Eritrea: just a question of time
by Merrill Findlay
First published first published in The Canberra Times, 7 June 1989
 In
a stone room dug into the side of a narrow rocky gorge
we bent towards a tiny transistor radio. It was news time
and we were listening to the Voice of the Masses, the
frequency of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, transmitting
from deep within Eritrea's "liberated zone".
The
signal was weak. My companions, all senior members of
the EPLF, strained to hear a report from the front line
in Tingrinya, the guttural Semitic tongue that is one
of the nine national languages of this small former Italian
colony on the Red Sea coast of Africa. They translated
for me: "Fighting on the Massawa Asmara road continues.
Four thousand Ethiopians either killed, wounded or taken
prisoner. Twenty nine T54 and T55 tanks destroyed or taken.
1,489 weapons taken, three 85mm field guns, five trucks
..."
"A
tactical offensive to eliminate a certain portion of the
Ethiopian army on the extended lowlands," explained
Andrbrehan Welde Giorgis, the Harvard educated Director
of Education and member of the EPLF Central Committee,
the de facto government of most of Eritrea. "Our
tanks against their tanks. Conventional positional warfare
designed to get us to a point where we can administer
the final coup de grace..."
Outside
a nomad was herding his goats to their night shelter where
he would light a fire to protect them from hyenas - as
his forebears had done for centuries. Inside a young revolutionary
was preparing traditional Eritrean coffee on a small charcoal
stove made out of recycled sheet metal. As we talked,
she roasted the green coffee beans over the coals, ground
them and slipped them into a bulbous clay jabena. The
rich coffee smell filled our underground room illuminated
by kerosene lamps.
 A
truck loaded with empty shells in the war zone. Photo
by Merrill Findlay 1988.
"We
are a people at war for the 28th year now," Andrbrehan
Welde Giorgis continued. "And this makes ours one of the
longest wars of national liberation in the world. What
we are fighting for is the right of self determination.
"But
side by side with this war, we are also fighting another
war; the war against illiteracy, against ignorance, against
disease, against backwardness. In brief an all round struggle
to transform Eritrean society."
This
was the "war" I had come to Eritrea to see - and I had
found what may well be the world's least publicised yet
most effective social revolution. In this "war", the front
line is in every Eritrean community and on every degraded
mountain slope, valley or field.
 Eritrea's
social revolution: a woman collects water from a dam built
with international aid through the Eritrean Relief Association.
Photo by Merrill Findlay, 1988.
Tragically,
Eritrea's social transformation and the war of national
liberation are intimately linked. The progress of the
former depends on the success of the latter and all attempts
by the EPLF to resolve the military conflict peacefully
have failed so far. A military resolution, Andrbrehan's
final "coup de grace," may yet be some time off because,
although the EPLF clearly has superiority on the ground,
its civilian populations and its combatants continue to
be at the mercy of aerial bombardment from Ethiopian MiG
fighters supplied by the Soviet Union, and from raids
by helicopter gunships - hence our underground accomodation.
The
recent attempted coup in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia,
by rebel Ethiopian soldiers tired of fighting a war they
can never win, gave brief hope for an eventual political
resolution to the conflict in Eritrea. From an Eritrean
point of view, peace can only be achieved with the fall
of the Stalinist regime of President Mengistu Haile Mariam,
so the EPLF wholeheartedly supported those plotting his
demise. Meanwhile, resources that could be used for peaceful
purposes in one of the poorest parts of the world are
being expended on what the EPLF revolutionaries claim,
is a war of national liberation against a colonising power.
The Ethiopians, on the other hand, see Eritreans like
Andrbrehan Welde Giorgis, as "secessionist bandits."
 A
baby plays while her mother is learning to read and write.
Eritrea 1988. Photo by Merrill Findlay.
But
the social transformation, this parallel "war" against
illiteracy, ignorance and backwardness, continues in Eritrea
- in spite of the military conflict. It is being orchestrated
by intellectuals, many of whom, like Andrbrehan, a farmers
son from the highlands near Asmara, have been educated
in other parts of the world and have voluntarily returned
to Eritrea to be part of the revolution rather than pursue
their own careers in Europe or North America.
Other
revolutionaries, like the men and women of all ages who
are participating in the EPLF's vocational training and
distance education programs as teachers or students, the
cadres in isolated rural communities, or the students
of Zero School (an EPLF boarding school of 4,000 pupils
set in another narrow valley of the liberated zone) have
never left Eritrea; but they too are unpaid volunteers
in this grand social experiment.
"In
the process of socio-economic transformation, education
plays a paramount role," Andrbrehan continued, "because
when we are talking about changing society, we are talking
about changing the people who compose that society - their
attitudes, their relationships, their conceptions of themselves
and their society and environment. So in this sense, for
us, education is the instrument of liberation. It is an
instrument with which we try to eradicate illiteracy and
fight ignorance, try to raise the cultural level of our
people. But not education for its own sake," he insisted.
" Through education we try to improve the living conditions
of the people."
Free,
universal and compulsory education for all Eritreans is
the EPLF's long term policy but Andrbrehan admitted the
education program, like all the EPLF's long term programs,
still falls short of this goal. The war, the drought and
the general lack of resources that Eritrea shares with
all Third World nations, makes it impossible to educate
the entire population of four million.
