I Didn't Do It for You (22 page)

He'd entered politics as a student, a devoted advocate of the Unionist cause, and swiftly climbed the political rungs, eventually achieving the Ethiopian title ‘
Dejasmatch
' (‘Honoured'), one notch down from ‘
Ras
' (‘Duke'). But he began entertaining doubts about the merits of the Unionist cause early on, Gebreyohannes wanted me to know. As Eritrea's post-war economic crisis deepened, Unionists in the Baito had argued ever more forcefully in favour of annexation. As long as it remained semi-independent, Eritrea would not benefit fully from Ethiopian investment, planning and jobs, they said. The logic worked with deputies who never strayed south, who had built up fantastical images of life across the border. Used to complaining about the Italians, they had failed to register how thoroughly European colonialism had transformed their country, pulling it far ahead of Ethiopia. As a minister, however, Gebreyohannes travelled far more than his colleagues, and the trips to Ethiopia opened his eyes. ‘I could see the poverty, the general backwardness and I knew about the corruption and poor administration. I came to realize that uniting with Ethiopia would not bring tangible benefits, because things in Eritrea were a lot better than in Ethiopia.'

He passed on his doubts to Unionist deputies. But Gebreyohannes' voice was drowned out as a formidable quartet–Asfaha, Baito vice-chairman Dimetros Gebre Mariam, police commissioner Tedla Ogbit, and the new Crown representative, General Abiyi Abebe–launched a concerted campaign to persuade the Baito to agree to dissolution. ‘There were some threats. Mostly, they tried to persuade the deputies it would be in Eritrea's best interests if they united with Ethiopia.' The
argument of national interest lent a spurious gloss to a decision in which the all-too-human yearning for personal advancement clearly played its part. The Baito deputies, said Gebreyohannes, were promised land, property and key posts in the Ethiopian administration if they agreed to smooth the way. If they played ball, they would never want for money again, for the Emperor had agreed to pay their salaries for the rest of their lives.

One by one, amenable deputies were called to the palace, where they put their signatures to a document agreeing to the Federation's abrogation. ‘The whole process took about a month.' The key November 14 meeting, at which dissolution was formally announced, was only called when 51 of the Baito's 68 members had signed. By tackling the deputies individually, Asfaha had softened up his audience, playing on each man's weaknesses while avoiding the dangers of open debate. The document, with its 51 signatures, allowed the chief executive to argue that, despite the failure to hold a vote, the motion had the backing of 75 per cent of Baito members–a perfect three-quarters majority.

Once the deed was done, it did not take long for the deputies to regret their actions, said Gebreyohannes. If they received their 30 pieces of silver–‘some salaries are still being paid to this day'–that was the only aspect of the bargain Haile Selassie honoured. ‘The Ethiopians had made so many promises about building schools, dams and clinics. None of that materialized. They promised land and positions of authority, but with a very few exceptions, those promises were not kept. At that stage, I realized that these people were liars and cheats, and we had made a pact with a power that would not keep its word.' Unionist hopes, he maintained, had died as factories were moved south, Ethiopians were sent to fill government posts in Asmara and key administrative jobs were transferred to Addis.

Gebreyohannes went on to hold two ministerial portfolios
in the Addis government. Looking back, he said, he felt he should have resigned, although it would have been no more than a gesture. ‘Politically it would have made no difference. Eritrea was already in a trap and it could not extricate itself. Nothing any individual could have done would have made any difference. But resigning would have given me some personal gratification.' How did he judge his former colleagues, the Baito deputies? ‘I feel pity for their human weakness. They were naive. It wasn't obvious to them what the result of their decision that fateful day would be. If the deputies had known what was going to happen, they would have acted differently. Many people make mistakes in their lives.'

A leading Unionist who had opposed annexation, a minister with no power to influence events, a man who felt sorry but, by his own account, no sense of personal responsibility–my fragile host had clearly not wasted his time in politics when it came to learning how to sidestep blame. He had resorted to the arguments used since time immemorial by those who belatedly register their small, self-interested actions have allowed a great, overarching injustice to occur. ‘It would have happened anyway', ‘We were just cogs in a giant machine', ‘If I hadn't gone along with it, I would have become another victim.' The standard excuses of those who feel destiny, in forcing them to choose between the roles of hero or traitor, has placed too heavy a burden on the shoulders of ordinary men. Hindsight, unforgiving as a prison spotlight, had pinned him and his colleagues against a wall and exposed their weaknesses for all eternity.

