Financial Times
June 20, 1998
Foes, then friends, and then foes again. Michela Wrong watches two of the world's poorest countries fight over land and honour
Evening is usually the best time in Asmara, Eritrea's capital. Because it's so far north, sunsets here are not the rushed experience of central Africa. Instead the bright light of the highlands, which has been chapping lips throughout the day, gradually turns soft and orange.
The swallows come out and swoop from villa to villa, and all you can hear, in this city miraculously devoid of the roar of traffic, is the bark of dogs, the murmur of conversation, and the cries of playing children.
But the experience has been spoiled for us. Howling low over the city comes the sound of jet engines, distorted by heat and distance. Immediately, heads crane from windows, pedestrians stop in the streets and people hang out of balconies. Is it one of ours, or one of theirs? Are we about to be bombed or are we safe? Only when that silent question has been answered is it possible to return to watching the World Cup or preparing dinner.
No one knows who made the threat, but most of Asmara's 400,000 residents are convinced that Ethiopia wants to bomb the capital, despite a moratorium on air strikes agreed by both governments in what is now a five-week-old conflict.
They accept their fate with remarkable sangfroid. It's true that since over 2,000 expatriates left two weeks ago, there's something of a Sunday afternoon feel to the place. But the shops on palm-lined Independence Avenue are still open, neatly uniformed pupils still sit their exams and slim young men stroll through the centre during the daily passeggiata, bumping shoulders rhythmically in the traditional greeting.
All this goes on despite the ever worsening news. Fighting at Zalambessa, clashes at Badme, an attack just south of the port of Assab and a constant stream of tanks and trucks taking young fighters and heavy equipment to the front. The sense of unreality is not helped by the fact that even the closest battleground is three hours away, a winding drive through a rugged mountain range so bleak it makes you wonder why anyone would bother to settle Eritrea in the first place, let alone fight over an inaccessible south-western strip.
As in so many wars, it has become impossible to know what is really happening. When there is fighting, Eritrea accuses Ethiopia of launching the attack at 5am - the attacks always seem to start at 5am. Soon after, Ethiopia accuses Eritrea of doing exactly the same but adds for good measure that it has humiliated, decimated and destroyed the Eritrean troops. The Eritreans are usually more laconic in their boasts.
"I was listening to Ethiopian radio. It's terrible the propaganda they are putting out," says Amanuel, a former fighter now working as a taxi driver. "Then I switched on Eritrean radio and the government told us the truth."
It would be nice to share his certainties. Instead, as this border clash turns into fully fledged war, the moral miasma surrounding it lingers. Is plucky little Eritrea fighting to prevent her frontiers being redrawn by an Ethiopia suffering, as one Eritrean internet user put it, from a seven-year itch: the uncontrollable lust for another country's land? Or is an aggressive young nation stepping on her neighbour's toes in the drive to prove her autonomy? There is now far too much testosterone flying through the air to tell.
Suggest the latter here and you risk triggering an attack of apoplexy. "How dare you accuse Eritrea of suffering from small man's syndrome?" a minister shouted down the phone on the line to me. "Do you think we fought 30 years in the bush, with the whole world against us, to have our territory carved up by anyone who comes along? This is an insult to the Eritrean people." Point proven, I felt at the time. But arriving in Asmara the sentiment seems cheap, so deep is the conviction here that Ethiopia is bent on a recolonisation, so genuine the solidarity in the face of adversity.
Historians might trace the roots of the present conflict to the 19th century. The Italian occupiers found a landscape they recognised - the parched mountain ranges of Eritrea resemble the mezzogiorno of Sicily - and a population they could do business with. They created a home away from home. It is still possible, on the leafy verandas of the capital's restaurants, to bump into friendly septuagenarians in three-piece suits and homburgs who reminisce fondly about the Mussolini era.
They left behind Africa's most graceful capital, full of broad boulevards, marble tiling, jewels of Art Deco architecture, barber shops and rickety Fiat Cinquecentos. But they also left a people changed for ever by their contact with the outside world, who no longer identified with Haile Selassie's feudal empire in Ethiopia.
Deny it as they might, Eritreans feel superior to their southern neighbours and the attitude to Tigre, from where Ethiopia's leadership hails, is particularly patronising. The fact that many of Asmara's maids and cleaners come from the province does not help.
"Intellectually, socially, emotionally, the Tigreans aren't capable of ruling Ethiopia," says a government official. "This war is their way of trying to smooth over their internal problems." Ironically, the same argument is made in Addis Ababa about the Eritrean government.
Surprise abroad over the level of hatred suddenly exploding between two movements that together toppled the Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991 is naive. The worst murders happen in families, they say, and central to most mythologies is the story of brothers, best friends, turning on each other from Cain and Abel, to Romulus and Remus, and Julius Caeser and Brutus.
