“What have we done? What have I done?” Pres. Isaias
Posted: 03 Sep 2022, 10:21
The Despotism of Isaias Afewerki
......
A few weeks after the outbreak of that war, I went to see Isaias with Paulos Tesfagiorgis—who ran the Eritrean Relief Association during the liberation war and had after independence overseen the country’s only human rights organization, the Regional Center for Human Rights and Development, for a brief period until it was shut down. Isaias carefully stage-manages every encounter and likes to meet alone without staff to keep a record. But the Badme War seemed to have shaken him. Arriving at his office, the guards were casual in dress and manner. Security checks were minimal. The receptionist, wearing her fatigues, waved us upstairs. The austere camaraderie of the guerrilla days lingered, but every visitor was monitored.
The presidential office was an unremarkable Italian-era building with the spacious corridors and high ceilings favored by Mediterranean architects from the era before air conditioning. Isaias’s own office was capacious, simply furnished, and dark. The curtains were drawn, and there was just one dim light shining on a coffee table. Isaias himself sat at a large desk, head in hands. He glanced up only to wave us to sit down. He was wearing a khaki safari suit and plastic sandals.
We sat, we waited. Then Isaias stood up, more heavily than his frame seemed to warrant—he is tall but slim—and joined us. His few steps were tired, and he slumped into the low chair, summoned coffee, and sighed. His face is normally inscrutable. At that moment he looked weary and wounded. He seemed at a loss for words. What he said next was the only time anyone can recollect any hint of remorse or self-doubt. If it was a performance for our benefit, it was a convincing one. “What have we done?” he asked. “What have I done?”
But Isaias’s brooding demeanor lasted no more than a minute. As he spoke, he transformed, becoming focused and energized. For more than an hour he surveyed the political and military landscape, the state of world geopolitics, and the failures of the previous seven years. His coffee remained untouched. He shifted his forceful gaze from Paulos to me and back. He was in command of our encounter, and our cups of coffee also went cold.
Perhaps eighty thousand soldiers died on both sides in battles that resembled the western front of World War I.
Eritrea had made the first gains on the battlefield. From Isaias’s encyclopedic monologue, battalion-by-battalion, he seemed utterly confident in victory. He was up against a much bigger country, however—and as Ethiopia cranked up its military mobilization, it would outnumber and outgun its smaller neighbor. Then again, overcoming long military odds was a familiar predicament for Isaias, even a comfortable one. Since leaving his university studies for the field in the sixties, forging the most efficient insurgent army in Africa, out-fighting Ethiopians was just what he did. We couldn’t tell if he believed in his own mystique, but he was certainly compelling: there was no detail on which Paulos or I could challenge him.
As Isaias detailed the deployment of his troops, their logistics and fighting capacities, he also portrayed himself as strategist, diplomat, quartermaster, and military tactician. All the other commanders who had led fighters in the previous war faded from his telling. And indeed, many were pushed away from any active role in the command. Isaias was determined that the victory should be his alone. We left the meeting with a clear sense of Isaias’s focused, manic micromanagement of the war, and a glimpse of the dark void that lay behind it. There was also no vision beyond battlefield victory and the inexorable working out of historical inevitability.
Isaias ran his war and lost it. Perhaps eighty thousand soldiers died on both sides in battles that resembled the western front of World War I. In May 2000, the Ethiopians overran Eritrean trenches, and the rout began. Veteran EPLF commanders hastily took charge of the disarrayed units and organized a last-ditch defense which slowed the Ethiopian advance. Isaias, who had previously scoffed at any suggestion of a ceasefire, desperately called Washington, D.C., to beg for one. Prime Minister Meles then ordered his troops to halt. The Ethiopian army chief of staff, General Tsadkan Gebretensae, rued that order for twenty years. He is now a member of the Tigrayan central command, organizing the defense against the Eritrean attack.
