EDF Fighters
By now, the world may have seen visual footage from a very narrow strip of the Front at Egri Mekhel, a spot where Ethiopian soldiers attempted to break through the Eritrean defence line. Earlier in the battle, they had attempted to do the same on the western edge of the flank, but were repulsed.
They tried again on this particular point, presumably because it is flat and their command thought that it would be an easy ride to the scores of tanks and armored vehicles they sent charging. They also sent or drove human beings, tens of thousands of soldiers and civiliansQthe latter to bring in military supplies on donkeys and mules and to take back war booty--, into this same well defended Eritrean position.
The result is too much to even look at, much less understand and describe. Death, even at the hands of God, is awesome and ugly. The human species counts its age in hundreds of thousands of years and still death is an unwelcome stranger to it. We mourn our dear ones and rarely admit our own mortality, and I mean normal, "GodUs will" mortality. We only come to terms with it when it happens.
What I saw on the Tsorona Front on Wednesday is impossible to come to terms with. Wars are always absurd. Unfortunately, we fight and justify them. Even within this absurdity, though, one ought to be able to differentiate the acceptable from the non-acceptable, the normal in the course of war from the abnormal and the civil from the savage. Horrific scene that awaited Journalists
Last week I reported that the TPLF "gained" ten kilometres of Badma land at the rate of two men per metre. This time, its troops were stopped at the Eritrean trenches and they paid 10.000 lives and 63 tanks just to run decimated, wounded and frustrated back to their trenches a few kilometres away. From the piles of corpses that I saw through the length of the kilometre long strip that we could visit, 10.000 dead may be an underestimation. They simply continue in the same gory manner, right, left and forward into the bushes between the two confronting trenches, as far as the eyes can see.
It is a stunning sight whose ugliness has little parallel. Young Eritrean soldiers, their noses stuffed with cotton and cloth to ward-off the stench from the rotting bodies, were busying themselves in their daily chores. I caught hold of one and pointing to the corpses and already smoldered 25 or so tanks, dozers and armed personnel carriers asked, "What is all this?"
He threw up his hands in triumphant resignation and said, "They came to our trenches and our country, what can we do? If they come again, weUll do the same thing. What do they want? But you know, when we see them like this, we feel sorry." He left me to my thoughts and to join his joking and chattering friends, happy in the knowledge that they have done their duty defending the Motherland.
My own feelings were not different from the youngsterUs. Like any Eritrean who loves his country, my first reaction was to heave a tremendous sigh of relief that all those tanks and potential hordes of invasion were stopped in the manner they were. Indeed, what did they want? The trenches are well inside Eritrean. The Eritrean town of Tsorona lay only about fifteen kilometres behind us.
Supposing this rubble had, as was intended, pierced through those defences? Where was it planning to advance if it could? Stop right there? Advance, only to Tsorona or continue on to the Hazemo plains and up the escarpment to the Eritrean plateau...... towards Asmara? We all had heard about this, discussed and debated it, but it seemed so remote a while ago. What has happened at Egri Mekhel the week of the 15th of March must be accepted as conclusive evidence that, denials and platitudes aside, the TPLF is on a course of the invasion of Eritrea. Thus, the relief at the foiled attempt.
After a while, however, relief gives way to a mixture of anger and sadness that the crazy ambition and totally misguided military strategy of a clique in power should be the cause of so much suffering, so much death of its own citizens. It is impossible to stand over the mutilated piles and ask not what in this whole conflict could be worth for them to be lying there unrecognized and unheralded. One also wonders if they had actually any understanding of why they had come. As my fellow visitors and myself were standing there torn between emotions, we could hear Radio EthiopiaUs denials of a defeat at the Tsorona Front from transistor radios blaring from the trenches. It was denying the dead lying right in front of us and the millions of dollars in tanks and bull-dozers twisted, dismembered and partly melted just metres away. It was, in fact, denying there had been a major battle right where we were standing. I wished for a minute that I could resuscitate life back into the miserable piles and tell them what their government was saying. We have heard of cruel wars, where masters and lords have driven hordes of slaves and serfs to their deaths for anything from territorial ambitions to pure pillage. We have also read books and seen movies of killing fields in the great battles that humanity involved itself in. But that was history, the foolhardiness of days gone by.
Sadly, the international community has still not waken up to the reality that the same type of "slave" and "serf"-drivers are occupying the seats of power in Addis Ababa. There can be no other name for political and military leaders who think of their own people in statistical terms alone. Tens of thousands of Ethiopians are lying nameless and faceless all along the zones of conflictQand we in Eritrea have seen this before. We saw it during the Haileselassie years, albeit at a much lesser extent and we saw it again during MengistuUs brutal reign. Throughout most of those two periods, the Eritrean revolutionUs persistent demands that the world takes those regimes for what they actually were, went largely unheeded. It woke up, as it did in the case of Mengistu, when the damage had already been done and those men had fallen from power.
The same scenario is now repeating itself. Only, and no Eritrean ever thought he would live to say this, it is worse even than MengistuUs excesses. For, never in the DergueUs numerous campaigns has anything of the magnitude of Egri Mekhel taken place. This is a massacre of oneUs own soldiers, cynically and willfully planned for territorial gain, in spite of very recent evidence that the probability of attaining the objective was inconceivable. No amount of excuses can ever absolve its perpetrators of full responsibility. As military leaders, they had Ghezagherehlase, Tsorona-1 and Badma to get adequate warnings from.
The international community too needs no more evidence than already exists to draw the necessary conclusions about the intentions of the TPLF regime and to take the appropriate stand on the matter. The carnage at Egri Mekhel is real and the destroyed tanks are also real. The three hundred bodies that a reporter said he counted are those he saw on a hundred-metre strip, not in the whole battlefield. All this is not, as Ethiopian propaganda would like the world to believe, "staged" for media consumption. Eritrean commanders do not have the habit of killing thousands of their own men and destroying twenty of their own tanks just to be on CNN. Military experts too better stop trying to figure out where in modern history so much damage was inflicted on an army in a single day, on a single spot. They will waste their time, as current military history is yet to deal with the TPLF or Weyane factor.
In the meantime, a war that can be stopped by the imposition of a cease-fire and the simple demarcation of borders is taking its human and economic toll on these two neighbouring and friendly peoples. It had been correctly stated at the outset that there can be no winner in this war. For this very reason, no one in Eritrea is gloating over Egri Mekhel, a major military score though it is for Eritrea. If it is any consolation, Eritrean mothers also happen to have enough heart to be shedding a tear or two on behalf of their bereaved Ethiopian counter-parts. There is, thus, an attitude in Eritrea that, while determined to defend the freedom and integrity of the nation at all cost, also gives peace and good-will a chance. The world and the powers that guide it need to explore this dimension for the sake of peace in this unnecessarily troubled region.