Surrender or Starve

ERITREA: SELF-RELIANCE, LIBERATION, AND WAR

South of the Sudanese border, the Red Sea hills erupt into a chain of sandstone and granite peaks whose eroded, sun-blistered faces, ocher and black, suggest the forbidding surface of a distant planet. It is a natural environment of near-total hostility. Plagues of locusts, grasshoppers, and army worms follow drought. The soil has no absorptive capacity, and within minutes of any rainfall, bucketfuls of water streak in dendritic patterns down the canyon walls and flood the valleys. Later, the mud at the bottom dries and cracks and is filtered back into the air as dust. Anything that might pass for a road is blocked by boulders, torn away from the scarps in the deluge. Mostly acacias grow here, and their scrawny roots and branches do little to anchor the soil or shield against the sun’s glare. The trees are of better value to the yellow weaver-birds who nest in them and to the camels who munch on the inch-long thorns. As one might expect, an aerial reconnaissance of this region would reveal few signs of human habitation. It is only as dusk approaches, when the sky becomes too dark for Ethiopian pilots to maneuver their Soviet-made MIG-23 fighter jets, that these seemingly inhospitable vastnesses come to life.

In the enveloping darkness, the defiles become crowded with people scurrying forth from daytime hiding places. Captured East German water tankers trundle out of acacia patches, and bulldozers begin clearing rocks from the road. The light of the rising moon catches the glint of metal rods, as many of the inhabitants are amputees equipped with crutches and artificial limbs. Fluorescent lights and gas lamps flick on in slate rock bunkers dug into the cliff sides, where workshops begin to operate. Tables, chairs, and other bits of furniture are being forged from ammunition boxes, while the snaps of the boxes are removed to make clasps for machines that wash lumps of black plastic, molded afterward into sandals for guerrilla fighters. Parts of Soviet-made cluster bombs are being converted into truck flywheels. The tips of spent tank shells are punctured to produce rain gauges for desert agricultural stations to the southwest. Wash basins are made out of exploded MIG shells, and the trip wires are cut into strings for kirars, a guitar-like instrument played by the soldiers.

In one bunker, whose roof is camouflaged by dark blankets and acacia branches, people don white lab suits and warm up British, Belgian, and West German machines trucked in pieces from Sudan and then reassembled. This is a tablet factory. In 1986, 40 million pills were produced, according to pharmacist Sennay Kifleyesus, including three million aspirin tablets and five million doses of chloroquin to fight malaria. Chloroquin is composed of four raw materials: talc, starch, cab-o-sil, and magnesium sterrate. Kifleyesus hopes to start production of some of these items soon. “We have to be more self-sufficient; we can’t depend on anyone,” he says. Kifleyesus is just one of many university-educated people smuggled into these canyons where no carbonated drinks are available and where the meals offered usually consist of only wot and enjerra, a lentil gruel served on a soggy, breadlike substance made from sorghum. The tablet factory is merely part of a large hidden medical complex, which includes an 800-bed hospital, where men and women trained in Ethiopia, Italy, Greece, Israel, the Soviet Union, the United States, and elsewhere are at work. In another bunker, four kinds of intravenous solutions are manufactured in reused plastic containers affixed with locally printed labels in the squiggly script of the Tigrinya and Tigre languages. Blood is stored in refrigerators powered by wind and solar energy. Skin grafting is accomplished in an operating room with boarded-up windows, a rough cement floor, and flies buzzing around a dirty fluorescent light.

A few miles away from the medical complex, in a mountain-side hut, crippled people operate an Italian-made machine that produces 10,000 sanitary towels per hour for women soldiers at the front. In other workshops, radios and VHS video units are repaired, and architects are designing roads and irrigation systems fed by the floor runoff. While everywhere else in famine-stricken Africa the scientific know-how and initiative are provided by U.S. and European technicians, here it is different: undernourished children are being fed with a dietary supplement invented in 1984 by a local nutritionist, Dr. Azieb Fessahaye, consisting of 55 percent wheat or durra, 20 percent finely ground chick peas, 10 percent sugar, 10 percent milk powder, and 5 percent egg powder. For feeding purposes, one part of the dry mixture is added to three parts of water; 4,400 pounds a month are being produced for 5,000 children.

It is fully dark now, and at an altitude of 5,000 feet the close starscape seems to breath. In a place where the daily routine is determined by the flight patterns of MIG jets and the lack of an effective antiaircraft cover—where even reservoirs must be concealed beneath camouflage nets—the workday has just begun for black Africa’s most ingenious society.

Welcome to Orotta, the base camp of what U.S. intelligence experts consider the world’s most sophisticated guerrilla fighters, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (known in Tigrinya as the Hizbawi Ginbar Harnet Etra), whose civilian offshoot, the Eritrean Relief Association (ERA), is considered the most effective locally based famine relief agency in Africa. If one thinks of Orotta as the administrative capital of a sovereign polity, which in reality it is, then by Western standards of efficiency, Orotta is one of the few black African capitals that actually “works.” Orotta also is the only capital not recognized by any Western power, even though the EPLF is doing more to bleed the resources of a Soviet-backed regime than are the contras in Nicaragua or the Angolan rebels led by Jonas Savimbi.

Orotta does not appear on any international map. Even Eritrea, for that matter, appears only as the delta-shaped, north-ernmost province of Ethiopia, capped at the top by a range of mountains that flattens out to form the Barka plain in the west; with the protruding arm of the Danakil depression—one of the hottest regions on earth—jutting in a southeasterly direction along the Red Sea. It is from the Greek word for the Red Sea, Erythra Thalassa, that Eritrea derives its name. Although only about fifty thousand square miles in area (the size of Pennsylvania or Mississippi, or, perhaps more to the point, Nicaragua), Eritrea holds the key to Ethiopia’s political stability and territorial integrity. Eritrea also forms the basis of Ethiopia’s strategic value: without Eritrea, Ethiopia would be a landlocked nation. The late emperor Haile Selassie, who prosecuted a war against the Eritreans for the last twelve years of his rule, was keenly aware of this. So, too, is the new communist potentate, Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam. At the core of all the mass executions, cabinet-level shootouts, and opaque conspiracies that helped Mengistu consolidate power in the late 1970s were differences about the war in Eritrea. The fate of the Marxist regime and its close relationship with the Soviet Union has been dictated by the progress of the war. The war has been responsible for the majority of logistical boondoggles plaguing the famine relief effort—weapons consignments receive priority at the port of Assab; half of Ethiopia’s trucking fleet is utilized by the military; C-130 cargo planes transporting grain have been delayed at local airports because fuel often is siphoned off for patrols over Eritrea and neighboring Tigre province by MIGs and Mi-24 HIND helicopter gunships. If U.S. influence in Addis Ababa is marginal despite the generous outpouring of food aid, it is because of Washington’s refusal to get involved in the war.

This is Africa’s longest running and most competently fought war. Facing off against the world’s best guerrilla fighters are upward of one hundred fifty thousand Ethiopian government soldiers—half of the total troop strength of black Africa’s largest and best-trained standing army. (The EPLF, with an estimated 35,000 fighters, is out-numbered by almost five to one.) The war, which has gone on since September 1961, when the government of Haile Selassie abrogated a U.N.-sponsored autonomy agreement with Eritrea, is literally a war without end, by whose interminable standards the Iraq-Iran conflict pales in comparison. More than a quarter million people have died so far on the battlefield, and about three-quarter million Eritreans have been exiled or internally displaced. But these figures are deceptive because the fighting of recent years has been the most bloody.

By 1986, Kidane Ghebermedhin, thirty-five, already had been at the front for nine years. His situation was not unusual. With no fixed period of service, many in Eritrea have fought as guerrillas for a decade or more. Their khaki shirts and shorts, canvas anklets, black plastic sandals, and Kalashnikov assault rifles are often all these guerrillas own. Many have gray hair by their early thirties. Never have I seen people who age as quickly as do these Eritreans. When I asked Ghebermedhin in October 1986 if he was discouraged after being a soldier for so long, he closed his eyes and shook his head. He didn’t seem to understand the question. “I’m happy just being a fighter; I never think any more about town life.”

A quarter century of conflict in Eritrea has engendered a monastic approach to existence, whereby absolute self-reliance, coupled with deprivation, has become a form of worship. In place of religion, which has been de-emphasized in recent years, there has developed an intense form of national and social cohesiveness born of isolation and historical entrapment.

From as far back as 3000 b.c., when, according to Egyptian hieroglyphs, pharaonic galleys journeyed to the farthest reaches of the Red Sea coast in search of myrrh, Eritrea has been pivotal to the overall destiny of Ethiopia, while at the same time evolving separately from it. However clear this pattern may be to the inhabitants of the region, the complexity of this relationship has kept Eritrea from achieving a distinct identity in the minds of foreigners. This failure of comprehension by the outside world has been partly responsible for the almost palpable sense of “aloneness” that permeates the Eritrean psyche.

The first great Ethiopian empire—the Roman-era kingdom of Axum—was centered in neighboring Tigre, thus making Eritrea practically a home province. Axum’s maritime trade was conducted through the ancient Eritrean port of Adulis, near modern-day Massawa. Internal dissension, the migration of Beja nomads from Sudan, and the rise of Islam eventually led to the kingdom’s demise in the ninth century a.d. From the tenth century onward, according to Colin Legum in the Minority Rights Group report on Eritrea, the “locus of [Eritrean] power moved steadily southwards” and caused Eritrea to drift apart from the rest of the empire, while still retaining its central importance due to the outlet it afforded to the sea. It wasn’t until five hundred years later, in the fifteenth century, that the ruling Ethiopian Amharas (who came to be known as Abyssinians) were able to reestablish a tenuous hold over Eritrea. As the Eritrean academic Bereket Habte Selassie noted in his book Conflict and Intervention in the Horn of Africa, Amhara rule was “tenuous because the people, geographically isolated and (by then) unaccustomed to outside rule, were fiercely nationalistic and stubbornly resisted Abyssinian attempts” at domination. Yet foreigners could not be kept out. During this period, the Eritrean coastline was frequented by Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Arabs, and, lastly, Ottoman Turks, who occupied Massawa in 1557. As a result of these influences, among others, Eritreans grew to be more sophisticated and less xenophobic than were the Amharas and Tigreans of the interior, whose cultures and political traditions were to evolve completely on their own. This is why present-day Ethiopian politics (especially during the 1970s) remains very much an enigma to outsiders.

The Turks held sway over the coast for three centuries until they were displaced by the Egyptians, who were aided by the British, in 1875. The Suez Canal had opened six years earlier, in 1869, and with the increased strategic importance of the Red Sea, the British needed the assistance of a proxy in order to exclude the French, who already were ensconced in neighboring Djibouti. But the Egyptians, like the Turks before them, were unsuccessful in penetrating the Eritrean interior due to stiff local resistance. This failure, among other factors, forced the British to use Italian imperial ambitions in the area as a means to keep the French out. With British help, the Italians occupied Massawa in 1885 and began their invasion of the highlands. “The trail was coated with the blood of thousands of Italian soldiers,” wrote Selassie. “Nevertheless, by 1889 all of Eritrea had been occupied, and Menelik [the Amhara king] had signed the Treaty of Ucciali, under which he recognized Italian rule over Eritrea.” The treaty demarcated the regional boundaries as they exist today. Selassie indicated that “two different imperial territories now existed side by side,” the one, Eritrea, governed by a white European colonial power; the other, Ethiopia, governed by a black African colonial power—the Amharas under Menelik—whose subjugation of the Tigreans to the north and of the Oromo people to the south was viewed by the indigenous inhabitants as no more preferable than any European-imposed tyranny.

