By Jonathan Steele

I WAS LYING gravely ill in the flat of a Royal Air Force doctor in Addis Ababa when I first heard someone mention the name of Asrat Woldeyes, or simply Asrat as he was always known. Even in my semi-comatose state, the awe with which his name was used got through to me. “We must see if Asrat is free. He is the best,” a voice said. “Yes,” another chipped in, “Let’s get Jonathan over to the Black Lion.” Was this a pub, I wondered feebly, and who is Asrat?

Having appendicitis is no thrill wherever you are. Getting it in Ethiopia, seven hours’ drive from the nearest properly equipped hospital, makes it even less wise a choice of location. But the three other reporters I was with plied me with enough liquid to avoid total dehydration and we bumped back to the capital city, our famine assignment cast aside by my soft moans of pain.

Luckily for me, with several million people in dire need, Addis Ababa was unusually well-supplied with trained people from all over the world, ranging from nutritionists, paediatricians, and nurses to the RAF general practitioner who was there to help any aircrews if they fell ill while dropping grain to starving villagers in the drought-ridden highlands.

My appendix burst somewhere on the ghastly journey. While they kept me overnight on a drip to give me enough strength for an emergency operation, the discussion in the RAF doctor’s centred on where to send me. Although there was one hospital to which expats usually went for relatively minor problems, no-one doubted the Black Lion hospital was the best for any serious operation, simply because of Professor Asrat. The Black Lion was Addis Ababa’s largest public hospital, a multi-storeyed complex which was always full. Asrat was its chief surgeon as well as being by far and away the country’s best-known doctor, and the doyen of the country’s medical corps.

As was to be expected, the operation went well and as I recuperated in the days that followed I began to learn a little more about the man who had saved my life. He saw me regularly as he did his rounds, but was scrupulously fair in not devoting more time to his only foreign patient than he did to any other. He popped in briefly, inquired how I felt, and once satisfied that there were no problems, moved on.

It was mainly from the British ambassador, Brian Barder, who let me spend the last few days of my recovery in the embassy compound before I flew back to Britain, that I began to learn more about Asrat. He had studied medicine and surgery at Edinburgh University as one of the first Ethiopians to get a foreign degree, I was told. He could have stayed in the West and had a successful career, but was a strong patriot and chose to go home. He quickly rose through the medical faculty at Addis Ababa University while also working at the Black Lion, turning it into a teaching hospital.

Asrat came from the Amhara Christian Žlite which had long run Ethiopia and it was not surprising that he became the favourite doctor of the Emperor Haile Selassie. When the emperor and his entire political entourage were overthrown in 1974 by a group of left-leaning army officers, Asrat was re-confirmed in his university job. They even permitted him to go on treating the 82-year-old ex-monarch, by then a prisoner in his palace. Asrat’s professional competence was too great for the new regime to want to lose his medical knowledge.

After returning to Britain and making a full recovery, I returned to Ethiopia three months later just as the famine was coming under control. I met Asrat briefly to thank him, but he seemed to think it was unnecessary. He had only been doing his duty. We had a drink and parted, and I was soon swept up in other crises, including a six-year stint as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent. With the Soviet Union crumbling there was little time to think about Africa, although when I read in May 1991 that the Ethiopian regime had lost power to a guerrilla army led by Tigreans and Eritreans, the traditional rivals of the Amhara, I did briefly wonder what had happened to Asrat.

Imagine my surprise when I learnt two years ago that he had been arrested and was considered by Amnesty International to be a prisoner of conscience. It turned out that he had decided to take on a political post about a year after the new regime came in. Worried by discrimination against his people, Asrat became chairman of the newly-formed All-Amhara People’s Organisation. This was enough for him to be sacked from his university post, along with 21 other professors.

Worse was to come. He was arrested in 1994 for holding a meeting at the AAPO office in Addis Ababa where he allegedly planned violent attacks against the state. Once in gaol he was tried on two other charges, and by the time I learnt of his difficulties he was facing a fourth set of charges. His supporters said Asrat was a victim of serial injustice, aimed at keeping him in prison for ever by adding new charges every time his previous sentence approached its end.

According to Amnesty, his prison conditions were worse than those of any other detainee. His gaolers feared his powers of argument and refused to let him speak to other prisoners. He was not held in solitary confinement in the physical sense. He slept on a mat on the floor in a barracks-type hall with scores of other detainees. But they were told not to communicate with him, or he with them.

Intrigued, I decided I would try to see Asrat, if only to do whatever I legally could to help him. No-one else in the world has ever so directly ‘saved my life’. The phrase sounds melodramatic. Was there anything I could do for him? The Ethiopian authorities were remarkably straightforward. I did not say I hoped to see Asrat until I had got a visa to enter the country, but they reacted favourably after the new British ambassador, Gordon Wetherell, put the case to the Security Minister soon after I arrived. Here was a British journalist with sentimental reasons for seeing Asrat. Why not let him?

By an irony, Asrat had just been transferred from prison to hospital after complaining of high blood pressure and failing sight in his right eye after a possible mini-stroke. The hospital the regime chose for him was none other than the Black Lion.

