was never to write a comprehensive history of the war; that formidable project I leave to others. This was a war which it was my dubious privilege to observe at close range, and it is that stressful proximity which underscores the narrative. The purpose, rather, was to record a more personal account of it, from my own perspective, using a multitude of Eritrean voices (and some Ethiopian ones); to record my ‘take’ on Eritreans’ experiences of the war, and more specifically their perceptions of the histories leading to it and its aftermath. I wanted to be clear that I was the one framing their stories, and in a very small way going through the experiences, too. Hence the first-person perspective, an indulgent approach, perhaps—or so it seems to me, and would seem so to those who were involved in my training as a professional historian. I am all too aware of the dangers inherent in the production of a book like this. Historians are normally able to hide behind scholarly apparatus in pursuing their craft and xix

PREFACE

publishing their ideas, and save the personal anecdotes for late-night sessions at the bar. But, normally, anything else is perceived as either too journalistic—an awful sin, for some—or, worse, pretentious and self-regarding. I have no defence, except to say that this is the only way I wanted to write, in this particular instance, no matter how exposed I might feel. Indeed I had long hesitated to write this particular book, because I struggled with the first-person and the approach I wanted to adopt, as well as with some of the more difficult memories involved on a personal level. In that sense, this is my existential crisis book—full of mid-life angst and infused with epistemological doubt. Perhaps, for the next book, I’ll revert to safer ground.   This book offers a set of accounts, my own as well as those of others, of the experience of the war; it is about histories of loss, defeat and yearning. But, more specifically, I was concerned to think about history during a war, for war does strange things to time, and history, and memory: what are the themes, the images, the tropes, the narratives, the reflections on a range of pasts that appear in the midst of new violence and under a relatively new regime? In some ways all I could think to do was to ask questions about the past: the liberation struggle, the precolonial past, colonialism, the nature of leadership. Historians rarely get the opportunity to live through such intense experiences: I sought to explore local struggles with the past in the midst of very contemporary xx

PREFACE

trauma. What did history look like, and how to make sense of the past, in these moments? In that sense, it is a reflection on the local voices which would normally constitute a historian’s primary source material—and which have often served as mine—but which are here considered in their own right, and in context. It is an account of their struggles with the past in a period of great emotional intensity, and the legacies of the past (or various versions of it) which several generations of Eritreans have had to carry. I suppose, in some way, I’m also asking: how does a historian process this experience, and still have something coherent to say? And so what follows is something of a personal journey, an exercise in self-reflection as well as reflection on the conversations I’ve been privileged to have with Eritreans and Ethiopians during the last two decades or more. Working in, and on, Eritrea in particular and Ethiopia and the Horn in general over the past twenty years or more has brought to light the shifting sense of time and past among Eritreans themselves. It has certainly presented challenges to the foreign historian who ‘embeds’ and who makes all the mistakes that might have been predictable when I first went there, but which nevertheless may serve as salutary lessons in method and context.   In simple terms, I offer here a modest exploration of the ways in which the war influenced history itself—that is to say, the memory of the events immediately preceding the conflict, as well as deeper histories in the region, xxi

PREFACE

at the level of both the collective and the individual. The war and its aftermath, a period of intense trauma, provided a window of sorts onto the rich, complex, contested past of the present: this book is essentially concerned with those historical imaginaries, and the memories which the conflict elicited—especially the ways in which one particular version of the past, the statist, authoritarian view of violent struggle at the heart of the Eritrean regime, has compelled thousands of Eritreans to flee the country; a kind of movement of time itself. In very practical terms, the bulk of the narrative is concerned with Eritrea and Eritreans, though there are forays into Ethiopia, and we end up—as many Eritreans have—in the UK. The text is based on more than twenty years of interviews and conversations, and these are rendered ‘real’ and in context. I have kept referencing to an absolute minimum. The people themselves are—I hope—given three-dimensional form, but real names are not used, and every effort has been made to avoid any detail that could reveal their identities and thus (for those still in Eritrea, especially) place them in grave danger.   When I first joined the University of Asmara, senior colleagues in Britain and the US applauded me for doing what used to be de rigueur, at least back in the 1960s: ‘cutting my teeth’ in an African university for a few years. Most of the time, I saw it as a pretty decent quid pro quo. But when I was 29 or 30, and had been at the  

xxii

PREFACE

University of Asmara for two or three years, I heard that a senior and respected academic in London, who should remain nameless, had expressed the concern that “Oh, it’s a pity about Reid—he’s gone totally native.” A wise(r) colleague once told me, after gently rejecting an article of mine for the journal of which he was editor, that “after a month in a place, you have enough for an article; a year, and you have enough for a book; but after three years, you don’t know what the hell is going on.” I’m not sure I completely buy that, but I like the sound of it. * * * My own affective reaction to the histories I seek to tell requires a moment or two. I have written about war in Africa for a long time, but never on this kind of intimate, personal level. In some ways, in hindsight, I accepted a great deal of the violence around me—whether at the front line, or entrenched in Eritrea’s past, or on the part of the state toward its citizens—in a fairly unquestioning way. In later years I reasoned that this was probably related to my own upbringing. Growing up in Belfast during the 1970s and 1980s, I presumably developed an inner resignation to the quotidian nature of political violence, as many of my compatriots did. At the same time, exposure to prolonged conflict breeds an awful inner emptiness, even nihilism. When I think about the war, I feel a profound loneliness, and I remember feeling alone. Is this also part of the story? Does my own emo xxiii

PREFACE

tional response to the war, my own feelings of inadequacy and my episodic feelings of despair, have a direct impact on my ability to tell others’ stories? Presumably, resoundingly, yes. At times I wondered whether history isn’t ultimately a crazy, chaotic, subjective kind of a beast—though no less significant for all that. The historian caught up in the events which form the backdrop of this book may strive to impose order on the stress and the trauma—and indeed it is a central plank of the selfrespecting scholar that she or he does so. But of course the historian is the product of political and emotional context, and I confess that at various moments over the years in working in this region I have thought: There are no answers. There is only mess. Perhaps this is the study of the past in its purest form.   And of course the problem with the approach adopted here—the snapshot, the conversation, the ‘eyewitness’—is what the historian doesn’t see or hear; the conversations I didn’t have, the events I didn’t witness, the times when—for various reasons, sometimes personal, because I was exhausted and distracted—I was absent, and not ‘involved’. There is also the question of what I have chosen to omit, which is quite a bit. It is flawed by my own humanity: partial, emotional, riddled with conceit and miscomprehension. At the same time, of course, people who read history—African or any other—don’t want a kind of rambling, Joycean stream of consciousness by the narrator. And so I have imposed an xxiv

PREFACE

artificial order on the seeming chaos, as any half-decent historian should.   It would be disingenuous of me, and a failing, if I didn’t highlight the fact of my own foreignness in all this. In Eritrea, I was, of course, aware of my difference, despite my supposed embeddedness; but in truth I saw this as more of an advantage than a burden, as it seemed to me that people would often say things to me that they wouldn’t to their own compatriots. Of course that doesn’t make what they said any more valid; but I have to work with what I have, as we all do. As time has gone on, however, I’ve been made aware of the oddness of my position—as all white scholars of Africa are, or should be. And books like this can often give off the unmistakeable whiff of ‘white man syndrome’—the ‘adventures-inAfrica’-type narrative that I have long held up to my own students as an illustration of objectification and of how not to write about the continent. Perhaps there is something of that in here, despite myself—though I should add that the Eritreans I knew, and know, would never allow such conceits to hang around for long. Notably, it is possible, as a ferenji, to feel very much the ignorant outsider when discussing Eritrean history with Eritreans themselves. Many felt a little defensive about ‘their’ history, didn’t particular like being ‘told’ about it by foreigners—hardly surprising—and occasionally held professional historians at a cool, even faintly hostile, distance. I’ve had Eritrean acquaintances who had a ten xxv

PREFACE

dency to say, with entirely false modesty and meaning precisely the opposite, things like “Well, you’re the historian, you can tell us, but you know, as far as we Eritreans are concerned …”, before proceeding to hold forth on the subject. The expert is expert no more, and finds himself lectured—berated, even—on subjects he must not know anything about, except perhaps the very basics, which elicit a crucial modicum of respect and a foundation from which to proceed. I once encountered a government official and former fighter at one of those plush embassy bashes in Asmara who was appalled and bemused that I—a foreigner!—was teaching Eritrean history, to Eritrea’s youth, at the University of Asmara. “But we know our history!” she exclaimed, finally. “What are you doing teaching it to Eritreans?” She shook her head as she wandered off, exasperated by my protests that in fact work was only beginning on Eritrea’s complex and fascinating past. She didn’t care about that, and frankly why should she?   She may have been particularly militant on the subject, but it wasn’t an unusual response. At one time, a number of senior officers from the Ministry of Defence approached us in the History Department at the University: they wanted, they said, to have the ‘true’ history of the armed struggle written. We were excited; a tremendous opportunity had presented itself, surely! Their earnest intent could scarcely be doubted. But it quickly became clear that what they were asking from us xxvi

PREFACE

was only some ‘advice’; they would do the writing. Mere historians (especially mere ferenji, though in our tiny department colleagues were mostly Habesha)2 could not be trusted with such an enormous task. Actually, in some ways it wasn’t so much about trust; it was about the fact of our irrelevance to the real world. They knew the history, as some existential truth, and historians were only bit-part bookkeepers and antiquarians. They—as living, surviving Eritreans—were the real historians. This demonstrated in the starkest of terms the nationalisation of the past—‘experts’! What did they know? History was lived and breathed, experienced, by those caught up in it or rooted in the societies and communities coexisting with its legacies. It was only ‘studied’ by outsiders, by those who didn’t know anything to begin with.   Many Eritreans were keen historians themselves and supportive of my own work on the history of the country, and its peculiar trajectories over the course of the long twentieth century. But some were not, and told me so in refreshingly direct terms. One old friend enjoyed mocking me about my research plans, and my desire—my need—to meet with the relevant government officials in charge of granting clearance and access. “Why do you want to do research?” he laughed. “Always chasing after meetings with the Sha’abiyya3 … You know the truth! What does your research do to help me? Nothing!” * * * xxvii

PREFACE

Finally, a note on scholarly framework, or at least scholarly inspiration, is in order. Some of these points of reference now seem somewhat distant, as I survey the end product, but they were important to me nevertheless. When I was first mulling over the project, I was reading Raphael Samuel’s splendid collections of essays on memory and history in British culture, while the imagined past was also the central theme running through Robert Colls’s powerful and moving Identity of England.4 At the same time, in this book I have been centrally concerned with violence—perhaps no great surprise, given my own research interests over the past two decades. I have drawn on some of the brilliant work which has been done on memory and violence, including that by Jay Winter and Wolfgang Schivelbusch.5 Violence is omnipresent in the narrative which follows: in different ways and in different contexts, but more or less constant—in the war itself, its aftermath and its interpretation; the implications of prolonged violence and the shadows it throws across social, cultural and political landscapes; the epistemological repercussions of violence, both local and global; the emotional responses to it. Violence has the most profound impact on ideas about time and history, obviously enough; it fractures time and distorts its perception, stretches and shrinks it, disrupts the plane of vision, and, again, this is largely owing to the deep emotion it produces. Emotion, too, is the heart of this—­ particularly melancholy, anger, powerful feelings of xxviii

PREFACE

discontentedness. These kinds of emotion are temporal and historical by their very nature; they are backwardlooking, rooted in a sense of the past, and of time itself and its passage, and its distortion. Psychology—whatever our view of the discipline itself—has thrown up any number of theories about memory: trauma produces particular kinds of memory in the individual as well as in the collective.6 My comprehension of the vast and expanding field of emotions history remains rudimentary, but work by Jan Plamper and Peter Stearns, among many others, eases the passage of the dilettante.7 Eritrean historical consciousness has long been characterised by mourning, loss and grievance,8 and more broadly it is possible to understand history in the Horn from the perspective of emotional response and remembrance, most obviously manifest in the martyrology—a kind of mortocracy—which underpins the Eritrean state in its modern form.   But the Horn also elucidates poignantly the role of the state in the making of history alongside grassroots perceptions of a troubled past; the role of nostalgia for glories real and imagined; and the uncertainty and anxiety, behind the bullishness of public political imperatives, about the temporal and spatial shape of the nation itself. I recommend David Rieff ’s wonderful In Praise of Forgetting to all and sundry, while at the same time keeping Sidney Pollard’s The Idea of Progress close to hand. Recent studies of historical memory—notably relating to xxix

PREFACE

the commemorations around the centenary of the Easter Rising in Ireland—have helped shape some of my thinking.9 Time, in other words, was ordered in shifting ways, and was often mangled, distorted, refracted and packaged/repackaged in a multitude of ways, on a multitude of levels. Sometimes it was—for certain actors—neatly linear, with a clear sense of trajectory; at other times, it was cyclical, and demonstrated patterns more akin to ancient Mediterranean or Chinese ideas about the cyclical nature of history: no especially marked ‘change over time’, nothing akin to ‘progress’, but instead endless repetition and thematic recurrence; quotidian challenge within celestial loop. At other times, it is a bit of both cycle and line. Above all, increasingly it is foreshortened, shrunk to fit the needs of global ‘modern history’ and global circumstance. A key reference point in this regard is Jack Goody’s The Theft of History, in which he explored notions of time itself, and the imposed European universality that came with hegemonic globalisation. In this book, Goody suggests that the very measurement of time, and in turn of historical periodisation, took place according to European notions of ‘antiquity’, progress, civilisation, mechanisation and industrialisation.10 Meanwhile, a largely Europeanist historiography of nations/nationalism and historical identity forms something of a critical backdrop, and I find myself returning time and again to Anthony Smith, among others.11 My ego, finally, has long been stimulated by the likes of Rian xxx

PREFACE

Malan and Ryszard Kapuściński, but perhaps the less said about that, the better.12 Suffice it to note, following John Gray, the need we have to award ourselves stories, both as individuals and as collectives.13 * * * It has long seemed to me that Eritrea, in particular, illustrates the multidimensional struggle with both time and space. Generations of nationalists and intellectuals and ordinary citizens/subjects (depending on the moment) have wrestled with Eritrean identity in spatial terms, as members of a former colonial territory, a status which supposedly awarded them the basics of modernity but which also denied them the freedoms which they would otherwise not have been able to realise through righteous nationalist struggle—to put it somewhat teleologically. But their identity needed to be defined in temporal terms, too—for Eritrean nationalism was based on a fundamental rejection of Abyssinian time, a temporal plane which would absorb and flatten them, and deny them, again, a set of freedoms through which to imagine their own timings and chronologies and trajectories. Ultimately, this is a country haunted by the past, and by the dead, and the graves are shallow.

xxxi

1

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

It is the mid-1990s. In the world of Africanist scholarship, thoughts are focused on paradox—the hope offered by the end of apartheid in South Africa alongside mass murder in Rwanda—but also on the end of the Cold War, and what that might mean for democracy and development in Africa. Historians think about ethnicity, identity and, increasingly and predominantly, the impact of the colonial moment, which is now very much centre stage in historical scholarship on the continent. It feels as though Africa is on the cusp of something, but it isn’t entirely clear what that might be.   Eritrea is in the first flush of independent sovereignty after three decades of war. During that time, from 1961 to 1991, the country, a former Italian colony later attached to Ethiopia, was engaged in a prolonged struggle for independence. The first few years of ‘the struggle’, in local shorthand, were dominated by the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), which split in the early 1970s

1

SHALLOW GRAVES

and which was in time largely supplanted by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) following a brief but violent conflict between the two movements: a struggle within the struggle. Now, however, in the mid-1990s, the EPLF is absolutely dominant and the civil war isn’t talked about much. It is a moment of triumph, yet Eritrea is a largely unknown, curiously neglected little slice of coastal Horn of Africa. This place isn’t Nigeria, or Kenya, or South Africa, or even Uganda, magnets of international analysis and comment and strategic interest and inward investment. And it isn’t Ethiopia, on which much more in due course. True, the study of violent conflict in modern Africa is about to become rather more fashionable than it has been since the new era of Africanist historical scholarship in the 1960s; but Eritrea—at one time, until superseded by Sudan, claiming the longest war on the continent—barely registers in discussions. At this moment, in the middle of the last decade of the twentieth century, there are a small number of long-term observers, participants, analysts—journalists, activists, anthropologists, political scientists—who have been there since the 1970s, and in some cases earlier. They are now joined by a new batch, equally small in number, who come in after independence, myself included, excited and impressionable. We believe we have joined a special group. A secret circle, almost.   Eritrea is simultaneously upbeat and haunted; resilient and damaged. There are shadows, if you know where 2

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

to look; mutterings about the nasty treatment of Jehovah’s Witnesses and anyone else who doesn’t quite buy into the EPLF agenda. There are some quiet sceptics, for whom the EPLF is simply another ‘regime’ to be managed, monitored and ultimately mediated. But I confess that, although I’m aware of them, I hardly notice them. Overwhelmingly, there is relief, even disbelief, and certainly immense pride that Eritrea is finally ‘free’, and among Eritreans and ferenji alike the benefit of doubt is in ample supply. The country is embarking on the construction of a national history, the building of a national narrative. It is a time of selective reflection on the dynamics which have shaped the place. We newbies eagerly read Ruth Iyob and Dan Connell and Roy Pateman, Bereket Habte Selassie and Lionel Cliffe,1 and get to grips with the parameters within which that history is being forged. We get to know our Eritrean hosts as much as possible, and those of us who stick around a while make some firm friends, and occasionally more. We ask questions and sometimes we get answers. We all end up with an opinion.   The celebration on 24 May 1993 which marks Eritrea’s metamorphosis from toxic appendage of Ethiopia to full-fledged member of the family of sovereign nations is a poignant one indeed. The great and the good from both sides of the border are in attendance, commanders and scions of the two new political organisations in charge of the region’s destiny: the EPLF and  

3

SHALLOW GRAVES

the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) stand side by side, having apparently fought the war to end all wars—the borrowing is no triviality—and having seemingly dispatched the terrors of the past into, well, the past. Of the various guests, the presence of Meles Zenawi is perhaps the most significant. The new Ethiopian leader delivers a speech in which he asserts his fervent hope that the wounds of the past will now heal, that the great ideological, national and ethnic divides which have driven the two countries for several decades will now be consigned to history.2 Scholars might pick over them, but the men of destiny have other, grander visions.   The idea that things might be ‘consigned to history’ is significant, and reflects a wider use of the term in public political discourse elsewhere in the world—that somehow history is a place where one could dump toxic materials, and slam the door shut; a kind of creepy basement for storing bad feelings, or a sewer into which corporate modernity might pour those materials which are now of little use. With that achieved, everyone might dust themselves down and ‘move on’, to use a phrase much favoured by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998 in the context of the Northern Irish peace process.3 For US President Bill Clinton, also heavily invested in those negotiations, the protagonists in the Northern Irish conflict are like drunks in a bar, addicted to centuries of fighting and unable to walk away from it. They need to 4

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

“get over 600 years of religious fights”.4 Now peace has been signed. Job done; unpleasant chapter closed; onwards and upwards. Meles and Isaias Afewerki certainly seem to be the products of a brave new world in the early and mid-1990s: part of what is described as an African renaissance, an idea with its roots in the midtwentieth century and now revived by Thabo Mbeki in South Africa and, later, Clinton himself. The premise is rebirth: an eschewal of the past, with all its horrible vagaries as well as nasty predictabilities. After all, Francis Fukuyama, the straw man of long-term critics of neoliberalism or the harsher repercussions of globalisation, has proclaimed the end of history, and the Cold War is over.5 ‘History’—in so far as it is comprehended as a set of unfortunate if necessary experiments in human wellbeing, and almost with an agency of its own—is no longer required. Indeed it is an expensive drain on everyone’s bottom line, and an active impediment to further progress.   There is certainly something compelling about the idea of forgetting, which might even, in certain circumstances, be regarded as a public duty.6 But it is often rather more difficult to achieve than its exponents seem to imagine. Meles’s speech in Asmara in May 1993 is well received; and by the end of the year, the Eritrean and Ethiopian governments have signed a series of agreements which put a legal and diplomatic seal on the door behind which horrible histories lurk. A senior 5

SHALLOW GRAVES

EPLF figure even declares that the movement itself needs to exist no longer, for its job is done—the hardfought independence of Eritrea—as though the Front itself had been simply a historical plot device, a vehicle for the achievement of a destiny which, now secured, renders the vehicle itself neither necessary nor desirable.7 Yet a few months later, it is clear that other dynamics are altogether more active. When Isaias makes his inaugural speech to the OAU, he uses the occasion to lambast the organisation for its manifest failings—the most prominent of which is the lack of support it had offered to the EPLF itself during its struggle.8 Isaias is angry; history is not dead; grievances run deep. Eritrea, it soon transpires, is a nation in the grip of the past, and governed by the dead. And Ethiopia, too, is haunted by history, struggling with its ability to mobilise famed antiquity, on the one hand, and move beyond that past into the sunlit uplands of developmental modernity, on the other. The two countries are indelibly intertwined in space and time.   Be that as it may, at the University of Asmara, my own place of employment, we are excited. Now that the long war is over, surely, this is the time to look at the past full in the face and do something about it. I’m involved in the design and implementation of the country’s first undergraduate history programme. We think about Africa, and the region, but above all we position core modules on Eritrea at the heart of our new curriculum. 6

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

It feels like the most enormous privilege imaginable. Embarrassing though it is to confess, I feel we are a pioneering little History Department which will punch way above its weight, leading a thoroughgoing revisionism across the Horn of Africa, repositioning Eritrean history from out of Ethiopia’s shadow and building a series of new contours along which the region’s history can be understood. My ambitions are almost boundless. We’re just like the History Department at Dar es Salaam in the 1960s, I tell myself (and others, if they’ll listen).9   Those hopes and insufferable ferenji conceits notwithstanding, there is a nagging issue. Eritrea is shaped by a militant territorial nationalism which is the outcome of decades of seeming isolation. It is at odds with the supposed moment of post-Cold War globalisation and the triumph of transnational neoliberalism. Even in its newfound sovereignty, its seat at the UN warming up, Eritrea feels isolated, or certainly secluded. Sure, there is a substantial international presence now, following the EPLF’s triumph on the field of battle, and not just the smattering of historians and political scientists and stringers for the big news agencies. But the place feels secluded and off the beaten track. Few people back in the UK know much about it. I find that I have to explain where it is all the time—“it used to be part of Ethiopia …” is the sentence I offer, repeatedly. A senior academic in London tells me before I go that I’ll love Asmara, which he erroneously describes as a beautiful port city 7

SHALLOW GRAVES

on the Red Sea. Still, the seclusion soon feels precious— those of us who have come for the long haul believe we are part of a special group—and even the militant nationalism feels more of an opportunity than an obstacle. I think of Menelik’s Addis Ababa just after Adwa. Embassies spring up; donors and NGOs come to town, eager to help. They rent the nice villas, the former Italian residences, in Tiravolo suburb and bring loans and development plans and jobs for a lucky English-speaking local cohort. The EPLF make it clear, though, that while assistance is welcome, all development will be undertaken by them, and that NGOs and other outside agencies need to fall into line with their plans and initiatives. It is all quite thrilling.   There is one other great advantage to Eritrea, which is its proximity to Ethiopia itself, a great place to visit for a quick break if you have a bit of cash and a few days to spare. Addis is the big metropolis, where all sorts of crazy stuff happens—the nightlife, the cultural vigour, the history. Not like little Asmara, pretty but somehow inhibited, in a tough, rocky neighbourhood, its people friendly and welcoming but also cautious, conservative, wary, its cultural life defined by violence and loss. Here, in the mid-1990s, hardly anyone has spotted, or at least drawn attention to, the simmering problems between the governments in Asmara and Addis. Roy Pateman notably tells us, in the second edition of his popular book published in early 1998, that as long as these two 8

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

regimes remain in place, there is zero risk of another war.10 Only John Young has noticed a problem, in a 1996 article which soon takes on the lustre of remarkable prescience. I later get in on the act, wise after the event.11 But for the moment, the popular narrative is peace and reconstruction.12 Everything else is a blip, a hiccup. Toward the end of 1997, the new currency is launched, the nakfa, named after the northern redoubt of the liberation war. There is much celebration in bars and on the streets. Only the death of Yemane Baria, beloved Tigrinya singer, darkens the mood, briefly. Within a few weeks, stories emerge about trouble at the Ethiopian border involving people trying to pay for petrol and other things in nakfa, but being told laughingly by Ethiopian traders that they don’t recognise this curious, pretend money. Either pay in Ethiopian birr or in US dollars, they say. In one case, a friend tells me that his nakfa is burnt in front of him by a contemptuous shopkeeper. But no matter: people remain upbeat and jubilant. The war is still months away.   It is the mid-1990s. It feels like a time of possibilities. For the historian, in particular: what kinds of historical vistas might now be possible in this radically altered region in a radically altered world? Eritrea feels battered and a little ragged round the edges; but it essentially works and feels upward in trajectory. Even though it is obviously haunted by the past, reflected in the unabashed desire to broadcast a singular historical narrative, 9

SHALLOW GRAVES

it seems to offer the opportunity to rewrite the history of the region: Eritrea as an arena of armed struggle, but at the same time a platform for social-democratic transformation, in partnership with like-minded movements in Ethiopia; a progressive nation made from the most inauspicious of beginnings. I quickly become an ardent Eri-phile and, what’s more, an admirer of President Isaias Afewerki and the EPLF. It looks like history is, finally, on their side. It also looks like they knew, all along, that it would be. In fact this is perhaps the most potent thing about them; the rest of us are just catching up.  

* * * It is sometime between the signing of the Algiers Agreement, in December 2000, and the political clampdown on the part of the Eritrean government in September 2001: a few months of curious respite, melancholy, relief, horror, following two and a half years of war with Ethiopia. A very strange time, and stranger still in retrospect. No one is quite sure what has just happened— though Eritrea has ‘survived’, just—and few can be certain of what is to come. It is sometime during those eerie months when I sit one evening with a former leading figure from the liberation struggle era. He has long since stopped drinking alcohol—for those reasons about which no one talks, but which are fairly obvious—though he is generous in the provision of whisky at his comfortable home in central Asmara. He is not Sha’abiyya, but a 10

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

prominent former leader of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), known in shorthand as Jebha (‘Front’). And in the midst of conversation he gestures vaguely in the direction of the President’s Palace, on the junction of Independence and Martyrs Avenue. “The problem is”, he intones, quietly but authoritatively—he has a rather portentous manner, even when discussing the merits of various pizza toppings in the nearby Italian restaurant—“the problem is that they know” (again, the thrusting thumb toward the seat of government) “that the real heroes of the revolution are deep under the ground.”   Much private conversation as well as public discourse during the war is concerned not directly with the war itself, but with the armed struggle and the EPLF. The history appears seamless, the fighting simply the latest visceral manifestation of a long tradition of cross-border violence and of the testing of Eritrean nationhood. I spend much of the war getting to know the Sha’abiyya, and talking to former fighters who in a few cases also become friends, for a time at least. Against the backdrop of Badme, Tsorona and Zalambessa, of Bure and Adi Quala, through 1999 and 2000, we talk about ‘the Field’, its triumphs and tribulations, the untrustworthy and bloodthirsty and venal Woyane.13 It seems the natural thing to do. That war is given new meaning, new vigour, by this one.   Deep under the ground: in many ways, it is a very Jebha thing to say. After all, the ELF martyrs are  

11

SHALLOW GRAVES

largely forgotten, or at least some think so, and the Front’s contribution is itself buried deep within Sha’abiyya histories of the war. The civil war between the two movements in the 1970s is hinted at and alluded to, but never discussed in any depth; not now, at a time when hard-won nationhood is under assault. My friend might be referring to his fallen and forgotten ELF compatriots. It strikes me as a profound and beautifully simple statement on Eritrea’s capacity for both remembering and forgetting. In any case, it is increasingly clear that the bodies of the revolution have in fact not been buried very deep. The idea of death and burial, of mourning and commemoration, has come to define Eritrea.   Yet my Jebha companion finds a moment to pause in his ruminations on the politics of sacrifice and of revolutionary violence. He remembers an Eritrea which was not about armed struggle, or quotidian death, or Ethiopian persecution. He recalls, momentarily but with deep sadness, the port of Massawa in the 1950s and 1960s: “It was like Monte Carlo,” he half-whispers, thinking about the expensive yachts berthed there, the glistening Red Sea just beyond, the soaring temperatures that made movement during the day difficult, and the sophisticated nightlife that drew the owners of the yachts onto the causeway. They dined on the most excellent fish, and drank the finest booze, served by wellupholstered waiters. Massawa in the 1960s: good times; 12

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

a Monte Carlo on the Red Sea, just before the violence of the revolution consumed everything. * * * “We were children of the sixties,” slurs Dawit, a senior figure in the EPLF and now the government, as he lurches—staring intensely, and intensely drunk—at the bar in a popular late-night haunt in Asmara. I have asked him why, at the tender age of fourteen, he had begun his long dalliance with the liberation struggle. It is a crude, simplistic question, though in truth the only one which he is capable of answering in his present condition. Dawit is a fixture on the nightclub scene: routinely inebriated, but with remarkable stamina, and an ability, especially in dangerous times, never to be too loosetongued even when completely drunk. But he is a terrific source of anecdotes. And on this night, he remembers feeling desperately affronted in 1962, or shortly thereafter—he can’t remember precisely—soon after Ethiopia’s abolition of the federal arrangement and its annexation of Eritrea. He was outraged, above all, by the sight of Ethiopian soldiers barefoot, occupying Asmara and taking up garrisons across the city. Eritrean police had long been well equipped, civilised: boots, uniforms, modern arms. They were disciplined, professional, trained. They marked Eritrea above Ethiopia, which to this generation—the angry young men and women, schoolchildren in the 1950s, revolutionaries in the 1960s—was emphat 13

SHALLOW GRAVES

ically not the great motherland of antiquity, the centre of a historic civilisation with which all peoples in the region (and especially the Tigrinya of highland Eritrea) would want to belong. No: Ethiopia was a feudal monstrosity, backward and undeveloped, as evidenced in this barefoot rabble which had the audacity—emboldened as they were by the inertia of an indifferent international order—to march into Eritrea and sully its nascent modernity and insult its identity. And so Dawit, still in school, made his connections with the representatives of the ELF, as did so many students across the territory in the early and mid-1960s. Dawit now regards himself as an idealist, a word he repeats endlessly when intoxicated, and he believes fervently in Eritrea’s destiny and in its special history.   But there have long been disagreements over the precise direction of that history, and the nature of destiny. The armed struggle itself had begun with new conceptions of time and space. That dramatic reconfiguration was instigated in inauspicious circumstances by the Eritrean Liberation Movement (ELM), involving a group of young Muslim men in Port Sudan in the late 1950s, invigorated by Sudan’s newfound sovereignty. They felt greater affinity with Sudan, indeed, than with the Holy Empire to the south. But they were swiftly supplanted by the ELF, which was possessed of a wider, trans-regional historical vision: theirs was a history which centred Eritrea not on its highland plateau, where 14

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

people had a compromised affinity with Ethiopia, but on its lowlands and northern mountains. Here, there were well-worn routes to Sudan and Egypt, and there was the baking coast, where fishermen and traders had co-ownership of the Red Sea basin and networks of kinship and commerce across the Middle East. There was no Solomon-and-Sheba mythology here, but rather a rich, proud heritage spanning Arabia, the Upper Nile, the Levant, the Euphrates and the Tigris. As the violence engulfed the nation, so time was sent scattering, like so many birds in the face of forest fire, and many strove to locate Eritrea’s place in the great temporal plane. War gave Eritrea new histories.   Eritrean revolutionaries continued to wrestle with time and memory, and it cleaved the nationalist movement in two. There was episodic violence between the ELF and the EPLF; Eritrean against Eritrean. The emergence and eventual triumph of the EPLF in the course of the 1970s, and the vicissitudes of the liberation war itself, meant the increasing significance of ideas about isolation, self-reliance, solipsism. Increasingly, none of the temporal cultures available locally were to be trusted: not the sectarian, Islamic regionalism of the ELF, nor the perfidious, suffocating narratives of Ethiopia. And so Eritrea would have its own time, its own set of historical reference points. Thus there followed a fundamental clash between deep-seated historicism—the vision of antiquity implicit or explicit in the Ethiopian state-building project—and 15

SHALLOW GRAVES

a newer form of foreshortening, the more presentist vision of the EPLF in Eritrea, which was nonetheless derived from the same tradition. Its modern-era martyrstruggle narrative, and the ‘national democratic programme’ as finalised at the 1987 Congress,14 were in many ways an attempt, whether consciously or subliminally, to counter the grand narrative of Solomonic Ethiopia and the Kebra Negast.15 The struggle gave Eritreans the power to alter time itself and shape this and subsequent generations. The EPLF eschewed the Ethiopian grand narrative, naturally enough, but in some ways too they were in competition with it, and sought a radical alternative. Like the Kebra Negast, there was a solipsistic core in that alternative vision: only select groups could partake of it and belong to it. Unlike the Kebra Negast, however, the EPLF’s vision—encapsulated in the national programme produced at the 1987 second congress—was a full embrace of modernity, and characterised by a presentist historicity. But it was also a lonely vision, for the struggle was rooted in a curious solitude. That sense of solitude is neatly captured by the writer and journalist Jeremy Harding, who visited the Front in the late 1980s when it was still based in the northern mountains. He recalls gazing at the night sky with his Eritrean guide as an airliner eased its way across a blanket of stars. “Probably it comes from Nairobi and maybe it is going to Jeddah,” the guide, Fesseha, comments. “The stewardesses are serving cocktails, beer, 16

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

whisky—anything you want—and the passengers are relaxing. Even the slightest thing about our lives down here, they do not need to know it. They have opened their magazines and pulled down the trays from the seats in front. They are waiting for the drinks.”16   Time zones, one on top of the other; parallel lives. Far beneath that blanket of stars, the EPLF carves its revolution from the rock in the northern mountains: the schools, the hospitals, the factories. Fighters’ shoes from rubber tyres; recycled weaponry; sanitary products and artificial limbs in the underground caverns, as Ethiopian planes, serviced by Soviet technicians, bomb the surface above. Above all, the resolve, and the unity, and the discipline. Here is the nation made, for good or ill. And now, as a new war rages along the border, the cult of the liberation struggle sits at the core of the nation. Eritrea has been forged in fire and sacrifice; this is nothing new. War had made these men and women, and those of us fortunate enough to get to know some of them are offered glimpses into that world. Always guarded, but warm and generous at the same time, they relate the histories that made them to those they come to trust, a little. * * * A bunch of them from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are sent to the University to complete certificate courses in politics and international relations. There is a history 17

