I Didn't Do It for You (40 page)

The open-mouthed astonishment the conflict triggered amongst Western allies was misplaced. The relationship between the EPLF and TPLF, in truth, had never been quite as cosy as foreigners had liked to believe. Italy's colonial occupation of Eritrea had marked a parting of the ways for communities on both sides of the frontier. Inhabitants of Ethiopia's underdeveloped Tigray migrated north in search of work, supplying sophisticated Asmara with its unskilled labour. Eritrean urbanites who had grown up associating Tigray exclusively with maids, street-sweepers and janitors, tended to look down on their neighbours. That Eritrean sense of superiority had been reinforced during the Struggle, in which the longer-established EPLF played the role of mentor and guide to the inexperienced TPLF. In the field, the two movements had squabbled over military practice, relations with the Soviet Union and their vision of the future. They were brothers, certainly, but a touchy younger brother can easily come to hate a patronizing older sibling.

Long before Badme erupted, trouble had been brewing. There had been other clashes, including exchanges of fire, in disputed border areas–Bure and Bada were two examples–during which the Ethiopians had burned Eritrean villages and ousted administrators. Spotting what looked like a pattern of creeping territorial encroachment, Asmara suspected the TPLF
leadership of trying to redraw the map. Hated in Addis, the Tigrayans–Eritrean officials argued–were bent on carving out a Greater Tigray in preparation for the day Ethiopia's majority ethnic groups ejected this minority from power. They brandished a 1997 map of Tigray which seemed to confirm their fears: funded by a German charity, it drew a meandering, curving frontier in the west that took a large bite out of Eritrean territory, ignoring the sharp diagonal shown on every other commercial map. If Eritrea surrendered its claim to Badme, everyone would want a piece of it, and the land its Fighters had died to win would be nibbled away, kilometre by kilometre. Ethiopia's leadership met rhetoric with rhetoric. ‘Since independence, Eritrea has picked a fight with every one of its neighbours,' Ethiopian officials said, citing a series of disputes with Sudan, Yemen and Djibouti. ‘This is a police state, run by a Fascist president, that only knows how to make war.'

Land was not the only issue–economic relations between the two neighbours had also curdled. Chafing over its unfamiliar landlocked status, Addis complained that its goods were being held up at Assab and it was being ripped off by sharp-elbowed Eritrean businessmen selling Ethiopian coffee on international markets. Asmara, for its part, had watched the establishment of giant factories in the Tigrayan capital of Mekelle with a jaundiced eye, suspecting the TPLF of planning to supplant Eritrea as Ethiopia's supplier of manufactured goods. The final blow had been Eritrea's insistence on introducing its own currency, in the teeth of Ethiopian resistance. When the nakfa was launched in 1997, a furious Addis decreed that future trade would have to be conducted in hard currency, requiring Eritrean merchants to take out letters of credit with Ethiopian banks. The fact went virtually unnoticed abroad in all the excitement, but when the fighting broke out in Badme,
trade along the once-busy border had already petered away to a mere trickle.

Within weeks, deeds were being committed that could never be forgiven. At the beginning of June, Ethiopia dramatically escalated the conflict by sending the air force to bomb and napalm Asmara airport. When Eritrean gunners shot down one of the jets, they discovered the man at its controls was none other than Bezabeh Petros, an Ethiopian pilot who had been captured by the EPLF during the Struggle and sent home. Returned prisoners, according to the conventions of war, must not go back into battle, yet here was Bezabeh, attacking Eritrea once again.
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Unable to believe the news, Asmarinos flocked to the airport to see for themselves. ‘For 30 years we've been bombed, gassed and murdered by the Ethiopians. They only just stopped blooding us. Now the same pilots, the men who flattened Massawa, are back bombing Asmara. And it's our friends who send them. It's just unthinkable,' a government minister told me, trembling with rage.

Eritrea retaliated by sending its jets screaming over Mekelle, where they struck the military airport but also dropped cluster bombs near a school, killing 12 children. Eritrean officials later said the school strike was a mistake, the work of a pilot with no previous experience of live combat. But Isaias did not do the diplomatically astute thing and issue a hand-wringing apology. Expressions of regret are not an Eritrean forte. (‘I didn't spend 30 years at the Front to apologize.') ‘It was a terrible accident,' acknowledged this stiff-backed president. ‘But this is war.' Mourning a massacre of innocents, appalled Ethiopians were left with the triumphant words of the Eritrean air force chief ringing in their ears: ‘They hit us once, I hit them twice.'