The fact that Eritreans, Tigreans, and Oromos viewed the black Amharas no differently than these three groups viewed the white European intruders is a truth that many in the liberal West may find hard to accept, but whose implications are crucial to a proper understanding of the present conflict. When the Eritreans say they are fighting Amhara (Ethiopian) colonialism, they mean it in the same way as did other Africans when they struggled against French and British colonialism. The generally darker skinned Amharas of the central highlands, speaking a different Semitic tongue and perpetually insulated from the cosmopolitan influences of foreign cultures, were considered alien by the Eritreans. Although Italian occupation spelled all the evils inherent in colonialism—land expropriation, exploitation of cheap local labor, and delimitation of educational opportunities to serve the needs of an emerging subsecretarial class—in Eritrean eyes, Amhara domination would have been no less intolerable. Eritreans fought in large numbers for Mussolini against Haile Selassie in the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and in traveling through Eritrea today, one encounters many an old man, fluent in Italian, who is proud of his part in that war.

From the very beginning, the Italians saw Eritrea as a potential staging post for a future invasion. With this in mind, a road and railway network was constructed and a settler population installed that brought new technological skills along with it. All this development led to urbanization, as Eritreans left their ancestral villages to seek work on these massive projects. A modern capital rose up in Asmara, which, with its yellow stone houses adorned with bougainvillea, is still one of the loveliest cities in Africa. The coming of fascism in Italy led to further investment in Eritrea. In order to convey military and other supplies from the port of Massawa up to Asmara, located 7,000 feet above sea level, the world’s longest aerial ropeway was built. The new transport system allowed Eritreans to visit parts of their own country they had never seen before, thus facilitating the growth of a modern national consciousness. Trade unions were established, and local political culture came to be more advanced than was the case anywhere on the continent with the exceptions of Egypt and South Africa. Whatever its sins, Italian capitalism, even under Mussolini, proved to be a liberating social force in comparison to Amhara feudalism. Consequently, Eritrea surged ahead of its Amhara-dominated neighbors.

The fifty-two years of Italian rule were surely the most intensely experienced chapter in Eritrean history and served to crystallize Eritrea’s separate identity. By the time the Italians were defeated by the British on the battlefields northwest of Asmara in 1941, Eritrea was a very different place from the rest of Ethiopia, whose experience of the Italians was restricted to the brief and brutal military occupation of Addis Ababa and other garrison towns between 1936 and 1941. Thus, in the aftermath of the war, when the world failed to adequately recognize this distinction, the Eritreans felt utterly deserted. The shattering effects of what, in their eyes, was a gross betrayal by outside powers are apparent in the EPLF’s obsession with self-reliance, which is comparable only with the austere individualism of the Albanians—another people who have historically felt themselves to be completely alone.

The British military occupied Eritrea until September 1952, when the Western powers imposed a U.N. mandate on the local inhabitants that made Eritrea a semiautonomous territory under the sovereignty of Ethiopia and Haile Selassie. The rationale for this action was articulated by the U.S. secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, in a Security Council debate: “From the point of view of justice, the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive consideration. Nevertheless, the strategic interests of the United States in the Red Sea basin and considerations of security and world peace make it necessary that the country has to be linked with our ally, Ethiopia.” Significantly, in 1953, the United States started work on the Kagnew communications and intelligence-gathering complex outside Asmara and on naval access facilities at Massawa. The Eastern bloc, which had no influence in the region at the time and thus had no strategic interests to look after, sided with the Eritreans, although in later years, hostile Soviet actions quickly would dissipate any feelings of gratitude among Eritreans.

The emperor never respected the U.N. autonomy agreement. The territory’s independent institutions gradually were subverted, political parties were banned, and Tigrinya, the official language of Eritrea, was suppressed and replaced by Amharic. In 1961, the Eritrean Liberation Front, or ELF (not to be confused with the EPLF, which emerged later), was formed. The war broke out in September when the guerrillas mounted hit-and-run attacks with antiquated Italian weapons the guerrillas had been able to purchase. The following year, without the slightest protest from the U.N., Eritrea was formally annexed to Ethiopia as its fourteenth province, an action no more natural than the 1975 Moroccan annexation of the Spanish Sahara.

The Eritrean guerrilla struggle began in the 1960s as very much a Moslem-oriented affair. Tom J. Farer, in War Clouds on the Horn of Africa: The Widening Storm, wrote:

Not surprisingly, the ELF’s early supporters included the likes of Syria and the leftist Egyptian regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The domination of the ELF by Moslems and outside Arab radicals was a dubious, rather artificial arrangement. The orthodox Coptic Christian highlanders, who always accounted for about half of Eritrea’s population, felt immediately estranged. As Farer suggested, after Israel’s dramatic success in the 1967 Six Day War, the ELF’s Arab patrons became more than ever preoccupied with their own problems and consequently lost interest in peripheral areas such as Eritrea. But with the 1969 coups in Sudan and Libya, which brought two radical regimes to power that supported the ELF, the organization got a new lease on life. The spate of ELF hijackings of Ethiopian Airlines planes constituted the beginning of Muammar Gaddafi’s career as the Daddy War-bucks of terrorism. Like all radical organizations, the ELF soon divided into factions, with rival bands aligning themselves in the usual places—Baghdad and Damascus. By this time, of course, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and other Eastern bloc nations had signed on by helping the ELF in order to win prestige in the Arab-Islamic world and to help destabilize the pro-U.S. emperor in Addis Ababa.

However, radicalism did not cause the ELF’s eventual decline. The ELF’s Arab-Islamic outlook did because Eritrea was not Arab and was only partly Islamic. The population of four million was equally split between the Tigrinya-speaking Christians of the highlands and the Tigre-speaking Moslems of the coast and western plains. (Tigrinya and Tigre are closely related Semitic languages, but are almost mutually unintelligible. The language of Tigre should not be confused with the province of Tigre, where Tigrinya is spoken.) Welding these two population groups together psychologically—at which the Italians inadvertently succeeded—was not an easy task. Rather than build on this unity, the ELF, with its Arab cohorts, almost destroyed it.

The EPLF was formed in 1970. It had a strong Christian element, and, as its name implies, had a distinctly Marxist tinge at the beginning. Isaias Afewerki, a Christian, commanded the EPLF field forces, while foreign relations were in the hands of Osman Salih Sabbe, a Moslem renegade from the original ELF, whose job it was to keep money flowing in from Arab capitals. Nonetheless, a civil war motivated by religious animosities broke out between the ELF and the EPLF in 1972; six thousand men were killed in this struggle waged in the shadows of the greater EthiopianEritrean conflict. By the time the civil war ended in 1975 with no clear-cut victor, Emperor Haile Selassie had been deposed in a coup in Addis Ababa, and a new government, headed by the Dergue, had come to power. The Dergue’s initial egalitarian posture and talk of “reform” had raised hopes that the new government would seek to end the bloodshed in the north by compromising with the Eritrean resistance. These expectations were dashed on Bloody Saturday, November 23, 1974, when General Aman Michael Andom, an “Ethiopianized” Eritrean who had been negotiating with the Eritrean guerrillas on the Dergue’s behalf, was ordered killed by Mengistu in Andom’s Asmara villa precisely because he was believed to be close to achieving a historic peace settlement.

The effects of Andom’s death were quick and devastating. Whole units of locally recruited government police in Eritrea deserted to the guerrillas. Students returned to their villages to join the ELF and the EPLF. As Farer revealed, “Having at last converted the great mass of Eritreans into the enemy, the masters of Addis could now pursue the logic of counterinsurgency to its murderous end.” The same famine that in the mid 1970s had ravaged Wollo and Tigre and sparked the overthrow of the emperor “now tightened its grip on Eritrea.” However, the Dergue did not allow its newly created relief agency to distribute food or foreign donor organizations to work in the area. Farer reported that “the government of Ethiopia tried, with careful premeditation, to orchestrate the starvation of Eritrea’s rural population.” The Dergue was barely a year old and had only just begun to emerge from the obscurity of the barracks, but already famine had become one of its main tools against a recalcitrant ethnic group: a fact that the world would still find difficult to accept a decade later when the same tactic was used again by the same government against the same group.

The drought and internal divisions notwithstanding, the dramatic, almost overnight growth of the Eritrean guerrilla movement following Andom’s death led to the encirclement of Dergue troops in the main towns of Eritrea. Arab and Eastern bloc aid to Eritrea poured in, while the Soviet Union, assisted by Cuba, continued its blackmail of the Dergue by arming the Eritreans in order to get Mengistu to completely sever his links with the United States. The famine, the demise of Haile Selassie, and the possibility of an age-old empire splitting asunder attracted the world media to the Horn of Africa. Eritrea, in 1976, was suddenly a front-page news story.

In a last ditch effort to save its skin, the Dergue conscripted forty thousand Christian peasants in May 1976 for an assault on Eritrean guerrilla positions. The peasants were told they would be fighting “a holy crusade against the Arab infidels.” But the new army was cut down by the guerrillas before it had the chance to attack. Jon Swain, the correspondent for the London Sunday Times, wrote:

On the heels of this disaster came the most successful Eritrean offensive in the history of the war. The ELF and the EPLF, each able to field roughly sixteen thousand soldiers, together rolled up the countryside. Nakfa, the district capital of Sahel in the north, was captured by the EPLF, who have held it ever since. The Dergue was driven out of every main town except Asmara and the ports of Massawa and Assab. The road linking Asmara and Massawa was blocked, Asmara was under siege, and street battles raged in Massawa. Between 80 and 90 percent of Eritrea was in guerrilla hands in late 1977. The Dergue was on its knees, not only in Eritrea, but in the southeast of the country as well, where the Somali army was seventy-five miles inside Ethiopia on the road to Harar and Addis Ababa. The empire, forged at Axum in the century of Christ, was about to crumble. Then the Soviets rewrote the script by turning their guns on their former Eritrean allies.

In the midst of the guerrilla offensive, the incoming Carter administration had suspended all military aid to the Dergue because of its poor human rights record. Mengistu thus had nowhere to go except Moscow; because the USSR had armed the Eritreans in the first place, the Kremlin held the key to the war’s outcome. “In Ethiopia, the Soviets created opportunities for themselves by causing the problems,” observed Alan L. Keyes, a former assistant secretary of state for international organizations. Mengistu arrived in Moscow in May 1977 for a week-long state visit. Soviet arms began arriving in large quantities in Ethiopia later in the year, along with the same Cuban advisers who had been assisting the Eritreans. The obvious ensued: the guerrilla offensive ground to a halt. Soviet navy shelling from offshore battleships prevented the EPLF from taking Massawa. By May of the next year, the Dergue had accumulated enough new weaponry to launch an offensive of its own. The Cubans ran the logistical backup. Throughout late 1978 and into 1979, war swept across the Eritrean landscape. Thousands of civilians were killed, crops were burned, and tens of thousands were forced across the Sudanese border into refugee camps that still exist. Nerve gas and antipersonnel bombs disguised as children’s toys reportedly were used. This was a form of warfare that the world would come to know better in coming months when the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan.

As the U.S. media spotlight drifted away from the Horn of Africa in 1979, the Eritrean guerrillas were in retreat, divided among themselves, and only beginning their transformation from a pro-Soviet, Marxist movement to an anti-Soviet, ideologically nebulous one. But the impression U.S. journalists took with them as they moved on to Iran and Afghanistan at the end of the decade remained, even after they returned to Ethiopia in 1984. In the late 1970s, both war and famine had ravaged Ethiopia, but at that time, the media were predominantly interested in the war. By 1984, however, Third World conflicts with heavy Soviet involvement in Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador, and Nicaragua—not to mention Afghanistan—took the sting out of the Eritrean story. So even though Ethiopia’s situation was again a matter of war and famine, this time only the famine got reported because the unprecedented images of masses of people dying of hunger gave the famine story much greater novelty value. Because few journalists bothered to cover the war, most observers still thought of it as just a case of “Marxists fighting Marxists.” Neither Congress nor the Reagan administration had any real way of knowing that the situation had changed because U.S. officials could not enter guerrilla-held areas due to a continued U.S. State Department policy of only recognizing Ethiopian sovereignty in Eritrea.

