Africa's Forgotten War
The
Economist
May 8 - 14
A
D D I S A B A B A A N D A S M A R A
Unless mediation succeeds,
two countries in north-eastern Africa will resume a pointless war that has already claimed
more lives than the one in Kosovo
At the time, the two governments said little about the May 6th incident. Why should they? They were close allies. As rebel movements, they had fought side by side to overthrow Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopia’s dictator, in 1991. The two leaders, President Issaias Afwerki of Eritrea and Meles Zenawi, the prime minister of Ethiopia, are related. In the past, they had usually settled any problems with a quick telephone call.
The two men had kept in close touch after the defeat of Mr Mengistu in 1991. Two years later, they had finessed the independence of the province of Eritrea against the opposition of many Ethiopians. Moreover, they were sober, thoughtful men—“new leaders of Africa”, Bill Clinton had called them admiringly during his trip to Africa only a month before the incident. Surely they would not let it get out of hand?
But Mr Issaias made a huge mistake. He thought that a brisk showdown would make it clear to the Ethiopians that he would not be pushed around. It was the chance Mr Meles had been looking for—a chance to prove that he was not a puppet of the Eritreans. Within a few days, the two countries were at war. On June 6th, each side bombed the other from the air, Ethiopia attacking the airport of Eritrea’s capital, Asmara, and Eritrea attacking Mekele, hitting a school, accidentally.
In retrospect, it is clear that neither side expected to go to war. Indeed, Ethiopia had cut defence spending from $1.31 billion in 1991 to $124m in 1996 and had drawn up defence plans for all possible contingencies: war with Eritrea was not one of them. But both governments rapidly recruited and rearmed. Ethiopia doubled the size of its army to 200,000. Eritrea called up everyone not in an essential occupation.
America rushed to make peace between its friends. Though it failed, it did bring about a lull of several months, which the two countries used to shop for arms. Flashy fighter aircraft were soon on their way to the Horn of Africa from different parts of the former Soviet Union. Strategic points on the border were fortified with trenches and ramparts. Tank traps were dug and artillery batteries installed.
Fighting resumed on February 6th, at Badme, where the first incident had occurred nine months earlier. Dozens of Ethiopian tanks and tens of thousands of men advanced across the valley towards the Eritrean trenches, where they met a barrage of artillery, mortar-and machinegun-fire. The Eritreans then came out of their trenches to try to surround the attackers in a pincer movement but were themselves caught in the open by a second Ethiopian wave. After three days of fighting in which thousands had been killed or wounded, the Eritreans were forced back some 20 kilometres (12 miles). A month later the Ethiopians tried the same tactics at Tsorona. This time the Eritreans stood firm. They destroyed at least 30 tanks and claim to have killed 10,000 Ethiopians in a 60-hour battle. By now, the war may have claimed as many as 50,000 dead. The battles are few but the casualties many. The death toll is high because the combatants use the weaponry of the Korean war, the tactics of the first world war and the medical treatments of the 19th century. In most modern wars, for every soldier killed, three are wounded. In this war, the ratio is nearer one to one. Unlike the fighting in other parts of Africa, the struggle is not a matter of internal rebellion or ethnic unrest but an old-fashioned war between nation-states.
The fighting has displaced hundreds of thousands of people. They are so poor, and government assistance so meagre, that many, at least of the Ethiopians, may starve this year. There have also been expulsions. About 200,000 people of Eritrean origin remained in Ethiopia after independence; Ethiopia has rounded up more than 20,000 of them (Eritrea says 50,000) and dumped them across the border. Elderly people who have never been to Eritrea have been chucked out, as have women married to Ethiopian men. Eritrean property has been seized, and sold, by the government. Eritrea has not officially deported Ethiopians, but many of them have lost their jobs and gone home. Remarkably, in neither country have the citizens of the other country been attacked. This is so regardless of the poisonous propaganda campaigns by both governments.
