Surrender or Starve

POSTSCRIPT

It is only 45 minutes by plane across the Red Sea choke point of Bab al Mandeb (“The Gate of Lament”), from the tribal turbulence of al-Qaeda–infested Yemen to the sleepy calm and stability of the newly independent Horn of Africa state of Eritrea. While the West promotes democracy, economic development, military demobilization, and the muting of ethnic hatreds as the only path to domestic tranquility, even as it apologizes for its own legacy of colonialism, Eritrea, at least for the moment, provides a rebuke to all that. Eritrea has achieved a degree of noncoercive social discipline and efficiency enviable in the Third World and particularly in Africa, and it has done so by ignoring the West’s advice on democracy and development, by cultivating a sometimes obsessive and narcissistic dislike of its neighbors, and by not demobilizing its 200,000-man army until there are jobs waiting for the troops, even as its leaders are openly grateful for the Italian colonial experience.

While the streets and shops of nearby Yemen—from where I had just come—are plastered with the photos of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose cult of personality is mild compared to those of other Arab and African leaders, one never sees a photo of Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki, the veritable founder of this country, who led a guerrilla movement that wrested independence from Ethiopia in 1991 after a 30-year low-intensity war. “Photos of me would create an air of mystery and distance from the people. It’s the lack of photos that liberates you. I hate high walls and armed guards,” President Afewerki told me. While other leaders in the region live inside forbidding military compounds, President Afewerki lives in a modest suburban-style house, and greeted me in his secretary’s office at the end of an unassuming corridor. He moves about the capital in the passenger seat of a four-wheel-drive vehicle, stopping at red lights, with only one follow car. Western diplomats here say they have seen him disappear into large crowds of Eritreans without any security detail at all. “It’s easy to put a bullet in him and he knows it,” remarked one foreign diplomat.

Security, which consumes the Western diplomatic and aid community in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a—as well as everywhere else in the Middle East—is barely an issue in Asmara. Though the capital of a desperately poor, drought-stricken country in one of the world’s most politically volatile regions, Asmara, despite its tattered storefronts in need of a paint job, is not only among the cleanest capital cities in Africa, it may also be the safest: the only capital south of the Sahara where one can leave the car door unlocked or prowl the back streets at all hours without worry of being robbed, even as police are barely in evidence. As for political violence, whereas one Western aid administrator in Sana’a had told me of his fear of assassination, on account of his being a soft target, and whereas the ugly fortress architecture and entry procedures of the American Embassy there are a study in paranoia, American, Israeli, and other resident diplomats and aid administrators in Eritrea move freely about the country without guards or other escorts, as if they were at home.

Eritrea, a country of 3.5 million inhabitants, almost half of whom are illiterate, is a place where women run shops, restaurants, and hotels, where handicapped people have shiny new crutches and wheelchairs, and where, unlike in so many Third World countries, people drive slowly and attend driving school, where scrap metal junkyards are restricted to the urban outskirts, where receipts are given for every transaction, and where there are no electricity blackouts because of sloppy maintenance and badly managed energy resources. Foreign diplomats in Asmara praise the country’s lack of corruption coupled with its good implementation of aid projects. While rural health clinics in much of Africa have empty shelves and missing, unacounted-for supplies, in Eritrea clinic managers pull out a ledger and document where the medicine went.

An immense fish farm near the port of Massawa testifies to Eritrea’s ability to effectively utilize foreign aid and know-how. The 600-hectare complex channels salt water from the Red Sea, purifies it, then uses it to raise shrimp in scores of circular cement tanks. The high-nutrient excess of that process is for breeding tilapia, normally a freshwater fish. The remaining waste water is pumped into asparagus and mangrove fields and artificially created wetlands. Though the operation is overseen by a firm from Phoenix, Arizona, and for a time employed an Israeli consultant, the consultant is no longer needed, the Eritreans themselves modified the pump engines, and in almost every respect run the operation.

