IN ERITREA
By Thomas Keneally
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/27/maga ... itrea.html
Sept. 27, 1987
Credit...The New York Times Archives
ON THE WALL OF EVERY mud-brick clinic in Eritrea I saw the same poster. It shows two children, one suffering from starvation, the other from the protein-deficiency syndrome called kwashiorkor, which creates the characteristic pot-bellied look of the victim of famine. The writing on this ubiquitous poster was usually in Tigrinya or Tigre, the major languages of Eritrea, a land situated along the Red Sea coast of what is now Ethiopia. Throughout Eritrea there is a strong, even a biblical sense of famine waiting like a bandit in the next valley, or around the corner in the next erratic rainy season.
Whenever famine strikes in the Horn of Africa, we too see malnutrition and kwashiorkor, on our television screens. We saw such images during the great famine of 1984-85, and it now seems that, because of a combination of drought and locust plague in the Horn, we may see them again during the coming year. The pictures, and often the words that accompany them, give the impression that Africa is a pit of helplessness.
But it is not only drought that causes famine; war does as well. For 25 years the Eritreans have been fighting to wrest their independence from the Ethiopians; the Ethiopians have been fighting to crush the Eritrean separatist movement. More recently, the Russians have intruded in the Horn and supported the Marxist Ethiopian government's attempts to defeat the Eritreans.
When it comes to famine in the Horn of Africa, is the hot breath of conflict more crucial than the hot breath of the Sahara? In Eritrea, journalists and aid workers advised me, one sees all the factors at work - tortuous regional politics, the interference of a superpower, a long-fought war.
YOU MUST ENTER ''FREE'' ERITREA FROM the north, by way of the Sudan, a nation that combines political confusion with religious and factional passion (map, page 46). The day I was to leave Khartoum for Eritrea proceeded like a chapter from a Graham Greene novel.
At the breakfast table in the Hotel Acropole, where aid workers and Western journalists stay, there were rumors that the army would overthrow the ineffective Sudanese government of Sadiq el-Mahdi by nightfall. There were other rumors that the so-called September laws - the strict enforcement of the Shariah, the Islamic legal code -would be suspended. Maybe there would be legal booze at sunset - perhaps a great party at the old Sudan Club, a little bit of England built near the Nile in Lord Kitchener's day and now the haunt of aid workers attenuated by malaria.
That same morning, a report came to the capital - it turned out to be true - of the slaughter of more than a thousand Dinka tribesmen in the southern Sudanese city of Daien by their rivals, the Rizayquat Arabs. My flight to Port Sudan, not far from the Eritrean border, was canceled for any and all of these reasons, but without explanation.
When I finally did get to Port Sudan and encountered the beginnings of the Eritrean organization, the idea of the embattled and helpless Africans evaporated.
The Eritreans had created their own aid-distribution system, the Eritrean Relief Association. It worked by night - thus avoiding the Ethiopian bombing - to get food and other materials to Eritreans on both sides of the front line, a 200-mile-long fortified trench that separates Eritrean-controlled territory from that of Ethiopia. The association's achievement was the more notable since it was managed by officials living and working in bunkers and dry-stone shanties under the bomb sites of the Ethiopian Air Force's MIG bombers.
In the spectacularly crumbling port of Suakin, south of Port Sudan, in a great depot of clapboard and corrugated iron, Eritreans service a fleet of Fiat and Mercedes trucks that will carry supplies across the border. While I waited at a clinic the Eritreans run in the ruins of Suakin, I talked with a young Eritrean amputee injured by an American mine left over from the days of the United States support of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, who was overthrown in 1974. During our conversation the man polished black leather boots stuck onto prosthetic limbs that belonged to his friends in the clinic.
When the truck arrived, we approached Eritrea down the Red Sea coast, passing through clapboard villages innocent of a blade of grass and amid the tents of nomads wearing brilliantly colored jackets and carrying crusader swords.
In the back of our truck lay a young soldier of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (E.P.L.F.), the main opposition force. He was a paraplegic and had also developed some kidney problems. Now he was being trucked back in, over the long road, to the Eritrean base hospital in the mountains, at Orotta. He was frequently ill from the violent motion of the truck. But no matter what sensations the harsh road produced in that half of his body that had feeling, he shamed me in my sweaty discomfort in the crowded front seat by barely speaking above a murmur.
We reached Orotta just at dawn, as the day's first Ethiopian Antonov came over the mountains on a reconnaissance mission.
AN ITALIAN COLONY FROM 1890, Eritrea was captured by the British in 1941 and held until 1952, when the United Nations federated Eritrea into the Ethiopia of Haile Selassie, the squat ''Lion of Judah,'' something of a hero in the West but a tyrant at home.
In 1962, the Emperor forcibly absorbed Eritrea, canceling the Federation. Amharic, the imperial language, was imposed. There were massacres of nomads and lowland Moslems. In the Emperor's hands, famine became a weapon: Food aid was denied to areas where resistance to the central government was strong.