Ostensibly, the war is being fought over nothing more than a few hectares of barren
mountain and desert. The border, established nearly 100 years ago between Ethiopia and the
Italian colony of Eritrea, has never been marked on the ground. In the past, for the sake
of convenience, some areas have been administered by the authority on the other side of
the border. Eritrea says that the Ethiopians had been encroaching for months, trying to
exact tax from Eritrean peasants or pushing them off their own land. Ethiopia claims it
had been the traditional administrator in these areas. The two countries had set up a
border commission but it had never got far.
Maps for your choice
In 1997 a map appeared in Ethiopia, apparently commissioned by the Tigrayan provincial
administration. It showed large chunks of Eritrea belonging to Tigray province. This,
according to the Eritreans, proved Ethiopian designs on their territory. Eritrea’s
action in May 1998 was, they say, to protect their threatened citizens. In due course they
want to take the border issue to international arbitration, where Ethiopia can present its
claims; each side will then abide by the ruling.
But does the controversial 1997 map represent Ethiopia’s claims? No, says Mr Meles, it does not. Neither, however, does he accept the border as it appears on maps at the moment. Nor will he say what Ethiopia’s territorial claims are. Eritrea must first promise to withdraw from the territory it seized last year. Then, he says, Ethiopia will go happily to court, present its claims, and accept the ruling. So, apparently, both sides would accept a ruling resulting from international arbitration. All that in theory divides them is the matter of a ceasefire and withdrawal. That this has eluded negotiators for a year suggests that the cause lies deeper. This is confirmed by Mr Meles’s description of the border incident as “Sarajevo 1914. It was an accident waiting to happen.” What then is the true cause of the war?
When Eritrea became independent in 1993, Ethiopia became landlocked. With a population of 60m and few resources—its biggest revenue-earner is coffee, worth about $450m last year—it aimed at self-sufficiency and protection for its meagre industries. Eritrea, a coastal state with only 3.5m people and even fewer resources, aimed at becoming the region’s Singapore. It tried to attract investment to make processed goods for export.
Ethiopia was afraid it would become a pool of cheap labour for Eritrean industry and that its own industries would be vulnerable to cheap Eritrean exports. The government began to impose tariffs. Eritrea increasingly found that the two countries’ common currency, the Ethiopian birr, was overvalued for its exports. Looking back, Mr Issaias and Mr Meles both say “We were too kind.” Each seems to think his country’s generosity was being exploited by the other.
In 1997, Eritrea introduced its own currency, the nacfa. It expected, at launch, a one-to-one exchange rate with the birr, but Ethiopia refused to touch the new currency, insisting that all large transactions should be in dollars. That wrecked commerce between the countries and deepened the gulf between them. Ethiopia also accused the Eritrean oil refinery at Assab of overcharging for its products, and said that Eritrean traders were smuggling coffee across the border and re-exporting it.
By the beginning of last year, Eritrean independence began to look like an amicable divorce that had gone wrong. The separated partners had thought they got on so well that they had not needed to formalise what was whose. Suddenly they began to quarrel about everything.
The core leadership in both countries is drawn from the same basic group of Tigrayan
Christian highlanders: a proud, self-reliant people suspicious of outsiders and as
uncompromising as the mountains around them. Victory in the long war against Mr Mengistu
in these harsh mountains made them even tougher.
Guerrillas into
politicians
The successor governments to the Soviet-backed Mengistu regime were two guerrilla
movements: the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the
Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). Both had been
left-wing Marxist movements; both had been through purges and periods of extreme
ideological disputation. But, emerging as victors in 1991, they turned pragmatic, at least
in their economics. Neither showed much interest in liberal democracy but their political
systems differed.
In Eritrea, the EPLF threw out the defeated Ethiopian army. It then set about establishing a tightly controlled state. Building on Eritrean solidarity, among both fighters and exiles, the country’s leaders tried to extend war-time discipline and the spirit of self-sacrifice to peacetime. Today they tolerate little political freedom, though their control depends more on moral pressure than on repression.
By contrast, when the Tigrayan TPLF guerrillas, dressed in shorts and with their hair long and wild, walked into Addis Ababa eight years ago, the locals feared them as an invading army. The TPLF had originally fought for the independence of Tigray but then set up like-minded movements among other ethnic groups, bringing them all under a national umbrella.
