Eritrea is facing tough times. Ten years since Eritrea and Ethiopia began their devastating 1998–2000 border war, the standoff seems as far from a solution as ever. The enthusiastic mood of nation building seen in the post‐independence period from 1991 after the 30‐year liberation war with Ethiopia has long since faded.
Eritrea still suffers from the impact of the last war and the looming threat of a return to conflict. The peace deal has yet to be implemented fully, dominating daily life. Some quarter of million troops face each other across the trenches running along the 620‐mile frontier. Economic life has stagnated, private enterprise has been choked and the youth are caught up in the giant programme of national service, making Eritrea one of the most militarised nations in the world. Conscription in sub‐Saharan Africa's largest army stretches for decades and recruits are paid cripplingly low wages. Payment to raw recruits is enough to buy them merely a pack of cigarettes a month. Once hailed as the bright star and hope of a new Africa, Eritrea now collects a rogue's gallery of grim accolades. In 2007, Paris‐based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) dropped Eritrea below North Korea on its annual ranking of press freedom, listing Asmara as the worst in the world. Critics have been silenced in the most brutal of methods, while thousands flee each month. It is regularly accused of the jailing of religious minorities, while military roundups for deserters have become common on Asmara's streets. Eritreans were the greatest single nationality to seek asylum in the United Kingdom in 2006, a situation mirrored in several countries elsewhere in Europe, as well as Israel.
Principle Over Pragmatism
War or no war, from Asmara, there seems little hope for better times in the near future. The tight rule of President Issaias Afeworki has retreated into ever greater secrecy and paranoia, with the 62‐year old ex‐guerilla squeezing his nation into a particularly unpleasant corner. With his liberation war era dictum of ‘you are either with us, or against us' still a rigid pillar of Issaias' increasingly despotic rule, Eritrea has lost many potential useful allies. While legally correct on the bitter issue of the border with Ethiopia — with Addis Ababa continuing to fail to implement the United Nations backed border ruling made as part of the 2000 peace deal that ended the war — a blundering Asmara has been outplayed by Ethiopia's superior public relations skills. Eritrea's cutting of fuel to the UN peacekeeping mission in December 2007 was only the most recent example in a long list. The fuel blockade, forcing a pull out by the UN military observers in border zones in March 2008 to leave only a skeleton force in the capital, was seen by Asmara as a legitimate action to remove the presence of a force it said favours its enemy Ethiopia. It argued that the UN Security Council, as a guarantor of the 2000 peace deal, had failed to take action against Ethiopia for its continued occupation of land ruled to belong to Eritrea by a legally binding 2002 border commission decision. What was needed, Eritrea therefore argued, were not UN peacekeepers but the simple enforcement of that decision.
Yet sending UN peacekeepers home wins few friends, however correct on paper Eritrea is on the issue of the border. For Eritrea, never one to be seen to directly beg, it was a provocative stamping of the feet for attention. Its subsequent ama teurish back pedalling, claiming fuel supplies were limited across all the country while ignoring that it had rebuffed repeated UN requests to import fuel for themselves, did little to garner support. Some 100,000 died in bitter fighting the last time the enemies clashed, but the world has grown tired at what is, on the surface at least, a pointless squabble over a worthless patch of dusty desert. The border commission closed shop in September 2006, exasperated at finding a working solution. In his signoff, the president of the Eritrea Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) Sir Elihu Lauterpacht called for co‐operation between the two sides, with ‘open boundaries’ so that some of the ‘manifest absurdities’ where the line cuts a village or a road multiple times could be solved. Yet Eritrea has refused any further talks on the practical implementation of the border. However, by ignoring pragmatic politics for the bloody minded insistence of a principle that promises little success or reward, Issaias is testing the nation that ‘never kneels down’ to its breaking point. For larger Ethiopia, the border dispute makes far less of an impact to it as a nation than it does for its struggling neighbour. Addis Ababa can afford to wait as Asmara slowly weakens. Eritrea watches as Ethiopia, opting instead to call for dialogue it knows Asmara will reject again, wins another round.
Limited Choices
Issaias is better used to fighting a battle than leading a nation in peace and remains mentally, if not physically, hunkered down in the trenches. For Issaias to continue his hermitic rule, his options for survival seem limited to maintaining the border status quo and keeping the frontier sealed with Ethiopia. If the border opened, the current complete economic control by the government would not be able to be maintained, nor the people held under the repressive framework of national service. Solving the border and opening up Eritrea to the outside would have massive implications. With the exchange rate so tightly fixed ‐ with all official foreign exchange run by the government and heavy prison sentences handed out to black marketeers ‐ Eritrea's Nakfa currency would likely be crippled by any exchange that would come with border relaxation, leading to potentially disastrous consequences for the feeble economy.
