- By Robert D. Kaplan (CIA Agent)
JULY 1988 ISSUE
EXPLORE
The Loneliest War
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In 1979 the EPLF decided on a “strategic withdrawal,” deliberately giving up territory in southern Eritrea in order to consolidate a base area in the northern Sahel district, around Nakfa. In the meantime troops were rapidly deserting the ELF, which by mid-1980 had only 6,500 men, and joining the EPLF, whose ranks swelled to almost 30,000. Fighting again broke out between the two organizations in 1981; the ELF, though it still has a small following among Eritrean refugees in Sudan, has been militarily irrelevant ever since.
With a secure base area and no enemy except the Dergue to worry about, the EPLF set about strengthening itself in every way. A network of trenches and underground corridors, several hundred miles long, was constructed. Thousands of educated Eritreans who had been in exile returned to work with the EPLF. These new recruits, brought in by way of Sudan, staffed the hospital and ran the workshops that were being set up in the Orotta area. Many of the recruits were from middle-class Christian families that lived around Asmara, and their presence encouraged a drift in EPLF ideology away from its initial Marxist bearings.
While the EPLF dug in, the Soviets helped build up the Ethiopian Army, from 65,000 men to nearly 300,000. More than 2,000 Soviet advisers arrived. In return, the Dergue made the Dahlak Archipelago, off Eritrea’s Red Sea coast, available to the Soviet Navy, and Soviet planes began making long-range reconnaissance flights over the Indian Ocean from the Asmara air base, which the Americans had deserted. The enormous military-assistance program allowed the Ethiopian government to launch the largest offensive ever against the Eritrean guerrillas, in February of 1982. Called Operation Red Star, it involved fifteen divisions whose troop strength was estimated at over 100,000.
This time the Ethiopians got nowhere. The EPLF held all its major positions, and reportedly as many as 40,000 Ethiopian soldiers were killed or wounded, although no one will ever know the toll for sure. Another offensive of the same magnitude was launched in 1983, but the results were similarly disastrous. At the time, the American public was preoccupied with fighting in Lebanon and Central America, but blood was flowing in larger quantities in the Horn of Africa, in a war that featured a guerrilla resistance, backed by virtually no one, that was capable of withstanding a large Soviet-equipped army.
The transformation of the Soviet Union from ally to oppressor, the continued indifference of the West, and the ambivalence of the Arabs and the rest of the Third World strengthened the EPLF’s desire for self-reliance. With an almost maniacal singlemindedness the Eritreans repaired all captured equipment or converted it to other uses. Comparisons between the EPLF and other insurgent movements in Africa and the Middle East elicit only contempt from the Eritreans. When I once asked an EPLF official about similarities between the Eritrean and Palestinian situations, he replied scornfully, “Has the PLO ever captured an Israeli tank?”
Africa’s Israelis?
Elsewhere in the world the breaking down of traditional social barriers has often led to a measure of tyranny over the individual. But in Eritrea it has had the opposite effect. There exists a degree of concern for the individual that is rare in Third World armies. Every platoon is equipped with basic medical supplies. Makeshift operating rooms are set up in the field. One soldier I met, whose eardrums had been damaged in a bomb blast, had been provided with a hearing aid, something I found astonishing, considering that there isn’t even tea in the trenches. (Water is usually the only drink, aside from an occasional intelligence sources say that not even satellite photographs enable them to estimate EPLF battle losses, because the guerrillas get their dead and wounded off the field so quickly.
As the Israelis have demonstrated, bravery often derives from self-assurance: the knowledge that in the event of trouble your superiors will go to the limit to save you. Secure in that knowledge, Eritreans have more than once proved their willingness to take well-calculated risks—for example, by attacking the enemy air base at Asmara, in 1986, and destroying or damaging some forty MiGs and other planes. In contrast, it is hard to imagine an army with worse morale than the Mengistu's Hailemariam Dergue’s. Many of its soldiers are ethnically Oromos, who come from the southern lowlands of Ethiopia. They have been forcibly conscripted and given minimal training before being dispatched to the mountainous north of the country to fight the Eritreans, a people the Oromos have no interest in fighting. Even the Amharas serving in Mengistu’s army tended to be unenthusiastic (Passive and uninvoled due to lack of interest or care).
- By Robert D. Kaplan (CIA Agent)
JULY 1988 ISSUE