SHALLOW GRAVES

component, and they become my students, which is a wholly ridiculous situation, and one which results in me becoming a guerrilla groupie. They are mostly mid-ranking, lieutenant-colonels and the like, smart and funny. Many of them are already serving diplomats, with no particular training, but they don’t need training; they are tegadelay, EPLF veterans. They take it upon themselves to be my tutors in the history of the struggle. A certain extracurricular routine develops. I teach them introductory courses on world and African history. We finish a particular class, on Fanon, or some other instance of armed struggle elsewhere in Africa, or the French Revolution, or the First World War. And having listened politely and taken notes, they await the end of the class. And then they say, actually we really know all this stuff already—we learnt it in the Field—so, let’s go somewhere in town and talk, and we go drinking somewhere in the city. They can certainly drink. They talk about the Field, Ethiopia, command structures, weapons, Eritrea, the culture that binds them together (inasmuch as they could make me understand that). And I listen, rapt, and believe myself to be the luckiest person on earth. One particular group become buddies of mine, and I am very proud of the fact. I meet them as their half-baked lecturer, new PhD still glinting like a silly bauble, and they humour me. But in 1999 and 2000 they decide to further my education. I am provided with a glimpse into an inner world; permitted to spend some time as a guest on the outer 18

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

circle of their experience, of their camaraderie, and of the intimate histories that made up the nation.   Lt-Col. Tesfai is in some ways the archetype, and the unspoken leader of the group. He is quiet, stoical, short and stocky, given to bursts of humour, but he can be brooding and laconic, even when it was his idea to socialise. He conveys a healthy cynicism about the world but doesn’t talk much about politics per se. Like many of his cohort, he is diabetic, and injects himself when we are out boozing freely. Typically, he is divorced, having married in the Field (his ex-wife is also a fighter), but with independence came the realisation that the union was no longer feasible. He is generous to a fault. He once becomes angry with me for quietly paying the bill after an evening out, but the only reason I do so is that we have been running around together for months and I haven’t been permitted to pay for a single beer. He is not impressed, and tells me never to do it again. He possesses a striking outer calm—until one day he chases a very young boy, who has been begging, down Independence Avenue in broad daylight because the kid says something rude to him in Tigrinya when he is refused money. And he catches the boy, too—as I watch him, shocked and embarrassed, careering down the street, I think he’ll never manage to catch the unfortunate wee lad—and beats him, drawing a small but concerned crowd. This is an uncharacteristic outburst from someone normally remarkably controlled. Later, when I press him on what 19

SHALLOW GRAVES

the boy had said to enrage him, he won’t elaborate, except to imply that the remark had been something to do with him being a former fighter.   Tesfai is a product of the Sha’abiyya. It is in every fibre of his compact, strong physicality, and in his every modest gesture and quiet utterance. When he was assigned to a diplomatic posting in the Gulf, he got himself a new wife, an Eritrean woman who had been living in the UAE for quite some time, and brought her back to Asmara. His home is furnished with tables and chairs and ashtrays and ornaments that speak of shopping trips in Dubai. But he is less keen for me to have an Eritrean girlfriend, preferring to suggest that there “are plenty of ladies”—prostitutes—to keep me company if I need it. It is a strikingly chaste view of the nation’s physical composition: prostitutes are okay, but otherwise don’t get involved. Whether it’s because I’m a ferenji, or whether the woman I happen to be interested in at that moment was in fact born and raised in Addis Ababa—though no less Eritrean for that—I have no idea.   He introduces me to the backstreets of Asmara, and to the forgotten heroines of the nationalist revolution. One day, in a nondescript café—there are thousands of them in Eritrea—somewhere behind the central Post Office, he calls over the owner—a stout, smiling, matronly woman. She embraces him warmly, and sits with us. An old friend, perhaps a relative, I think. But I later discover that she had been a member of an EPLF cell in the city, and had been imprisoned and tortured by 20

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

the Derg. She had lost children in the struggle. Now she sells tea and beer and pastries in a modest establishment, of which there were dozens across the city, her name enshrined nowhere. But people know who she is, what she had been, what she had sacrificed.   Tesfai and his friends had made it through the liberation struggle in reasonably good nick, despite the usual health complaints arising from participation in the Field: bullet wounds, embedded shrapnel, chronic diabetes. But they regularly take me to a place called Denden. Denden—named after a hill outside Nakfa which had been one of the redoubts of the liberation struggle—was a residential complex for disabled exfighters on the site of Kagnew, the old US army base, outside Asmara city centre. They did so to remind me— not in so many words, they would never do anything that unsubtle—of the price that had been paid by others in pursuit of a nation. The bonds they have with these less fortunate comrades are beyond deep. Tesfai tells me how, by mutual consent, he impregnated a woman, a double-amputee who had lost her legs in the struggle and who had been unable to find a partner, living on the borders of subsistence in Denden. We go together to the child’s christening party, where the Johnnie Walker flows liberally and the baby’s face is stuffed with Italian cake and even a glug of whisky. The mother, scarred and brutalised by the struggle, is proud and happy. Tesfai tells me that, “in her situation”, the most precious gift he 21

SHALLOW GRAVES

could give her was a child (a son, even better) who will look after her when she is old. She has given her past; Tesfai has given her a future. Perhaps it is a simple oldfashioned extramarital affair disguised as an act of beneficence, but I don’t think so. The quiet earnestness with which he tells me of her plight and what he had decided to do convinces me otherwise.   And now a new generation of Eritreans are dying at Tsorona and Zalambessa. Together, Tesfai and I drive around the Kebessa;17 I, waiting nervously for news of the outcome of the fighting, Tesfai calm and reassuring and insistent that we go to Debarwa or wherever to check out some new hotel or restaurant or bet shai. We would sit in the invariably faux-marbled bars and courtyards of these places, sipping beers, talking about the Woyane and the struggle. As much as Tesfai permits it, that is: we talk for a while, and then he abruptly draws matters to a close with a grin, and says, “So, Rich, let’s go. Let’s do something else.” As the war drags on, the history of the liberation struggle is thrown into stark relief; maybe it takes on a greater lustre than might otherwise have been the case. Amid the daily reports of fighting, or in the months of seemingly interminable waiting for the fighting to resolve things one way or the other, I have become drawn into that history, and have become enmeshed in a different epoch, which resonates as this next phase of violence unfolds before us. * * * 22

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

The younger ex-fighters, those who joined toward the end of the 1980s, also talk of their lives, their personal histories, being inextricably bound up with the Front. Their stories are those of the EPLF itself, and make up the history of the nation. Like Medhanie, who has grown up with the Front, quite literally, from dry riverbed schoolboy, to musician and entertainer and, now, journalist in the Ministry of Information, where he is charged with broadcasting the impact of this latest Ethiopian aggression and recording the building of the nation, community by community. Medhanie is animated on the subject of the EPLF’s ethos of maximising the potential of its members, giving them purpose and meaning.   I travel north with Medhanie and some of his colleagues, into Sahel. To get there, we move among memorials and clamber over the jagged, splintered surface of time itself. History is the landscape; the landscape is history. The supposed contrast between the Tigrinya—a historicised people with a temporal trajectory and a clear future—and the Tigre, apparently trapped in stasis, with neither history nor future— becomes stark. The change-making, urbanised Tigrinya look down on their benighted, timeless fellow Eritreans, onlookers as colonial rule and subsequent revolution made Eritrea; the huddled, ragged multitudes squatting motionless at the edges of the carefully demarcated estate. In the 1840s Walter Plowden, British pro-consul and a relatively sensitive observer of Habesha affairs, 23

SHALLOW GRAVES

wrote about these mountains. He travelled here on a mission to Ras Ali, at a time when ‘Ethiopia’ itself had been rendered asunder by internal conflict and violent regionalism; the polity existed in name only. As he surveyed the various communities, he found himself on the frontiers of the ‘Abyssinian Empire’.18 These were the peoples beyond the direct control of the ancient Habesha imperium, carving out their intricate social and political structures in the hills and defiles between the Ethiopian massif and the Red Sea coast of modern Eritrea and Sudan. The Tigre are the second largest ethnic group in Eritrea, and have had their own part to play in this region’s history. But my Tigrinya companions are less than complimentary about them, as we move through their scattered settlements on the way north. Medhanie begins to rehearse the familiar narrative, one that I’ve heard many times: that the EPLF had always sought to construct one nation, to bring people together and, while recognising and celebrating diversity, build strength through unity. All ethnic groups are joined in the visions of nationhood articulated by the Sha’abiyya. But once we start driving past the distinctive, rotund huts of the Tigre, my companions shake their heads, bemused: “Agh, these poor simple folks. And lazy, too. What can you do!” The Tigrinya have tried to bring civilisation and modernity to these wild regions, to rocky Sahel, in ways that Plowden’s fractious Abyssinians could only dream of doing. 24

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

  We pass through Afabet, scene of the famous EPLF victory in March 1988. For a decade, the EPLF had been penned up in the northern mountains, holding off repeated ground assaults and aerial bombardment by the Ethiopian army, the latter reinforced by Soviet arms, equipment and personnel. But in the course of the mid1980s, they had begun to inch forward, becoming ever more daring in their switch from desperate defence to increasingly assured offence. Shortly before the encounter at Afabet, the EPLF had broken through the Ethiopian positions around Nakfa, whereupon the Ethiopian army decided on a limited withdrawal southward. The Ethiopian forces were winding their way through the narrow valley just north of Afabet, but the EPLF moved rapidly—including, Spartan-style, on foot—along the ridges on either side of the valley, overtaking the retreating Ethiopians and setting up a trap. The rear EPLF unit began shelling the Ethiopian tanks, and one incredibly skilful—or lucky—shot hit the lead tank, which was at that moment approaching the narrow defile through which only one vehicle can pass at any one time. The destruction of this tank blocked the way of the retreating force, which was now trapped in the valley. The EPLF attacked the entombed column from both the rear and the surrounding ridges. As the fate of the Ethiopians became clear, the Ethiopian air force was ordered in to destroy all vehicles or equipment which might be captured by the Eritreans. 25

SHALLOW GRAVES

  A massacre of tragic proportions ensued. The EPLF still managed to capture a fair amount of ordnance, including heavy artillery. Meanwhile an advance Eritrean force had now reached Afabet itself, and the panicked Ethiopian military command decided to evacuate the town and retreat still further—back toward Keren—while fears that the Eritreans might also now be able to cut the Keren–Agordat road, linking the highlands with the western lowlands, led to the withdrawal of the bulk of the Ethiopian army in Gash-Barka province. The Ethiopians pulled out of the key regional centres of Tessenei, Barentu and Agordat, and effectively abandoned the west and north of Eritrea to the liberation forces.   The battle of Afabet, lasting just a few days, was momentous. At the time, it was described in memorable terms by the veteran journalist and Afrophile scholar Basil Davidson. Davidson, long an ardent supporter of the Eritrean struggle for independence, declared that not since the rout of a French force at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 had there been such a momentous triumph for an anticolonial army, and one—as in the case of Indochina— against all conventional odds.19 In truth, of course, it was the outcome of years of resilience and planning on the part of the EPLF. It may not have made the end of Ethiopian occupation of Eritrea ‘inevitable’, but it ended any hope the Ethiopian government had of crushing the liberation forces and of ever holding Eritrea securely.  

26

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

These events unfolded scarcely a decade earlier, yet by the time I and my Eritrean colleagues, each of them a veteran of the liberation war, gaze on the scene, it has already acquired quasi-mythical status. Medhanie walks me across the valley and breathlessly explains the details; the significance for him and their nation is evident. The place of the battle itself has a strangely haunted, spiritual feel. It is a wild, open-air cathedral; a holy place on the edge of the mountain stronghold.   We move on, heading north into Sahel, along halfroads and half-riverbeds, struggling with multiple flat tyres. And then we come to Nakfa, the ultimate monument to Sha’abiyya military power and political vision, where the revolution is carved out of the rock itself. We are now moving through time—backwards, in that we arrive in the environment that made Afabet possible and long predated it; and yet forwards, too, for the spirit and culture of Nakfa now pervade Eritrea, and it is the place where the modern state was founded, later to be transposed onto a dazed and exhausted populace. In 1978–9, the EPLF, its forward units able to see the lights of the capital Asmara, and its forces in effective control of much of the country, took the dramatic but necessary decision to pull back and consolidate here, in the face of an Ethiopian army newly reinforced by Soviet support. It became known as the ‘strategic withdrawal’, and is essentially the foundation stone of the modern state.20 The leadership, including Isaias Afewerki, were well 27

SHALLOW GRAVES

versed in the revolutionary narrative of Mao’s Long March; they had long accepted that such a decision might be necessary, however difficult—and, for many, heart-breaking—it might be. Nakfa was the symbol and the centre, the final holding position of the Eritrean armed struggle, and ultimately the birthplace of the Eritrean nation as it now is, for good or ill.21 For it was in this place, notwithstanding the military setback which the strategic withdrawal involved, that the EPLF became a state-in-waiting, and honed its sense of mission, of discipline, of nation—and of history itself. The physical core is Denden, a scarily steep hill with striking panoramas to the east and south; the trenches which marked the last line of EPLF defence are still very much visible, and are (I imagine) full of ghosts, and bathed in a stony greatness. My Eritrean hosts sat in these trenches when it rained heavy ordnance, and kept at bay the Ethiopian state and a not-insignificant chunk of the Soviet Union’s military capacity. The enemy, those who would crush this movement and obliterate them, confine them to little more than a footnote in Ethiopian history, sat just metres away. How to be here, and see and feel this, and not become a complete devotee of the nationalist cause? It would be difficult not to, but in any case I have long since succumbed at this point.   We move on, driving shakily a few kilometres beyond Nakfa. After what seems like aeons, we arrive at the prisoner-of-war camp, located in a narrow valley sur28

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

rounded by steep and closely packed mountains. The camp holds a motley collection of Ethiopian soldiers, mostly seized in the most recent round of fighting. They while away the time engaged in various activities—playing volleyball, holding dancing competitions, carving woodwork, chatting idly—waiting for the respective governments in far-off Asmara and even further-off Addis Ababa to sign the formal agreement which would ‘end’ the war, and then for the Red Cross to facilitate their release and return home. It could be weeks, months, even years. No one seems to mind very much. Time has slowed; hours tick by across the rugged mountains, baked in sunlight. There are no fences in this camp; the landscape precludes the possibility of any great break-out, and, anyway, no one seems particularly motivated to escape. Escape where? Some prisoners are playing volleyball with Eritrean soldiers; Amhara prisoners are practising dancing in a nearby hut. They make up songs and little dramas about the Woyane, mostly focused on how little they seem to care for human life. It becomes a common theme as I am introduced to selected POWs for interviewing.22   The first, a young Oromo, was a volunteer. As he understood it, he was only supposed to serve for six months, and then he would be sent home, but this didn’t happen. Some comrades even committed suicide when they realised there was no release. He emphasises the ‘human wave’ tactics of the Ethiopian army. Oromo and 29

SHALLOW GRAVES

others were even sent to ‘clear’ minefields by marching across them. But Tigrayans never did this, only the other ‘tribes’. If you disobeyed, or hesitated, you were shot in the back. At first, we were told this is just a border conflict; but soon, it was clear that our main goal was to overthrow the government. There then followed much gushing about how wonderful the Eritrean government had been to them, and how they had clearly been fed lies and propaganda by their own government about how Eritreans were murderous warmongers. This is clearly not true! This is repeated almost verbatim in each interview—though it must be said that every single interviewee is evidently mightily relieved to be here in this camp, and no longer dodging bullets and shells. A twenty-five-year-old Tigrayan captive has less to say about supposed ethnic tensions within the army, and generally shrugs when questioned about these issues. He was told that the war was a matter of defence against Sha’abiyya aggression. But others are more vocal. An Amhara prisoner bemoans the fact that he had been promised 400 birr per month but was actually paid half that. However, he is robust in his interpretation of the events of 1998, when “Eritrea invaded us”. This was a matter of national defence, he declares, unblinking. Badme must be retaken—this was what the war was about, or so we were told. But when it was retaken, the war didn’t stop, and people became perplexed. Why were we still fighting? Some people asked questions, 30

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

and were imprisoned. Now Tigrayans became intent on entering Eritrea, and stealing property. We lost life because of this. The Derg had been our common enemy, and we hoped the Woyane would be better. But they have started to oppress us, and now people are feeling bad. But they don’t talk loudly.

  His Kambaata colleague recalls the recruitment sergeants coming to his village. “They promised us we’d be officers, and work only for the development of the country. But then we were taken by force at night, and found ourselves on the front line. We were ill-treated by Tigrayans,” he says, who got better food and clothing. “We were sent over minefields, while the Tigrayans stayed at the back. Even dead Tigrayans get better treatment: their soldiers get a proper burial.” He says they “set Badme free”—like others, he evidently has no qualms about asserting this in front of the Eritrean officers, who don’t show any reaction at the choice of words—but that then the war went on. “Why? we asked. Some people who asked that were killed. The commanders told them: ‘We will destroy all of Eritrea, kill all of them.’”   Now a very young man from Gambela, in the southwest. He says he’s eighteen, but he looks so much younger. It’s a familiar story: he evidently joined for the money but was paid only half what was promised. He didn’t know what the war was about—“I don’t even speak Amharic!” he says, exasperatedly, and so had no idea what was being said when the news came on. He 31

SHALLOW GRAVES

really was in another man’s army. His Somali comrade had been promised 800 birr when he joined up, but again was paid only 200. He was recruited from school in his village in the Ogaden. A quick war, dismiss the Sha’abiyya, and then back to school, shouted the recruiting officers. Now he is here. He knew nothing about Eritrea before joining up, though he is aware that many people in the Ogaden are sympathetic toward Eritrea,23 and that anti-Woyane movements have some links with Eritrea. But otherwise he doesn’t know anything. All he knows now is that Tigrayans are also treated well in this army, but he had no shoes.   A Gurage, who had been a professional soldier since the early 1980s, tells us that he had been a soldier in the Derg army. But defeat in 1991 meant opportunities for ‘non-political’ soldiers like him: having proven his political neutrality, his professionalism and historical invisibility, he was transferred into the Woyane army as a military trainer. Trainers were much needed, he says: the new Ethiopian army under the EPRDF was pretty poorly trained, with no capacity to function as a national force. The Derg had operated a modern military system, and brought in advice from ‘different countries’ (he adds, somewhat euphemistically—referring, of course, chiefly to the USSR and Cuba). And their tactics were humane, civilised; none of the ‘human wave’ assaults practised by the Woyane, who were ‘primitive’ and failed to understand the complexities of conventional war. 32

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

“They have killed so many with their primitive system,” he says, mournfully. He admires the Eritrean Defence Force, he asserts—without so much as a glance at the camp commander sitting alongside me. They don’t want to risk lives. But the Woyane army comprise politically naive recruits who are prodded forward from behind.   And so, Eritrean soldier and Ethiopian prisoner—a stone’s throw from Nakfa, the bastion of nationalist resistance and the scene of so much bloodshed just a few years earlier—nod in agreement about how professional and honourable the Derg military had been, compared to ‘this lot’. On that, it seems, at this particular moment in time, everyone can agree.   Our Gurage informant didn’t accept the original ‘Ethiopia-as-victim’ argument, he tells us. This wasn’t about Badme, even at the beginning. “Where is Badme, anyway? None of us knew!” he exclaims. In his opinion, the intention has always been the recapture of Massawa and Assab: glistening historic jewels on the scorched Red Sea coast, which didn’t rightly belong to an independent state, and certainly not one like that run by the Sha’abiyya. And then he and his men were told, officially, that the aim was the reconquest of Eritrea, with the overarching objective of its reincorporation into Ethiopia: where it had always belonged. Their mission was to correct this abnormal, unacceptable historical aberration. He says there was some surprise and scepticism, and even some of his comrades asked, “At first we were being 33

SHALLOW GRAVES

invaded; now we are the invaders. Who will be responsible for this?” The answer came: “All Ethiopians will be responsible.” Meanwhile, as a Gurage—a small ethnic group to the south-west of Addis Ababa—he was keenly aware of historical ethnic cleavages. Tigrayans were always protected, if at all possible, he declares. Most of the dead were from other groups. Tigrayans stayed at the back, pushing them forward. Always illit­ erate Tigrayans are officers! he spits. And then, again, this time fixing me with his gaze, “the Eritrean army is the best.” This is great propaganda, obviously—though I’m the only member of the audience—but it must be said that the Eritrean soldiers present remain stonily impassive, even uninterested.   And so it goes on; each story is poignantly individual, but the message is a collective one, and they speak to the multitude of histories that haunt this region. As we leave the hut where the interviews have taken place, an Eritrean soldier gestures around the camp and says, just a little bitterly: “They have a good life here. It’s all politics. They’re better treated than our own people, and some of our own soldiers!” I’m taken to the bakery where giant ovens are operated round the clock to produce bread. We move to a different part of the camp and watch a performance by the prisoners, singing and dancing to their respective traditional music. It begins with Tigrinya—despite the evident hostilities in that direction expressed by some—and then a haunting Amharic 34

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

piece; then Gurage, now Oromo. Everyone sings with moving earnestness into a microphone which isn’t plugged in. The Somali guys are particularly impressive.   We now drive to another smaller ‘prison camp’ some distance away—except it’s not really a prison camp at all, but a rather charming settlement nestling among some trees. This is for those who gave themselves up. They have their own little chalets, and live largely free, unfettered lives. “They’re not exactly prisoners”, says Lul, the camp commandant. I’m allowed to interview some of them. Many of the assertions are riffs on familiar themes: the mendacity of the Woyane regime, the ubiquitous ethnic favouritism, the evident determination of the government to continue the war even after the Eritrean government had accepted the peace terms back in ’99. An Amhara platoon leader tells how he was sentenced to death for refusing to make a virtually suicidal attack, but managed to escape, crossing the lines to the Eritreans. The man who issued the death sentence later followed him, and is now in this very camp. But for some reason he’s unavailable for an interview. A Tigrayan tells of his own frustrations: I came here because I oppose the objectives of the war. The Woyane have been in power since 1991, and in that time there has been no development, no progress. People are complaining. So the war was waged deliberately to distract people, and fundamentally was aimed at the capture of Massawa and Assab. They had a hid 35

SHALLOW GRAVES

den agenda; the war was not sudden, but rather they were thinking of launching the war since 1991 … Because the Woyane are Tigrayan, the other groups expect that Tigray is progressing, people are rich, as if Tigray is benefiting … But ordinary people get nothing, there is no benefit; only the top leaders. They benefit and own factories, such as Badme marble factory which is owned by Meles. All the new factories are owned by the Woyane leaders.

  Several rise to the occasion and make appropriate remarks about the need for organised opposition, and for the TPLF regime to be overthrown. This is a careless, brutal regime which “does not care about people”.   If the Eritreans present have any creeping misgivings about their own plight, they are buried deep—and in any case, for most of them, the worst is still to come. As it is, they listen intently to the assertions of their Ethiopian guests, tutting empathically and nodding approvingly at the appropriate moments. As we depart, Medhanie chuckles and shakes his head, looking at me expectantly. “Ah! The Woyane … eh? eh? What kind of people are they?” But later, the camp commandant tells me that Eritreans are angry—not just at the Woyane, but at their own government. “How should we respond to this war? That’s what they say. The President always said he didn’t want to fire the first shot—but what about now?” he mutters, clearly annoyed. These are the first hints of the criticism of Isaias Afewerki that will only 36

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

grow in the months ahead. For the moment, patriotism and blind faith remain reasonably robust; but then, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, most Eritreans are still in a kind of quiet shock at the scale and intensity of the recent war, and in time neither patriotism nor faith will be enough as Eritreans begin to understand the horror of their own situation.   Ethiopians and Eritreans alike ponder their histories as they while away the hours in these baked, ancient hills. The camp represents the meeting of great temporal tectonics in those isolated mountains, themselves the creation of seismic, crunching geological shifts under way millennia earlier. The actual prisoners of war, especially the Oromo and Somali youth who seem to form the bulk of the prisoners, are the long-term victims of Solomonic imperialism in the late nineteenth century and beyond. As Menelik’s empire fanned out across the south from his Shoan core in the 1880s and 1890s, it incorporated a host of groups whose destiny, it seems, lay with a Greater Ethiopia—a historical project rooted in the spiritual and political visions of the Tigrayans and the Amhara.24 From among those same communities, long marginalised and impoverished, our prisoners had responded eagerly to the arrival of recruiting sergeants, been thrust into the centre of a war they had little interest in, and now find themselves here: near Nakfa, base camp of the Sha’abiyya revolution, and far from home. But the Eritreans are also far from the Tigrinya heart 37

SHALLOW GRAVES

lands from which most of the soldiers and officers hailed, and it is increasingly clear that they are prisoners, too, in this camp with no fences, and in a nation where territorial demarcation and temporal delimitation pervade everything.   In the wake of the war, the boundary between captive and captor is blurred. It is, in many ways, a very ‘modern’ moment: in their uniforms, in the weapons they are adept at using, in the regimes they represent, and in their optimistic wait for the intervention of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Yet it is a moment of profound historical resonance. In these mountains, at this moment, history is alive. The regimes in Asmara and Addis Ababa that have gone to war are self-proclaimed modernisers, ostensibly dusinterested in long-running squabbles and the murky savagery of the past. For these thoroughly modern guerrillas, it is supposedly about social justice and development, carried forward by armed struggle espousing the most modern of political ideologies and objectives. And yet, it seems not; for here we are, in a far corner of the northern mountains of Eritrea, with the echoes of histories of imperialism, violence and nationalism bouncing off the rocks. There is no escaping these histories, for all the public rhetoric and however much these prisoners and their guards wish it were otherwise. In some ways, this place is so still and, the homemade entertainment of the inmates and the rumble of the 38

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

bakery notwithstanding, so silent. But time is buzzing and humming here, like a pylon—surging through the individual stories of the people who have come from many places, and who want to go somewhere; and in the great temporal tectonics which bump up against one another in this putatively remote place: this is where history, in a sense, is most visible, away from the light pollution of cosmopolitan presentism.   As I leave the camp, one of the commanders—a plump, affable man who is more schoolteacher than EPLF stalwart, though in his way he’s that, too—gushes about his love of history, his eagerness to know more, to understand the meaning of ‘all this’ (he waves his arms to encompass the prisoners, and the chalet guests, and the bakery, and the hills). Perhaps, should he ever escape from the camp, he would come to the University and learn something! We exchange Asmara contact details. Months later, when he has finally managed to get out of the camp—reassigned or on leave, I can’t quite recall— we meet in Asmara. I lend him my battered old copy of J.M. Roberts’s History of the World. He’s delighted. But I don’t know what he made of Roberts’s grand sweep of the human past, or whether he considered it odd that Eritrea scarcely warranted a mention; for in the next few months, things turn decidedly nasty in the Sha’abiyya state. The government soon cracks down on all dissent, and the memory of Nakfa becomes, for many Eritreans, a millstone rather than a focus of pride or celebration.  

39

SHALLOW GRAVES

History is a burden, and time weighs heavily. I never see my friend, or my book, again. * * * One bored, beery evening, with a diverse bunch of Eritrean friends—Saba, quick-witted and urbane, with links to the local branch of Alliance Française; Haile, deportee and to all intents and purposes Ethiopian, permanently creeping around Asmara without up-to-date ID; Gebre, the gruff, sensible bar manager—I ask, in the light of everything they now know and have experienced, what it is to be Eritrean. It’s a deeply unfair question—who else could answer that question about their own homeland? They ponder silently for a while, seemingly stumped. Then Gebre suggests that really it is the experience of the armed struggle which is the defining moment in the making of the Eritrean national character. The others nod thoughtfully. Everyone agrees: Eritrean identity is all about the armed struggle, and the attributes which the violence engenders. Sacrifice, endurance, duty: this is what it is to be Eritrean. True, authentic, organic Eritrea is born through violent sacrifice. The history and memory of the armed struggle are already dominant in the 1990s, but during the war, and in the years beyond, the culture of the struggle is reified. Was there anything of substance before the struggle, before Hamed Idris Awate25 launched his war against the nefarious empire in 1961? 40

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

  Increasingly, it seems, no. Certainly, the armed struggle—and the idea of armed struggle—pervades popular political culture, and dominates political discourse: perhaps most obviously through the appearance of the enormous monument in the form of the shida, the iconic footwear of the EPLF fighter, in central Asmara. Martial music and songs from the struggle play continually on television, complete with shakily shot videos of fighters in their rocky habitat, staring moodily at the horizon, on guard against all enemies. All the while, as powerfully emotive exercises in public mourning, there are the national days of remembrance and celebration. Independence Day, 24 May, is central in the national calendar, naturally. On one occasion, during the war, the crowds gathered in Meskel Square at the far end of Liberation Avenue are treated to the usual festivities— dances and performances depicting the vanquishing of colonialism, and the steadfast heroism of the EPLF— while in the background truckloads of fresh recruits move slowly out of the city to take on the Woyane. The baton is passed, as in some grand, military relay; this is the same war, merely reprised. And then there is Martyrs’ Day, held every 20 June to remember those who died during the armed struggle, and centred on candle-lit processions of women moving through towns across the country. How poignant this is on the three occasions of Martyrs’ Day that fall during the war, with Asmara cast in darkness and haunted by the dead. The  

 

41

SHALLOW GRAVES

spectral pillars of the nation flicker in the dimmed light, and we listen to the President’s mournful pronouncements; and as the evening wears on, the bars reopen and the drink quietly flows again. On one Martyrs’ Day, late in the evening, an Eritrean friend and I find a small bar in a quiet backstreet near Meskel. In the murk of the place, he tells me, in hushed tones: “You know, the President himself shot and killed a man here … when he was very young. I don’t know, maybe twenty years old. He came in and killed an Ethiopian general.” I have no idea if it’s true. But it is presented as a crucial rite of passage, as important in its way as Awate’s shooting-up of an Ethiopian police post somewhere near Haicota on 1 September 1961. Maybe even more important. Either way, 1 September is another key date in the calendar, marking the start of the armed struggle; the occasion of much dancing and cavorting.   Eritrean literary output is limited, but what there is, is as often as not concerned with the struggle or, more broadly, with the twentieth-century history of a nation betrayed and rebuilt through its own efforts (led by the EPLF). The armed struggle narrative is an attempt to impose an unambiguous story in a place which has long had ambiguous and mixed histories, histories which seeped out on each side of multiple frontiers, and which placed in jeopardy the very essence of being Eritrean. But there are few memoirs, diaries or personal accounts written by leading figures or ordinary fighters.26 To pro 

 

42

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

duce such work is widely regarded as ‘selfish’, self-promoting; providing irrefutable evidence for individual self-awareness, which is dangerous. Few people did it, therefore: instead, it is about ‘us’, ‘we’, the collective. The EPLF even banned the azmari or waata singers in the early 1990s—the minstrels who would show up in bars to make up funny songs about individuals willing to buy them a drink and spare a little change. They weren’t ideologically acceptable. Only the collective, never the individual.   And forming the backdrop to it all was the nation’s real centre for excellence, Sawa military training camp; its significance loomed large, throwing the University of Asmara into deep shadow. It was the embodiment of historical militarism. Here was the essence of the nation expressed: as Sebhat Ephrem once described it in a speech at Sawa, the camp embodied the geographical, military, economic, political and—most important— the socio-psychological factor, the power of morality and organisation of the people. An official of the ruling PFDJ27 party bridles when I suggest that Sawa is a remarkable exercise in militarism. No, he grunts. This is about nation-building. A political project. The aim is to create a citizen army, unlike other African armies. That is Africa’s problem. Eritrea is to be different. And through the citizen army, a sense of national unity would be created. The youth impress many with their ability and dedication during the 1998–2000 war, when tens of 43

SHALLOW GRAVES

thousands join the new war and see off Ethiopia. Some old fighters later concede to me that they had feared the worst, did not believe that this new generation could do the job. “But the war taught them the ethos and culture of the armed struggle!” one tells me, enthusiastically. “They proved themselves worthy inheritors of the tega­ delay generation.” The tegadelay—the original fighters, heroes of the armed struggle—are now joined by the warsai yikealo, literally ‘those who follow the great’. * * * The search for ‘a history of one’s own’ has defined Eritreans’ long twentieth century, and it has produced a curious kind of ambivalence about the past. Colonialism, in all its guises, is regarded as fundamentally evil—and the EPLF’s own political programme makes this patently clear. Colonialism—and its nefarious handmaiden, neoimperialism—is to be combated wherever, and whenever, it is encountered.28 And yet there is a fundamental paradox at the heart of the nationalist narrative—namely that colonialism is the midwife of Eritrea itself; it is the sine qua non of the nation, whether the Italian variation or that of Abyssinia. Colonialism facilitates the realisation of Eritrea’s true destiny through armed sacrifice— the only way, in turn, such a destiny could be realised in the end. And no one could be in any doubt about the perfidious and nefarious influence of colonialism when watching national festivals and Independence Day cele44

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

brations: it appears in the guise of rubber dragons, preying on the oppressed masses, until they are slayed by heroic fighters. What distinguishes Eritrea, it seems, is the violent birthing exercise which underpinned the EPLF’s social and political revolution, steeped in modernist political thought; here is the nation born, forged in righteous fire, not inscribed by long-dead monks in decaying monasteries, stitched together by clerics, clinging to bizarre, reworked visions of Zion and of Christ, and acting in cahoots with untrustworthy and expansionist state-builders. In a curious way, Eritrea’s strength is that its history is short and heroically ferocious; Ethiopia’s weakness, and the root of the immorality at the heart of the rotten body politic, is that it has too much of a past, and of the entirely wrong kind.   But as it turns out, it isn’t quite as simple as that.

45

2

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

Under a hail of small arms and artillery fire, the young Ethiopian soldier had climbed with extraordinary determination up an impossibly steep escarpment toward the Eritrean positions. Most of his comrades had already fallen at or near the base of the cliff, or thought better of it and somehow avoided the advance which had been ordered. But onward he had gone, dodging death, driven on by something—fear, courage, patriotism; we can’t know. But when he reached the lip of the escarpment, and put his head above it, he had finally met his end. When we find him, he is slumped serenely against a rock, a single bullet hole in his forehead. In that immediate area, no other body is visible; no one had made it as far as he had. From the information we gather, he perhaps believed that Asmara itself was just beyond that sheer incline. But if he peeked eagerly over the top, he wouldn’t have seen much, and what did he did see, he wouldn’t have seen for long. He was a long way from Asmara, but fatally close to Eritrean guns.

