With a secure base area and no enemy except the Dergue to worry about, the EPLF set about strengthening itself in every way. A network of trenches and underground corridors, several hundred miles long, was constructed. Thousands of educated Eritreans who had been in exile returned to work with the EPLF. These new recruits, brought in by way of Sudan, staffed the hospital and ran the workshops that were being set up in the Orotta area. Many of the recruits were from middle-class Christian families that lived around Asmara, and their presence encouraged a drift in EPLF ideology away from its initial Marxist bearings.
While the EPLF dug in, the Soviets helped build up the Ethiopian Army, from 65,000 men to nearly 300,000. More than 2,000 Soviet advisers arrived. In return, the Dergue made the Dahlak Archipelago, off Eritrea’s Red Sea coast, available to the Soviet Navy, and Soviet planes began making long-range reconnaissance flights over the Indian Ocean from the Asmara air base, which the Americans had deserted. The enormous military-assistance program allowed the Ethiopian government to launch the largest offensive ever against the Eritrean guerrillas, in February of 1982. Called Operation Red Star, it involved fifteen divisions whose troop strength was estimated at over 100,000.
This time the Ethiopians got nowhere. The EPLF held all its major positions, and reportedly as many as 40,000 Ethiopian soldiers were killed or wounded, although no one will ever know the toll for sure. Another offensive of the same magnitude was launched in 1983, but the results were similarly disastrous. At the time, the American public was preoccupied with fighting in Lebanon and Central America, but blood was flowing in larger quantities in the Horn of Africa, in a war that featured a guerrilla resistance, backed by virtually no one, that was capable of withstanding a large Soviet-equipped army.
The transformation of the Soviet Union from ally to oppressor, the continued indifference of the West, and the ambivalence of the Arabs and the rest of the Third World strengthened the EPLF’s desire for self-reliance. With an almost maniacal singlemindedness the Eritreans repaired all captured equipment or converted it to other uses. Comparisons between the EPLF and other insurgent movements in Africa and the Middle East elicit only contempt from the Eritreans. When I once asked an EPLF official about similarities between the Eritrean and Palestinian situations, he replied scornfully, “Has the PLO ever captured an Israeli tank?”
Africa’s Israelis?
The EPLF front line at Nakfa, sixty miles south of Orotta as the crow flies, is in a bleak, deforested region brutally scarred by landslides. Nakfa has been the scene of heavy fighting many times, leaving the town, which once had a population of almost 7,000, a patchwork of ruins above which rises a single minaret—a kind of modern-day African Pompeii. The trenches, a few miles farther south, are dug into a twisting spur of Denden Mountain. Soviet T-55 tanks and various kinds of artillery lie hidden in man-made recesses. Across a defile, on a similar ridge, are the Ethiopian lines. In some places the two armies are less than a hundred yards apart and a pair of low-powered binoculars is all that is necessary to see the low-powered binoculars is all that is necessary to see the faces of Dergue soldiers peering through the slits of their fortifications. The defile is a no-man’s-land of minefields, defoliated olive trees, and, when I was there, numerous decomposing bodies of Ethiopian soldiers.
In the warren of slate passageways, noisy with field mice, on Denden Mountain, war is the only reality. Few existences can be more rugged. Extremes of heat and cold are the norm. Soap is nonexistent. The crucible of toil and suffering has broken down sexual and religious barriers. In a society where clitorectomy and infibulation used to be widespread, the exigencies of war have liberated many women; women account for almost a third of all EPLF soldiers. But unlike other armies that include large numbers of women, such as Israel’s, the EPLF deploys women in front-line combat units, where they drive tanks and fire artillery. Reportedly, some 30 percent of the Eritrean wounded are women. There is an almost neuter quality to female Eritrean guerrillas. After years of living in the field exactly like the men, they have come to resemble them physically. Their hair is short, their hands and feet callused, their legs sinewy. Though men and women sleep side-by-side in the cramped front-line quarters, sex is said to be rare and pregnancies are unusual. The atmosphere of pent-up sexual tension, so prevalent in almost every Middle Eastern country is notably absent.
Elsewhere in the world the breaking down of traditional social barriers has often led to a measure of tyranny over the individual. But in Eritrea it has had the opposite effect. There exists a degree of concern for the individual that is rare in Third World armies. Every platoon is equipped with basic medical supplies. Makeshift operating rooms are set up in the field. One soldier I met, whose eardrums had been damaged in a bomb blast, had been provided with a hearing aid, something I found astonishing, considering that there isn’t even tea in the trenches. (Water is usually the only drink, aside from an occasional intelligence sources say that not even satellite photographs enable them to estimate EPLF battle losses, because the guerrillas get their dead and wounded off the field so quickly.
