I Didn't Do It for You (31 page)

Ethiopia had swapped sides in the Cold War and the consequences for Kagnew were immediate. On April 17, the Derg gave the US just four days to close five facilities in the country, including the communications base. The defence agreement signed in 1953–the most astute piece of diplomacy Haile Selassie ever negotiated–was to be terminated a year ahead of schedule, Addis decreed. The news was delivered on a Saturday, timing designed to make the pullout as practically difficult as possible for Ethiopia's erstwhile friends. Amazing as it may seem in retrospect, the Derg's decision hit US officials in Addis and Asmara like a thunderclap. ‘We'd thought things had stabilized, we didn't expect the Ethiopians to make the break that radically,' says Wauchope. ‘They had been adept at playing the superpowers off against each other. The Ethiopian government still had links, don't forget, with Yale, the Ford Foundation, TWA. To suddenly opt for one side was quite a jump.'

Wauchope found himself in command of an emergency operation to ensure nothing of any strategic interest–no coding
information, no classified circuit boards, no transmitting or receiving equipment–remained intact for the East bloc experts he knew would be invited to pick over the site by the Ethiopians once the Americans left. ‘It was an exciting, hair-raising time. We had to scramble like hell, but by Monday we'd worked out how to destroy or dismantle everything of strategic value. I tried to organize the closure with a maximum of dignity, but while I was out loading the transport plane we heard that Ethiopian soldiers had attempted to storm the consulate. The marines were put on alert and the Ethiopians were told this was a violation of the Vienna Convention. Then they demanded a tour of the Kagnew facilities and we had to conceal the backup machines that were still in use. The Ethiopians were telling us we couldn't remove any hardware, so we destroyed the classified circuit boards by slipping them into the water collection point. In the end, they got nothing. When we left the consulate, we placed the instructions to the game Dungeons and Dragons amongst the procedural papers, just to sow confusion, and we left the calling cards of prominent people in government we had no use for lying around, to give them something to think about.'

International pressure on the Addis government secured the Americans an extra two days' grace. On the last day, the Stars and Stripes were ceremoniously lowered at the consulate and staff joined a convoy of vehicles from Kagnew Station which threaded its way through Asmara to the airport. Many of Asmara's residents lined the streets to watch the convoy pass and some, Wauchope remembers, were weeping. The grief was prompted not so much by fondness for foreign guests whose role had been, at best, contentious, but by fear of what the future held. ‘All the other Western consulates in Asmara had been ordered to close at the same time. They felt that the last international witnesses to their sufferings were leaving and
now there would be massive ethnic cleansing by the Ethiopian army.' At the airport, the Ethiopian military was waiting and a last attempt was made to board the American flight and inspect what was on board. ‘We faced them down, told them they were violating international law, and then we were out of there.' If Wauchope, who won an award for the role he played, felt more than a pang at abandoning the Eritreans, there was no doubt in his mind that Kagnew's closure was overdue. A morally untenable partnership had been brought to an appropriate end. ‘It was what we had been lobbying the embassy in Addis for. We had lived in that country and we had understood what the Eritreans felt.'

 

America's need for terrestrial spy stations did not disappear with Kagnew. Washington had had a backup ready since 1974, having signed an agreement with Britain to set up a communications facility on the coral atoll of Diego Garcia, a remote former dependency of Mauritius. Diego Garcia was never going to be able to rival Asmara for reception, but it was ideally placed for the US fleet operating in the Indian Ocean, and monitoring equipment from Kagnew was transferred there. In retrospect the entire Kagnew operation, unknown to most Americans today, barely mentioned in writings on the topic, would seem blessed with a miraculously low public profile. Washington proved far less lucky with Diego Garcia. There, islanders evicted by the British government to make way for the American military waged a vociferous legal campaign, ensuring that while Diego Garcia remains in operation as a logistics, military and communications base, a key part of America's ‘war on terror', no one has ever been left in any doubt as to its role.