Nevertheless, although the media had consigned Eritrea to obscurity, major fighting continued in the 1980s, and the nature of the guerrilla movement was significantly altered. The EPLF decided on a “strategic withdrawal” in 1979 and deliberately gave up territory in southern Eritrea, including the town of Keren near Asmara, in order to consolidate a base area in the northern Sahel district around Nakfa. In the meantime, troops were deserting regularly from the Arab-backed ELF, which by mid 1980 boasted only 6,500 troops, while EPLF ranks had swelled to almost 30,000. The same year, fighting broke out between the two organizations, and in 1981, following an EPLF offensive against ELF concentrations in the Barka region of western Eritrea, the ELF was defeated and its remaining troops were driven over the border into Sudan, where they were disarmed. The ELF, although it still has a small following among Eritrean refugees in Sudan, has been irrelevant ever since.

From then on, possessing a secure base area and faced with no other credible enemy except the Dergue, the EPLF strengthened itself in every way. A network of trenches and underground corridors several hundred miles long was constructed. Thousands of educated ethnic-Eritreans came over to the EPLF side after going into exile abroad because of increased repression in Ethiopia. These new recruits, who were 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 around Asmara, and their presence further encouraged the Western-oriented drift in EPLF ideology away from its Marxist bearings, which the 1977 Soviet sellout had precipitated.

The last vestige of Eritrean goodwill toward the Soviet Union was wiped out by the Soviet buildup of the Ethiopian army, which was expanded from 65,000 to nearly 300,000 troops, thus making it the largest in black Africa. Using figures from a Central Intelligence Agency report, James A. Phillips, a senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, noted that “Moscow supplied Ethiopia, a state which had only 62 tanks and 27 jet fighters, with over 350 tanks and 70 jet fighters.” “Volunteer” pilots from Cuba, North Korea, and other Soviet bloc states joined the ranks of the Ethiopian air force. More than 2,000 Soviet advisers arrived in the country. In return, the Dergue made the Dahlak archipelago, which was 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 airbase that the United States had deserted.

This massive assistance program allowed the Ethiopian government to launch its largest offensive ever against the Eritrean guerrillas in February 1982. Called Operation Red Star, it involved fifteen divisions with an estimated one hundred thousand troops and featured the introduction of Soviet-manufactured Mi-24 HIND helicopter gunships into the region for the first time. The offensive was a total failure. The EPLF held all its major positions, and as many as forty thousand Ethiopian soldiers—close to half the invasion force—may have been killed or wounded. Thousands were taken prisoner by the guerrillas, and large quantities of weapons were captured. Another offensive of the same magnitude was launched in 1983, but the results were just as disastrous. While the U.S. public was preoccupied during this period with fighting in Lebanon and Central America, blood was flowing in large quantities in the Horn of Africa, in a war that featured a guerrilla resistance—backed by virtually no one—withstanding one of the largest Soviet arms onslaughts in history. There was only one precedent: the struggle of the Viet Cong against the United States. No other resistance group, particularly not the ones well known to the public, were in the same category. Not even the Viet Cong, who were armed and supported by the Chinese and North Vietnamese and who rarely engaged in set-piece battles like the EPLF did, had chalked up such an impressive record.

Nevertheless, Eritrea was in every respect a friendless nation. The transformation of the Soviet Union from ally to oppressor, the continued hostility of the West, and the ambivalence of the Arabs and the rest of the Third World only reinforced the EPLF’s obsession with “self-reliance” and its relative disdain for other Middle Eastern and African liberation groups. A mania developed in the EPLF around repairing captured equipment and converting it for other uses. Comparisons between the EPLF and other insurgent organizations were treated with contempt. “Has the PLO ever captured an Israeli tank?” asked an EPLF official scornfully, when the question was raised about similarities with the Palestinians.

In early 1984, the EPLF captured the town of Tessenei on Eritrea’s western border with Sudan and overran all government positions eastward up to the Red Sea, thereby gaining the port of Mersa Teklai. War was taking its toll on the land, however. Much of the heavy fighting of the previous years had occurred during harvest season, and to make matters worse, the Ethiopian army was employing the same scorched-earth tactics in Eritrea as the Soviet army was using in Afghanistan. War had restricted the seasonal migration of nomads, which led to the loss of livestock. On account of the security situation, fertile areas of the coast and the Barka plain could not be cultivated. The agricultural balance, always fragile in this corner of Africa where nature is particularly cruel, was destroyed. But when a resultant famine woke the media from their five-year-long sleep, the images that television cameras beamed back into U.S. homes were of a drought-scarred landscape, not a war-scarred one.

Yet from every perspective, Eritrea presents a picture of modern war. The EPLF front line at Nakfa, sixty miles as the crow flies south of Orotta, is a bleak, deforested region brutally cut by landslides and the color of mud. Captured from the Dergue in 1977, Nakfa has been the scene of heavy fighting many times since, leaving the town, which once had a population of seven thousand, a checkerwork of ruins punctuated by a single minaret. Nakfa is sort of a modern-day, African equivalent of Pompeii. The trenches a few miles farther south are perched along the twisting spur of Denden Mountain. Soviet T-55 tanks and five different kinds of artillery lie hidden in manmade recesses. Across the defile, on a similar ridge, are the Ethiopian lines. In some places, the two armies are as close as sixty yards apart, and a pair of low-powered binoculars are all that is necessary to see the individual faces of Dergue soldiers peering through the slits of their own fortifications. In between is a no-man’s-land of minefields, defoliated olive trees whose barks are corroded by napalm, scores of Ethiopian bodies lying like broken toy soldiers, and the uncollected remnants of the November 1985 Dergue attack on Nakfa, in which 6,000 government troops were killed or wounded in repeated predawn attempts to scale the Denden escarpment (the same number of casualties attended the successful 1941 British assault on a similar scarp at Keren, which led to Mussolini’s withdrawal from Eritrea).

The Dergue threw twenty-five thousand soldiers against the EPLF at Nakfa in November 1985 in the gory, hellbent conclusion to an offensive that lasted from July through November 1985, involved 200,000 troops and $1 billion worth of Soviet weaponry, and resulted in an estimated 14,000 dead and wounded. It had to be one of the biggest unreported stories of the decade. Not more than a handful of articles were written about it in the U.S. press.

The prelude to the 1985 offensive came in the first week of July, when the EPLF captured the strategic hilltop settlement of Barentu in western Eritrea, a major weapons store for the Dergue. During the next seven weeks, the EPLF took more equipment back to its base area than had been captured in many years. The catch reportedly included fifteen T-55 tanks and dozens of trucks and artillery pieces. The government moved an estimated thirty thousand troops into the area as part of a redeployment of two divisions from the Ogaden desert in the south. According to diplomatic and other sources in Khartoum, there were as many as thirteen attempts to retake the town, and 2,000 Ethiopian soldiers were killed or wounded in the process. The EPLF deliberately left open an escape route that it subsequently ambushed; hundreds of bodies littered the field. Finally, the government resorted to bombing from the air. The EPLF withdrew on August 25.

A few days after reoccupying Barentu, Ethiopian troops captured Tessenei, between Barentu and the Sudanese border. Having chopped off the EPLF’s western territorial flank, the Dergue struck eastward and rolled up the Red Sea plain. A guerrilla commander told the London-based Financial Times (December 13, 1985) that one of the tank battles “was like Rommel confronting the British at Tobruk.” The guerrillas now were in control of only an oval-shaped tract the size of Belgium that jutted southward from the Sudanese border and covered Eritrea’s central mountain region in the Sahel district. Near the southern tip of this oval was Nakfa, where the EPLF had its largest concentration of heavy weaponry. The Dergue used napalm, cluster bombs, T-55 tanks, and MIG-23s to support its ground attack on Denden Mountain. But after several weeks of fighting, there still was no breakthrough. The offensive ended inconclusively, and by summer 1986, the EPLF had regained the coastal strip.

The biggest victim of the fighting was the famine relief effort. Daily overflights by MIGs and Antonov bombers forced relief convoys coming from Sudan to travel only at night, according to Chris Cartter, Africa program coordinator for Grassroots International. The Economist, a British weekly magazine, reported that five of the twenty-three relief camps inside EPLF territory were bombed. During a visit to the camp at Salumna, Financial Times correspondent John Murray Brown saw (and reported on December 13, 1985), a “large number of empty cluster bomb-shells.” Eritrean officials claimed that “upon entering the towns of Barentu and Tessenei… the Dergue’s forces… raided a storeroom, seized food, and burned agricultural tools.” The most significant loss was the destruction of the Ali Ghidir agricultural scheme near Tessenei, a 12,355-acre ex-Italian farm, mechanized and irrigated by the EPLF. In one of the few articles written about the offensive in the U.S. press, Clifford D. May reported in The New York Times (September 29, 1985) that “war, rather than drought, is increasingly becoming the main cause of hunger and homelessness on the Horn of Africa.” Unfortunately, the realization came a bit late: the eighth major government offensive in as many years was ravaging Eritrea. In the United States, news coverage of the famine already had peaked several months before, and the public was losing interest in the subject. The last horde of journalists was leaving Sudan and Ethiopia, yet the war in Eritrea still was obscure.

In the warren of slate and sandbagged passageways, noisy with field mice, on Denden Mountain, the war is the only reality. Few existences can be more rugged. Even the strong, sugary tea, which in the austere dietary conditions of the Third World functions as an elixir, rarely is available. Water is usually the only drink, aside from an occasional pitcher of homemade sorghum beer, called suwa. Extremes of heat and cold are the norm. Teeth are brushed with the peeled branch of a tree. 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 women, who account for almost a third of all EPLF soldiers. But unlike other armies where women make up a large portion of the recruits, such as Israel’s, in Eritrea they are in frontline combat units, drive tanks and aim artillery, and perform tasks such as repairing automobile motors (30 percent of the wounded reportedly were women).

After years of living and performing in the field exactly as the men, women have come to physically resemble them. Women’s hair is short, their hands and feet calloused, their legs sinewy. As The Guardian correspondent David Hirst put it in a February 19, 1985, article: “The integration seems to be so complete and natural, so devoid of competition or coquetry, that it has subtly moulded their physical appearance and demeanour. It often takes more than a glance to tell the difference between the women and the younger men.” In the cramped, frontline quarters, although men and women sleep side by side, sex is said to be rare; and pregnancies are unusual despite the unavailability of any means of birth control. The EPLF evidently has a puritanical streak. Except for the few fighters who marry or form intimate liaisons, celibacy seems to be the rule. Still, the atmosphere of pent-up emotional tension, so prevalent in almost every Middle Eastern country, is notably absent. Eritrean males also evince little interest in the few Western women they encounter.

Of the few sexually intimate relationships that are established among the guerrillas, many are between Moslems and Christians, who always serve in the same units. The EPLF emerged, in part, as a nonsectarian alternative to the Moslem-dominated ELF, and this history has left its mark in terms of the deliberate unimportance attached to religion by the fighters. In Eritrea, mostly older peasants wear Coptic crosses or Moslem skullcaps, and only a few peasants bear a dirt spot on their foreheads, indicating constant bowing to the ground in the direction of the Moslem holy city of Mecca.

Elsewhere in the world, the breaking down of social barriers often has led to a form of tyranny over the individual, as in communist societies, for instance. But in Eritrea, the reverse is true. There exists a degree of caring for the individual that is extremely rare in Third World armies. Every platoon is equipped with basic medical supplies. Stretchers abound. Makeshift operating rooms are located in the field. One soldier I met, whose eardrums were damaged in a bomb blast, actually was provided with a hearing aid, something I found astounding considering that there isn’t even tea in the trenches. Western intelligence sources say that even with satellite photographs, they have no figures on EPLF battle losses, owing to the guerrillas’ ability to get their dead and wounded off the field quicker than all but the most sophisticated Western armies. It makes for a striking contrast with the Ethiopians, who leave many of their dead behind. (The Dergue, moreover, refuses to admit the existence of the eight thousand prisoners of war being held by the EPLF; this lack of acknowledgment abandons these prisoners to an almost stateless existence, with little hope of ever returning home.) The guerrilla wounded that cannot be treated at battlefield medical stations are transported by trucks and Land Cruisers to the hospital at Orotta, eight hours away from the closest frontline point. Whenever asked what type of military equipment they are in need of most (in addition to shoulder-fired antiaircraft guns), EPLF officials always mention helicopters to get their wounded to Orotta quicker.