47

SHALLOW GRAVES

  It is a couple of weeks after the ceasefire in June 2000, and I accompany a group of Eritrean journalists to the Adi Quala and Mendefera areas, where much of the recent fighting took place. I have been invited by the Ministry of Information to bear witness, they insist, to mass death and destruction. There are times during the war, and in the immediate aftermath, that the Eritrean nation is ringed with bodies, and the state becomes associated with death. Time is occupied by the fallen or by the desire to escape them. This is the point at which Eritrea becomes the land of the dead.   We walk across stretches of ground which a couple of weeks earlier had been fields of fire, and count corpses. There are glimpses of their lives among the putrid remains. In the most dreadful and immoral way, the papers and personal photos are sometimes removed from their broken bodies, and some of these are thrust into my hands. Here are their histories—standing in courtyards with family members, pictures of loved ones. These personal effects provide glimpses into those lives now extinguished. They were once young, and probably never knew much about the reasons for this war, or Eritrea. But here they are now, scattered on mountainsides and at the bottom of steep defiles. Dead Ethiopians, the latest victims of a very particular kind of memory, on a battlefield which is a peculiar kind of frontier across time itself. This is the place where Eritrean soldiers define themselves and their histories with the greatest 48

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

lucidity; where the memories of their victimhood and historical suffering are sharpest; where the moral rectitude of being Eritrean is beyond doubt, and the natural state of things. In these weeks after the fighting has stopped, as gentle winds blow across the battlefields and carry the stench of the dead far and wide, there is no doubt, no wondering. There is simply clarity. That will change soon enough, and the doubt will creep in as histories unravel. But not now, with the combat freshly ceased and the bloodied nation, tens of thousands of its young recently buried, steadying itself and taking stock.   We walk for several kilometres across the recent battlefields near Adi Begio. At various points the Ethiopians clearly attempted to advance up almost impossibly steep slopes, at the top of which the Eritrean army was securely entrenched, with horrendous results: there are clumps of half-decayed bodies lying pretty much everywhere. The Eritrean officers are keen to emphasise that these slain soldiers are non-Tigrayan—chiefly Oromo and Amhara—as the Woyane would never risk their own in such a suicidal assault. Indeed, retreating soldiers were shot from behind, I’m told. (One such case is described to me by an Eritrean soldier who says he witnessed it from his dugout: about ten Oromo soldiers trying to retreat, and nine of them are killed by their own side.) It is a theme which repeats over the next few days: the navigating of corpses, the mournful commentary on the waste of human life, and the enemy’s evident disregard  

49

SHALLOW GRAVES

for it. The detritus of war is everywhere: incongruously bright rubber gloves at a makeshift first-aid post; a blood-drenched T-shirt, evidently pulled from a dead or dying Ethiopian soldier of the 221st Brigade of the 22nd Division. It proclaims that “We will keep the pledge of our patriots”. If the pledge was to die needlessly on a mountain on which he had no right to be, then he kept it. In some places, some of the Ethiopians almost made it to the Eritrean positions—an extraordinary feat of luck and skill and courage. But once in close range they stood no chance. Some were trained for ‘long-distance’ fighting, a Lt-Col. tells me—marathon runners, used to moving quickly over tough terrain. Other enticements were used, say the Eritrean soldiers. They intercepted Ethiopian radio messages in which they heard commanders promising their junior officers promotion if they succeeded in capturing such-and-such a hill; or exhorting their men to one final effort, as the glittering prize of Asmara itself lay just beyond the crest of this hill, and so on. (It didn’t.) Another man, a farmer, confirms this: “You know, some Ethiopians, when they reached those distant villages”—he points southward, back toward the valley—“they thought it was already Asmara. They danced and celebrated!”   But the battle is not quite over. The problem, for local farmers, is that the corpses are poisoning the water. All across the land bodies are decaying bit by bit, like a final, toxic, slow-motion offensive against the brittle Sha’abiyya 50

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

state. And then there are the wild dogs, feasting on the dead, and leaving the remains scattered across a wide area, making it impossible to cultivate or rebuild. It is a problem all over the former central front. The dogs of Adi Nefas are a particular problem. I’m told that they have been getting used to human flesh, and now they are becoming bolder, scavenging closer and closer to homesteads. But the animals are serving one important purpose, it seems. They have uncovered multiple graves, pulling bodies out from deep underground. These are the soldiers buried by the agalay, the special units attached to the Ethiopian military with the express function of burying the slain. But they pile multiple bodies into a single grave, and the dogs are discovering this.   The last village before the border on the Mereb River, Ksadika, was caught in the eye of the storm. There is evidence of looting. People there say the Ethiopian army came with Tigrayan peasants from across the border, including women and children. They took everything of value, say the locals. Stripped the place bare. They even stole from the poorest households, one villager shouts at me. And when they pulled out, they planted landmines all over the place, effectively rendering frontier villages like this uninhabitable. A short time before we arrive, a small girl is killed by a landmine attached to a biscuit tin, which she tugged at curiously. Near Ksadika, we talk to an elderly villager on the road. “We saved only ourselves,” he declares. “There’s nothing else left. We were told to 51

SHALLOW GRAVES

evacuate the village when the war broke out; we left all our property behind and went to stay with relatives. Our homes were destroyed by Tigrayan militia and civilians. They even brought their children and their donkeys.” He pauses for breath, and looks haunted and exhausted. We later discover that his teenage son was killed by a landmine a week before. “From now on we don’t want any relationship with these people. The ties are forever cut. But we respect our government and have not taken any revenge … These are very cruel people and cruel soldiers. The Tigrayans left us only with stones. Maybe they’ll come and take these as well.”   In each place we visit, there are apparently cases of rape. This is often told to us in hushed, allusive tones. We are unable to interview any of the assaulted women, however. Our party is all male, and it isn’t appropriate for us to talk to any of the women, who have been confined in what remains of their homes, attended to by relatives and neighbours. The trauma attached to this horrific weapon of war is impossible to understate.   On these battlefields, each episode of violence seems to have a prequel, a set of antecedents of killing and destruction, and its own set of memories. One farmer, Tesfamichael, is sickened by the death and the stench. “I’ve lost my appetite,” he tells us. “I have never seen such a war. I’ve lived fifty-nine years. This war is terrible, a destructive war. I witnessed the civil war in this area between the ELF and EPLF; I lived through the Derg 52

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

war. But this is much worse than anything we’ve seen before.” Another agrees. He claims to have buried some twenty-five bodies by himself. “This is a bitter war. The nature of this war is difficult to explain.” A local administrator dismisses the Ethiopian government as shifta, a historically evocative word broadly translating as ‘bandits’ but long used as a pejorative for anyone whose ­violence and politics are illegitimate. For him, the remembering of past violence even involves an improvement of the reputation of the former worst-ever foe, the Derg. “I was a member of the EPLF local militia. I know both the current war and the liberation struggle. Both regimes are enemies, but the difference lies in the atrocities and destruction. The soldiers of the Derg brought destruction only to military or government targets; but the Woyane have committed atrocities against poor farmers. This is completely different, and much worse.” The claim is dubious, as numerous reports from the 1980s attest.1 But no matter: this is now the narrative, underpinned by anger and shock. Another informant, an old man in Adi Nefas, echoes the point: “During [Haile Selassie and the Derg regimes] there were many atrocities against the Eritrean people; but these atrocities by Woyane are much worse. They kill civilians, steal property, rape women, expel Eritreans from Ethiopia. It is all difficult to explain. The Derg certainly committed atrocities; but they were mostly concerned with military targets, the EPLF.” 53

SHALLOW GRAVES

  There are similar stories in the western lowlands, where I travel with another group of Eritrean journalists a short time afterwards. In Agordat, the gateway between the lowlands and the highland plateau, the soldiers of the Woyane have just departed, and memories are still fresh of ‘Black Monday’ in 1981, when troops of the Derg massacred four hundred civilians following suspicion that the community was harbouring ‘spies’. In this neighbourhood, and further west still, where Eritrea abuts both Ethiopia and Sudan, the nation’s history is marked by the dead. Ethiopian soldiers have only pulled out of this area a few weeks earlier, and now the community comes to terms with the violence that has just overcome it. In this corner of Eritrea, the Beni-Amer—inhabitants of the warm, fertile plains abutting Sudan—remember their complex, ambiguous struggles with liberation movements, on the one side, and a succession of Ethiopian governments, on the other. Thus is the nation squeezed out of the tightest and bloodiest of corners.   We come to Tessenei, and then head due south, along a road parallel to the Sudanese border, to the village of Guluj. It is a bright, beautiful morning. There has been heavy fighting here, and the local administrator is keen to show us bodies—Ethiopia’s dead, naturally. We are led to a series of substantial graves, each containing several corpses, the victims of Eritrean artillery bombardment as the Eritrean army sought to recapture the area. Limbs are 54

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

pulled out of the ground to demonstrate the fact: silent witnesses to the indomitable spirit of the Eritrean nation, and victims of its inexorable historical trajectory. We talk to an old man, Usman, who has witnessed the two occasions in recent weeks when the Ethiopian army occupied the village and surrounding area. “On the first occasion, things were okay; they were just passing through on their way to Tessenei. But the second time, things were very bad. As they pulled out of Tessenei, they killed a number of civilians—possibly revenge for having lost so many of their own soldiers in the recent fighting. The bodies of the latter were piled into several trucks. Blood was everywhere.” Inevitably, again, there are comparisons with past wars, and the production of the other, older dead. Little prompting is required to this end. Usman was here during the Derg time. One of the journalists with us, Abu, recalls that in 1985 Guluj was razed to the ground by the Derg army because it was a centre of operations for the ELF.2 True, says Usman. “But this lot, the Woyane, are much worse. Tigrayan soldiers are terrible—full of hate and spite. Other groups—the Amhara and the Oromo— they’re okay with us; they even give us little things. In this recent war, it is clear that while the Amhara and Oromo soldiers are required to fight, the Tigrayans are desperate to crush Eritrea. They need victory.” Usman tells us that when the Ethiopian army began to fall back under pressure around Tessenei, “the Amhara soldiers came to us: Escape, now! they shouted. Get away! The 55

SHALLOW GRAVES

Woyane are going to kill you!” But when the Tigrayans are around, the Amhara are silent, he says. Tensions are evident between them. All the officers are Tigrayan. They organised meetings when they captured Guluj. “We are not coming to capture Eritrea,” they told the cowed, wary audience, according to Usman. “We are going to overthrow the government.”   We are shown more graves, dug by Ethiopian military bulldozers, and filled with more bodies. These graves are scattered among huts on the residential edge of the village. Further out, toward Om Hager, farmers beginning to plough their land complain that they are uncovering decaying corpses. Blood and death were everywhere, says Afewerki, who describes how he was ordered to wash the trucks of blood several times by Ethiopian officers. Many local inhabitants have bodies in their homes, and can’t sleep there until these dead Ethiopian soldiers (as we are told they are)3 are removed. But the Ethiopian army is not only interested in organic death. They go out of their way—by several kilometres—to flatten a small industrial area, including an expensive cotton factory, at Aligidir. Eritrea’s factories—a reminder of its postcolonial aspirations and search for self-sustaining modernity—must also go. Indeed the administrator of Adi Nefas in the highlands tells me that the Ethiopians simply want “to weaken the Eritrean economy. Eritrea was progressing,” he says, with no hint of doubt. “So Ethiopia, lagging behind in economic 56

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

terms, has tried to block Eritrean reconstruction and has waged this war deliberately. A border conflict is just a matter of maps.” We visit a local administrator, who produces a long and incredibly detailed list—of shops, hotels, snack bars, tea shops, huts, stores, bakeries— destroyed by the Woyane. I’m struck by the desire for data: there is something in the EPLF psyche, perhaps, which is able to withstand human tragedy with such seeming resilience, and which at the same time reduces that tragedy to statistical minutiae.   Now to Tessenei itself, scene of horrendous and intense fighting. Here we see much larger graves. The old familiar smell returns, stinging the nostrils and the back of the throat. Dogs and hyenas have uncovered these particular histories, scratching at the ground in recent days until half-mutilated bodies are exposed. It is a truly revolting site, and I badly wish I wasn’t there. But this is almost like being shown a set of holy relics, and I need to display both respect and decorum, to the dead as well as my hosts. My travelling companions, and local officials and soldiers, are as desperate for external eyewitness verification as I am to walk away from the rotting corpses and body parts protruding from the rancid earth. The fighting was especially terrible here, as the Ethiopian army fought to hold on to a hill in the face of a sustained Eritrean assault. Casualty levels were clearly high. We climb the hill, and everywhere dogs have licked clean the bones of the fallen. The latter, judging by their uniforms, 57

SHALLOW GRAVES

were mostly Tigrayan—an elite unit. Later, we move into the hills south of Barentu, in the direction of the Badme plain where disputes about demarcation had started the war itself, back in May 1998. Now the area is demarcated by the dead. Shallow graves, here; bodies lying in sharp gullies, there. Here is a Somali, judging by the identification on his person. It becomes quite dangerous to scramble along these ledges and hilltops, but it is the only way to see the Ethiopian dead lying in gullies and riverbeds, where they fell trying to take a hill occupied by Eritrean forces. My companion Abu pauses at a particularly grisly vantage point, and gestures downhill. “There you go,” he mutters hoarsely. “Cheap African life.” I am gripped with remorse. I have stumbled into the killing fields, ignorant and self-possessed; I have wandered absently into someone else’s dying.   In all of these locations, angry, bitter Tigray is the new–old enemy, seething with historic resentment, and plotting catastrophe for Eritrea. In these weeks after the ceasefire, people are traumatised, pensive. Our informants are well aware that my travelling companions are journalists from the Ministry of Information, but I’m encouraged to ask them whatever I want. Their answers are flowing, seemingly natural. The administrator of the central front district which includes Ksadika tells us that before the war relations with communities across the Mereb were good: “We had the same culture,” he says, using a phrase which is repeated a lot by my translator. 58

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

But now, since the behaviour of the Woyane, “the relationship is forever damaged. We don’t want to remember those people who committed such atrocities.”   A battalion commander says he knew all along that the war would escalate. “I was in the border areas before May 1998; Tigrayans were committing atrocities against Eritreans. For me it was always clear that the Woyane wanted to overthrow the Eritrean government and replace it with a satellite government. I knew this all along. I was in Badme … I was there when the Tigrayans were crossing the border in 1997, when the Tigrayans were removing the harvest and expelling Eritrean farmers.” Long before the formal start of the war in May 1998, Tigrayan militia were terrorising locals, shooting at the Eritrean flag, threatening people with the expropriation of their land. A priest, visibly upset, exclaims: “Successive Ethiopian regimes say, we don’t want the Eritrean people, only land and property. But the Woyane are trying to destroy Eritrean identity, culture, its very existence. This is why they have done these things!” In Tokombia, in Barka, Ethiopian soldiers destroyed the Patriots’ Cemetery, where the bodies of fallen Sha’abiyya were interred. This, some local men assert, tells you all you need to know: “Those dead fighters, they fought for all of us. But Ethiopia wants to eradicate us.” In Guluj, Usman has a stark warning. “Don’t trust Woyane or the peace agreement,” he says as we conclude our interview in the cool, shaded terrace of a café. “Expect bad things to come.” 59

SHALLOW GRAVES

  We begin the long drive back. South of Barentu, Eritrean soldiers, overwhelmingly Tigrinya, have returned, and move purposefully around the hills while the Kunama herdsmen pass through them with their cattle like ghosts. Some Kunama, unreconciled to the Sha’abiyya state, welcomed the Ethiopians a few weeks earlier; others were at best ambivalent about the return of the Eritrean soldiers. They occupy a precarious space, these frontier pastoralists, a space permanently inbetween; and now they move silently along the pathways as the agents of adjacent political orders come and go.   A little while later, I travel to a refugee camp somewhere north of Keren. I’m in the company of an Italian friend whose dynamic enthusiasm to help is shaming, and I’m really only tagging along. The camp sprawls for some distance, a straggling oasis of UN-blue tarpaulin. People tell us what they need. I scribble earnestly in my notebook. * * * The scenes around Adi Quala and Tessenei represent the awful culmination of two dreadful years. In many ways the worst thing about the war for those stuck in Asmara is the long, torturous wait for resolution, and for news, of whatever kind. The high stress during periods of fighting at the front is followed by periods of low-level, continual stress; ennui; a great deal of drinking; speculation and gossip; intense and sometimes destructive 60

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

relationships. Many of us resident foreigners struggle with both objectivity and meaning in all this. Journalists come and go, and they tend to congregate when the waters are bloodied. They mostly find it all very exciting, but the general consensus is also that this is a curiously pointless war. “Two bald men fighting over a comb” was how the novelist Jorge Luis Borges famously described the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina in 1982. But it is a phrase now applied to Eritrea and Ethiopia.4 I argue with journalists a lot, and adopt an altogether unjustified sense of my own superiority. To me they are vultures, swooping in for the story, but not really understanding anything, and claiming objectivity. I’m not sure which is the worse evil. Perhaps somewhere deep down I’m envious of their ability to capture the essence, file the story, and get away. But I disguise this beneath a cantankerous self-righteousness and extol the virtues of my supposed embeddedness. My ex-fighter friends reinforce this notion, and offer succour, whether they know it or not.   In February 1999, Isaias suddenly accepts the OAU peace plan. The Eritreans have been pushed out of Badme. They’ve lost Badme. For a few hours, on a quiet Sunday in Asmara, people are stunned. We quietly contemplate the meanings of this. I am crushed by the sense of defeat and anticlimax. Is that it? Have we lost the war? Is it over? Within a few days, however, it is clear that the war is not over. Now the fighting spreads horrifically 61

SHALLOW GRAVES

along the central front: Tsorona and Zalambessa, where there are bloodbaths, and where the fighting takes on a more terrible intensity. There is vicious fighting in the south, too, on the Bure border adjacent to Assab. Assab is arguably the worst place along the border to fight, with its below-sea level, scorching temperatures making it impossible to fight during the day. Mostly the shooting starts in the small hours of the morning, and is over by daybreak, or late morning at best. As the weeks go by, I feel a terrible guilt that back in February I hadn’t wanted it to end this way. After Tsorona and Zalambessa, everyone is praying for peace.   In the meantime I resolve to ‘do my bit’. In the eerie aftermath of the carnage at Zalambessa, I agree to serve as an independent observer on a project organised by the Federation of Eritrean Workers and the Ministry of Labour. The aim is to interview dozens of Ethiopians still living and working in and around Asmara, and to contribute to a report for the International Labour Organisation at the UN to demonstrate that Ethiopians are not being mistreated and are living perfectly happy lives in the midst of the war. All the Ethiopians we talk to are wonderfully content—naturally—and have no experience to report of any mistreatment whatsoever. And it certainly seems that many find our sombre line of questioning—Have you ever been harassed for your nationality? Do you have access to the Ethiopian Embassy? Is there any discrimination in the workplace?—really very 62

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

amusing. We—a translator and another Eritrean journalist—check their ID cards to make sure they are actually Ethiopian. Over several days of interviews we encounter one solitary incident involving an argument at a factory between an Eritrean and an Ethiopian, with the former making reference to the nationality of the latter. But it was all resolved amicably, it seems. All is harmony, and the Eritreans are certainly keen to project this image. This will change a few months later. But for now, all seems well. Perhaps more interestingly, the project itself takes us on a tour of light industry in and around Asmara—leather goods, spaghetti, matches, textiles, soft drinks—and it turns out that business isn’t so good since the war began. In fact, it’s pretty dire, as for most of them their primary export market had been Ethiopia. The war is beginning to strangulate Eritrea’s fledgling economy.   Those of us who have been here a while, and who spend time with ex-fighters, develop a razor-sharp sense of injustice. And then, during a lull in the fighting sometime during 1999, the British ambassador to Ethiopia shows up in Asmara—Eritrea, bizarrely, is also within his brief—and holds a little reception in the old consulate building. I and a couple of friends are invited, and we see it as our mission to attend and set him straight on a few things. We drink his wine, becoming animated on the topic of Eritrea’s innocence in all this, and berate him for the UK’s appallingly pro-Ethiopian position (as we 63

SHALLOW GRAVES

see it) in the war. He seems relieved when the reception limps to a close and he can get back to Addis. But we feed off these incidents. When Thomas Keneally arrives on a sympathetic visit, we are star-struck. The author of Schindler’s Ark! How can Eritrea possibly be on the wrong side of justice?   I am the ferenji patriot, the ‘friend of Eritrea’, and am roundly identified as such. And I am something of a believer—or, as I like to think of it, a critical friend. I occasionally appear on Eritrean TV. I am an ‘independent expert’ on Eritrean and regional history, but on the right side. I don’t remember much about those TV excursions, except that in my mind I was offering objective assessments of historical relations between Eritrea and Ethiopia, but that in reality I come across as very much pro-Sha’abiyya, or at least pro-Eritrea. Unsurprisingly I am attacked in the Ethiopian media, though they seem to at least partially mistake me for someone else—I’m not American, and my PhD is not from UCLA—but no matter: this historian is having his day in the sun, and he’s loving it. But not for long. Shortly after one particular interview of this “long-term resident and friend of Eritrea”, as I’m introduced, an Eritrean friend comes up to me in a bar, looking angry. He works at a foreign embassy, and is a ferociously intelligent, sharp-witted individual but with something brooding about him. He hisses at me: “Why are you doing this? Why are you defending these fucking people?” I try to protest, but he  

64

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

silences me: “You are a mouthpiece for this fucking regime.” I don’t believe this is fair, naturally, but I can see how it might look. Sometime later, soon after the September 2001 crackdown, my friend is arrested and we never hear from him again, though in the years to come he appears in the pages of various human rights reports. I know, rationally, that I am not responsible for this man’s incarceration, but the thought never leaves me that, in some way, I am.   At the University we implement our curriculum, making use of meagre human and material resources— thanks to some UNDP money I order John Iliffe’s Africans in bulk, though my students prefer Kevin Shillington, and I end up ordering a lot more of his History of Africa—and we assiduously promote Eritrean history. All the while we work in trepidation of the president of the University, who by all accounts is close to the Big President (as my Russian colleague calls Isaias), though many people whisper knowingly that he wants to be closer still. He has very little patience for staff or students, it seems. It’s part of a larger problem, namely that the University isn’t really trusted with anything important to do. Intellectuals—and there were quite a few of them in the Eritrean diaspora—are useful only up to a point, to give gravitas to the struggle at some important forum, or at particularly key moments in the political battle. But they are disposable, and are not usually fighters. They might speak learnedly about 65

SHALLOW GRAVES

political and economic development, constitutional issues, legal systems; but they know nothing about life in the Field, don’t understand the core values of the liberation movement, its sense of sacrifice and brotherhood. They are on the outside. And so the University of Asmara is a service centre for government, not a centre of intellectual excellence. But we plough on regardless, doing our best to foreground Eritrean history and to cultivate connections with the Party’s own intellectuals, who are now the cerebral keepers of the flame. As time goes on, the leadership demonstrate little faith in the institution, and the Big President—though he is the Chancellor of the University—never attends graduation ceremonies. It is second-rate, and they know it. The institution is soon earmarked for closure, as part of a political project.   And then, as news filters in that the Ethiopians have broken through in the west, there is unprecedented tumult on campus. The students even stage a protest of sorts, occupying the quad of the main building to demand more information, and that they be allowed to contribute in some way to the faltering war effort. The University president talks to them in an open-air meeting, but he’s not best pleased. People at the top don’t like unscheduled gatherings, even if they’re motivated by patriotism. (Student leaders are later punished brutally.) Soon after, the students are sent off for military training and all normal activities in the University are suspended. 66

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

This is one of the most difficult, and surreal, of moments. During this enforced sabbatical, I sit in my office each day and try, and fail, to write. I’m gripped with a profound loneliness; a depression, I guess. Every day is hot and dry, though the rains are not far away. The University is almost totally deserted; there are no students, and not many people at all. On the ground floor of the main building, which houses the administrative offices, some office doors and windows are open, but there are no people to be seen; a dry dust blows through the campus. Most of the expatriate teaching staff have left, or are leaving, the country; even large numbers of the Eritrean staff have disappeared, I don’t know where. I imagine, improbably, that they’ve all gone to the front. But their absence distresses me, and I wonder what it is they have found to do outside this graveyard of empty rooms, silent computers and still corridors. It is a low ebb, and I’m not sure what I’m doing here.   The Ethiopians are halted, and a ceasefire is declared. Soon after, there is the announcement of a peace agreement, the reaction to which is muted—at least among the people I know. Eritreans seem to take triumph and disaster the same way. But, above all, everyone is exhausted. * * * In the years following the ceasefire, Eritreans stare across the Mereb, alternately glum, weary, anxious. A few remain eager for the fight. One old friend, Amanuel— 67

SHALLOW GRAVES

former ELF, who chain-smokes with the same energy he brings to political conversations, and we have quite a few of those—declares that the only chance for peace is the military defeat of Ethiopia; this is the only thing that can be done, the only thing that makes sense. For some, I sense a wider desire—even among those who were often quietly critical of the government—to deflect from its manifold failings and focus on the great blight of Eritrea’s narrative, the sinister refractor of Eritrean time, the empire-state of Ethiopia. Another informant, a former EPLF fighter who on one level fervently hopes there will be no more war (“for the sake of all Eritreans”), simultaneously muses on the necessity of one more round of fighting in order that Ethiopia can be defeated once and for all. Then we can get back to business, he says.   Sometime after the ceasefire, I return to the central border. Life is difficult and precarious. Communities are vulnerable to kidnapping and harassment by the Ethiopian military, and people are snatched near the Mereb, and interrogated—about the military presence in the area, about the state of reconstruction, and so on—and are usually then returned, though some are not. The weakness of the Eritrean government is being exposed, and criticisms are beginning to be voiced. “We don’t blame the government too much, because they have limited resources at their disposal, but … we need more help!” says one informant. People feel abandoned by a distant state. 68

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

  But I confess I am less interested in post-war reconstruction—local officials are keen to showcase the homes they have rebuilt to replace those destroyed in the fighting—than in the unfolding historical imagination around cross-border relations. In the communities south of Adi Quala, the memories are fresh: memories of death, of looting, of destruction. Here, there is a live rethink going on about the historical relationship with the people across the border. Before the war, there were close relations with those Tigrayans, I am told repeatedly. One local farmer holds forth: There was intermarriage, and blood ties. We knew them well. But really, when we think about it … you know, the people from Rama,5 they already had a reputation for stealing; even among themselves! And their women, well … let me tell you that no Eritrean woman ever went there to get married. No! But Tigrayan women, they are submissive. And they came here all the time looking for husbands, and they got them, too. But we didn’t give them normal men. They were given the disabled ones, or those who couldn’t get themselves an Eritrean woman. We and they are not the same! Tigrayans have always seen Eritrea as a foreign land.

  I talk to a young woman who is the fortunate owner of one of the new concrete homes that have been built to replace those destroyed in the fighting. “There is no chance of improved relations. The battle is still going on. Last year a farmer wandered down to the Mereb, and he 69

SHALLOW GRAVES

was taken and hasn’t been seen since. What can we do?” Others are a little more sanguine. Of course, because we live so close together, it is inevitable that one day we will reconcile, and use the Mereb together, says one. But, we will not forget their crimes and atrocities. And we will pass that on to the next generation. Reconciliation does not mean forgetting. We will never trust them again.

  Later, we talk to Gebreyesus, in his mid-sixties. We shelter from the rain and have tea in his home. “They need to apologise and admit they did terrible things to us”, he says. “Otherwise, it is not possible to normalise relations.”   A little later, as the group sheltering from the rain increases, they ponder the intimate histories which once defined trans-Mereb relations. Gebreyesus tells us that Eritrean women feel superior to Tigrayan women, and so they aren’t much in demand as wives. But as the conversations unfold, it seems that there was no especially dramatic history before this war; conflicts were normal, mostly around cattle getting lost and trespassing, but nothing too major. Only in recent years have the Tigrayans, and their militia, begun to harass us. They have come to hate us. But why? Jealousy, people assert. You know, for so long, Tigrayans, especially women, were part of our community. They said they liked us, because we were generous and hardworking. Whereas they are not. Sometimes their women were even PFDJ members! But 70

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

there were lots of Eritrean traders in their village [Rama]. They were the most successful merchants; all the good busi­ ness was theirs. And so they simply want to punish us, and have what we have.   Our conversations concluded, my journalist companion Medhanie and I wander a while around the village. He likes to use these moments to cap our findings with his own observations. “We don’t need their housemaids!” he grins, referring to the most common occupation of Tigrayan women coming to Eritrea for work. “We just need fridges and washing machines!” He recalls Tigrayans gathering beles—the prickly fruit common in the highlands at a particular time of the year—along the Massawa road, and carrying them on their heads to Asmara, where they sold the fruit by the side of the road. Bwa! Medhanie almost spits in disgust. “Now Eritreans use trucks to gather and sell them. Poor Tigrayans!”   There are so many layers of emotion across the central border areas, in the months and years after the ceasefire; expressions of fear and loathing born of multiple traumas. Conversations often come back to wives and husbands and sexual interconnections, against which state-level politics are mere backdrop. At the same time, it is the fact of living with sexual violence which remains the biggest obstacle to peace. “It is more difficult for the many women who were raped during the fighting,” says one man quietly in his home near Adi Begio. “This is unforgettable for the coming generations. This is not 71

SHALLOW GRAVES

easy for women in our culture. It is difficult to discuss.” The assault on the women of the community is terrible and real. In many ways it is all that matters. Under­ standable, then, that the anger is directed at Tigray, and Tigrayans, and all they represent. On a visit to Mai Dima, not far from Mendefera, Medhanie and I talk to a man whose incandescence is typical: “The Woyane are not comparable [to anything]. They are evil … Tigrayans have jealous behaviour. If you give shelter to a Tigrayan for one night, in the morning he will steal from you and leave … In Eritrea we showed much progress since 1991, and we were self-reliant. They want to retard our development.” And another: “We will never forget the atrocities.” It is bustling market day, and things seem to have ‘moved on’, as they say. But perhaps not. “Whenever we see the ashes of our old houses, every morning, we feel anger … We will never reconcile. In the future there will be peace between the governments; but not the civilians. The atrocities are like inscriptions in the rocks.” One young man says: “I can’t forget it. I lost my grandparents. If it was purely military, it might be forgotten. But no, because of the targeting of civilians—the looting, the demolition, the murder. How can we forget?”   The close proximity of Tigray has engendered a particularly virulent form of hatred, it seems. But I begin to wonder whether Tigray—while the liability of some of its people for the recent violence is real enough—has in some ways become a safe target at which to throw such 72

FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

raw emotion. “The conflict is not between two peoples,” another person tells us in Mai Dima. “It’s between two governments. If they reconcile, then the relations between the peoples can get back to normal … We will never forget [the destruction]. But we don’t blame the Ethiopian people.” I wonder whether people believe their own government carries any responsibility—for failing to defend these borderlands, and the mothers and sisters and daughters who watched the Eritrean forces withdraw to safe ground, exposing them to the predations of an invading army. Perhaps; but they won’t say so, explicitly.   We drive to Adi Nefas. When we arrive, the village is virtually deserted, as everyone is out on the land. I wander around, and the windswept place is surrounded by ghosts and graves. Everywhere are the unmarked graves of the Ethiopian dead, and the large mass grave below the village, by the side of the main road, is still visible, now enclosed by cultivated land. The coloured stones denoting rank and regiment are still there. The windblown hills are haunted by war, both the memory of it and the fear of its return. But there is also a sense that no one is to be trusted on this blustery frontier, and that the past is a terrible burden, but that history is not solely about evil, predatory Tigray, however prominent that idea may be in the dominant political narrative. “We Eritreans need peace!” exclaims a young farmer, when we finally find someone to talk to. “There has been too much war. What can we do?” 73

3

DREAMS OF ABYSSINIA

A few weeks into the war, the deportations from Ethiopia begin. In the weeks and months that follow, tens of thousands of people arrive in various states of dishevelment and shock, relieved of property and possessions and money, except what they are able to carry with them. These are the Eritreans who have been living in Ethiopia, including the substantial community in Addis itself. But many of them have lived in Ethiopia for years, decades in some cases, and a sizeable proportion of them don’t even speak very good Tigrinya. Some of the younger ones have never been to Eritrea, which is essentially a foreign country to them. But they are no longer welcome in Ethiopia, and, after all, Meles Zenawi has declared that Ethiopia can deport anyone it wants to if it doesn’t like the colour of their eyes. It is a sorry sight indeed: coachloads of old and young, women and children as well as men, dumped unceremoniously at the border and made to walk the last few hundred metres into Eritrea; people who had been

75

SHALLOW GRAVES

successful traders and business folk, artists and writers, teachers; their homes and shops and savings all seized. We hear stories of midnight visits by security officials in Addis, of the separation of families, of the lives and friends and lovers left behind. In Asmara, they are known as Ameches, a very Eritrean joke: they are named after an automobile factory originally established in Eritrea by the Italians, but later relocated to Addis. The cars were then exported to Eritrea. An Ameche: built in Ethiopia, exported to Eritrea.   Still, in some walks of life in Eritrea, the deportations are a fillip. At the University, we get a couple of new colleagues, enabling us to actually teach the curriculum we had designed before the war. I’m not sure how we would have delivered it otherwise, this ambitious programme ranging across Eritrea’s history from antiquity to the modern age. As these traumatised and disoriented colleagues arrive—thrown out of their jobs at further education colleges in Ethiopia—it seems unfair to load them with teaching about history that is now catching up with them in very brutal ways. But there are students to teach, and courses to run, and they are just glad to be alive and to have jobs. There is new blood on campus, too: expelled Ameche students, mostly from Addis, with their own very different histories, begin to arrive. They seem different, somehow, from our mostly local, pre-war cohort. They often seem to have nicer clothes, or at least a more polished sense of style; some 76

DREAMS OF ABYSSINIA

of them seem to carry themselves a little more confidently than Asmarinos, and generally have better English. But many of them have lost everything, or at least a great deal, by the time they show up in Asmara. Still, they try, often quite successfully, to recreate their Addis lives in dull little Asmara, with its half-dozen nightclubs, oppressive obstacles to the invisibility which is always possible in a big city like Addis, and occasional threat of aerial bombardment.   Some deportees, wily or lucky enough to grasp the vagaries of regional history and of the revolutionary politics through which they have lived, invested in property in Eritrea a few years earlier, and transferred at least a little money. At least they have somewhere to live. Relatives in the diaspora—in Germany, Sweden, the US—send cash to try to cushion the blow. The war is tragic for them, in many ways, and it clearly affects many of them deeply. Some never really recover from the abrupt expulsion from a country that was really the only place they knew as home. Many are simply not Eritrean at all, in any meaningful sense, but are classified as Ethiopians of Eritrean descent. Sometimes they don’t even speak Tigrinya, or at least not very well, and they warily navigate a new urban landscape with their mellifluous Amharic. They tend to band together, these Ameches, and are distinctive by their Addis upbringings and gauche Tigrinya and Amharic chatter over coffee and the sense they emit that they are ill suited to a war 77

SHALLOW GRAVES

zone. But for others, more phlegmatic, the war is just another obstacle to be navigated in a stormy family history in a region in which nothing can ever be taken for granted. Some had done their national service in the 1990s, wisely enough, and then returned to Ethiopia for their education. (Addis Ababa University is seen as, and probably is, vastly superior to Asmara University.) For many Ameches the greatest shock is when they are called up, a new source of recruits in a nation where everyone is potentially a soldier.   There are sometimes tensions between Ameches and Asmarinos. Usually these are manifest in little more than a gentle ribbing of the folks from Addis, but occasionally it is more than that: a suspicion of their Amharic tongue, of their haughty bearing, of their supposedly rich, highlife backgrounds. Bitter relations with Ethiopia—and in particular, the backward extrapolation of hostility— explain, somewhat, the slightly ambivalent attitude toward the deportees on the part of the government itself. At a certain point, the President himself refers to them as “crooked” or “unwanted” teeth, and there is more than a suspicion that the upper levels of the Sha’abiyya don’t really trust them, though many older deportees had close personal relationships with the EPLF leadership. Soon after the war, Amharic music becomes popular in clubs and bars across the city. This annoys the government, and eventually—inevitably—a ban is placed on it, though in truth it is difficult to police. 78

DREAMS OF ABYSSINIA

  Above all, the Ameches are, in the end, emblematic of the fraught historical ties between Eritrea and Ethiopia. In particular, they are the final vestiges, and living incarnations, of the unionist idea, which is not a good thing to be as the war rumbles on and the language coarsens. They become collateral damage in the long struggle between cultures and nations and histories. No one is quite sure when that struggle began. * * * The Sha’abiyya aren’t big fans of precolonial history. Not many revolutionary nationalists are, in truth: it’s all a bit murky back there, with none of the clarity of modernity, or the straight lines of demarcated space. In Eritrea, there can’t be absolute certainty about what the relationship was with Abyssinia/Ethiopia, and so nationalist ventures into the deep past are often ambivalent. It is in stark contrast to Ethiopia’s robust historical self-awareness and the long-cherished notion of glorious antiquity (though the EPRDF isn’t quite so keen on this, it must be said). But there are occasions when the war is extrapolated backwards into deep time. In June 2000, some Ethiopian soldiers, withdrawing on the central front after the ceasefire, place some dynamite under a preAxumite stele in Eritrea and blow it up. Take that, ancient Kebessa, with your spurious attempts to outma­ noeuvre the ancient glories of Ezana’s empire! By the 1980s, sympathetic European observers as well as 79

SHALLOW GRAVES

Eritrean scholars and activists in exile sought to reach into the deeper past, and to discern an older pattern of resistance and domination. They searched the texts of such normally unpalatable individuals as James Bruce or Henry Salt for indications that ‘Eritrea’ did have a kind of ‘pre-life’, as a region with distinctive identities and the capacity to resist Abyssinian imperialism.1 The war itself convinces some people of the historical continuities running under the land like fibre optic cables. Soon after the ceasefire, a Lt-Col. in the Eritrean army on the central front gives me a history lesson: “History is being repeated by the Woyane! Tigrayan feudal rulers were coming to Eritrea from the 13th to the 16th centuries [sic], for example, and as a result all the villages in this part of Eritrea are located on hilltops, for safety and protection. Tigrayans were always coming into Eritrea to loot and destroy; the Woyane are simply repeating history.” (Notably, earlier in the interview the Lt-Col. tells me that the Woyane were actually trying to eradicate a history of peaceful, commercial relations between communities on either side of the Mereb.) He goes on: At the end of the struggle, we tried to improve the relationship with Tigray, but our grandparents were not happy about it. They didn’t want to improve the relations. They told us, be careful, these people are dangerous—we know them well! They advised us like this, right after 1991 … Try to observe the villages—all located on the tops of the hills, for safety from Tigray! 80

DREAMS OF ABYSSINIA

… The name Hazhaz in Asmara, it originated from Tigrayan aggression. Ras Alula captured Tsazega in Eritrea, invading these lands; there was a big battle at Tsazega, and the Eritrean kingdom there refused to obey Alula, and resisted. They pushed Alula back to Hazhaz, [there was] heavy hand-to-hand fighting. The name literally means “catch him!” So from the Tigrayan feudalists onward, up to the Woyane, history is being repeated.

