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1 Nationalism, the 1998–2000 Ethiopia–Eritrea war and the denationalization of ‘Eritreans’
To understand why Ethiopia and Eritrea expelled, or created the conditions conducive to the flight of, tens of thousands of individuals from their territories it is necessary to consider the historical and political relations between the two liberation fronts who, as erstwhile comrades in arms against the Derg, fought a bitter war against each other between 1998 and 2000.
The first section, ‘Seeing the present though the past’, assesses the historical relationship between the EPLF and TPLF from the late 1980s onwards to the outbreak of war between Ethiopia and Eritrea in May 1998. I focus on the political understandings that underpinned their joint military operations against the Derg and their failure to deal with growing political and economic differences between 1991 and 1998, which directly contributed to war in May 1998. The second section, ‘The “enemy within”’, examines Ethiopia’s treatment of her ethnic ‘Eritrean’ nationals. I begin by setting out the experience of an estimated 75,000 persons who were arrested and expelled from the country between June 1998 and March 2002; I then examine the situation of the remaining ‘Eritreans’ – variously estimated at 75–200,000 people – who were denationalized by decree and forced to apply for permission to remain.
Seeing the present though the past: History, nationalism and identity
Western intervention in Eritrea and Ethiopia began in earnest in the 19th century, following Egyptian attempts to control the port of Massawa on the Red Sea coast between 1820 and the late 1870s. In an attempt to curtail French ambitions Britain encouraged Italy to take over Massawa in 1885, following which Italy sought to annex land claimed by Ethiopia. Following its defeat by Ethiopian forces in 1896, Italy negotiated successive treaties with Ethiopia – in 1900, 1902 and 1908 – to establish the border between its colony (Eritrea) and Ethiopia. Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and occupied it until 1941 when a joint Ethiopian–British force defeated Italian forces, thereby allowing Haile Selassie to reoccupy the throne. Following Italy’s defeat, Eritrea was administered by Britain under a UN mandate until 1952 when, following a controversial referendum, the UN decided that Eritrea should be federated with Ethiopia.
In 1962 Haile Selassie formally incorporated Eritrea into Ethiopia, an act which alienated substantial sections of Eritrea’s population and contributed directly to the rise of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and later the EPLF. Despite occupying Eritrea militarily from 1962 onwards, Ethiopia failed to destroy the ELF and the EPLF (despite internecine conflict between the two fronts in the 1970s and early 1980s). Ethiopia’s ability to subjugate Eritrea was undermined by the rise of armed opposition movements in Tigray (the TPLF), the military overthrow of Haile Selassie in 1975, and the 1976 war with Somalia (which invaded the Ogaden in support of the Western Somali Liberation Front).
In the Horn ‘history’ has a Janus-like quality and has been selectively used by nationalists who have ‘mined’ the past – which they see as a repository of cultural exemplars (Smith 1996: 450) – to identify a ‘common’ language, shared symbols and values and political ‘myths’ to create a new ‘nation’ (Baxter 1994; Alemseged Abbay 1997). Ethno-nationalists in Ethiopia and Eritrea have used history as a resource and as a tool to mobilize support around their idea of the nation, which is said to possess an ‘authentic’ national culture that is worth defending. This process is especially evident in Tigray and Eritrea, where many individuals share a common language, kinship and culture that remains important today (Alemseged Abbay 1997, Tronvoll 1999: 105). Indeed the leadership of the two fronts are both Tigrayan and they ‘issue from tightly-knit elite groups with a tradition of authoritarian rule and (ethnic) group cohesion’ (Abbink 1998: 558).
The EPLF developed out of the ELF, which was a Muslim-based organization that drew its initial support from the north-western lowlands. Internal divisions within the ELF, in particular its hostility to growing numbers of recruits from the Christian highlands, lay the basis for the emergence of a secular, socialist programme by the EPLF (Firebrace, Holland and Kinnock 1984; Weldehaimanot and Taylor 2011). Growing internal political differences led the EPLF to break away from the ELF in the mid-1970s and the two fronts became embroiled in a bitter war of fratricide which forced the remnants of the ELF to retreat to the Sudan in 1981.
