I Didn't Do It for You (38 page)

Mengistu was running out of time. In early 1989, the Ethiopians suffered an even more humiliating defeat than
Afabet when the TPLF, with EPLF support, captured the northern town of Inda Silase. The rebellion had spread beyond Tigray province to embrace disaffected Amharas and Oromos in central and southern Ethiopia, their movements uniting to form the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), bent on regime change. The army was being pushed southwards, entire units defecting as it retreated. Sensing the ground shifting beneath their feet, generals in Asmara and Addis staged a concerted coup attempt in May, minutes after Mengistu had left for East Germany, one of the countries he hoped might be persuaded to fill the vacuum left by a withdrawing Soviet Union.

The rebel generals had been in secret communication with the EPLF, preparing a post-Mengistu accommodation. But the putsch failed. Ironically, Sokurov, today's disillusioned stunt man, played a key role in its collapse. Training in the mountains, he heard the news on the radio. He had received no orders from either Moscow, barely aware of what was happening, or Addis and, privately, he had seen enough to sympathize with the coup plotters. Yet, ever the professional, he ordered his elite unit into action in Asmara, occupying the airport and army's staff buildings. ‘One of my men shot the commander of the air force in his office. Another rebel general was killed in his car at a checkpoint, trying to escape. They had to use a grenade launcher to get the other one out of his office, where he had locked himself. Afterwards we found warehouses full of military supplies and documents suggesting that after the coup the Eritrean separatists would enter Asmara.'

Twenty-seven commanding officers paid the price for this abortive action. Beaten and tortured to death, their corpses were left for days to bake in the sun as a warning to others. Mengistu, who had flown back to Addis in a hurry, ordered the severed head and mutilated body of General Damesse Bulto,
commander of the Second Revolutionary Army, to be paraded through Asmara's streets. ‘I felt sorry for them,' Sokurov admits. ‘If I'd been a neutral bystander I'd have taken their side. Within a month and a half, another 3,500 suspects were arrested and shot.'

Mengistu was still in control, but he had just executed his best and brightest officers–not an act likely to improve an army's battlefield performance. Where could he turn for the military equipment he persisted in believing could swing the battle his way? The answer was far from clear, given the new warmth developing between the superpowers. In June 1989, Herman Cohen, the US assistant secretary of state for Africa, met Anatoly Adamishin in Rome to discuss US–Soviet collaboration on Africa. During that meeting, Adamishin made it clear that Moscow would be happy to pass the Ethiopian baton to Washington. Worst of all, both the Soviets and the Americans had made diplomatic overtures to the EPLF. For a dictator who had always played the ‘my enemy's enemy is my friend' game with such gratifying results, nothing could have been more worrying than this enlightened superpower agreement to pull together.

Boxed in, Mengistu appealed one last time to the ally that had been so generous in the past. How could he sort out Eritrea, he whined to Moscow–blithely ignoring the $725m in weaponry sent in 1988, the $975m he was in the process of receiving for 1989–when he had no ammunition? His stores were empty, he must have more. Baffled by the discrepancy between the telegrams from Addis and its own figures, Moscow dispatched its top military brass that summer to settle, once and for all, the puzzle of Ethiopia's arms deficit.

‘I was sent to really sort it out,' recalls General Valentin Varennikov, then commander-in-chief of the Soviet Union's land forces. ‘I gave Mengistu the figures for our shipments–
they looked pretty impressive–he wasn't too pleased by that. I told him, “It can't continue forever like this in Eritrea. Time has shown there can only be a political solution.” He just said, “I won't talk to bandits.”'
¹⁰
Determined to see conditions for himself, Varennikov toured the army fronts, noting the strange intimacy that had developed between the two sides which, increasingly, shared the same covert desire: an end to the war. ‘On the Eritrean frontline, I asked why there was no shooting and the Ethiopians said: “We told the rebels the Soviet delegation was visiting today, and asked them to hold fire.” I was astonished by that attitude.'