As the Israelis have demonstrated, bravery derives from self-assurance, from the knowledge that whatever the risks, in the event of danger your superiors will go to the limit to save you. The Eritrean guerrillas have proved more than once their ability to take well-calculated risks, such as the January 14, 1986, attack, behind enemy lines, on the airbase at Asmara, in which the estimates of the number of MIGs and other planes damaged or destroyed went as high as forty. Again, by contrast, it is hard to imagine an army with a worse morale than the Dergue’s. Many of its soldiers are ethnic Oromos, Moslems from the southern lowlands of Ethiopia, themselves persecuted by the Christian Amharas, who were conscripted forcibly 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. Nor are the Amharas in Mengistu’s army enthusiastic. Many of the officers were trained in the West during the reign of the emperor and resent the present government’s Marxist ideology and reliance on Soviet military assistance. The Amhara recruits, meanwhile, especially the educated ones, often desert or escape over the border before being drafted. The Ethiopian refugee camps in Somalia and Sudan are filled not just with peasants from the famine-wracked countryside, but with educated Amharas from Addis Ababa as well.

Concerning the EPLF, the comparison with the Israelis is by no means farfetched; it is useful to make this comparison, as it strikes at the heart of what makes the Eritrean guerrilla movement unique in the Third World and, by extension, explains why the ERA is so much more effective than is any other African relief group. Israel has long been noted for boldness in guarding the welfare of its citizens and, in some cases, of Jews outside the country. This was powerfully demonstrated during the rescue of 7,500 black Ethiopian Jews from the provinces of Gondar, Tigre, and Wollo in December 1984 and January 1985. For Leon Wieseltier, writing in The New Republic (Februrary 11, 1985), the rescue was an example of the Israeli “belief in action… the idea of getting things done promoted to the status of a principle.” In other words, as Wieseltier explained, “make the protestations, and make them again; but also arrange the border crossings, establish the transit stations, obtain the food.”

Unlike the Jews, the Eritreans come from a more backward part of Afro-Asia, nor have they had the cultural experience afforded the Jews by centuries of exile in the West. On the contrary, Eritreans always have lived in one of the most brutal, nasty corners of the world and can count even fewer friends on their fingers than can the Israelis. But, by the standards of their own plight and the region they inhabit, the Eritreans have put this principle of moral action into practice. While the U.S. public was awed by the Israeli deliverance of the Ethiopian Jews, at the same time and practically side by side, the EPLF was delivering its people—more than one hundred thousand of them—to the relative succor of emergency feeding centers on the Sudanese border; the EPLF provided these people 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 were in EPLF-controlled areas. Yet despite the fact that in late 1984 and early 1985 ERA was the recipient, by some estimates, of less than 5 percent of all the international aid coming into Ethiopia, the efficiency of ERA, coupled with support from Eritrean expatriates in the West and in Saudi Arabia, kept the number of deaths in Eritrea in the tens of thousands; whereas in Dergue-held areas, as many as one million people are thought to have perished. Jack Shepherd, a food aid specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in the Africanist journal Issue (14 [1985]) that the Eritrean guerrillas (along with those in Tigre) have “reversed the classical guerrilla warfare pattern: Instead of peasants supporting and feeding an army, the guerrillas are feeding and sheltering themselves and the peasants.”

“They are just like the Viet Cong,” remarked one visitor to Eritrea, “except unlike the Viet Cong, these people like each other.” The ERA clinic is a poignant illustration of this point. On a continent where people do the most horrible things to each other, the clinic is a rare institution. It was opened in May 1979 in an unfinished cement building on the outskirts of Port Sudan near the airport. There is not a tree in sight. The goats and stray dogs in the area escape the blazing sunlight of one of the hottest cities in the world by hiding under the rusted carcass of a school bus. Except for making the building available at a monthly rent, no help of any kind is provided by the Sudanese authorities. (Until ERA constructed a small dormitory structure for foreign relief workers and journalists, they had to stay in the clinic itself while waiting for transport into Eritrea.) The rooms teemed with flies by day and mosquitoes by night. In adjacent beds, on soiled mattresses, were close to one hundred amputees and paraplegics, children among them; they were victims of a war about which few people knew.

The clinic functions as both a school and a hospital. It is self-administered: even the teachers are amputees. The wheelchairs and artificial limbs are made and repaired by the patients themselves. Bedside classes are taught up to grade eight. The curriculum includes English, science, mathematics, ceramics, and music. The patients are kept constantly busy. During several days at the clinic in March 1985, and again in October 1986, I detected few signs of depression among the patients. “We have no psychological problems here,” said one of the teachers. “Our people accept everything.”

The clinic is part of an ERA health care network that includes six regional hospitals and an extension service with several hundred paramedics reaching villages and nomadic encampments throughout the EPLF zone. “I know of no other system, which, given the same conditions and resources available, operates as efficiently,” said Dr. Sam Richard Toussie, a Columbia University epidemiologist and rural health specialist, who has worked in insurgent areas of Africa, Asia, and Central America. The EPLF’s biggest success has come in the area of infant care. Since 1982, the number of nomads within the EPLF base area giving birth in hospitals has risen 50 percent. Dr. Abrehet Kidan, a Syracuse University–trained gynecologist, said that in 1986 a project was begun to burn all nonsterilized bottles in Eritrea in order to cut down on infections and to encourage mothers to breast-feed longer. Still, 56 percent of Eritrean children are malnourished (compared with 80 percent in mid 1985), according to Dr. Assefaw Tekeste, head of the Orotta hospital, and the general population suffers from all the usual tropical diseases. In large part, this is due to the war-wrought isolation of Eritrea, a constant shortage of supplies filtering into the base area, and the difficulty of reaching people in EPLF territory behind Dergue lines.

ERA’s primary function is as an agricultural development and famine relief organization; the ERA is responsible for farms, displaced persons camps, and resettlement schemes. Even in Nakfa, amid the ruins of the town, cabbage, cauliflower, eggplants, sunflowers, and eleven different kinds of tomato are being raised with the help of a motorized water pump captured in 1977 from the Dergue. At Himer, further west in the direction of the Barka plain, 150 irrigated acres of millet and sorghum are under cultivation on a sandy desert so parched that there is not a tree or a bush in sight. The number of displaced persons camps doubled in late 1984 to more than twenty, with an average population of five thousand for each camp. The reason for the increase again was war, not drought, as stepped-up MIG bombing raids on villages drove many Eritrean peasants out of their homes.

ERA’s ultimate aim is to resettle all 100,000 of these refugees, in addition to several hundred thousand more by the end of the decade, at a cost to foreign donors of $25 million. But, from the looks of the plans and the way ERA officials talk, about the only similarity between this resettlement scheme and the one organized by the Ethiopian government is the name. In Ethiopia, resettlement has sparked an international outcry, with several studies indicating that up to one hundred thousand people have died in the program due to poor planning and brutal treatment of the peasants at the hands of Marxist cadres. Moreover, no food, drinking water, or tools of any kind reportedly were available when peasants arrived at the new sites. In Eritrea, on the other hand, officials always emphasize that resettlement will be carried out only “as conditions permit.” ERA documents list not only the exact amounts and kinds of seed, tool, insecticide, and other equipment needed at each site before it can be occupied, but the cost of each item, too.

Yet, despite the surfeit of pronouncements by relief experts, politicians, and journalists about the “need for Africans to help themselves,” and despite public disgust about the misuse of aid by the Ethiopian government, it wasn’t until mid 1985, when the food situation in government-held areas already was being brought under control, that donations to ERA—a group that was doing nothing if not helping itself and efficiently utilizing available resources—began to proportionately catch up with donations earmarked for Ethiopia. At the end of March 1985, in Orotta, Tekie Beyene, the ERA information officer, complained to me that “we have publicized our food situation for five years but only now does the international community begin to listen. Compared to what is happening in Ethiopia, we have saved our own people.”

A look at the military map in mid 1985 revealed that nearly half of the areas affected by famine were in the hands of some guerrilla group, be it the Eritreans, the Tigreans, or one of the smaller bands operating in Gondar or Wollo. The so-called Ethiopian famine was in part a misnomer in the sense that the Ethiopian capital was not the address for many of the victims. By all neutral estimates, several million of the eight to ten million peasants facing starvation lived in areas that could be reached only by ERA or REST. As Dan Connell, a former Reuters correspondent and executive director of the Cambridge, Massachusetts–based relief information service, Grassroots International, told The Nation (January 19, 1985): “Because of the fighting, very little of the food contributed by the United States and other donor countries is reaching the starving in the rebel-controlled areas.” But few of the politicians, entertainers, journalists, and donor agency officials who beat a path to Addis Ababa in the autumn of 1984 were aware of this. The only Ethiopian group they had any knowledge of was the Dergue’s RRC, whose two top officials, Dawit Wolde Giorgis and Berhane Deressa, were later to defect and seek political asylum in the United States, where they would attack the regime they once had defended before all these foreign visitors.

It took the ghastly spectacle of 300,000 starving and shell-shocked Eritrean and Tigrean refugees, brought safely out of Ethiopia by guerrilla armies and assembled at emergency feeding centers on the Sudanese border in late December 1984, to make the international community aware of the famine’s other half. Subsequently, it became de rigueur for people such as Senator Edward Kennedy and singer Harry Belafonte to make a stopover at the Sudanese border on their way home from Ethiopia. But the aid imbalance was slow to be rectified. Although in the first six months of 1985, Ethiopia received almost all of the estimated 750,000 tons of grain required for that period, according to Western relief officials, ERA got only half of the 67,500 tons it requested. By 1986, however, most of the main donor groups active in Ethiopia also had pledged money for some project or other in Eritrea. Belafonte’s organization for instance, USA for Africa, whose representatives had been criticized for appearing too respectful of the Ethiopian government, gave $80,000 for a new medical laboratory at Orotta hospital.

Drawing attention to the situation in Eritrea and Tigre always was hard going, for reasons that seldom were mentioned. Reporting from areas controlled by the guerrillas was not easy: food and lodging conditions were awful, and no phones or telex machines existed for journalists to maintain contact with their home offices in the event of a breaking story elsewhere in Africa. Not many journalists made the trip. As a result, the public was not sufficiently sensitized to the situation behind guerrilla lines. In addition, Addis Ababa offered a far more comfortable atmosphere for foreign visitors than did Khartoum and the refugee camps on Sudan’s eastern border. The Sudanese capital is a torpid, dusty city, plagued by temperatures that often rise above 100 degrees. The Khartoum Hilton is far out of town, and the center of the action for relief officials was always a Greek-run hotel on a depressing downtown street that despite its helpful management did not offer the kind of creature comforts ordinarily expected by Western visitors. The border towns of Kassala and Gedaref, close to the refugee camps, were even worse off. Given that relief flights didn’t operate daily from Khartoum, as they did from Addis Ababa to camps in government-held areas, it was impossible for visitors who could not charter their own plane to get to the eastern border and back in one day. Not surprisingly, everybody liked “Addis,” while few liked Khartoum. Partly as a consequence of this attitude, Sudan, the rear base for ERA and REST, attracted smaller numbers of “fact finders” than did Ethiopia, where the RRC was within walking distance of the Hilton.

It was the Reagan administration, so often criticized in the early days of the famine for its seeming slowness in responding to that emergency in Ethiopia, that was among the first to begin helping Eritrea and Tigre. By early December 1984, Washington already was shipping food directly to the camps on the Sudanese border and funneling cash into the hands of a few private charities, which used the money to bring grain into areas controlled by the EPLF and the TPLF. Publicity about this relatively modest program was kept to a minimum because it appeared to violate Ethiopian sovereignty in Eritrea and Tigre, which the U.S. State Department still officially recognized. It wasn’t until a year later, near the end of 1985, that a cross-border feeding program, which more satisfactorily met the needs of ERA and REST, was in place; close to two hundred Mercedes and Fiat trucks operated by Eritrean and Tigrean drivers transported approximately six thousand tons of grain a month into guerrilla territory.