  The nineteenth century also offers a route into ways of contextualising the contemporary. A play is performed at the Odeon in Asmara for the 1 September 2006 celebrations commemorating the start of the armed struggle. In the play, the village of Beleza, on the border with Tigray, is attacked by the Tigrayan warlord Wube.2 Wube and the village chief meet to decide the time and place for the battle. But first, declares the Eritrean chief, I must consult with my people before fighting! Only after consulting with the people can I go to war. The message for the President is undeniable, but it seems rather risky, my Eritrean friends snigger. In the end, however, there is a great battle, and many people die; but with massive sacrifice comes victory, and the Tigrayan Wube—forerunner of the Woyane—are defeated. All’s well that ends well, then—with another, more patriotic, and thus less subtle message. On Eritrean television, the state broadcaster occasionally runs footage of warsai training and fighting and dancing along 

81

SHALLOW GRAVES

side men in traditional garb, adopting military poses and thrusting traditional weapons, as though some link were being imagined between a precolonial tradition of militarism and the modern Eritrean military establishment.   In truth, however, there isn’t much interest in the gloomy deeper past. People are bemused by my obsession with nineteenth-century European texts on the region. Miners of the fossil fuels necessary to spur revolutionary, patriotic zeal find the deeper past barren earth. * * * But no matter, because soon, in linear, landscape-gardened fashion, European imperialism entered to provide much-needed clarity to the historical journey. It is a journey with which multiple cohorts of Eritrean students have become familiar: the arrival of the Italians at Assab in 1869; their seizure of Massawa (assisted by the British); their gradual encroachment inland, up into the Kebessa, and their founding of the capital at Asmara. For the citizens of independent Eritrea, Italian rule might be but dimly recalled, but the physical legacy is undeniable. During the war, there is renewed, furious interest in Italian colonial maps: the border is very clear on these maps! The Italians demarcated the border and it is clearly marked! Colonial maps become almost holy relics, sacred texts, where the truth is unambiguous and nonnegotiable and absolutely on Eritrea’s side. No matter that in some ways this avoids the ‘facts-on-the-ground’ 82

DREAMS OF ABYSSINIA

question; or that occasionally the Italians seem to have pegged the border to a stream which shifts course seasonally. These are righteous documents, proof that Eritrea exists in the shape the government says it does.   The Italians are everywhere in the very cityscape of Asmara itself. The Art Deco architecture draws tourists and makes Asmara famous—at least to those in the know. Eritrea, the land of violence and invading neighbours and national service and increasingly swollen prisons? No! The city has some of the most exquisite modernist architecture …! There are sometimes even small groups of tourists during the war; they look utterly alien as they wander around looking for modernist landmarks and interesting architecture: the famous Fiat garage, designed like an aeroplane; Cinema Roma; the opera house; the building off Martyrs Avenue designed to look like a boat. Italian Eritrea nestled, shabby but respectable, across the city, and in other towns too, like Keren and Massawa. This is the very fabric of the built environment, the product of a colonial regime long gone if not quite forgotten.3 The last living remnants of Italian Eritrea are to be found in the Casa d’Italia, a restaurant and social centre in the middle of Asmara, all stucco walls and palm trees and, it must be said, some of the finest (though not the cheapest) food anywhere in the city. In its shady recesses can be found the last of the elderly Italian community, and the dual-heritage children with a foot in both worlds and yet often in neither. 83

SHALLOW GRAVES

Italian memories are instilled in the architecture of bars and cafés, too, and sometimes in their very names: Bar Crispi, for example, at the foot of Forto4—named after the Prime Minister of Italy at the time of Adwa—with its cool, faux marble interior. There are many others: Alla Scala, Torino, Napoli, Roma. The shape of the city itself, with present-day Independence Avenue (formerly Via Mussolini) cutting through the centre, reflects Italian racial and social engineering. To the north of the grand, tree- and café-lined avenue, the European residential quarter, with its beautiful stucco villas half hidden by jacaranda and bougainvillea; to the south, the ‘native’ sections, grubbier and more crowded—but still, not without considerable charm—centred on markets and churches. It is a division codified by segregationist policies enacted in the course of the 1930s, under the Fascist administrators of the new Roman Empire, and carried through in pursuit of the sanitary and racial agendas then in vogue.   Above all, however, Italy gives Eritreans Eritrea itself. The road from Asmara to Keren—hairpin bends for much of the way, snaking along the northern ridge of the great massif that was the Ethiopian Highlands—is jokingly called ‘the heart of Tigray’ by my Eritrean companions. The road is crooked and treacherous; it needs to be approached cautiously, and isn’t to be trusted. At various bends, as the road etches its way across a stunning landscape, there are little memorials to those whose vehicles 84

DREAMS OF ABYSSINIA

have plummeted over the edge into the ravines below. The road has been responsible for many deaths. Yet the road itself illustrates Eritrean superiority over neighbouring Ethiopia, and particularly simple, backward, impoverished Tigray. The road was built by the Italians, whose engineering feat was an impressive one, and it led through landscapes which told the story of Eritrea’s halting but undeniable modernity: from the outskirts of ‘Piccola Roma’,5 on toward the citrus fruit plantation at Elabered, one of the earliest colonial projects in commercial agriculture, and to Keren itself, which was given a major boost in terms of urban growth by the railway built there in the course of the 1930s. The colonial experience had elevated Eritreans to a higher plane.   “Italian colonial rule made us different, you see,” Medhanie asserts as we head to the border one day. It was the thing that made Ethiopians, especially Tigrayans, jealous of Eritrea. “Who can tell why they are envious of us,” he muses. But he knows why, really. “Probably the great political and economic development of Eritrea as a colony,” he says matter-of-factly, chewing on the twig that Eritreans use to clean their teeth. In Adi Quala and the escarpment to the south, there is a curious intersection of these histories: of defiant warriorhood, of the making of the nation, of foreign imperialism. It is a stunning vista, and when Medhanie and I arrive to follow up on an earlier trip to the former front, I am struck by how little I remember of how beautiful the area is. The last 85

SHALLOW GRAVES

time I was here, the place was covered with corpses and smelt of fresh death. Now I have a little more time to reflect, in this place where historical trajectories meet. Now, there is much pride in how the community has recovered and begun to rebuild. “Adi Begio has a famous history!” a group of elders tell me with evident delight, referring to the spot where the Ethiopian advance had been halted just to the south. In Adi Quala itself, the district headquarters, there is now Adi Begio Hall, newly built, entirely functional—a small, basic conference hall, with rows of chairs in which people will assemble to listen to the pronouncement of policy directives. But there is enormous pride in it. “Adi Begio is the graveyard of the Woyane!” as one local informant tells me. But it is even more than that, it seems. Overlooking the valley, just outside Adi Begio, is a small but well-kept Italian war cemetery. Nearby, a monument glistens in the morning sun, commemorating those who lost their lives at Adwa. It is a beautiful, quiet site, the valley stretching below, with the hills around Adwa itself in the distance. We stand for a long while, with a group of elderly militia (they, not the regular army, are permitted in the Temporary Security Zone), surveying the eerie scene. The war memorial was erected for Adwa; but it seems now to belong to Eritreans themselves, and not just because they too lost thousands at the battle. They did, of course: an Italian army containing thousands of Eritreans was crushed within hours by Menelik’s heaving 86

DREAMS OF ABYSSINIA

force. Those unfortunate enough to be captured by Menelik’s soldiers were mutilated and maimed, their bodies marked forever as punishment for defying the flow of time itself. But Adwa meant more than that, for it was a moment of birth: for modern Ethiopia, the product of Menelik’s skill, audacity and serendipity; and of course for Eritrea itself, which would otherwise have never existed. In the 1890s, all was still somewhat in flux, and Eritrea was not (yet) meant to be, as such: it was merely a platform for the invasion of Ethiopia, and when that spectacularly backfired in 1896, Eritrea actually became a place in its own right, albeit the product of imperial calamity. It was la colonia primogenita, the firstborn colony, in a new Italian empire.   The monument belongs to Eritrea because it seems to reinforce the deeply moving historicity of the region. The bones of the dead from the recent war remain in the fields below; but now those fields are once again under cultivation, and scattered across the green and brown patchwork below us are the farmers and their wives and their children, moving slowly but deliberately in the sunlight, for under the weight of the past crops still need to be harvested. The stoical militia with us gaze at the scene and chat quietly, and suddenly they seem to me to take on the aspect of sentinels, timeless and watchful, as though they also belong to the past as well as to this moment. In the days that follow we move around these hills, from Adi Quala back up to Mai Dima, and every 87

SHALLOW GRAVES

night as the darkness falls on the steep defiles and rocky paths, the black air is congested with silent ghosts.   The Italians didn’t forget their loyal servants and intermediaries. Soon after the ceasefire, the Casa d’Italia decides to honour the valorous askari—those Eritreans who had served in the colonial army between the 1890s and the 1930s—in an exhibition celebrating the colony’s deeper past. Yes, how proud they had been to serve: dressed in their exotic tropical garb, a combination of the European military tradition and the European geographical imaginary, they marched into feudal, slaveowning, Christ-fearing, barefoot Abyssinia as the harbingers of a brave new world. After fighting at Adwa, many serve in Libya, and are honoured in Rome itself. It is a curious exercise in sub-imperialism, and a remarkable reversal of fortune; for the ancestors of the askari had sought to carve out a life on the troubled and turbulent frontier in the Kebessa, seeking to keep the Habesha state at bay or at least to mediate its more brutal demands, while doing the same with whatever entity happened to be creeping up from the coast. For many eager askari recruits, this had been about the promise of a plot of land, a little education, or the ineffable satisfactions of martial identity. But now it takes on a new lustre, as the clearest manifestation of a deep-rooted contrast between us and them. Many crossed the border in October 1935 into Haile Selassie’s ramshackle polity, agents of the colonial mission and of vengeance, and of the expansion 88

DREAMS OF ABYSSINIA

of Mussolini’s new Fascist empire. An old veteran we manage to locate in a village not far from Mendefera tells me of the pride he had to serve, back in the thirties. The experience taught him some important lessons, he says, as we talk in the yard of his home, badly damaged in the final offensive. And what are those? “Ethiopians— very destructive people,” he says, shaking his head. “And all Ethiopians hate Eritrea.” * * * Then come the Brits.   The British period clarifies, gives foundations to, the nationalist struggle against Ethiopia. But the cashstrapped Brits, suddenly finding themselves in charge of enemy territory, were a contradictory lot. Newspapers, debate, political parties: it was all suddenly permitted. But at the same time perfidious Albion leaned toward the dissolution of the territory, even though many members of the British Military Administration were aware of the folly of so doing, and made use of former Italian Fascist personnel because they didn’t have enough of their own people. Worst of all, they stripped the territory of anything worthwhile—the docks at Massawa were dismantled and sent off to Britain’s South Asian empire, itself in its dog days, a heinous act which echoes still in the Eritrean imagination—then basically washed their hands of the whole thing, kowtowing to the Americans, and walking away without so much as a 89

SHALLOW GRAVES

backward glance. In the meantime, however, they unleashed ferocious public debates about the future of the territory.   At the heart of those debates was an existential question: should Eritrea be independent or should it join with Ethiopia, in some shape or form? In the period after the war, I become increasingly interested in the second of these options, in the notion of unionism in the 1950s, during the federation period, when Haile Selassie’s empire was gradually undermining Eritrean autonomy and Isaias Afewerki’s generation was still at school. It is difficult to find people to talk to about it. But not so long ago, before the war broke out in ’98, borders didn’t seem to matter so much. Everyone might be a unionist, if by that term it was meant that one believed in peaceful harmony with Ethiopia, now that freedom had been violently won. In the mid-1990s, it was very much in the air. The agreements that had been signed between the two countries in 1993 were followed by warm rhetoric. Borders wouldn’t matter in future, it was said; soon there could even be some kind of union between Eritrea and Ethiopia—albeit one rather more carefully and equitably negotiated than last time. Unionism, it seemed, was back in fashion. It’s not enough to think of the brief reprise of unionism in the 1990s as the disingenuous attempts by two sinister, cynical regimes to hoodwink one another, their own people and the watching world. This was a curious reworking of many of the 90

DREAMS OF ABYSSINIA

ideas current in the 1940s and 1950s, expounded by a generation which the liberation fronts had angrily disavowed, and yet which clearly had something interesting to say about cross-border trade, cultural connectivity, natural and historical affinity. It had just gone badly wrong by the end of the 1950s, but there was no reason it couldn’t work again.   What it all meant is hard to say. A genuine, pragmatic effort on the part of two regimes to rethink the past and the future? Perhaps. But now, the union narrative runs very much counter to the normal interpretation of events, and specifically of relations between the two countries. After 1998 there would be no more talk of union, not even normality in relations, and once again the history of unionism was thrown into shadow—the preserve of a foolish generation which didn’t know any better and which was, in one way or another, in hock to His Imperial Majesty.   But the 1950s wasn’t quite as linear as all that. Eritreans headed south, in an act of aspiration, of ambition. There was no contradiction between the sense of superiority of Eritrea over Ethiopia, on the one hand, and the southward migration to Addis, on the other: it was part of the same story. Eritreans came to see themselves as building a new Ethiopia. One elderly gentleman, Paulos, whom I come to know well, is a deportee in his seventies, and talks warmly of his migration to Addis in the 1950s, of the hard work he put into build 91

SHALLOW GRAVES

ing up his own company, and of the other Eritreans who did likewise. (He contrasts this, despairingly, with the state of Asmara now—nobody works, he says; people are simply sitting around, waiting, sleeping. The work ethic is gone.) Paulos came to love his life in Addis, had a family, owned property. Those Eritreans believed they had built the city, and that they were favoured in all professions as smart, industrious, hardworking. Eritreans could even run Ethiopia. “That was why the Woyane and others hated us,” says Paulos. “We were too successful!” He was deported in 1998, losing everything. But a part of him never truly left Addis. Of course, people travelled in both directions in the 1950s, and beyond. As ambitious Eritreans were going south to make their fortunes, they passed Tigrayans heading across the border in search of work in the Eritrean highlands—often from eastern Tigray, Agame district, which is where the insulting term arose: Agame! Agame! Ignorant labourers, coming up to Asmara to find work and make a few birr, which they cherished in miserly fashion before sending the money home to the feckless broods waiting for them in abject poverty. Generations of Tigrayans come to be all too aware of the taunt and the seeming arrogance behind it.   For Paulos and many others, the political debates of the 1950s were, in some ways, neither here nor there; this was a generation of young men and women who headed south in the belief that Ethiopia was as much 92

DREAMS OF ABYSSINIA

theirs as Ethiopians’, their natural arena as much as Haile Selassie believed Eritrea was his. It is a striking reworking of the past, one in which the Kebessa now takes centre stage in the historical narrative. But others, of course, were politically active. I manage to track down Aboy6 Gebreyesus, who was a member of Andinet—the Unionist Party—and a former student of Woldeab Woldemariam, one of the leaders of the independence movement and (for some) the ‘father of Eritrean nationalism’. Born in the mid-1920s, he was a Unionist in the 1950s—a member of ‘the stupid party’, he jokes coyly when we first meet. He says in retrospect this was a mistake. But at the time, he and many others of his cohort strongly disagreed with Woldeab’s ideas—“he was always writing about how Ethiopia was backward”—and came to mistrust him. “We feared that Britain or Italy would return, and preferred to go with ‘black’ colonialism! For us, Woldeab and independence would mean a Western threat, foreign influence … Better to be with Ethiopia.” Unionism was a very distinctive kind of African nationalism, after all—it was very emotional, as a senior EPLF friend asserts later, based on the idea of Ethiopia as this great independent state and of Haile Selassie as a great ruler. But this was not to be confused with some feeling of equality between the two peoples, asserts Aboy Gebreyesus; not at all! “Even so, Eritreans regarded themselves as superior, and Ethiopian culture as inferior. That was wrong!” he says. “But we always felt superior, 93

SHALLOW GRAVES

different.” Still, he remained steadfast in at least one, perfectly reasonable conviction. “The Federation might have worked,” he declares, “had it not been for Haile Selassie,” who was completely to blame for undermining everything and rendering the whole thing unworkable. At the same time, too many Eritreans went into Federation willingly because of personal ambition: they thought they would receive promotion, rank, status. Tedla Bairu7 was one such: ambitious, proud. But there was too much rivalry and jealousy within Eritrean political circles; everyone was out for themselves and trying to undermine one another. When the inevitable disappointment came—at least for some—they turned away from Ethiopian rule. The old man suggests, playfully, that he was one of them.   And with that, our conversation is done, and he shakes my hand warmly. Then he moves off into the gorgeous morning sunlight in which Asmara is bathed, the stooped but dignified survivor of a complex past in a country run by those who now seek to simplify that past, if not actively deny it. There aren’t too many of this generation left to talk to. One such is Bocretsion—urbane, articulate and gently sceptical. He grew up in the 1930s, and then in Ethiopia, and became a nationalist of the old-fashioned kind. Like Paulos, he was also deported in ’98. Against the backdrop of the clampdown in September 2001, we talk of his life and his hopes. He has faith in the nation’s long struggle to overcome repeated 94

DREAMS OF ABYSSINIA

betrayal at the hands of distant ‘great powers’ over several generations. He is a believer in the Eritrean nation, he tells me, but refuses to explicitly endorse the EPLF. This is not solely about the Sha’abiyya.   By the early 2000s, everything has changed. Old folk—those born in the 1930s—might remember, but the narrative has changed, and the talk is no longer of union, or of travel, or interconnectedness. Histories now are of how badly things have gone wrong for Eritrea because Eritreans have misread (or allowed themselves to forget) Ethiopia’s true character: grasping, nefarious, deadly. The war reifies certain tropes; essentialises particular histories of Eritrea and its relationship with the great empire to the south. The seeds were already there, of course: the liberation struggle had gone some way to ossifying particular images. But now, any notion of flexibility, of the porous and the ambiguous, and certainly of compromise, is expunged from the nation’s historical narrative, from its very character and identity as defined by Isaias and the Sha’abiyya.  

* * * It is popularly said in Eritrea that ‘under the Italians we could eat, but we could not think; under the British we could think, but not eat; but under the Ethiopians, we could not eat, and we could not think.’ Thus were Eritreans given a clear set of temporal frameworks within which to conceptualise their own history. 95

SHALLOW GRAVES

Indeed, Eritreans often speak of the benefits of colonisation. Since the sixteenth century, long before even the Italians, a wave of occupiers take their place in the great panoply of Eritrean history: the Portuguese and their muskets, marching up the escarpment to rescue Ethiopia from the predations of jihadists; the Turks, developing the coast and the immediate hinterland as part of a global network of trade and communication; even the Egyptians, coming into the northern mountains and the western lowlands. All of these, Eritreans say, taught us civilisation! Ethiopia knew nothing! In the course of the war, against the grim backdrop of Badme and Tsorona and Adi Begio and Areza, Eritreans talk knowingly of the deep past contained within these rugged hills. They talk of the monastic militarism of Ethiopia, of the imperialism that has been part of their lives and that of their ancestors for aeons. Eritrea is the central character in this victim narrative, its share in the ancient glory that was Axum long stolen, long forgotten, except by a handful of archaeologists. Waves of colonists come and seize what they want, pushing Eritreans, as Larkin might have had it, to the edges of their own lives. But it is an experience which gives, too; it is fertile earth. At times, it seems that Eritrea owes everything to grasping foreigners.   But it has been a bitter journey. An old Sha’abiyya friend muses one afternoon in the office where he is ‘frozen’—sidelined from active duty—but to which he 96

DREAMS OF ABYSSINIA

nonetheless comes every day. Eritreans lament, and they pray, and they hope for things to get better, says my friend, paraphrasing a saying attributed to Woldeab Woldemariam. He looks sideways at me, a glint in his eye: “First the Italians, then the British, then the Ethiopians … then we came. God help them.”

97

4

THE EMPEROR

There was such a fear of the precipice in the Palace that everyone tried to hold on to his Majesty, still not knowing that the whole court—though slowly and with dignity— was sliding toward the edge of the cliff. Ryszard Kapuściński, The Emperor1

Thus, in his account of the overthrow of Haile Selassie in 1974, did Ryszard Kapuściński describe the sense of impending catastrophe which both gripped and paralysed the Emperor’s increasingly calcified entourage. It is difficult to read Kapuścińki’s admittedly highly stylised (and not unproblematic) depiction of the late imperial regime, and not to think of President Isaias Afewerki and his inner circle. A markedly personalised and apparently omnipotent regime; an autocrat who maintains control through a multitude of secure channels, each reporting on the other; a government in which real power often does not rest with the most outwardly senior figures,

99

SHALLOW GRAVES

such as ministers, but with the lowly whom the Leader has brought in and raised up, their authority derived solely from their personal connection with him. We know what happens to Haile Selassie and his strange court; we have not yet reached the denouement of the Isaias state, that final and usually blood-splattered act which comes to all regimes that are only omnipotent until, suddenly—hollowed out and desiccated as old husks—they are not. For that procession, millions of Eritreans have an anxious wait.   Isaias Afewerki is a compelling and yet strangely unknowable figure. He manages to be both dominant centrepiece and yet elephant in the room, simultaneously. Isaias is omnipresent and manifest in virtually every single account of modern Eritrea—whether by historians, political scientists, anthropologists, journalists, policy analysts, humanitarians. He has represented many aspects of Eritrea and its history in the popular imagination, as symbol and avatar, including, increasingly, as monster. He has long fulfilled a need, as all leaders do, in one way or another, and certainly those with such remarkable longevity; but that need changes over time, and he has been a lightning rod for both anxious desire and despairing fury among Eritreans, who have long held him in awe as well as loathing. For external audiences, in the timeharried worlds of political analysis and journalism, he was the easily targetable ‘brutal strongman’ of the troubled postcolony, the low-hanging fruit of much tropical discourse. It was a trope which sat comfortably among audi100

THE EMPEROR

ences unwilling or unable to think about structure or process, and certainly not the deeper past.   Watching Isaias means becoming fixated with the relationship between time on the one hand and the Great Leader on the other; with the manner in which the figure of the President seems to channel time itself, and embody space as well as history. Leaders are conduits of time, and repositories of collective memory and, indeed, much private memory, too; and they are echoes and iterations of those who have come before, whether consciously or otherwise. Just as space and time were linked, so too were time and person: in Isaias, time stopped. For a person is a space, too: they channel the past; presidencies and kingships are spaces through which ideas about time itself flow. Lessons, or at least alluring parallels, abound from the region’s history, and it is difficult not to increasingly think of Isaias as channelling the past, and embodying some kind of Habesha time. The region certainly boasts a long lineage of the charismatic and the downright insane in terms of kings, emperors, presidents and prime ministers—state-builders and rebels, shapers of political order and defenders of it. Certain traits and tropes have become attached to these individuals over time. He belongs to a rich and compelling canon of warrior-kings in Habesha history, around whom narratives have been carefully woven and imagery assiduously cultured: from Yekuno Amlak and Amda Tsion in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth 101

SHALLOW GRAVES

centuries, to Ras Michael in the late eighteenth century, to Tewodros in the nineteenth. And it is the ghost of Tewodros which seems to haunt our narrative most intensely: I become increasingly fixated not just with Isaias, but with the tragic emperor who was at once the harbinger of ‘modernity’ (according to one interpretation) and the incarnation of the past. His career and the images around it mirror those of the Eritrean President—except, so far, for the ending.   Isaias may indeed have been channelling a host of spectral figures who drifted across the highland plateau on gentle winds—ghosts of wars past, whispering their exhortations into the President’s ear. But he also sees himself as the end of history, the great judge of the past, and for him the past is only betrayal and sacrifice and injustice, giving rise to those elements from which his own personality seems to draw succour. Political leadership involves, at the best of times, a peculiar form of madness. In the Horn of Africa, a region characterised by markedly high levels of conflict and instability—and thus high levels of political stress—it might be said that leaders here are like any other, only more so. When I ask one Ethiopian informant about his perception of the performance to date of the new Prime Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, he replies using the voice that might, he says, have been used by his father’s generation—that the man hasn’t killed nearly enough people, and therefore is barely visible and clearly not significant. He is only partially joking: it has been a long-held view 102

THE EMPEROR

that leaders need to assert themselves by episodically inflicting violence on recalcitrant subjects, lest the latter think the ruler dead or incapacitated. Besides, what is the point of leaders if the world is perfect? * * * [He is] strong like Samson, a great warrior like David, a conqueror in war and himself unconquered. From the chronicle of Amda Tsion, c.1314–13442 There was no safety but in Ras Michael. James Bruce on Ras Mikael Sehul as Ethiopia descends into civil war, 17693 The King Theodorus is young in years, vigorous in all manly exercises, of a striking countenance, peculiarly polite and engaging when pleased, and mostly displaying great tact and delicacy. He is persuaded that he is destined to restore the glories of the Ethiopian Empire, and to achieve great conquests; of untiring energy, both mental and bod­ ily, his personal and moral daring are boundless. Walter Plowden on Tewodros, 18554 Farmers, plough! Nobles and princes, lords of hereditary lands … I will give you what your grandfathers possessed! Merchants, practise your trade! … Thieves and robbers, stop; surrender! Woe betide the limbs of those who pillage and rob! Courage, O people! Emperor Tewodros, quoted in a royal chronicle, c.18555 103

SHALLOW GRAVES

  During the struggle, EPLF fighters wore neither rank nor insignia on their uniforms, and there were no other obvious markers, including personal adornment, of political or military authority. There were none of the normal distinguishing accoutrements around leadership; but everyone knew who was who. For many years Isaias was not at the centre of the personality cult normally associated with dictators or long-term patriarchs in Africa and beyond. For the first few years of the EPLF’s existence, indeed, he was deputy secretary general of the EPLF—behind the largely titular leadership of Ramadhan Nur—until 1987, when he formally took over the leadership. Of course, everyone in the Front knew where power lay. This was absolutely central to the ethos of the Sha’abiyya.6 It was a curious kind of unspoken and unseen cult of personality, embedded in the quiet, collective determination of the EPLF’s struggle, which eschewed individual glory and position, and which was ironically incarnate in the person of Isaias himself. Still, as everyone also knew, he had stamped his authority on the movement many years before, in 1973 at the time of the manqa crisis,7 when a number of ‘dissidents’ within the fledgling EPLF demanded democratic reform and criticised the high-handedness of Isaias. He moved decisively against them: some were killed, and others publicly repented, as befitted an emergent regime forming around the person of Isaias, who had trained in China at the height of the Cultural Revolution. 104

THE EMPEROR

  No personality cult, then; but when foreigners first meet him, as he emerges into the realm of global visibility in the course of the 1970s and 1980s, he routinely impresses those interlocutors who venture into ‘the Field’. In November 1978, in the town of Keren, in the central northern Eritrean highlands, the journalist and activist Dan Connell witnesses the retreat of forces of the EPLF from the town, a strategic node which they had held for several months, in the face of an overwhelming Ethiopian–Soviet offensive. For many, it is a devastating moment, and possibly even the beginning of the end for the Eritrean liberation struggle—already in progress for almost two decades at that point. In the confusion of military traffic heading north toward the mountains, Connell bumps into a distraught Isaias Afewerki, then deputy secretary general of the EPLF, and de facto leader of the movement. “‘It’s finished’, he had muttered, shaking his head.” A little later, he apologises to Connell for his outburst. “When I am challenged, I become more stubborn—more and more rigid. I’m very emotional. I get sad, but I don’t get discouraged.”8 It is a revealing moment, demonstrating with poignant lucidity the power of emotion in the moment of struggle, of defeat, of the severest pressure imaginable; it is also a markedly portentous statement on the part of a man who will later become known for his extraordinary political inflexibility and his outbursts of frustrated passion.  

