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A fragment of the many EPLF songs always comes into my mind these years. The line goes like this: "gebar tehaguisu sala hizbawi gembar." For some reasons, my brain only retains a few lines of most of the propaganda songs. The gebar in my opinion has never been contented neither in the gedli era nor in the post-independence period. The EPLF and for that matter the ELF were mostly dependent for the war effort on the resources of the peasantry and the pastoral communities. Thanks to some research work done (such as in Zimbabwe), the romantic history of the peasant and guerrilla relationship has nowadays not been totally accepted.
Among the many rules for its army, Mao's communist leadership warned his fighters to replace the doors of the peasant houses once they were used for sleeping. This was a deliberate deception of the communist army. To use his favorite word, these rules on how to treat the peasants were sugar-coated bullets. The fact is that in the entire duration of the war the communist army had been ravishing the peasant economy. Elsewhere, the left insurgent armies unlike the status quo they fought against were good at cloaking their extortionist deeds. They tend to issue various nice little rules and proclamations that purportedly deal with the "welfare" of the peasant masses. The fronts in our country and particularly the EPLF were good imitators. During the 70s, the EPLF established ERA to solicit food and other sources ostensibly for the internally displaced people, and the war affected rural communities. What percentage of the tonnage reached the victims, and what was apportioned by the guerrilla army will remain the challenge of researchers. The EPLF refined its deception skills and commissioned two or more rural surveys called Food Needs Assessment Studies in the late 80s and early 90s. The teams were surpervised by mostly people from the Scandinavian countries, which were the major donors. The enumerators and survey designers, and analyzers were EPLF fighters and cadres. A cursory view of the data collected on the surveyed villages is quite reavealing. The data for the average size of the rural families was repeatedly shown as 5-6 people. This was at a time when the average size of the rural families was on the decline either because of voluntary/forced recruitment or escape in search of jobs to neighboring countries. In some villages, able-bodied people were so scarce that, in some instances, the trip to the traditional cemeteries was shortened for a convenient place. It appears that the donor supervisors were taken in. The donors had shipped and transported overland huge quantities of food supply to the guerrilla-held areas. This, according to the author of the book Without Troops and Tanks, may have enabled the EPLF and also the TPLF to launch large scale offensives during the final stages of the war. The authors' initial task was to do an evaluation of the cross-border food support activities of the donors. Though not very naive, they also bought the idea that the EPLF was after the welfare of the rural folks, and called the relationship as "reciprocal." They stated that the Front was getting political support in exchange for the food they obtained for the peasants. The EPLF was glamorized, while other African liberation fronts without nice little organizations for public relations purposes (such as the SPLA (Sudan People's Liberation Army)) were denigrated for their "rapacious" activities. What the SPLA practised was not different. But who in his right mind would believe that a liberation front that conducts rural surveys about the rural people would prey on its own people? The fate of one village among many hundreds in the highland zone would prove my point. I expect other chroniclers to follow this example. I will not disclose the name of the village for safety reasons. During the late 80s successive droughts were a norm among many highland villages and other places in Eritrea. The villages were prone to famine as a result of not only harvest failures but also the effects of the war on their traditional coping mechanims such as trans-humance, urban-rural dependencies and others. Located in contested areas, these communities were in distress. Foreign religious NGOs were active in those years building wells and micro-dams. The village in question, which was endowed with a fertile valley, accepted the help and expertise of one NGO to grow a particular drought-resisting grain. Government units often visited the area in the day time from the nearest town, and the guerrillas remained active during the night. Unexpected adequate rainfall and the fertile soil produced a bountiful crop waiting soon to be harvested.
It appeared that the small EPLF units operating in the vicinity were suspicious of any help that does not have their approval, and had their own plans.
Every harvest year in the month of September, villagers traditionally trek outside their village and perform the harvest rituals, hoye-hoye, to the delight of the community. In the month of September in the late 80s, on hoye-hoye days, tens of residents of the village turned out en masse to celeberate the coming harvest festival. Unbeknownest to them, the gombeles' innocent trip was transformed into a nighmare. The guerrillas handed them sickles, ordered them to harvest the crop, and load it to the camels, and departed in the early dawn. Not soon after, the EPLF were so proud of this operation that they braodcasted it in Dimtsi Hafash. You wouldn't do this to an enemy village in Ethiopa, if at all one could call an entire village an enemy.