Mr Meles had to find a way of ruling with public consent what he had won by force. The TPLF has retained control, although devolving some power to the regions. To provide a safety-valve, it drew up a constitution which allows, in theory, any region to secede. In practice, none will be able to follow the Eritrean example. Even so, Mr Meles knows he has to maintain a political balance and allow a lot more freedom of expression than exists in Eritrea. Small, neat and highly intelligent (he has taken two degrees since becoming prime minister, passing one with top marks), he might be taken for an academic. But he has a streak of steeliness forged by long years as a guerrilla fighter. He still carries a Kalashnikov bullet in his temple.
Mr Issaias is austere and unpretentious. He drives himself to work in an old car and sends his children to the local state school. But his diffidence hides a truculent pride. He embodies the Eritrean slogan “never kneel down”. He seems, like most Eritreans, to trust only his own countrymen. Also an ex-guerrilla, he does not back off quarrels. He has already launched wars against Sudan and Yemen and fallen out with neighbouring Djibouti. One of his more worrying remarks recently was that he was glad the war with Ethiopia was happening now as his generation (he is 53) was still young enough to fight; that meant the younger “Coca-Cola generation” could learn what Eritrean independence was all about.
Mr Issaias believes Mr Meles’s government is Tigrayan and unpopular, and that other Ethiopians will not fight for it. The war, he says, will end in his overthrow and Ethiopia’s nationalism will fall apart. He is wrong. Mr Meles has never been stronger. The war has given him the perfect chance to prove that he does not take orders from Eritrea and that he is a true Ethiopian.
Although both men profess to want peace, they show no sign of blinking at the prospect of a war that may destroy at least one of their countries, perhaps both. Each man talks nostalgically of the good old days of the war against Mr Mengistu. There are reports from both sides of commanders at the front jingoistically preparing for battle. Nationalism is easily whipped up, playing on a nasty undercurrent of chauvinism, in the media and on the street, on both sides: “They need to be taught a lesson,” “Eritreans always look down on us,” “Tigrayans have an inferiority complex.”
Ethiopia is stronger economically, has better weapons and a much larger population. It would probably win on the battlefield. But then what? Although Mr Meles says he could never restore his relationship with Mr Issaias, he dismisses any thought of trying to take over Eritrea, reversing its independence, or grabbing the port of Assab to get access to the sea. The suggestion is that he would like Mr Issaias overthrown.
America had hoped to use Mr Meles and Mr Issaias as its regional allies against the Islamists in Sudan, whom it accuses of supporting terrorism (but see article). The war has wrecked that plan. Both countries are trying to light fires in the region. Ethiopia has established a link with Sudan, hoping to build an alliance of Eritrean dissidents that would include Islamist groups opposed to Mr Issaias’s government. If that succeeds, it could be dangerous: the Christian-Muslim balance is as delicate in Ethiopia as it is in Eritrea.
This has forced Mr Issaias to make up with Sudan. And he has forged links with another
American bogeyman, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. Eritrea is also trying to arm the Oromo
Liberation Front and the Ogaden National Liberation Front, two movements pledged to
overthrow Mr Meles, based in northern Kenya and western Somalia. Both Ethiopia and Eritrea
are bent on stirring things up in Somalia, a country still torn apart by civil war.
The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) picked up the baton. It reiterated its demand for a withdrawal of Eritrean troops, which would be followed by general demilitarisation of the border. Ethiopia accepted the plan last November. At first, Eritrea kept its options open by seeking clarification on nearly 40 points, but in February, after its defeat at Badme, Eritrea also formally accepted it.
However, the OAU, either through incompetence or through an attempt at creative ambiguity, has given the two governments different interpretations of its own plan. Mr Meles claims it has endorsed his interpretation of the word withdrawal (that Eritrea must get out of all areas occupied since May 1998). Mr Issaias says withdrawal of Eritrean forces refers only to the area around Badme. The OAU has yet to make clear what its plan really says.
Last week a respected UN envoy, Mohammed Sahnoun, took up the challenge, visiting both capitals. If he can keep the two sides talking till the end of May when rain is expected, he could buy a few months’ peace. It is a small, last chance. Neither side shows much sign of wanting to take it
.