The delay was a matter of both logistics and politics. Tens of thousands of tons of wheat and dried milk powder were piling up in Port Sudan warehouses in the early weeks of spring 1985, because there were insufficient trucks to bring the food over the border. When the trucks did arrive, it already was summer, and the first substantial rains in several years made the unpaved roads into Eritrea and Tigre impassable until late September. Then the Sudanese government got nervous about the entire project because it was bound to anger the Ethiopians at a time when Sudan was trying to get Mengistu to reduce his support for the African southerners fighting a secessionist war against Moslem Arab Khartoum. Moreover, in the wake of the overthrow of pro-U.S. president Jaafar Nimeiri in April, anti-U.S. feeling was stronger than usual in the capital, as the public of this Arab League state became increasingly aware of the U.S. role in helping black Ethiopian Jews escape to Israel via Sudan in the final months of Nimeiri’s rule. The Transitional Military Council, which succeeded Nimeiri, eventually gave its approval for the project, provided that publicity about it be kept to an absolute minimum and that the U.S. role in the actual transport of the grain over the border be as indirect as possible. Among other things, this resulted in many of the responsibilities of Mercy Corps, an Oregon-based charity handling the Tigre side of the operation, being transferred to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Also, although the United States was paying for most of the grain and the trucks, the day-to-day operation on the eastern border was placed in the hands of citizens from other Western countries. Negotiating these provisions took some time, and it wasn’t until the end of 1985 that Eritrea and Tigre were getting the kind of massive assistance that Dergue-controlled areas already had been receiving for twelve months.

But the politics weren’t only of a Sudanese making. There was stalling by Washington, too. Officials in the State Department and in USAID knew that even the most ambitious cross-border project could not get food into many contested areas of south Eritrea and central and eastern Tigre as easily as a Dergue-approved initiative operating from Addis Ababa could, mainly because the distances were shorter and the roads better. Also, the Reagan administration, hoping that the famine would provide an opportunity to wean Ethiopia away from the Soviet Union, did not want to alienate Mengistu before at least giving him a chance to approve a feeding program across guerrilla lines from his side of the trenches. Although only food was to be transported by ERA and REST, food could be a strategic weapon in guerrilla societies where there is little distinction between fighters and civilians. So the cross-border program was organized in no particular hurry, on the premise that just the threat of it actually being implemented would force Mengistu to cooperate on a similar program run from Addis Ababa.

The strategy bore mixed results. Following a midwinter meeting in Geneva between Vice President George Bush and representatives of the Ethiopian government, approval for a so-called northern initiative was given. The New York–based Catholic Relief Services was to move 25,000 tons of grain a month into Eritrea, while World Vision, a California-based Protestant charity, was to transport a similar amount of food into Tigre. The RRC pledged to do nutritional surveys in order to identify the needy in frontline areas. But as one donor agency official told me, the surveys were done “either incompletely or not at all.” It took several months of further negotiations with the Dergue before the trucks began rolling out of Addis Ababa and the ports of Assab and Massawa. The attitude of the Marxist TPLF constituted another hindrance. Not long after the operation finally got under way, the Tigre side of it ground to a halt in early March 1986 after the TPLF killed two Ethiopian employees of World Vision in the town of Alamata in southern Tigre. The Tigrean guerrillas did not want any people from the government side coming into their area. Although the dead Ethiopians, both women, worked for a Western relief agency and not for the Dergue, the TPLF made no distinctions. According to an account written by Blaine Harden (The Washington Post; International Herald Tribune, March 29–30, 1986), both USAID and World Vision officials stated that the killings were deliberate, as the two women were shot in the dining room of a relief compound after they had identified themselves as World Vision employees.

The hostile attitude of the TPLF, the purloining of grain by Dergue soldiers in both Tigre and Eritrea, and the Dergue’s prohibition against U.S. nationals monitoring grain deliveries in contested areas made the task of World Vision and Catholic Relief Services arguably the most difficult and politically sensitive of the entire emergency effort in Sudan and Ethiopia. If the two charities didn’t succeed, it wasn’t because they lacked the will. It is questionable just how much of this food, if any, actually made it to needy areas on the guerrilla side of the trenches. USAID obviously assumed that not much would because at about the same time that the northern initiative became operational, the final go ahead also was given for the cross-border program operating from Sudan in cooperation with ERA and REST. From a humanitarian standpoint, it is hard to find fault with the Reagan administration. Faced with a war situation in a barely accessible region of Africa, the administration did the only thing that could possibly be done—bring food up from both sides of the battle lines in the hope of reaching as many hungry peasants as possible.

Where the administration failed was in its political strategy. As the emergency drew to a close in 1986, the Dergue was as hostile toward the United States as in 1984; some would say even more so. U.S. officials didn’t seem to understand that it was not the famine but the war in Eritrea—and to a lesser extent in Tigre—that held the key to a political shift in Addis Ababa. But because Washington was operating on the basis of outdated assumptions about the Eritrean resistance, it could not construct a bold strategy for prying the Dergue loose from Moscow. Instead, U.S. policy seemed to rest on the hope that despite a $4 billion Soviet arms investment and the influx of several thousand Eastern bloc advisers, who, among other duties, ran Ethiopia’s security services, the Dergue could be bribed away with grain, much of which was going to areas that Mengistu had a strategic interest in starving. It was a naïve hope, not a realistic calculation.

In a world of imperfect choices, where 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 make Mengistu cry “uncle.” Liberals on Capitol Hill would have fewer complaints about a group whose exemplary treatment of the eight thousand POWs under its charge has been documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross and whose competence in the field of famine relief during the 1984–1986 period is a matter of public record. The only deserved stain on the EPLF’s reputation was the group’s 1987 attacks on famine relief convoys in heavily contested areas of Eritrea. Without trying to justify these unjustifiable actions, it should be stated that almost every day since the late 1970s, MIGs and other Soviet-made planes take off from Ethiopian government airfields and bomb anything that moves in EPLF and Tigrean guerrilla zones, thereby effectively stopping famine convoys from traveling during daytime hours. After a decade of avoiding retaliation, which got the EPLF absolutely no Western recognition in return, the guerrilla organization changed its policy and was condemned around the world for doing exactly what the Dergue attempted on a daily basis. It reminds me of the situation two decades ago in Biafra—as described by Dan Jacobs in The Brutality of Nations—where the international community looked the other way at massive Nigerian government human rights violations but lambasted the Biafran rebels on the few occasions when their behavior was insupportable.

Unlike Nicaragua, no advisers were needed to train an army. The Eritreans have taught themselves to use all the Soviet equipment they have captured; they might even be able to teach the U.S. military a thing or two. In the spring of 1984, for instance, an EPLF attack on the Asmara airbase resulted in the destruction of two Soviet IL-38 MAYS long-range naval reconnaissance planes, thus forcing the Soviets thereafter to do all their monitoring of the U.S. Indian Ocean fleet from bases in South Yemen. Nor would the EPLF require many different kinds of weapon. Western intelligence experts confirm that the guerrillas capture from the Dergue much of what they need with the exception of shoulder-fired antiaircraft guns, which the Dergue doesn’t have available for capture because the EPLF has no aircraft. In few other places would the sale of a few hundred antiaircraft guns have such dramatic effects as in Eritrea. A sale might accomplish more than all the aid to the Nicaraguan, Cambodian, and Angolan rebels combined, and the effects would be primarily and demonstrably humanitarian in nature (another thing liberals would like) because an air cover would allow cross-border relief convoys already being financed by U.S. taxpayers to roll twenty-four hours a day rather than just at night. In addition, there would not be much debate about the likelihood of the EPLF winning because the guerrillas have no pretensions about toppling the Dergue the way the contras do about toppling the Sandanistas or Savimbi’s rebels do about toppling the Marxist Dos Santos regime in Luanda. The EPLF wants to change Eritrea, not Ethiopia, and might even be satisfied with an autonomy agreement like the one under Haile Selassie, provided that this time it was respected. Moreover, there is so much building dissatisfaction inside the Ethiopian military about the war and the Dergue’s exclusive reliance on the Eastern bloc that the EPLF need not even be victorious for Reagan Doctrine planners to get their money’s worth. The EPLF only might have to fight a degree or two better than it presently is in order to create the conditions necessary for a coup or policy shift in Addis Ababa; conditions that millions of tons of Western-donated grain have not been able to create.

But perhaps the most attractive aspect of assisting the EPLF is that unlike the muddled realities of Nicaragua and Angola, the Horn of Africa offers more clearcut distinctions between good and evil, the recent EPLF attacks on food convoys notwithstanding. The 1986 World Human Rights Guide gave Ethiopia the lowest rating of any country in the world. Human rights investigations by the U.S. State Department and Amnesty International turned up similar results. Besides the usual evidence of torture, the murder of children, and unlawful detention common to all the most brutal Third World regimes, the Dergue has been guilty of deliberately denying food to large segments of its population and of collectivizing millions of ethnic Oromos against their will. This is a regime with few defenders in Washington. No serious person, liberal or conservative, would deny that almost anyone would be preferable to the current leaders in Addis Ababa. True, many would say that the regime of Haile Selassie wasn’t all that much better, but lacking the guidance of Eastern bloc security advisers, it was not nearly so lethally competent as the Dergue is in carrying out a policy of repression. In any case, the rule of the emperor, which collapsed in 1974, is not the issue. The issue that needs to be explored is why the United States—while supporting insurgencies in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, and Nicaragua— is not supporting an insurgency in Ethiopia, whose population of 42 million is larger than that of all those other countries combined. Why, as Yonas Deressa, president of the Ethiopian Refugees Education and Relief Foundation, has asked, is the United States allowing the Brezhnev Doctrine to be implemented in the Horn of Africa rather than the Reagan Doctrine?

The ready answer offered by officials at the U.S. State Department and National Security Council is that the Eritrean guerrillas “are Marxists just like the Dergue” and thus cannot qualify for U.S. military support. Interested members of Congress, such as Senator Orrin Hatch, the vice chairperson for foreign policy on the Senate Republican Steering Committee, also have branded the EPLF with the “Marxist” label. In an editorial column in The Wall Street Journal (April 4, 1986), Hatch recommended that because the EPLF is “Marxist-oriented,” and wants “to secede from the country,” the United States should fix its hopes instead on the “non-communist, non-secessionist” Ethiopian People’s Democratic Alliance (EPDA).

The use of the verb “secede” is questionable in this context, given that the region in question has been largely outside the Ethiopian government’s control for a quarter century already and for a decade before that was officially declared “autonomous.” More to the point, notwithstanding the democratic virtues of the EPDA, its army is small, and its role in fighting the Dergue is marginal compared to that of the EPLF, or even that of the TPLF. The EPDA is simply not a viable substitute for the Eritrean guerrillas in the task of destabilizing a regime that Moscow has built into its most powerful ally on the African continent. But Hatch and others won’t even consider helping the EPLF because it is “Marxist.”

Responding to these charges, Isaias Afewerki, the number two man in the EPLF hierarchy after Ramadan Mohamed Nur— but reputedly the real power in the organization—told me that “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.” It was the same answer that he and Ramadan Nur had given to the handful of other journalists, almost all European, who had interviewed them. Unlike leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization, EPLF leaders have no record of backtracking or contradicting themselves. Nevertheless, the EPLF cannot deny that it has a Leninist command structure, with its leadership organized around a “politburo” and a “central committee.” Afewerki admitted that in its early stages, the EPLF was influenced heavily by Soviet literature, which was a reaction against Western colonialism in Africa. Such terminology “was all we knew,” he claimed. Concerning the United States, Afewerki 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.” However, he is bitter about the U.S. refusal to recognize Eritrea as separate from the rest of Ethiopia.