The EPLF begat the PFDJ in the early 90s. The PFDJ was also a menace to sedentary villages. Long before the dictator in Asmera decided to take the village of Badme with a mechanized army around May 1998, little typewritten proclamations were posted on the main avenues of Asmera. A curious crowd of people would gather, read silently and could not believe their eyes. The proclamation asked every one who carried arms in the past be it for the Derg, or the ELF ("neber" was the word used), and the EPLF militia to report to his zoba. The message was very ominous. Dumbfounded, the crowds dispersed silently. The regime did not either publish or broadcast its proclamation through its own media. These wallpapers remind one of the Soviet and Chinese communist era wall newspapers. The then Minister of Local Government, Sherriffo (the enforcer as Saleh Younis once called him) showed up on Eri-TV, and announced a wefera in the rural areas. Graduates of the Sawa military camp were called to report. The targeted regions were not indicated in detail. Some urbanites remembered the collective farms of the former communist countries, and found it in conflict with the Macro-Policy of the government--the Macro-Policy that supposedly nurtures the private sector. Mestiyat, one of the few pioneering private press, made an incisive comment about it. It warned about the rich of failures of collective farms all over the world. It was the first to fold, when its staff were hastilly asked to report for the wefera campaign. The wefera, according to the Minister, was to be done in coordination with the Ministry of Agriculture. Families were advised to provide beso and other food requirements for their children. Thousands of Sawa graduates were then sent to the south part of Eritrea which later functioned as a forward position for the coming war with Ethiopia. The war erupted soon, and the "agricultural battalions" were soon transformed into fighting battalions in the trenches of the Badme, and Zalambessa area. The wefera project appeared to have been forgotten. But it was not. Western travelers passing the highland regions of the kebessa of Eritrea and Abyssinia often commented of the well-terraced agricultural fields. The Baitos [village assemblies]and their rural communities tended these fields for hundreds if not for thousands of years. Hundereds of thousands of man-hours might have expended on them across many years. The PFDJ sent a fleet of tractors in the month of May and plowed the fields around the plains of the Godaif and Adi-Guadad areas, in Selima and Shimezana regions. The Godaif people who in the past bravely protested the emperor's regime when it snatched some land for the airport were this time intimidated. When told about this incident, an amused friend said that the peasants were probably not consulted about it. Unlike the war for Badme, the invasion of the several villages by government fiat was very silent. Rain was abundant during that year and the prospect for a good crop year was very promising. But the supply of labor was a big concern because hundreds of thousands of people were out in the front lines. The state media had the dictator strutting around the so called wefera regions boasting about the modern farms launched and belittling those who attributed the good crop to the unusual rain. Awate.com's lates editorial on the increasing trend of agricultural settlements at the expense of agricultural communities in the lowlands of Eritrea, and in particualar the Gash-Barka, is a grave matter. I do not know the magnitude of these settlements. Were these people willingly or forcibly transported by the regime and settled similar to what the Derg did in the south of Ethiopia? Or was it done through some other devious and sly means? I have no clue. What I was aware of and nobody seems to write about was what happened in the late 90s. It was what the regime called Policy Meteyas Addtat in the metahit areas. Awate.com's warning should be well taken. History has a lot of examples for us. Remember the revolution that was quashed in Paris, France in [1871]. The uprising, popularly known as the Paris Commune by historians, was brutally crushed by the regime. The few hundreds of survivors were then given the unenviable option of soldiering for the then expanding French colonial ambitions. These noble and proud Parisians accepted the offer and took arms from the state and departed for Algeria. They were instrumental in subduing the Algerian patriots, according to Albert Camus. After defeating them, they took their best farmlands north of the Atlas Mountains, and became farmers. Almost a hundered years afterwards, the grandsons of the communards faced the uprisings of the grandsons of the defeated Algerians in the 19th century. The war took the lives of close to 2 million Algerians, and France lost it colony. Would we live to witness such a scenario in our life time in Eritrea? I prefer to reply in the negative. The regime in Asmera has no commitment for small holder agriculuturalists. The state in Eritrea is for state monopoly in all aspects of the ecomomy, as Awate.com has also pointed out. The few thousands of people who were corralled by the regime in various places in the metahit are simply rootless ghosts and former soldiers who, unlike the small holder French agriculturalists, have not a great stake to defend, and will simply vanish once a lesser oppressive regime surfaces. Remember the people who were forcefully sent to Humera time and again from the Ethiopian towns. They often vanished upon arrival. But who knows. |
