Total victories normally denote the complete encirclement and surrender, routing, annihilation, or destruction of an opposing force. In other words, for there to be total victory on the battlefield, there ought to be, on the other side, a defeated army, broken in material and spirit and submitting to the mercy of a victor. That is not what I found on the Eritrean side of the front -- far from it and quite the opposite.

Throughout the five days I was there, a morally and materially intact Eritrean army was engaged in a seemingly unending series of battles against an Ethiopian side that had been decimated and spent in the process of gaining a strip of Badma land some ten kilometers inside Eritrea. Having mistaken this "gain" for a military upper hand, the latter was attempting to pierce further into Eritrean territory and to belatedly live up to its hasty claim of "total victory." But, it was not getting anywhere. If anything, its unbelievably thoughtless waves of attacks was consistently being repulsed at a human cost that simply defies the imagination. In this particular round, a contest of nerves if I ever saw one, the Eritrean army has maintained its cool and morale. Some may regard its leaving of the trenches as a form of defeat, but one visit to the front indicates that it has definitely rendered meaningless, the TPLF regime's "recapture" of Badma and its environs.

I talked to several members of the Eritrean Defense Forces (EDF) -- from generals down to the rank and file and the "Sawa Kids" of the national service -- about what the retreat meant to them. If there was any bewilderment, frustration or anger when it happened, it had cooled off by the time I met them. There was, instead, a general attitude of composed reflection and an active engagement in a process of coming to grips with and controlling what many saw as a riddle.

And it was a riddle because, by any standard of measurement or stock-taking, they were the ones who had won that particular battle. Veterans of the Eritrean revolution have been recounting, and not without a note of regret, that they have never witnessed so many bodies of Ethiopian soldiers, including those of forcefully conscripted children and the elderly, piled up in one place and as a result to a single, uninterrupted battle. Neither have so many tanks (about fifty so far), trucks and other military hardware been destroyed within the same span of time and space -- all this at minimal cost to the Eritreans.

Why, then, the apparent reversal the so-called retreat? Because, throughout this conflict, the TPLF command has been and still is using its greatest advantage -- i.e., the most callous and reckless sacrifice of its own citizens for even the most minor territorial advance. True, its armed forces have amassed an alarming pile of all sorts of air and ground murderous hardware and they have been unleashing them without much effect, as if they simply pipe them out of Lake Tana. Their attitude towards their own soldiers is even worse. Through the international media, the world has already witnessed the tremendous human loss the regime suffered in early February in the clashes at Ghazagerehlase and Tsorona. Compared to what has been happening in the Badma plains, that was child-play. For, after the most intensive bombardment of an Eritrean position, estimated at times at between 6,000 bombs an hour, Ethiopian brigades are driven by stick, bayonet and machine-gun from behind to occupy it in successive waves -- one gets mowed down to be followed by a second for the same fate, and then a third .... As one Eritrean commander put it, "They are trying to combine modern and sophisticated weapons with pre-World War I assault techniques. They feel that their human resource is limitless. Well, we have fallen back to more defensible positions and our losses simply do not measure up to a small percentage of theirs. If they don't stop and go to the peace table, more of their people will die. Believe me, we are not enjoying this carnage."

And it is this carnage that the TPLF government is calling a total victory. To make a ten-kilometer advance, it has paid at least 20,000 human beings. That means 2,000 per kilometer, or two citizens per metr. Besides, it is not even an advance, as fighting in the area has still been continuing throughout last week, until an apparent stand-off over the past few days. Obviously, this particular Ethiopian offensive has also lost its clout and, of course, some more thousands have died or been incapacitated.

The Ethiopian people, therefore, have been made to celebrate a hollow victory, a sham triumph that totally conceals the real story. This emptiness, this cynicism and shame is now being orchestrated to sound like the Adwa of the 20th Century. If the perpetrators of this farce were the Weyane leadership alone, one could simply ignore the whole exercise as one more lie and deceit in a nauseating series. What surprises me most, is the way several members of the Ethiopian intelligentsia, or what is left of it, is gloating over this latest and, at best for them, inconclusive round of fighting. Some of the more extreme in their number, pseudo-historians and fallen philosophers included, have even started to write obituaries for Eritrea as an independent state. It is amazing how hitherto silent voices are now clamoring to position themselves in a burgeoning or re-kindling anti Eritrea camp. Many of these are people who sat through the Dergue's atrocities over the peoples, not only of Eritrea, but also of Tigrai, Oromia, and wherever else in Ethiopia that regime perpetrated its crimes. Most of them, except for one or two, who have chosen to put all of their eggs in the Weyane basket, are opponents of the TPLF regime and cannot wait to see it go. With very few exceptions, these are people who have been "fighting" an "Ethiopian revolution" from the safe havens of Western capitals, but who jump in whenever someone else's sacrifice brings down a regime they say they oppose. They jumped in from their shelters when Haileselassie fell, but jumped out when the Dergue frowned on them. They jumped in when the Dergue fell, but were jumping out until the TPLF and the EPLF or Tigrai and Eritrea got locked in this senseless conflict, when they decided to stay put. Why? Because that is what they had wanted. What can be more god-sent than your enemies fighting and weakening each other? Here is an opportunity for another jump!

