I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

  The Eritreans waited and gradually, reluctantly, they realized that there would be no UN cavalry riding over the crest of the hill. ‘The public reaction was one of shock, pure shock,’ remembers Dr Berhane, with a sardonic twist of the lips. ‘It was as though Eritrea had suddenly become an orphan. The Federal Act obliged the UN to intervene and people waited for that. But the UN never responded in any way.’

  By its silence, the UN added Eritrea to what was to become a long list of African countries in which it botched operations originally undertaken in good faith. Like Congo in 1961, Western Sahara in the 1980s, Somalia and Rwanda in the 1990s, Eritrea can argue that its future trajectory would have been radically different had the UN, at a crucial juncture, shown some backbone. Where these countries differ from Eritrea, however, is that while the UN has never been allowed to forget how its troops failed to prevent the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s elected prime minister, or flew out of Rwanda just as the genocide of nearly a million Tutsis began, only the victims today remember the UN’s feebleness in Eritrea.

  The UN’s cynicism was to leave an indelible mark on the psychology of a people. No UN document can ever have been reprinted more often or more avidly perused than Matienzo’s final report, on sale in the clubs and offices the Eritrean diaspora opened around the world. Eyes glazing with boredom, outsiders would marvel at the unflagging interest Eritrean scholars showed in the minutiae of UN charters, articles and clauses. But there was method to this seeming madness. If international law had been violated, then the armed campaign launched by first the ELF and then the EPLF was not, as Addis maintained across the decades, a ‘secession rebellion’ and the guerrillas were more than thuggish shiftas. Eritreans were merely fighting for respect of the law, because no one else would.

  When Isaias Afwerki addressed the 48th session of the UN in September 1993, four months after Eritrea had won independence, the new president dispensed with diplomatic circumlocution and used the forthright language of a rebel movement sure in the knowledge of its own moral rectitude. ‘I cannot help but remember the appeals that we sent year in and out to this Assembly and the member countries of the United Nations, describing the plight of our people,’ he told startled delegates. ‘The UN refused to raise its voice in defence of a people whose future it had unjustly decided and whom it had pledged to protect.’ As one high-ranking UN official told me: ‘These weren’t so much scars, as great bleeding, seeping, open wounds.’

  The UN’s amnesia not only fuelled a bitter sense of grievance, it marked the start of what was to become a mulish Eritrean insistence on self-reliance. If the international community could so casually brush off its responsibilities, if written agreements counted for so very little, the angry students who were to lead the rebellion concluded, then Eritrea would simply have to turn inwards, tap her own resources, and win justice on her own. They would never depend on anyone else again.

  Halfway through the research for this book, I flew to New York. I felt I understood the realpolitik that lay behind the UN’s decision not to act, but I was still curious. How had the UN justified such pragmatism to itself? How does an institution go about smothering an issue when it knows it is legally in the wrong? What had happened to all the telegrams sent by despairing Eritreans, whose numbers had faithfully, if pointlessly, been recorded by the independence campaigners? Most large organizations are obsessed with procedure, compelled by their own internal rules to crank out anodyne replies to correspondence, however inane or nonsensical. Had some sorry UN official been assigned the task of telling the Eritreans, ever so politely, to get lost? Had the steady stream of Eritrean petitions triggered, at least, a modicum of internal hand-wringing?

  The UN archives are not stored in the waterfront skyscraper familiar from so many television shots. They are kept in a building hidden around the corner, opposite Uganda House and the embassy of the Republic of Korea, where a Chinese laundry does a hissing trade and West African stallholders tout cheap luggage. Inside, where a handful of archivists work silently in their offices, there is a hush. The grey-blue carpets soak up the noise, the bullet-proof security doors keep the street bustle at arm’s length. It was clear, from the few tables set aside for readers, that this was a place unaccustomed to receiving members of the public. The week I visited, I was one of only two outsiders to drop in.

  I had e-mailed ahead, specifying what I wanted to see–files compiled in the wake of Ethiopia’s 1962 annexation–but nothing was ready. As the morning progressed the archivist, a middle-aged woman from New Jersey, began looking more and more unhappy behind her computer screen. ‘This has never, ever happened before,’ she moaned, stabbing at her keyboard. She was sweating, she had a migraine. ‘I have never had these kind of problems calling up a file.’ The box
es I had asked for, she eventually explained, had been re-catalogued, and the computer was refusing to recognize the numbers she was typing in.

