I Didn't Do It for You (21 page)

As Spencer noted in his memoirs, the Ethiopian team had succeeded far beyond its own expectations in undermining the work of those aiming for a weak federation. ‘That the final result was one more closely knit than they had intended was the source of some surprise–even to me.'
³⁴
One of Matienzo's last speeches to the Eritrean assembly carries a palpable sense of foreboding: ‘I feel it my duty to sound a word of warning,' said the diplomat, about to start a life in exile in Argentina. ‘The strength of a constitution lies in the strength of a people's desire to respect it, and words mean nothing without the spirit and intention behind them.' ‘I did my best,' he seems to be saying to critics of the future. ‘If the goodwill isn't there, there's nothing more I can do.'

The new constitution was approved by the new Eritrean Assembly on July 10, 1952, and on September 15, British administration of Eritrea came to a formal end. The Emperor cut a symbolic ribbon and crossed the Mareb river as ecstatic highlanders, brilliant in their white
shemmahs
, chanted ‘Mother Ethiopia! Mother Ethiopia!' The party staged to celebrate the event was attended by the man the Emperor, in a classic piece of nepotism, had named to the key post of Crown representative–
Andargachew Messai, his own son-in-law. ‘The Emperor did, I think, abuse his position,' Spencer told me, with a shrug of distaste. ‘But then, you're dealing with a Middle Eastern mentality.'
³⁵
He registered another small, ominous harbinger of what lay ahead. Ethiopia's newspapers did not bother explaining the niceties of the federal relationship to their readers. ‘The Federation was presented to the population simply as “We've won back Eritrea”.'
³⁶
If it isn't the way you want it, behave as though it were, was the tacit message from on high.

The lawyer had done his work superbly. The process of ‘easing into' complete union was already well advanced. Spencer, however, would not be around to see the fall-out of his labours, moving back in 1960 to the US, where he taught international law in Boston. ‘I figured I'd been in Ethiopia long enough and I had a daughter who needed an American education.'
³⁷
In truth, he was worried about political developments in Ethiopia and weary of the constant clashes with the British, French, Soviet and US embassies in Addis, where his knee-jerk belligerence had left him ‘cordially hated'.

Many years after leaving, Spencer would have the novel experience of being denounced at a US press conference by Isaias Afwerki, then a rebel leader, for his role in Eritrea's historic betrayal. He knows what today's Eritrean government thinks of him, but Spencer is not the kind of man to apologize. In an autobiography in which he bitterly berates himself for missing many a trick on Ethiopia's behalf, the one topic on which he never expresses a moment's regret is Eritrean federation. His mind still runs along the worn grooves of post-Second World War thinking, in which strategy is always seen in terms of Fascist ambitions to be thwarted, British imperialism to be quashed, Arab fundamentalism to be stifled and Soviet influence to be fended off. He does not approve of what Haile Selassie did to the Federation after his departure, he says. He
would have advised him to act differently. ‘But that feeling of Eritrean nationhood was not there at the time.'
³⁸

He is probably right. But a man who, by his own account, spent most of his working hours confined to conference halls and cabinet rooms, his social life hobnobbing with Ethiopian aristocrats and foreign diplomats, was never in any position to gauge how ordinary Ethiopians, let alone ordinary Eritreans, really felt. By leaving Addis when he did, he was spared the jarring experience of setting his neat documents against the messy reality of Ethiopian occupation, with its bulldozed villages and public hangings. Distance and time help when it comes to escaping the spectre of regret. Spencer finds recourse in the excuse available to all lawyers granted, for one moment in their lives, the chance to change the world: ‘They were my clients. I had to look at everything from their point of view, even if I didn't always share it. I was their advocate.'
³⁹

Running through Asmara is what must surely be one of the most frequently baptized boulevards in Africa. Its many christenings track the stages of Eritrea's busy history. In Martini's day, it was known as Corso Vittorio Emanuele, after the king who ruled from across the seas. Under the Fascists, it was renamed Viale Mussolini, but when the British took over and taught the Italians to be ashamed of themselves, it became Corso Italia. Under imperial Ethiopian rule, it turned into Haile Selassie Avenue, only to metamorphose into National Avenue under the Derg. This was the street down which rebel tanks, cheered by hysterical Asmarinos, thundered when the EPLF captured the city, a victory parade followed by another, inevitable rebranding as Liberation Avenue.