105

SHALLOW GRAVES

  But now, in the heat of the struggle, it is a quality to be admired; and those who bother to take an interest are routinely captivated by the modest revolutionary who has apparently been chosen to lead the Eritrean people to the Promised Land. In 1984, Isaias—then deputy secretary general of the EPLF—tells an eager Western audience via the charity worker James Firebrace and the Labour MP Stuart Holland: I think the EPLF is an expression of the aspiration of our people. We want to transform this society and to have a modern society, not the kind of society we have—people suffering from hunger, people living under very difficult conditions, natural catastrophes, very infertile soil. We have suffered, and 23 years of war in Eritrea has compounded the sufferings of the people. We are striving to fight for our right to self-determination and to transform this society socially, economically, culturally. And to do both at the same time.9

  It is difficult not to be impressed: the steely resilience, softly spoken; the refreshing vision; the political and social conscience.   And so it continues into independence. His photo doesn’t hang in hotel lobbies; his face isn’t on banknotes, nor is his image anywhere public. In the late 1990s, there are two partial exceptions to this covert cult of leadership. The first is a furniture and household goods shop at the south end of Martyrs Avenue, in the window of which hung an enormous rug with 106

THE EMPEROR

Isaias’s face on it. People remark on this laughingly, because it is so unusual; no one takes it seriously, and I can’t say what happened to the rug. It is not a good likeness but close enough, in the heady days before the war, to draw bemused gazes, and to leave no one in doubt that this is indeed the President whose face is usually nowhere, except on TV, of course. The other partial exception is in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, newly opened in 2000 and the only major international hotel in the country. There is a fair amount of dubious artwork in the place, as befits the branch of a global chain, but in the foyer there is a very large frieze of some classically posed and supposedly fictional EPLF fighters in the field. One of them, however—a figure very much prominent and centrepiece—bears an uncanny resemblance to a mirthful Isaias, standing in command of his men and his mission, and encapsulating the tough idyll of comradeship and sacrifice associated with the armed struggle. It is passed daily by a procession of diplomats, businessmen, senior officials and hookers, and those who simply want a cold if dramatically overpriced beer. For many, the resemblance is striking and worth commenting upon. ‘Enjoy this degraded and indulgent life,’ the Isaias figure appears to be remarking; ‘but look on me and my comrades. This was the life that made yours possible.’   Yet he is not averse to having fun with the people. It is always a thrill to see him appear in nightclubs, which 107

SHALLOW GRAVES

happens quite frequently. He likes to dance and drink, and fulfils the supposed needs and expectations of his gender. He is a serial philanderer, according to some, with a ferocious sexual appetite; but no matter, for that’s his business. He is certainly often seen around town at night, popping up at various hotspots with a sizeable entourage, and is not averse to throwing himself into traditional Tigrinya dancing, and accepting with handsome benevolence the adoration of young women and young men alike. Older women, too, seem to love him, as the beautiful, dutiful son. He is allowed to let off steam. He is a reassuring presence. In the course of 1998 and 1999, he seems calm, resolute, unflappable. And reasonable: he says he didn’t want this war, and we believe him. But now it has started, he will finish it, and hopefully the Woyane with it. He embodies stubborn resistance and the finest characteristics of Eritrea’s past.   There is a blip. At the end of February 1999, news comes through that the Ethiopians have retaken Badme. That is stunning enough. But then Isaias announces that he will accept the OAU peace proposals—the same plan at which he had scoffed a few months earlier, when it looked as though Eritrean forces had the upper hand. Everyone is taken by surprise, and a depressed air settles on Asmara. What is he doing? people mutter quietly. Have we simply surrendered? But wisdom is soon restored to the President: Ethiopia refuses to accept Eritrea’s offer, claiming that it is not genuine, and within 108

THE EMPEROR

weeks the war has widened violently across the central front. People are in awe of Isaias, who can now claim to be the victim of Ethiopian chicanery. He called their bluff, knowing full well that the evil Woyane would never accept his offer.   We have all—even us ferenjis—fallen under the spell. Many of us grow up, in a very real sense, in his shadow, and in his state. I am secretly envious of my journalist friends who get to interview him. I can only claim to be a drinking buddy of his brother, for a while; the joke in the group is that he is the ‘prince’. But he deliberately plays the fool, perhaps subconsciously differentiating himself from the forbidding, ineffable presence in his life. Through these connections I get myself invited to his sister’s wedding, and watch as he frustrates his bodyguard by moving this way and that, into the crowd, greeting, smiling. Flunkies try to sit at the table where he finally settles to observe the party. But he is distant with them and appears uninterested. I long to drink Scotch with him—he’s fond of a drop, we hear— and for a time we all watch him, outwardly sceptical and nonchalant, but inwardly with admiration and reverence, willing him to ‘succeed’, in whatever form that success might come. * * * My people are bad; they love rebellion and hate peace; delight in idleness, and are averse to industry; but, if God 109

SHALLOW GRAVES

continues to me my life … I will eradicate all that is bad, and introduce all that is salutary and good. Emperor Tewodros to the missionary Henry Stern, c.186210

 Suddenly, however, the war is not going well. The Ethiopians have broken through in the west. They are advancing toward the highland plateau. There is confusion in Asmara. Who is in charge? Who allowed this to happen? It turns out that Isaias had taken direct control of military operations, and now it is a debacle that poses an existential threat to the nation. Many in the inner circle of Party and Government, as well as in the military high command, hold Isaias responsible for the debacle which saw Ethiopian forces break through the Eritrean lines south of Barentu. Rumours of an imminent coup fly around the capital. A group of senior EPLF figures are said to be planning to move against Isaias and take control of the war effort. They send Sebhat Ephrem as an intermediary to talk to him. Isaias dismisses the whole thing, and then proceeds directly to the front to be with the army. The generals tell him, don’t worry, you’ll have no trouble from those people. The coup quickly runs out of steam. It has briefly threatened to unseat him, but the emperor survives. He goes on, to occupy the role of archpatriot, mourner-in-chief, the great educator.   In the months following the ceasefire in June, things begin to change. Isaias’s conduct of the war comes under scrutiny, and the criticism swiftly broadens out to 110

THE EMPEROR

include his political leadership and his authoritarianism. It sets in train a grim sequence of events in the weeks and months following the ceasefire in June. In the course of 2001, leading figures demand that the national assembly be convened, that the constitution—in cold storage since before the war—be implemented, and that, in sum, the President be held to account in the wake of what has been, they now believe, a disastrous war. He warns them against this course of action, and when they ignore his laconic admonition and circulate a highly critical statement to the PFDJ membership, he warns them again; and, then, over the course of a single weekend, while the world is still gazing slack-jawed at the space where the World Trade Center had once stood, he swoops. Most of the leading critics are arrested, save those who happen to be out of the country; newspapers are closed down and their editors and journalists rounded up. It is the decisive moment of transition into the personalised authoritarianism which has long threatened, in truth.   Now, there is no question of an understated, undemonstrative personality cult. In the run-up to the crackdown, stories abound concerning the man’s strength of character and sheer bloody-mindedness. While the ‘G15’ are planning their final assault, another, gentler group of critics—mostly academics and artists from the diaspora—arrange to meet with the President to discuss what was known as the ‘Berlin Manifesto’: in summary, another set of demands for reform and a warning against an authoritarian path. People note in awed whispers 111

SHALLOW GRAVES

how Isaias had apparently met a dozen or so of these critics on his own—without aides, advisers or any other government official present. He had faced them down, and they had left, cowed and empty-handed. Even those sympathetic to the growing murmurs about the need for reform are in awe of the man: his audacity, his resolve. Maybe, just maybe, he knows something they don’t. The projection of power—as important, increasingly, as the practical exercise of it—has become something quite spectacular. But it is also the outcome of at least one very practical tool: his ability to identify weak personalities and appoint them to run institutions. He is surrounded by such weak people, over whom he can exercise complete control; Eritrea is ostensibly run by them, but they can’t, and wouldn’t, do anything. This is the land, not of institution and process, but of personality and character, both big and small. * * *

All rule in this country depends on the energies of a chief himself … no sooner is my back turned than they plunder the King, refuse their proper tribute … Besides … I am old now, and when I am dead all will come again to confusion. Ras Welde Selassie of Tigray to Henry Salt, 181011 [Tewodros] seems little by little to have thrown off all restraint, until he became remarkable for reckless and wanton cruelty. Henry Blanc on Tewodros, 186912 112

THE EMPEROR

  In the years after the crackdown, it is all very different. He remains the struggle incarnate, but he’s an anomaly, too; a departure, which perhaps reflects the new realities of Eritrea’s modern history, however frightening Eritreans themselves find them. He is unusual, unprecedented, in Tigrinya culture. My friend Amanuel leans in close, one warm afternoon, as we talk of these things. “There is a proverb in Tigrinya,” he says. “The tall stalk of sorghum is only for birds or for cutting. If I am different, if I stand out, I will die. Isaias defies that. And Eritreans struggle to understand it.”   But his famed political acumen is blunted by testosterone and paranoia. Isaias has made the transition from Spartan genius, stoical visionary, to alcoholic madman, authoritarian monster, in remarkably quick time. A young warsai tells me about his parents, deported from Addis in 1998. At first, he says, they loved Isaias and wouldn’t hear a bad word about him in their home. But now they loathe him and everything he represents. When the President begins to lose that generation, he’s in trouble. There is no question in their minds that the war was his debacle, and his alone. But he hates them, too, it seems. He seems to despise the Asmarino middle class, such as it is, just as he hates those from Addis, the Ameches. These urban groups make him nervous, and he has only contempt for them. Only contempt, too, for urban intellectuals, who flutter around on the privileged margins of the armed struggle. Increasingly it is difficult 113

SHALLOW GRAVES

to understand whom he does like or respect. Not many, it seems. But he likes the peasants, so it is said. He has long advocated their promotion in the movement, rather than educated urbanites. He likes uneducated folk from the adi, and the government is full of them. And they love him. There is a direct correlation. Most of the criticism comes from the urban highlands—he’s losing them. But in the villages, and especially in the western lowlands, he is the only one to be trusted. As his lustre fades somewhat in the highlands, he is seen by lowland Muslims as their protector, the only political figure who can be trusted to look after their interests. The Tigrinya, by contrast, are spoilt and unappreciative of his genius.   He is indeed the tall stalk; full of fear and loathing. He is perennially drunk, people whisper; but now he doesn’t go out much. No more nightclubs, no joyous, whisky-fuelled dancing at Sembel Huts, a popular weekend spot. That particular image had begun to erode in 2000 and 2001, with the escalation of unlimited national service and the damage done to family life—the most important thing to most Eritreans—as a result. Many continue to give him the benefit of the doubt— indeed, some do not hold him personally responsible for any of the terrible things happening to their children, but rather seek to blame those beneath him. But for thousands of mothers and wives and sisters, he has become the enemy, the destroyer of the social fabric which had bound Eritrea together through all the hard114

THE EMPEROR

ships of the liberation struggle. He was the reveller, but now becomes the inveterate boozer; the nasty drunk. Everyone has a ‘sozzled Isaias’ story, many of them involving him bottling people, including ministers and members of his own inner circle.   He’s riddled with malaria, say others. The health issue is a favourite topic of hushed conversation. Rumours abound. Maybe he’s dying? He is often away for treatment, of some kind or other, for some condition or other. Perhaps the cerebral malaria for which he was treated in Israel back in ’93; but now more serious. Perhaps the liver? The result of his alleged boozing? People enjoy talking about it, and whispering. During his appearances on TV, he often seems pale, drawn, sweaty; suffering from indigestion. Maybe it’s just the simmering contempt for some of those much around him that has him feeling bloated, uncomfortable. But those medical trips to Qatar increase in frequency. In Isaias, Eritrea has its putatively living embodiment; the nation made flesh. But that body is weakening.   He disappears from view, only to appear at carefully governed events, or on TV to give rambling interviews. Jokes begin to do the rounds—though usually with Robert Mugabe or Muammar Qaddafi substituted for Isaias himself. He is the engineering drop-out from Addis University who is now obsessed with building roads that no one can drive on. He wants to move mountains, literally, as in the case of the airstrip at Sawa mili 115

SHALLOW GRAVES

tary training camp. He travels around the country in his trademark shades and short-sleeved shirts, planning infrastructural projects that may or may not happen. All the while, he goes on, only because he surrounds himself with the weak and the fawning, who are simply glad to be in his presence.   The system hangs on him, people say. We even need him, in a way, says one friend. Increasingly, in effect, there is indeed a cult of personality developing around him. In part this is because those around him and underneath him “are total shit”, according to Danny, my good friend in national service with a keen ear to the ground. If he ever goes, there will be civil war. Danny shakes his head distantly. “Big problems for Eritrea.” He pauses. “We kind of need him!” But once he is gone, there will be no system, and all the other guys will be kicked away—Wuchu, Filipos,13 all the others. They have no future without Isaias, mutter the people in the know. They are nothing. They exist because they are attached to him—seething, resentful, fearful, maybe, but utterly dependent. He is both obstacle to change and represents the only hope for it. Every conversation—whether hinged on demarcation, or political reform, or an easing of national service—about the future ends thus: only if the President is willing. Only if Isaias wants it to happen. But he’s not so all-powerful, it seems. Stories emerge of his anxieties about the popularity and local power of certain of his army commanders. Others say that he was 116

THE EMPEROR

only saved by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which provided him with cover. Isaias was genuinely afraid of the ‘G15’, says an old ex-fighter friend, the astute and twinkle-eyed Solomon. They had him in the bag, he says, and he would never have dared to move against them had it not been for 9/11. I am doubtful about this, but the fact that it is entertained as a narrative is interesting in itself—almost as though, once again, external events have robbed Eritreans of their rightful future.   At the heart of it all, Isaias maintains control through a crude but effective use of human psychology: he freezes, promotes, sidelines. No one is quite sure when or how it might happen to them. Everyone is hypervigilant. Nobody trusts anyone else. Junior people are personally selected by the President to lead some project or other, without the knowledge of the relevant minister, who then must hold his tongue when he finds out and watch his back. Isaias creates a system of ferocious competition, breeding an ossifying rivalry between ministries and individuals within ministries, between bosses and their subordinates. Ministries themselves are now largely useless, one insider friend tells me, because the President creates new projects and agencies and unofficial ministries which ostensibly do the work of the actual ministries; and the people in the latter, including the ministers themselves, don’t do anything all day, but drink tea and wait for developments. Secretaries slouch up and down the hot, dusty corridors, and are certainly 117

SHALLOW GRAVES

too busy to receive visitors, if you go there needing something done; but everyone is really just waiting for something to happen. The result: Isaias has created not just a vacuum, but a whole bunch of strategically placed vacuums, and so he is, almost by default, everywhere. There is nothing he doesn’t know about, whether local or national, no detail that doesn’t get passed to him as soon as it becomes relevant. And so everyone watches one another, and no one targets him.   The response of at least one senior figure to all this talk of an all-powerful ‘President’s Office’ is to snort dismissively. This is no imperial court, he laughs one day, when I visit him in his own office for a ritual talking-to. “There are maybe three or four people working in there. It’s very small! How can the President’s Office be as powerful as you all seem to think?” This might be said to be missing the point somewhat, but it is best not to argue. “Sure,” this man tells me a few months later, “he’s a powerful personality and in many ways he embodies the struggle. But it’s simply lazy to reduce everything to one man.” Be that as it may, the President’s utter self-belief and overpowering doggedness make ordinary people doubt themselves. They think, maybe there is something in this … after all, what do I know? Maybe there are things I don’t understand, and he does. The beauty of the selfdoubt system is that people become frightened by everything, and nothing. Amanuel—who knows his Adam Smith—explains it comically. “An invisible hand is at 118

THE EMPEROR

work in Eritrea!” he exclaims mischievously. This leads to much mirth in our company, which takes several moments to calm. “The thing is, often nobody knows where orders are coming from. Army, police, state security, ministries: they all act in fear that there is some kind of power watching them, but in fact there is really only confusion, bordering on chaos. Isaias fosters this to create suspicion and competition in the lower ranks.” Everyone says this is the outcome of the attempt to remove him after Barentu fell, in May 2000. Since then, Isaias has created shadows and mirrors.   In the years that follow, he consolidates, and consolidates still more. Episodic predictions of his demise come and go episodically, and he remains; his critics become ever more vocal and despairing, but he is still there. “The dogs bark,” he is supposedly fond of saying, “but the camel continues to march.” And march it does, past numerous milestones as Eritrea grows older, despite the stories of chronic ill-health and booze-fuelled insanity. It marches on through isolation, seeing off numerous diplomatic visitations and requests; brushes off the growing number of young Eritreans fleeing the country; and survives periodic skirmishes with the Ethiopian army along the border where war might—he asserts, repeatedly— restart at any time. It even thuds on through the strange quasi-coup attempt of January 2013, when some soldiers seize the television station in Asmara for a few hours. The broadcast goes off air for a time, and then things return 119

SHALLOW GRAVES

to normal, and the martial music plays once more. And the camel will not discuss the border: the Algiers Agreement was signed and agreed, and then Ethiopia broke its terms and continued to occupy Eritrean land where Badme used to be. The camel has no interest in reopening negotiations, even after its old enemy Meles Zenawi—more fox than camel—died in 2011. Sheer political and biological longevity might have been a cause for celebration for most people, perhaps offering a moment for reflection and an opportunity to sigh and say, Okay, let bygones be bygones; let’s talk to this new guy—after all, Hailemariam Desalegn is no Woyane, not in the strict sense—and hear what he has to say. But not for the camel, this kind of indulgence, this weakness. No flinching, no reflection. For some, indeed, that is unthinkable: only Isaias, it is said, can bring about the destruction of the Woyane, and that is his last remaining function! His historic mission: to humble Ethiopia. Everything else, and everyone else, is secondary now. (“Even Eritrea?” I ask one normally critical exponent of this view. “Even Eritrea,” he replies, quietly.)   No great orator, he can make speeches that seem to go on for hours, managing to be both monotonous and angry at the same time. His speeches are grim trawls through Eritrea’s terrible history of oppression and betrayal and struggle; he knows his history, for sure. And in interviews, he is defensive, prickly, sanctimonious, given to outbursts of barely concealed rage. Yet for a 120

THE EMPEROR

certain generation of younger, eager EPLF fighters, an appearance by the President on TV to make a statement is an event to be keenly anticipated: he is their lodestar, their constant. They must believe that he knows things because they certainly don’t. “Now we will know where we are going,” says Medhanie to me one day, hearing that Isaias will be on TV that evening to give an interview. “Now we will know our future.” An older, more cynical tegadelay friend has a slightly different view. People are drawn to him, he says, “like moths to the flame”. In part, this is because there have been moments in the past when he has proven doubters wrong over certain issues, and his subordinates are now in awe of him. But increasingly he is rambling in speeches and angry. He blames everything on someone else; everyone else is incompetent. In speeches he treats everyone else like an idiot; he is the great philosopher-king. It works with older people, says Ermias, a well-connected friend in one of the ministries. It works because they don’t know any better. But if there was an election tomorrow, no young person would vote for him. Then, with a quick glance around the bar, Ermias does his excellent impersonation of Isaias and his repetitive speeches in that monotonous tegadelay Tigrinya (my Ameche friends say they struggle to understand it, sometimes). Jokes are doing the rounds. A warsai dies and goes to heaven—sees Isaias trying to get in—changes his mind and says, No, actually, I’ll go to the other place, thanks. That kind of thing. 121

SHALLOW GRAVES

  All the while, the opposition huffs and fumes and storms around in exile, impotent and largely disorganised. They watch him intensely, so that he is, as Amanuel quips one evening, “the leader of the opposition as well as the President of the country”. It is true that they can’t take their eyes off him, as they stand, stake and hammer in hand, gripped by the sight of the great vampire who holds them contemptuously in his gaze. It seems he has defied the wisdom of the old Tigrinya proverb. Either Isaias is a freak of nature or just extremely clever—a Gulliver among the Lilliputians, seizing gleeful advantage of the naive, homespun wisdom of his compatriots. But even some of his critics secretly admire him, and espy some righteousness, some rigour, some veracity in his positions. One friend, who is given to ranting nightly about the failings of the regime, becomes more reflective when he thinks about the President. “Well … he has this character, it must be said … Sure, he’s stubborn, but he has been proven right in his foreign policy—about Somalia, in particular.” Damn it, the man must be right about something—though it might not actually be Somalia. But in any case nobody compares to him. He looks purposeful, energetic. The opposition are nowhere.   Even Ethiopians are somehow fixated with him. When discussing the EPLF or Eritrea in general, they invariably come back to him. The crazy, evil, historybusting dictator. He is the personification of everything gone wrong. He dominates the EPLF, says one TPLF acquaintance. Only he talks; no one else. Madness! 122

THE EMPEROR

  Foreigners remain fascinated by him. And that is the problem, according to one PFDJ official. Complaining to me one afternoon about author and activist Dan Connell, he says that Dan “was obsessed” with Isaias. After independence he was always asking to meet with him. But independence was different from the Field; the President was busier, and had less time. But suddenly Connell is criticising the government. It is as though he feels personally betrayed by the President!14 And look at these descriptions of the President as a violent drunkard!15 That is just racist. These are just cartoons. The President is a complex, sophisticated character. * * * And so, what will happen when he goes, as go he surely will, when the sheer limits of biology will bring the assiduously crafted personal authoritarianism to a shuddering halt? What will Eritreans do, and what will they get in his stead? Another Isaias, perhaps? Someone to govern in his memory and style, North Korean-fashion? Of course, there is no anointed successor, no one to watch instead of Isaias. I trust a handful of people to pose this question to, but they often struggle with an answer. Sometimes Yemane Gebreab is offered, gingerly, as an option. But it’s much easier to say who won’t be— none of the ministers, everyone agrees, confidently. Except maybe, for a time, Ali Abdu. People laugh about Ali Abdu, Minister of Information, who is nicknamed 123

SHALLOW GRAVES

Uday, after Saddam Hussein’s son. He was Isaias’s radio operator during the struggle—see how fast he’s been pro­ moted! Now he is the ultra-loyalist, spouting Isaias’s guff and even beginning to look a bit like him.16 Meanwhile stories begin to circulate that Isaias is grooming his son, Abraham. That is not quite so funny, and although no one really believes it, the idea is a frightening one. To be sure, and whatever the case, Isaias will haunt Eritrea for many years after he is gone; he has already ensured that, in one sense or another, the dead will continue to govern—as he has always believed, it seems. Eritreans will miss him. But won’t they then seek to break from this deeply rooted tradition of political command? And if so, where will they look for their inspiration? Perhaps leaders, for once, should be regarded as less important than processes and institutions. I wonder, at times, whether Eritreans have fixated on Isaias at the expense of more nuanced, considered assessments—of the nature of their society, of their collective history, of their armed struggle or the interpretation of it. Isaias’s putative evil in a sense exonerates the people around him and underneath him; but everyone, all of us, are somehow complicit in political failure. At events to mark Eritrea’s various anniversaries in London, packed with members of the diaspora, Isaias Afewerki invariably haunts the room: people wonder, how have we allowed this to happen?   Sometimes it seems as though Isaias represents a curious return, in independent Eritrea, to an older, Abyssinian 124

THE EMPEROR

model of authoritarianism or Habesha monarchism: the stoicism; the hardiness; the stubborn pride; the courtier politics. Eritrea was supposed to be different, and might well have been. As his regime has become entrenched, private memories of the leaders of the 1940s and 1950s— what they stood for, how they operated—have become rather more positive. In popular memory at least, the 1940s and 1950s witnessed a kind of more inclusive, chaotic, democratic politics. It was represented by leaders of a very different hue—Woldeab Woldemariam or Ibrahim Sultan. Some now recalled the urbane, thoughtful leadership of those men—sophisticated, cultured men who recognised nuance and practised compromise accordingly, and demonstrated political good faith, with all its attendant risk; but better that, it seemed, than no faith at all. This was rooted in nascent ideas about democracy, plurality, compromise and negotiation; centrally, ideas about political modernity which an Eritrean political class grasped enthusiastically. Romanticisation, no doubt; but it is the result of too much time spent watching Isaias. That generation ultimately misjudged Ethiopia’s, and Haile Selassie’s, intentions. Isaias and his group utilised that misjudgement to justify a particular kind of leadership that ironically returned Eritrea to a nineteenthcentury Ethiopian style of military monarchy.   But as to how he will go, it is difficult even for Isaias’s bitterest enemies to contemplate that, for everyone knows that his demise will signal—or will be a signifi 125

SHALLOW GRAVES

cant part of—the kind of violent political turmoil that every Eritrean fears and dreads as they peer into the gloomy future. In a sense Isaias has become Eritrea, and his falling, his death, cannot mean anything other than profound rupture, collapse, trauma. Perhaps this is overly pessimistic, and it will be better than that.   Kapuściński’s description of a delusional Haile Selassie’s final weeks is somehow apposite: Imprisoned in the rooms of the Menelik Palace on the hills above Addis Ababa, Haile Selassie is spending the last months of his life surrounded by soldiers. According to eyewitness accounts, these soldiers, as in the best times of the Empire, still bow before the King of Kings. Thanks to such gestures … Haile Selassie still believes that he is the Emperor of Ethiopia … The King of Kings gets up at dawn, attends morning mass, and afterwards plunges into his reading. The former supreme ruler still repeats what he said on the day of his deposition: “If the revolution is good for the people, then I am for the revolution.”17

  It is difficult to imagine this kind of ending for Eritrea’s emperor. Still, as the story of 1974 illustrates, stranger things have happened and, in the Horn of Africa, invariably do.

126

5

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

The tensions are rising, and the arguments escalate. Amanuel, burnishing his ELF credentials, enjoys winding up Danny. “This lot—the warsai,” he proclaims, gesturing aggressively toward Danny as we sit at a café, “want everything given to them on a plate. We won liberation! Now they must finish the job.” Take your guns, he says, complete the revolution. Danny, trapped in never-ending military service and a veteran of the Assab front, looks annoyed. “And do what?” he asks, smiling for my sake but clearly irritated. “We hate the Sha’abiyya; they don’t care at all about us. But what good would it do to turn our guns on them … They are our fathers, brothers, uncles. How can we use violence against them?” No, he says; we wait, and we hope. But he is afraid of them, too. This turns out to be a recurring joust, for these two now clash regularly when we all meet. On one evening, it starts out as an amusing, light-hearted exchange. Warsai Danny pokes fun at Jebha Amanuel:

127

SHALLOW GRAVES

“Ha! The Sha’abiyya kicked you out of Eritrea—those little shorts are good for running away in!” And Amanuel back at Danny: “Bwa! You warsai bolted back to Asmara in 2000. You people don’t know how to fight.” But now it takes a darker turn. Amanuel demands to know why the warsai accept all this shit instead of standing up to their unit commanders. Danny says there’s no unity among the warsai—maybe just the firstround lot, in the early 1990s—and that so many of them are now in jail for precisely that, for questioning their officers. Eritrea is full of prisons only for disobedient and rebellious warsai, he says. Danny, maddened by the pointing finger of the chain-smoking Amanuel, says he’s not afraid of anything, but he is not willing to die or be punished for this administration. He later whispers angrily to me as Amanuel disappears for a much-needed piss that the latter wasn’t even in Eritrea during the war, but in Germany, or London, or somewhere; what right has he to talk like that?   But others wonder about all this, too. A senior EPLF contact confesses to me one day that he, too, asks himself why the warsai generation takes so much crap. When he and his cohort were young, they stood up. “At their age we went onto the streets and threw stones. Why are they not doing it?” But this generation seems afraid of the punishments routinely meted out to dissenters. When even members of the EPLF wonder why no one is rebelling against them, we have entered a rather surreal 128

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

universe: surely the whole point was to create a unitary and quiescent state, I find myself wondering. It is as though the liberation cohort cannot quite believe that they have succeeded (more or less) in creating such a state and are waiting for the backlash. Yemane Gebremeskel, presidential adviser, makes a speech to some young folk during a round of ‘public consultations’. “If you want power,” he exhorts his weary and browbeaten audience, “be manly about it and take it! Break a window when the door is closed!” No one quite knows what to make of this. But increasingly these speeches by top-rank Sha’abiyya are regarded humorously by their intended audiences. Danny recalls a talk given to his battalion by an EPLF commander. “We had to eat leaves during the struggle when there was no food!” the commander declares, expecting this to impress the assembled youth. The warsai chuckle at this. “Ah, that explains why there are no more trees in Eritrea, and no shelter from the fucking sun down in the desert [Barka].”   Now we are seeing the gradual erosion of the 1990s EPLF consensus—it is beginning to rot. It is questioned, rejected, in little shrugs, and the subtlest of eyebrows raised, and sometimes, in safe places after beers, in full voice in the company of those who are trusted. The 1990s consensus is going now, eaten away by the pain of loss and sacrifice, and by constant, aching denial. People are beginning to eschew Sha’abiyya time. They want a different kind of time, one which doesn’t move so gla 129

SHALLOW GRAVES

cially. And they want a different kind of history, which is to say, future. Surely it wasn’t always like this, they say, and surely it can’t always be like this?   The generations have begun to divide. The hard-bitten war veteran cohort increasingly struggle with the sight of a new generation: born in around 1980, often abroad or in Addis Ababa, who came of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and who—in common with the young everywhere else in the world—have plans, dreams, ambitions. Not for them the drudgery of armed service— proud as they invariably are to be Eritrean. For that reason alone the Sha’abiyya seem to despise them, even though the liberation war was ostensibly fought for them. But there is something in the sight of their jollity and aspirational internationalism that provokes some dark emotions in the belly of the EPLF state; almost as though the leadership cannot bear to see how time threatens to undo the great struggle and its memories and institutions, and that they might one day be forgotten in their turn. At any rate, a longer journey from the disabled fighters cloistered in Denden barracks is difficult to imagine. Time has done for them all, or will in the end. Still, younger Eritreans debate ferociously the nature of the armed struggle, and its aftermath and consequences; this is history that matters to them, and no one has a monopoly on it. But it speaks to the generational struggle which is increasingly apparent. And it is not a straightforward one, either. Sometimes, it seems 130

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

that the President hates the young. The University, he declares not long before effectively shutting the place down, has done nothing for national development: all it has done is breed self-obsessed and inept citizens who throng around the many photo shops across the city, cooing over their own images.   On Eritrean TV, great efforts are made to link the generations, with old footage of the EPLF interspersed with more recent shots of warsai, with songs of military glory and heroism playing in the background. But it has become clear that even many warsai weren’t trusted; they may have fought well enough in the recent fighting, but the EPLF knew that many warsai despised them and had come to the opinion that the EPLF story was a myth; that they had seen how the Sha’abiyya conducted themselves when under pressure in war, and that it wasn’t pretty. As time goes by, I’m informed by various sources that the government is actually very worried about the gulf between the fighters and the younger generation; do they share our values? Perhaps the notion of inheritance should have been better explained, notes Ermias wryly. Government people are worried now; but it might be too late.   My old friend Danny is a warsai. I have known him since before the war—irreverent, cheeky grin, uncouth sense of humour, little respect for authority. Danny is about my age, and most of his adult life has become defined by the war. He is called up for the pre-war 131

SHALLOW GRAVES

national development campaign, and remains in the army for the next fifteen years. He says that many older officers in the EDF are oddly ‘jealous’ of the warsai, or seem somehow to want to punish them for some unspecified misdemeanour. They are denied meat, and indeed they are monitored constantly for what they are eating. Danny says that once when posted near the border, waiting interminably for something—anything—to happen, he and his pals came across the great prize dreamed of by all national service conscripts: roadkill. It is a rabbit, quite a big one, and they can’t believe their luck. They sneak it back to their barracks, salivating at the thought of cooking this mangled but entirely edible piece of meat. But they are discovered, and the officers seize the mashed cadaver, hurling insults at Danny and his friends as they do so. The rabbit is quickly consumed by the officers themselves. Danny tells this story in his characteristically humorous way. But it seems, he says, that “the general attitude among [the Sha’abiyya officers] is, ‘we are fucked, so you will be too’, and that they want to make us suffer as they have for all their lives …” (Amanuel, as is his wont, maintains that this is the fault of the warsai themselves. “They’re too soft, too … individualistic. They take all this shit and are only looking for their own asses … They have the right to question, take control. The Sha’abiyya might well have expected it!”)   Danny ends up serving on the Assab front, and after the war remains in service. On occasional trips back to 132

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

Asmara, we watch the youthful exuberance drain from Danny’s face, which becomes lined and seemingly permanently dirty. He can still do his famous Michael Jackson dance, after numerous beers. But now he talks mostly of the war. He says that “so many” soldiers shot themselves in the foot or the hand in order to get out of combat. The problem was that the burn marks from close-up selfinflicted wounds were easy to detect, so the way around it was to place a water bottle between the gun and the hand. Danny never tries this himself, though at times he is desperate enough to ponder it. But he tells me that his best mate had been killed in the recent fighting, and he was overcome and consumed by rage. Can he exact some retribution? he asked his commanding officer. The officer gave him the nod, and Danny—the same funny, naive Danny from before the war, with his love of draught beer and comical loathing of football—quietly slips off to kill a recently captured Ethiopian prisoner. I don’t dare ask him if this helped in some way, and we avoid entirely the international legal dimension. This is what happens all the time, says Danny, momentarily dead-eyed. But then Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ comes on in the bar we’re in, and he brightens up, though he’s not yet drunk enough to attempt the moonwalk. * * * By now even the habitually loyal and doggedly upbeat are wilting a little. My Jebha companions are predictably 133

SHALLOW GRAVES

depressed. “We thought we were superior to everyone,” they say. “We thought we weren’t even African. But in reality we are ignorant.” Meanwhile, even Medhanie seems tired, now. He mourns, too, the passing of the struggle as the great moment in his life. For now, things aren’t quite so simple, and the challenges are different. He worries, quietly, that Eritrea is not what it was supposed to be. Too many Ethiopian influences, he tells me one afternoon at a tea shop in Keren. I wonder what he means. “Returnees, Ameches, from Addis … you know. People who didn’t serve in our struggle, and who aren’t committed. They want different things, I think.” Later, Medhanie elaborates while we travel together on a trip to the central border. “You know,” he says, as we bump along in our Land Cruiser—and I know from his tone that he is about to embark on a lengthy soliloquy— “these rural areas still have Eritrean culture. Asmara is becoming contaminated, and Eritrean culture is being undermined.” (Okay, I think to myself. I’m hot and tired and fed up in the backseat, but I’ll bite.) “Why is that?” I ask. “Well, first … because Ethiopia was there for such a long time. In many ways it is an Ethiopian town. Next, the deportees have brought Ethiopian influences. Now the place is full of liars, cheats, thieves. The deportees, these foreigners, bring bad influences …” Some of my best friends are deportees but I remain glumly attentive as Medhanie holds forth on the subject. He depicts the EPLF’s struggle as pristine, rural, infused with a kind of 134

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

pastoral idealism. Merrie Eritrea. Not an Ethiopian influence in sight; no contaminated urbanism. Medhanie reminisces tirelessly about the armed struggle, and life at the Front. One evening, he lectures me on heroism, blindness to danger or personal risk, on the communal and collective approaches to property or any other kind of ownership. It was wonderful, he says, frequently. An irreplaceable way of life. He admits to moments of doubt himself. “When our army retreated from Mai Dima in May 2000, I was puzzled. Why had they done this! We were actually advancing before that moment. But then I realised that this was a different kind of war, and I don’t always understand it …” His nostalgia is profound, and I find myself trying hard to imagine what it must be like— in one still relatively young—to feel so keenly that the best of life has already gone; the comradeship in the midst of violence an increasingly distant memory. “Things are different now,” he says wistfully on several occasions. The armed struggle was not simply a war. It was a way of life. The EPLF made Medhanie, man and boy; it was his education and his family. And there are thousands like him. I wonder, too, about the seeming gulf—despite the recent war, despite the new opportunities for intergenerational comradeship—between EPLF fighters and just about everyone else. The gulf seems as wide as ever. In many ways they seem to inhabit different worlds, each disappointed in the other, each wondering about the other’s war, the other’s history and their own place in it. 135

SHALLOW GRAVES

  The government’s seemingly immovable position is that no Eritrean can rest now, for renewed aggression might come at any time. Some say they look forward to a resolution of the non-war with Ethiopia—preferably through the peaceful restoration of order at the border, but by military means if necessary. There is much rage immediately after the ceasefire, and a desire to have another go at Ethiopia. Who could possibly yearn for another round of violence, or believe that the Eritrean army would stand any chance of success, even if there was? Few people I talk to think it would be anything other than a disaster, ending in defeat for Eritrea. If there is another war now, a couple of close friends in military service tell me, the situation will collapse. Morale in the army is low; the government has no support. So, I tentatively probe, it wouldn’t be like ’98? They laugh. Nothing like it. Biniam, the big, jovial Ameche, is in national service. He says if the Woyane attacked now they’d be in Asmara straightaway without bullets. Berhanu, an old colleague from the now-defunct University, talks so quietly and nervously he hardly moves his mouth, except to guffaw in his contorted, tobacco-strained way. A few good Ethiopian units, moved up from Somalia, would do the job, he says. Even a senior EPLF acquaintance agrees. It’ll be a war to the finish next time, he sighs quietly. It won’t be like ’98; much more dangerous. Defections are rife and the army is seriously depleted. Many units are now at half strength, according to a 136