In 1974 a military junta, the Dergue, led by an army officer named Mengistu Haile Mariam, overthrew Selassie and established a Marxist regime. Like the Emperor it had deposed, the new government chose to base its prestige on the crushing of Eritrea. It argued, as had the Emperor, that an independent Eritrea would mean a landlocked Ethiopia.
By 1977, however, the Eritreans had all but driven the Ethiopian soldiers out, while capturing mountains of Ethiopian weaponry. Then the Russians intervened; the Soviet Navy shelled Eritrean positions around the Red Sea port of Massawa. Soviet tanks, weapons and planes were thrown into the battle. The East Germans arrived to organize the Ethiopian security forces. More than 10,000 Cubans were committed to the fight, along with South Yemeni artillerymen and tank drivers.
The Eritreans retreated to their northern bases and gave up their cities, in order (they say) to save them from destruction. In 1978, the Eritreans constructed a fortified trench line; since then the Ethiopians have launched eight major offensives, without succeeding in conclusively penetrating it. Meantime, the focus of the Eritrean struggle has become the E.P.L.F. - at first sight just another of those confusing sets of initials for which Africans struggle and die in the dark, and which bemuse the Western observer.
BY DAYLIGHT, OROTTA, like all of Eritrea's regional centers, resembles a long, steep, deserted valley in remote Australia or Arizona. Dwellings and offices are generally dry-stone bunkers dug into the cliffside, their roofs and entrances camouflaged from the air by logs, earth or the ubiquitous thorn trees. From the sun-dazzled hillsides you get no clue that thousands of Eritreans live and work directly below you. Indeed, you become used to your guide pointing to a mound beneath a thorn tree and saying something like, '
My first nights in Orotta I shared meals of pasta and goat meat with a middle-aged Eritrean called Saleh, a former provincial governor who had come over to the Eritrean side during the late 1970's. Saleh was waiting for his son to return on leave. The son was with the Eritrean mobile strike forces operating beyond the front, the trench line that runs from about 100 to several hundred miles, by land, south of Orotta.Under there is the economic planning commission.'
At dusk each day Saleh would borrow a prayer mat - a fancy affair with a compass inset in its fringe -from the E.P.L.F. information department and, setting it on the stony ground, make calm obeisances to Mecca.
My guide for the month I was to be in Eritrea was a lean veteran called Fessaha. When we bathed by torchlight in streams, I saw the wounds Fessaha had incurred as an E.P.L.F. soldier: a shrapnel splotch on the neck, the healed pit of a bullet wound in the hollow of the shoulder, the blue-white map of an injury to his side.
For many nights Fessaha was the one who would deliver me, down under the low eaves where the staff's supply of AK-47 automatic rifles rested, through the curtains, into the sophisticated interior of this or that E.P.L.F. bunker-department. You might find yourself in the photo-reproduction section of the information department, or in the cave where the twice-weekly newspaper, Events, is produced. Or perhaps it was the exercise-book department (the covers bear a photo reproduction of a smiling nomad girl and a slogan: ''Let's fight illiteracy!''). Amputees, olive twigs clenched in their mouths, leaned on their crutches and worked the complicated Italian stapling machine.
There's a cinema section too, run by a turbaned Frenchman called Hillal. His original name is Christian Sabatier, and he's been in Eritrea since 1976, making a film archive of the Eritrean war and society. Hillal's video studio and editing rooms, cut into cliffsides, employ 50 people. Hillal warned me that it's nearly impossible to photograph or film the Eritrean leaders. Among other reasons, said Hillal, they fear igniting ancient religious differences between Eritrean Christians, animists and Moslems, any of whom might feel their religious group is underrepresented in the leadership. The leaders seem too engrossed by the war to expend much thought on international public relations; though they are a nationalist group fighting a So-viet-backed Marxist regime, they themselves insist on employing the standard Marxist rhetoric, which does not seem to reflect the democratic diversity of the movement and does little to help them among Western governments.
What drew Hillal to become the E.P.L.F.'s chronicler? For one thing, he said, he was attracted by what he called ''the mind set'' of the Eritrean fighter - trench warfare and old-fashioned schooling are equal preoccupations. Hillal was also attracted by the focused, unfactional, idealistic nature of the Eritrean movement. It is the closest he has come in a lifetime of filming to that pure entity he described as
NOT FAR FROM HILLAL'S studio is Orotta's extraordinary hospital, a vast series of bunkers and caves that extend almost five miles down a harsh valley. The hospital is arranged according to the standard Western administrative pattern, with bunkers for neurology, orthopedics, cardiovascular, maternity and other departments.La Revolution, la femme particuliere.
On litters in the corridor of one of the three operating theaters - which have been fashioned from huge sea containers dug into a hillside and connected by doors - lay three postoperative E.P.L.F. soldiers, along with a boy of 8 with head injuries from shrapnel. In the dimly lit cardiovascular ward, its long roof held aloft by eucalyptus-log props, I met a slightly built 20-year-old girl named Gimja, who had been wounded two weeks before while assaulting an Ethiopian stronghold near Asmara, beyond the front. The surgeon lifted Gimja's shift and showed us the long dressing over her stomach.