Lined with cafeterias, banks and grocers, this is the heart of the city, the natural starting point for the evening
passeggiata
in which Asmarinos effortlessly reclaim the thoroughfare from which they were once barred. The Italians planted the boulevard with Canary Palms, which now tower high above pedestrians' heads, giving central Asmara the slightly louche flavour of a
Riviera beach resort, an exotic suggestion of desert vistas and Arab sheikhs. Hidden under the brick and tarmac runs Mai Bella, the river on whose banks a pregnant Queen of Sheba, returning from her fateful tryst with Solomon, is said to have stopped and called for water. This brush with royalty has not saved the river from a sordid fate. It is now a sewer, collecting Asmara's stinking waste and channelling it to the outskirts of town.

At one end of Liberation Avenue lies the Ministry of Education, a massive, prune-coloured Modernist block. It was once the headquarters of the Fascist Party and inside the building a stone staircase bearing a wrought-iron motif of flaming torches rises grandly to the first floor. Open a door and you enter a classical lecture room, with tiered wooden seats and a vaulted ceiling. It is a place full of ghosts, whose whisperings keep lost pigeons fluttering anxiously in the eaves. This was once the meeting place for Eritrea's Assembly–the Baito–and it was here that one of the most humiliating chapters in the country's history took place. Humiliating, because if so many of Eritrea's injuries were inflicted by outsiders, this was an episode in which Eritreans themselves were to be forever implicated, the moment when betrayal took on a sour domestic flavour. The collaborationist sins of the fathers would only be purged by the sacrifices of a new generation of Eritreans.

 

It did not take Haile Selassie long to demonstrate his lack of enthusiasm for federation. Within days of the Emperor's ratification of the new constitution, Moslem residents were complaining that the Baito had allowed the country's flag–blue as the sky, blue in tribute to the UN which had given birth to democratic Eritrea–to disappear from government offices,
now sporting Ethiopian colours. The Imperial Federal Council, the promised ‘organ' meant to smooth out Federal problems, died a quick death, smothered in its cradle. Haile Selassie was so far above ordinary mortals, it emerged, that even the Council's Ethiopian delegates did not have the right to submit proposals unless asked to by the Emperor, and the Emperor, as it happened, did not feel like discussing Federal matters. The Council's Eritrean delegates twiddled their fingers for four months in Addis before returning, ignored and defeated, to Asmara. The Eritrean executive got the same cold-shoulder treatment from the Ethiopians, who ‘never answered letters, never gave answers to specific queries and in fact ignored the Eritrean government', the British consul told London.
¹
As the Baito chairman, Sheikh Ali Redai, aptly put it: ‘A hyena had been put with a goat and the result was obvious.'
²

Crucially, Eritrea's impotence also took economic form. On advice from the withdrawing British administration, the Eritrean government had handed Ethiopia control of Martini's railway, the ropeway, telecommunications and the extensive Italian state properties. The Ethiopians showed much the same cavalier approach to Eritrea's remaining infrastructural heritage as the British had done, moving entire industries south. The ropeway was sold by the Emperor's son-in-law and dismantled, its rusting gantries the only evidence of former greatness. But Ethiopia's most undermining move was to take over the collection of customs duties at Eritrea's ports and then fail to remit Asmara's share, which accounted for up to 60 per cent of Eritrean revenue.
³
Leached of its main source of income, having foolishly surrendered control of its assets, the Eritrean government was soon struggling to pay its civil servants. Haile Selassie was killing the Federation by simply pretending it did not exist.