There was another reason, I came to realize, why the Baito members refused to acknowledge a sense of guilt. During the grim years of the Armed Struggle, every Eritrean family paid a price, whether measured in slaughtered sons and daughters, years in detention or blighted prospects. In later life,
Gebreyohannes himself would become a passionate advocate for direct talks with the EPLF, a stance that won him a seven-year jail sentence from an Addis government that did not believe in negotiating with ‘bandits'. ‘The old guys feel they have nothing to apologize for, because they suffered so much afterwards,' explained a historian friend. ‘They feel they paid their dues.' Had Gebreyohannes seen his time in prison as a form of atonement, an act of expiation washing clean a sullied conscience? I would have liked to ask him, but when I next returned to Asmara, I learnt that the old man had died.

It was an approach that held little water with the last participant in the ‘day of mourning' I tracked down. In his legal chambers on Liberation Avenue, Dr Yohanes Berhane, a mere youngster at 73, seemed as quietly furious today as on the morning he was called as a young judge to bear witness to the historic events in the assembly hall. Wearing a silk-embroidered shirt and neatly-knotted tie, Dr Berhane belonged to a community of wizened Asmarinos who got up in the morning, put on their pin-striped suits, picked up their Borsalino hats and walked to wood-panelled offices where there was nothing for them to do. Younger partners now ran their businesses, but they were fighting the good fight, determined to keep up appearances.

Dr Berhane had the clipped delivery of the lawman who sees no need to waste words, but emotion ran just below the surface. Despite his supposed neutrality, Dr Yohanes had been disgusted by what he had seen. Afraid to voice his feelings in front of Ethiopian troops, he had stalked off, refusing to join the others at the palace for champagne. ‘It was an abuse of power, you know, they were not supposed to betray us. They had sworn to uphold the Federation.' From then on, he was to snub the Baito members–‘they made themselves a laughing stock'–not an easy feat to pull off in a city Asmara's size. As for acts
of expiation, he had no time for them. ‘There may be parliamentarians who regretted it afterwards, I wouldn't know. I did not talk to them. I had a grudge against them.'

Through fear and greed, naivety and laziness, the Baito deputies had betrayed their own. Their children would not lightly forgive them, and the rebel movement that sprang up would contain within it a strong element of youthful disgust for a generation regarded as corrupted. But Eritreans who hated the idea of union with Ethiopia clung to a last hope of rescue. They had not forgotten the stipulation Matienzo had made a decade earlier, the formal undertaking Spencer and Aklilou had sought in vain to have dropped from the UN Commissioner's final report. There lay Eritrea's guarantees, spelt out in black and white. The Federation could not be altered or abolished without the UN General Assembly first being ‘seized' of the matter. Since the UN had brought about the Federation, only the UN could destroy it.

There is a bitter little story that does the rounds in Eritrea. Like the ‘I didn't do it for you, nigger' anecdote it goes–whether true or invented–straight to the heart of the way Eritreans came to regard the outside world. When the embryonic rebel movement was engaged in its first serious firefight with Ethiopian forces on a hill outside Asmara, an old man approached the young men crouched behind their guns. ‘Just keep shooting,' he told them. ‘If we can only keep this up for 48 hours, the UN will come in and sort everything out.'

