I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  Matienzo immediately plunged into a series of meetings with Eritrean village elders, political leaders and civic organizations, explaining that he would be overseeing the drafting of a constitution for a soon-to-be-federated Eritrea, complete with democratically-elected Assembly. The announcement hardly triggered dancing in the streets. ‘The Commissioner gained the impression that the population was mainly pessimistic,’ he noted. ‘Part of the population had no real confidence in the idea of federation or the possibility of applying it.’25 As he prepared to set about turning UN Resolution 390 A (V) from abstract concept to concrete reality, Matienzo can hardly have guessed just how testing the next 18 months would prove. He was about to lock horns with a lawyer who–notwithstanding the fact that this was not his country, not his homeland, not his fight–considered it a point of principle never to surrender an inch when negotiating on behalf of his employer, the Ethiopian Crown.

  John Spencer, by his own reckoning, was to be more intimately involved in the drafting of the Eritrean constitution and technicalities of Britain’s handover of power than any other Ethiopian government employee.26 Having agreed the broad lines of what he wanted with Spencer, Aklilou was content to oversee developments from Addis. Neither man entertained any doubts as to where their boss stood on the matter.

  In public, Haile Selassie, while hardly faking enthusiasm for the federal compromise, had at least agreed to accept the inevitable. ‘The formula as adopted by the General Assembly does not entirely satisfy the wishes of the vast majority of the Eritreans who seek union without condition, nor does it satisfy all the legitimate claims of Ethiopia,’ he told his nation.27 But it had become obvious that the formula was the only one that could obtain a two-thirds majority at the UN–better this, than an even longer wait for justice. ‘The solution has been adopted and the principle accepted,’ he affirmed. The truth was slightly different. ‘The Ethiopians did not want federation of any kind, they never believed in any of it,’ Spencer told me at his Long Island retirement home. ‘The Emperor really pushed our hands, he was all for taking Eritrea immediately. He said, “I insist on the full return of Eritrea to Ethiopia.” I told him, “No, you have to ease into it, you can’t grab it all at once. Even if you want nothing to do with the Federation, you will have to slide into it gradually, bit by bit.”’28

  So when Spencer flew to Asmara to take his place alongside Matienzo, a team of UN legal advisers and representatives from the British Military Administration, he was hardly negotiating in good faith. The Emperor, he knew, regarded the documents he was labouring over as so much meaningless paperwork, to be trashed as soon as the world looked the other way. ‘Was it hypocritical of me? Yes, I’d agree with that. But it was justified. I had said to the Ethiopians, “I’ll help you get Eritrea” and that is what I did. They were desperate for access to the sea.’29

  Spencer’s aim was to strengthen the Federation to the point where Eritrea was so tightly bound to Ethiopia, total incorporation was only a blink away. Eritrea would be another province of Ethiopia in all but name. Matienzo and his advisers, in contrast, were committed to a Federation which was more than just a form of words. The relationship should be loose enough to allow independence, should the public ever decide to embrace it. Concession by concession, paragraph by paragraph, Spencer negotiated a better deal for the Emperor, ‘easing into it’ as only a wily lawyer knows how.

  The Federation’s very foundations were built on shifting sands. As legal experts pointed out at the time, there was something innately problematic about the notion of federating the Western-style democracy Britain had introduced in Eritrea, in which the rights to an independent press, trade union membership and freedom of religion were guaranteed, with an ancient empire whose criminal justice system dated back to the 13th century and in which all real power lay in one man’s hands. Burma’s delegate on the UN Commission had recommended a system in which the governments of Eritrea and Ethiopia tackled domestic matters and a separate federal body handled defence, foreign affairs and inter-state trade affecting both territories, a clear carve-up of jurisdictions. Yet by the time Matienzo came to write his final draft, the three-body notion had been rejected in the face of Ethiopian hostility. Once the Emperor had ratified the UN-approved Federal Act, ‘the organs of the Ethiopian Government dealing with Federal affairs would constitute the Federal Government’, the report said.30 There was no word on how the promised ‘organs’ would be created or how ‘federal’ issues would be differentiated from ‘internal’ matters. In the end, the only new ‘organ’ established would be an Imperial Federal Council, composed of Eritrean and Ethiopian delegates, supposed to meet at least once a year to thrash out any problems. It was a murky, ambiguous formula, hard to grasp, easy to ignore.