Squabbling and divided, the Baito often failed to meet at
all, thanks to its increasingly dictatorial chief executive, Tedla Bairu. A committed Unionist, the irascible Bairu seemed bent on destroying the Federation from within, vetoing deputies who did not share his political views, refusing to call cabinet meetings and regularly suspending what he dismissed as an ‘assembly of idiots'
⁴
for months at a time. When deputies dared to voice unhappiness over Ethiopian interference in Eritrean affairs, the Emperor's son-in-law put them firmly in their place. ‘There are no internal or external affairs as far as the office of his Imperial Majesty's representative is concerned, and there will be none in the future,' said the Crown representative. ‘The affairs of Eritrea concern Ethiopia as a whole.'
⁵

For those who did not regard a future under Ethiopian rule as paradise on earth, the atmosphere had turned stifling. Debate itself was becoming increasingly impossible: in 1954, Eritrea's only independent newspaper closed, sued into extinction by the Crown representative. Harassed and threatened–a leading activist, Woldeab Woldemariam, was said to have survived seven attempts on his life–pro-independence campaigners fled the country. The public responded to this steady whittling away of freedoms with petitions, demonstrations and general strikes. But Ethiopia now had 3,000 troops stationed in the territory, and they did not hesitate to use live ammunition on the crowds. ‘Under the Italians you could eat but you could not speak,' Eritreans muttered amongst themselves. ‘Under the British you could speak but not eat. Under the Ethiopians, you can neither speak nor eat.'

Psychologically, politically and economically, the Asmara government was being made to look ridiculous. ‘The adage: “Eritrea is dying on the vine” would still seem, at least to the uninitiate, a valid description of the local situation,' reported Matthew Looram, the US consul to Asmara, in a 1959 telegram back to Washington. ‘The Government, which in effect acts as
a Quisling instrument for the Emperor, is neither trusted nor respected by the people.' Half admiring, half appalled, he added: ‘Machiavelli could well have taken a leaf out of the Ethiopians' book, for it seems to me that they have used extremely astute tactics to date in their gradual takeover of Eritrea.'
⁶
As the 1950s came to a close, the tribal chiefs and aristocrats who sat on the increasingly subservient Baito agreed to formally abandon the Eritrean flag, bowed to a redefinition of the Eritrean government's role as an ‘Eritrean
administration
under Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia' and, in a particularly unpopular ruling, agreed to replace the Eritrean official languages of Tigrinya and Arabic with Ethiopia's Amharic tongue.

In pushing for union, Haile Selassie had enthusiastically applied the stick, while forgetting to dangle a carrot. The seeds of armed revolt were being sown. With their culture denied them and peaceful protest exposed as not only ineffective but dangerous, a group of exiled Moslems met in Cairo to announce the formation of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), committed to winning independence by military means. The first shots in what was to be Africa's longest guerrilla war were fired in 1961 by a well-known former
shifta
chief, who led a band of ELF in a raid on a police unit in the western lowlands. Initially, the movement numbered only a few dozen men, armed with Syrian Kalashnikovs, who had learnt their fighting skills in the Sudanese army. But from such small beginnings, national uprisings grow.

It was against this depressing background that Asfaha Wolde Michael, Bairu's wily successor as chief executive, summoned the Baito members to the vaulted hall off Asmara's central boulevard on November 14, 1962, on what would in future be dubbed ‘the day of mourning'.

They mustered in a mood of uneasy, ominous anticipation. The previous day, Ethiopian troops had staged a show of force
in Asmara's city centre, chanting ‘a bullet for anyone who refuses'. While many of the deputies naively assumed they were being called to debate the budget, the better-informed, warned of what was coming, had tried to skip the event. Some had announced they were on vacation, a handful had actually admitted themselves to hospital, feigning sickness, in a bid to deny Asfaha a quorum. But policemen hauled them from sickbeds and homes, holding them overnight to prevent them leaving town.

Registering that Ethiopian troops had been posted around the building in a way that seemed more intimidating than reassuring, the flustered deputies clattered up the grand staircase and filed into the hall. The doors were closed behind them: no escape now. Without more ado, Asfaha rose to his feet and read out a short statement. Declaring that the notion of a ‘federation' had been imposed on Eritreans as ‘a weapon of disintegration', Asfaha said it was clear that all progress would be stymied as long as two administrations divided Eritrea and Ethiopia. ‘Now therefore, we hereby unanimously resolve that the Federation with all its significance and implications, be definitely abolished from this moment, that from now on we live in a complete Union with our motherland Ethiopia.' After a split-second of stunned silence, there was applause, but Asfaha did not push his chances by risking a vote. Blurry photographs of the event, creased with the years, show the deputies, dressed in white flowing robes and formal business suits, standing stiffly to attention. Their faces are impossible to read.