As the Israelis have demonstrated, bravery often derives from self-assurance: the knowledge that in the event of trouble your superiors will go to the limit to save you. Secure in that knowledge, Eritreans have more than once proved their willingness to take well-calculated risks—for example, by attacking the enemy air base at Asmara, in 1986, and destroying or damaging some forty MiGs and other planes. In contrast, it is hard to imagine an army with worse morale than the Dergue’s. Many of its soldiers are ethnically Oromos, who come from the southern lowlands of Ethiopia. They have been forcibly conscripted and given minimal training before being dispatched to the mountainous north of the country to fight the Eritreans, a people the Oromos have no interest in fighting. Even the Amharas serving in Mengistu’s army tend to be unenthusiastic.
A comparison of the EPLF and the Israelis is by no means far-fetched. It goes to the heart of what makes the Eritrean guerrilla movement unique in the Third World—and, by extension, explains why the Eritrean Relief Association (ERA), the civilian arm of the EPLF, is so much more effective than any other African relief group. Israel has long been noted for boldness in looking after the welfare of its citizens and even, in some cases, of Jews outside the country. Its concern was powerfully demonstrated by the secret rescue of some 10,000 black Ethiopian Jews from the provinces of Gondar and Tigre, in 1984 and 1985. At the same time and practically right next door, the EPLF was delivering more than 100,000 of its people to emergency feeding centers on the Sudanese border, providing them with whatever water and food it could muster at transit stations set up along the way. Of the approximately eight million peasants threatened with starvation by the Ethiopian famine, about two million—fully a quarter of the total—were in EPLF-controlled areas. Yet although in late 1984 and early 1985 the ERA received, according to some estimates, less than five percent of all international aid coming into Ethiopia, the efficiency of the ERA, coupled with support from Eritrean expatriates in the West and Saudi Arabia, held the number of deaths in Eritrea down to the tens of thousands. In Dergue-held areas, it is believed, as many as a million people died. Jack Shepherd, a food-aid specialist, noted in the Africanist journal Issue that the Eritrean guerrillas have “reversed the classical guerrilla warfare pattern.” Instead of peasants feeding an army, he observed, the guerrillas are feeding the peasants.
The ERA clinic in Port Sudan, across the Sudanese border, provides another illustration of the EPLF’s concern for those in its care. It was opened in May of 1979, in a cement building near the airport. There is not a tree in sight. The goats and stray dogs in the area escape the blazing sunlight by hiding under the rusted carcass of a school bus. Except for making the building available—at a monthly rent—the Sudanese authorities provide no help of any kind. Until the ERA constructed a small dormitory structure for foreign relief workers, visitors had to stay at the clinic itself, as I did. It was an unpleasant stay. The rooms swarmed with flies by day and mosquitoes by night. In adjacent beds, on soiled mattresses, were amputees and paraplegics, children among them—all told, close to a hundred civilian victims of the war. The clinic functions as both a school and a hospital. The wheelchairs and artificial limbs are made and repaired by the patients themselves. The clinic is part of an ERA health-care network that includes nine regional hospitals and an extension service whose six hundred paramedics travel to villages and nomadic encampments throughout the EPLF zone. “I know of no other system that, given the same conditions and resources available, operates as efficiently,” says Dr. Sam Richard Toussie, a Columbia University epidemiologist and rural-health-care specialist, who has worked in insurgent areas of Africa, Asia, and Central America. The biggest success has come in the realm of infant care. Since 1982 the number of nomads within the EPLF zone giving birth in hospitals has risen by about 50 percent.
Still, enormous suffering remains. More than half of all Eritrean children today are malnourished (as compared with 80 percent in mid-1985), and the population suffers from all the usual tropical diseases. And, of course, there is the fact of constant war.
Eritrea and the United States
In a world of imperfect choices, in which the United States often finds itself supporting regimes and resistance movements of limited caliber, the Eritrean guerrillas would appear to be useful proxies in a low-intensity war to exert pressure on the Marxist regime in Addis Ababa. Liberals on Capitol Hill would have relatively few complaints about a group whose exemplary treatment of the at least 8,000 Ethiopian prisoners of war under its charge has been witnessed by international relief officials and whose competence in famine relief is unquestionable. The only significant blots on the EPLF’s record are the recent attacks on famine-relief convoys (which the rebels claimed were also carrying weapons and supplies for the Ethiopian army) in heavily contested areas of Eritrea. Almost every day since the late 1970s MiGs and other Soviet-made planes have taken off from Ethiopian government airfields and bombed anything that moved in EPLF territory, effectively preventing EPLF famine-relief convoys from traveling there during daylight hours. After a decade of avoiding retaliation against the bombing and against the frustration of its famine-relief efforts—restraint that got the EPLF absolutely no Western recognition in return—the guerrilla organization changed its policy, and has been rightly condemned for doing so. Still, compared with the more muddled situation in a country like Nicaragua or Angola, the situation in the Horn of Africa offers something approaching a clear-cut choice between good and bad. The World Human Rights Guide, published by The Economist in 1986, gives the Eritreans’ enemy, Ethiopia, the lowest rating of any country in the world. Human-rights investigations by the State Department and Amnesty International have come to similar conclusions. Quite apart from the usual mayhem—unlawful detention, torture, the murder of children—the Dergue has been guilty of collectivizing millions of Oromos against their will and, as noted, of deliberately denying food to large segments of Ethiopia’s population. Governments don’t get much worse than the one in Addis Ababa.