Meles’s calculus was that Isaias would be overthrown or contained, which seemed possible at first. Eritrean veterans knew who had bungled the war and who had salvaged some honor in the defeat. Demands for change grew louder. Paulos organized a group of independent Eritreans to petition for human rights and democracy. They met in Germany, writing a letter to Isaias, reflecting on their country’s predicament and asking for Eritrea to turn towards the path of democracy. (The story is vividly told in Stephany Steggall’s book, The Eritrean Letter Writers.) In November 2000, the “Group of 13” (G-13) met with Isaias in Asmara.
This was not an encounter that Isaias wanted and one for which he appeared astonishingly ill-prepared. Meeting the group alone, he began by accusing them of betraying Eritrea and giving solace to its enemies, then demanded they apologize and retract the letter. They of course refused. One of the G-13, the eminent physician Haile Debas, read out the substance of their letter, watching Isaias’s reactions closely. The president was ill at ease and unable to handle a well-articulated challenge. Leaving the meeting, Haile remarked to Paulos, “We have a bigger problem than I thought. He is mentally unstable.”
A few months later, fifteen senior EPLF leaders—the “G-15”—formulated similar demands. Isaias ignored them. They made the fatal error of waiting. In private conversations (some of them recounted in Dan Connell’s book, Conversations with Eritrean Political Prisoners) they shared their dismay at how Isaias had betrayed their dreams and their remorse over their own failure to confront him over his abuses. For his part, Isaias was biding his time. A week after 9/11, with the world’s attention distracted, he struck with his trademark ruthlessness.
Petros Solomon returned from his morning jog to find security men waiting for him outside his home. His young children were waking up inside. They have not seen or heard from him since. Their mother, Aster Yohannes, was studying in the United States at the time. After negotiating with the president’s office, she flew home. When Aster’s flight landed at Asmara airport, security agents boarded the plane and took her straight to a prison camp. Her children waited at the arrivals holding their flowers until the airport had emptied. She, too, has been neither seen nor heard of since. Their daughter Hanna has patiently campaigned for her parents not to be forgotten. She told her story in PBS Frontline’s Escaping Eritrea last year.
One of the G-15 dissidents recanted. Three were abroad. The other eleven—among the most celebrated leaders of the liberation struggle—disappeared into Isaias’s gulag. Some are feared dead, others incapacitated. No one knows. No charges have been published.
Abiy Ahmed became prime minister of Ethiopia in 2018. A reformer and relative political novice, he offered an olive branch to Isaias. One veteran diplomat compared it to a rabbit asking a cobra for a dinner date. The two men declared an end to the conflict with Eritrea, and Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The details of the deal weren’t revealed to the African Union or the Ethiopian parliament, however. Best practice—and the standard procedure at the African Union—is for a peace agreement to include provisions for democratization, human rights, and demobilization of over-sized armies, all subject to international monitoring and reporting. In this case, everything was chanced on words of goodwill. The Nobel Prize was a triumph for wishful thinking, but the Norwegian committee wasn’t the only one guilty of gullibility. The deal was greased by prince Mohamed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi. The U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Tibor Nagy, anticipated a “warm, cordial” relationship with Eritrea. Isaias got sanctions lifted, a security pact with Ethiopia, and an emergent axis of autocrats that brought Somalia into his sphere of influence.
After Eritrea was brought in from the cold, Isaias didn’t relax his grip. Instead of demobilizing his vast army, he shopped for new weapons. Instead of allowing his people to move freely, he dispatched security agents to Addis Ababa. When Covid-19 hit, he took the opportunity for a rigorous lockdown. He trained special forces for the Somali army, reportedly with the goal that President Mohammed Abdullahi “Farmaajo” could dispense with the inconvenience of an election. The Somalis are skilled at restraining would-be autocrats, however, and managed to hold their election in May, removing their aspiring dictator. Isaias is also fishing in Sudan’s troubled waters.
But for Eritrea’s despot, these are sideshows. The contest with Tigray is the main event.
For Isaias, this portends a final decision by force of arms. He will fight without mercy. If he prevails, his lifelong ambition of becoming master of the Horn of Africa will be within his grasp. Should Isaias fall, a complacent international community will be able to claim no credit for the end of his dictatorship and destabilization. Hopefully, after a lost generation, Eritreans will be able to enjoy their long-awaited liberty.
