Justin Pearce travelled to the Ethiopian province of Tigray, a hot spot in the country’s border conflict with Eritrea
The colonel sits in a cabin lined with plastic grain sacks (“net contents 100kg”) and decorated with paintings of the Ethiopian kings who kept the Italians at bay in the 19th century.
“The moment our sovereignity was violated I can say with confidence that the entire Ethiopian people rose up willing to die for their country,” says the colonel. “This comes from a history of people who have not been conquered ever. We come from that background and culture.”
His cabin, built of timber and branches, sits on a low hill above the Badme plain – the stretch of bushveld which earlier this year saw one of the bloodiest battles since World War II as the Ethiopian army fought, trench by trench, to expel the Eritrean army from disputed territory which the Eritreans had occupied in May 1998.
The colonel will not reveal his name, but manages to look secretly thrilled when a fellow journalist dubs him “the liberator of Badme”.
Ethiopia’s status as the one African kingdom which managed to avoid the European carve-up of the late 19th century is a continuing source of national pride. True, Italy managed a five-year incursion into Ethiopia during World War II, but Ethiopians dismiss this as “the fascist occupation”, a mere historical blip.
This time, the enemy is not a conquering empire but a fledgling nation of three million people to Ethiopia’s 60-million. And, in Badme at any rate, the Ethiopians are once again in control of the disputed village. Some sources say they have gone further, making a pre-emptive push deep into Eritrean territory. As we approach Badme village there is no sense that we are anywhere near a front line, despite most maps putting the settlement almost on the border.
No civilians live in Badme any more – unless you count the few prostitutes who comprise the military entertainment corps. The Ethiopians say landmines are keeping the farmers out of the fields – the occasional lonely plume of sorghum is the only clue that this was ever agricultural land. A vine, heavy with green squash, winds around the thatched roof of one house. Soldiers loiter and smoke in the street, lounge in the shade of the low buildings. The doors are chalked with graffiti, one English phrase standing out among the Ethiopian script: “We have desaedid to follow Yesus.” A brown goat peers into an abandoned home. From the gloomy interior a white goat stares back. I pick up a corroding cartridge shell as a souvenir.
Around the town, every clearing reveals a greasy tank, the muzzle of its gun wrapped in hessian. Water trucks rumble along the roads, slaking the thirst of an army in an area where the rivers flow for only a few months each year. Green ammunition chests are strewn across a stony hillside. A few hundred soldiers sit shoulder to shoulder under a shelter built of branches, a rare respite from the 35C heat.
In the bush some hundred metres off the road, an intact scalp of hair and a military uniform sprawled on the sand mark the passing of a soldier – one soldier among the tens of thousands who are believed to have died in the battle of Badme – his flesh long since decayed.
Funeral wreaths are sold on the streets in Addis Ababa – on Churchill Avenue, the main potholed boulevard where cattle have near misses with bright-blue minibus taxis and squadrons of little boys are ever on the alert to scrub the pavement mud off pedestrians’ shoes. The wreaths are great shield-shaped confections made of orange marigolds, with crinkly coloured paper forming a purple border and a magenta cross in the middle. Ethiopia is a devoutly Christian country.
“Lots of people dying?” I ask the vendor.
“Yes, a lot of people dying.”
“Why?”
“HIV.”
“What about the war?”
“No Ethiopian soldiers die in the war. Only Eritreans die in the war.”
Addis Ababa is as far from the front line as Bloemfontein is from Beit Bridge. From the capital to the war zone takes a two-day bus journey during which you are either zigzagging up the side of a mountain or zigzagging down the side of the mountain. Terraced hillsides of grain give way to alpine meadows, and then banana groves. Priests are dotted along the roadside with silver crosses and embroidered umbrellas. As the bus slows for a precipitous corner, children run along side with handfuls of brightly scrubbed carrots, or pea pods still attached to stems – padkos.
So the distant war breeds its own myths in Addis – and the most popular justifications concern the Eritrean President, Isaias Afwerki, about whom everyone has a story to tell.
“Isaias smokes pot.” This matter-of-fact statement comes from Daniel, one of the teenage wideboys who try to make a fast birr by showing ferenji (whites) the way to where they were going anyway, and then tagging along muttering about needing to buy school books.
In a bar in Piazza, the old Italian quarter of the capital, an American- educated telecommunications engineer lowers his voice conspiratorially. “You know, Isaias is a bit fucked in the head.” He leans closer, over his mug of pale draft St Giorgis beer. “He had yellow fever. It did something to his brain.”
You only have to read the Ethiopian press to realise where these ideas come from.
“The proverbial king of Asmara goes bananas” was the headline on a characteristic piece of analysis in the government-run Ethiopian Herald. “The story goes these days he [Isaias] has even stopped taking any medication that would otherwise help him restrain from going naked in public,” the article continued.
But scurrillous rumours about a neighbouring president seem redundant once Eritrea is in your field of vision. We stand on the hill above Zalambessa, a town currently held by Eritrea, which the Ethiopians want back. To our left are the bizzare domes, peaks and flat-tops of the Adwa mountains. In front of us, the Ethiopians’ battle plan is laid out as if on a map. The regional commander looks through his binoculars. “Those tin roofs you see behind the town are in Eritrea,” he admits. “But the town itself is Ethiopian.”
The current line of control is marked out in parallel lines of trenches, only 200m apart, in front of the town.
“Last week they were using loudspeakers to call our soldiers to come over to their side,” the commander says. Here they speak the same language on both sides of the border – Tigrinya, incomprehensible to the Amharic speakers of central Ethiopia. We’re in Tigray – Ethiopia’s northern most province – and from our hilltop we have only the commander’s word for where Tigray rightfully ends and Eritrea begins.