There seem therefore few options for Issaias. Having staked so much on the border issue ‐ the thousands killed in the two‐year war, the devastation of its infrastructure, the painful years of stalemate and removal of the most basic of freedoms ‐ Issaias cannot now negotiate on the frontier without negating so much of the horrific suffering he has led his country into. Importantly however, nor does it seem as though he wants change. Perversely, the border standoff acts a major prop to his rule. Without an ever present fear of Ethiopian attack ‐ whether that be perceived or real ‐ the regime's iron grip rule would be impossible to justify. Much is blamed on the ongoing stalemate, titled officially as a state of ‘no war, no peace’. The failure to implement the constitution and lack of elections are all explained away as a consequence of the standoff in the interests of ‘national security’. So too are the continued detention without trial of critics, including some of Issaias' closest colleagues. Among many others, these include the ‘G‐15’, the group of 15 top government officials and former liberation leaders who in 2001 wrote an open letter calling for ‘peaceful and democratic dialogue’ and for Issaias to be ‘governed by the constitution’. Issaias last year was reported to have dismissed in fury the constitution as ‘just a piece of paper’ following repeated questioning by a foreign journalist as to the reason for its lack of implementation. How far Issaias wants to keep control for power's sake and how far he still genuinely believes he is working for the good of his nation he led to independence is unclear. However, either way, it is the consequences of his actions and not his motive that decide the fate of Eritrea.
The Challenge for the Opposition
It is clearly grim news for ordinary Eritreans. Yet how long will they continue to put up with the situation? A lot longer, Issaias reckons. He certainly relies heavily on another guiding principle, that since Eritreans suffered and survived for 30 years in the liberation war, they can do the same again if needed now. It is true that with the internal opposition apparently crushed, the people exhausted, the university shut down and the young caught up in far flung defence and agricultural projects, there seems little likelihood of an effective internal challenge to the regime anytime soon. Those who would have already made a stand ‐ the young, students, the G‐15 and other voices for change ‐ have apparently all already been arrested, fled or settled for a course of simple survival. The high costs suffered by so many seem likely to deter any further major protest. Issaias is still regarded as the only choice of leader, not least because of his removal of those who could have posed some challenge. With critical media unavailable and no other choice, he still is likely to enjoy strong rural support. Yet the thousands of young Eritreans fleeing to Sudan or Ethiopia to avoid conscription into decades of national service, despite the shoot‐to‐kill policy on the border, show that for many the breaking point has already come. Leaving the country is, however, a very different matter from challenging the regime. How long those left behind can continue to limp along in such a strait jacket is difficult to judge. State propaganda churns out rhetoric full of patriotic zeal, coupled with praise for cash donations from Eritreans abroad with the regime fearing drop offs of remittances. Yet the overbearing mood in Asmara is one of despondency and quiet hopelessness. Food costs are rising, and basic necessities are increasingly hard to find. Aid agencies have been expelled or their work strictly restricted, while UN aid agencies have been warned to expect a similar fate for many of their development operations. For the economy, the potentially lucrative fledgling mining industry provides some hope, but it is unlikely to progress far in such a climate if the major investors needed to upgrade it into large scale mining remain understandably wary. Massive efforts have been made to improve domestic food production since food aid was blocked in September 2005 but it's a slow process, and Eritrea's efforts to become entirely self‐sufficient have had more to with Diaspora cash and good rains than agricultural policy success. Much of the effort has been undermined by the haemorrhaging of Eritrea's brightest and best youth fleeing the country. It is that group perhaps best capable of organising some form of opposition.
Yet external opposition groups, such as those in the umbrella Eritrean Democratic Alliance (EDA), remain largely ineffective. The inability for any opposition to operate inside the country and the largely effective block on any non‐government media penetrating far in Eritrea, give them little platform on which to work. Their voice is barely heard inside Eritrea. With much of the opposition based or meeting in Ethiopia, many in Eritrea see the groups ‐ however honest their real ambitions ‐ as a thin smokescreen for Ethiopian attempts to win back its lost Red Sea access. Few in Asmara can imagine how such groups can challenge Issaias, short of receiving military backing by Ethiopia. Yet however much Eritreans may want change, far too much blood has been spilt for them to easily swap the current regime for a leadership seen as being backed by a deeply distrusted Ethiopia.