I have no personal joy in saying this, but I find it sad that a wave of opportunism should seize those Ethiopian intellectuals who are prodding the TPLF along this suicidal path. How easy it has become for them to wear a fictitious mantle of democracy and to simply parrot Abbay, Seyoum and Ghebru Asrat's crude and parochial maxims in philosophical language. What kind of a democracy is it, I wonder, that they have out there, where every regional president, government minister, ambassador . . . on down to the minor officials has a Weyane boss under him? Since when and why have these great critics of the TPLF's ethnic-based regional government or federation or whatever it is, acquiesced in a Tigrean domination? No, all this sudden upsurge of support for the Weyane can be nothing but a relapse of the old imperial malaise of the Hailesselasie days, a recurrence of the dream of the 1940's to own Eritrea and its coastline. The Weyane are the tool, the means to that end -- how simplistically they have fallen into a trap, a quagmire.

What is even more amazing and ridiculous is the way these self-serving and opportunistic intellectuals are calling upon the Eritrean intelligentsia to "rise against the EPLF government." It has now become fashionable for them to declare their concern and sympathy for intellectuals "muted" by what they have termed a "repressive government." Eritrean intellectuals are being coaxed into declaring Eritrea as the aggressor in this conflict. They are being courted unabashedly to take up the Ethiopian position on every imagined issue in this conflict -- the Eritrean economy and the nakfa, not TPLF expansionism is the root cause of the war; the map of Eritrea should be changed to accommodate the new map of Tigrai..... need I go on? I understand that some are even demanding that for there to be a cease-fire, Assab should fall under a joint Eri-Ethiopian administration, an Ethiopian naval force should patrol the Eritrean coastline, Eritrean fish should be jointly exploited by both countries, etc. The suggestion is that any self-respecting and democratically-inclined Eritrean should adopt these "recipes" for peace.

Eritreans, intellectuals or otherwise, have the habit of handling their own affairs in their own style and on their schedule -- and this includes the issue of democracy, whatever that term may signify. If the Ethiopian intellectuals I am referring to and their present mentors (God, the number of mentors they have had -- Hailesselasie, Mengistu, and now Meles/Seyoum/Abbay....!) do not like the way things are done in Eritrea, it is simply none of their concern. If change is in order in Eritrea, that decision is purely the business of the Eritrean people. In a conflict of the present type and magnitude, Eritrean intellectuals, regardless of their political inclinations, are bound to unite to defend the independence and sovereignty they paid so much to achieve. That is precisely what they are doing.

So my advice to our detractors is, first, that they should stop gloating over this hollow triumph, this non-victory that they are convinced is a major step in their quest to re-kindle their dreams of Empire. Even arm-chair strategists can, with some research and objective thinking, discover the difference between a "tactical retreat" and a "total victory" on the war front. Second, I would ask them to undertake an investigation into the fate of the tens of thousands of conscripts whose bodies are rotting on the Tsorona and Mereb-Setit fronts. One cannot strut with the "mantle of democracy" on, at the expense of these voiceless victims of unbridled expansionist greed. Third, Eritrean independence may have been a bitter pill to swallow, but there is no way that it can be un-swallowed now. Pursuing this obsession, as I pointed out several months ago in another article (titled "The March of Folly"), is a folly of suicidal proportions. I would advise this group of Ethiopian intellectuals and their new mentors to stop fabricating history once again. Let us face it. Whether Ethiopian scholars and the TPLF leadership like it or not, it was the Eritrean revolution that played the greater role in the demise of the Haileselassie and Mengistu regimes. Why this death-wish is being pursued again beats all of us here -- i.e., those of us with a different perspective of history. There is, as they ought to know, another version of the history even of Ethiopia -- the Paul Henzes and other archaic Ethiopianists or Ethiopists notwithstanding.

It is a pity that we should come down to this -- again. Over the past seven years of peace, broken fences were being mended, old friendships re-discovered and a common fate was being laid out. Back to square one now, only because old desires of Ethiopian domination have re-surfaced and a minority government seeking full acceptance and blinded by its own provincial dreams has unwittingly helped dig its own grave. There is, thus, a fundamental difference of perception here. It is not the Eritrean economy or political system that is at the root of the problem. It is the Ethiopian dream of aggrandizement, the old imperial greed coming back with a new agenda -- the creation of a superpower in the Horn, one complete with satellite sates -- that has become the destabilizing factor on this eve of the new millennium. Peace will only come if this madness ends.

As for their gloat over that costly strip of land around Badma, let me just conclude by saying that, in the course of a war, there is always the risk of having laughed too early. One should always be aware of the possibility of a last laugh by the other side!