Such initiative and communal discipline is the result of a Maoist-degree of mobilization and an Albanian-like xenophobia— but without the epic scale of repression and the Marxist ideology that once characterized China and Albania. This organizational aptitude and xenophobia is, in turn, as Eritreans never cease to explain, the product of culture and historical experience much more than it is of policy choices. Eritrea never had feudal structures, sheikhs, or warlords. Villages were commonly owned, and governed through councils, or baitos, of elders. “It was not a society deferential to individual authority,” explained Yemane Ghebre Meskel, director of President Afewerki’s office, “so we didn’t need Marxist ideology to achieve a high stage of communalism.” Wolde ab Yisak, president of the University of Asmara, observed that “communal self-reliance is our dogma, which in turn comes from the knowledge that we Eritreans are different from the Ethiopians, the Arabs, and everyone else.” (On my flight out of Eritrea, I overheard a teenage Eritrean girl from the diaspora lecturing her younger siblings in American English about how the “Ethiopians murdered our people.”)

This clarified sense of nationhood, rare in a world of nation-states rent by tribalism and globalization, is in part an inheritance of Indian colonialism. “We look at colonialism more favorably than other peoples in Africa and Asia,” said Yemane Ghebread, the political affairs officer of the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice, the successor to the country’s guerrilla movement, the EPLF. Having conquered Eritrea in the late nineteenth century, by the late 1930s the Italians turned their new colony into one of the most highly industrialized places in Africa, with a road and railway network that united a people previously divided by mountains and deserts. To drive from Asmara to Massawa, a descent of 7,500 feet in only seventy miles, down the tangled vertebrae of coppery-green peaks on a road of neverending switchbacks, bridges, and embankments, built by Mussolini in 1935–1936 and maintained in excellent condition by Eritrean highway crews working seven days a week, is to experience the historical energy of the industrialized West transplanted successfully to an African people, rather than being dissipated following the departure of colonial administrators.

Another benefit of Italian colonialism, according to Ghebre Meskel, was “town planning.” Rather than concentrate everything in Asmara, the Italians developed Massawa and other towns so as to prevent the overcentralization that now plagues other Third World countries. To stem urban migration into Asmara and thus preserve this legacy, the Eritrean government has tried to improve life in rural areas: a reason why Asmara has no shantytowns surrounding it breeding political extremism.

Following the defeat of fascist Italy in World War II and the dissolution of its East African empire, the new United Nations voted to incorporate Eritrea into Ethiopia. The Eritreans, unhappy with this decision, revolted finally in 1961. For thirteen years Eritrean guerrillas fought an Ethiopia backed by the United States. In 1974, when Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was over-thrown—leading to a Marxist regime headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam—Eritrean guerrilla activity did not cease, and from then on the Eritreans fought an Ethiopia backed this time by the Soviet Union. Yet despite their ability to grind away at a Soviet-supplied war machine, which featured MIG fighter jets and Soviet generals on the battlefield, the secretive and independent-minded Eritreans received no aid under the Reagan Doctrine (President Ronald Reagan’s program of arming Third World anticommunist insurgencies). Nevertheless, in 1991 Eritrean and Tigrean guerrillas, fighting on separate fronts, defeated Mengistu, with Eritrean tanks rolling triumphantly into the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. Thus, in the minds of the Eritreans, they fought and won a three-decade struggle against a state ten times as populous, with no help from either of the superpowers or the rest of the outside world. They owe nothing to nobody, they emphasize repeatedly, and are filled with disdain for international opinion. A taxi driver, for example, berated me for the West’s focus on the crimes of former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, whereas Mengistu, who was responsible for at least twice as many deaths through his collectivization programs, lives in lavish exile in Zimbabwe.

