Authors: Keneally Thomas
In 1961, a long, punitive thirty-year occupation of the Eritrean capital, Asmara, by the Ethiopian army began. First the emperor and then Mengistu counted the crushing of the Eritrean rebels a national priority, and spent money on the conflict that would have been better devoted to feeding their starving. The rebellion that overthrew the emperor had, at first, created hope of peace in Eritrea, but within the Derg, as we have seen, there was a lethal tussle which the hawks, led by Mengistu, won. The military budget in 1984, just as the famine reached its height, consumed 60 per cent of national income, and Mengistu’s Ethiopian army was 300,000 strong.
After the fall of the emperor and an early taste of an increasingly intransigent Derg, seven Tigrayan university students in Addis Ababa formed the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front.
It was the behaviour of the Ethiopian army in Tigray that gave overall impetus to the rebel movement. In 1975, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front formed an alliance, even though they had different aims – the Eritreans seeking independence, the TPLF fighting for an Ethiopia in which they would be represented and treated with justice and equity. In response to the brutality of cadres and the army, the Oromo Liberation Front was also founded and operated in the south-east in the area of Harar, and then, in the 1980s, in Wollega province in the west as well. To add to the mix, in the east an Afar Liberation Front was founded, in answer to the Derg’s attempts to make the Afar into collective villagers. Wherever these rebel groups operated, Mengistu denied food relief – in any case, the first food priority was the army. Rightly, wrongly or unknowingly, Western aid agencies supplied the Ethiopian army for their battles against insurgents.
By the time the famine of the 1980s began, the Eritrean and the Tigrayan rebels were more than guerrilla groups. They were fully equipped conventional armies, each lacking only an air force. Though helped by some outside parties, by the Saudis, Palestinians and even, at one stage, the Israelis, their main source of
matériel
was weapons and ammunition captured from the Ethiopian army. During the war, I visited the Eritrean rebels in the highlands twice: once to write an essay for the
New York Times
magazine, then to make a documentary for London Weekend Television. I saw a range of weapons, from T-55 tanks to 88mm heavy artillery and the racks of rockets known as Stalin’s Organs, all with Russian instructions attached in Cyrillic script, and all formerly
Mengistu’s arms. The rebels wore camouflage fatigues captured from Ethiopian depots and troops. All these had been paid for by Ethiopia, even at the famine’s peak, and surrendered up in turn by an Ethiopian army that proved itself inadequate for the task Mengistu set it.
Dawit Wolde Giorgis and other authors, such as the political scientist Roy Pateman, give a picture of how badly the Eritreans were treated by the Ethiopian army and thus how its actions swelled the ranks of the rebels. Before being made head of the RRC, Giorgis had served as governor of Eritrea under the Derg from 1979–83. He found himself in command of a country of ruined schools and bridges. The town of Decamere, south of Asmara, had once been called ‘the second Rome’ for its restaurants and coffee shops, but was now a roofless collection of hovels. Eritrea was a countryside empty of young men, since they had all been arrested, driven by government extremism into hiding, or into the ranks of the rebels. According to his account, as people came to trust Giorgis a little in Asmara – a fair imitation of an Italian town itself, with its opera house and wide boulevards – Christian women dressed in long
shemmas
, their hair braided and tattooed Coptic crosses on their foreheads, crowded round him asking where their husbands were and whether they had been shot by the Ethiopian army. Giorgis found that many of the missing people had been imprisoned outside Asmara, at the site of a trade fair held by the emperor in 1967. The Expo ’67 site was not a conventional prison: behind its high-wire walls torture was the accustomed mode, and Eritrean males, shot through the back of the neck in true Lubyanka style for their supposed and sometimes real association with the rebels,
were buried in the grounds among eucalyptus trees. Giorgis says that he broke the news to 270 women that their menfolk were dead, and he heard their traditional ululating cry, something like keening, which they produced in different keys for births, weddings and deaths. He was surprised that many of them thanked him because they were able now to wear their widows’ weeds and devote themselves to mourning.
Giorgis decided to offer an amnesty for rebels to turn themselves in. But Mengistu and the Derg clamped down on such policies. Even in the midst of famine and the hungry years that followed the famine, Mengistu would not tolerate such appeasements and their resultant freeing of funds to deal with the famine. While Giorgis argued that there was no military solution, and that to seek one would be to add to the hunger of both Eritreans and Ethiopians, frontally taking on the rebels remained the Derg’s and Mengistu’s military policy.