It was odd to be climbing the stairs to the eighth floor of the hospital to visit the man who was once its chief surgeon, and who now was a prisoner in the institution he had helped to build up. Six soldiers in khaki uniforms guarded the corridor. Supremely confident, Asrat invited the security man from the ministry who was escorting me to stay in the room. As the conversation moved from polite pleasantries and a discussion of his health to political issues, I saw the strength of character which had put Asrat behind bars and kept his spirits up while there.

“The government allowed us to have an opinion, so I had an opinion. And then this. It happened like a bang. I never dreamt I would be in prison,” he said, when I asked him how his chairmanship of AAPO had landed him in gaol. One of the charges was that he had called for the regime’s violent overthrow. I read the speech before I left London and it was certainly a piece of super-patriotism, praising the way the Amhara had stood up to Italian invasion and suggesting the new Tigrean-dominated regime were foreign occupiers. But it was not a specific call to arms.

Asrat laughed, saying he had always been a man who tried to save life. He had never favoured political violence. He reminded me that the present government, his current gaolers, had been happy to rely on his word when it suited them. The trial of the Dergue, the former regime, was still rumbling on in Addis and Asrat had been summoned from prison to testify in the case against those who had murdered the emperor. They are charged with suffocating the old man with a pillow.

Asrat was one of the last independent people to see him alive. It was about a month before he died. “Then I was sent to the war front as a surgeon on the normal three-week tour of duty. When I got back, I was intending to give the emperor a check-up but my son was upset that I had been away. So I took a long weekend and arranged to go in on Wednesday. On the Tuesday evening I suddenly heard my name being mentioned on the radio. The Dergue were saying they had not been able to find his doctor and the emperor had died. It was as though I was somehow responsible.” When he had last seen him, the emperor was in good health in spite of his age. As Asrat put it, the talk about not being able to find his doctor “was clearly a pretext to cover up the fact he was murdered”.

Asrat’s main differences with the new regime, which he happily expounded even though the security man was still there, were two fold. He did not like the way Eritrea had been allowed to become independent. (Shortly after I saw him, the two countries whose guerrilla armies had been close allies in the struggle against the Dergue, went to war themselves. Many see it as Africa’s most baffling and pointless war, fought by men who were once good friends and for the sake of a few miles of semi-desert.) Asrat also disliked Ethiopia’s new federal system, under which all political parties had to be associated with a region. “The All-Amhara People’s Organisation was designed to combat tribalism but it had to be done under a specific name. We wanted brotherhood for all Ethiopians but it was difficult to stand on a general platform when everyone was put under a different tribe. That was the paradox,” he explained.

Asrat clearly relished talking, and for almost an hour he ranged over the political landscape and his place in it without any visible fear of the government which was keeping him under lock and key. I barely had to prompt him with questions. A week after my first visit I was permitted another conversation. His only companion in his private cell-cum-ward was a short-wave radio on which he listened to the BBC World Service. I brought him some books but his eyesight was poor and he could hardly read.

Other visitors to Ethiopia began to ask to see him, including members of the European Parliament, like Glenys Kinnock. Diplomats from several Western embassies took turns in visiting. I wrote Asrat’s story up in a long piece for the Guardian Weekend magazine but for various internal reasons it was not published until November last year. By then pressure from Amnesty International and various lobby groups was growing. On Christmas Day I received a phone call, saying Asrat was being released on health grounds to get medical attention abroad. Within a few hours he would be on a plane to London.

It was wonderful to visit him on Boxing Day if only for half an hour. Once again he was in hospital, though this time a free man. A dozen people crowded into his room at the Wellington Hospital in north London, and others thronged the lobby. I could see he was indeed a celebrity in his community. Asrat was tired, ill and jet-lagged, but he remained his usual smiling and resilient self.

The next day he flew to the United States to visit relatives and go to the hospital in Texas where he had had bypass surgery many years earlier. All seemed to go well and he was sent home to a nephew in Pennsylvania. Only a few weeks later he complained of pains, was admitted to a local hospital, and died.

It was a sad and sudden end to a story which had seemed to be looking up. At least Asrat died in freedom, though not in the country to which he had given so much. I cannot say I repaid him by saving his life, but if my article helped in the campaign which gave him a few months of liberty, it is more than I expected.

Jonathan Steele is an Assistant Editor of The Guardian and has been a foreign correspondent for roughly thirty years. In 1985 he covered the great famine in Ethiopia.

By Lee Nichols

Ten thousand meters is a pretty long distance to run (6.2 miles, for us Americans). But it’s nothing compared to the distance, both figurative and literal, that separates the lives of Haile Gebreselassie and Leslie Woodhead.

The former is, quite simply, the greatest long-distance runner in history. Standing at only 5’3″, Gebreselassie isn’t someone you would immediately associate with Michael Jordan, but it’s a valid comparison — like Jordan in basketball, Gebreselassie isn’t merely a great athlete. He is one who has completely redefined his sport and set a standard that may not be duplicated for decades.