Vertical antenna poles–the debris left behind by the ASA–are still scattered around Asmara. Not far from the airport,
where young boys tend their goats, a round golf ball of a building rises incongruously from the grassy plains–a giant receiver built by the Americans, now used by the Eritrean military. Kagnew's Tract E, with its solid bungalows, sports facilities and central location, was too good a site to allow to go to waste. It was used as a garrison by the Ethiopian army and, after independence, the EPLF moved its Fighters in. When I visited what is now known as Den Den Camp, baptized after the mountain peak the Ethiopians never managed to wrest from EPLF control, the giant dry-cleaning unit vaunted in the US army brochures was working full blast, processing dirty laundry for UN troops in town. But the clock tower was telling a time of its own making, washing was draped over fences, and the once-neat lawns were littered with rusting containers, temporary homes for soldiers too poor to afford lodgings in town.

Perhaps the Gross Guys would have recognized the atmosphere in the two clubs, where the Melotti beer and
zibib
start flowing early in the morning, a cheap anaesthetic for the frustrated and bored. It is ordered by Eritrean paraplegics of both sexes, wounded in both the new war against Ethiopia and the conflict Kagnew's servicemen were determined to ignore. Wheelchairs crunch along the walkways where young GIs once strolled and the bars in which Spook and his acolytes staged their silly pranks are now run by young ex-Fighters with pinned-back trouser legs, survivors of a series of wasteful wars.

‘Come, we should go,' my Eritrean friend told me, as we watched a young amputee in what was once the Oasis Club pick a fight with a barmaid who thought he had already had too much to drink. ‘Otherwise you will see something you should not.' Not state secrets, but a spectacle he wanted no foreign visitor to witness: Eritreans behaving badly.

 

For the Eritrean rebels, who by late 1977 controlled 95 per cent of Eritrea, nothing could have been more disastrous than the Derg's formal entry into the Communist camp.

The banal rules of the Cold War dictated that the Soviet Union backed Marxist rebel movements fighting right-wing governments supported by the US. Here, thanks to Ethiopia's ideological flip-flop, was a Marxist rebel movement fighting for independence from a Marxist government. For Soviet strategists, it made no sense: national frontiers and ethnic hostilities were surely destined to fade into insignificance once scientific socialism conquered the world. Previously sympathetic to the Eritrean cause, Moscow decided it had no time for a rebellion that refused to fit its ideological paradigm. ‘There is no insurgency in Ethiopia,' declared one Soviet observer
¹¹
–obliterating Eritrean history with the same breathtaking highhandedness once demonstrated by the UN's bored bureaucrats. If the US eventually decided to return to the Horn on Somalia's side,
¹²
no one wanted to touch the Eritrean rebels. Rejected by the East bloc, spurned by the West, they were on their own.

Mengistu made his first trip to Moscow in May 1977, returning in a state of near-euphoria. Unfazed by their long-standing role as Somalia's military supplier, the Soviets had offered Mengistu the weaponry that would allow him to wage ‘total war' on Ethiopia's enemies. ‘He was absolutely ecstatic,' remembers Ayalew Mandefro, defence minister of the day.
¹³
‘He told me: “We are going to need large warehouses and a big storage capacity.”' In the middle of the year, Somalia launched a concerted grab for Ethiopia's eastern Ogaden and Somali President Siad Barre, exasperated by Moscow's clumsy attempts to back both horses in the same race, moved to expel 1,700 Soviet advisers. The Soviet Union was free to make good its promises to Ethiopia, ferrying in $1–2 billion of armaments, 12,000 Cuban combat troops and 1,500 military advisers during
a six-week air and sea lift. The value of Moscow's arms deliveries outstripped in a matter of months what the US had supplied during all its dealings with Ethiopia.