In the port of Massawa down on the Red Sea, a harbour very important to Ethiopian interests – without such ports, Ethiopia would become landlocked – Giorgis organised a peace festival for 1982. His enemies in the Derg declared that this was ‘Eritreanism’, a further sop to Eritrean feeling. Mengistu himself flew into Asmara for talks with Giorgis, who claims to have told him the Eritrean conflict required tolerance and patience. The way to defeat the EPLF, said Giorgis, was by way of an economic and social campaign, and by a more peaceable demeanour on the part of the Ethiopian military. Mengistu could not accept anything like this, and before the famine struck Giorgis lost his governorship and came home to take over the RRC.
Major offensives were launched into Tigray and its
borderlands between 1980 and 1985, and there were three even larger offensives in Eritrea to go with the early ones. During the sixth offensive against Tigray, in August 1980, the army destroyed grain stores, enforced the collection of taxes and contributions, and caused 80,000 farmers to abandon their land. The seventh offensive began in February 1983 and was aimed at Shire in western Tigray, an area that normally produced a bounty of grain. More than 100,000 residents and 375,000 migrant labourers, who had arrived to help with the harvest, were forced to flee. Many of these would ultimately arrive in the Korem famine shelter to the east, and the Ibenat shelter towards Gondar. Their appearance put under stress the resources of all agencies then in the field.
When the famine was in its early phase, recruiting from millions of Ethiopian peasants and the forced conscription of boys in high school and the resettlement areas continued apace, as Mengistu and his Russian military advisers prepared for a great assault, and a final solution to the Eritrean situation.
The Red Star campaign of 1985 involved a heavy bill paid to President Brezhnev’s USSR for sophisticated military equipment, all at a time when the relief agencies of the West were supplying Ethiopia with emergency food. Mengistu raised 120,000 Ethiopian soldiers to crush Eritrea. It is hard to watch film of the Addis Ababa parades of these uniformed men and boys: the flash of hard light off their massed bayonets; the thunder of their stamping military boots, so different from the rubber sandals Eritrean infantry men and women wore. For one knows that these Ethiopians, fed by relief agencies working to a greater or lesser extent under a
blind-eye policy, were on their way to a military catastrophe, and that all the equipment in evidence represents an utter waste.
For this supposedly final campaign, it was Mengistu himself who planned the strategy and deployment of his forces. When, on the so-called Nakfa front (named after a highland Eritrean town), the rebels, while giving ground, also inflicted massive casualties, Mengistu assassinated a number of generals.
Nonetheless, there had been early and considerable advances for the Ethiopian army, though some of them were partly based on the pliability of the rebel command and of its leader, Issayas Afeworki. The highlands that ran throughout the middle of Eritrea were the natural habitat for the rebel army, who did not mind retreating to survive. The rebels were well-organised and robust in morale. Every night, fleeing through mountain passes, their fellow Eritreans joined them, telling horror stories about the massacres committed by the advancing Ethiopian troops.
The overwhelming Ethiopian forces pushed them back to Nakfa, which became the town on whose capture Mengistu staked the entire Red Star campaign. Indeed, its fall would have been a crisis for the rebels. By the time Nakfa was fully besieged, there were nearly 200,000 Ethiopian troops surrounding it, with 15-17,000 Eritreans as its garrison. They lived in the ruins of the bombed town, whose jacaranda trees were the only surviving signs of normality along the ruined avenues. Ethiopian bombers were overhead continually, and the damage they did not do was concluded by the artillery. But one of the reasons Nakfa did not fall was that Mengistu,
self-appointed chief of staff, had ordered his front-line troops to halt their advance so that the Third Infantry Division, his former unit, would have the honour of taking the town. The honour would never be achieved. By the time the Third Infantry Division arrived, it was struck by Eritrean forces equipped with captured weapons they understood better how to use than had the Ethiopian conscripts. Soviet military advisers accompanying the Ethiopian army had counselled the methods used by Marshall Zhukov and others in the Red Army on the Eastern Front in 1944 and 1945 – using overwhelming force in frontal attacks. None of this worked against the mobile and superbly trained Eritrean rebel army, who were skilled in flanking movements and in ambush.