Back in Addis, Varennikov became embroiled in an almost comic cat-and-mouse game of Find the Weapons as he attempted to verify exactly how much Soviet equipment Mengistu had stockpiled around the city, squirrelled away for a rainy day. ‘They were trying to be crafty. They would ask us which warehouse we were going to check the following day and then, overnight, they would move all the supplies. But I was an old soldier, I was on to them. In the morning I'd say: “I had a vision in the night. I'd like to visit that other warehouse.” I'd find it absolutely bursting with supplies. We would take photos and show them to Mengistu and say, “Look, there's so much stuff you don't even have room to store it.”' The general lifts a hand above his head. ‘They weren't just supplied, they were oversupplied. Everything was there.'

The Soviet Union's military establishment had always shown more indulgence towards Ethiopia than Gorbachev's reform-minded foreign policy experts had thought wise. When the civilian politicians had scolded and admonished, the generals had come through. Now, finally, the two spoke as one. ‘The Soviet Union was like a cow that was being milked by anyone who felt like it, including Ethiopia,' concluded Varennikov. He had a terse exchange with Mengistu before flying out. ‘I leave
confident that you will end this war,' he told Ethiopia's president. ‘If you fail to do so, our leadership may rethink their opinion of you.'

Moscow was effectively finished with Ethiopia. The withdrawal of Soviet experts, started quietly in the wake of the attempted coup, was stepped up a notch and, in the autumn of 1989, Sokurov became the last adviser to quit Eritrea. He rebased in Addis, where he continued training young Ethiopians for an increasingly paranoid regime. But he was no longer happy with his role. ‘I felt I was becoming an instrument of manipulation by unscrupulous Soviet politicians and that I could die in the sands of Africa.' Finally, he used a shrapnel wound as an excuse to escape, returning to a Soviet Union itself on the verge of fragmenting into its constituent parts. ‘For three years, the Ethiopians wouldn't allow me to leave, so I didn't tell them I was going. Once I'd recuperated I was told the situation in Ethiopia was changing so quickly, there was no point returning. Actually, the situation at home wasn't much better. I felt I had left one country and returned to another.'

 

Mengistu, the ultimate pragmatist, was not quite finished. He had one last card up his sleeve: a strange, esoteric card, admittedly, but one that might just allow him to snatch triumph from the jaws of defeat.

He began laying the groundwork for a three-way alliance which would provide him with a fresh source of arms, the weaponry he persisted in believing held the key to the war. Its shape emerged when, in August 1989, Cohen became the first US assistant secretary of state to visit Addis in 15 years. The US official found an uncharacteristically friendly and amenable Mengistu, who promised unconditional negotiations with the
EPLF, pledged to open Ethiopia's economy to private investment and pushed for an exchange of ambassadors. Crucially, the Ethiopian leader pledged forthright action on an issue he knew was close to the heart of America's influential Jewish lobby: the Falashas.

Legend has it that the ancestors of the Falashas, who call themselves the ‘House of Israel', were in the retinue that accompanied the original Menelik on his flight into Africa bearing the stolen Ark of the Covenant. When Ethiopia embraced Christianity in the fourth century AD, the Falashas did not follow suit. They clung instead to the rites of early Judaism, though their observances diverged so widely from established orthodoxy that for years Israel's rabbis queried whether they could be regarded as Jewish at all. Pushed to the margins of Ethiopian society, accused by Orthodox Christians of witchcraft, harassed by the state, the Falashas became virtual outcasts, dreaming of the day they would be granted the Right of Return.

A long-running scholarly campaign to win them formal recognition as Jews triumphed in 1975 when Israel's parliament decreed them descendants of the Tribe of Dan. As conditions in Ethiopia worsened, securing their evacuation became a rallying cause in both Israel and the US. During the 1984–5 famine, Mengistu had allowed Israel to remove 15,000 Falashas, but tens of thousands still remained. Mengistu now planned to use them as human hostages in a giant barter that would, with any luck, remove the need to make any real concessions in peace talks with the EPLF and its rebel allies.

‘For Mengistu, the name of the game was Israeli arms in exchange for Ethiopian Jews,' recalls Herman Cohen in his memoirs.
¹¹
Mengistu dusted off the sales patter Haile Selassie had used to woo foreign supporters in a previous age: in a hostile Moslem region, a Christian and a Jewish nation must
cling together. Israel would replace the Soviet Union as military supplier and the Americans would give the ingenious deal their blessing. ‘Though the [Ethiopian government] knew we could not openly acquiesce in Israeli arms deliveries, they expected a wink and a nod indicating we would not protest if Jerusalem opened the arms faucet,' Cohen writes.