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

friend who has spent a great deal of time in the border areas. He was formerly something of an optimist. But in the months since I saw him last, he has faded considerably and looks gaunt. Danny says that at Senafe near the border the barracks are nearly empty. All the educated Tigrinya have fled to Ethiopia, and the only ones left are the Beni-Amer or Kunama conscripts. Some remain wedded to the idea that, come what may, Eritreans would fight, and that no Eritrean wants to see an Ethiopian puppet regime in Asmara. Every Eritrean has this internal struggle, says my friend Gebre in the PFDJ. They hate us, but what’s the choice if the Ethiopians attack again? I’m not so sure, judging from what seems to be going on. Big Biniam waves his giant hand dismissively. “I don’t care if the Woyane get here. Why should anyone fight for the Sha’abiyya? I wouldn’t. I only care about myself and my family.” The army may be much reduced, but the officers are doing good business, siphoning off food and basic supplies for themselves and for leverage. Smuggling is rife. The famed professionalism of the Sha’abiyya, once so captivating, seems to have evaporated. The lives of national service people are made tolerable or miserable depending on what kind of officer they have. Some are okay, understanding and humane. But increasingly commanders of units are corrupt and venal. They sell ID and leave papers for up to 10,000 nakfa, to relatives or anyone who has money. It’s all about the business. What would happen if there was  

137

SHALLOW GRAVES

another war with Ethiopia? It’s a question asked and discussed in quiet tones all over the city. Who knows … perhaps another invasion would be enough to fire up our flagging youth, says one of my PFDJ contacts, pensively. But it’s a daunting prospect. “The war with Ethiopia really fucked us up,” a friend whispers to me over lunch one day. “Really, it did.”   The problem, now, is that for most young people the main goal seems to be to avoid Sawa, that great nationbuilding project in the western scrubland, at all costs. Everyone wants so much more. Sawa is soon supplemented by a ‘school for social sciences’ at Nakfa, which effectively replaces the University. I’m told proudly by a senior PFDJ figure that this is in many ways a continuation of the cadre system which underpinned the armed struggle and ensured the ideological clarity of a core of fighters. Once again the struggle provides an important precedent, and particular individuals are selected for ‘politicisation’. “It will take time,” says my Party man, drawing on a well-established Sha’abiyya notion of temporality. “But we’re getting there.” Increasingly I come away from these conversations—which are more like monologues—with the sense that it doesn’t really matter when they might ‘get there’, or maybe even if they ‘get there’ at all; it is, rather, the exercise that is important. A young woman who is active in the PFDJ youth wing enthuses over coffee one day: “The youth are motivated and patriotic! They believe in unity, and in the achieve138

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

ments and values of the armed struggle.” My friend Ermias, ever a reliable and knowledgeable source, later confirms that the cadre school at Nakfa is a crucial part of the government’s desire, in the years following the war, to reconnect with the young, to more forcefully imbue the latter with the principles of the struggle and (supposedly) of the EPLF itself. The virtues of the armed struggle cannot be taken for granted; that much is clear. One of those ‘youthful’ new recruits—in fact, now in his late twenties, and looking much older than that—is a former student of mine from the University. He tells me with deadpan humour that he has been selected to be a political cadre, and has been to Nakfa for training. He rolls his eyes and relates the story of his ‘training’. “It’s all the same old stuff,” he says. “Old ‘Right vs Left’, old Cold War politics, ideologies. Nothing in the EPLF has changed.” But the teachers at Nakfa are disappointed to discover that the concerns of the young aren’t political or ideological: they are economic, financial. Many of the questions asked by the students relate to salary and the economic hardship they are facing. Not exactly spoken by dedicated revolutionaries. “People need to eat first,” says Ermias, “and the politics will follow.” * * * The history of the nation, and the struggle itself, involves a multitude of emotional and psychological histories; journeys of mind and spirit which make up the body 139

SHALLOW GRAVES

politic. The nation, after all, simply sits at the intersection between individual and collective perceptions of time. The story of the armed struggle involves half-hidden histories of private trauma, and the personal memories of violence and irruption. It is the story of psychological stress and depression and PTSD that manifests itself episodically in some essentially very decent but evidently very damaged people. In ‘the Field’, heroism was the product of carefully conditioned culture, of socialisation—meaning that anyone could be a hero. Fear was overcome; men and women became acclimatised; the revolution was rooted in the ability of ordinary people to perform extraordinary things and to endure extraordinary suffering. But there is a great deal of psychological damage in Eritrea. Wild emotion is generally held in check, but it is just below the surface. When it cannot be held in check, the poor victims of loss and war and distress—the ‘crazy people’, as my friends refer to them—are sent to St Mary’s, a secure institution for those certified as insane by the Sha’abiyya. Conditions are awful.   Those are the extreme cases. But for many people, the psychological impact of prolonged war has been profound. Men and women have endured death and combat and sacrifice from youth to middle age. Time is stretched out in a long seam of battle, and mental illness is rife. “People have problems,” Amanuel tells me. “All the way up to the leadership! But how can they change now? 140

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

What ‘treatment’ is possibly available?” Amanuel recounts the story of a friend of his—an EPLF fighter, while Amanuel was in the ELF, in spite of which they remained close. His friend lost his legs in combat, and left for Port Sudan to ‘recuperate’. They exchanged letters. Amanuel insisted that they should set aside their ideological differences. “We will meet in Free Eritrea,” he wrote to him. And meet they did. They got drunk in a bar in Asmara, and argued; his friend lost his temper and drew a gun, before breaking down and crying inconsolably. Too much had gone unsaid and unexpressed. But it is a dangerous thing to let go. The psychology of the group is dominant. “We have to heal our own pain, our own suffering,” says Amanuel. “But at the same time there can be no individual pain—only that of the group. And the group remains silent.” And so fighters drink, try to keep their emotions in check; the struggle remains internal. Many victims and veterans of the struggle are hopeless alcoholics. Occasionally these are formerly senior figures, eventually dropped and frozen out, to be pitied but never helped. They wander the bars and clubs drinking, and greeting all and sundry in the manner of the unhinged. Berhane, owner of a popular nightclub, points out one such character to me one evening. The man is completely plastered, and ranting to sympathetic passers-by. “Look at him,” Berhane whispers. “Poor guy … he gave such great service to his country and he should be looked after. Of course when he’s dead they’ll give him a nice funeral. 141

SHALLOW GRAVES

They always do that.” It’s common enough: the lobby of the Nyala Hotel in downtown Asmara is full of frozen and embittered former government people, sitting and complaining all day about Isaias.   These are the curious individual histories of the armed struggle, the histories that don’t really get told, and that certainly aren’t celebrated, but that are just about everywhere, sometimes under the very noses of the government. These are the personalised histories of Eritrea and Ethiopia, the human outcomes of their recent pasts: international neglect, brutal human rights abuses, prolonged experiences of violence or the threat of violence, all coagulating and becoming manifest in the messed-up brain wiring and personality disorders of people who just happened to be born in Eritrea, at a particular moment, to particular parents. This is the history of Eritrea, I come to think sometimes; if you had to perform it in some grand human pageant, this is what it would look like. In part, at least. National history is played out in these millions of stories, stories of millions of damaged people trying to cope. Not the kind of history favoured by patriotic militants, who prefer their heroes stoical and their suffering silent, but there it is; the messiness of life, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. * * * The anti-individualism of the EPLF—once so admirable, and such a core strength—now seems like a terrible 142

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

flaw at the heart of the project. It is reflected, too, in the notion of zero-sum in political discussion, and in the unquestioning stance this can lead to with regard to authority and loyalty. A senior figure, frozen, says that too often there is a notion—perhaps stemming from the armed struggle, but perhaps older—that there is only ‘one view’, ‘one opinion’, which is worth holding at any given moment. If you deviate from my view, you’re not with me, but against me. It is obviously the case in the EPLF, but it also seems to be true of the Eritrean opposition, who splinter endlessly into more and more factions because they can’t agree on a broad position.   Even older Eritreans begin to wonder about nationalist history as prescribed by the Sha’abiyya. One acquaintance, formerly an activist and loyalist, tells me that the EPLF has completely mismanaged Eritrea since 1993. “Everything before 1993 is for the history books,” he mutters angrily one day—that is, it is now irrelevant. “We must judge the movement on its record since then … and the record isn’t good.” Loyalists begin to struggle with the history, too. Medhanie is becoming ever more cynical. Normally the most loyal of tegadelay, he has been pushed into a situation in which no grown adult with a modicum of intelligence and creativity should be placed. He sighs that ‘we are at war’ is the constant message, and the strapline to everything. It doesn’t matter what the question is; the answer is Woyane. “The top people are closed, inflexible,” he tells me quietly in a 143

SHALLOW GRAVES

backstreet café. “This constant war talk, this Woyane business, isn’t good.” I ask if he can question the leadership directly. “Yes, many of us do, but it can’t be loud. Still, there are many of my age group [he was born in the mid-1960s, and joined the struggle in the mid-1980s] who …”—he hesitates, choosing his words carefully— “do not find things now as we expected. Things are difficult. Stagnant. Our leaders are becoming aged, they have no new ideas. For there to be new ideas, there need to be more young people brought in. We can act as a bridge,” he asserts brightly. “But for now—no change. Instead, many people are now running away, escaping abroad. They are frustrated and left with no option.” He grins, a little wearily. “This is why we call the Sha’abiyya ‘tortoise’ … slowly, slowly …” Medhanie is a complex character, in many ways, as a former fighter: he constantly and, I confess, tediously at times, extols the virtues and achievements of the liberation movement and of the armed struggle. It is, after all, the only life he has known. But I sense a growing anger in him. If the EPLF loses these guys, they really are fucked, I think to myself. He mutters darkly about mistrust of certain senior figures in the movement who, he suggests, have changed since independence, and certainly since the war. “They do their own … individual work,” he says, with emphasis. He declines to go into detail, but merely says they do this “rather than continuing to pursue the objectives of the armed struggle”. More broadly, quietly but unmistak144

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

ably, there is mockery in the air, and it is common for my friends to ridicule the President and the EPLF. Big Biniam guffaws one day, thinking about the catchy monikers awarded to senior figures: “Thirty years’ struggle? Bwa! I don’t believe it. They spent fifteen years fighting and fifteen years choosing their own nicknames.”   Now, the government is trying to recreate Sahel in wider Eritrean society as well as in national culture. It is all-pervasive. Whether the shock of the war has accelerated this, or whether this was always the plan, is a matter of conjecture. But there is no question that the war has dovetailed neatly into a larger, longer-term vision for the nation-at-arms, with its origins in the rugged northern mountains. I meet with a formerly prominent EPLF figure, now frozen, who was closely involved in the early rounds of national service, between 1993 and 1997. He recalls the great nation-building project of which national service was a central part. There was such spirit, such enthusiasm! Everyone wanted to do it—“in fact we were overwhelmed by those wishing to contribute, coming from all over the country and from abroad.” But what happened? The government took it for granted, and indeed abused it: “They failed to capitalise on this enthusiasm in ’98. They made service interminable. Soon the young people were alienated.” The thirty-year struggle is transposed onto national service. But it is harder to re-create Sahel than might be imagined. This is the President’s great failure. (Soon after, I’m told that  

145

SHALLOW GRAVES

since talking to me this man has become nervous; perhaps he said too much? He’s happy to meet again and talk history, but not about the current situation.)   He is not alone in his creeping despair. In the months and years after Algiers, Eritreans from many walks of life and of all political persuasions quietly contemplated their histories and the wreckage which was the outcome of a disastrous relationship with Ethiopia. After all, the liberation war against the dying imperial regime, and then the Derg, had taken its toll: it had decimated an emerging urban middle class, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, an era which had seen the loss of ‘so many good people’, as one former fighter once confessed to me. The war with Ethiopia had brought out the worst, perhaps; pitted Eritreans against one another. This was the adi mentality: the village, the home community, the ancestral land. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. Zerosum; no concessions; no alternative points of view. This was what the liberation war taught us, says my friend and informant. He says his former ELF comrades witnessed this first-hand in 1998 when they volunteered for service as the renewed war with Ethiopia escalated. They were treated with contempt by EPLF officers at Sawa. But there could be no public demonstration of anger, or of any feelings beyond stoical patriotism directed in support of the Sha’abiyya state. No individuals, only the collective. The adi. And the EPLF would write the history of the adi. There would be no room for the ELF or 146

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

their sacrifice. I’m told the story of a public meeting at which an EPLF cadre berated an ELF veteran: “You were drinking coffee while we were fighting,” he sneered. The ELF man was aghast, and fumbled for an appropriate response, confused and incandescent. “What are you saying!” he finally spat out. “How can you say that!” Later, the University is closed, and colleges are opened across the country under the control not of educators but of ex-fighters. A BA or a BSc is an obstacle to advancement in Sha’abiyya country. As the President has said, any EPLF fighter can do a better job than someone with a degree. They have morphed into supermen and, much less visibly, a handful of superwomen. And they are everywhere, line-managing the inept and the unskilled in areas of activity about which they don’t know anything. It doesn’t matter, deadpans Ermias: they are fighters! They know how to do everything!   Eritreans of different provenances and backgrounds argue over what has gone wrong, and to what extent. Former fighters despair. Some quietly wrestle with the idea that the government—led by people they had followed for decades—is failing; others have come to believe that the problem lies in the EPLF’s over-ambition, in its misplaced belief in its own transformative power. The issue, in other words, is not the Front itself, but the unforeseen obstacles placed in its way. This was not how it was supposed to be. The EPLF originally won the support of a diverse range of Eritreans. But they have 147

SHALLOW GRAVES

come to despair about the failure of the nation. The Front has no monopoly on how to love Eritrea, says Abeba, an Eritrean from the diaspora; we, too, have our rights to speak, and critique, and love. But the government seems to struggle with that notion, finding it increasingly difficult to manage a nation whose needs are more diverse than they anticipated. The only way they can cope with this reality, it seems, is to broadcast the line ever more forcefully: We know what we’re doing, even if—and in fact especially if—you can’t understand it. But some are prepared to accept Sha’abiyya logic. I spend an afternoon in the company of Ruta, active in the youth movement of the PFDJ (‘NUEYS’), who breathlessly extols the virtues of the leadership. “We are allowed to debate [within NUEYS],” she avers. “We have no time for the opposition, who aren’t offering anything new anyway. We trust Isaias!” Even after 2001, and the awfulness of the war? I ask. “Well, yes, because those people [the G15] were up to no good, and offered nothing new. Even the closure of the private press was a good thing because they were infiltrated by the CIA and were no good for unity. Unity is absolutely key! We must be prepared to accept the loss of a certain amount of freedom for stability and security.” The words are at once heartfelt, naive and chilling. But perhaps she’s right. I press her on the issue. She becomes exasperated. “Anyway, who is going to do the job if not the PFDJ? What’s the alternative?” She briefly looks furtive, but never loses the 148

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

humorous glint in her eye. “I’m worried that I’ll be seen talking to you. But then they’d be pleased with what I’m saying,” she chuckles.   Anyway, who to blame? The astute, thoughtful, multilingual Tekie, one of the few ex-fighters at the University of Asmara, muses one day in my office: “We believed that our ethos would rub off on the population … but instead their ethos rubbed off on us!” The Front had regarded itself as different, almost beyond time and space; the values and internal logic, its sheer puritanical force, were supposed to transfer to the wider populace, but they have proven stubbornly resistant. So it’s the people’s fault? Maybe; but later, Tekie exclaims: “If anyone has a reason to oppose this government, it’s me!” He has been denied opportunities to develop, to thrive. But he refuses to succumb against the backdrop of heightened authoritarianism. Instead, his contempt is directed at the ‘opportunistic’ elements now standing in opposition to the EPLF. “They had nothing to do with our struggle,” he grunts, as though this in itself invalidates their position. But this is in fact a common view among loyalists. “Ah, X,” sighs a senior PFDJ official sarcastically about an exiled academic, long a fierce critic of the President. “He always has our best interests at heart.” A deliberate pause. “But … where was he during the struggle?” If you weren’t there during the struggle, you have no right to speak. If ever a revolution contained the seeds of its own destruction, surely this is it.  

149

SHALLOW GRAVES

  Meanwhile, the ghosts of the G15 hover, impotent and regretful. Perhaps they should’ve stayed quiet; worked from within, a friend in the Party says one day. “But they were no democrats. Now we are turning these guys into heroes! They were the products of the era of violence just as Isaias was. The only thing the people have now is the power of silence: this scares the government, just as it unnerved the Derg. What are they think­ ing? our leaders wonder.” Each watches the other in an uneasy variant of Rousseau’s social contract. The revolution hasn’t yet run its course, but what will happen when it does? So many questions and worries. The gains of independence are being questioned in ways that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. “Nothing!” replies an ex-fighter in Keren, when asked what independence meant to him. “And I doubt it means much to most Eritreans.” * * * Time passes. The one thing we can be sure of. And Eritreans watch it pass. Within a few years, it is muttered by some, just wait, just wait: when demarcation comes, then there will be change, there will be reform. It seems, by a strange twist of fate, that even Eritrea’s prospects for democracy, and a civilian life, or any kind of a future, hinges on a half-arsed border drawn up a century earlier under the auspices of a colonial project that hadn’t even expected Eritrea to be a thing. Still, once again, Ethiopia 150

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

is the key: simply demarcate, and there will be no need to run Eritrea in the way Isaias is now running it. The border, let’s draw it up, and pull out the army, and have no more of this. Then we can move on. The border: always the border. Let’s put it right, agree on some bits with Ethiopia, and then we can breathe again. But for years after Algiers, it remains the defining plank of domestic and foreign policy. As the cadre school at Nakfa expands—including some less-than-enthusiastic young recruits, my former students—the youthful guardians are presented with a core message, a repeated answer to almost every question. National security is paramount: until the Ethiopian threat is resolved, and the border secured, everything else is secondary. Then comes virtual demarcation—a rather pusillanimous UN solution to Ethiopian intransigence. The Eritrean government’s view now is that the whole thing is done and dusted. “The border is resolved,” Isaias declares one day, “and the conflict is finished. Now we have to concentrate on the development of the country.” But the remainder of the relevant news bulletin is replete with references to the nasty Woyane up to no good in Somalia, and the evil TPLF regime, and so forth. People begin to wonder if the border is Isaias’s lifeblood. If he lets go of Ethiopia, with which he seems to be entwined in a death grip, won’t he just plummet into the void? And so, as often before, the fate of the Eritreans lies along this spidery, riverine line, the physical space that binds the two countries together on an uncompromising landmass. 151

SHALLOW GRAVES

  On state media, the military history lessons continue. The festival at Sawa is televised. As the cameras pan across a vast plain—how anyone who is actually at the show can see anything is beyond me—viewers are treated to seemingly endless military manoeuvres. Then a woman appears in traditional garb, in the middle of a huge square, miles from the audience, miming woefully to a Sha’abiyya number. As the tinny warbling continues, she is joined by some deranged-looking youngsters who dance unconvincingly. As I watch all this in my hotel room, I realise I have become jaded beyond repair. I find all this too awful for words, especially when the camera focuses on the Great Leader, who is lapping up some praise poetry and the adulation of old women. When will it ever end? I scribble in my notebook. But I watch nightly. Most people can’t feed themselves, no one has any money, electricity is intermittent, there is real misery everywhere—but here is some cultural dancing on TV, to remind everyone how great unity looks. The usual PFDJ dignitaries give speeches at the big Expo festival, and read from the same script. Culture and identity should be celebrated! they say. Our enemies are trying to destroy our culture. We must unite! I wonder which enemies are actually trying to destroy Eritrean culture and which culture they’re talking about. At a youth conference, young folk are urged to be energetic in defence against external interference. Struggle. Sacrifice. We need more of it! In the meantime, though, cultural 152

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

diversity is to be celebrated and showcased. The government is straining to do so, and the Expo festival is a Sha’abiyya variation on the old panis et circenses strategy, though the panis is in short supply. Representatives of various ethnic groups wander around the Tiravolo area of Asmara, looking bemused. There is much drum-beating and flag-waving, children singing the national anthem, and gatherings of proud-looking Eritreans from the diaspora. More dancing, more traditional cultures on display. So much effort goes into this that I begin to wonder whether the government really believes in national unity at all, deep down. At the same time, Expo is crawling with soldiers, checking IDs, which reminds us what is underpinning EPLF-led Eritreanness. Beyond Expo, people queue for everything and pray for relief.   For some, Eritrean history—Eritrean time—is strikingly cyclical in other ways. A senior figure, frozen out of the inner circle as punishment for his supposedly unorthodox views, confides to me that he has been a member of the movement for more than thirty years and he has no idea, now, where the country is headed, or what the big plan is in the leadership, if there is one. But one thing is clear, to him at least: “Ours is a strange kind of nationalism,” he sighs. “We have a disjointed approach to ­history. Each generation forgets the previous one, disregards it, rejects its values and principles. We did it during the struggle and now it’s happening all over again: young people today are disillusioned, and can’t relate to the 153

SHALLOW GRAVES

struggle generation.” He fears that, right at this very moment, the spirit of the struggle is dissipating, evaporating, in the general despond and cloying authoritarianism. There is much talk in certain circles about the need, now, for a history of the revolution. In the History Department at the University, we are momentarily excited about our possible involvement. But no: this is not to be trusted to non-fighters, and certainly not to a ferenji. Yet, as a senior figure in the EPLF tells me one day, who is going to write this properly? Those in the government think history is just a series of key events. In any case, he says grimly, the struggle is not over. They might think it is, but it isn’t. No one is in a position to write the history of a phenomenon that has not yet run its course. In any case the Sha’abiyya only have contempt for what Isaias has referred to as ‘so-called historians’ who don’t properly analyse anything. We all consider ourselves duly chastised. But no one is good enough, it seems. A senior PFDJ person lectures me in his office on how to do history properly. “Historians need to look much more deeply at things,” he declares, as I shift uncomfortably in my seat, which is in a lower position than both his chair and his outsized, orderly desk. (It is an unsubtle psychological trick commonly employed in government offices, which someone tells me, a little sardonically, that they learnt from the Derg.) “You need to go into the layers, do more fieldwork!” It is a curious kind of gaslighting. You begin to doubt yourself; but 154

CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 2

then you force yourself to remember that no amount of depth and layering would be good enough for this lot. What kind of history does the PFDJ approve of ? I wonder, and wonder still.   Still, for most Eritreans, it’s largely hypothetical. Moses, in his seventies, a self-published writer who was deported from Addis, says it’s very hard to publish anything now. Censoring? I venture. “No paper,” he says, and slurps his sweet tea.

155

6

THE UPSIDE DOWN

Addis Ababa can be intimidating to those who have spent time north of the front line, on the other side of the border. On numerous visits to Ethiopia in the years after the war, in search of local answers to questions about the war and its meaning, I routinely feel like a stranger, and occasionally out of my depth. Often, the city, stretching out in the shadow of Menelik’s palace of Entoto, feels like a damp, cold, sprawling building site. It is the un-Asmara, the upside down; a parallel world where many things seem familiar, and yet are not—like one of those disturbed dreams in which people and places are dimly recognisable but yet nothing is quite right, and everything is distorted and unfamiliar. Addis has life. The most tangible difference to those of us ensconced for too long north of the border is the sight of a well-heeled, urban middle class, enjoying the finer things. There are many caveats to this, of course; but there is a little elbow room here.

157

SHALLOW GRAVES

  It doesn’t help that encounters with Ethiopianist colleagues repeatedly reinforce the notion of scholarly difference. One of them tells me on a dark, thundery afternoon, in his office—in between complaining about the state of his guts—“I feel sorry for you lot, you Eritrea-based scholars … you think Ethiopia is some kind of monster. The EPLF really get their claws into you.” He’s right, to an extent. A US-based colleague—a dyed-in-the-wool, fully language-proficient Ethiopianist, of the kind only these mountains can produce—snorts, half-joking, over beers in downtown Addis, “What are you doing in Ethiopia? Your problem is you’re a dabbler. A dabbler!” Real Ethiopianists don’t dabble. They learn Amharic (rarely Tigrinya), study Ge’ez, immerse themselves in the textual and cultural richness and geographical purity which only Ethiopia can generate. Ethiopia is all that matters. In this world, even Eritrea is largely irrelevant; a curious little sideshow; grim B-movie to Ethiopia’s historical blockbuster.   At times, I feel Eritrea’s marginality keenly. I spend an evening with a senior American colleague, who is something of a legend here in Addis. He wears his three decades in the region easily. He has close links with Addis Ababa University, where he’s an external examiner; he runs exchange programmes between here and his institution in the US. I am deeply envious. Eritrean expertise is a poisoned chalice. AAU has many problems, I know that; but at least there is an AAU, and I can’t help think 

158

THE UPSIDE DOWN

ing about what might have happened had the war been avoided, and if the University of Asmara had been properly supported in the late 1990s. Might it have competed, or at least grown? Who knows? All I know is that, on this balmy evening in a restaurant in Sidist Kilo, I selfishly feel depressed and cheated as I listen to my older colleague reminisce, and then guiltily remember the thousands of Eritrean lives blighted by the denial of such opportunities and linkages.   The war means different things down here, and the memories of it are more contrasting still. In many ways it is less important than in Asmara—or at least not so allconsuming, and certainly its ramifications are less keenly felt. That in itself is something of a shock, in truth, coming from a place where the whole country feels like the front line. At times, in fact, it is difficult to find anyone who cares very much about Eritrea in Addis Ababa—at least not quite in the way that Eritreans cared about Ethiopia. It isn’t that the war, or Eritrea, is forgotten; by no means. It lurks in the minds of anyone involved in or concerned with Ethiopian politics and the future. It is just that there is other business to attend to, challenges to face, GDP to grow, lives to live, quotidian but brutal hardships to survive, politics to change (or not). * * * “You’ve spent too long in Eritrea, listening to the Sha’abiyya,” says John (Yohannes), an old Tigray People’s 159

SHALLOW GRAVES

Liberation Front (TPLF) leader and formerly a member of Meles’s inner circle. I hear that a lot. John is determined to correct all my misapprehensions, all the fundamental misreadings of history brought about by my over-exposure to the EPLF. I give him things I’ve published to read, and he’s not impressed. One article in particular arouses his ire, and he later calls me up and shouts at me down the phone about all the things I’ve got wrong.1   “During the struggle the EPLF didn’t teach us anything … I was there. We taught ourselves and had different positions.” John seems angry, and exasperated. “The EPLF are so fucking arrogant!” he exclaims, when we meet in his office in downtown Addis.  

They peddle so many myths about themselves and their rootedness among the people; about the nature and ethos of the armed struggle. You know from the early 1980s they were taking people by force into the Front … they were never ‘of the people’. It was forced conscription. But everyone was always afraid of talking. Unity had to come at all costs. We all came from a student activist background … But once Isaias took over, the manqa was crushed2 and the ELF was defeated.

  John is increasingly animated. He is fed up with the narrative about the EPLF and their great popular revolution. The TPLF was relatively democratic. We had debate and tolerance. Isaias killed dissenters. The TPLF was led by 160

THE UPSIDE DOWN

students; the EPLF was led by one man and a few people with elementary-school education. In Eritrea the intellectuals in manqa were killed, and the ones that were left had no education—Wuchu, Mesfin Hagos …

  He’s a busy man. But he feels the need, evidently, to take some time to put me right on a number of things. Isaias started the war, and even John couldn’t believe he could be so crazy. “What was he thinking?” John wonders. “Didn’t he think about the consequences?” John shakes his head grimly, a lot. He is wide-eyed and emphatic. The objective was to overthrow the Ethiopian government, simple as that. Isaias thought the government was weak; one little push and it would all collapse. “But we said, no! You must behave like a state now … We knew what Isaias was up to from the early 1990s, and we had to put a stop to it.” Everything is the exact mirror of the narrative north of the border. “Eritreans and Tigrayans are one people”, says John, often. But Isaias and the EPLF have betrayed that relationship. Their superior attitude only came with Italian rule. Because some poor Tigrayans went to work there, they developed this superior attitude. But lots of their poor people came to Tigray! In western Tigray, in Shire—those are Eritrean immigrants! Hamasien is an insult just like Agame. In ’98, the EPLF thought, ‘these poor Agame, they’ll collapse easily.’

  John becomes reflective. “I agreed with Meles at the time [not to continue the war after June 2000] … for us 161

SHALLOW GRAVES

it was a political decision. But I was wrong. Now I wish we had gone to Asmara. But we didn’t, and Isaias survived. The Amhara certainly wanted us to …” Many people I talk to are of this conviction. Another Tigrayan friend—one with relatives in Eritrea—echoes the point. “Meles failed on several occasions [after 1993] to deal with Eritrea. There shouldn’t have been a ceasefire in 2000; Meles shouldn’t have signed the Algiers Agree­ ment.” A former army officer says: “We could have gone all the way to Asmara. We should have done so. Then we could have dictated the peace … the divisional commanders demanded of Meles, why did we stop?”   I meet with John again on a later trip, and check in on him. “Eritrea is nothing to us,” he says, loftily, as I pick up my line of questioning from our earlier conversations. “Sure, Isaias is a problem for the region. But Eritrea is never on the TV; we don’t think about it. We won’t be starting another war. Of course if he starts one, this time we’ll finish it. But we won’t start it. Eritrea is an invented country with an invented history. Not our problem.” But in the same breath, almost: “Make no mistake, though!” he exclaims, suddenly a touch maniacal. “Every Ethiopian would want to go and fight if the war started again. They would want to finish the job!” Eritrea is to be pitied—a basket case, nowhere to go, so many problems. No longer a threat, but a shame nonetheless. “Anyway,” he declares dismissively, returning to his earlier theme, “no one in Addis cares about Eritrea 162

THE UPSIDE DOWN

anymore. No one talks about it. Isaias goes on about war because he has to; but not here.” Just then, an old comrade of his approaches our table. He notices the book about the war which John has just given me. “Ha!” he laughs. “This is still lingering, eh?” He nudges my friend playfully. “We will have to go to the Red Sea and finalise the matter. The power of the gun!” My friend chuckles darkly. “Hmm. I wish we had done that five years ago.”   I interview a former senior officer in the Ethiopian army. The General is a short, stout man with piercing eyes; he is calm, measured, in the main, but there is fire just underneath. He is rotund but purposeful. He tells me that he had intelligence that Eritrea was preparing for war long before May 1998. Four months before, he says. He told Meles and the Politburo to prepare. But they said, No! Are the Eritreans insane? Of course there will be no war. And they voted not to prepare, and not to give the General the military increase he asked for. “When the war started I felt bitter. I could have done something. The Eritreans considered themselves hegemonic. The armed struggle made them believe they could do anything. Anything at all in the region!” It is a remarkable moment, as the General reflects on Eritrean arrogance and military aggression. Eritrea thought Ethiopia weak, its army depleted and inefficient. But they underestimated the strength of Ethiopian nationalism, he asserts. 163

SHALLOW GRAVES

  We talk about the events of 1999, and the awful destruction involved on the central front. The capture of Badme shifted the balance toward us. Tsorona was a miscalculation, sure. But we had success elsewhere, and Eritrea suffered badly … The international media made a big fuss about our supposed ‘human wave attacks’, and became a buzzword! But it is nonsense. Operation Sunset3 was fought from a position of weakness. The Eritreans tried to retake Badme and failed. We withdrew at Tsorona, and then Eritrea thought we were weakened, and attacked. But we massacred them. By May [1999] the balance was in our favour. For the next few months we evaluated our position carefully; we recruited heavily and increased the size of the army, in fact almost tripled it. We studied how to conduct large-scale operations. We studied the Second World War, and understood how to gain surprise … We became the best army in Africa: highly trained, technologically advanced.