He has risen from rural poverty in Ethiopia and broken world records at every track distance from 2,000 to 10,000 meters. And not just broken them, but completely smashed them, lowering them not by fractions of a second but down to times considered unthinkable even a decade ago.

In 1992, he won the World Junior Championships (for runners under 20 years old) at both 5,000 and 10,000. The next year, at track & field’s biennial World Championships, he won the 10,000, a feat he would duplicate in 1995 and ’97. He has also won world championships in the wintertime sport of indoor track, at 3,000 meters in 1997 and both 1,500 and 3,000 this year.

And — most importantly to Leslie Woodhead — Gebreselassie, at age 23, was the 10,000 champion at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

Woodhead is also a star, but in the world of documentary filmmaking. The British director, screenwriter, and producer has created films on subjects that are literally all over the map, specializing in documentaries that focus on the daily lives of people in Africa, China, Nepal, and the South Pacific. He spent 20 years shooting five films about the nomadic Mursi people of Ethiopia, which won him the top award of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1992.

Among his most noted works are films about China’s Cultural Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and since the mid-Eighties he has done a series of docs for HBO, including pieces on the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Lockerbie air disaster, and the Soviet shooting of a Korean passenger jet. He is currently the executive producer of dramatized documentaries for HBO.

His previous work in Ethiopia intersected nicely with his current feature film, Endurance. Released by Walt Disney Pictures in limited locations throughout America — including Austin — Endurance is the story of Gebreselassie’s life, from plowing fields and raising cattle in the remote village of Asela to international celebrity as the greatest runner from a region of the world famous for dominating the sport.

Haile Gebreselassie

Woodhead teamed up in 1995 with acclaimed sports documentarian Bud Greenspan, award-winning producer Edward R. Pressman, and The Thin Red Line director Terrence Malick with the intention of doing a documentary about the incredible distance-running traditions of East Africa. It was decided that the film would focus on the winner of the men’s 10,000 in Atlanta, whoever he might be — and he would almost certainly be either Gebreselassie or one of the three Kenyans in the race.

The resulting film is an unusual blend of documentary and not-quite screenplay: The film re-creates Gebreselassie’s childhood using Ethiopian villagers, including many of Gebreselassie’s relatives, not so much acting as simply re-creating the normal activities of their life for the camera. Gebreselassie plays himself as an adult, and the film finishes with Greenspan’s actual footage of the Olympic race.

Speaking to The Austin Chronicle from Holland, Woodhead (who is currently working on a two-hour special for the BBC about the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81), took a few minutes to chat about Endurance.
Austin Chronicle: Of all the topics in the world that you could have picked for a documentary, why this one?

Leslie Woodhead: The original idea was not mine, but Terrence Malick’s, a fellow citizen of yours in Austin. He has a tremendous passion for long-distance running, and he wanted to make a film on why so many come from East Africa. He had always longed to do that. He found my documentaries on East Africa, and got in touch with me and asked if I’d like to direct it. I hadn’t done a cinema documentary before; I’m a TV person.

I’m fascinated by that part of the world, and I’m fascinated by someone who does something we normal humans can’t imagine doing. I got hypnotized by that. The main part of my life has been in ethnographic documentaries, and I’m fascinated by the culture that makes so many great runners. That’s all I had going into it.
AC: Your film topics seem to be all over the map. What causes you to zero in on a certain topic?

LW: I’ve often wondered that myself. My film subjects have been as various as Tony Bennett and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and East African cattle herders and the Srebrenica massacre. I come from a tradition of zeroing in on the particular, and from that we can get the big picture. This subject fits that. I just want to record the years that I’m on the planet, and I’ve been lucky to find people who allow me to do that. I grew up in the British documentary tradition, which makes hundreds of films a year for British television.

Leslie Woodhead

AC: Unlike Europe, the United States is a notoriously weak market for track & field. Americans generally don’t follow the sport except in Olympic years, and the average sports fan over here has never heard of Gebreselassie. Do you have high expectations for this film in the U.S., or are you aiming for bigger success in other countries?

LW: It’s just really difficult to tell. I was surprised in the first place that Terrence wanted to fund it anyway. It’s a strange creature of the community of cinema. I guess I wouldn’t have got it done if not for him. He found people who would enable it to happen. [Eventually, this process led to] Disney Studio chairman Joe Roth, who’s also a running nut. It came down to the passion of a few individuals. What has surprised me is that it has screened to hard-assed documentary crowds at festivals and touched a chord with people who know nothing about running and couldn’t care less about it. They just like the story of overcoming tremendous difficulties. It transcends the specifics of just running. Most who have seen it so far aren’t into running. Somehow, in a way I don’t understand, it touched a chord in various people.
AC:The storytelling is very simple. Is this movie intended more for children, or was that just a particular style you wanted to use?