Afewerki, said to be in his later thirties (he says he does not know his exact age), met me in a protected veranda furnished with broken furniture at the EPLF command outpost of She’eb, three hours by Land Cruiser southeast of Orotta. The interview was scheduled for 10 a.m. on October 15, 1986. At ten exactly, he arrived on foot with no escort, dressed in a khaki safari shirt and blue jeans. With short black hair, a clipped moustache, and a cold, authoritative style of speech, Afewerki affected a military disposition.

Was he leveling with me about the EPLF’s non-Marxist orientation? There is no action that the EPLF has taken within the area under its control that would suggest otherwise. The most left-wing concepts ever pushed by the organization’s economic department were a mild land reform program, designed to narrow the gap between peasants and a few rich merchants, and aid to rudimentary worker organizations. Moreover, EPLF officials did not evince the coercive manner of approach to the civilian population that is so apparent in all communist societies. While in Addis Ababa, one often hears phrases like, “This is what we’re going to do”; in Eritrea, it is more common for someone in authority to ask, “How do we convince people to do it?” Marxism, or capitalism for that matter, is simply not the issue in Eritrea. In a place with no heavy industry, no circulating currency, and only a rudimentary class structure, such terms have far less relevance than they do in Washington. The ideology I’ve heard professed by Eritreans is so vague that it seems little more than a form of the social contract theory developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century.

In addition, after the experience of being bombed for a decade by a Soviet-supplied air force, Eritrean dislike of the Soviet Union is comparable with that of the Afghans. Moscow is constantly being condemned by Eritreans at all levels of society, from field commanders to peasant women. Amputees sometimes are referred to as “Mr. Gorbachev’s work.” The depth of hostility toward the Eastern bloc was made clear to me on my second journey into Eritrea (October 1986) at an ERA service station in the heart of Sudan’s Tokar desert, where vehicles transporting grain from Port Sudan to Orotta were repaired. Due to the combination of a flat tire, reports of flooding further on, and the fear of being attacked by MIGs if caught on the road in daylight, I was held up there for seventeen hours. There were no toilets, nothing to eat, and only a few containers of expired Turkish mineral water to drink. Therefore, it was a pleasant surprise when a young Eritrean entered my hut and asked me if I wanted to watch a video. He led me to a clearing between a water tanker and a refuse heap where about two hundred people, many of them children, were seated on makeshift benches before a VHS unit hooked up to a generator. It was an EPLF propaganda film. After the usual scenes of marching soldiers, the camera switched to a ceremony where Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam was smiling and shaking hands with the then-Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. At the sight of Gromyko, there was a distinct hiss from the audience, which grew more audible as the camera focused closer on the Soviet official’s chiseled and stony face. The looks of burning hatred registered by some of the older children would have made President Reagan’s eyes water, had he been able to visit this desert hovel. In a continent infected with a double standard on nonalignment, it seemed that these people were drawing the proper distinctions.

One would have to search far and wide for another issue on which official Washington appears as unknowing of the facts on the ground as in the case of Eritrea. Ironically, this ignorance continues despite the recent media attention lavished on the Horn of Africa, at a time when undermining Soviet client states in the Third World is particularly in vogue. But it is easily explained. No U.S. government official has visited the EPLF base area because the United States still recognizes Ethiopian sovereignty there, and so few correspondents of major U.S. media have made the trip that the amount of secondhand information available to people in Washington is incredibly sparse. A handful of analysts with access to satellite photographs at the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA are knowledgeable of the EPLF’s military capacity. But even they lack a feel for the organization’s ideology and the way in which the guerrilla’s and their leaders view the world and the superpowers.

A senior Reagan administration official admitted 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 in terms of U.S. interests a “separatist” struggle in Ethiopia may be just as effective.

Nonetheless, the Marxist seal affixed to the Eritrean guerrilla movement is so easily disputed that it may be just a Washington excuse for inaction. The State Department and the White House are not under any pressure from any quarter to reevaluate their basic assumptions, so they don’t. Why formulate a new policy if the current one is not under attack? One would expect Soviet involvement in such a populous and strategically placed country as Ethiopia, coupled with a record of human rights violations by the government with few precedents in Africa, to shake the U.S. bureaucracy out of its inertia. But the media are uninterested and no influential lobbies are at work. Although the tactics the United States uses in some parts of the world are the subject of endless scrutiny, often sparking official debate, other equally strategic regions are strangely ignored. (The U.S. role in Angola, which is of no greater strategic value than is the Horn of Africa, has been written about extensively.)

Although the Ethiopian famine resulted in lengthy public discussions about relief policy, little interest was stirred up about the administration’s overall strategy in the Horn. The upshot, incredible as it may seem, is an official U.S. posture based on a 1950s situation when there was a pro-U.S. regime in Addis Ababa with a growing separatist movement in Eritrea that was encouraged by the Soviet Union and was oriented heavily toward the Arab world. This situation threatens Israel’s fragile, newly born right of passage in the Red Sea and the construction of U.S. military facilities in Massawa and Asmara. Not much else would explain the U.S. government’s defense of the Dergue’s claim of absolute sovereignty over all of Eritrea. U.S. diplomats retort that despite Moscow’s gridlock on the Dergue, the United States still can count the mass of Ethiopian people as its friends, so why alienate a population by recognizing its enemy? Besides, giving military support to one of the two sides in the Eritrean war only could add to the suffering, and encouraging the territorial dismemberment of any country is a destructive policy.

These are fine words, except that in the opinion of many, if not most, Amharas, the enemy is not the Eritreans but the Dergue. Not that it really matters. There is no case of a Third World dictatorship, assisted to such a large degree by the Soviet and East German security services, being dislodged by the popular will. As the Soviets proved in the late 1970s, the road to influence in Addis Ababa runs through Eritrea. Furthermore, in a military sense, Ethiopia is already a divided land, and giving the guerrillas defensive weapons would probably decrease the suffering, rather than increase it. Granted, these arguments may not be without flaw, but they certainly are worth a public debate.

“The Amharas are slaughtering our people, and the bombs of their MIGs and the shells of their tanks are burning our fields. Such is the situation. Why is everyone quiet? These are the things I want to know….America must stop the flow of Soviet weapons.” It was not what I expected to hear from a sixty-five-year-old Moslem peasant woman. According to media accounts, she should have been talking about the drought and the sacks of grain from abroad that saved her family from starvation. But this woman’s home village, Af-abet, forty miles north of Nakfa, at one point had been overrun by the Ethiopian army, and the place where she lived now, Adishek, much closer to Nakfa in the EPLF zone, was so near to the front line that built into a low ridge were little corrugated iron bunkers for the chickens. Her world was one of war and ethnic hatred. Although grain from the United States was feeding her village, the gift of food wasn’t on her mind when she spoke to me—guns were. She was no fighter, just a helpless peasant.

Although not sponsored by the Reagan Doctrine, Eritrean guerrillas nevertheless have managed to tie down and bleed a 300,000-troop, Soviet-supported, black African military that otherwise would be a threat to all of East Africa, especially Kenya and Somalia. These are vital U.S. allies offering base facilities to the U.S. Indian Ocean fleet. Yet few members of the U.S. public even have noticed.

The most recurring vision I have of Eritrea is, paradoxically, not one that I myself 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 were looking for anything in particular. The soldier replied that he was looking for satellites, claiming that they 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.

TIGRE: EXILE AND REPATRIATION

The Mercedes truck staggered up one hill and down the next, bucking the field of craters that passed for a road through the brush. The glare of the headlights was diffused by thick clouds of dust kicked up by the wheels of all the trucks in front of us: even with the windows shut it was like crawling up the wrong end of a vacuum cleaner. Everyone sweated and coughed. I held a damp rag over my nose and mouth. The sound of grinding gears helped to drown out the loud, scratchy music that the Tigrean driver insisted on playing.

After several hours of driving, the convoy halted. With the help of a half moon and starlight, I was able to get my first good look at the northern Gondar, which the TPLF was using as a corridor into Tigre from its rear base on the Sudanese border. It was a ghostly landscape; the ravages of war and drought had left only shadows behind. Every object in view looked shriveled and burned like the remnants of a house after a great fire. The plain was dotted with carob and acacia trees, but all the branches were completely bare; it might as well have been a field of skulls. The grass was dead, and the lack of topsoil made the ground a vast carpet of dust.

Out from behind the rocks and crevices emerged little groups of men and women dressed in khaki shorts with Kalashnikov assault rifles slung over their shoulders like picks and shovels. Some wore bandage-like cloths on their heads as turbans. Their low chattering in Tigrinya had the effect of hundreds of birds waking. We now were an armed convoy of about twenty grain-laden trucks completely financed by U.S. taxpayers and protected by a group of self-declared Marxist rebels.

In theory, the U.S. government did not deal with these guerrillas. Rather, it dealt only with REST, which was supposed to have complete control over the trucks and the grain. But this trail in Gondar was a long way from Washington, and legalistic divisions tended to get submerged beneath the overpowering imperatives of war in this remote corner of Ethiopia. Not that there was evidence of grain being diverted to the soldiers. But, as I was to learn (during my trip in February 1986), nothing was easily verifiable in TPLF areas. The conditions in Tigre were even more primitive than those in Eritrea. Water was not always available even for washing. After living for days on crushed biscuits and marmalade, I felt ill more often than not. In such a state, traveling only at night and sleeping much of the day, it was difficult for an outsider to judge just what was going on. The guerrillas and our Tigrean guides often were not cooperative. The successive scenes of biblical-like migrations, patrolling soldiers, and trucks moving in the night created an imagery so rich it may have concealed as much as it illuminated. In Tigre, there were no trenches defining areas of control, no tanks or artillery pieces indicating troop concentrations, and no set-piece battles whose results were a matter of record. The TPLF, with an estimated 15,000 soldiers and no heavy equipment, was waging a classic insurgency campaign similar to those being waged in Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, and elsewhere. The Dergue was responding in kind: crops were burned, markets razed, and drinking wells poisoned in the midst of a drought in order to “deny the enemy valuable resources and cover.” Villages frequently changed hands, meaning that peasants were caught in the middle even more than occurred in Eritrea. This was a small-scale version of Vietnam and Afghanistan, except that there was a famine here as well.

Unlike Eritrea, this wasn’t a war of conquest on the fringes of the empire. This was the empire devouring its own heart. Ethiopia, as an imperial concept, grew up out of Tigre. Axum, in the northwest of the province, was the legendary birthplace of Ethiopia’s first emperor, Menelik I, son of the Hebrew king Solomon and the queen of Sheba. Only a century ago, a Tigrean emperor, Yohannes IV, ruled all of Ethiopia from Makelle before Addis Ababa was built by the Amharas. Now it was the same old story: the Amharas—who prevailed in the Dergue—were fighting the Tigreans, who resented the domination. In a sense, little had changed since the Scottish explorer James Bruce visited Gondar and Tigre in 1770, when, as Alan Moorehead wrote in The Blue Nile, there were “endless marchings and counter-marchings of futile little armies,” with an “atmosphere of Grand Guignol… of horror piled upon horror until everything dissolves into a meaningless welter of brutality and bloodshed.” Western journalists in the 1980s found northern Ethiopia as baffling and incomprehensible as Bruce must have found it more than two hundred years earlier. The TPLF, like the Dergue, was the product of a secretive, self-contained culture that for centuries eschewed contacts with the outside world. One could draw fewer conclusions from a tour of Tigre than from a tour of Eritrea.

Yet basic patterns did emerge. Not everything was unclear. Much that was clear went unreported, and much of what was reported was not properly explained. As in the case of Eritrea, one could visit the government-held areas of Tigre on a day trip from the Hilton in Addis Ababa, with a box lunch to go along. Or, one could visit the TPLF side from Khartoum; it took two weeks, the food and accommodations were even worse than in Eritrea, and the trip was less rewarding. Thus, while legions of journalists followed entertainers and politicians to Makelle, on the government side, where RRC officials lectured about the Dergue’s ability to provide the entire province of Tigre with relief supplies, the TPLF roamed the countryside all around Makelle, and in response, the Dergue was literally burning crops and blasting peasants out of their tukuls (huts) in places such as Abbi Adi, sixty miles from where all the journalists stood.