The oversized delivery changed everything in both the Ogaden and Eritrea. The turning point in the north came in Massawa in December, when the EPLF's seemingly unstoppable advance ground to a sudden halt. As Soviet ships moored offshore opened fire and Soviet advisers took the controls of Ethiopia's spanking new artillery, hundreds of Fighters were mowed down or drowned on the flooded salt pans. The EPLF was no longer fighting a panicking African army, it was pitted against a superpower boasting seemingly inexhaustible resources. By July 1978, after a campaign of saturation bombing by the freshly-equipped Ethiopian air force, all the towns the ELF and EPLF had won in southern and central Eritrea had been recaptured. Forced to accept the inevitable, the EPLF pulled out of Keren, its Fighters stripping the town of every object of potential use as they headed up into the only area that now seemed safe: the mountains of the Sahel, where they would spend the next 10 years.

Their leaders called it ‘strategic withdrawal', but to those who took part in it, this had the metallic taste of defeat. ‘It was our Dunkirk,' acknowledges Zemehret Yohannes, today a leading member of Eritrea's ruling party. ‘It was a defining moment. The biggest army in black Africa, with modern equipment and Soviet help, had pushed us out of the territory we'd been holding. Every expert was saying, “This fight is hopeless, it's a dead movement.” In retrospect, it baffles me–how, in those circumstances, we could say: “We can prevail.” It seemed a kind of stupidity.'
¹⁴

Towards the end of the eighth century BC in Ancient Greece, a revolutionary society was born where the limestone fingers of the Peloponnese mainland reach into the blue Aegean. It was founded by the Spartans, who had invaded neighbouring Messenia in search of fertile land. Sparta had won the territory it coveted, but with it came a population of rebellious subjects who outnumbered their new masters and did not take kindly to being used as forced labour to work the fields. To protect themselves against the
helots
, or serfs, the Spartans came up with the concept of the military state.

Not for them the dissolute habits of the Athenians and soft comforts of family life–Spartan men prided themselves on their self-denial and iron discipline. They lived in barracks, their closest comrades were fellow fighters. Sent as children to run barefoot on the chilly mountainsides, they learnt to bear pain without a whimper. Warriors until the age of 60, their greatest ambition was to achieve ‘a beautiful death' on the battlefield, defending the Spartan state. Women were no exception: they
too were expected to espouse the Spartan virtues of simplicity, moral rigour and extraordinary physical toughness. Feminists before their time, they enjoyed, in the absence of their menfolk, levels of freedom unheard of in the Ancient world. The other Greek city-states scorned the Spartan model, regarding it as totalitarian and brutalizing. But when Ancient Greece was invaded by the Persian army in 480 BC, it was a group of 300 Spartan warriors, embracing their fate in a doomed last stand at Thermopylae, who showed their effete fellow Greeks what it meant to die for a cause.

There was something very Spartan about the society that took shape in the late-1970s in the Rora mountain range that rises from the plains north of Keren and runs north-west to the border with Sudan. The Spartans built their militaristic state on a victory: they had subjugated the Messenians but knew they would not remain forever supine. The EPLF, which emerged as the only viable rebel movement after a final clash with the ELF, built its society on defeat: with Moscow's entry into the war, it had gone from holding independence in the palm of its hands to confronting total annihilation. Like the Spartans, the fighters of the EPLF adopted a rigidly puritanical lifestyle. The need to create a lean fighting machine meant that conventional family structures were rejected, traditional roles recast. Not only was the Eritrean woman Fighter, accounting for 30 per cent of rebel forces, often as deadly as the male, their children–separated early from their warrior parents and inculcated with the Movement's dour values at the Revolution, or Zero, School–would grow up to outstrip them both.