 

Unbeknown to ordinary Eritreans, the UN and its key member nations had already signalled that they took the Federation no more seriously than Haile Selassie. Writing in 1953 to the British ambassador, a Foreign Office employee was toe-curlingly frank about London's faith in the arrangement. ‘I think I
can say that we never really in our hearts expected the exact United Nations solution to last in the long run,' he said. ‘The important thing was to have a solution with some chance of success which would release us from the task of administering indefinitely a territory whose inhabitants did not want us to rule them indefinitely. Such a solution having been reached, our concern was that there should not be an immediate breakdown for which we could be blamed.'
⁹

The following year, an exchange of letters between the British registrar of the UN Tribunal in Eritrea and Andrew Cordier, assistant to the UN Secretary-General, was even more revealing. The registrar, Albert Reid, comes across as a self-important busybody, puffed up by his role as head of the UN's only remaining body in Asmara, but what he had to report was important. There was a growing rivalry, he warned, between Federal and Eritrean law courts over their respective fields of competence. The passage of time was throwing up more and more ambiguities in the constitution over where Eritrea's autonomy ended and the Emperor's sovereignty began. ‘I feel I should draw your attention to the growing belief…that eventually the Eritrean question will again have to come before the General Assembly,' he said. Cordier's irritated response suggests that if he ever bothered to read the documents forwarded to him through the years by Schmidt and Matienzo, he had certainly not retained any detail. ‘You should scrupulously avoid creating any impression whatsoever that the United Nations has any interest in the political situation within the Federation,' he warned. ‘There now exists no basis on which the United Nations can show any interest in the political problems of Eritrea and the Union. Although the United Nations played the decisive role in the drafting of the Eritrean Constitution…that job has been completed to the satisfaction of the General Assembly, and that item has been removed from the agenda.'
¹⁰

Legally, Cordier was in the wrong, but when you are the boss, that doesn't really matter. Only two years after Matienzo left Asmara, congratulating himself on a job well done, there was the sound of an organization washing its hands.

Eritrea's anti-Unionists never got to read these frank exchanges. Blissfully unaware of just how keen the UN was to forget Eritrea, demonstrating a touching belief in the sanctity of international commitments, they sent increasingly frantic messages to the UN's New York offices as the Baito's powers were curbed, asking for Matienzo's undertaking to be enforced. Signed by unhappy Moslem district chiefs, disappointed Christian notables, members of the Baito and high-profile activists who had fled the country, the appeals flew thick and fast across the Atlantic.

Merely filing these petitions exposed Eritreans to enormous risk. After exiled campaigner Mohamed Omar Kadi went to New York in October 1957 to present a 72-page denunciation of Ethiopian policy, he made the mistake of returning home. He was promptly sentenced to 10 years in jail for bringing the Ethiopian government into disrepute. Four-year sentences were handed out to two Moslem League leaders who sent a telegram to the UN the following year; other petitioners were demoted from their high-level government jobs.
¹¹
Determined to crush dissent in its infancy, Addis went so far as to ask the UN to supply it with the identities of those signing the petitions, the better, presumably, to effect a crackdown. The request was refused by the UN's legal adviser, on the grounds that Ethiopia had clearly violated the spirit of the Federal agreement and it was ‘not clear', to use his delicate phrase, what it intended doing with the information.
¹²

The Eritreans risked their necks. They complained in the 1950s, when the Federation first came under assault, they filed petitions in the 1960s, when the Federation was abolished and
they protested in the 1970s, when the civil war was well under way and the complainants had joined the rebel movements. By the 1980s, they had become more sophisticated, and an EPLF representative buzzed around the official heads of mission at UN headquarters in New York, handing out memos and leaflets, occasionally being arrested by UN police after protests by the Ethiopian delegation.
¹³
It was all for nothing. Occasionally, visiting Eritrean delegations received sympathetic hearings from Middle East representatives at the UN and won a little coverage in the US media. But since Eritrea had officially ceased to exist, however illegally, its case could only be discussed in the General Assembly if either Ethiopia or some powerful sponsor nation wanted the topic broached.

It never happened. In the giant red tomes of the UN Yearbook, which list the subjects placed on the General Assembly's agenda for debate, ‘Eritrea' last appears in the index in 1957 and then vanishes, not reappearing again for 35 long, blood-spattered years. The country and its citizens had, as far as the UN was concerned, been expunged from the record. ‘Who, after all, is the UN?' Chet Crocker, former US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, rhetorically asks today. ‘The UN is not the General Assembly. It is the Permanent Five and we are the Permanent Five, we, the Brits, the French, the Soviets and the Chinese. And we weren't about to start unravelling an African state.'
¹⁴
The powerful nations, for reasons that will soon become apparent, did not want the subject raised.