In a counter attack, the Eritrean rebels routed the Third Division and killed its commander. They drove the Ethiopian army back a mile, killing 11,000 soldiers, inflicting thousands more casualties and capturing great numbers. While Nakfa was simply another town to the Ethiopian soldiers, it was a symbol of survival to the Eritreans, and now trenchlines, deep bunkers and strong points were built by both armies across the highlands. After three weeks of useless campaigning, Mengistu returned to Addis, which his troops had left – cheering from the backs of trucks, saluting from the turrets of Russian tanks – only a month before. The Eritrean success was the most complete act of defiance yet offered to an Ethiopian government.
No one in Addis or in the Derg mentioned the defeat. A deputy minister of Information named Bealu Girma wrote a
roman à clef
about the campaign, entitled
Oramai
. When published it sold quickly but was soon suppressed, and two
months after its publication Girma disappeared. For Mengistu and the Derg, Nakfa was a defeat that dared not speak its name, as was the famine, now just petering out for the mass of the peasantry and the resettled into mere continuing seasons of chronic hunger.
Two years later, after all that useless expenditure, Nakfa was still in rebel hands. I spent the better part of a week there, sheltering with an Eritrean guide among bureaucrats and soldiers in an eight-foot-deep bunker with an L-shaped entrance. The city remained under siege, but the Eritreans had driven back the Ethiopians to right and left, and both sides were holding trenchlines. The Eritreans also operated in mobile groups beyond the Ethiopian lines, destroying columns of supply trucks and, at one stage, mounting a raid on the Ethiopian warplanes parked at Asmara Airport. Thanks to Mengistu, the rebels were still in possession of their highlands and were defending them with what is known in the arms trade as ‘sophisticated weaponry’, for which Mengistu had paid his not-so-pretty penny.
It was a triumph of bluster and good luck that Mengistu was able to receive so much famine aid while wasting so much substance on an unnecessary war.
In Mengistu’s last days, when the famine had ended and while subsistence farmers were still chronically hungry, he did not cease pursuing his profligate military policy, sending off his Antonov bombers and helicopter gunships to attack cities that had fallen into the hands of the rebels.
Farmers could not plant or harvest for fear of attack from above, and normal daytime trade could not take place. In this way, the dictator hoped to impose a new famine on the rebel areas, and without the operations of the Eritreans’ and Tigrayans’ aid agencies – the Eritrean Relief Association (ERA) and the Relief Society of Tigray (REST) – might have succeeded.
Makale, the capital of Tigray province, now belonging to the rebels, would be twice bombed at massive cost, and Massawa, the port on the Eritrean Red Sea coast, was pulverised by Mengistu’s bombers. In 1993, at the time of the Eritrean referendum of separation from Ethiopia, I saw Eritrean survivors of Massawa’s bombing still living in ruins. In a small ticket office on the Massawa railway station, amidst burnt-out freight trucks and bomb craters, I met a man in his twenties with his young wife and three children. Both the man’s arms had been blown off in one of the bombing raids and he wore a black plastic prosthesis on both. The raids of 1991 also burned 25,000 tonnes of food aid and destroyed the port installations. Near the war’s end, an Eritrean woman cried, ‘Whenever Mengistu realises he is defeated, he kills people with airplanes.’ Mengistu used napalm, phosphorus and cluster bombs against Hawzen in Tigray, killing 1800 people. In his last days, he managed to replace his losses of equipment in a deal with Israel over the black-skinned Falasha Ethiopian Jews, who claimed to be descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and who numbered 15,000. In the Israelis’ concern for the Falashas, and their desire to bring them safely to Israel, they supplied Mengistu with cluster bombs and other equipment, and in return the
Falashas arrived in Israel on relays of planes. Cluster bombs from a number of sources had been commonly used in the war, and would explode in mid air and disperse over a wide area other smaller bombs, from which the ERA trucks hid by day. They had a ferocious impact not only upon the bodies of those hit but upon the minds of survivors. These bombs were among those dropped on the port of Massawa once the rebels had captured it, in a pounding aimed to prevent the port’s use for aid shipments. No great fuss or complaint, on the scale of the Eritreans’ and Tigrayans’ earlier supposed attacks on convoys, was made about this destruction.