LW: I am heavily influenced by Robert Flaherty, who pretty much invented documentaries in America in the Twenties. Terrence Malick is also very influenced by him. Without knowing it, it turned into a Flaherty film. Most people can’t imagine such a culture [as rural Ethiopia] with so few material goods, so I wanted to clear out any complex detail that would make it difficult to understand. I wanted them to feel the life rather than have the facts about it.

Haile’s own family played many of the villagers, and they all improvised the dialogue. I wanted them to say things as they saw it, rather than as I saw it. They replicated their own lives that way.
AC: Endurance is really a biography rather than a documentary. Given that your history is in documentaries, what made you want to do it as an acted-out, scripted movie?

LW: There’s no script. When Gebreselassie won the race, we just followed him back to Ethiopia, and he gave his life story back into a tape recorder. We just used headlines into which the locals improvised their own story. It was like filming a documentary, just observing them living their lives, gathering the harvest, tending cattle, and such. Just life going on. Even the funeral scene [for Gebreselassie’s mother, who died of cancer when he was nine], even though there was no body, people went through those events as if they were real, and we just let it go on and took pictures. We didn’t ask them to do anything. It reminded me of the way we do anthropological documentaries. I’m usually doing documentaries of a political nature, so a lot of my life has been spent on documentary re-creations, and this was an intersection of my usual interests, although this was different from anything I’ve done before. I kind of made it up on a daily basis.
AC: How much of a challenge was it to fit the filming in with Gebreselassie’s professional schedule?

LW: It was really difficult. We were lucky, because in the months after the Olympics he took time off. Even so, he kept his training going, morning and afternoons, and we had to film around that. And it was difficult to detain him for filming, but he was very gracious. The slow-motion pace of filming is not natural to someone who runs all the time. It was frustrating for him, but he was also fascinated by it, and had suggestions on how to do it better. His main motivation is patriotic, and he wanted to show that his nation is not only about problems. He wanted people to see the achievement and celebrations that don’t normally reach the outside world. He also wanted to show the documentary in Ethiopia and show his countrymen good news about Ethiopia.

When we did another month of filming in spring of ’97, he was much harder to come by. He was training hard then.
AC:What kind of challenges did filming in rural Ethiopia pose?

LW: It was difficult to bring in the logistical needs of the film crew. We had to make sure equipment wouldn’t be smashed to pieces. They have brutal roads, with lots of dead animals and crazy driving. They [the crew’s Ethiopian handlers] were keen that we wouldn’t travel the roads at night because of bandits, they wanted us to get out before nightfall. Once we didn’t make it, but we didn’t get stopped. It was demanding to get food for the crew and phone lines to Hollywood. It was a constant grind.
AC: Tell me about the difficulties of filming Gebreselassie in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.

LW: He’s the most famous man in Ethiopia. It was like trying to film Paul McCartney in London. We could only film for a little bit before he would be recognized and swarmed with fans.
AC: I read one criticism of Endurance which complained that you didn’t spend enough time on Gebreselassie’s professional career. Why did you run through that portion of his life so fast? Why not mention his successes leading up to that Olympics, and that he was the pre-race favorite?

LW: That’s a fair observation. I was interested in the big sweep. It’s not a sports documentary. It tries to move into different territory, from being a kid in a tough environment to the big podium. To do all of his career just wasn’t the film that we wanted. It’s like attacking Bonnie and Clyde for not doing a social history of the area. It would be tough to cast it in detail.
AC: So you went to Atlanta just looking to film an African winner of the 10,000? Could this movie just as easily have been about Paul Tergat [of Kenya, who won the silver medal]?

LW: Absolutely. In fact, Pressman Films optioned half a dozen runners going in. We met with them, and would have gone with any of them if they had won. I hoped it would be Haile, because we liked him and I knew Ethiopia. I rooted like heck for him.
AC:Did you know anything about Haile’s career before you decided to do this?

LW: No. Absolutely not. I found out about him once I got involved with the story, but I knew nothing of his extraordinary achievements. We worked on the film for nine months before Atlanta, and by then we knew a lot and were learning a lot about long-distance running and learning who the stars were and its history. Just like with our filming in Bosnia, we had to get up to speed in a hurry. One of the fascinating aspects of doing a documentary like this is colliding with an aspect of life that you know nothing about.

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.

Dr. Richard Pankhurst
First published as an article in the Addis Tribune newspaper in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on 19 February 1999.

1 Ancient Times

Since time immemorial the area which is now called Eritrea played an important role within the framework of the wider region which we now know as Ethiopia.

The coastal area represented the external door and the window of much of the Ethiopian region. The area lay off the Red Sea coast, one of the major trade routes of ancient times. Recent Egyptologist studies suggest that the area was probably the celebrated Land of Punt, to which Queen Hatshepsut and other ancient Pharaohs despatched their memorable naval expeditions; and that Puntite seafarers before long were themselves travelling up the Red Sea to Egypt, to participate in international trade.

The coastal area was later likewise visited, shortly before the Christian era, by Ptolemaic naval expeditions, which came in quest of elephants, aptly termed the tanks of the ancient world.