The regime is, however, not as strong as it looks. It has its own deep divisions. Issaias continues his rotating policy of bringing the upper echelons in and out of power to keep his influence strong. Yet the top leadership were badly shaken by the botched assassination in October 2006 on the powerful head of internal security, Colonel Simon Ghebredengel. That the shooting took place in a central Asmara side street was shocking in itself. Doubly so was the fact that General Gerezgheir ‘Wuchu’ Andemariam, one of four top military chiefs and commander of the central zone of Eritrea, was widely fingered as being behind the attack. The very public action rocked the leadership. Wuchu, said to be wanting to cover poorly laid tracks of financial corruption, initially fell out of favour. Yet he was soon seen back beside Issaias, and the promised ‘investigation report’ was never released. In short, Issaias could not afford to lose such a strong supporter as Wuchu. Few know clear details of what drives decisions by the PFDJ leadership, but even the most casual of observers can sense the regime is becoming increasingly edgy. Reacting so aggressively to any perceived threat, however apparently minor, they appear paranoid not only due to the border standoff but from internal concerns too.
Despite a labyrinthine meddling in regional politics Issaias is, after all, increasingly isolated. He has fallen out with Western nations he blames for the failure to pressure Ethiopia to implement the border ruling, topped by the United Sates. The US, with its close connections with Addis Ababa, angers Issaias especially. He sees Washington using Ethiopia as a proxy force against Islamist and nationalist fighters in Somalia battling the US‐backed weak transitional government there. Eritrea's hosting of Somali leaders and allegations of arming their fighters have prompted Washington to threaten to add Asmara to its list of states sponsors of terror. Asmara is also accused of backing Ethiopian internal rebel forces such as the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF). It all however carries with it a high cost. Such groups have been battling Addis Ababa for decades and their role will likely help Eritrea little beyond winning temporary favour from nations or individuals who find Asmara a useful tool by which to needle Ethiopia. Eritrea's role in Somalia is declining, and it has pulled open support for Sudanese Darfur rebels in a bid to reconcile differences with Khartoum, as well as chairing a weak peace deal with eastern rebels it once hosted. A lonely Eritrea seems desperate for the friends it can find. A bizarrely obsequious April 2008 Eritrean foreign ministry statement is perhaps indicative of Asmara's current concern at the consequences of its often hostile diplomacy. From a nation so proud of its liberation fighter history came praise for ally China's crackdown on pro‐independence protestors in Tibet, calling it an ‘inalienable part’ of China. Issaias seems to have led Eritrea far from the days of its own independence struggle.
Routes Forward
Can war therefore be avoided? Nairobibased analysts made dire predictions of imminent war but the status quo has held. Skirmishes along the border have flared up and died away without either side taking wider action. Nevertheless, it is worrying that liberation‐era fighters in the leadership seemed convinced that having battled Ethiopia before, they will win again. Many are tired of waiting and seem itching for a fight to resolve the matter once and for all. They also seem dangerously out of touch with the ordinary people who realise that the military of Eritrea today, and the nature of the threat it faces, is vastly different from the victorious memories in the long guerilla battles for independence. Eritrean soldiers are no less brave, but their strength has been weakened by years of waiting in the trenches ‐ following battles in which Ethiopia drove them far back inside their own territory. Nor is the balance of a potential battle on their side, given Ethiopia's far greater resources of arms, cash and men. In battle, Eritrea can only expect to hold their lines and fight to a stalemate while Ethiopia can aim to topple the leadership. Ethiopia, currently bogged down fighting in Somalia as well as its own ethnic Somali region of Ogaden, can also pick the time that suits it best.
Many feared that the expulsion of UN peacekeepers raised the risks of conflict, yet their effectiveness was always limited and skirmishes have died down without their intervention before. Some even say the pull out will make commanders on the ground more careful about sparking a fight, since there is now no third force to calm the sides down. Ultimately any skirmish will, unless events spiral too far too soon out of control, be taken further only by a decision from either capital. The border stalemate could, and most likely will, remain in place for many years yet. Both nations have clearly good reasons not to fight again. Still, with Ethiopia having shown clear willingness to act against Somalia, fighting Eritrea remains a clear possibility. It would require little to justify, with a handy ‘counter‐terrorism motive’ unlikely to face much complaint from Washington. Ethiopian Prime Minsiter Meles Zenawi has warned that were Ethiopia to fight then it would be the final time, warning of an all out war that suggests a push all the way to Asmara. The consequences of such a move are far from clear, but such considerations seem not to trouble Issaias. Eritrean fighters achieved their independence ‘against all the odds’, and Issaias believes he can lead them into doing it again. It's a dangerous gamble for a goal that will at best be but a Pyrrhic victory for a principle ‐ at the bloody cost of a nation.