It was a revealing comment. The image of a stinging slap kept surfacing in conversations with Eritreans in those tense days. Justifying the Badme operation, a senior Eritrean diplomat
likened his country to a man being pinched repeatedly under a table until he smacks his opponent. ‘Everyone sees the slap in the face, but no one knows about the pinching that preceded it.'
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I spoke to an Eritrean merchant with three children waiting to be called up. ‘Jesus may have said, “If someone slaps your face, turn the other cheek,”' he told me. ‘But here in Eritrea we have our own version. It goes: “Slap my face and I'll hit you back so hard you'll never dream of trying it again.”' It was the rationale of a country brutalized into knee-jerk belligerence, the reasoning of a small, threatened society that had concluded, on the basis of hard experience, that violence was the only message outsiders would ever understand. Israel and Rwanda would have understood such thinking perfectly. It was an early hint that Eritrea was destined by its history to bungle the subtle challenges of peace.

A strange fatalism had descended on Eritrea. Gripped by a sensation of déjà vu, residents noted, with resigned impassivity, the fact that Western embassies started evacuating their nationals from Asmara just before the first raid on the airport, a timing that not only suggested a helpful tip-off from the Ethiopians, but spelt out an all-too-familiar message. The going had got tough and Eritrea's newest buddies–the diplomats, aid workers and businessmen who had rushed to promise partnerships and investment after independence–had scarpered. Just as in the old days, Eritrea was on its own. The realization that the outside world had also labelled Eritrea the aggressor prompted the same shrug of the shoulders: what else was to be expected from the international community that had tolerated the Federation's abrogation, ignored the EPLF's existence and armed the Derg?

There was a feeling of vast sorrow at the thought that, after a brief seven years in which Fighters had exchanged their camouflage for civvies, they were being asked once again to make the
ultimate sacrifice. The Nakfa trenches had been tolerable because Fighters had always believed their offspring would eventually inherit the deep peace that went with unchallenged sovereignty. They had suffered to ensure the next generation would not. Now ageing
tegadelti
dispatched their children to the new front, sick to their stomachs at the sight of the open trucks packed full of tense young faces, trundling west.

But the grief went hand-in-hand with what, to outsiders, seemed a baffling self-confidence. This war would be nasty, but the Eritreans knew they were destined to triumph. The EPLF legend of plucky solitude had them in its seductive grip: how could a people that had bested Haile Selassie and Mengistu, despite the best efforts of the US and Soviet Union, ever lose? Of course, Ethiopia, with its 70 million strong population to draw on for recruits, dwarfed Eritrea, with 4.5 million. But those ratios had held true before and had always proved ultimately irrelevant. It was the EPLF, after all, which had taught the TPLF the secrets of guerrilla warfare and provided the tanks that rolled into Addis. Africa's Sparta knew its own violent origins: no people did warfare better than the Eritreans. ‘We will win,' my old friend John Berakis told me with mournful certainty. Grizzled as he was, he stood ready to take up the gun again if his government needed him. ‘We have always won. What can the Ethiopians teach us about fighting? We had to teach them how to get rid of their dictator.' A government minister told the same story: ‘We could walk through Tigray if we wanted,' he assured me. ‘But we're in a dilemma over what to do–do you finish off your friends?'

It was dangerous, delusional folly, not only because the Eritrean army of 1998 was a far flabbier entity than the lean fighting machine constructed during the Struggle, nor because the task of defending a 1,000-km border differed substantially from holding the mountain fortress that was Nakfa. Nations
that believe they cannot lose slide into war more easily than states that suspect the contest will be close. When victory seems assured, opportunities for negotiation are neglected; the blurred fudges that allow faces to be saved and compromises struck regarded as beneath contempt. ‘I didn't spend 30 years in the bush to compromise.' Below the overweening confidence lay something more ominous in its implications, whose outlines the TPLF had sensed. The EPLF had forced Eritrean sovereignty down the gullet of a wriggling international community by being ready to fight harder, suffer more intensely, hold out longer than its enemy. Modern Eritrea had conjured itself into existence through war; the notion it would have to continue asserting its identity through combat seemed unexceptional. ‘We fought the forgotten war, everyone was against us,' an ex-Fighter told me. ‘Winning that war meant we came to exist as a nation, we came to be known. So now it's a question of not losing our identity. First we will go to war, then we will negotiate from a position of strength.'

A peace plan put forward by the US and Rwanda in June quickly foundered. In Eritrean eyes, Ethiopia's readiness to launch an air campaign made a mockery of the entire process, which was passed to the OAU, most of whose Addis-based delegates shared the Ethiopian view of Eritrea as hot-tempered regional bully. In retrospect, Isaias' defiant speech at the Cairo summit was beginning to look like a very poor investment.

After a lull in which two of Africa's most famine-prone countries indulged in a multimillion-dollar arms shopping spree, pumped tens of thousands of barely-trained recruits into their armies and signed up Ukrainian mercenaries to fly their planes, fighting resumed in earnest in February 1999. Eritrean predictions that the rest of Ethiopia would leave the Tigrayans to fight alone proved disastrously off-key. Tapping into brooding public resentment over the surrender of Ethiopia's
coastline, Meles rallied the nation behind him. His commanders opened a new front on the outskirts of Assab and then sent wave upon wave of soldiers crashing against dug-in Eritrean positions in Badme. With Badme lost, Eritrea's central and eastern fronts under attack and the prospect of recolonization–or at the very least, the instalment of a puppet government in Asmara–looking a distinct possibility, Isaias accepted the OAU's peace terms. Eritrea, the nation that prided itself on needing no one, now looked to the despised UN for its salvation, blue-helmeted peace monitors deploying along the contested border in September 2000.

Engaging over 500,000 troops and displacing 600,000 people, the Badme war won the dubious honour of being not only the worst conflict ever staged between two armies in Africa, but the biggest war in the world at the time, more devastating than the rather better-publicized Kosovo crisis. It created a level of hatred unparalleled even during the Struggle, which found particularly mean-spirited expression. Even under the repressive Derg, Eritreans with no interest in politics and families of mixed origin had been able to earn a living and put down roots in Ethiopia. No longer: Ethiopia loaded more than 70,000 men, women and children–many holding Ethiopian passports–onto buses and dumped them across the border. There was something of a spurned lover's fury behind this mass deportation: ‘You want independence? Here, take it, and get out.' In Eritrea, thousands of Ethiopians were made to feel so unwelcome they left of their own accord.
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The detail that sticks in my mind, evidence of what miserably petty acts wounded pride can push us to perform, emerged during a UN briefing in a compound outside Assab. The UN unit in the area had been trying to arrange the most basic and humane of services: burying those killed during Ethiopia's abortive push on the port. Nearly a year after the war's end, the
bodies still lay baking in the sun. Neither Eritrea nor Ethiopia was ready to lose face by acknowledging the corpses as their own. The UN had been reduced to identifying the dead by their footwear: boots for the Ethiopians, black plastic sandals for the Eritreans.

 

‘Whatever it costs' runs the motto on an Italian bridge erected on the plains outside Massawa. It could have served as the EPLF's maxim, and now the unflinching message had acquired a bitter resonance. It was not so much a question of the numbers of Eritrean dead, although the figure the government eventually announced–19,000 in just two years–seemed almost unbearably high compared to the 65,000 lost during the Armed Struggle's 30 years. Eritrea had lost the sympathy of its foreign friends, aghast at the shattering of their dream of an African Renaissance. Its economic take-off had belly-flopped. As long as Isaias was in control, Addis made clear it would have no dealings–trade or otherwise–with its neighbour. The Ethiopian market, which had accounted for two-thirds of Eritrean output before the war, vanished. With Addis redirecting its exports to Djibouti and Berbera, Assab became a sun-baked ghost town, the cawing of crows reverberating around the once-bustling port. Eritrea's newly-renovated hotels lay empty: tourism is always the first casualty of war. The ever-loyal diaspora had been squeezed dry during the fighting, digging deep into its pockets to pay for new weaponry. Sighing over a botched opportunity, foreign entrepreneurs put their plans for Eritrea on indefinite hold and looked elsewhere. Even if anyone felt ready to shoulder the risk of investing in Eritrea, they would struggle to find the staff–the nation's brightest and best had been dragooned into a 300,000-strong standing army Isaias was in no hurry to demobilize.