I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation. Michela Wrong

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СКАЧАТЬ over a dusty border village escalated into mass mobilization on both sides. The much-trumpeted friendship between Isaias and Meles had counted for little: the two leaders were no longer talking. Ethiopia accused Isaias of being a megalomaniac, Eritrea regarded the new war as proof that Ethiopia had never digested the loss of its coast and was bent on reconquest. Defying an Ethiopian flight ban, I flew to Asmara with a group of journalists, our chartered Kenyan plane taking a looping route via Djibouti and over the waters of the Red Sea to lessen the chances of being shot down. At the end of a buttock-clenching trip, we landed to find Eritrean helicopters crouched on the tarmac of an airport that had just been bombed by Ethiopian jets. Foreign embassies were scrambling to evacuate their nationals, the BBC’s World Service was telling British citizens to leave while they still could.

      The mood in town was bewildering: every Asmarino I met was convinced they would win this new war, albeit at the highest of prices, every foreign journalist believed they must lose. The Eritreans’ unshakeable certainty was exasperating, a positive handicap during a crisis that might require for its solution the murky skills of diplomacy, an ability to conceive of shades of grey. As ever, the community stood grimly united. ‘Eritrea is not made of people who cry,’ said an old businessman who had just waved goodbye to a son going off to fight. ‘We did not want this, but once it comes we will do whatever our country requires.’ The Eritrean capacity for speaking with one voice was beginning to sound a little creepy to my ears, as depressing as the belligerent warmongering blasting from television screens in Addis Ababa. In its chiming uniformity, it had a touch of The Stepford Wives.

      Two years later, after at least 80,000 soldiers from both sides of the border had died, the doubters were proved correct. With Ethiopian forces occupying Eritrea’s most fertile lands to the west and a third of Eritrea’s population living under UNHCR plastic sheeting, a peace deal was signed and a UN force moved in to separate the two sides. The war had been a disaster for Eritrea. But True Believers, already seriously questioning their assumptions, were about to be dealt a final, killer blow. In September 2001, President Isaias arrested colleagues who had dared challenge his handling of the war – including the ex-Fighters who had been closest to him during the Struggle – and shut down Eritrea’s independent media, a step even the likes of Mugabe, Mobutu and Moi had never dared, or bothered, to take. So much for Africa’s Renaissance. Many of the ministers whose independent musings had so impressed me were now in jail, denied access to lawyers. Plans to introduce a multiparty constitution and stage elections were put on indefinite hold, bolshie students sent for military training in the desert where no one could hear their views. Aloof and surrounded by sycophants, Isaias clearly had no intention of stepping down. As it gradually became clear that this was no temporary policy change, Eritrean ambassadors stationed abroad began applying for political asylum, members of the Eritrean diaspora postponed long-planned returns. As for the economy, who was going to invest now that the country’s skilled workers were all in uniform, the president had fallen out with Western governments, and relations with Ethiopia, Eritrea’s main market, were decidedly dodgy? No one cuffed the beggars on Liberation Avenue any more, because the beggars were not chirpy urchins but the old, left destitute by their children’s departure for the front.

      Far from learning from the continent’s mistakes, Eritrea had turned into the stalest, most predictable of African clichés. What was striking was how far the waves of despair and outrage at this presidential crackdown travelled. For the journalists, diplomats, academics and aid workers who followed Africa, this felt like a personal betrayal, because it had destroyed the last of their hopes for the continent. Had this happened in Zambia or Ivory Coast, we would have shaken our heads and shrugged. Because it had taken place in Eritrea, special, perverse, inspiring Eritrea, we raged. ‘How could they, oh, how could they?’ I remember an Israeli cameraman friend moaning over lunch in London’s Soho. This from a man who could not have spent more than a fortnight in Eritrea in his life.

      Somewhere along the line, it wasn’t yet clear where, the True Believers must have missed the point. They had failed to register important clues, drawn naive conclusions, misinterpreted key events. The qualities we had all so admired obviously came with a sinister reverse side. Had we mistaken arrogant pig-headedness for moral certainty, dangerous bloody-mindedness for focused determination? I had become intrigued by the Eritrean character, I realized, without digging very far into the circumstances in which it had been forged. ‘They carry their history around with them like an albatross,’ a British aid worker who had spent years with the EPLF had once warned me, but at the time I had not grasped her meaning. What was it in the country’s past, I wondered, that had given rise to such stubborn intensity, so invigorating in some circumstances, so destructive in others? What had made the Eritreans what they were today, with all their extraordinary strengths and fatal weaknesses?

      Even the most determined optimist has his moment of reckoning. An instant when he is forced to admit the society he sanctified is far darker, more convoluted, yes, on occasions downright nasty – than he was ready to admit. Increasingly, I found my mind wandering back to an incident I had once witnessed on Knowledge Street, round the corner from the sandal monument. Walking past a moving bus, I had noticed that the passengers were in uproar. At the heart of the storm of gesticulation sat a wizened old grandmother. The bus drove by and I heard it brake suddenly behind me, the doors open, the sound of an object hitting the pavement, the doors close, and then the bus disappeared into the night. Turning, I was astonished to see that the old woman, whom I guessed to be in her seventies, had been hurled horizontally out of the door – probably by the other passengers. Certainly, no one had interceded on her behalf. Maybe she had been very rude to the conductor, maybe she was a well-known fare dodger. Tempers, I knew, frayed fast in Eritrea. But I was astonished to witness an incident of this kind in Africa, where respect for old age runs so deep. That collective ejection was the kind of unsettling event that made you wonder if you had ever understood anything at all.

       CHAPTER 2 The Last Italian

      â€˜When the white snake has bitten you, you will search in vain for a remedy.’

       A 19th-century rebel leader warns Eritrean

       chiefs against the Italians

      The old man lunged for his wooden cane and began flailing about around our feet. A moment earlier, the yard had seemed at peace, its occupants lulled to near coma in the heat, which lay upon us with the weight of a winter blanket. Now a deafening cacophony of clucks, squawks and screeches was coming from under the trestle bed on which Filippo Cicoria perched. From where I sat, I could see a blur of scuffling wings, stabbing beaks and orange claws. Two of his pet ducks were battling for supremacy. This was a cartoon fight, individual heads and wings suddenly jutting from the whirlwind at improbable angles. I kicked feebly in the ducks’ direction. ‘No, no,’ grunted Cicoria, jabbing rhythmically with his cane. ‘You have [jab] to hit them [jab, jab] on the head [jab].’ The squawks were rising in hysteria, but his broken leg, pinned and swollen, was making it difficult to manoeuvre into a position where he could deliver a knock-out blow. ‘That’s enough, you stupid bastards … THAT’S ENOUGH.’ There were two loud shrieks as the cane finally hit home and the duo fled for safety, leaving a small deposit of feathers behind.

      Feathers, I now saw, lay everywhere. A breeze from the sea, a narrow strip of turquoise behind him, lifted a thin layer of white down deposited by the pullets cheeping softly in the hutches above his bed. A dozen muscovy ducks dozed in the shade, their gnarled red beaks tucked under wings, while at the gates grazed a gaggle of geese. The air was rich with the acid stink of chicken droppings. The man, it was clear, liked his fowls. But not half as much as he liked old appliances. Cicoria’s scrapyard, perched on the last in the chain of islands that forms the Massawa peninsula, held what had to be the biggest collection of obsolete fridges and broken-down СКАЧАТЬ