For most correspondents on the government side, the TPLF was never more than a vaguely defined, evil-bent force whose only goal, it seemed, was to disrupt the RRC’s relief efforts. The March 1986 killings of two Ethiopian employees of World Vision by the TPLF provided ample justification for this view. But if one looked beyond the “policies of relief” to the politics of war, the guerrillas’ hostility to the presence of Western relief workers in Alamata was not difficult to fathom.

From a relief standpoint, World Vision’s actions were unassailable. The private charity was transporting food as close as possible to the TPLF front lines and feeding as many people as could be fed. However, looked at another way, World Vision’s role was not so benign. The Dergue, with Soviet financial and technical help, in the early months of 1985 had completed a successful offensive that seriously disrupted relief work in TPLF-controlled areas. The MIG bombings of transit camps along the escape route to Sudan and the capture of the Hermi gorge, which linked the densely populated central highlands with western Tigre, trapped thousands of starving peasants in places where no help was available. The towns of Abbi Adi and Sheraro also were taken. Abbi Adi reportedly was bombed on market day, March 1, 1985, and according to eyewitnesses in Sheraro, the hospital was destroyed and the wells were poisoned. Next, Mengistu had to consolidate his battlefield victory, and the Tigre part of the northern initiative that USAID was then pushing on him, as a complement to the cross-border program from Sudan, would help him do just that. Having gotten the Soviets to bankroll the military side of the offensive in Tigre, the Ethiopian leader now got the United States and World Vision to pacify the populations of the newly won areas with grain handouts. As Paul Vallely wrote in The Times of London (June 4, 1985), it amounted to “a bizarre de facto alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union.” Not that USAID or World Vision went to the altar innocently. They were aware that the northern initiative might further the Soviet aim of defeating the TPLF, which, although avowedly Marxist, was fiercely anti-Soviet on account of Moscow’s ties to the Dergue. But that was the price of feeding hungry peasants. The TPLF was not so sentimental. The guerrillas approached the World Vision employees in Alamata as they would have Soviet advisers—through the crosshairs of a rifle.

The media paid scant attention to the Alamata killings. (Blaine Harden’s article in The Washington Post was a notable exception.) But two other events of even greater significance involving the TPLF that occurred around the same time received almost no coverage at all in the United States because they could have been reported only from the TPLF side: the Makelle prison break and the repatriation of eighty thousand refugees in Sudan back to Tigre. Between midnight and 3 a.m. on February 8, 1986, the TPLF stormed the prison at Makelle, the same town where RRC officials had assured throngs of journalists, politicians, and entertainers that the government’s hold over the entire province was secure. The guerrillas claimed to have freed 1,800 prisoners. Without disputing that figure, Western diplomats in Khartoum confirmed that at least seven hundred prisoners escaped, many of whom had been detained for political reasons by the Ethiopian regime for more than a decade. The break was preceded by two diversionary attacks, one on the Makelle airfield and the other on a main road leading out of town. These attacks drew off two brigades of government soldiers. This was a painstakingly planned operation of great cunning and dramatic execution behind enemy lines that demonstrated what Western military analysts already knew: although lacking the equipment and infrastructure development of their Eritrean guerrilla counterparts, the TPLF was still one of the best-trained, nongovernmental fighting forces in the world.

The freed prisoners provided a fount of information about jail conditions in Ethiopia. The Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights sent an Anglo-French legal team, led by Alex Lyon, a former minister in the British Home Office, to take evidence from the former detainees. According to an article by Colin Legum, a noted expert on African affairs, that appeared in the International Herald Tribune (May 20, 1986), “The lawyers found that the civilian population of Tigre were victims of arbitrary arrest and torture, and detained without charge in overcrowded, insanitary conditions. Evidence from people who had been in other prisons showed that conditions in Makelle prison were not exceptional.” Several different methods of torture were employed, which included submersion in a barrel of hot, dirty water and beatings with a leather whip called the “ox penis.” Legum wrote that one prisoner “said he was forced to confess to murder by having a rachet screwed into his hand.” Lassa fever and typhoid reportedly were common.

The same week as the prison break, REST began a three-month program of repatriation of Tigrean refugees from camps in eastern Sudan. It was a benchmark event of epic proportions that signified the end of the famine emergency in northern Ethiopia: 80,000 of the 300,000 Tigreans in the border area were trekking several hundred miles back to their homes in an operation planned by their own relief organizations with little outside help. In political terms, the return exodus was the last in a series of referendums in which a large peasant population, by voting with its feet, expressed absolute fear of the internationally recognized government in Addis Ababa and complete faith in a guerrilla group recognized by nobody. The first round was conducted in late 1984, when 200,000 Tigrean refugees stampeded over the border into Sudan, joining another 100,000 Tigreans already there. Like the Eritreans, the Tigreans were escaping war and drought. They preferred to dodge bombs from MIG runs on refugee columns during the eight-week journey on foot from central Tigre rather than go to nearby government feeding centers for help. Time magazine (January 21, 1985) reported the story of Mohammed Idriss, sixty, and his family of eight.

The feeding centers would give food only to those with identification cards indicating membership in a government peasant association. Because people from TPLF-controlled areas had no such documents, they were denied food and sometimes beaten. For many, if not most, of Tigre’s five million inhabitants, the food that the international community was donating in late 1984 and early 1985 may as well not have been given because it was delivered to the wrong address—that of the Ethiopian government, which was not so much governing Tigre as fighting a war with it. The Reagan administration, in addition to some private charities operating from Khartoum, already was aware of this problem and had begun planning a cross-border feeding program, in cooperation with REST. But others, particularly the United Nations, persisted in believing the Dergue. As late as September 21, 1985, the office of Kurt Jansson, the U.N. emergency coordinator in Addis Ababa, without even consulting REST released a report maintaining that 80 percent of the famine victims in Tigre were receiving help from the RRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Western donor agencies operating from government-held areas. In light of the refugees’ own accounts of what really was happening at government feeding stations, coupled with the fact that the TPLF controlled most of the countryside in the province, the U.N. claim seemed preposterous. As Allen Pizzey of CBS News reported on March 22, 1985, “Three weeks of travel across rebel-held Tigre have shown clearly that the government has no administrative presence… and is not distributing food aid.”

Having escaped to Sudan, the Tigreans entered a new kind of hell. More than one million of Sudan’s 22 million people were refugees, and the Khartoum government—destitute from civil war, drought, and its own corruption and mismanagement—was unable to offer the Tigreans anything except the assurance that they wouldn’t be sent back across the border to Ethiopia. The refugees thus were dependent upon the mercy of international organizations, mainly the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which, having dragged its feet on U.S. government predictions in 1983 of a mass influx of refugees the following year, was ill-prepared for the human flood. The Tigreans were packed into a number of holding camps strung out along a dun-colored moonscape near the towns of Kassala and Gedaref. The largest was Wad Kowli, southeast of Gedaref on the Atbara River, a few miles from the Ethiopian border. According to Sudan Commissioner’s Office of Refugees, there were as many as 90,000 Tigreans at Wad Kowli in early 1985. Gayle Smith, the author of two books on Tigre, who visited the camp in March of that year, said in a telexed report to Grassroots International that the camp presented a “microcosm of an entire society dying out.” More than one hundred people were dying a day of measles, multi-resistant shigella, and a host of other diseases. The daily death rate at the camp was fourteen per 10,000—the highest anywhere in the world, reported UNHCR field officer Jean-Michel Goudstikker. UNHCR explained that due to “a declining and deteriorating supply” of water from the Atbara River, the camp had to be serviced by tanker trucks. The situation was so bad that on February 17, according to Barbara Hendrie, a representative of Grassroots International who was there, Wad Kowli had “one day of surface water left.” The refugees couldn’t even bathe. Hendrie also reported “tremendous shortages of clothing, blankets, cooking utensils and salt and pepper for food.”

The Tigreans were degraded in other ways as well. The refugees’ presence sparked resentment among local Sudanese, who on several occasions stoned whole groups of camp inhabitants. Tigrean women were frequent targets of rape attempts by Sudanese soldiers. The night of February 10, 1986, after men in the camp had tried to help the women resist the soldiers, the army sealed off Wad Kowli and arrested 166 people. All of the men detained received five lashes each, said a UNHCR source. (In a May 16, 1985, dispatch, Paul Vallely quoted a Sudanese official at another camp as saying that “every Ethiopian woman who crosses the border deserves to be raped as the price of admission.”) Therefore, one could hardly blame the fifty-seven thousand Tigreans, who in May 1985, despite continued drought and war conditions in Tigre, elected to return home against the advice of REST and other agencies.

By February 1986, however, drought conditions in western Tigre and parts of central Tigre had improved enough for REST to launch a repatriation program. A large crop in the west the previous spring and the likelihood of early belg (light spring) rains on the eastern escarpment of the central highlands meant that refugees returning to those areas would be able to sustain themselves until the first harvest of maize and sorghum, expected in June. The returning refugees were divided into groups of forty, according to village, and each peasant was given water, 100 grams of sugar, and five days worth of biscuits upon leaving Sudan. In addition, the International Rescue Committee in Wad Kowli distributed chloroquin for use against malaria contracted along the way. The TPLF, in cooperation with REST, had set up relief stations every three days walk, where fresh rations were provided along with medicine for the sick. At the last relief station, tools and seeds were to be distributed for planting. Those who lived in the central highlands had a month of walking ahead of them.

From the moment the Tigreans left the thatched tukuls at Wad Kowli there was no shade. It was a never-ending climb into the highlands. The passage through the vast ocean of dust in northern Gondar was as monotonous and unfriendly as a sea voyage. Some had donkeys. But most slung their sacks and plastic jerry cans on sticks over their shoulders. One old man had a leg injury and could barely walk, yet somehow he was walking. They were all half-naked in their ragged shammas. But this was no march of sorrow. These people were going home and, according to relief officials, were healthier than they had been in years. But because they were not visibly starving, it was not a news story.

I followed the returning refugees across Gondar almost as far as the border with Tigre, riding in a grain convoy that closely paralleled their route. I saw firsthand what food aid specialist Jack Shepherd of the Carnegie Endowment said was unique in the Third World: a guerrilla army that was feeding its people rather than feeding off them.

At dawn, two thousand refugees straggled into the TPLF relief station at Gichew, where I had arrived the night before after a five-hour truck journey from Wad Kowli. I had slept out on the open plain and was awakened in my sleeping bag by the sound of feet pounding nearby. Except for the shrill racket of cicadas, there were no other noises: the refugees were too tired to talk. Gichew was one of the transit camps set up by the TPLF in late 1984 to aid starving peasants escaping to Sudan. Now it was being used for the second time to assist the same people coming back. The site was selected because the thick brush made it hard to spot from the air and the high ground made it difficult to attack. Otherwise, Gichew was indistinguishable from the rest of the Gondar wasteland. My recollections of it are in black and white; drought had drained the color out of the landscape. All the trees looked stunted. Only the termite hills appeared tall (some were as high as six feet). The relief station was manned by sixty TPLF fighters and ten staff members of REST. The commander, Alem Ayel, was twenty-six years old.

The guerrillas doled out water to the refugees from oil drums. The line was silent and orderly. People sought out shade in tukuls and in the folds of the hills. In an underground slate bunker, chloroquin, Tylenol, rehydration salts, antibiotics, children’s multivitamins, and an iron supplement were available. Grain was distributed by the TPLF in the afternoon, and in the evening a cup of flour was given out to each group leader; the flour was supposed to be enough to make dinner for forty. A guerrilla soldier with a notebook went around making sure every group was accounted for. Beads and silver charms dangled from black shoelaces around the women’s necks as they prepared the enjerra. The smoke from the cooking fires at dusk drew a charcoal veil over the darkening tableau. “It is obvious we are afraid our relatives have died of hunger or have been taken by the government soldiers. So we are in a hurry to get back to see how they are,” said Lete Gebreal, thirty-three, of Damo village, which was nearly a month’s walk from Gichew.