And as Israel and Rwanda have shown, the trouble with the suffering endured by the Eritreans is it creates a sense of extraordinary entitlement. There used to be a character in the Reggie Perrin television series who started every sentence with, "I didn't get where I am today by ..." In Eritrea, a similar refrain crops up. "I didn't spend 30 years fighting in the bush to be pushed around/kept waiting at the bank/be given a parking ticket," it runs.
There is also relentlessness, a sheer mulishness that was born of desperation. Western newspapers have made much of the folly of two of the world's poorest nations - average per capita income of under $200 a year - going back to war. But as the richer African countries have shown, it is the middle classes with videos to steal, premises to burn and businesses to loot, who will tolerate any abuse rather than risk showdown. Those with almost nothing have less to lose.
And if, as one minister told me, your very identity is bound up in a map, and a fairly tiny one at that, dying for a frontier does not seem so absurd. "You can forget the Christian motto about turning the other cheek," says a trader. "The Eritrean approach is, if you so much as brush your fingertips against my face, I will gather up all my resources and come down on you like a thunderbolt."
This response comes from within a country proud of its Orthodox and Moslem traditions - the population is split almost evenly between the two faiths. In keeping with political independence, the Eritrean Orthodox Church split from the Ethiopian Church in 1994, consecrated its own bishops and reaffirmed the belief that it is the genuine Christian article.
E.M. Forster's edict that he would rather die for a friend than for his country, so expressive of western disenchantment, barely gets a hearing here. When word spread that Eritrean artillery had shot down an Ethiopian MiG fighter, instead of hiding away at home, residents poured out of their houses to celebrate and the metal debris was paraded through the streets. "It was like a football crowd. It went on for about two hours," said an onlooker.
The trouble with winning a war against all odds is that it creates a belief in your own invincibility. Ask any Eritrean about the worrying numerical superiority enjoyed by the Ethiopians (in population, about 15 to one) and they wave the problem away. "We will win. We have already won. What can the Ethiopians teach us about fighting?" asks an old man sitting in the Bar Vittoria, where a hissing coffee machine pours out a steady stream of espressos and cappuccinos.
Forgotten are the strategic differences between a guerrilla campaign and regular warfare, which have tripped up many a former rebel movement in their time.
The exasperating self-confidence makes you want to bang heads, shake your interlocutors into the real world, where pride must be swallowed and issues fudged. All the more so because these people are so impressive. Yosief used to cook for the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. He lugged his saucepans over mountains, grabbing what ingredients he found, to feed a guerrilla army.
Cooking at night to avoid Ethiopian bombers, baking bread in piles of stones, he prepared banquets for 2,000-strong international conferences - it was that kind of movement. Now he is ready to shelve his plans to open a catering school and fight if the government decides to mobilise men over the age of 50.
As every day passes, a horrible sense of déjà vu grows. The Eritrean diaspora (California, New York, Rome) has started contributing cash to the war effort, just as it did during the liberation struggle. When an Ethiopian pilot was captured, it turned out he was the same one who had bombed Eritrea under the former regime and was captured and, with much publicity, released.
And just as the world watched indifferently as Eritrea fought for independence for three decades, many Eritreans now feel alone, abandoned by erstwhile friends. The Americans started evacuating before Ethiopians jets had even attacked Asmara. Remaining staff insist there was no tip-off, but no one believes them.
What was new was the sense of siege. Ethiopian warnings that the safety of aircraft bound for Eritrea could not be guaranteed all but halted services. Some residents joke about leaving by camel or taking to the sea. But passenger ships only stop at the Red Sea port of Massawa, a three-hour drive down the escarpment, once every two weeks and it's a 36-hour haul to Jeddah.
Sometimes, you bump into a procession of white-shawled women, waving green fronds and singing as they walk to the Orthodox cathedral to pray for peace. They are not the only ones showing signs of strain. If workmen are still dutifully putting up new housing, planting trees and terracing hillsides, everyone is aware that the painful task of reconstruction is now in jeopardy.
If the mass of the population backs the government, it is possible to find a dissenting voice. "This generation has grown up with war and it has left them deeply embittered," observes a retired businessman, cupping a hearing aid. "They have lost all their skills, all they know how to do is wage war."
The profit motive finds a way of overcoming old antagonisms. At a factory on the airport road, a young manager shakes his head over the growing piles of stock once destined for Ethiopia, and now with nowhere to go. His generation of entrepreneurs, he admits, feels a certain impatience towards the antagonisms built up on the battlefield. "We have to find a solution that allows both of us to save face while yet conceding."