  Spencer’s next challenge was winning a key post in Eritrea’s government for a representative of the Emperor. As he admits in his memoirs, the UN Resolution 390 V made absolutely no provision for such a step. Yet the Ethiopian delegation, with typical brass face, informed a surprised Matienzo that this had always been ‘a generally accepted principle’ during discussions at the UN. Eritrea’s future Assembly, due to be split down the middle between Moslem lowlanders and Christian highlanders, would struggle to pass legislation, Spencer argued. Granting a Crown representative a role would stabilize the volatile mix. Matienzo put up a stiff fight, knowing the Moslem community would regard this as letting Haile Selassie in by the back door. But Spencer kept up the pressure, and events in South America worked in his favour. As Matienzo pored over the paperwork, he learned there had been a change of government in Bolivia and he had been declared persona non grata. With his homeland barred to him, his very status as negotiator challenged by the Ethiopians, Matienzo can be forgiven for being distracted.

  By the time Matienzo came to draw up the final version of the constitution, the Ethiopians had won huge concessions. The Crown representative would have the power to formally invest the Assembly’s chief executive, send any legislation thought to encroach on Federal affairs back to the Assembly for a second vote and promulgate laws, all while enjoying ‘place of precedence’ at official ceremonies. Eritrea’s future ‘autonomy’ was beginning to look distinctly compromised.

  Spencer was to notch up a number of other triumphs, but Matienzo was not completely made of jelly. He stood firm on the issue that mattered most to Spencer and Aklilou, raised in what must surely qualify as one of the most obvious leading questions ever put to the UN. Once the Federal Act and Eritrean Constitution had come into force, they wanted to know, under what circumstances could the arrangements be amended or violated? Matienzo called in an international panel of legal consultants to settle what was clearly a crucial question. The panel’s findings, from Haile Selassie’s perspective, were disastrous. Once the legislation had been introduced, it ruled, Eritrea’s future could be regarded as settled, ‘but it does not follow that the United Nations will no longer have any right to deal with the question of Eritrea’. The UN resolution on which Eritrea’s Federation was based would ‘retain its full force’, Matienzo’s final report stipulated. ‘If it were necessary either to amend or to interpret the Federal Act, only the General Assembly, as the author of that instrument, would be competent to take a decision. Similarly, if the Federal Act were violated, the General Assembly could be seized* of the matter,’ he added.31

  In his memoirs, Spencer simply blanks out the finding, choosing, just as his employer would later do, not to see the evidence of his own eyes.32 But Matienzo’s conclusion–glossed over by Ethiopian historians but spelled out repeatedly in the Commissioner’s reports and speeches33–was crystal clear. Ethiopia would not be free to tinker, water down or abolish the Federation, no matter how unhappy it became with the arrangement. Since the UN had guaranteed the Federation, the Federation could only be ended with UN approval. Aklilou raged at the ‘perpetual servitude’ to which his country was being sentenced, just another form, as he saw it, of neocolonialism. For once, his words fell on deaf ears. It
didn’t take a genius, listening to the ‘theoretical’ scenarios explored by the Ethiopian delegation, to guess Addis’ long-term intentions. If he surrendered a future UN role in Eritrea’s future, Matienzo must have realized, he would effectively be abandoning a state whose autonomy he was pledged to enshrine to its hungry, impatient neighbour.

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER 8

  The Day of Mourning

  ‘To betray, you must first belong.’

  Kim Philby

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

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

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

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

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

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