Their kingdom was what was loosely known as the Sahel and its contours were dictated by the gradient, for the mountains form a more effective barrier against an advancing army than anything man could contrive. This was the part of Eritrea no one really wanted–most of it too steep even for Eritrean
farmers, adept at tilling the narrowest highland ledge. The first foothills erupt from the dun-coloured plains around the town of Afabet like whale humps breaking through the surface of a calm sea. Strange stone excrescences form impossibly perky breasts. Then the Rora escarpment starts in earnest, the peaks–giant slabs of brown rock–crowding in upon the dry water-courses. The only fruits that grow here are the fig cactus and fleshy green pods of Sodom's Apple, which give nothing, when you tear them open, but a cobweb of poisonous white sap, said to be strong enough to stop a man's heart. It is a landscape of scrawny thorn trees and spiky pink baobabs that gesticulate nightmarishly across the narrow valleys, like witches crazed with grief. Baboons thrive, gambolling along the ravines in thuggish packs of 40 and 50, red in face and rear. So do foxes, which hunt hares with long, white-tufted ears. But few humans would want to set up base here, unless they had no choice.

Choosing its sites close to the border and the vital access routes to Sudan–a neighbour whose cooperation could never be taken for granted–the EPLF dug in. As the realization set in that the guerrilla movement was in for the long haul, the structures grew ever more complex, ghostly echoes of the institutions and organizations the Movement hoped one day to establish in peace-time Eritrea, a practice run at administering a state.

Up in the north at Orota, the EPLF built an underground hospital in whose white-washed rooms most major operations, short of heart surgery, could be staged. Sprawling for 5 km along a valley, equipped with 3,000 beds, it was known as ‘the longest hospital in the world'. Learning that survival rates depended on the time it took a wounded Fighter to receive emergency treatment, EPLF doctors took huge pride in the speed with which the injured were tended by frontline medical units and then whipped, tier by tier, to hospitals whose
sophistication was in inverse proportion to their distance from the battlefield. At the very most, it was decreed, no Fighter should be more than two hours' distance from a surgeon.

In Orota too, a small pharmaceutical plant turned out essential drugs, bandages, even sanitary pads for the women Fighters. In other workshops, Fighters manufactured bullets and repaired the damaged trucks, tanks and radio sets captured from the Ethiopians. Once the supply of arms from Arab countries dried up–former supporters belatedly realizing they were dealing with a secular Marxist movement, rather than an Islamic revolt–the EPLF was forced to rely on theft, careful recycling and mechanical cannibalization for most of its weaponry. Orota was also the location of the famous Zero School, where the children dubbed ‘Red Flowers' were taught. The logistics and military base–the EPLF's de facto citadel–lay further south at Nakfa, where, in 1976, its Fighters occupied a small settlement on the high plateau enjoying panoramic views down to the bleak Naro plains and the distant haze of the Red Sea.

Talking about these installations is always confusing, because the EPLF deliberately muddied the water in an attempt to protect their bases from bombardment. Sensitive sites were often given the same names as villages in the lowlands, or identified by code words, stripped of associations which could give Ethiopian strategists helpful clues. Even today, if you present a former Fighter with a map he will struggle to place them, brows puckered, fingers wandering lost and uncertain across the grid.

The same deliberate confusion surrounded the Fighters themselves. Adopting nicknames is a very Eritrean habit, perhaps because the fund of traditional local names is so limited, it's easy to get confused. But the practice was taken to new extremes at the Front, a form of initiation ceremony
that underlined each individual's entry into a testing new existence where no one could afford the luxury of homesickness or regret. You arrived an ordinary civilian, with your own petty, small-minded concerns and were reborn a warrior, or
tegadlai
, dedicated to the Cause. If a Fighter was stocky, he would be known as ‘The Body' or ‘Sack', if he was thin and ascetic, he became ‘The Priest'. A veteran activist was baptized ‘The Movement', a macho man reborn as ‘Rambo', a campaigner who sported a moustache became ‘Charlie' (as in ‘Chaplin') and, with the thumping inevitability of a group of British squaddies dubbing the giant amongst them ‘Titch', a particularly dark-complexioned Fighter would be known as ‘Tilian' (‘Italian').