  But the Eritreans, they never changed, and never tried to, he says. They are the same army from the liberation struggle until the recent war. I know their tactics … The TPLF always tried to theorise and conceptualise problems. The Eritreans were empirical. In the mid-eighties we transformed ourselves radically. The leadership said, ‘We have to do research, look at Vietnam [for example].’ We tried to create a military doctrine, and rethink our strategy, and tactics. We read Clausewitz … As a result, from 1988 to 1991, the TPLF was unstoppable. 164

THE UPSIDE DOWN

  During the war, he says, the Eritreans were over-confident in their military ability, and didn’t think there was anything more they needed to do. “Isaias always said, ‘No one needs to train us, we defeated the entire world!’ We thought we needed to transform … The EPLF thought there was nothing more to learn.” He pauses, and sighs. “The Eritreans are gallant fighters, believe me. But their leadership failed them.”   We pause for tea, and thunder rolls across Addis. “Well, anyway,” he says, almost sympathetically, “the Eritreans were always searching for a new identity. And their identity was based on Nakfa … They developed this image of invincibility. They think they are the best at everything they do. They endured problems with superhuman strength! They created hospitals! And so on … all based on Nakfa. Eritrea was too small for them!” It’s all myth-making, declares the General; not nation-building. “They’re not interested in history. They don’t look back. They need to negate the history of Ethiopia; we are their antithesis! Unless the EPLF leadership goes, Eritrea will want to go to war with Ethiopia.” He sighs heavily. He has a bad cold, and looks tired. “Was it worth it?” he wonders aloud. “Was it worth it, the Eritrean struggle? Is this ‘liberation’?” * * * I cast my net a little wider. Many Ethiopians have no idea about Eritrea, or even what it looks like. “It’s all 165

SHALLOW GRAVES

stones!” laughs Eyob, my Amhara ‘fixer’. “Not green, like Ethiopia.” But for those who know something or care, one theme persistently comes across: Eritrea really belongs to Ethiopia. This is not an argument that was somehow ‘finished’ with hard-won independence in 1991. By no means. My questions to a range of Ethiopian informants about Eritrea and the recent war invariably lead to the same conclusion. A government source says casually one day that the Amhara really do believe that Eritrea belongs to Ethiopia; the fact that it doesn’t, currently, is a curious anomaly, but hopefully one that will be sorted out one day. But then the Amhara don’t really like northerners much, in general. Including ‘Eritrean Tigrayans’—as my source insists on calling them. Especially the Amhara intellectuals: they’ll never forgive the TPLF for supporting Eritrean independence. They’ll never forgive us. There are still some problems in the Amhara attitude toward us—how can a Tigrayan run Ethiopia, they ask!   I do a lot of listening in tej bars. Zelalem, an Ethiopian from the US, is wistful when I turn the conversation to Eritrea. “Ah, they didn’t have any choice during their referendum … What were they going to do? But it was like severing the head from the body … Unity is natural, and Eritrea should not be separate. Yes, we are one people.” I get talking to a waiter in my hotel. No, Eritrea should not be independent, he whispers. The people are the same. Only the Eritrean government wanted this. A 166

THE UPSIDE DOWN

few days later, on a quiet evening, I take this guy and his friend out—or, rather, they take me out. They are both Amhara. “Why did the Tigrayans give up our ports?” they wonder over beer and tibs. Perhaps it was a conspiracy between northerners. A Tigrayan acquaintance asserts that there is no basis for Eritrean independence. “We are the same people. We need union.” For many Amhara, the past was a country long gone. A country where these bloody northerners didn’t have the whip hand or most of the good jobs. A country that had a coastline, and that hadn’t yet been needlessly separated from Eritrea. But a couple of Amhara friends will concede one thing: of all Tigrinya music, they tell me one evening in a noisy cultural theatre, “the Sha’abiyya is best. At least theirs is national music. Woyane music is shit.” Maybe so, but of course in the end Tigrinya is good for singing about war; Amharic music is for love, as one Sudanese friend asserts, laughingly.   “Most Ethiopians don’t care much,” a government adviser tells me a little while later. “Except, that is, in the sense that—as most believe—Eritrea does indeed belong to Ethiopia.” Ah yes: quite a big caveat. Most Ethiopians don’t care, except to say that Eritrean sovereignty—hardwon, bloody sovereignty—is in fact a fallacy, a nonsense, an affront to the natural order. So … they kind of do care, then, right? Well, yes, but they’re not prepared to do much about it. Ethiopia sweeps on; bigger issues to deal with; problems of its own. But history is strong: things 167

SHALLOW GRAVES

will come round again, and Eritrea will return. Poor Eritrea, labouring under its nasty and anomalous dictator, will be saved in the end. In the meantime, the government will push for harder sanctions, to cut off Isaias from the profits of his gold, and watch the situation unfold. Depending on whom you talk to, naturally, the ruling EPRDF is seen as having done a pretty good job in difficult circumstances: economic problems, yes; some political blunders, notably after 2005, sure. But it has steered a pretty solid course, kept the faith, stayed ahead of the game, refused to be enmeshed by history. And all of this in a dodgy neighbourhood! Meles and his circle certainly don’t want another war with Eritrea: that would be a disaster, says my government informant. The guys on the inside, at the top of government and the army, are wary, unsure how a collapsed Eritrea might pan out. It could get messy. Best not to provoke it. The most important thing is to deal directly with the Eritreans’ alleged plots and machinations.   For others, it is time to make even greater use of Ethiopia’s good offices. Certain opposition groups begin to convene in Addis, much to the disdain of many in Asmara. “No one respects them,” friends in Asmara tell me just prior to this trip. “Not even the Woyane.” And indeed, in Addis I’m told that many in the Meles circle hold the Eritrean opposition people in contempt, secretly. At the very least they are seen as utterly implausible. Perhaps such disrespect dates to the 1950s, when 168

THE UPSIDE DOWN

the Emperor had been able to take advantage of a squabbling and disunited Eritrean political class, and drive a wedge through them on the way to outright annexation. Sixty years on, and here we were again: a bickering bunch of Eritreans, jostling in the shadow of the Holy Empire, hoping for insightful meetings with the Great Leader while sipping tea for hours at the Addis Hilton. * * * Other Eritreans are here now, too—those who have escaped from Eritrea itself and have come to Ethiopia. For many of them, this is where they had grown up, and from where they had been ignominiously deported some years earlier. I run into an Eritrean friend whom I haven’t seen for years. He has come here via Uganda—an increasingly popular route. There are lots of Eritreans in Addis now, he says, breezily. But the big struggle is making any headway through the thicket of bureaucracy around confiscated property, lost as a result of the deportations. Court cases are drawn out, if you are lucky enough to actually bring one to court. And in any case, my friend notes, much Eritrean property has long since been demolished as Addis continues on its seemingly unending expansion, or at least renovation: stuff is built on the site, and then the land is sold on again to a third, fourth, fifth party … It is an absolute nightmare, in these circumstances, to look into who might owe whom for what, and when. Is anybody liable, anymore? Just a dozen years on 169

SHALLOW GRAVES

from the deportations, and it already seems like ancient history. There are hotels to build, and investors to attract. Why do these Eritreans annoy us with their questions about what happened to their property! I go to the area where my elderly friend Paulos had had his business, and where he brought up his family. The house is still there, but someone else is in it. The business is gone.   I meet up with an old friend from Asmara who has recently undertaken the hazardous journey across the border on foot, at night, evading soldiers and hyenas, and struggling with desperate hunger and thirst. Now he is in Addis, with extended family, and I have never seen him happier. He confesses to feeling a certain shame at having to come back to Ethiopia—he had been deported in ’98—but he is comfortable and hopeful as he stays with his cousin and her Tigrayan husband. Everyone has been wonderful, he says. Even the Ethiopian soldiers who picked him up at the border were very kind. As we stroll around the city, he is a marked contrast from the man I knew in Asmara—nervy, anxious, always hiding as he hadn’t completed national service. Then, he had lived on the margins of life, in the dark corners of the state. Here, he is reborn. Who on earth thought it would end up this way? * * * In a short space of time, Ethiopia has undergone waves of traumatic change: the decline and death of the impe170

THE UPSIDE DOWN

rial regime; the brutality and quotidian violence of the Derg; the rise of the armed liberation movements with their revolutionary agendas and shrewd intelligence; the EPRDF state and all its flaws and political experimentation and bloody crackdowns and Chinese economics. The EPRDF is nervous about the deeper past, which is a fount of nasty imperialism, ethnic domination, political division and cyclical violence. The millennium celebrations in 2007 are a carefully vetted version of the national past; a new national history for a new age. For the Tigrayan leadership, of course, it was a fear of the past, a nervousness; yes, we have Axum and Yohannes IV, and as much claim on the Solomonic inheritance as anyone; but the nation’s history is a dreadful place, full of violence and oppression and reactionary, exploitative forces, riddled with ethnic hatred and bloody regional convulsions. Best not dwell there too much, unless and until the forces of the past are something that can be used safely, and profitably. There were indeed such moments, and for sure the war with Eritrea was one of them. With Badme recaptured in February 1999, the Adwa celebrations took on new meaning, although in effect the meaning was the same: arrogant enemies come from the north, and we destroy them, every time. In timely fashion, interviews with Ethiopian veterans of the 1935–6 war revealed, of course, a similar propensity to marry the past with the present.4 The Sha’abiyya aggression, it’s just like the Italians, and all the rest of ’em … 171

SHALLOW GRAVES

they come wanting our land, and we chase them off. That was a good use of history, and one familiar to all patriots under pressure. But in other realms, history was a nuisance, and didn’t stand up to too much scrutiny. The jumpy, ever-vigilant Meles didn’t want any statues of Yohannes IV, much to the chagrin of Tigrayan nationalists, lest they stir up other ethnic histories and enflame simmering antagonisms. What mattered was the emphasis on a bloody presentism, the appalling acts of the Derg, and the awful convulsions which had necessitated the revolutionary resolve of the TPLF and, at length, the EPRDF. And so a Red Terror museum was built, commemorating—no one should ever forget—the many victims of Mengistu’s reign of blood in the late 1970s. It sat, shiny and new, but of course appropriately mournful, amid the other, ever more dilapidated museums peppering Addis itself.   Over lunch at John’s home, we deepen the historical range and he muses on how the TPLF built a historical identity, based on Axum as well as more recent developments. But the EPLF always had to construct their history. The EPLF indulges only in myth, not history, he says, matter-of-factly. They created all sorts of ideas to justify their war. “Yohannes IV was not particularly important; more important was Alula, as a great general who resisted the Italians. But the EPLF removed his statue at Dogali,5 and wanted to wipe all traces of the past, especially anything Tigrayan.” They thought this would make them independent, he laughs, in a faintly  

172

THE UPSIDE DOWN

sinister way. “But they were already independent; why did they feel the need to do this?”   Ethiopia: the great military state, with its proud heritage of heroism and resistance. It is impossible to visit a gallery or a museum in Addis without being reminded of the ineffable role of war and the warrior in Ethiopia’s past. And yet, many of the beggars who descend on vehicles at traffic lights across the city are disabled soldiers from the ‘war in Asmara’, my taxi driver tells me. Their dreadful circumstances offer a stark contrast in a nation which celebrates its military history so vividly. But as seems to be the case, there is no particular cult of the TPLF fighters. Nothing like the cult of the tegadelay in Eritrea. As the General says, with a flash of anger, “in 1991 a number of experienced Tigrayan fighters were compulsorily retired and demobilised. Told to go back to a different life.” You don’t see us celebrating our struggle endlessly, a former TPLF fighter tells me. We had to adapt, bring new people in, make ourselves fit with civilian culture. We could never be some kind of exclusive fighters’ movement. The proof, he says, is in the very poverty of Addis itself: “you see lots of former TPLF fighters begging in the streets! They’re like everyone else … we never made a difference between us as fighters and the larger population.” The point is indeed an important one, but he doesn’t seem to notice how awful it sounds. * * * 173

SHALLOW GRAVES

One lonely weekend, I visit the big hotels in search of international cricket on TV; after all, it’s an Ashes summer. I don’t find any cricket but I hang out for a while in the lobby bar of the Sheraton. I’m struck by the global importance of Ethiopia as represented by the clientele. It speaks to extraordinary self-belief and national selfimage. The African Union is here; major embassies and the regional headquarters of big companies and NGOs, too. The bar at the Sheraton has canapés, for Christ’s sake. There are no canapés in Asmara. Eritrea is scowling, isolated, angry, afraid. I don’t know if this means Ethiopia has won the war. Wars are not won by decent bar snacks alone, though I confess that I waver on that, momentarily. But I begin at last to understand the severe limitations of militarism. In itself, it is insufficient. Eritrea’s narrative—tiny Sparta, justice on its side, survives another war, triumphant and righteous—is beginning to look tired, and the people caught up in it are tired, too. In Sha’abiyya world, this is not how it was supposed to go. Life, and history, is a messy, complicated business. It’s not an easy lesson to learn—for historians or anyone else.

174

7

MOVING TIME

And now, there is the beginning of the exodus, the departure from EPLF time, just as the EPLF in its youthful pomp had eschewed Ethiopian time. People are demoralised, depressed, quiescent, increasingly disillusioned with the daily bombardment of patriotic exhortations. Awet n’hafash! Thirty years’ struggle! We must be vigilant! Perhaps, even without the war, it would have come to this: after all, the signs were there. The manqa crisis of ’73 suggested as much: the brutal authoritarianism, the solipsistic patriotism. But the war haunts everything, and casts a long shadow. In the years that follow, the war becomes part of a teleological narrative—inexorable, unavoidable, and symptomatic of the Sha’abiyya state and state of mind. The overpowering sense is of oppressive calcification. Why had the martyrs died? people wonder. What strange mix of problems and personalities in the liberation war had led to this latest difficulty for this young nation? Perhaps,

175

SHALLOW GRAVES

even, it was whispered by some, the events of 1998 could have been avoided—another big war hadn’t been inevitable. It might have been avoided had the President really wanted to avoid it, if Isaias had simply sought to damp down the outrage and rein in his own forces. But that’s not how he is built, and he reacted as he did, and so some fifty thousand of his own citizens are now dead or injured, and an equal number, if not a little more, of Ethiopians. It was done in the name of the heroes of the revolution, and for the revolution itself. But if it could have been avoided, and wasn’t, then what did that say about the liberation movement?   For now, the war seems only to service some abstract idea of the nation—betrayed, bloodied, but unbowed— and as a useful reminder of the awful trajectory of Eritrean history and the achievements of the armed struggle. Eritrea’s modern history offered choices: histories of debate and plurality, and of reasoned and legitimate dissent. A neurotic and myopic regime opts instead for a highly disciplinarian, brutalised, securitised and emotionally one-dimensional version of national history in which fewer and fewer Eritreans could actually see themselves or their aspirations for the future. * * * Shortages abound, and the cost of living increases dramatically. It becomes quickly apparent that this is indeed a war that Eritrea could ill afford. Bread is in short sup176

MOVING TIME

ply; people joke that if you want more bread, you better photocopy the bit you have. Petrol is terrifically expensive. Coca-Cola becomes rare. Soon the beer factory breaks down—apparently—which is just about as devastating as it gets. Now people can’t even numb the pain, except through dropping araki into their tea, and there’s only so much of that you can take.   The ‘Green Pub’ is located in the Intercontinental Hotel on the outskirts of Asmara. As a business, the ‘Intercon’ has been more or less saved by the war with Ethiopia, for this is the long-term home of the Italian military police, watching over the shenanigans of the UN ‘peacekeepers’—testosterone-infused teenage soldiers, mostly, for whom this is all tremendous fun with no obvious danger attached whatsoever. Prices in the Intercon are hiked; cheaper local beer disappears and is replaced with hugely more expensive tins of Heineken. The ‘Green Pub’ (a Dubai-kitsch reimagining of an Irish bar), meanwhile, is the site of a sex market, where young (and some not-so-young) Eritrean women make themselves available with very few inhibitions to white men. Their brothers and mothers and fathers had fought for independence. But this is good money, and impending destitution drives many toward the tables of white folk with dollars to spend. In the city beyond the Green Pub, Eritreans generally are deeply suspicious of this new white invasion. (There are also non-white peacekeepers, for example from Bangladesh, but they aren’t around 177

SHALLOW GRAVES

much, and keep themselves to themselves.) Meanwhile, there are no Russian peacekeepers but there are Russian military technicians and advisers attached to the Eritrean air force. Often they are Cold War racists, and many barely hide their contempt for anyone or anything Eritrean, yet the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade earlier has driven them to a life in various bits of Africa, fixing planes and guns and generally doing so either drunk or hungover. The real money is in Congo, one tells me, but the Horn will do for a while. And they are in Ethiopia, too: Russians on either side of the border know one another. Old mates, servicing the air forces of two countries at war. Ha! There’s old Viktor, working in Addis; Boris is here in Asmara. Life! War! Who gives a shit! Let’s have a drink. In time, though, the word is that the Eritrean air force can’t really afford Russian advisers or trainers, and so opt for the cheaper folk from Belarus.   And then there are the returning diaspora, the beles, as they are nicknamed, after the fruit that blooms annually in the highlands. They flock back after a brief hiatus during the war itself. All baseball caps and sneakers and attitude, they bring gifts of clothes and accents to their less-fortunate cousins. They are proud to be Eritrean— fuck Ethiopia, man—but many of them dream of LA, or NYC, or DC. The beles seem to be increasingly aggressive, and ruin any establishment which they enter in force. The teenagers from Saudi Arabia are the worst, as they tear into araki for the first time and quickly lose  

178

MOVING TIME

control. Asmara no longer feels familiar. It feels edgy, divided, dark. My national service friends watch them grimly, cavorting around the city and crowding us out of our old haunts. “Look at them,” says Danny. “They think this is Eritrea. They should be sent to Sawa.” He thinks about his comrades somewhere out there in the cold night, shivering in a ditch, and glares darkly toward the pulsating dance floor.   These folks form a curious juxtaposition with the seemingly ever larger pool of certifiably mad people wandering around Asmara. Insanity is everywhere. If truth is the first casualty of war, then sanity isn’t far behind it. The ‘crazy people’ lurch around the city centre like primed warheads, either suffering in tortured silence as they pace the streets or sharing their thoughts at various levels of vocal pitch and aggression with startled passers-by and (an easy target) the patrons of pavement bars and cafés. That is the worst, because then you are captive. And there is a new cohort, too—the young men filtering in from the front, haunted, desperate, edgy, frightened and frightening. I am afraid of them, I confess. But it is a fear born as much of profound and uncomprehending respect as of a natural antipathy toward the potentially unstable.   So, this is Eritrea’s post-war moment. This is what the leadership of the EPLF has bequeathed to Eritreans. One colleague at the University sighs when he thinks of what Eritrea had been, the idealised notion which many 179

SHALLOW GRAVES

citizens carried around in their heads. “Eritrean culture is disappearing,” he mutters. Honesty and cooperation— much-valued national attributes—are no longer much in evidence; instead, selfishness and corruption. People in administration collect their monthly salaries without ‘doing anything’. Everyone now only looks out for their own interests. There are few channels of communication between administrators, or even between ministers and generals. Within a short time of the ceasefire, the ‘system’—in so far as one exists outside the Office of the President—has ossified and few people I talk to have any faith in it. Or even believe that there is a ‘system’ at all.   The nation is in lockdown, and a quiet existential crisis unfolds. A generation is consumed by military service, which is now indefinite. The University has been closed down and relocated. Its students are not patriots, declares the President: they are self-possessed and incompetent individuals, whose passions don’t extend beyond looking good in their graduation photos. Military round-ups are periodic and continual. Soldiers sweep the city, clearing bars and cafés and nightclubs, stopping people on the streets, forming roadblocks around the towns and cities. Many are caught. Others hide—in toilets, in DJs’ boxes, in homes. I know of people who rarely come out, except when reasonably certain they can spend some time in downtown Asmara without being stopped and checked. Some friends disappear for months at a time until, desperate and going out of their 180

MOVING TIME

minds, they sneak to drink bun with friends, and scurry home long before dark. Students die on military training exercises. The parents confront the police. How many people can they arrest? people wonder. But prisons swell. People in national service scratch out a living by hook or by crook; but it’s hardly living at all. Stories float around about students at one of the new colleges being arrested for cheating in exams; others are engaged in what is jokingly called ‘digology’, their most important subject, which involves them being siphoned off to build houses for army officers.   Life feels impossibly bleak, at times; no hope for progress, and some friends and acquaintances and informants are simply living lives in name only. Medhanie is all out of upbeat messages, and is weary and depressed. He tells me he wanted to ‘get on’, acquire a proper profession, rather than just doing fieldwork for the Ministry of Information. But the Party has denied him continually, and he is told, ‘Wait, be patient.’ He picks up a little as we sit in a café. “In the future, yes, there should be a free press; there should be an alternative to the ruling PFDJ, a democratic choice.” His face falls again, and he swallows his tea a touch impatiently. “But not now,” he mumbles. “Now there is too much instability. The EPLF is essential to Eritrea at this time.” Later, Ermias agrees. “Well, Medhanie is a conservative … but he’s right about that. Things are too sensitive now. There is a time for action. This is not it.” Ermias goes on to declare—rather 181

SHALLOW GRAVES

hilariously, in context—that the government can ‘kiss his ass’, given the commitment and sacrifice he has offered over the years. He is, essentially, a sentient loyalist, convinced that at heart the EPLF is still a sound, progressive movement capable of self-improvement and national development. He just wants his economic situation to improve. “This is the concern of my and every younger generation,” he says. “And sure, yes, I could try to leave, even illegally. But though I might disagree with the government, I can’t disagree with my country. This is my country.” He then proceeds to get extremely drunk.   It is a common refrain: Abdu, for example, is exasperated, even though he has managed to escape military service on health grounds. “If I criticise the government,” he says, “it’s because I love my country. I care about it. But here I’m seen as the enemy. Why is this?” Amanuel tells me about having to visit a police station on fairly routine business, but how he ended up being slapped hard across the face by a warsai while there. “Eritrea was not liberated so we could simply treat one another the way the Derg used to treat us,” he says, visibly moved. He wrote a letter of complaint. Perhaps he had spent too long in London; either way, it is definitely more of a Jebha than a Sha’abiyya thing to do. An old friend gently warns me, over lunch, not to say or write too much of anything critical, as I have begun to do. Everywhere, the walls seem to be closing in. There are spies and ‘listeners’—the colloquial term refers to women’s earrings— 182

MOVING TIME

everywhere. Taxi drivers, barflies, members of your very own social group. The taxi drivers are the worst, says Danny. They pick you up when you’re drunk, entrap you into saying something stupid, and then drive you straight to the police station. And they get their petrol for free! I suggest playfully that he’s being paranoid. He laughs, but then becomes quite stern. “It’s my job to know this stuff.” Then he swears me to secrecy.   Social life is becoming surreal. People simply disappear; suddenly, they’re just not around anymore. You quietly ask someone, what happened to X? And the even quieter reply is, Oh, X has been arrested, or X has gone to Sudan. It increasingly feels as though every other person you know is in prison or has been in prison recently. On one day alone I bump into three people who had recently been released after serving time for various crimes and misdemeanours: trying to escape; or changing money on the black market. Security is everywhere. Everyone is nervous. I talk to someone, the manager of a local business, who begins our conversation with a litany of despair about the state of Eritrea: there’s no money, no tourism, no investment, the government is fighting with everyone, especially the US, it’s terrible, they must be more flexible, young people are fleeing the country, which is a very bad thing for any country. The more I agreed and extended heartfelt sympathy, the more he began to shift, ending up in a 180 degree turn. We must be optimistic, and have faith in the government, they have built schools, 183

SHALLOW GRAVES

they are very committed, we must give them time—two or three years, I think—and then we’ll see the situation, because after all they have done some very good things, especially in building national unity, look at the Expo fes­ tival, they really want to show us our culture, and for that we must admire them. We will survive!   Biniam is contemptuous of his compatriots. “Fucking Eritreans, man. They don’t ever take a stand. In the morning they’ll grumble about everything: no food, no money, no future. In the afternoon they’ll applaud Isaias and throw flowers at his feet.” But Biniam is making the best of it. The smooth-tongued Ameche, who has been in the army since soon after being deported from Addis in 1998, always has some ‘other business’ on the go, which explains the scruffy but stylish car he drives around Asmara. And he is in Asmara quite a bit, it seems, because he can get ‘stuff ’ for his commanding officer.   I regularly hang out with Biniam, Danny, Ermias, Amanuel and a few others, our conversations grimly circular, brightened only by the humour which Eritreans use to navigate their circumstances. Ermias grew up in exile in Port Sudan, but returned at independence to work in one of the ministries. Now he is just trying to survive. He is on the constructive-critical side of those in government service: he longs for a transfer of responsibility to his generation but ultimately he is loyal, and counts himself a patriot. We drink and talk endlessly. In the cold breaking dawn, heaved out of a nightclub where there has been 184

MOVING TIME

an army raid, we wander the streets of Asmara desperate to urinate and to avoid roving military policemen. My long-suffering friend, entombed in his job at the Ministry, just wants to find “a street with no government”, as he puts it, where he can take a piss.   Or Amanuel, his life dedicated to revolutionary politics. As a mere kid he was involved with the ELF, and spent time in Algeria once the ELF was expelled from the field of combat. He returned to Eritrea to make his contribution—he wanted to teach—but in the end was frustrated by the lack of creativity, openings, freedom of expression. Now, he is angry at everyone—at the government and Ethiopia in equal measure—and can’t understand the Eritrea that he and thousands of others fought for.   Others continue to believe that change is coming. “Don’t worry,” one friend tells me confidently. “Change is just around the corner.” But it won’t be some awful, bloody rupture. No, it will be peaceful, orderly, and some of the old faces will simply be reassigned. For others still, there is the romanticised national past—rooted in visions of a communal life in the adi, governed by the baito. A friend of mine points out that the EPLF was an imposition across the Kebessa, because it cancelled out older democratic traditions, the baito, the village council—a place of debate and discussion and consensus. Those traditions can be resurrected, he says. Other, equally upbeat folk talk of gold mining and the great prospects for the Eritrean economy if all this comes to 185

SHALLOW GRAVES

pass. But first there must be peace. Only demarcate … But as the years go by, the border ossifies, an extension of the regime which is apparently indelibly intertwined with it. But people are weary of the memory. There is a fracas on a bus one day, as a man tries to get off but the bus driver hasn’t heard him, at which point the man, angered, shouts agame! at the driver. Several people tut noisily, and reprimand the hapless passenger: “Bwa! What’s wrong with you? Are you still living in 1998?”   Time does indeed seem to have come to a standstill in more ways than one. Popular singer Abraham Afewerki’s new song seems coded: my patience is as deep as the ocean, he sings, but the implication is that he mustn’t be pushed too far, or exploited. I think about that song as I sit in the Ambassador Hotel on Liberation Avenue, on a return trip after a few months’ absence. Nothing has changed: the same 1980s pop art on the walls, some of the same clientele, the same country and western tape that’s been playing on a seeming loop for much of the past decade. There are only occasional jolts in the deadening seeming-timelessness. There is some shooting on the border as the Ethiopians flex their muscles from time to time and perhaps seek to provoke Isaias into doing something stupid. But he doesn’t respond. He has more important things to worry about, as time lies heavily across the land. * * * 186

MOVING TIME

A particular kind of angry outrage is reserved for the international community, Ethiopia’s partner in crime. “What’s the point of the UN?” exclaims a tegadelay informant, his rage at the situation in Eritrea in the years after the ceasefire directed at that august global body rather than his own government. The UN fills the role of dubious, capricious Greek god, appearing from time to time to issue abstract strictures, but merely nudging Eritrea toward ever greater catastrophe, and seemingly unable or unwilling to do much about that tragic trajectory. Its washing its hands over the former Italian territory at the beginning of the 1950s; its refusal to intervene at the time of the annexation by Ethiopia in 1962; its subsequent aloofness as the Eritrean struggle unfolded through the 1970s and 1980s. Everywhere in Eritrea’s history there is the troubled relationship with that amorphous but sinister creature, the international community—sometimes exchangeable with the UN Security Council, at other times the US or the EU, or just ‘the world’. Its betrayals are physical. In the years after the ceasefire, Eritreans stand on the border and look on with dismay at the temporary security zone cutting a swathe along hundreds of miles of common frontier. “But most of this is inside Eritrea!” proclaims one informant in disgust. “We are treated like a defeated enemy. How can the international community allow this to happen?” The nation’s history is refracted by a brutal and sinister external agent. “Always you Europeans 187

SHALLOW GRAVES

­ isconceive the war,” I’m scolded one day by an angry m elder in Mai Dima. “We Eritreans never wanted this war. To the south, down there, Ethiopia is always the cause of war. They came to our land and we fought them … we didn’t go to their territory. The international community always misunderstands this issue.” There is anger among the villagers—many of whom are ex-fighters—that the world sees them as ‘guerrillas’, as ‘warriors’. We are vic­ tims! they say, indignant and perplexed.   But there are more immediate problems for the inhabitants of Adi Nefas, a village south of Asmara caught up in the fighting in 2000. In the aftermath of the war, a split developed within the community—broadly, it seems, along generational lines. The youth favoured the roadside, but the elders wanted to remain on the hilltop. The older folk didn’t want to move too far from the graves of their ancestors, and took their concerns to the local administration which had initially favoured relocating the village closer to the main road. But the elders won a compromise, and were allowed to remain on the top of the hill, where the nefas—the wind after which the place was named—was fiercest. It seems to symbolise so magnificently a particular problem for rural Eritrea. While the older members of the community chose to remain near the church, some youth moved down onto a flatter area near the road, and others moved off the hill altogether. “Young people want to be nearer the road”, Medhanie grins. “And why not! Are hilltop 188

MOVING TIME

villages the future?” he wonders. He makes the tsk noise Eritreans make when they are reflecting, musing, pondering open-ended questions, but which also indicates that they know deep down what the answer is. Eritrea’s history is on the tops of hills, fighting off assailants, and staying close to the church and the graves. Perhaps its future is something different, and that is where the road comes in.   Yet roads lead to the wider world, and the world can scarcely be trusted, for Eritrea’s destiny is, it seems, to be at the armed, lonely margins of the global past. An old friend grunts when I ask for his prognosis. “You know the situation. It’ll be the same old stuff … ‘the world is against us; we must be patient.’ And so on. Nothing will change.” Patience; solitude; alone in the world, and the makers of their own history: the historical narrative is tireless, even as ordinary Eritreans begin to wonder if an alternative story isn’t possible. Perhaps, after all, it’s true that Eritrea has a special place in global history, a curious and not always entirely compatible pairing of embittered nationalism and outward-looking, cosmopolitan diasporic identity. In terms of the former, the overwhelming sense is of betrayal and neglect, deeprooted anger at the forgotten struggles of freedom fighters as the world stepped absent-mindedly over their mountain stronghold and got on with other things; yet the West has long been home to millions of Eritreans, who became acculturated and absorbed oth 189

SHALLOW GRAVES

ers’ traditions and histories, and were certainly globally conscious. But they too loved Eritrea, just as much as any ex-fighter.   The emotional state of the nation is fragile; the politics of memory in the public realm are rooted in affect, seeping out from behind the stoicism. At St Mary’s, there are now many psychologically damaged people—increasingly young national service conscripts. True, says Danny, sometimes they fake it—people will go to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate their unfitness for service—and the psychiatrist supports the claim with a shrug and a ‘malesh’—Arabic, commonly used, simply meaning ‘whatever; let it be’. The crazy folk are given Valium. Danny is happy because he has written permission to come to Asmara to see a psychiatrist, although he has to be careful because the paper clearly states that he needs to return to his unit immediately. He is in good company, for the disturbed are everywhere, soaking up Asmara while on release to see psychiatrists. They hang around in bars and cafés, mostly self-contained but occasionally agitated and haunted. Everywhere, too, there are the frozen ones, the ex-fighters who are drinking themselves to death. And they die all the time. The joke on the street is that when the death notice says ‘Rest in Peace’, people say, ‘No; it is us who rest in peace, now that this guy is gone.’ Everywhere there are the damaged emotional histories of the individuals who compose the new nation, with its reliance on a history of war and struggle and sacrifice. 190

MOVING TIME

That might have worked, indeed, had there been a wider intergenerational buy-in to that history; or if there was some tangible bargain, a benefit, from long-term participation. But there was none of the latter, and decreasing levels of the former. Increasingly it is apparent that this was a huge error of judgement on the part of the government, and that this is a nation whose history is constructed on a series of brittle fault lines. For all the hubris and episodic triumphalism, Eritrean visions of the past are increasingly melancholic, and characterised—indeed underpinned—by mourning. * * * And so, fed up with digology, increasing numbers of the young flee the country, either setting out on their own or paying an agent—often linked to the Eritrean military itself—to get them across the Sudanese border. From that point many fall prey to people traffickers and endure some of the worst hardships imaginable. But if time won’t move in Eritrea, it must be moving somewhere else. And they head in that general direction, regardless of the risks. The burden of the past has become unbearable, to those young and fit and intrepid and desperate enough to attempt flight. They are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, and so the exodus begins. Or continues, depending on whether we regard this as only the latest episode in a long history of outward migration from Eritrea. Sometimes, they just 191

SHALLOW GRAVES

need to get some money together for their local officers, who only require that they leave their weapons behind. ‘Agents’ are involved who are themselves in the Eritrean army. It has come to this: the great struggle, the revolution, begins to unravel a few kilometres from the Sudanese border, as young, famished, exhausted conscripts scrape together whatever money they can to depart the arena of violence.   My younger friends talk almost casually about flight. According to Ermias and Danny, it’s now so common, people simply announce they’re doing it. (Danny says he knows of a group that had arranged to go to Sudan that very morning.) Officers simply say, Okay, but please leave your rifle. Even my cadre friend talks about it. He turns up at our usual table one afternoon, and has to endure a bit of humour at his expense from the group. Yosief the cadre! Bwa! Yosief looks embarrassed, and shrugs. “It’s nothing to me,” he says, and explains how he simply wants to get his wife and children to Sudan. So much for the loyalty instilled by the political awareness programme at Nakfa. But joking aside, there is no question that this is now a constant, terrible struggle for many Eritreans: to stay or go? Ermias says that in his Ministry there is a quiet debate going on among his colleagues, about whether it really is better to flee abroad and risk everything, or stay and ‘make do’. The thing is, says Ermias, that it’s difficult to make a fair assessment. The ones who get away eventually write to us, and say, 192

MOVING TIME

look, I made it! It’s wonderful here! But often they only do that to keep up appearances, and the reality has been detention centres, destitution, joblessness. I offer my own advice. But in the end this is a huge psychological burden for all Eritreans. Meanwhile the President doesn’t care, or says he doesn’t. We don’t need them, he sneers; they obviously wouldn’t have made any contribution to Eritrea if they had stayed anyway. He refers to those who flee as disposable, and uses the term for the gritty refuse you throw away after making sua, the traditional beer. It is a particularly insulting term to use. Ermias says that the ex-fighters in his Ministry are equally dismissive. “Sure,” they say, “go ahead, run away!” They—the fighters—are the only ones that matter. They can run everything by themselves anyway.   Tens of thousands of Eritreans, predominantly young, flee the country, undertaking the terrible, hazardous journey into Ethiopia or Sudan, and thence, if they are lucky, into the world beyond. Some end up being trafficked in Sinai. Others drown in the Mediterranean. They are driven from Eritrea by the past, risking everything—life itself—in search of a future. A peculiar kind of historicity grips these flights of migration, which embody the desire to dilute history. As for the government itself, the tendency has long been to dismiss them—“people have always run away from our struggle,” says the President on TV, and so it becomes, curiously, a core part of being Eritrean. An old EPLF acquaintance 193

SHALLOW GRAVES

reminds me of a saying: either do what they say, or leave the country. But recently the government has become more concerned about the ongoing haemorrhaging of sovereignty and time itself, and has entered into discussion with the EU about the problem; because, more importantly, the EU is increasingly worried about how to stem the flow. Perhaps President Isaias can be helped to do so, they wonder.   And so to Calais. The town was captured by Edward III in 1347 in the aftermath of the Battle of Crécy. England governed the place for the next two hundred years, and when it was finally lost to the French in 1558, a despairing Queen Mary I supposedly declared that ‘Calais’, alongside the name of her husband, would be forever inscribed in her heart—a visceral extension of England into continental Europe, lost and bitterly recalled. But here, now, in the filthy, freezing mud and tarpaulin streets of the ‘the Jungle’ camp (and its successors), people who have come thousands of miles hope for better things. There are many nationalities here— Nigerians, Malians, Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans—people from the former European empires, or from those zones caught in the crossfires of imperial ambition, dating in some cases to the nineteenth century. Many others are fleeing recent violent catastrophe in the Middle East, conflict which is itself only the latest outcome of a concatenation of events dating back decades. They represent the reflux, and the victimhood, of global history. And 194

MOVING TIME

prominent among them are Eritreans, who now constitute one of the largest groups of migrants coming to Europe.1 They are the ‘lucky’ ones; many others have died on the journey.   Asylum cases land on the desks of UK-based ‘experts’, myself included. In the heart-breaking transcripts conducted by Border Agency personnel of traumatised Eritreans, and in interviews with them, I am struck by the role of the past: they have been coerced by harrowing histories into a world of people trafficking, rickety boats, muddy detention centres, interrogation in grey rooms under strip lights. Many, consciously or otherwise, show no interest in the past, or express heartfelt hostility toward it. Some of them turn up at Eritrea-related events in London—conferences on peace-building, or gatherings to mark independence. These are usually sombre, melancholy occasions, full of modest but powerful, expressive testimonies. In the room, too, are the dead and the lost, a long line of the departed stretching back to the martyrs of the struggle itself and reaching up to the terrible deaths in Sinai or in the Mediterranean. But the exiled young are Eritrea’s future: what will happen to the past, and to the nation, under them? Maybe it is their task to forget, for a while.