Read full article https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-despo ... ki-de-waal
Paulos Tesfagiorgis and Alex de Waal
......
A few weeks after the outbreak of that war, I went to see Isaias with Paulos Tesfagiorgis—who ran the Eritrean Relief Association during the liberation war and had after independence overseen the country’s only human rights organization, the Regional Center for Human Rights and Development, for a brief period until it was shut down. Isaias carefully stage-manages every encounter and likes to meet alone without staff to keep a record. But the Badme War seemed to have shaken him. Arriving at his office, the guards were casual in dress and manner. Security checks were minimal. The receptionist, wearing her fatigues, waved us upstairs. The austere camaraderie of the guerrilla days lingered, but every visitor was monitored.
The presidential office was an unremarkable Italian-era building with the spacious corridors and high ceilings favored by Mediterranean architects from the era before air conditioning. Isaias’s own office was capacious, simply furnished, and dark. The curtains were drawn, and there was just one dim light shining on a coffee table. Isaias himself sat at a large desk, head in hands. He glanced up only to wave us to sit down. He was wearing a khaki safari suit and plastic sandals.
We sat, we waited. Then Isaias stood up, more heavily than his frame seemed to warrant—he is tall but slim—and joined us. His few steps were tired, and he slumped into the low chair, summoned coffee, and sighed. His face is normally inscrutable. At that moment he looked weary and wounded. He seemed at a loss for words. What he said next was the only time anyone can recollect any hint of remorse or self-doubt. If it was a performance for our benefit, it was a convincing one. “What have we done?” he asked. “What have I done?”
But Isaias’s brooding demeanor lasted no more than a minute. As he spoke, he transformed, becoming focused and energized. For more than an hour he surveyed the political and military landscape, the state of world geopolitics, and the failures of the previous seven years. His coffee remained untouched. He shifted his forceful gaze from Paulos to me and back. He was in command of our encounter, and our cups of coffee also went cold.
Perhaps eighty thousand soldiers died on both sides in battles that resembled the western front of World War I.
Eritrea had made the first gains on the battlefield. From Isaias’s encyclopedic monologue, battalion-by-battalion, he seemed utterly confident in victory. He was up against a much bigger country, however—and as Ethiopia cranked up its military mobilization, it would outnumber and outgun its smaller neighbor. Then again, overcoming long military odds was a familiar predicament for Isaias, even a comfortable one. Since leaving his university studies for the field in the sixties, forging the most efficient insurgent army in Africa, out-fighting Ethiopians was just what he did. We couldn’t tell if he believed in his own mystique, but he was certainly compelling: there was no detail on which Paulos or I could challenge him.
As Isaias detailed the deployment of his troops, their logistics and fighting capacities, he also portrayed himself as strategist, diplomat, quartermaster, and military tactician. All the other commanders who had led fighters in the previous war faded from his telling. And indeed, many were pushed away from any active role in the command. Isaias was determined that the victory should be his alone. We left the meeting with a clear sense of Isaias’s focused, manic micromanagement of the war, and a glimpse of the dark void that lay behind it. There was also no vision beyond battlefield victory and the inexorable working out of historical inevitability.
Isaias ran his war and lost it. Perhaps eighty thousand soldiers died on both sides in battles that resembled the western front of World War I. In May 2000, the Ethiopians overran Eritrean trenches, and the rout began. Veteran EPLF commanders hastily took charge of the disarrayed units and organized a last-ditch defense which slowed the Ethiopian advance. Isaias, who had previously scoffed at any suggestion of a ceasefire, desperately called Washington, D.C., to beg for one. Prime Minister Meles then ordered his troops to halt. The Ethiopian army chief of staff, General Tsadkan Gebretensae, rued that order for twenty years. He is now a member of the Tigrayan central command, organizing the defense against the Eritrean attack.
Meles’s calculus was that Isaias would be overthrown or contained, which seemed possible at first. Eritrean veterans knew who had bungled the war and who had salvaged some honor in the defeat. Demands for change grew louder. Paulos organized a group of independent Eritreans to petition for human rights and democracy. They met in Germany, writing a letter to Isaias, reflecting on their country’s predicament and asking for Eritrea to turn towards the path of democracy. (The story is vividly told in Stephany Steggall’s book, The Eritrean Letter Writers.) In November 2000, the “Group of 13” (G-13) met with Isaias in Asmara.
