By David Hirst in Tsorona, on the Eritrean-Ethiopian border
Guardian

Six weeks after the battle of Tsorona, the bloodiest yet of this desert ‘border’ war, Ethiopian soldiers still lie unburied on the baking plain, just yards from Eritrean trenches; an occasional breeze, otherwise welcome, brings only the stench of decomposition.

A fifth of Eritrean combatants are women. ‘I was born in Addis Ababa [the Ethiopian capital],’ said Agib Haile, 21. ‘Ethiopians are my friends. I love them so much. It was horrible.’

The horror, it seems, was less in what Eritreans themselves suffered – though she lost her closest friend – than in what they inflicted on the enemy.

The Ethiopian commanders’ strategy was simple. Deploying tens of thousands of barely trained recruits along a 3-mile front, they drove them forward, wave upon wave, with the sole mission of blowing themselves up on minefields until they had cleared a path to the Eritrean front line for better trained infantry, mechanised forces and armour.

In the third or fourth wave, about 5,000 peasants came with them, their mules and donkeys bearing food and ammunition for an Ethiopian breakthrough.

It didn’t work. The doomed men hardly raised their weapons, but linked hands in a despairing communal solace in the face of certain death from four sources: mines, perfectly aimed artillery, the trenches and their own officers in the rear, who shot them if they turned and ran.

This was the horror of which Ms Haile and her companions spoke, of mowing down the oncoming horde till their Kalashnikovs became too hot to hold, their fingers raw from unclipping grenades.

Hidden agenda emerges

It is not really a ‘border’ war at all. Eritreans have long suspected a broader ‘hidden agenda’. The evidence for at least a steadily unfolding incremental agenda grows increasingly plausible. The chief impulse behind it is Tigrayan ethno-regional nationalism: the attempt of a small component of the multi-ethnic Ethiopian state to assert itself, at the expense not only of neighbouring Eritrea but all other nationalities inside it.

Eritreans and Tigrayans together brought down the Ethiopian Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991. The Eritreans opted for their long-cherished goal of secession. The Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) seized power in Addis Ababa.

But that decision to stay within the Ethiopian polity was at odds with the goal of Eritrean-style independence that the TPLF had long proclaimed. It never formally repudiated its 1976 ‘independence’ manifesto, under which Tigray was to have access to the sea. Although it was not spelled out, that access could only be via Eritrean territory.

The collapse of the Mengistu regime was so complete that, with Eritrean help, the Tigrayans could take over and dominate the Ethiopian state. They ended the ‘chauvinist’ supremacy of ethnic Amharans through whom the Emperor Haile Selassie and then Mengistu had ruled.

In theory they replaced it with ‘unity based on equality’. In practice their multi-party system, constructed on rigidly ethnic lines, was but a thin democratic facade for a Tigrayan supremacy that was even more extreme than that of the Amharans.

‘The essence of democracy is majority rule,’ said a former ambassador to Addis Ababa. ‘But here we have 4 million Tigrayans lording it over 18 million Amharans, and 20 million Oromos – always the most oppressed.’

Tigrayans dominated the administration, security services, police and army. Bitter memories of Amharan ‘chauvinism’ seemed to pervade and envenom their new sense of mastery.

The Ethiopian state in their hands, they persisted, if surreptitiously, with a Tigrayan agenda. The right of secession was enshrined in the constitution while they diverted state resources to their own people and region, and enlarged Tigray province at the expense of others.

In 1997, when the border troubles with Eritrea began, this marked a new threshold in the unfolding agenda. The TPLF published a new ‘political map’ of Tigray that incorporated some of the territories – Eritrean according to sacrosanct colonial boundaries – over which the two states are now at war.

Though they were allies during their common ‘liberation’ struggle, the Tigrayans harbour a traditional animosity towards the Eritreans which came out with crude vehemence in semi-official rhetoric. They accused the Eritreans of looking down on them – which many do.

All-out war looming, Tigrayans mobilised the Ethiopian state on their behalf. The army, overwhelmingly Tigrayan, was vastly enlarged, to some 250,000 men, with the recruitment of other nationalities.

Mengistu’s Amharan generals were released from prison, and Amharan officers re-enlisted. But Tigrayans still furnish 80% of officers; other than as ‘advisers’, there are few Amharans above the rank of captain.

Politically, they adopted the full pan-Ethiopianist discourse, in a so far largely successful attempt to win over the Amharans – many of whom were never reconciled to the loss of Eritrea – as their new allies of convenience.

By the time the war resumed in February, on a larger scale, Tigrayans had begun to speak openly of bringing down the regime of President Isaias Afewerki and replacing it with a ‘transitional government’ drawn from a small dissident group defeated by the president’s followers early in the liberation struggle.

Here, at Tsorona, it was no longer a question of border claims. Tsorona was the natural pathway to the Eritrean capital, Asmara. Prisoners of war say they were given instructions on how to get there. Obviously, with a puppet regime installed in Asmara, the TPLF could have imposed what is probably its maximalist territorial agenda – access to the sea at the port of Assab – while gratifying the pan-Ethiopian irredentism of the Amharans. It would have been a great triumph.

Threat of losing face

But Eritrea, with its superior military skills, has so far foiled such ambitions. Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, and his TPLF face a dilemma: to retreat with grievous loss of face – within Tigray and the rest of Ethiopia – or pursue the war with the risk of greater setbacks. They still seem bent on the second course.

Nothing illustrates its unsustainability like the horrors of Tsorona. If the conduct of war is a measure of a government’s fitness and ability to rule, then Tsorona is a terrible indictment of the TPLF. It was Oromo peasants it selected as human minesweepers, and Tigrayan officers who shot them from the rear. Yet it showed hardly less contempt for its own people. Local Tigrayan villagers were pressed into that suicidal baggage train, and mainly Tigrayan soldiers died in the tanks that were entrusted to no other nationality.

Not surprisingly, resentments are reported to be deep and growing. It is far easier for Eritrea to exploit the simmering hatreds of oppressed Ethiopian nationalities than for Ethiopia to exploit a discredited, unrepresentative Eritrean opposition. With the supply of arms to Oromos and others, it has apparently begun doing so.

If, under international pressure, the TPLF compromises, it could, Eritreans believe, save itself and Tigrayan ascendancy over the Ethiopian state; if it does not, sooner or later Eritrea is likely once more to act as a catalyst of great upheavals within its giant neighbour.