  She could provide copies of Matienzo’s speeches in abundance, drafts of his reports and letters to his superiors, but no Eritrean appeals. On the second day, she called a balding male colleague over to help, and he too worked silently away. A few more files surfaced, but never the ones I’d asked for. I had failed, and I found my failure grimly fitting. Somewhere in the UN’s vaults lay boxes of correspondence and memos, full of tantalizing insights into the thinking of the day on Eritrea. No one would ever read them now. The system had swallowed them up. They were as thoroughly lost to posterity as if they had been fed through a shredder. Technological modernization had, quite by accident, completed the task of deliberate forgetting launched by the UN in 1952.

  I left clutching copies of the sole snatch of relevant correspondence unearthed during three days of searching, a tiny chink of light in what would now, it seemed, be a permanent darkness. On August 24, 1963, the UN’s acting director in Cairo wrote a poignant little letter back to headquarters. He had just received a delegation from the ‘Political Committee of the Eritrean People’s Legal Representatives Abroad’, he told New York, which had handed him a petition for the Secretary-General. ‘They complained that although they sent six or seven petitions before, they have never received an acknowledgement, and they are quite upset about it,’ AK Hamdy wrote. ‘Can you please see to it that an acknowledgement is sent.’ Hamdy’s request, and the petition, had been forwarded to the UN’s legal counsel, a Mr Stavropoulos, with a covering note. Read 40 years later, with the knowledge of the tens of thousands of lives that would be lost in a war in which the UN played a contributory role, its casual indifference chills the heart. ‘Would you be kind enough to look these over and let me have your views,’ the UN official passing on the paperwork has scrawled in thick black ink. ‘My feeling is we should not acknowledge. Do you agree?’ And he added a further comment, laden with the exasperation of a teacher sick of a difficult pupil’s incessant whining. ‘I think that we are really through with the question of Eritrea.’15

  CHAPTER 9

  The Gold Cadillac Site

  ‘Whatever happens we have got

  The Maxim Gun, and they have not.’

  Hilaire Belloc

  Of an evening, Asmarinos like to drive part of the way down the winding Massawa road to a spot called Durfo. There, bonnets pointing recklessly towards the sheer drop, handbrakes cranked, they have sweet tea delivered to their windows and watch the cloud cover roll across the peaks like a river of white. A few hundred feet below, villagers suddenly stumble in the swirling mist, groping for landmarks, voices muffled under a muggy blanket of vapour. But up here, under a heaven the colour of forget-me-nots, vision and hearing remain preternaturally clear. The shouts of children wrestling in a compound, a bridle clinking on a straining mule, an old man expectorating: unexpected and strangely intimate, the sounds arrive from across the valley.

  Just as South Africa’s fate was determined by the realization that the pretty pebbles children played with on the banks of the Orange river were diamonds, and Congo’s destiny was shaped by the understanding of what could be done with the sap dripping from its wild rubber vines, Eritrea’s course was to be shaped by the whims of topography and climate. ‘Geography has been our misfortune,’ a former EPLF commander once ruefully told me. He was referring to Eritrea’s location on the Red Sea, but the country’s true curse is invisible to the naked eye. For the Eritrean highlands are endowed with a scientific peculiarity–unnoticed by generations of farmers, missed by colonial explorers–of huge value to anyone in the know. It is an idiosyncrasy that goes a long way to explaining why America and its allies at the UN were so ready to turn a deaf ear to Eritrean pleas, so happy to accept Ethiopia’s amoeba-like absorption of its tiny neighbour.

  Twiddle the tuning knob on a short-wave radio at night and you begin to grasp the nature of the secret ingredient. A sudden Babel fills the room: Israeli voices shouting in Hebrew, dreary Russian monologues, plinky-plonky Eurotrash hits from Germany. Declarations by Libya’s revolutionary committees battle to be heard above swooning Egyptian love songs. Gusts of folksy music from Eastern Europe compete with the mellifluous voices of a French phone-in, only to be drowned out in their turn by prayers from Saudi Arabia. The radio shrieks, squawks and hisses like a thing possessed. Local AM radio stations have been picked up as far away as Brazil, Finland and Australia.1 Transmissions from China, broadcasts from South Africa: they ring out loud and clear. The Hamasien plateau just happens to be one of the best places in the world–some have ranked it the best place on earth–from which to receive and transmit radio signals.

