Mereja.Forum

[Sadacha Macca]

August 2 2001....

''This conversation took place in Petros Solomon's family home on Martyrs Boulevard in Asmara, Eritrea, across from the Nyala Hotel. I had met Petros in July 1976 on my first visit to the field with EPLF. We had spoken often since then.

I will never forget interviewing Petros on the battlefield in Massawa in December 1977, hours after the Eritrean front failed to capture one of the last major Ethiopian strongholds in the country in what was a key turning point in the war. This marked the first stages of the 14 year Soviet intervention that forced the liberation movement into retreat, then stalemate for nearly a decade. Petros was visibly saddened, taking the loss of Eritrean life under his command personally-and he provided me with figures for EPLF casualties, one of the rare times the Eritreans did so. But he was already sorting through strategic and tactical options for the next confrontation, as was his [and most EPLF commanders] won't.

During the stalemate years I met him in a commander bunker in Nak'Fa, Eritrea and in ''guest houses'' and underground offices in the Sahel. In the early 1990s, after the final victory, I interview him in his capacity as minister of defense [1992-1994], then as Foreign Minister [1994-1997], and later as Minister of Fisheries [1997-2001]. The most recent encounter had come during a visit with my wife, Debbie Hird, in February 1999 in the midst of the 2nd round of fighting with Ethiopia.

Always, Petros was both passionate about his work and candid about his own and the country's strengths and weaknesses. He was a patriot and a pragmatist. He thrived on results and was equally impatient with bureaucracy and other's ego, especially if the blocked effective action for attainable objectives. Yet he also had a quick wit and a sparking, playful sense of humor. It was inevitable he would clash with Isaias Afewerki.

I had met but never formally interviewed Berhane, who joined us for this conversation and whom I met again at his house in Asmara later in the month to talk further, thought that time without a tape recorder.

An early member of both the EPLF and the People's Party, Berhane had been inducted into the party Central Committee in 1976 and remained part of the organization's inner core throughout the rest of its existence.

As I loaded my first cassette tape, we chatted about the fruitless efforts of security officials, acting on direct presidential orders, to uncover corruption in the Ministry of Fisheries in Massawa in an attempt to discredit Petros and of the chaotic and opaque character of the government's and the PFDJ's spending practices--conditions which Petros had long criticized.

At this point, I turned on the machine and let the conversation drift a bit before turning to the subject of the People's Party and its role in the liberation struggle''...

Petros Solomon: There is a lot of spending now. If this is really a corruption inspection, then everything has to be inspected. Somebody should be responsible for all the spending in this country, and I am quite sure it is not the parliament. The Parliament has never discussed these issues. All the government should be scrutinized for what has been going on: How are things administered? How is money collected? How is money disbursed?

Connell: There is no published national budget. Is that correct? There hasn't been one since the formation of the government?

Petros: No. A budget that is discussed and ratified by the Parliament or the Cabinet? I think there have been one or two exercises in the Cabinet that were not fully implemented. And most of the time it didn't work, because they have two sections in the budget--the Recurring Budget and the Capital Budget.

The Recurring Budget is the salaries and the expendables. That's where people concentrate. The Capital Budget has been discussed many times, but it doesn't work, it doesn't function.
It's not a rational way of decision making that we have, with ministries studying strategies, presenting them to Parliament, and then the government informing Parliament about the resources, materials, treasury, and all that, and then allowing the budget-or allowing money-to be spent in the most rational way for the country of Eritrea.
The discussion has been there one or two times, I think, but with no results.

Connell: But some of the international donors are starting to complain now about the lack of transparency on these financial issues.

Petros: As far as I know, there has never been a budget discussion in the Parliament. Maybe on some issues only.

[Conversations with Eritrean Political Prisoners, pages 74-78]

''Petros Solomon, one of the former EPLF leaders who fell out with the president, predicted what awaited them in a way that best resonates with how the daily practices of struggle during the liberation movement left their marks on Eritrean politics after independence: The President, he said, ''will try to freeze us as members of the Central Committee [of the PFDJ: People's Front for Democracy and Justice].... and then court-marshal us according to the traditions and ways of doing things of the party.''