This was not an encounter that Isaias wanted and one for which he appeared astonishingly ill-prepared. Meeting the group alone, he began by accusing them of betraying Eritrea and giving solace to its enemies, then demanded they apologize and retract the letter. They of course refused. One of the G-13, the eminent physician Haile Debas, read out the substance of their letter, watching Isaias’s reactions closely. The president was ill at ease and unable to handle a well-articulated challenge. Leaving the meeting, Haile remarked to Paulos, “We have a bigger problem than I thought. He is mentally unstable.”
A few months later, fifteen senior EPLF leaders—the “G-15”—formulated similar demands. Isaias ignored them. They made the fatal error of waiting. In private conversations (some of them recounted in Dan Connell’s book, Conversations with Eritrean Political Prisoners) they shared their dismay at how Isaias had betrayed their dreams and their remorse over their own failure to confront him over his abuses. For his part, Isaias was biding his time. A week after 9/11, with the world’s attention distracted, he struck with his trademark ruthlessness.
Petros Solomon returned from his morning jog to find security men waiting for him outside his home. His young children were waking up inside. They have not seen or heard from him since. Their mother, Aster Yohannes, was studying in the United States at the time. After negotiating with the president’s office, she flew home. When Aster’s flight landed at Asmara airport, security agents boarded the plane and took her straight to a prison camp. Her children waited at the arrivals holding their flowers until the airport had emptied. She, too, has been neither seen nor heard of since. Their daughter Hanna has patiently campaigned for her parents not to be forgotten. She told her story in PBS Frontline’s Escaping Eritrea last year.
One of the G-15 dissidents recanted. Three were abroad. The other eleven—among the most celebrated leaders of the liberation struggle—disappeared into Isaias’s gulag. Some are feared dead, others incapacitated. No one knows. No charges have been published.
Abiy Ahmed became prime minister of Ethiopia in 2018. A reformer and relative political novice, he offered an olive branch to Isaias. One veteran diplomat compared it to a rabbit asking a cobra for a dinner date. The two men declared an end to the conflict with Eritrea, and Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The details of the deal weren’t revealed to the African Union or the Ethiopian parliament, however. Best practice—and the standard procedure at the African Union—is for a peace agreement to include provisions for democratization, human rights, and demobilization of over-sized armies, all subject to international monitoring and reporting. In this case, everything was chanced on words of goodwill. The Nobel Prize was a triumph for wishful thinking, but the Norwegian committee wasn’t the only one guilty of gullibility. The deal was greased by prince Mohamed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi. The U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Tibor Nagy, anticipated a “warm, cordial” relationship with Eritrea. Isaias got sanctions lifted, a security pact with Ethiopia, and an emergent axis of autocrats that brought Somalia into his sphere of influence.
After Eritrea was brought in from the cold, Isaias didn’t relax his grip. Instead of demobilizing his vast army, he shopped for new weapons. Instead of allowing his people to move freely, he dispatched security agents to Addis Ababa. When Covid-19 hit, he took the opportunity for a rigorous lockdown. He trained special forces for the Somali army, reportedly with the goal that President Mohammed Abdullahi “Farmaajo” could dispense with the inconvenience of an election. The Somalis are skilled at restraining would-be autocrats, however, and managed to hold their election in May, removing their aspiring dictator. Isaias is also fishing in Sudan’s troubled waters.
But for Eritrea’s despot, these are sideshows. The contest with Tigray is the main event.
For Isaias, this portends a final decision by force of arms. He will fight without mercy. If he prevails, his lifelong ambition of becoming master of the Horn of Africa will be within his grasp. Should Isaias fall, a complacent international community will be able to claim no credit for the end of his dictatorship and destabilization. Hopefully, after a lost generation, Eritreans will be able to enjoy their long-awaited liberty.
Read full article https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-despo ... ki-de-waal
Paulos Tesfagiorgis and Alex de Waal