195

POSTSCRIPT

Where is Eritrea, anyway, and why would so many people not want to live there? It is a question asked by people in Britain with ever-greater frequency. Eritreans, of course, form only one segment, although a sizeable one, of growing numbers of migrants fleeing war, persecution and economic devastation; squeezing into Calais and trying to hide in trucks headed for Dover. In Britain, there is ferocious debate about these people and their situation. For some, there is only desperation to help—centres collecting food and clothing are overwhelmed—and a belief that this country, with its international legal obligations as well as a putative, self-anointed moral leadership, is bound to welcome them; especially children, whom the Conservative government declares it will accept (though it emerges that the actual numbers of children brought to the UK were embarrassingly small; the pledge is later dropped).1 But on the other side is a groundswell of opinion, fired up by a right-wing press, that ‘enough is enough’, that no more migrants can come into the UK, which is already ‘full up’ and has—so the narrative goes—been

197

SHALLOW GRAVES

altered, indeed distorted, beyond all recognition by years of immigration. It is exploited by UKIP, the UK Indepen­ dence Party, whose ill-disguised racism and xenophobia are expressed under the banner of renewed British patriotism, and by a host of smaller, equally unpleasant political gangs. Anti-immigration is also the defining principle of a large number in the Conservative Party itself. A pop star, Lily Allen, travels to ‘the Jungle’ and, overcome with emotion at the terrible plight of the population on the move, apologises on behalf of Britain for refusing them entry (though the young Afghan man to whom she made the apology later comes to the UK) and for screwing up their lives and their country.2 The scorn heaped on her in the days after by the right-wing press is extraordinary, yet also depressingly predictable.3   In truth, Eritreans have been coming to the UK as asylum seekers for a number of years—certainly since 2002, in the wake of the crackdown. At first, the UK Home Office is keen to send them away, which is why Horn of Africa specialists get so much business sent our way by solicitors and lawyers. (“Is this person really at risk of persecution for being Pentecostal Christian?” “Is this person really a Pentecostal Christian?” “Shouldn’t every citizen be obliged to do national service and not run away from it?”) In time, as the tyranny of the regime in Eritrea becomes clear, the granting of asylum becomes more straightforward. But soon, the backlash: too many people, tramping over England’s green and pleasant land 198

POSTSCRIPT

(or, more precisely, south London housing estates), scrounging benefits and generally undermining the nation’s sense of itself and its history.   Then comes the EU referendum, during which much of this comes to the fore and becomes altogether nastier. Issues become conflated; the notion of ‘free movement’—which applies only to EU member states— becomes part of a larger cacophony of noise concerned with ‘open borders’ and people flooding in from all across the globe. And so, in June 2016, those who vote in the referendum do so by a narrow margin to leave the European Union. Regardless of the chaotic debate preceding the referendum itself, and the flood of misinformation which characterises the ‘Leave’ effort in particular, Britain now must ‘knuckle down’ and get on with Brexit. In the months that follow, there is much talk of the UK ‘taking back its sovereignty’ and, more than that, of somehow recapturing an ill-defined moment in the past when the country had an empire, and was the pre-eminent trading nation in the world, and was proud and naval and free, and had a clear sense of its own identity and mission, and so forth. For anyone with even a smattering of knowledge of British history, this reinvention, this crazy collage, is profoundly depressing;4 but on it goes, as a divided, squabbling government nonetheless seeks to make the best of it, and promises the sunlit uplands of—something or other. A time of Churchill and the Blitz; Palmerston; industrial 199

SHALLOW GRAVES

prowess? The comedian Al Murray, capturing the zeit­ geist, sardonically titles his 2016–17 tour “Let’s Go Backwards Together”.5   While Brexiteers in the UK proudly trumpet Britain’s imperial heritage in anticipating a future outside the EU, and decry the British variant of what was known in Australia as ‘black armband history’,6 not many are quite as keen to consider the consequences of that imperial past, or the responsibilities which it might entail. Metropolitan, bleeding-heart lefty elites are to blame for distorting British history and identity, and for denying what was true, and great, about the country that saw off Napoleon and Hitler, and that once governed a quarter of the world’s surface. Including Eritrea, for a time.   ‘The Jungle’ and its successors represent a curious intersection of histories—of remembering and forgetting—among both Britons and Eritreans, each seeking to locate and make sense of usable national histories. As Britain struggles with its own identity and history, in the brave new world of Brexit, migrants and refugees struggle with theirs, too. Eritreans—migrant and haunted—are running away from their burdensome past, or at least a particular interpretation of it, at the very moment when millions of Britons, and a sizeable chunk of the British political establishment, appear to be running back toward theirs—or, again, a very particular interpretation of it. Which nation will ultimately come unstuck as a result of their respective stances is a matter of debate. Certainly, neither seems to be a sustainable long-term strategy. 200

POSTSCRIPT

  As Britain contemplates its national history and identity, Eritrea does likewise, each on the move, their notion of time mobile, their mobility temporal, and each bound to the other in ways that many of their leaders and most of their people might scarcely recognise. But more than that: the interconnection of Eritrea and Britain compels us to think about how time moves with people, how it echoes and rebounds as space shifts. Eritreans arriving in Europe carry with them long memories, and even longer histories, which alter as they move. Asylum seekers rethink their national history. And in wanting to enter the UK, they are stumbling, unknowingly for the most part, into a country arguably more divided and uncertain about its own past, its own place in the world, its own identity, than at any time in recent history. These are two countries which are curiously connected by the vagaries of imperial and global history, both at the crossroads of change. What will their histories become and how best can a historian read it? Let me record here my fervent hope that a scholar from Eritrea will one day attempt some British history. Now that would be worth reading. * * * And so, it seems to have ended as surprisingly as it began. When the first shots were fired at Badme in May 1998, everyone was looking forward to a robust, healthy partnership between Eritrea and Ethiopia. The talk over 201

SHALLOW GRAVES

the previous few years had been only of cooperation, and a new era of peace and stability. Suddenly, troops were being mobilised, towns were being bombed from the air, and people were being deported and displaced in their thousands. The language was thick with resentment and animus. Two decades and countless policy assessments later, when Abiy Ahmed showed up in Asmara in July 2018 to sign the deal which would end the war, quite a few people were wrong-footed, again. After all, just a few weeks earlier, stories marking the twentieth anniversary of its beginning were still highlighting the seeming intransigence of the respective positions of the two governments. There was no discernible movement in either direction, and there was no reason to doubt—despite there being a new man in charge of Ethiopia—that the no-war, no-peace scenario with which regional experts had become so familiar was going to end any time soon. That’s the thing about the Horn of Africa: just when you’re getting comfortable with the status quo, and you’re pretty sure you know what’s what, off it goes again, and you’re left scrabbling around trying to make sense of the changes.   After all, both regimes had much to gain from the status quo. For Isaias Afewerki, there was the political legitimacy gained from a permanent war footing, and the sense that Ethiopia was acting entirely in character by posing an enduring existential threat—which itself gave life and sustenance to the EPLF. In Ethiopia, there  

202

POSTSCRIPT

was long satisfaction that they had Eritrea where they wanted it: isolated, quarantined, haemorrhaging legitimacy and people, increasingly unstable. Neither, of course, wanted to go to war—not Eritrea, because there was a growing realism about its military prospects, and a recognition that next time they would lose big; not Ethiopia, because nominal victory in battle would bring chaos and complex involvement on its northern border. Still, it’s worth remembering that Isaias Afewerki and the EPLF leadership do have history in terms of sharp tactical and strategic adjustments: the withdrawal to Sahel in 1978–9, when they were in sight of victory, but as the Soviet Union arrived in force; the warmth of the mid-1990s agreements with the TPLF-led Ethiopian government, despite a tormented history of bitter disagreement; the abrupt acceptance of the OAU framework agreement in February 1999, after the Ethiopians had recaptured Badme; even the (alleged) support for al-Shabaab in Somalia, however we define the nature of that support.   So, all’s well that ends well: harmony has broken out, there are hugs and smiles all round, the two leaders get on like long-lost buddies, embassies have reopened, roads and telephone lines are reconnected, and everyone can move on, relieved that it’s all over. But something is bothering me. We have been here before. We were told before that, historically, there was ‘nothing to see here’, and that we all had to move on and let the wounds of the 203

SHALLOW GRAVES

past heal—Meles Zenawi’s speech at Eritrea’s independence celebrations in 1993, anyone? But there is more than that. What happened to the hate-filled language about the Woyane and the Sha’abiyya, the contempt, the bile, the deep-set grievances expressed? Perhaps it was only words. But words can be pretty damaging, in some ways no less so than the sticks and stones with which both governments are so skilled. Do words simply get uttered in anger, and then drift off like steam, evaporating into nothingness? Maybe. But then there is the actual destruction—material and infrastructural, but more importantly, experienced by the people whose lives have been ruined by this war. What about the tens of thousands of dead and injured, the displaced and deported, those left bereft and destitute by the loss of loved ones and homes and possessions?   And so I feel terrible, playing the part of the cynical killjoy, but I wonder what we are supposed to make of all this. Scenes of jubilant, happy people in both countries are wonderful. But when I see these pictures of people celebrating, I also feel deep sadness: for those who died; for those in Eritrea who have been trapped in military service for much of the last two decades, and who had their lives blighted as a result; for those who ended up with little choice but to flee Eritrea, exposing themselves to the traffickers of Sinai, the overloaded boats of the Mediterranean, detention centres and increasingly xenophobic European politicians. It is refreshing to see Isaias 204

POSTSCRIPT

smiling. But what is he smiling about, exactly? What should we do with the war, both the experiences of it and the historical imaginaries that led to it? How should Eritreans and Ethiopians remember this conflict, which is in any case a curiously forgotten or at least neglected one? How will historians come to write about it, assuming they will—as an unfortunate spasm in the wake of Eritrean independence and the reconfiguration of power in the region in the 1990s? Or as the bridge to something else more profound, as yet unknowable? What did that war mean? Perhaps it will become a bizarre footnote. Everything depends on what happens next.   Millions of Eritreans have had their lives blighted by the war—in addition to the sixty thousand dead between 1998 and 2000. The government might proclaim a new era, but there are now two generations of people who may not be so willing—or able—to simply forget that it happened and move on. Perhaps the government is relying on widespread exhaustion, and hopes that relief will militate against the anger that many young people have felt for a long time about the regime and its policies. That might work. But in time there will be a need to confront the war—its roots, its cost, its aftermath. In many ways it is typical of Isaias that he feels able to simply declare the war over, after years of a very different kind of message, and expect everyone to fall into line. But those with longer memories will continue to wonder about the terrible sacrifice imposed on the 205

SHALLOW GRAVES

Eritrean people; about the President’s mishandling of events in 1998; about his even graver mishandling of the highly successful Ethiopian offensive in May 2000, when Ethiopian forces broke through in the west, placing the entire country in jeopardy, and compelling a number of senior EPLF figures to contemplate a coup against him. Perhaps Isaias or his inner circle don’t quite understand the domestic implications of peace, or believe that they can be controlled in any case. Does Isaias fully grasp the enormous pressures building up within Eritrea over the past two decades? If not, the regime may be in for a rude shock. On the other hand, perhaps both Eritrea and Ethiopia have been offered some attractive incentives, and external bonuses and dividends are on offer—perhaps by the Gulf states or even the EU. Maybe some targeted largesse can sort out any rumblings of discontent. Any number of scenarios are possible. But at the very least, questions need answering, and histories need writing. When they are, it won’t necessarily be to the EPLF’s or Isaias’s benefit.  

* * * Eritreans have lived, now, with more than half a century of war, or the threat of it, and with the domestic violence which this has generated. The nation has been defined by it. Those who make it to Calais have been propelled forward by that past, and are the products of those revolutionary wars which were begun in such deadly earnest 206

POSTSCRIPT

in the 1960s, and whose ramifications shudder through their lives still.   Whether the war of 1998–2000 was a hiccup, an unfortunate aberration, or whether it was a critical turning point in the region’s history, it certainly served to reify particular histories and memories, notably of the liberation struggle and the political vision of bloodforged Eritrean nationhood. It reified the history of the armed struggle, and hardened particular histories of Abyssinia and its constituent parts—notably Tigray and the Amhara-speaking heartland. It exposed deep flaws in the EPLF’s foreign policy, and its strategy for social and political cohesion; and it exposed the flaws in Isaias Afewerki’s own character. It also pushed the Isaias group toward authoritarianism, though of course scholars of the armed struggle will quickly point out that those tendencies were present already. Would things have been different without it? Would the regime have been impelled on a different, more liberal path without the war to infuse its agenda with a peculiar energy and rigour? The problem is that 1998 has long looked ‘inevitable’—fixed in time, written in the stars. It was always going to happen, most of the analyses of the past twenty years suggest, precisely because of the psychological make-up of both the EPLF and the President.   But we also know that, should peace hold, and should the change happen internally that Eritrea so desperately needs—in fact, one should follow the other—then there 207

SHALLOW GRAVES

are different versions of the past available. They have been in cold storage for a while now. But they can be brought to light, and made as real as those versions of time with which Eritreans have lived for too long now. The war, and its lengthy aftermath, was the period in which many Eritreans began to quietly question the history that had become the received wisdom of the nation, and thus to question their future under the shadow of that history. At the same time it served to throw up complex ideas about the historical relationship with Ethiopia—if one knew who to ask. Violence does strange things to time, stretching and distorting it, obscuring some things and revealing others with shocking clarity. War bends time, refracts it; it pushes people’s memories backward and propels them forward into the future—as it does, ultimately, with people themselves. The challenge for the historian, struggling to make sense of temporal order at the best of times, is how to understand these shifts in public and private memory; these eddies of historical consciousness. Fundamentally, how do we listen to the dead, across rocky, contested borders?   I search for lessons, but if there are any, they will come only slowly. I went to Eritrea expecting, and probably desiring, a neat geometry of violence. For a time, the EPLF seemed to provide just that. But what transpired, in the end, was messier, and more traumatic. For me, as an ignorant ferenji, this was something like enlighten208

POSTSCRIPT

ment; but that is neither here nor there. For millions of Eritreans, and especially the young, may the experience of the war and its aftermath make sense, in the fullness of time. It may even be to their advantage that the graves are as shallow as they seem to be.

209

A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Given the nature of this book, it seemed out of place to weigh down the text with footnotes—hence this brief note on the best material on the war, its context and its aftermath. It is not exhaustive, and does not include the large volume of material on contemporary politics in both Eritrea and Ethiopia. For the moment, discussion is dominated by policyoriented analysis and political commentary.1 A good example is a recent issue of the Horn of Africa Bulletin, which contains several pieces by seasoned and knowledgeable authors on the implications of the rapprochement between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and discussion of likely scenarios.2 It is essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary relationship between the two countries, and what the apparent ending of the war means for the region and for the two nations themselves. This work is the latest addition (at the time of writing) to a long line of incisive contemporary analysis which has episodically appeared since the first shots were fired—for example, pieces by Patrick Gilkes and Martin Plaut,3 and later by Plaut and Sally Healy.4 This kind of work made for essential reading at the time, and now they represent important staging posts in the long ‘no-war, no-peace’ scenario, and in some ways have taken on the lustre (if that is the

211

A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

correct term) of primary source material. The same is true of the analysis which came out of International Crisis Group in 2005.5 Sally Healy’s later project for Chatham House, an examination of overlapping violence and peace agreements across the Horn, considered the Algiers Agreement in comparative context.6   More substantively and conventionally ‘scholarly’ work, including work by historians, anthropologists and political scientists, is rather thinner on the ground, as I suggested at the beginning of the book. This may be because, in fact, the war itself is not especially interesting in intellectual terms, though, as may be clear by now, I don’t myself hold to that view. But there are some important exceptions. Kjetil Tronvoll and Tekeste Negash’s Brothers at War was one of the first attempts at a scholarly assessment of the conflict. However, it was written early on in the conflict, and as a result—while making an important contribution to the growing body of opinion about the causes—it was published before the Ethiopian offensive of 2000 which ended the war and fundamentally reshaped the Horn.7 The late Tekie Fessehatzion, one of Eritrea’s finest scholars, produced an insightful and thoughtful book on the meaning and context of the conflict shortly after the Algiers Agreement was signed.8 The essays in Dominique Jacquin-Berdal and Martin Plaut’s important edited collection offer a range of perspectives,9 while Kidane Mengisteab and Okbazghi Yohannes considered the war among a range of challenges confronting Eritrea,10 as did the contributions in a collection I edited on Eritrean foreign policy under the auspices of Chatham House.11 Ruth Iyob framed the conflict in spatial terms as well as in terms of political culture,12 while in some of my 212

A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

own work I have sought to place the war in a longue durée perspective.13 More recently, Martin Plaut’s excellent study of modern Eritrea includes intelligent, well-informed analysis of the war.14 With the partial exception of some of the contributions to the Jacquin-Berdal–Plaut collection, there have been few detailed military histories of the war, although a recent addition to Helion’s ‘Africa at War’ series is one for the military buffs.15   It is worth noting that much of this scholarship is concerned primarily with Eritrea, and not coincidentally so. The war has come to dominate Eritrea in a way that it hasn’t Ethiopia, where the ‘Eritrean question’ is only one of several issues with which the EPRDF government has had to contend.16 The impact of the war on Eritrean politics, society and economy has been so much greater. An important exception to this general trend is Kjetil Tronvoll’s fine monograph on memory and identity in Ethiopia, which considers the war within a larger analytical framework.17 Briefer treatments of the war also appear in Gebru Tareke’s study of the rise and fall of the Derg, and in Harold Marcus’s grand-sweep history of Ethiopia.18 Christopher Clapham has recently capped a truly illustrious career with a regional study in which the 1998– 2000 war receives characteristically perceptive treatment.19   The war generated writing that is more or less transparently supportive (indeed representative) of one side or the other. At least some of this is valuable as primary source material, read in the correct light. An illustrative sample on the Ethiopian side would include Addis Birhan, for whom Eritrea was Ethiopia’s ‘problem child’, and Medhane Tadesse’s selfpublished book, neutrally titled but polemical, subjective and impassioned in the substance.20 On the Eritrean side, a special 213

A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

issue of the Eritrean Studies Review from 1999 offers up a range of perspectives, bound together by the shared conviction that Eritrea, now as in the past, is the wronged party.21   There is no question that the ending of the war offers an opportunity for further, more careful reflection. We can only hope that there will be a new surge of balanced, scholarly work—especially by the next generation of Eritrean and Ethiopian historians—in the very near future.

214



pp. [xviii–xxix]

NOTES

PREFACE

1. See the Bibliographical Note. 2. Highlanders. 3. Nickname for the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), mostly pejorative but also affectionate. 4. By Raphael Samuel, see Theatres of Memory: past and pres­ ent in contemporary culture (London & New York, 1994), and his posthumously published sequel, Island Stories: unravelling Britain. Theatres of memory, Volume II (London & New York, 1998). Also Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford, 2002). 5. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European cultural history (Cambridge, 1995); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: on national trauma, mourning, and recovery (London, 2001, 2003). 6. See for example Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: from domestic abuse to political terror (London, 1992, 2001). 7. Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: an introduction (Oxford, 2015); Susan J. Matt & Peter N. Stearns (eds.), Doing Emotions History (Urbana, 2014). 8. See my ‘Mourning and Glory: toward affective histories of  



215

 

pp. [xxx–3]

NOTES

 violence in Africa over la longue durée’, Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 1:1 (2017). 9. David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: historical memories and its ironies (New Haven & London, 2016); Sidney Pollard, The Idea of Progress: history and society (London, 1968); Richard S. Grayson & Fearghal McGarry (eds.), Remembering 1916: the Easter Rising, the Somme, and the politics of memory in Ireland (Cambridge, 2016). 10. Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge, 2006). 11. Notably, Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford, 1999). 12. Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart. Blood and bad dreams: A South African explores the madness in his country, his tribe and himself (London, 1991); Ryszard Kapuściński, The Emperor: downfall of an autocrat (London, 2006; 1st edn in Polish, 1978). Worthy of note here, too, is A.F. Robertson’s terrific Community of Strangers: a jour­ nal of discovery in Uganda (London, 1978)—written in the first person by an anthropologist working in Bugerere district in the late 1960s and early 1970s—which got me wondering whether anthropologists or journalists really should have all the fun in writing such absorbing accounts from which they didn’t feel the need to remove themselves; indeed quite the opposite. 13. For example, Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals (London, 2002); and The Silence of Animals: on progress and other modern myths (London, 2013).  

 

 

1. CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES, 1

1. Ruth Iyob, The Eritrean Struggle for Independence: domi­ nation, resistance, nationalism, 1941–1993 (Cambridge, 216



pp. [4–9]

NOTES

 1995); Dan Connell, Against All Odds: a chronicle of the Eritrean revolution (Lawrenceville NJ, 1997); Roy Pateman, Eritrea: even the stones are burning (Lawrenceville NJ, 1998); Basil Davidson, Lionel Cliffe & Bereket Habte Selassie (eds.), Behind the War in Eritrea (Nottingham, 1980); Lionel Cliffe & Basil Davidson (eds.), The Long Struggle of Eritrea for Independence and Constructive Peace (Trenton NJ, 1988). 2. Quoted in Iyob, The Eritrean Struggle, 143. 3. He famously felt “the hand of history upon our shoulders”, even though “a day like today is not a day for soundbites”: ‘Blair: in his own words’, BBC News, 11 May 2007. 4. ‘Irish “drunks” row prompts Clinton apology’, BBC News, 8 October 1999; also J.C.D. Clark, Our Shadowed Present: modernism, postmodernism, and history (London, 2004), 5. 5. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992). 6. Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting. 7. In Connell, Against All Odds, 251. 8. In ibid., 282–3. 9. The History Department at the University of Dar es Salaam, along with a handful of others such as Ibadan, was in the vanguard of the ‘new’, revisionist and often nationalist history of Africa in the 1960s. To many in my own cohort, made up of anxious postmodernists, it took on a decidedly romantic aspect; a kind of scholarly Camelot. 10. Pateman, Eritrea, 264. 11. John Young, ‘The Tigray and Eritrean Peoples’ Liberation Fronts: a history of tension and pragmatism’, Journal of  

 

 

217

pp. [9–27]

NOTES

Modern African Studies, 34:1 (1996); Richard Reid, ‘Old Problems in New Conflicts: some observations on Eritrea and its relations with Tigray, from liberation struggle to interstate war’, Africa, 73:3 (2003). 12. The spirit is captured in Amare Tekle (ed.), Ethiopia and Eritrea: from conflict to cooperation (Lawrenceville NJ, 1994). 13. A Tigrinya nickname for the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, literally meaning ‘uprising’ or ‘rebellion’, first used in reference to an insurgency in Tigray in 1943 against Haile Selassie. In Eritrea it was used pejoratively but it wasn’t actually derogatory in origin. 14. This is an appendix in Cliffe & Davidson (eds.), The Long Struggle of Eritrea, 205–213. 15. The Kebra Negast—‘Chronicle of the Glory of the Kings’—was produced in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and has long been regarded as Ethiopia’s ‘national epic’. In essence it relates the story of how Ethiopia was founded by Menelik I, son of King Solomon and Makeda, Queen of Saba (Sheba), and how it becomes the ‘new Zion’, possessed of a covenant with God. 16. Quoted in Jeremy Harding, Small Wars, Small Mercies: journeys in Africa’s disputed nations (London, 1993), 360. 17. The Highlands. 18. This is described in W.C. Plowden, Travels in Abyssinia and the Galla Country (London, 1868), ch. 1. 19. In Connell, Against All Odds, 228. 20. Awet Weldemichael, ‘The Eritrean Long March: the strategic withdrawal of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), 1978–79’, Journal of Military History, 73:4  

218



NOTES

pp. [28–42]

(2009). For contemporary accounts, see Tekeste Fekadu, Journey from Nakfa to Nakfa: back to square one, 1976– 1979 (Asmara, 2002); Connell, Against All Odds, ch. 10. 21. Once again Tekeste Fekadu, one of the very few EPLF fighters to go into print, has written on this in detail in The Tenacity and Resilience of Eritrea, 1979–1983 (Asmara, 2008). 22. The following account is based on interviews of POWs, near Nakfa, 23 September 2000. In truth it might be tricky to get ethical approval for such an exercise from most universities in the UK today. Fortunately, I wasn’t employed by one of these, but by the University of Asmara. I was accompanied by an Eritrean journalist, who also served as translator, and at least one Eritrean camp officer at any one time. 23. The Somali Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia has long been a source of armed opposition to successive Ethiopian regimes. 24. The classic argument is in Donald Levine, Greater Ethiopia: the evolution of a multi-ethnic society (Chicago & London, 1974, 2000). 25. Hamed Idris Awate, former Italian colonial soldier and bandit, is credited with firing the first shots of the Eritrean liberation struggle. 26. As noted above, Tekeste Fekadu is one important exception, but Alemseged Tesfai is in a wonderful league of his own: see for example his Two Weeks in the Trenches: rem­ iniscences of childhood and war in Eritrea (Lawrenceville NJ, 2002). For other forms of cultural production, see Ghirmai Negash & Charles Cantelupo (eds.), Who Needs a Story? Contemporary Eritrean poetry in Tigrinya, Tigre  

 

219

pp. [43–80]

NOTES

and Arabic (Asmara, 2005); and Jane Plastow (ed.), Three Eritrean Plays (Asmara, 2006). 27. People’s Front for Democracy and Justice. 28. Article 11(F) in the EPLF’s ‘National Democratic Programme’ of March 1987 states that the Front will “support all just and democratic movements, as our struggle is an integral part of the struggle of the world’s peoples, in general, and the struggles of the African, Asian, and Latin American peoples against world colonialism, foreign intervention and racism in particular”: in Cliffe & Davidson (eds.), The Long Struggle of Eritrea for Inde­ pendence, 213. 2. FRAGMENTS OF A WAR

1. See for example Mary Dines, ‘Ethiopian Violation of Human Rights in Eritrea’, in Cliffe & Davidson (eds.), The Long Struggle. 2. Although largely expelled from the field of combat in Eritrea in 1981, the ELF maintained a presence in Sudan and hovered close to the western Eritrean border. 3. There is no reason to doubt this, given the direction of the fighting and the fact that the Eritrean army did not actually stand and attempt to hold Guluj, which is exposed in an open plain. 4. ‘Ethiopia and Eritrea: Why are they fighting?’, The Economist, 11 June 1998. 5. A village just across the border in Tigray.  

3. DREAMS OF ABYSSINIA

1. Pateman, Eritrea, ch. 2; Semere Haile, ‘Historical Background to the Ethiopia-Eritrea Conflict’, in Cliffe & 220



NOTES

pp. [81–84]

Davidson (eds.), The Long Struggle of Eritrea, 12–15; Jordan Gebre-Medhin, ‘Eritrea (Mereb-Melash) and Yohannes IV of Abyssinia’, Eritrean Studies Review, 3:2 (1999). See James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 5 vols. (London, 1790); Henry Salt, A Voyage to Abyssinia and Travels into the Interior of That Country (London, 1814). 2. Ras Wube Haile Mariam was ruler of Tigray and other neighbouring provinces between the 1830s and the 1850s, remembered in Eritrea as having led episodic raids into the central plateau. 3. Interestingly, though, it’s not this remarkable inheritance the Ethiopian air force wants to flatten; one day on Ethiopian radio it’s announced that the air force will destroy the terrible Korean-built housing estate on the edge of the city. Eritreans seem to be so proud of that, so it’s gotta go! my friends joke. 4. Headquarters of the state broadcaster. 5. ‘Little Rome’, Mussolini’s name for Asmara. 6. A respectful term for an elderly gentleman, roughly equating to ‘father’. 7. Tedla Bairu was the first Chief Executive of Eritrea (1952– 55) under the federal constitution. 4. THE EMPEROR

1. Ryszard Kapuściński, The Emperor: downfall of an autocrat (London, 2006; 1st edn in Polish, 1978), 82. 2. G.W.B. Huntingford (ed. & tr.), The Glorious Victories of Amda Seyon, King of Ethiopia (London, 1965), 53–8. 3. Bruce, Travels, II, 680. 4. Plowden, Travels in Abyssinia, 455.  

221

pp. [85–160]

NOTES

5. Richard Pankhurst (ed.), The Ethiopian Royal Chronicles (London, 1967), 147–8. 6. See for example David Pool, From Guerrillas to Govern­ ment: the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (Oxford, 2001). 7.  Manqa means ‘bat’ in Tigrinya, and the episode was so named because the ‘conspirators’, as conspirators do, met at night. 8. Connell, Against All Odds, 173. 9. James Firebrace with Stuart Holland, Never Kneel Down: drought, development and liberation in Eritrea (Trenton NJ, 1985), 127–8. 10. Henry Stern, Wanderings among the Falashas in Abyssinia (London, 1862), 122. 11. Ras Welde Selassie of Tigray, in National Archives UK: Foreign Office 1/1 Henry Salt, ‘Extracts’, April 1810. 12. Henry Blanc, A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia (London, 1970), 5. 13. Senior Eritrean army commanders and veterans of the liberation struggle. 14. I have no qualms about inserting this anecdote as it will come as no surprise to Dan Connell himself. 15. For example, Michaela Wrong, I Didn’t Do It for You: how the world used and abused a small African nation (London, 2005). 16. Ali later fled into exile and claimed asylum. 17. Kapuściński, The Emperor, 163, quoting a contemporary Agence France Press report. 6. THE UPSIDE DOWN

1. For interested readers, the offending piece was ‘Old 222



pp. [160–198]

NOTES

Problems in New Conflicts: some observations on Eritrea and its relations with Tigray, from liberation struggle to interstate war’, Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, 73:3 (2003). 2. In 1973, the Isaias group cracked down on critics within the movement who were concerned at the growing authoritarianism of the leadership. 3. The code name for the Ethiopian offensive that captured Badme in February 1999—so named because Isaias had once declared that as long as the sun set in the west, Eritrea would hold Badme. 4. A. Hilton (ed.), The Ethiopian Patriots: forgotten voices of the Italo-Abyssinian war, 1935–41 (Stroud, 2007). 5. A small settlement on the coastal plain just inland from Massawa, where the Tigrayan Ras Alula, Emperor Yohannes’s commander in the north, ambushed several hundred Italian soldiers in 1887, setting back Italian imperial ambitions by several years.  

7. MOVING TIME

1. ‘Calais Crisis: first ever quantitative survey in the Jungle reveals thousands of refugees still trying to reach the UK’, The Independent, 21 May 2016.  

POSTSCRIPT

1. ‘Why has the UK ended its “Dubs” child refugee scheme?’, The Guardian, 10 February 2017. 2. ‘Lily Allen apologises on behalf of England while visiting Calais refugee camp’, The Telegraph, 12 October 2016. 3. ‘Sorry, Lily Allen, but you’re wrong: people worried about immigration have nothing to apologise for’, The Telegraph, 13 October 2016.  

 

 

223

pp. [199–212]

NOTES

4. It is an argument made powerfully in David Andress, Cultural Dementia: how the West has lost its history, and risks losing everything else (London, 2018). 5. See http://thepublandlord.com/ 6. Patrick Brantlinger, ‘“Black Armband” versus “White Blindfold” History in Australia’, Victorian Studies, 46, 4 (2004). A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

1. I discuss some of this briefly in my ‘Writing Eritrea: history and representation in a bad neighbourhood’, History in Africa, 41 (2014). 2. ‘Imagining Peace: Ethiopia–Eritrea rapprochement’, Horn of Africa Bulletin, 30:3, July–August 2018. 3.  War in the Horn: the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia (Chatham House: London, 1999). 4.  Ethiopia and Eritrea: allergic to persuasion (Chatham House: London, 2007). 5.  Ethiopia and Eritrea: preventing war, Africa Report No. 101, 22 December 2005. 6. Sally Healy, Lost Opportunities in the Horn of Africa: how conflicts connect and peace agreements unravel (Chatham House: London, 2008). 7. Kjetil Tronvoll & Tekeste Negash, Brothers at War: mak­ ing sense of the Eritrean–Ethiopian war (Oxford, 2000). 8. Tekie Fessehatzion, Shattered Illusion, Broken Promise: essays on the Eritrea–Ethiopia conflict (1998–2000) (Lawrenceville NJ, 2002). 9.  Dominique Jacquin-Berdal & Martin Plaut (eds.), Unfinished Business: Ethiopia and Eritrea at war (Lawrenceville NJ, 2005).  

224



NOTES

pp. [212–213]

10. Kidane Mengisteab & Okbazghi Yohannes, Anatomy of an African Tragedy: political, economic, and foreign policy crisis in post-independence Eritrea (Trenton NJ, 2005). 11. Richard Reid (ed.), Eritrea’s External Relations: under­ standing its regional role and foreign policy (London, 2009). 12. Ruth Iyob, ‘The Ethiopian–Eritrean Conflict: diasporic versus hegemonic states in the Horn of Africa, 1991– 2000’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 38:4 (2000). 13. Richard Reid, Frontiers of Violence in Northeast Africa: genealogies of conflict since c.1800 (Oxford, 2011). I attempted a shorter-term analysis in ‘Old Problems in New Conflicts: some observations on Eritrea and its relations with Tigray, from liberation struggle to interstate war’, Africa, 73:3 (2003). 14. Martin Plaut, Understanding Eritrea: inside Africa’s most repressive state (London, 2016). 15. Tom Cooper & Adrien Fontanellaz, Ethiopian–Eritrean Wars. Volume 2: Eritrean War of Independence, 1988– 1991 and Badme War, 1998–2001 (Solihull, 2018). 16. See for example Gerard Prunier, ‘The Eritrean Question’, in Gerard Prunier & Eloi Ficquet (eds.), Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia: monarchy, revolution, and the leg­ acy of Meles Zenawi (London, 2015). 17. Kjetil Tronvoll, War and the Politics of Identity in Ethiopia: the making of enemies and allies in the Horn of Africa (Oxford, 2009). 18. Gebru Tareke, The Ethiopian Revolution: war in the Horn of Africa (New Haven & London, 2009); Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Berkeley, 2002).  

225

pp. [213–214]

NOTES

19. Christopher Clapham, The Horn of Africa: state forma­ tion and decay (London, 2017). 20. Addis Birhan, Eritrea: a problem child of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa, 1998); Medhane Tadesse, The Eritrean–Ethiopian War: retrospect and prospects (Addis Ababa, 1999). 21. ‘Special Issue: Eritrea and Ethiopia: from conflict to cooperation to conflict’, Eritrean Studies Review, 3:2 (1999), guest edited by Tekie Fessehatzion.

226