A jokey form of shorthand, the nicknames not only made things simpler, they served as a security precaution. In a nation of less than 4 million people, where names usually tell the world whose son you are, it was alarmingly easy to track down a Fighter's village and extended family, vulnerable in Ethiopian-controlled territory. If a Fighter was stripped of his ancestral identity, known only by his nickname even to his rebel comrades, then his relatives were protected from retribution. For the same reason, Fighters were encouraged not to discuss religion or tribal affiliations: such differences, which had done so much to deliver Eritrea into Ethiopia's hands, should in any case be put aside in the fight for a united, independent Eritrea. The result was intense friendships based on the here and now. ‘When my best friend was killed, a man I had fought alongside for years, a man I really loved, I buried him without knowing where he came from,' remembers one ex-Fighter.
¹
‘Today I would like to go and see his mother and tell her what a hero her son was. But I don't know who she is. He was my brother, but I knew next to nothing about him.'

In a country infatuated with its own history, this is the
episode Eritrea loves the most; it is remembered with the same perverse nostalgia British veterans reserve for the Blitz. A tribute to pigheaded determination and endurance, Nakfa was so integral to the Eritrean experience it seemed only natural, when the post-independence government launched a national currency, that it should be baptized the Nakfa. During the decade the EPLF spent in Nakfa, the Ethiopian army launched eight large-scale offensives in a vain attempt to break the rebel movement's hold on the plateau. A journalist visiting the front once counted 240 bombing sorties by enemy aircraft in a day, with one shell landing every minute. Even today, when a new Nakfa is rising from the ruins, much of the plateau remains an ugly moonscape, each acne scar on its pitted face representing a massive explosion. The original town was reduced to rubble, its simple white mosque the only piece of masonry extending higher than waist level. Some say the pilots who flew the MiGs and Antonovs spared the mosque because it served as a useful compass point, allowing them to establish their bearings above the escarpment before releasing their bombs. Others say they tried to hit it but always failed, a sign, perhaps, that the town held a special place in Allah's affections. A victory for sheer obstinacy, constructed on a military rout, Nakfa was Eritrea's Verdun. It would never fall into Ethiopian hands, and the failure to capture the EPLF's de facto capital would prove the Mengistu regime's ultimate undoing.

The Eritreans survived by moving underground. Hospitals, technical colleges, theatres, guest rooms for visiting VIPs, parking places for the camouflage-painted jeeps, offices where young leaders like Isaias Afwerki, Petros Solomon, Ibrahim Afa, Ali Sayyid Abdallah, Mesfin Hagos and Sebhat Ephrem planned military strategy: they were all painstakingly dug into the rock and carved into the sides of valleys, the narrow entrances then covered by screens of undergrowth and foliage. From the air,
they were virtually invisible. The Fighters became creatures of the penumbra, for it was best to go about your business in the hours of dusk when pilots found it hard to focus in the half-light, and during the chill of night. ‘When I think of my visits to the front in the 1970s, all I remember is darkness, darkness, darkness,' says Koert Lindyer, a veteran Dutch journalist.

The tentacles of their underground network extended far beyond Nakfa itself. In a giant semi-circle that swept 240 km from Karora on the Sudanese border, down to Nakfa and south to Halhal, north of Keren, the Fighters dug parallel lines of trenches. It was backbreaking work. But, as the Fighters said, whipping themselves on to greater efforts: ‘Better to sweat than bleed.' In a conflict in which Ethiopians usually outnumbered Eritreans 10 to 1, and the enemy tapped a seemingly unlimited supply of weapons, the contours of the land were the one obvious advantage the Eritreans enjoyed. If they were forced to surrender one position, there would be another trench line to fall behind, and then another, and another.