Outside, under a full moon, a boy of about 20, his femur shattered by a machine-gun round, arrived on a stretcher borne by four soldiers. The wounded from beyond the front are brought out of shock in mobile operating theaters and then carried by litter or camel to a point where ambulances wait to take them slowly north. The journey can take three or more nights. The wounded boy, set on the ground, insisted on engaging in all the Eritrean politenesses, solemnly shaking hands with the four stretcher-bearers and with me as I passed.
In a bunker farther up the valley, Eritreans manned old pill presses from Manchester, England, producing antimalarial pills, antibiotics, iron tablets. Another machine - from Bologna, donated by an Italian aid organization - manufactures 40,000 capsules a night. (The hospital's equipment, like much of the materiel used by the Eritreans, is generally either bought by the Eritrean Relief Association or donated by friendly aid agencies in Western Europe, Canada, the United States and Australia.) You can see the canisters of E.P.L.F. drugs on the shelves of every mud-brick or stone clinic you visit.
FESSAHA AND I TRAVELED either well into the night, our truck guided by some landmark the driver alone carried in his head; or else before dawn, when the polestar was so bright that some of the passengers we picked up - soldiers, village militia, clerks, mechanics - would wonder aloud if it wasn't a bomber.
Arriving at a village, I would stagger along dried stream beds to find the local school. It seemed that the whole of Eritrea was dedicated to learning math, science, English, Tigrinya, Tigre or Arabic from textbooks printed at Orotta. In Indalal, Inkema, Nakfa, Erota, Adashi, Hishkub - desperate little highland towns, flayed by bombing and famine - children with sticklike limbs sat on boulders in brush shelters and mud-brick bunkers reciting from their English grammars. These children, who had barely pulled through the famine of '85, who crouched in holes as the MIG's went over, were being taught as if for a future of boulevards and computers. Nomadic girls, brilliantly shawled, a thin bangle through their nostrils, regarded me with a shy tranquillity over the open pages of their exercise books. Like many of their countrymen, they seemed to have achieved a delicate balance of health, which could be easily upset by the next drought or Ethiopian offensive.
In the adult classes, the teacher wore fatigues and a shirt while the women students sat swathed in brilliant cloth, green and gold, blue and orange, tribal markings on their cheeks, the thick bangle through their right nostrils indicating marriage. Inevitably, the children were further ahead in Eritrea's no-nonsense curricula than the parents.
ONE AFTERNOON, IN A markedly desolate little town where dust moved in clouds like sea mist, I talked to two forthright village women, traditionally dressed, bangled and marked. The more coy of the two was a member of the elected village assembly. Nearly 10 years ago both of them, with their husbands and children, had retreated with the E.P.L.F. from the region around the southern town of Afabet.
As we left, I turned to a young woman official who was traveling with us. Was it likely that these two had suffered in childhood some form of female circumcision, the traditional genital mutilation women are widely forced to bear in Egypt, the Sudan and other parts of Africa?
the official said.Oh, yes,
Almost certainly. You can't ban it by edict. That drives it underground.
And the daughters of those two women?
The official was barely more than 30, assigned to the E.P.L.F.'s office in Milan. Earlier, she had remarked that by her age most nomad women had died in childbirth, or of complications brought on by anemia, malaria or starvation.I think you can be equally certain those two wouldn't let their daughters be cut.
She would travel with us for five days, sleeping on hard clay platforms, a cloak over her for warmth. Our party would be roused by Fessaha at odd times of night, the hour dictated by how long it would take us to get to our next stop. The woman would always be ready to depart instantly and would carry my backpack out to the truck, despite my protests. She wore her turban stylishly; even the plastic sandals the E.P.L.F. turn out in some factory in a valley looked on her like high Italian fashion.
Despite her genial company, I began to think of her as the sort of handsome apparatchik who snaps up the jobs on the fringe of the fighting rather than at its center.
One afternoon we met a man who was growing greens in a small irrigated garden about seven miles from the front line. Many such modest gardens, barely worth a bomb, proliferate in the area. The gardener said that when the Ethiopians moved into his native village down south, they'd made everyone speak Amharic. He claimed that those who resisted had had fingers and other oddments of their limbs cut off as punishment. Walking away from him, I remarked to the woman from Milan that I thought his account sounded like something he'd heard rather than seen. Dismemberment over a matter of language seemed a little fantastical to me.
Perhaps it was so, she said. But she claimed to have seen fierce things in her native city, the Eritrean capital of Asmara. The Ethiopian security forces, nicknamed Afan -
- have a well-established tradition of torture and have now been trained in the higher arts of interrogation by the East Germans. Three 20-year-old school friends of hers, she claimed, who'd been working on a secret press in Asmara, were shot and their bodies thrown down on the main boulevard. It was three days before their parents were allowed to retrieve them.He Who Abducts and Kills