The coastal area, throughout its long history, was in fact closely involved in the foreign trade of the hinterland. Much of the latter’s commerce passed through the Red Sea coast: exports consisted largely of gold, ivory, civet musk and slaves, and the imports of textiles and other manufactured goods.

The area’s proximity to the sea was invaluable in bringing the inhabitants of the area into contact with the outside world, but was at the same time highly disadvantageous, in that the coastal lands were often threatened by foreign interference, invasion, and even occupation.

2 Aksum

Ethiopian history, as we know it, dawns with the emergence of an important centre of civilisation in the north of the country: this civilisation is exemplified by the great temple of Yeha, which dates back to perhaps the sixth or seventh centuries BC.

From this early beginning developed the historical Aksumite state: with its plough agriculture, reservoirs and dams, great palaces, and remarkable stele. One of these obelisks was looted by the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini: it is my earnest hope that the resumption of peace, for which we pray, will be followed by the stele’s long overdue return to Ethiopia, in accordance with international agreement.

But to return to the Aksumite state: there can be no denying that it constituted the origin of the subsequent medieval Ethiopian state. This is evident from the hierarchical, and largely feudal form of government, the system of land tenure with the institutions of gult and rest, and the unique relationship between church and state. The historic continuity between Aksum and medieval Ethiopia is likewise evident architecturally, with the decorative carvings on Aksumite stelae serving as the model for the rock-hewn churches of both Tegray and Lasta, excavated a millennium or so later.

If Aksum was the political centre of this great civilisation, Adulis, in what is now Eritrea, was its principal port. This is apparent from archaeological evidence, as well as from the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Graeco-Egyptian text written in the first century or so of the Christian era.

This relationship between Aksum, the inland capital, and Adulis, the coastal port, set a commercial pattern, which was to continue for centuries, right down, in fact, to modern times. The Ethiopian region throughout this period was thus an economic unity embracing the coast no less than the hinterland.

The coastal region was likewise the territory through which Christianity entered Ethiopia, in the early fourth century, after which Aksum emerged as the religious capital of a realm covering much of the coastlands as well as the interior. Islam penetrated northern Ethiopia by a similar route, three centuries later, when the first Muslims were reportedly welcomed by the Aksumite ruler of the day.

Economic and communicational ties between the hinterland and the coast found expression also in political links. By the early middle ages we find the northern districts of Hamasen and Seraye, two of the principal districts of what is now highland Eritrea, under the rule of the famous Ethiopian Zagwé dynasty.

Ethiopian control of the area continued after the so-called the Solomonic restoration of 1270, when at least four Ethiopian emperors, ‘Amda Seyon, Sayfa Ar’ad, Dawit and Yeshaq, are known to have granted extensive lands to monasteries in both Hamasen and Seraye. It is reported that Emperor Dawit also enrolled men from Hamasen in his imperial army.

3 The Later Middle Ages

Later again, in the fifteenth century, the Ethiopian Emperor Zar’a Ya’qob was in effective control of most, if not all, of the northern region. It was he who established the rank of Bahr Negash, or ruler of the lands beside the bahr, or sea. This title was given to the ruler of the north, who was appointed by the Emperor, and exercised jurisdiction not only over Hamasen and Seraye, but also over the semi-coastal peninsula of Bur. Zar’a Ya’qob allocated sizable stretches of land to the great monasteries of Debra Bizen in Hamasen and Debra Maryam in Seraye. He likewise established military garrisons in Hamasen, doubtless because it lay on the important route to the Red Sea port of Massawa.

Evidence of the significance of the Bahr Negash, and of his position in the hierarchy of Ethiopian government, is preserved by the early sixteenth century Portuguese traveller Francisco Alvares. He indicates that the official was Emperor Lebna Dengel’s uncle, and, like other provincial chiefs, paid the monarch sizable taxes, in horses, as well as in silks and cotton cloth, imported from India. Soldiers from the country of the Bahr Nagash likewise played a prominent role in the Emperor’s army. One of them, Awrai ‘Uthman, was his governor of Ifat and Fatagar.

The sixteenth century was a major turning-point in the history of the northern region. The rise of the Ottoman Empire was followed by the Turkish occupation of Massawa, in 1557, and by a Turkish blockade of the interior. This action was strongly opposed by three Ethiopian emperors: Sarsa Dengel, Za-Dengel, and Susneyos. Sarsa Dengel, who succeeded in driving the invaders to the coast, is said, in his chronicle, to have had strong support from the local Hamasen peasantry, led by a certain ‘Aquba Mika’el. Za-Dengel and Susneyos both later sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to obtain Spanish or Portuguese help in expelling the Turks.

The establishment of Gondar as the capital of the Ethiopian realm in 1636 was yet another landmark in the country’s history, and had its impact also on the lands of the Bahr Negash. Local tradition of Hamasen, recorded in Johannes Kolmodin’s memorable study, the Traditions de Tsazzega et Hazzega, tells of many nobles from the area who travelled to Gondar to serve in the Emperor’s court, and were subsequently appointed by the Ethiopian monarch to positions of status in their localities. When the Turks again attempted to interfere with imports, in the late seventeenth century, Emperor Iyasu I, whose wife Walatta Seyon was a noblewoman of Hamasen, made his way to the area, and broke the blockade.