The bitter war between the two Eritrea-based fronts – which was being waged simultaneously with Ethiopia’s attempt to occupy and administer Eritrea – required the EPLF to create and sustain its political base. Thus in addition to cultivating support from its ethnic ‘heartland’, the Christian highlands of Kebessa (i.e. the provinces of Akele Guzai, Serae and Hamasien) it was compelled to seek support (or effect control over) former ELF areas in the north-west and among ethnic minorities such as the Adi Caieh, Kunama and Afar (the latter two live on the border with Ethiopia and have periodically supported the Ethiopian government).
As Gilkes has noted, the Kebessa is ‘largely synonymous with the area inhabited by the Tigreans of Eritrea, Tigrinyna speaking, Orthodox Christian, agriculturalists’ (1999a: 12). Specifically (p. 13):
the Kebessa had previously been an integral part of the state against which the EPLF was attempting to build up a nationalist agenda. This forced the EPLF leadership to create a new past, to invent their version of Eritrea’s history, indeed to fabricate a history of conflict between the Kebessa and the region of Tigray south of the Mareb river1.
The nationalist vision of the EPLF that emerged in the 1980s was isolationist and guided by an unswerving ideological commitment to socialism based on the front’s reading of history. Through political indoctrination and the struggle against Ethiopia the EPLF forged a strong political identity among several generations of tegedalie (fighters) who fought and died to achieve Eritrean independence.
Matsuoka and Sorenson summarize the EPLF’s vision in the following way (2001: 50):
Eritreans conceptualize their identity … as a hybrid produced of centuries of cultural fusion and shaped by Italian colonialism, which transformed social and economic relationships within a colonial space and established a sense of Eritrean-ness within those boundaries. This sense of national identity was then strengthened by Ethiopian repression and through the independence struggle.
There is ample evidence that the Derg, the military council against which the EPLF fought, committed crimes against humanity in its fight against secession-ist movements and against Ethiopians (Human Rights Watch 1991; Tronvoll, Schaefer and Girmachew 1999). The Derg committed numerous atrocities against civilians directly, through the violence inflicted by its armed forces and indirectly by the violence caused by its policies and implemented by its officials. Table 1.1 lists some of the major ‘crimes’ of the Derg that fall under the rubric of state-directed violence and have been recognized as genocide (see Box 1.1)
Table 1.1 The Derg’s ‘crimes against humanity’, 1975–1991
Year | Incident |
1970–75 | The massacre/murder of large numbers of civilians in Eritrea |
1977–78 | Killing an estimated 20,000 individuals during the ‘Red Terror’ in Addis Ababa, Tigray and other provinces |
1982–86 | Counter-insurgency operations were responsible for the deaths of 225,000 to 317,000 ‘famine’ victims |
1984–88 | 50,000 deaths caused by compulsory resettlement |
1988 | Implementation of a ‘state of emergency’ in Eritrea and Tigray which led to the execution of civilians, forced relocation and air raids and cluster bombing of civilians, markets etc. |
Box 1.1 Eritrea’s ethnic cleansing of Ethiopians in July 1991
‘Six weeks after they lost the war, hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian army soldiers, sick and hungry, are huddling without shelter in squalid camps or slogging on foot through brutal mountain passes in a chaotic nightmare of demobilization … Hundreds have died of exhaustion, malaria and pneumonia.’ Some men were forced to walk 200 miles from Aduwa to Mekele, where there were ‘only 50 tents in this rain-drenched camp to protect more than 50,000 soldiers, some of whom were trying to carve sleeping places out of mud’. After defeating the Ethiopian army ‘the Eritreans held most of them as prisoners of war. In the last several weeks they have been pushing them across the border … The Eritreans … refused to agree a proposal by the ICRC to fly some of the soldiers to the southern part of Ethiopia with the result that soldiers are strung out in camps around the city of Gondar … [and] in the province of Gojjam [and in] Aksum, Aduwa, Adigrat and Mekele in the province of Tigray. About 50,000 soldiers … escaped across the Sudan border to Kassala and 40,000 more clustered around Homera on the Sudanese border.’ ‘About 30,000 wives and children of the Ethiopian soldiers stationed in Eritrea have been bussed by the EPLF across the border in the last two weeks and are crowded into camps.’