The definitive symbol of such self-reliance, collectivity, and rudimentary survival is a monument in downtown Asmara—not of an individual, or even of a generic guerrilla fighter, but of a giant pair of sandals, shedas, in the native Tigrinya language. The rubber sandals, which the Eritreans produced themselves from recycled tire rubber, were worn by every Eritrean fighter: the ultimate necessity in a stony desert war zone. The monument to the sandals indicates how the long struggle against Ethiopia has achieved such mythic proportions in the minds of Eritreans that it has come to supercede the power of religion itself in a society split evenly between Moslems and Orthodox Christians: an impressive achievement on a continent where Islam and Christianity are increasingly the banners of antagonistic group identities.

In 1996, following a long series of town meetings, the Eritreans drafted what one foreign diplomat called an “impeccable constitution.” But after a second war with Ethiopia erupted in 1998, the constitution was never implemented. The 1998–2000 Eritrean–Ethiopian War resulted in, by some estimates, 19,000 Eritrean dead and 60,000 Ethiopian dead, with tanks and fighter jets engaged in desert combat reminiscent of the Arab–Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. A U.S.-brokered ceasefire has resulted in the current demarcation of the disputed border, under U.N. auspices.

Since this latest war, the very stubbornness and social discipline that continue to make Eritrea the most civil of societies in a myriad of ways rarely considered by Western journalists and policy elites, have also made it a pariah in Europe and the United States—and for good reason. In 2001, national elections were postponed indefinitely (though free and fair elections at the village level were underway at the time of my visit). Far more disturbing, though, in a widespread crackdown on dissent, eleven high-ranking officials, nine journalists, several businessmen, and two Eritrean nationals working for the political and economic sections of the U.S. Embassy were arrested and are still being held without charge. Eritrea now has the worst press repression in Africa. Moreover, a campaign of national mobilization forces young men and women to spend eighteen months in the military and civil service: a good idea in principle, except that they are often kept much longer without any guarantee of being released. That, and the exceedingly slow pace of economic reform, along with the recent political repression, has led to young people quietly leaving the country. An increasingly disaffected diaspora refuses to invest here in substantial amounts until conditions liberalize.

“We’re not asking all that much,” pleaded one foreign diplomat to me. “They don’t even have to hold national elections, if they would just implement a version of China’s economic reforms this place could bloom overnight like Singapore, given its social control and small population.” But as several diplomats admitted, except for some of the urban elite in Asmara, the sense of patriotism is so strong here that they detect no widespread unhappiness with the regime. “The change would have to come at the top, and it’s not altogether impossible that we will wake up tomorrow morning and learn that Isaias [President Afewerki] is no longer around,” whispered one resident foreigner. Another outside expert told me that he has not given up on President Afewerki, but if 2003 goes by without some political and economic reform he will consign him to the ranks of other boorish African strongmen.

My first interview with Isaias Afewerki was in 1986, in a cave in northern Eritrea, during the 30-year war with Ethiopia. That meeting had been scheduled for 10 a.m. and at ten exactly he walked in and asked, “You have questions for me?” He hasn’t changed. He was on time down to the second, and spoke in the same blunt and remote tone, with the same shy, withdrawn asceticism as sixteen years before. In contrast to the gas-bag homilies one hears from so many Arab and African politicians, Afewerki spoke to me for over two hours in intense, spare bursts of cold analysis. He may be the most intellectually interesting politician in the history of postcolonial Africa.

“All that we have achieved we did on our own. But we have not yet institutionalized social discipline, so that the possibility of chaos is still here. Remember, we have nine language groups and two religions. No one in Africa has succeeded in copying a Western political system, which took the West hundreds of years to develop. Throughout Africa you have either political or criminal violence. Therefore, we will have to manage the creation of political parties, so that they don’t become means of religious and ethnic division like in the Ivory Coast or Nigeria.” He went on to say that China was on the right path, unlike Nigeria, with its 10,000 dead in communal riots since the return of democracy there. “Don’t morally equate the rights of Falun Gong with those of hundreds of millions of Chinese who have seen their lives dramatically improve,” he told me.