The on-going relationship between the country of the Bahr Negash and the Christian interior is clearly demonstrated in a late eighteenth century Ethiopian map, found in many manuscripts of the time. It depicts Aksum in the centre, surrounded by twelve districts, the most northerly of which are Seraye, Hamasen, and Bur.

The Ethiopian state, however, was by then beginning to decline, in the era of the masafent, or judges. This was a time when the power of the central state collapsed, and feudal chiefs gained control of the provinces. The country of the Bahr Negash, like other areas, became virtually independent of the capital, but nevertheless remained closely linked to nearby Tegray.

This was scarcely surprising. The people of the area who were economically linked to Tegray, had virtually identical social structure and customs, spoke the same language or languages, mainly Tegrenya, and were affiliated to either of the two great monotheistic faiths: Christianity, mainly in the highlands; and Islam, in the lowlands.

4 Emperors Tewodros and Yohannes

The rise of Emperor Tewodros II, in the second half of the nineteenth century, was another turning-point in Ethiopian history. Like many of his predecessors he considered the country of the Bahr Negash an integral part of Ethiopia, and often declared, “My kingdom stretches to the sea”.

The extent to which the area was in fact still part of Tegray, and hence of Ethiopia, is evident from Tewodros’s tax documents, looted from Maqdala by the British in 1868. These records, which I edited with the late Ato Germa-Sellassie Asfaw, reveal that Tewodros received taxes from the Keren area, of what is now western Eritrea, as well as from the main highland districts: Seraye, Hamasen, and Akala Guzay.

The death of Tewodros was followed by the steady expansion of the Egyptians. Having acquired Massawa from the Ottoman Empire they advanced into Hamasen and Akala Guzay in the north, and Keren in the north-west, as well as Harar in the east. They were, however, defeated by Emperor Yohannes IV, at the battles of Gundat and Gura, in 1875 and 1876 respectively.

Yohannes, like Tewodros before him, often declared that his empire stretched as far as the coast, and his notable commander, Ras Alula, actually had his headquarters at Asmara, which was shortly to become the capital of the Italian colony of Eritrea.

Emperor Yohannes’ opportunity to regain access to the sea came in the early 1880s when the British and Egyptians needed Ethiopia’s help in rescuing Anglo-Egyptian garrisons besieged in Sudan as a result of the Mahdist revolution. Yohannes agreed to help, but insisted that the Egyptians should return to Ethiopia the territories they had recently acquired in the Keren area. He also asked for control of Massawa. His first demand was accepted, but as for the port the British Government agreed merely to promise free transit “under British protection”, for Ethiopian goods, including arms and ammunition.

A treaty embodying these principles was signed on 3 June 1884. Its preamble stated that it bound not only the signatories, but also their “heirs, and successors”. Ras Alula thereupon relieved six garrisons: the only ones in fact saved from the Mahdists.

Having obtained what they wanted from Yohannes the British Government arranged for the Italians, whom they regarded as a useful counter-balance to the French – their main rivals in the Scramble for Africa – to take over Massawa. The Italians thereupon seized the port, on 5 February 1885.

The treaty, which was supposedly to bind not only the signatories, but also their “heirs, and successors”, thus endured for only nine months!

A.B. Wylde, a sometime British consul for the Red Sea area, commented:

“Look at our behaviour to King Johannes from any point of view and it will not show one ray of honesty, and to my mind it is one of the worst bits of business out of many we have been guilty of in Africa… England made use of King Johannes as long as he was of any service, and then threw him over to the tender mercies of Italy, who went to Massowah under our auspices with the intention of taking territory that belonged to our ally, and allowed them to destroy all the promises England had solemnly made King Johannes after he had faithfully carried out his part of the agreement. The fact is not known to the British public, and I wish it was not true for our credit’s sake, but unfortunately it is, and it reads like one of the vilest bits of treachery that has been committed in Africa or India in the eighteenth century”.

5 Ras Alula, Dogali, and Adwa

The Italians, having gained a foothold at Massawa, soon attempted, like the Turks and Egyptians before them, to advance inland. Within two years they began to penetrate into the Ethiopian interior, but were defeated by Ras Alula in 1887. The engagement was fought at Dogali, only about 25 kilometres from the coast – an indication of the limited extent of Italian penetration up to that time, and of the fact that Ethiopia then still extended to virtually within sight of the sea.

The Italians, however, bided their time. Two years later Emperor Yohannes was killed at Metemma, fighting against the Mahdists from Sudan. Ethiopia was struck at the same time by two major calamities: a drought and a cattle plague. The resultant famine, perhaps unprecedented in the country’s history, lasted for three years, and was followed by several epidemics.

The Italians seized this opportunity to march inland once more. Finding no organised opposition they swept forward to occupy Asmara and Keren, after which, at the beginning of 1890, they formally established a colony which they named Eritrea. This they immediately fortified, rendering it impregnable against attack from the south, as Wylde observed.