Source: Perlez, J. ‘Ethiopia troops battle to survive misery of peace’, New York Times 15 July 1991. The EPRDF provided no assistance to the soldiers (or their dependents) who survived the expulsion. Also see Tekeste and Tronvol (2000: 46–7).
After Eritrean independence in 1993 public support for the EPLF began to wane. Rather than reaching out to Muslims and minority groups the party sought to ensure support from the Kebessa and the diaspora. In particular it relied on its control of the armed forces and a policy of compulsory, indefinite conscription to control and to inculcate its version of history into new generations of Eritreans.
By contrast, the TPLF only cultivated support from Christian, Tigrinya-speaking agriculturalists in northern Ethiopia who nursed long-standing grievances against the Ethiopian state (Aregawi Berhe 2004). However, it was not until the fall of the Haile Selassie government in 1975 and the concomitant politicization of university students that political space emerged for the development of socialist-inspired ethno-nationalist movements. At this time the Tigrayan National Organization emerged and espoused ‘national armed struggle’ against the Derg and ‘the right of nations to self-determination’ (p. 581). The movement was forced underground and retreated to Tigray, where students used the vernacular language, Tigrinya, and their knowledge of local culture and history to recruit peasants to join an armed rebellion against the Ethiopian state.
Initially, the founders of the TPLF conceived of ‘self-determination’ as a call for autonomy or ‘self-rule for Tigray in a democratic, poly-ethnic Ethiopia’ (p. 591). By the late 1970s the TPLF’s leadership reinterpreted the idea to mean ‘secession for an independent republic of Tigray but this idea clashed with the political programme of the EPLF, with whom it had forged a military alliance in the 1980s. Specifically, ‘[T]he EPLF claimed that although Ethiopian nationalities had the right to self-determination, the right to independence was conditional on first, the nationalities previously being independent, and second, on their being economically cohesive’ (Young 1996: 113). Debate and discussion between the two fronts led to a further qualification of the ‘right’ to succession, namely that acceptance of the EPLF’s position on this issue was a precondition for the formation of a united front with them. The TPLF grudgingly accepted this condition even though it continued to promote the development of other ‘nationalist’ movements against the ‘Amhara-dominated’ Derg.
Though the two movements fought together against the Derg they remained divided on numerous issues: the TPLF relied on mobilizing rather than conscripting peasants; the TPLF relied upon guerrilla tactics while the EPLF gravitated increasingly to conventional warfare; and the TPLF kept prisoners for relatively brief periods before releasing them while the EPLF incarcerated prisoners for years (Young 1996; Abbink 1998). In the name of revolutionary justice, both movements committed major atrocities against civilians, unarmed officials and the armed forces of the Ethiopian state (Table 1.2).
Table 1.2 Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) acts of ‘revolutionary violence’, 1975–1991
EPLF | TPLF |
1970–74: assassination of Ethiopian officials | 1978: annihilation of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party in Tigray |
1987–88: multiple attacks against relief convoys and the destruction of food aid | 1986: attack at Alamata, killing two World Vision employees |
1988–91: assassination of hundreds of ‘collaborators’ | 1990: 200 civilians killed in a fight against the Derg at Massawa |
1991: ethnic ‘cleansing’ of 120,000 Ethiopian soldiers and their dependents | April–May 1991: EPRDF/TPLF killings of anti-EPRDF protestors in Gojjam and Addis Ababa |
Regardless of a major rift between the movements between 1984 and 1988, they submerged their differences and fought the Derg. Following major successes against Ethiopian forces between 1989 and 1990, the TPLF established a coalition of Ethiopian-based opposition movements, which it called the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). In May 1991 representatives of the EPLF, the EPRDF and the Ethiopian government were invited to a US-brokered peace conf...