  Many of the reasons for the plateau’s extraordinary reception could be grasped by any schoolchild. The higher the altitude at which a radio receiver or transmitter is set up, the wider the geographical area it covers. Even before an inch of mast is erected, the Eritrean plateau enjoys a vantage point a mile and a half above sea level. Its position, well above cloud cover, means the tropical storms that play havoc with radio waves and monitoring equipment are rare. As for human settlements, whose buzzing power plants and humming factories give off distracting electromagnetic ‘noise’, once outside Asmara the plains are sparsely populated and quiet. And the fact that the plateau lies just 15 degrees north of the equator means the sun rises and sets at almost the same time all year round, making life simpler for those tuning in to distant frequencies.

  Added together, however, such factors still do not quite account for Eritrea’s electromagnetic uniqueness. Some experts have speculated that Asmara benefits from another intriguing natural phenomenon–‘ducting’–in which radio signals rise through the earth’s atmosphere, bounce horizontally along under the troposphere and return to earth via ‘ducts’ thousands of miles away from their original source. ‘Some said the weather was clearer, the air was purer, there was less surrounding interference, it was the magnetic fields, or Asmara acted as a kind of collector, picking up signals from the ionosphere,’ recalls Dave Strand, a US signals analyst who worked in Eritrea in the 1960s. ‘Obviously the altitude was important. But I don’t believe there is anyone in the world who really knows the answer.’2

  The Italians had been dimly aware of Asmara’s extraordinary broadcast and reception properties, setting up Radio Marina, a station used to communicate with Mussolini’s naval fleet. When the British took over Eritrea, they reluctantly ceded the field to their allies across the Atlantic. America’s embryonic intelligence industry had mushroomed with the Second World War and Washington was scouring the world for potential reception sites. In April 1943, a US army lieutenant arrived in Eritrea with a six-man crew and testing equipment. The radio traffic samples the team sent back to Washington confirmed what the experts suspected. The ‘levitated white elephant’ so derided by the British was, it turned out, the ideal spot to locate a spy station capable of eavesdropping on nearly half the globe. Brushing off British objections, the US army’s Signal Intelligence Service started building bomb-proof underground concrete bunkers to hold equipment, while launching an intensive training course in Virginia for the 50 men who would initially be posted to Asmara.

  The bet paid off almost immediately. Eritrea proved the perfect place from which to monitor the flow of Axis radio communications between Germany and Japan. In October 1943, when the Nazis were bracing themselves for an anticipated Allied invasion of the European mainland, the Wehrmacht gave the Japanese ambassador to Germany a tour of its defence lines. Baron Hiroshi Oshima’s long report, giving priceless details of Germany’s military dispositions, was radioed back to Tokyo.3 On the way, it was picked up by the Americans in Asmara. Decoded, it gave General Eisenhower the information he needed to plan the Normandy landings.

  With the end of the war, much of Asmara’s equipment was crated up and sent back to the US. But the American military was in no doubt about Eritrea’s long
-term significance. ‘The Joint Chiefs of Staff would state categorically that the benefits now resulting from operation of our telecommunications centre at Asmara…can be obtained from no other location in the entire Middle East–Mediterranean area,’ Admiral William Leahy bluntly told the Secretary of Defence in 1948. ‘Therefore, United States rights in Eritrea should not be compromised.’4 No other military base in black Africa would ever be deemed as vital to American national security.

  In 1950, the base jerked back into frantic life with the outbreak of the Korean War. Circuits to Europe, the Middle East and the Philippines were reactivated as the US homed in on North Korean communications. For the next 20 years, the listening post in Eritrea would be steadily expanded and modernized, but never scaled back. Locked into the new, deadly Cold War game, the US needed the reach only sites like Kagnew Station–as the Asmara listening post was eventually named–could offer when it came to listening in on the Communist world.