The core of the colony comprised the fertile highland provinces, without which such a polity would scarcely have been worth occupying, as well as the western lowlands, the ports of Massawa and Asab, acquired by Italy in 1885 and 1869 respectively; and, between them, a narrow coastal strip of largely Afar-inhabited territory. The remarkably long southern frontier with Ethiopia was, of course, entirely arbitrary.

Opposition to Italian rule flared up almost immediately afterwards, with the rebellion, in 1894, of Batha Hagos, a local chief from Akala Guzay. His insurrection marked the beginning of another Italian advance inland. Mounted from Eritrea, it took the Italian invaders, and their Eritrean colonial troops, into much of Tegray. The campaign culminated, however, in Emperor Menilek’s resounding victory at the battle of Adwa, in March 1896.

Despite this victory, the Ethiopian ruler was in an unenviable position. His large army, assembled from distant parts of the country ,was by then starving, and his lines of communication over-extended. Though he had defeated a relatively small Italian colonial force, he was scarcely in a position to fight a new campaign, should the Italians have decided to wage a major war of revenge. He had in any case no possibility of capturing Massawa, which was linked to the mainland only by a narrow, and easily defensible, causeway. The result was that Menilek, like Yohannes after his no less memorable victory at Gudat twenty years earlier, was not in a position to drive the invaders into the sea. Thus was it that the Italians retained what they chose to term their “first born” colony.

6 The Rise of Fascism

The Italians, after their defeat at Adwa, took little interest in Ethiopia or Eritrea, until after the rise of Fascism, in 1922. When two years later Ras Tafari Makonnen, the future Emperor Haile Sellassie, travelled to Paris, Rome and London, in an effort to obtain access to the sea for Ethiopia, they received him warmly. Later, in 1928, Italy agreed to grant Ethiopia part of the port of Asab as a free port. Mussolini, however subsequently decided, in the early 1930s, to invade Ethiopia, to avenge Adwa, and to win Italy “a place in the African sun”. It was only then that development on any scale began in Eritrea. Even so, it was largely restricted to the building of military roads, airports, hospitals, and naval installations.

Little or nothing was done for the education of the so-called “native population”. Many young Eritreans accordingly escaped to Ethiopia, to benefit from Ethiopian Government schooling in the country or abroad, and later joined Emperor Haile Sellassie’s service. They included Lorenzo Taezaz and Blatta Efrem Tewelde Medhen, two of Ethiopia’s leading officials of the time – and many others.

7 The Fascist Invasion, and Occupation

In the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia, which began in October 1935, Eritrean banda, or “native troops”, as the Italians called them, constituted a large proportion of the invading army. A few patriotic Eritreans, however, deserted. They joined the Ethiopian forces, and played a major role for example in the famous Black Lion resistance organisation. Two Eritreans, Abraha Debotch and Moges Asgedom, subsequently undertook an historic attempt on the life of the Fascist Viceroy Graziani, which was followed by the three-day Addis Ababa massacre of February 1937; while a third Eritrean, Zeray Deres, later carried out a one-man pro-Ethiopian demonstration in Rome, when the looted statue of the Lion of Judah was unveiled in that city.

Eritrea had meanwhile featured in the Hoare-Laval plan, put forward by the British and French leaders in December 1935, ostensibly as a “compromise” between Fascist Italy and Ethiopia. This plan, which was rejected by both parties, granted Mussolini an immense stretch of Ethiopian territory, but proposed in return that Ethiopia be granted access to the sea, through a strip of Eritrea adjacent to French Somaliland, and including Asab.

The ensuing Fascist occupation of Ethiopia was followed by the beginnings of light industry in Eritrea, set up largely to meet the needs of the Italian East African empire as a whole. This period also witnessed the development of Asab port; and the administrative annexation of the whole of Tegray to Eritrea. Also worthy of mention was the enactment by Fascist Italy of a series of racial decrees, which were without parallel until the establishment of the South African apartheid regime a decade later. These laws, introduced for the so-called “defence” of the Italian race, applied to Eritrea, as well as Ethiopia, and the rest of the Italian empire.

The establishment of the Italian East African Empire, which was followed, after Mussolini’s entry into the European war in June 1940 by the Italian seizure of British Somaliland, led to the creation of a vast East African Empire. Centred in Addis Ababa, though with a still only rudimentary road network, it extended from Eritrea, through Ethiopia, to Italian Somalia; and controlled no less than six ports: Massawa, Asab, Zeyla, Berbera, Mogadishu and Kismayu.

This empire crumbled as a direct result of Mussolini’s declaration of war on Britain and France, which led to British intervention, and the speedy collapse of Fascist power.

8 The Post-War Settlement

It may be interesting at this point to contrast the decolonisation of the Fascist empire, which took place in the 1940s, when the colonial powers were still strong, with the liberation, two decades later, of most other European colonies. The latter colonies were liberated as single units. The liberation of the Italian East African Empire, which the Fascists had ruled as a single entity, was, on the contrary effected piece-meal, and resulted in the fragmentation of the territory once more into three political entities: Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. Each emerged to independence separately, and at a different time. This militated against the maintenance of regional unity, which the Italians had established.