During the 1984-1985 famine the United States quietly provided food to Eritrea from camps on the Sudanese border. Without this unofficial cross-border effort, in indirect concert with the ERA, little of the world’s famine-relief assistance, which was funneled mainly through Ethiopia, would have reached the northern province. Such a “backdoor” program might become important again soon: last fall virtually all the crops in northern Ethiopia failed again, and last spring the government ordered all foreign relief workers to leave Eritrea and Tigre.
But the United States has been unwilling to initiate a more intimate relationship with Eritrea. Why? The answer offered by officials of the State Department and the National Security Council is that the Eritrean guerrillas are Marxists, just as the members of the Dergue are, and thus cannot qualify for U.S. military support. Influential members of Congress, including Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have also branded the EPLF with the Marxist label. Isaias Aferworki, who helped create the EPLF and is reputedly the real power in the organization, told me, “We totally reject any labeling from any quarter. We have our own realities, and we begin from there to solve our social and political problems. We are a broad democratic front struggling for national liberation. A national liberation struggle cannot be a Marxist struggle since it must accommodate all viewpoints.” Still, the EPLF cannot deny that it has a Leninist command structure, with its leadership organized around a Politburo and a Central Committee. Aferworki admitted that in its early stages the EPLF was heavily influenced by Soviet literature, in reaction against Western colonialism in Africa. Such terminology “was all we knew,” he claimed. Concerning the United States, Aferworki admitted that in its early stages the EPLF was heavily influenced by Soviet literature, in reaction against Western colonialism in Africa. Such terminology “was all we knew,” he claimed. Concerning the United States, Aferworki said, “The standing of America here has always been positive. The food aid to Eritrea is what we expected from a people of noble ideas, and whatever the motives of the U.S. government in giving the aid, the fact is we have really benefited from it.” Obviously, though, he is bitter over America’s refusal to recognize Eritrea as an independent polity.
Was Aferworki being honest about the EPLF’s orientation? No action that the EPLF has taken within the area under its control would suggest otherwise. The most left-wing program ever implemented by the organization has been land reform, and the program is a mild one. This program, the emphasis on women’s rights, the creation of health and agricultural extension services, and infrastructural improvements undertaken by the EPLF in the countryside it controls are exactly the kinds of things that the U.S. Agency for International Development encourages every government in Africa to do. Moreover, EPLF officials do not take a coercive approach to the civilian population, as officials do in so many communist societies.
After being bombed for a decade by a Soviet-supplied air force, the Eritreans harbor a dislike of the Soviet Union approaching that felt by the Afghans. The depth of hostility toward the soviets was made clear to me on my second journey into Eritrea, at an ERA camp in the heard of Sudan’s Tokar desert, where vehicles transporting grain from Port Sudan to Orotta are repaired. There were no toilets and virtually nothing to eat or drink. But the Eritreans did have a VHS unit hooked up to a generator, and I looked on at about 200 people, many of them children, watched an EPLF propaganda tape. After some predictable footage of marching soldiers, the scene switched to a ceremony in which Mengistu was shown smiling and shaking hands with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet President and former Foreign Minister. At the sight of Gromyko there was a loud hiss from the audience, which grew louder as the camera focused closer on the Russian’s stony face.
No U.S. government official has visited the EPLF base area. Even the secondhand information available to people in Washington is sparse. A handful of analysts with access to satellite photographs at the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA are knowledgeable about the EPLF’s military capability, but they lack a feel for the organization’s ideology and for the way in which the guerrillas and the leaders view the world and the superpowers. A senior Administration official admitted to me that “the general view held about the guerrillas is not an educated view.” People in Washington see “these guys as leftists and as essentially separatist, while groups like the contras are attractive because they openly declare an intention to topple a Communist government.” The official said that few in Washington realize that a separatist struggle in Ethiopia may be just as favorable to U.S. interests.
* * *
That struggle will go on, even if it must do so almost invisibly. The most frequently recurring image I have of Eritrea I never saw; it was described to me by a British colleague, John Murray Brown. He was sitting outside one night when he noticed an EPLF guerrilla lying on his back, searching the starscape. Brown asked the soldier if he was looking for anything in particular. The soldier replied that he was looking for satellites, which, he said, were easy to pick out in the clear night sky. The satellites gave him comfort, the soldier explained. They meant that at least somebody somewhere was paying attention to the war.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to
[email protected].
ROBERT D. KAPLAN is a former contributing editor at The Atlantic and the author of In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond.