I Didn't Do It for You (42 page)

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

Personal opinions have been replaced by jokes, not something I ever associated with Eritrea.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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Things were better under the Italians.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It would be refreshing to think officials in the State Department, the Kremlin, Whitehall or the UN occasionally remember the parable that is the Eritrean story, but it would be illusory. As with so many former colonies, Eritrea highlights the one-sided nature of memory in an unequal partnership. She is like a girlfriend who remembers every line on the face of the man who abandoned her, nursing each hurtful word of their raging arguments, honing her responses. When, years later, the two meet again, he delivers his most wounding insult yet. While the abuse has scarred her forever, he can barely recall the relationship. Eritrea is now being dealt the final insult: she is being forgotten by the powers that once used her.

The country I once liked to think of as Shangri La has become an unhappy land, but it is also a far more interesting, nuanced place. Once, talking to Eritreans, I had the impression of speaking to a many-headed monster, each of whose mouths chanted the same refrain. Now the Hydra's heads often speak in whispers, but they wear different expressions and none of the opinions they voice are the same. Some believe the government is wrong, but now is not the time to press the point. Some regard Isaias as misunderstood national saviour, some loathe him as the Great Betrayer. Eritreans are becoming rounded individuals, their community a more complex, conflicted society. That is no bad thing.

Writing this book, I used to marvel over the chasm between the stark experiences of the Eritreans I had come to know and the foreigners–often direct contemporaries–who impacted so heavily on their lives. Which life, given the choice, would I pick? A member of the Gross Guys–binge-drinking to obliterate the boredom, uneasily aware that in shirking Vietnam I had balked my generation's ultimate test, certain of tranquil retirement in middle America? Or a Fighter in my too-short shorts, listening to a piano recital under a thorn tree,
aware the odds were against me making it through the war? ‘We were unique,' Zazz the GI once surprised me by boasting, in a mood of bleary self-congratulation. The adjective seemed rather better applied to the earnest ‘shifties' Kagnew's commanders warned their boys against. Give me the Sahel any day, because the choice between blandness and passion seems no choice at all.

Yet Eritrea's story highlights the dangers inherent in that intoxicating, beguiling thing: a sense of purpose. ‘For years we felt superior, not just because we won the war but because we had idealism, we had a grand vision,' says Paulos. ‘Look at the ex-Fighters. It is only now that they are coming down to the ground and becoming ordinary human beings again.' The last few, chastening years have brought Eritreans earthwards with a vengeance, and even those in government recognize an element of hubris. ‘It's good to be normal,' ruefully acknowledges a government minister in Asmara. ‘We have gone from thinking we were unique, a people chosen by God like the Israelis, to realizing we too have our faults, we are not so special after all. It's called growing up.' Humility seems unlikely, but Eritreans no longer take it for granted they are a breed apart, no longer assume they know the answers to Africa's problems. As their present becomes murkier, they are losing the black-and-white certainties of the past.

As Isaias accurately predicted, today's Eritrea is no society of angels. The image of a Utopia built up in Fighters' minds has evaporated like the morning mist. Yet I can't write it off as just another numbing Third World disappointment.

If the curse of so many African states has been low expectations, passed from one generation to another like a genetic disease, a generation of Eritreans stands immune. The EPLF spent decades teaching its followers that every man and woman, Moslem and Christian, peasant and urban dweller, was
equally valuable. It set up popularly-elected assemblies in the villages, it championed women's organizations, it relentlessly trumpeted the merits of grassroots democracy. That work cannot now be easily undone. Aspirations were created, and the fact that they have been frustrated will not pass unnoticed. The notion of accountability has seeped into a people's psychology, as impossible to uproot as the dream of shady groves and green pastures ex-Fighters regard as the
real
Eritrea. ‘We had this idea of equality at the Front, and now it is fixed forever in our minds,' a friend ruminated. Amongst the older generation inside Eritrea, the unarticulated refrain–‘I didn't spend 15/20/30 years at the Front for
this
'–spools through daily life like the subtitles showing under films at Asmara's Cinema Roma. As for the diaspora, its Western-educated, foreign-passport-holding youngsters are coolly appraising, their expectations serving notice to a leadership that has lost its way. ‘Do you remember what John Kennedy said? “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.” Well, I feel precisely the opposite,' a young Eritrean told me on a flight to Asmara. He was returning to teach at secondary school, but his degree from a German business college meant there was no shortage of tempting alternatives if the experience proved frustrating. ‘Of course I'm a patriot. Of course I want to do my bit. But not at any price. This has to be a two-way relationship.'

The bumptiousness of such youngsters, like the unforgiving self-examination of older men like Paulos, is a great source of hope. The stroppier they get, the better. Surveying Eritrea's future, I feel nothing like the bleak despair that descends when I try to guess whether Congo will survive as a nation-state, or Sierra Leone's democracy will last the year. Eritreans have already achieved too much, against too many odds, for the country to fail.

Whenever pessimism threatens to set in, I'm always brought up short by the memory of a group of overall-wearing 80-and 90-year-olds, working happily in an abandoned hangar on the edge of town.

I came across them on my first visit to Eritrea, when I drove out to Asmara's grassed-over railway station at the suggestion of the transport minister of the day. With only one winding road linking the capital to Massawa, the government, he said, wanted to rebuild the old Italian railway. It had put the job out to tender, but the estimates offered by Western construction companies were more than an administration allergic to debt could swallow. Eritreans would do it themselves, the government decided. With hard work and application–the qualities on which the EPLF had always depended–the task could be completed on a shoe-string budget. Turn-of-the-century charts showing where the track once ran were dusted off, cannibalized sleepers collected into neat piles. The labourers who had worked as apprentices under the Italians were summoned out of retirement and told to train a new generation of railwaymen. ‘It's good to be working again,' one told me. ‘When you retire, both mentally and physically, things begin to slip.'

It became something of a showcase project, a picturesque expression of a national fixation with self-reliance. Visiting camera crews adored it. Their lenses lingered over the grizzled labourers as they lovingly oiled down the chuffing black Ansaldo and Breda steam engines, curved rails painstakingly by hand and fired up the disused Italian foundries. Trainspotters around the world, raving over ‘the steam story of the 1990s', tracked every development on their websites.