The Assembly was swiftly declared adjourned and the dazed Baito members were invited to the viceroy's palace to toast the day's work, leaving the hall to its pigeons and its ghosts. Since they had just made themselves redundant, it was the last time they would ever meet together in one place. It had
taken them just half an hour to abrogate an internationally-guaranteed compromise that had been to nobody's liking, abolish the constitution they had sworn to protect and lay the groundwork for war.

The foreign press largely ignored the event. In London,
The Times
, which like other newspapers had dedicated reams of print to the torturous discussions leading up to the Federation, devoted just four paragraphs–what is known in the news trade as a ‘brief'–to its sudden abrogation. Filed by ‘our own correspondent in Addis Ababa', a euphemism for an item almost certainly taken straight from the wire agencies, the story faithfully presented the version of events Haile Selassie wanted the world to believe, repeated to this day by scholars who should know better: Eritrea's Baito had ‘voted unanimously' to abolish the Federation.
⁷
The account telegrammed to Washington by Looram's successor as US consul was more accurate. ‘The “vote by acclamation” was a shoddy comedy, barely disguising the absence of support even on the part of the government-picked Eritrean Assembly,' he reported.
⁸

In Addis, Haile Selassie lost no time in ensuring that a highly dubious piece of lawmaking became set in stone. Both houses of the Ethiopian parliament were convened to pass, with indecent haste, a motion welcoming the Baito's resolution. The 10-year-old Federation was declared terminated, Matienzo's careful work redundant. Airbrushed out of history, Eritrea–reduced to Ethiopia's 14th province–vanished from Africa's atlases. November 16th was declared a national holiday in recognition of the fact that the Emperor, after so many years of striving, had achieved his heart's desire. He had made good Menelik II's blunder. Landlocked Ethiopia had acquired a coastline.

 

Why had the Baito's deputies caved in so meekly? Was it through cowardice, self-interest or did they simply commit the grossest of historical mistakes? Only the individuals themselves knew the answer. But my inquiries met with flummoxed expressions. ‘You're looking for the Baito members? Many of them went abroad, you know, they weren't very popular here. As for the rest, aren't they dead? Some of them were already quite old when they were deputies, and that's fifty years ago.'

It took weeks, but in the end I tracked down the last of the ageing protagonists. Time had whittled away their numbers. Less than a handful remained and most were in no rush to discuss a role they had hoped forgotten. One octogenarian, the well-heeled owner of an Asmara petrol station, backed off from me in his office, shaking his head. ‘It was a very painful period. I'd really rather not talk about it.' Another, sitting small and prickly behind his public notary's desk, radiated defensiveness. ‘It's too easy to judge things with today's eyes. It may look like a huge mistake now, but at the time it was done in good faith,' insisted 76-year-old Araya Hagos, who served as Asfaha's secretary. ‘People thought union was the only way to escape a repressive colonial regime.' As he talked, he became angry. ‘The Emperor behaved like a delinquent, in my view. He was a wicked, wicked man.' He would not say more.

So when I was eventually pointed in the direction of a turquoise villa a stone's throw from the sandals monument, it felt like a breakthrough. Originally built for one of Mussolini's sons, it belonged to Gebreyohannes Tesfamariam, former Minister of Economic Affairs in Eritrea's federal government. Aged 90 and deaf in one ear, Gebreyohannes needed his son on hand to serve as translator and loudspeaker. But as he held forth, gnarled hands clutching a polished cane so tightly it seemed the only thing anchoring his frail body to the floor, it became clear there was nothing wrong with his memory.
Behind him in the gloom of the 1930s lounge hung a portrait of the middle-aged Gebreyohannes in full ministerial regalia of stiff white shirt and black tails. He gazed at the photographer with sad, liquid eyes.