Ethiopia, liberated with the help of its own Patriots in 1941, was not considered a victim nation restored to freedom, but an Italian, or enemy, territory occupied by British troops. Partial British military occupation continued for several years. The British did not allow the country a fully independent government until the conclusion of the Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement of December 1944. The Ogaden and Reserved Area, amounting to almost a quarter of the country, were likewise kept under British occupation until July 1948. Ethiopia’s freedom of action, after liberation from Italian rule, was thus curtailed for almost seven years.

A solution to the future of Eritrea was also inordinately delayed. The British Government, to encourage desertions among Eritrean “native troops”, had dropped leaflets in 1941, during the fighting, at Keren and elsewhere. They contained texts such as the following:

“You people who wish to live under the flag of His Imperial Majesty, Haile Sellassie I, and have your own flag, we give you our word, you shall be allowed to choose what government you desire”.

Many Eritreans hearkened to such words, as George Steer reports in his book Sealed and Delivered, and defected from the Italian colonial army.

Despite these promises Eritrea was placed under a separate British military administration. This was at the beginning remarkably strict, and retained the Fascist racial laws for at least four years. During this time a spontaneous Eritrean movement for “reunion” with Ethiopia emerged, at first under the cover of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Eritrea. This was the earliest, and for almost a decade, the strongest of the Eritrean political parties.

It was during this time too that the British Military Administration undertook extensive dismantling of the Eritrean ports.

Discussion on the future of the ex-colony was postponed until September 1945, when the Foreign Ministers of the five Great Powers, Britain, France, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, discussed the matter, but failed to come to any conclusion.

A Four Power Inquiry Commission, on which the Chinese declined to participate, was eventually sent to Eritrea in 1947. It found the population divided into three main factions: pro-Ethiopian Unionists, for the most part Christians of the highlands, who demanded “reunion” with Ethiopia; adherents of a Muslim League strongly opposed to such a union; and members of a Pro-Italia Party, many of them Italian pensioners, who advocated the return of Italian rule.

The Commissioners, whose findings reflected the political biases of their respective governments, differed in their proposals. The British and Americans favoured the union of most of Eritrea with Ethiopia, except for the western province, which they wished to incorporate in the then Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The French and Russians by contrast proposed that the ex-colony should be placed under United Nations Trusteeship, leading to independence after five years.

The Four Powers being unable to agree, the issue was referred to the United Nations, which despatched a second Commission of Inquiry to Eritrea in 1950. This Commission, which represented five countries, found the Eritrean public by then grouped into two factions: the Unionists on the one side, and an Independence Block, formed by a coalition of the Muslim League and the Pro-Italia Party, on the other.

The Commissioners, like their predecessors, came out with differing proposals. Those of Burma and South Africa, urged that Eritrea should be federated with Ethiopia as a self-governing unit “under the sovereignty of the Ethiopian crown”; Guatemala and Pakistan wanted to put the territory under United Nations Trusteeship, to be followed by independence after ten years; while Norway advocated the outright union of Eritrea to Ethiopia.

The United Nations, considering the reported wishes of the Eritrean population, as well as the conclusions of three out of the five groups of Commissioners, finally decided, at the end of 1950, that Eritrea be federated with Ethiopia, under the Ethiopian Crown. An Eritrean Assembly was thereupon elected, under United Nations auspices, and chose the Unionist leader, Tedla Bairu, as its Chief Executive. An Eritrean Constitution was likewise drafted, and approved by the Assembly, in 1952.

This first Eritrean settlement, that of Federation, with which I am presently concerned, had taken no less than eleven years to achieve.

These long delays in re-establishing Ethiopian independence, and in settling the future of Eritrea, were deplorable, in that they wasted valuable time, and effort, which could have been better been spent on overcoming technological backwardness, and conquering disease and illiteracy.

So much for what we may call the first Eritrean Settlement, of 1952, with which I conclude my study. I leave it to the next speakers to take the chronicle forward to later times:

* to the story of the Federation, and Eritrea’s subsequent incorporation in Ethiopia;
* the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974;
* rebellion and civil war; the military victory of EPLF;
* the declaration of Eritrean independence; and
* the present conflict.

9 And what of the future?

When the bloodshed is over, and the scars begin to heal, and probably even sooner, it will be necessary to look to the future with new, and wiser, eyes. It is important to remember that the two countries of the Ethiopian region, divided by an artificial frontier, and years of civil war, as well as by the Peace Settlement of 1991, share a common millennial-old history, and form part of the same civilisation. Recognising that the economies of what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea have been linked since time immemorial, and that the two countries are bound together by innumerable racial ties, it should not be beyond the ingenuity of the peoples of this part of the Horn of Africa to devise a mutually acceptable framework, and the sooner they begin to think about this the better. The viability, development, and prosperity of the two states are inter-dependent, and the political and economic structures of the future should take this into account.