As for his Red Sea neighbor, Yemen, Afewerki called it “a medievalist society and tribal jungle going through the long transition to modernity.” He accused it of advancing an “Arab national security strategy against Israel,” a country he openly supports. However, he accepted the recent international arbitration that awarded the disputed Hanish Islands in the Red Sea to Yemen. Ethiopia, he said, could fragment because it is controlled by minority Tigreans who have created a Balkanized arrangement of ethnic groups (Amharas, Oromos, etc.), rather than try to forge an imperial melting pot in the way of the late emperor, Haile Selassie.

Despite his refreshing, undiplomatic brilliance, a few hours with Afewerki can be troubling. His very austerity, personal efficiency and incorruptibility is mildly reminiscent of Mengistu himself, who also suffered from a seeming excess of pride, even though he was a mass-murderer while Afewerki could yet turn out to be among Africa’s most competent rulers. Civilization in the Horn of Africa has often bred the sharpest political minds who, with cold efficiency, deal with their intellectual enemies not through written attacks but by imprisoning or killing them. And it is said repeatedly in Asmara that the president has closed himself off since arresting the very people who had challenged him intellectually.

General Tommy Franks, on several visits here, and most recently Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in a visit last December, held long talks with Afewerki. “The meetings were superb,” Aferwerki told me. “I mean that they were frank, without pretensions or flattery on either side. I share the strategic view of the Americans in the region. French forces in Djibouti have been a stabilizing factor, and U.S. troops will add to that. You need outside powers to keep order here. It sounds colonialist, but I am only being realistic.”

Afewerki has essentially offered the U.S. military anything it wants: bases without restrictions to bomb anyone it wants, at any time it wants. While the World Bank criticizes the viability of a new airport with a long jet runway at Massawa, Afewerki reportedly told Rumsfeld that “the runway can handle anything the U.S. Air Force wants to land on it.” Eritrea also boasts deep-water port facilities at Massawa and Assab, strategically placed at the mouth of the Red Sea.

Afewerki’s strategy seems to be the following. As he put it, “The increasing social and economic marginalization of Africa will be a fact of life for a very long time to come.” Ethiopia, in particular, he went on, will weaken internally as the Oromos and others demand more power. Its ethnic-Tigrean president, Meles Zenawi, already lives inside a vast security apparatus designed for his own protection. Meanwhile, across the Red Sea in Yemen, oil and water are running out, even as the number of armed youth swells: the political order of significant parts of Arabia could be the victim. And with fighting terrorism a permanent strategic priority of the United States, a stable and disciplined Eritrea makes it the perfect base for projecting American power and helping Israel in an increasingly unstable region. That, in turn, will foster the kind of Singaporean-type development Eritrea appears suited for.

When I pressed him about human rights abuses, which Rumsfeld himself pointedly raised in their meeting two weeks earlier, Aferwerki said that “if you just leave us alone, we will handle these matters in a way that won’t damage our bilateral relationship, and won’t embarrass us or you.” He indicated that he is more likely to satisfy U.S. demands on human rights in the context of a growing military partnership, but would not do so if merely hectored by the State Department.

I worried that, like many realists, Afewerki is obsessed with everything that can wrong in his country rather than with what could also go right: realism, to be wholly realistic, requires a dose of idealism and optimism or else policy becomes immobilized. And that might be the Eritrean leader’s problem. He seems more comfortable in a state of wartime emergency than he does in a state of peacetime possibilities. He analyzes brilliantly what he knows, but he gives in to paranoia about what he does not know. He did not seem to understand that foreign policy in Washington is often a synthesis of what the State and Defense departments are both comfortable with, and, therefore, Eritrea’s image problems in the United States cannot simply be blamed on Foggy Bottom.

The coming years in Eritrea will determine whether its brilliantly conducted struggle against Ethiopia—which also comprised one of Africa’s best homegrown famine-relief operations—will give way to equally brilliant peacetime policies that combine political and economic liberalization without the anarchy that has followed elsewhere on the continent; or, instead, give way only to repression and consequent stagnation, leading to another form of chaos. The choice, for the moment, is in President Afewerki’s hands.