It was an eight-hour journey by nighttime convoy from Gichew to Kaza, where the refugees would arrive after another three-day walk. Kaza had been firmly in TPLF hands since early 1984, and 100 guerrillas and REST personnel now occupied the cluster of tukuls on a flat-topped mountain (amba) overlooking a stream bordered by white oleanders. The meager trickle of water and the blooming, poisonous shrubs, along with a pack of colobus monkeys shrieking in the acacia branches, brought a sparkle of life to an otherwise dying landscape. The trees concealed 1,200 50-kilogram bags of U.S.-donated grain from the eyes of Ethiopian pilots.

In addition to being a relief station, Kaza functioned as a hospital and as an orphanage for 112 children whose parents had died of starvation en route to Sudan in 1984. The word “hospital” was misleading because a few basic medicines and bedding for up to 130 people were all that was provided. (In this respect, as in many others, conditions in Tigre were far more primitive than in Eritrea.) Haile Geremesken, the local TPLF commander, said that of the first nine thousand returning refugees who reached Kaza, eight hundred had spent at least one night in the hospital and three had died along the way. He showed me a notebook full of names as proof. This was relatively close to a normal death rate. If the commander’s figures were even partially correct, it meant an extraordinary achievement for REST and the TPLF.

The returning refugees arrived at Kaza one night after plodding through a dust that filled their nostrils and attacked their eyes and throat but was only a few feet away from clear water and oleanders. Although the drought was over, the villages that these refugees were going back to were by no means secure. From the standpoint of the Ethiopian government, these villages were “strategic hamlets” in the middle of a war zone. The government aim had been to depopulate them by starvation and aerial bombardment, thereby driving the people to the main roads and government reception centers, where many were separated from their families, and sent to resettlement camps in the southwest of the country. This policy still was continuing.

The fact that these Tigreans were voluntarily marching back to perhaps the same destiny owed much to the awful conditions in Sudan and to their all-consuming desire to learn the fate of their relatives left behind in Tigre. But the march also required an astonishing degree of faith in the TPLF. Some of these marchers— maybe one thousand of them—actually had been in resettlement camps and were among the lucky few to have escaped to Sudan. They now were completing a circle of migration: from village to government reception center to resettlement camp to safety in Sudan, then north along the Sudanese border to Wad Kowli or one of the other sites near Gedaref or Kassala, and finally back to the same village where the nightmare had started, and where it conceivably would start all over again.

As these refugees filed past with everything they owned tied up in bundles slung over their shoulders, it seemed to me that this repatriation revealed a lot more about the political preferences of a people than did all the rigged and semirigged elections that were forever taking place in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World. It seemed to me that TPLF, upon which these returning refugees in fact were staking their lives, warranted a closer look by U.S. policymakers concerned with turning the tables on a Soviet-backed tyranny whose actions had caused the famine in the first place.

The TPLF was borne out of ethnic conflict and a system of economic exploitation that even the most rapacious Western capitalist barely could imagine. For more than one hundred years, Tigre’s five million people, 70 percent of whom are Christian and speak Tigrinya, have been on a treadmill of war and famine that makes the 42,500-square-mile province (the size of Ohio, Liberia, or East Germany) an environmental disaster zone. In fact, by the second half of the nineteenth century, subsistence-level agriculture was being ravaged by fighting among various feudal armies. The orgy of violence left Menelik, the Amhara negus of Shoa, the most dominant of the warlords. In 1889, he became Emperor Menelik II, succeeding the Tigrean Yohannes IV, who died in a battle with the Sudanese. Tigre bore the brunt of the Amhara emperor’s war with the Italians. In 1896, Menelik led an army of one hundred thousand soldiers northward through Tigre as far as Adowa, where he defeated an Italian force that was poised to expand Italy’s colonial claim beyond Eritrea. In the words of the Minority Rights Group report on Tigre, authored by James Firebrace, Menelik’s “army fed itself from local food supplies leaving grain and seed stocks empty, and slaughtering the oxen used for ploughing. Seven years of famine followed [in Tigre].”

Imperial exploitation intensified under the rule of Menelik’s successor, Haile Selassie, which led to a peasant revolt in 1943 against both the emperor and Tigre’s own feudal aristocracy. The rebellion was put down with the help of a British bombing raid on Makelle, and reprisals were swift in coming. The peasants were disarmed, dispossessed of their land, and burdened by a brutal onslaught of taxation that filled the coffers of the emperor, the local nobility in Tigre, and the Coptic church. There was never any investment from any of these quarters back into the province, which is why there is no industry and almost no working class. There is so little money in circulation that halite (rock salt) is often used as currency. More than 90 percent of the people are peasant farmers, who have overworked the soil merely to eke out a living from it. The result has been five famines in the past thirty years alone. In 1959, 90,000 Tigreans starved to death. In the 1972–1973 period, 200,000 in Tigre and nearby Wollo died.

It was from the exceedingly thin strata of educated people that an underground resistance was formed in the early 1970s, which was active in the overthrow of the emperor. After the coup, the local aristocracy, led by a descendant of Emperor Yohannes IV, Ras Mangasha Seyum, established the Tigre Liberation Front (TLF) to oppose new rulers in Addis Ababa. But as the revolution progressed, the TLF itself became radicalized, adopted a Marxist program, and changed its name to the Tigre People’s Liberation Front. War was declared on the Dergue in February 1975, after it had become clear that Mengistu and his cohorts, although ideologically in step with the TPLF, were bent on the same imperial approach to Tigre as was used by the deposed emperor. As usual in the Third World, Marxism counted for little when pitted against centuries of ethnic hatred.

In typical Ethiopian fashion, the late 1970s in Tigre saw another pageant of internecine bloodletting as macabre as it was incomprehensible, with the TPLF fighting not only the Dergue, but two other Tigrean groups as well: the royalist Ethiopian Democratic Union of Ras Mangasha, and the Marxist Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary party, which was estranged from the TPLF because of hair-splitting disagreements about liberation doctrine. But taking place as they did in the atmosphere of paranoia accompanying the Dergue’s Jacobin reign of terror, these theoretical debates between different sets of hunted extremists led to armed clashes. Thanks partly to help from the Eritrean guerrillas, the TPLF defeated the other groups in 1978, thereby allowing for an expanded war with the Dergue, which, in the early 1980s, equaled anything transpiring in Southeast Asia or Central America for sheer horror.

Firebrace, in the Minority Rights Group report, describes the government’s 1980–1981 offensive against the TPLF.

That offensive was a failure. The next, in western Tigre in early 1983, occurred just after the harvest season in the only part of the province with a grain surplus. As Firebrace related, “Grain was seized, grain stores and fodder supplies burnt, oil presses and mills removed, and whole villages destroyed.” Once more, it was all for naught, as the TPLF regained the area after two months. While relief and rehabilitation aid requested by the government from the U.N. poured into other war-torn provinces during this period, nothing was allocated for Tigre, because 85 percent of the countryside was in guerrilla hands. The legacy of mass destruction combined with neglect triggered the 1984 famine, which most of the media would ascribe to “drought.” For journalists arriving in Addis Ababa direct from Europe and the United States, not only the distant past in Tigre but the recent past too might as well never have existed. The “war”—it rarely got more specific than that one word—was listed as just another reason for the calamity in the north.

Allen Pizzey was one of the few U.S. journalists who traveled in TPLF territory in order to explain the relationship between war and famine. Pizzey reported that “the Ethiopian government calls the rebels terrorists, but here they’re more like Robin Hood figures, protectors of the traders. Almost every teenager in Tigre wants to be a fighter. Recruits come in as fast as refugees stream out.” Although Pizzey’s account reached millions of viewers on CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, it is questionable how much effect the March 22, 1985, report had. It was a one-shot item lost in a barrage of countless other reports about Sudan and Ethiopia that barely mentioned the war and if they did, dismissed both the Eritreans and the Tigreans as “Marxist rebels.”

From a public relations point of view, the TPLF had much more working against it than did the EPLF. With the Eritreans, the problem was mainly one of getting the whole truth out. But the truth about the TPLF, even if one could get it out, was not wholly palatable. Unlike the Eritreans, the Tigrean guerrillas never disowned the Marxist label. In fact, the TPLF underwent a further radicalization in July 1985, when the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigre was established in the “liberated” area. The league’s founding document, which attacked “revisionism of all hues,” evoked the perverse extremism of the Albanian communists. This created another barrier to U.S. support for Tigre at a time when the outside world was just beginning to recognize REST as an exemplary force against famine. But nobody need have been surprised. The TPLF was created out of the same crucible of revolutionary violence as was the Dergue. Language and group loyalty, not ideology, have separated the two. The fact that the TPLF does not share the Dergue’s penchant for indiscriminate brutality may be merely a matter of circumstances; the TPLF does not have to police an unwieldy empire of disparate ethnic groups. The TPLF has only its own peasants to worry about, and its battlefield success partially depends upon their well-being, but the killing of two Ethiopian relief workers in Alamata does indicate what the Tigrean guerrillas are capable of when they are not dealing with their own kind. Although the Eritrean revolt was born during the rule of the emperor, the one in Tigre was very much a child of the revolution.

But the circumstances under which the TPLF operates are not going to change. Tigre and some depopulated areas of Gondar are all the guerrillas want, or ever need, to control. Thus, the issues— for donors interested in famine relief and for strategists interested in knocking a Soviet piece off the board—is how the TPLF fights and how it treats its own people in its own backyard. Marxist pretensions notwithstanding, the TPLF land reform program, the guerrillas’ emphasis on women’s rights, the creation of a rural health service, the building of schools to augment a literacy campaign, and other infrastructure improvements undertaken by the TPLF in the countryside are exactly the kinds of things that USAID encourages every government in Africa to do. “Marxism” in Tigre is—for example—little different than the sum of U.S. government proposals for the development of western Sudan. Although the Sudanese authorities never accepted U.S. advice, the “Marxist” rebels in Tigre have. Since 1975, a veritable societal transformation has taken place. Democratically elected councils at the village level have been set up. Firebrace, in the Minority Rights Group report, noted that “local power has shifted to those traditionally excluded from power—the poor peasants, women and particular groups who experienced discrimination such as Muslims in the highland areas and craftsmen.” According to Jon Bennett, a frequent traveler in the province, writing for the British journal The New Statesman (June 17, 1983), “What is unique here…is the extent to which the TPLF has captured the imagination of the Tigrean peasantry and managed to translate political consensus into participation.” Such policies helped account for why escaped peasants previously victimized by the Dergue in Tigre trusted the TPLF enough to risk going back. However, recent attacks by the TPLF on food convoys and feeding camps have undercut the deservedly good reputation the organization has forged among knowledgeable people. But it is worthwhile to keep in mind that these attacks notwithstanding, the human rights record of the TPLF on the whole has been a great deal better than that of the Dergue.

What the famine emergency revealed, for the few who cared to look, was that in terms of development policy at least, the guerrillas in both Tigre and Eritrea stood alongside the United States, which, by virtue of its massive economic assistance programs, usually has acted in the interests of the African peasantry. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, tended to support urban elites who exploited the peasants. Whatever the case in Nicaragua and El Salvador, in Sudan and Ethiopia at least, the U.S. government was on the right side of a long-brewing historical conflict. Unfortunately, the Reagan administration’s conservative supporters never really emphasized this aspect of the famine story. Nor did they take advantage of opportunities to undermine the Ethiopian government by promoting guerrilla groups whose fighting records have been superior to those of other insurgents whom the administration supported. Conservatives never really focused on the guerrillas because the media didn’t. Although conservatives generally are more critical of the establishment media than are liberals, in the case of the famine conservatives were just as manipulated by the media. The major newspapers, and especially television, determined the agenda for political debate in the United States. Eritrea and Tigre—ravaged by Africa’s bloodiest war and home to half the Ethiopian famine victims—never made it as hot items on the media’s list.