Washington was in a quandary. It had never accepted the notion of Eritrean independence, which it believed undermined the integrity of Africa's borders. But with Mengistu's brutal regime in terminal decline, officials did not want to see a fading conflict suddenly revived by a new injection of weaponry. Yet they were also keen to oblige their closest friend in the Middle East and placate Jewish Congressmen pushing hard for the Falashas. Perhaps, with some skilful manoeuvring, it might be possible to beat Mengistu at his own game, winning both major concessions at the peace table
and
the Falashas' departure without whipping up the war.

Washington decided to turn a blind eye to Israeli military training in Ethiopia and the dispatch of army uniforms, boots and tens of thousands of supposedly ‘obsolete' rifles, while warning both Addis and Tel Aviv it would not stand for deliveries of heavy munitions. The warning fell on deaf ears in Tel Aviv, excited by a surge in the number of Falasha arrivals. When, in February 1990, the EPLF finally captured Massawa in a daring land and speedboat operation, the Ethiopian air force responded with relentless bombing. Survivors reported that the pilots were dropping a ‘new kind of bomb' which shredded the port city's crowded streets: Israeli cluster bombs.
¹²
It took all Washington's powers of persuasion, including a direct intervention by former President Jimmy Carter, to convince the Knesset it meant what it had said.

The unedifying Falasha trade dragged on, but the rebels' momentum could not be slowed. In early 1991, the EPLF
careered along the Red Sea coast, coming to rest on the outskirts of Assab, Keren and Asmara. It sent brigades south to help the EPRDF sever the key artery between Gonder and Addis. With Ethiopia cut off from the sea and a surrounded garrison in Asmara only accessible by air, Mengistu was under almost intolerable pressure to grant the one concession he had always rejected: a referendum on Eritrean independence. He balked, and ordered a halt to Falasha departures, which had been running at a brisk 1,000 a month. ‘Give us arms or there will be no further Falasha departures,' he told the Israelis.

As a hardline Marxist regime responsible for at least 500,000 civilian deaths jerked in its death throes, Washington and Tel Aviv made an extraordinary decision. The time had come, they agreed, for an outright bribe. A decorative pretext was required. The payment, Cohen and his colleagues suggested, would be presented as reimbursement for the revenues Ethiopian Airlines, normally used for Falasha emigrations, would lose by ceding its passengers to Israeli-organized charter flights. The US Defence Department agreed to make $20m available. ‘It was hidden under the term transportation costs–we didn't want to call it “ransom money”,' Cohen told me. The Israelis beat Mengistu down from an initial asking price of $100m to first $58m and finally $35m, which was paid into an Ethiopian government account at the New York branch of the Federal Reserve. On May 24, as the Ethiopian army surrendered in Asmara, the TPLF agreed to delay its entry into Addis long enough to allow nearly 15,000 Falashas to be airlifted to Israel in a 36-hour non-stop shuttle.

The deal had been sealed, but Mengistu was no longer around to reap its rewards. He had boarded a flight to southern Ethiopia, where he was scheduled to inspect a batch of army recruits. Once the plane took off, he entered the cockpit and ordered the pilot to change course for Nairobi. He was bound
for Zimbabwe where, under the understanding eye of Robert Mugabe, a former fellow Marxist, he had already purchased a large farm and ensconced his family. The man who had promised he would sell his last shirt to cover his debts left the country owing Moscow $6 billion, most of it for arms.
¹³
Like Haile Selassie before him, Mengistu defied expectations that he would, in the proud tradition of defeated Ethiopian warlords, commit suicide rather than face capture. Instead, he chose the slow poison of alcoholic exile, complaining bitterly, during rarely-granted interviews, of the way Moscow had turned its back on the true faith and betrayed its favourite African son.

The Falasha operation was the crassest chapter in the story of the world's careless manipulation of Eritrea, final proof of how deep its self-serving cynicism ran. As far as the Israelis were concerned, peace in the Horn came a distant second to its determination to claim a recently-discovered lost tribe. Neither they nor the Americans ever appear to have felt a moment's embarrassment for their readiness to pay off a dictator who, had the rebel advance unfolded at a slower pace, would have used his ransom money to revive a dying conflagration.