If an ex-Fighter shows you how to pick your way through the uncleared minefields, marked with a grinning skull and crossbones, it is possible today to walk the trenches, which trail across Nakfa's slopes like worm casts on a sea-washed rock face. The camouflaged screen roofs are gone now, burnt as firewood by local shepherds. But the thick stone walls, rising higher than a man's head, still stand proud. They are interspersed with pokey underground antechambers where meals were eaten, classes held, sleep snatched and marriages consummated. The slabs of stone fit together with a neatness any Yorkshire dry-stonewaller would admire–the knowledge that a crack could let a bullet through encouraged a certain mathematical precision. At regular intervals there are neat gun-sights. If you peer through one of these slits, you will be brought up short by the sudden, seemingly magnified glimpse
of what kept the Fighters on their toes. Across the valley, with its own gun-sight trained precisely upon you, sits an Ethiopian position. As I knelt in the dust and imagined what it must be like to stare at your would-be executioner every day, I was reminded of the brown line of dirt that marked my T-shirt every time I belted up in a friend's car. Seat belts are always either filthy or broken in Eritrea. Having already braved death in so many more obvious ways, no one fusses over the dangers of flying through a windscreen.

Like the British squaddies at Keren, the Fighters came to know every inch of their natural fortress. Facing Nakfa to the south was Den Den, the mountain the Ethiopians struggled most fiercely to capture, as controlling it would have allowed them to turn their artillery directly onto the plateau. The place where Eritrean and Ethiopian lines lay barely 50 m apart–so close that Eritrean Fighters could hear the news being announced on Ethiopian radio sets–was known as
Testa a Testa
(‘head to head').
Fornello
(‘oven') was the area behind Den Den which saw the heaviest bombardment,
volleyball
the sport which involved Eritrean Fighters scrambling to lob Ethiopian grenades back over the parapets before they exploded. To the east rose
Sulphur Mountain
, regularly doused in flaming napalm. The winding track up from the valley was known as
Teamamen
(‘We are certain')–Eritrea's equivalent of ‘No Pasaran'. No Ethiopian force, the EPLF decided, would ever be allowed to breast its hairpin turns. Upturned in the ravines, the rusting Soviet trucks and tanks show it was a promise they kept.

What is it like to live a subterranean existence, one eye always on the sky for possible danger? You learn to merge with your surroundings as swiftly as a chameleon. Put yourself in the mind of an Ethiopian pilot, and see what he sees, roaring by so fast in a MiG his eyes can hardly fix on objects on the ground.
High above you, scouring these drab expanses of rock and scrub, he is wondering how anyone can survive in this dry landscape. He is looking for something out of the ordinary–a sudden movement that is more than a baboon or a goat, a bright flash of colour, swirling tyre tracks in the sand, some clue that there are humans below. So do nothing to attract his attention. Wash and dry your clothes indoors–a flapping shirt will draw him to you. If you must light a fire, remember that dry wood gives off little smoke, but damp wood is dangerous. If a truck comes to your area, sweep away the tracks immediately. Bury food tins–they can catch the sun and flash up a deadly signal. Before you go out, make sure you turn your watchstrap so the face points towards your body, not outwards, or pull down your sleeves and tuck them in to cover the glass. Forget about rings and jewellery–they glint too. Never wear white, or red, they are visible a long way off. Choose khaki, grey, anything dull. Avoid unnecessary large gatherings, that way, if a bomb hits home, the casualty toll will be lower. And if you're unlucky enough to be caught outside when a plane appears, then do as the rabbit, lizard and snake: freeze in your tracks, hold yourself as still as stone, so still you become part of the landscape, impossible to distinguish from the boulders and bushes, until the plane has gone beyond the horizon and the sinister game of Grandmother's Footsteps can resume. It can drive you close to madness, all that time in the sweltering darkness under the rock, like an antlion in its hole. When the bombing starts and you feel each boom vibrate through the earth's bowels, you want to break out of your living tomb and take a deep breath, because it feels better to see death coming out in the open, than to sit silently and wait. But this way you get to outsmart him, that Ethiopian pilot who wants to kill you. This way you get to live.