The border is the result of a treaty brokered a century ago between Ethiopia’s king Menelik II and the Italian government, which had colonised present- day Eritrea. In Addis Ababa, Menelik is remembered as the man who kept the Italians out of Ethiopia. To many Tigreans, he is the man who gave away a large chunk of Tigray to appease the Italians.
The links between Tigray and Eritrea go back more than 3 000 years. They were tied together in the oldest known civilisation in sub-Saharan Africa – the kingdom centred on Aksum, a town in the cool and fertile Tigrean highlands but still close enough to the coast of modern-day Eritrea to be able to take advantage of the trading opportunities provided by the Red Sea.
Over the centuries, the centre of power in Ethiopia shifted southwards. With Italy stripped of its colonies following World War II, emperor Haile Selassie succeeded in reincorporating Eritrea into Ethiopia, but Tigray and Eritrea remained two remote northern provinces. It was here that the rebellion grew against Mengistu Haile Mariam, the brutal dictator who had overthrown the emperor in 1974. By the late 1980s, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) had seized control of much of their respective provinces. They fought together for different causes: the Eritreans had their eye on independence, the Tigreans realised they had the strength to be the new ruling elite in the rump of Ethiopia.
With the fall of Mengistu in 1993, both achieved their aims – the divorce was amicable until the Eritreans asserted a little more economic independence than the Ethiopians would have liked. And the Tigrean regional government – not the Ethiopian central government- published a map of the province on which the borders upset the Eritreans greatly. The result: a Tigrinya-speaking prime minister in Addis Ababa at war with a Tigrinya-speaking president in Asmara.
Abeba Gebre Selassie (50) lived through the time when the EPLF and TPLF were fighting together. “Our children and the Eritrean fighters were covered with the same shroud,” she recalls.
Now she lives in a shack made of plastic sheeting. She left her village of Gerhu Sernay when the Eritreans moved their forces in. “To see the tanks rolling into the land of those who fought for Eritrean freedom -that’s very hurtful.”
Abeba has been chosen by our Tigrean guide and interpreter to speak to the journalists on behalf of the refugee community, so no one expects her political analysis of the situation to be objective. But the tears that roll silently, one down each cheek, are genuine.
The Ethiopian military still retains something of its guerrilla roots. Over their khakis the men wear the patterned Indonesian cloths inherited from the woyane – the TPLF fighters – which serve as turban or sweatband or shawl, depending on the weather. They march with plenty of purpose but none of the four- square rhythm of more conventional armies.
“You are a soldier!” calls one as I puff and pant in the thin air 3 000m above sea level, trying to keep up with the column on a training exercise. I make a shooting gesture with my zoom lens. Soldiers laugh.
The village of Fitsie, a few kilometres from the Zalambessa front line, has all but become a military camp. The civilians come back every Saturday, to trade in salt, coffee, grains, embroidered cloth, plastic shoes, T-shirts with pictures of Ronaldo. But they are outnumbered by the soldiers, who have turned the local bar into an officer’s mess. Inside, a picture of another warrior king overlooks an espresso machine designed along the lines of a jukebox.
At Ayder Primary School they keep their bomb in an unused classroom. Even in Mekelle, the Tigrean provincial capital, 200km from the front line, you can’t ignore the war. The bomb was a cluster bomb that fell last year on the school, killing more than 50 people. In an ad hoc school museum like no other, they still have its grey fibreglass shell, split open like a pea pod, and the remains of the bomblets that were packed inside. On the next table are schoolbooks ripped almost in two by a very sharp flying object. There’s a piece of purple nylon bearing the words “World Cup France 98”. It was once part of a child’s rucksack. Now it’s charred at the edges.
In another room, children in bright blue uniforms take turns reading for teacher while the sun shines through the hole in the roof made by the bomb. Gidena Abay (10) lowers his pants to show the mangled scars on his backside where shrapnel penetrated his flesh.
Once a backwater, Mekelle is now trying hard to assert its status as capital of Ethiopia’s top province. Camels still trek into town bearing salt to market from the Danakil desert. But they trek past a hotel, a hospital, a bank designed on a monumental scale with the round- topped pillars that recall the obelisks of ancient Aksum. Dominating the skyline is the memorial to the TPLF’s victory over Mengistu – a structure that wouldn’t look out of place in Welkom.
And the camels trek past the flat-roofed bars and hotels where the owners have paid their own homage to the current conflict. Bar Badme. The Sunset Hotel – “Sunset” being the code name for the operation that pushed the Eritreans out of Badme. Bar SU makes its intentions even clearer, with its hand-painted sign of a Russian Sukhov fighter jet. Inside are posters advertising Tigrean historical sites, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. Incense and roasting coffee beans smoke on a brazier. Grass and yellow flowers are strewn over the white vinyl floor.
I’m drinking with a Tigrean called Tekele who works for an orphanage where children are sponsored by unseen foster parents in Germany.
The bar’s owner, a woman with gold earrings and permed hair, brings our bottled beers.
“I named it Bar SU because those were the planes that beat the Eritreans.”
Very soon she brings two more beers. “We say in Tigray, ‘Your mother has two breasts,'” says Tekele. “That means you cannot drink only once.”
I leave Mekelle by plane. The airport is a corrugated-iron shed, but the foundations of what looks like another neo-Aksumite edifice are already in place alongside it.
Time for the body search. I take out my pocket knife – not allowed, I could use it to hijack the plane – and then, with trepidation, the bullet from my pocket.
Sheepish grin. “It’s from the battle of Badme.”
The security guy gives a slightly superior smile, and sends a colleague to fetch his keyring. From it dangles an unidentifiable but businesslike metal shape.
“That’s part of the Eritrean Mig-29 we shot down.”