 A
women's literacy class in a displaced person's camp, Eritrea,
1988. Photo by Merrill Findlay.
Nevertheless,
progress is significant. By the end of 1988 the Department
of Education had established 165 schools throughout the
liberated and semi-liberated zones of Eritrea with a total
student population of 27,000. The Health Department had
trained 2,500 barefoot doctors in peasant communities
and established a primary health care system and civilian
hospital service better than those of many already independent
African states. Other EPLF Departments have recorded similar
achievements.
"In
Eritrea, because of the long war and the deterioration
of the school system in the enemy occupied areas, we have
what can be regarded as a generation gap in education",
Andrbrehan Welde Giorgis explained.
"We
are trying to fill this gap - so we have this orientation
towards vocational training, training our people in middle
level skills,in construction, electricity, agriculture,
navigation etc. We have a school of technology, a school
of marine sciences, school of agriculture, and virtually
every civilian department has its own in-service training
program which tries to upgrade the professional skills
of its members."
Graduates
of the Education Department's teacher training programme,
in particular, feel their responsibility to pass on their
knowledge to others keenly. To them, teaching is a noble
profession.
"Most
of our people are ignorant because they live in rural
areas," Almaz Lijam, a young teacher of English at the
Zero School in the Orota base area told me.
"Even
those who live in urban areas, few of them have the chance
to learn you know, especially under this colonisation
of Ethiopia. So I am responsible as a person to enlighten
my people. Especially women. That is why I like to be
a teacher in the revolution."
I
met Almaz in one of the Zero School's staff rooms, a rough
shelter made from saplings and covered in foliage to camouflage
it against aerial bombardment. As we chatted under a thorny
acacia tree on the narrow valley floor, thirty middle-school
students filed along a well worn but stony track to their
science prac. class. Yes, here in this rugged and arid
gorge, was a heavily camouflaged but well equipped science
lab. with rows of test tubes, chemicals, Bunsen burners
- indeed everything you would expect to see in any western
middle school laboratory!
 Children
at a tube well during a break from school in one of Eritrea's
displaced persons' camps. Photo by Merrill Findlay, 1988.
In
the high plateau region of Rora Hubbub, at the small peasant
community of Endlal which is just twenty miles from the
Eritrean trenches at the real front line and only accessible
only by foot or 4WD, a younger teacher, Alefesh Asfarha,
curled up on my borrowed bed in the principal's office
one night and, in a gentle whisper, told me how, at just
fifteen, she had run away from occupied Asmara to fight
for the independence of her country.
Now,
at 21, after completing her secondary education at Zero
School plus ten weeks teacher training, she is liberating
her country not with a gun, but a blackboard. Her students,
both children and adults, sit on rocks in their brand
new class rooms and learn about a world they never knew
existed until this young teacher and her colleagues arrived
to establish their school.
This
school and others like it in the Rora region of Sahel
province is part of an integrated development program
defined and implemented after the savage drought of 1984/85,
by various departments of the EPLF, and financed by non-governmental
aid agencies in Australia, Europe and North America through
the Eritrean Relief Association. As well as schools, roads
have been constructed where there were none before; primary
health care clinics have been established; cash crops
have been introduced; and cottage industries have been
started in an effort to relieve the poverty and vulnerability
to drought of the local people. Specialists from each
EPLF department service the Rora communities and train
the local people in improved agriculture, soil conservation,
reforestation, veterinary science, health care etc.
But
most basic to all these changes has been the construction
of dams and wells to provide adequate permanent water
so the agro-pastoralists can settle permanently if they
choose. As Rigbe Bahre, a once illiterate young mother
from Rora Bakla told me: "Before, we were compelled to
live a nomadic lifestyle because there was no other choice.
We were always exposed to extremes of climate and other
things; this stationary life we can now lead is different
and much better.
"And
we are learning things now. To know something which you
don't know before is always good especially when it improves
your life and helps you understand your environment. Now
we have started to know even how other people live and
who is bordering our country and so on."
She
paused while my Eritrean friend translated. "Yes, it is
nice to know something. And our children are especially
lucky to get education while they are still young. Their
lives will be very different from ours."
 An
EPLF fighter on goat duty in Sahel province, Eritrea.
Photo by Merrill Findlay, 1988.
Back
in the underground room in the narrow gorge that is the
EPLF Secretariat, the coffee boiled and bubbled up the
slim neck of the jabena. Three times the girl caught the
overflow as ritual prescribes, then poured the dark fluid
into tiny white cups already half filled with sugar. It
was thick and very sweet, with just a hint of spice. And
across the mountains the tactical offensive continued,
fueled by the Soviet Union and its allies. (Ironically,
the Soviet Union arms both sides in the conflict, since
the Eritreans fight only with captured weapons.)
"Even
though Mengistu must be an embarrassment now to the Soviet
Union, you're still at the mercy of the superpowers ..."
I suggested in the half light.
"Not
really," Andrbrehan Welde Giorgis insisted. "The involvement
of the superpowers operates only to increase the sacrifice
of the people and the duration of the struggle. It cannot
stop us from winning our right to self determination."
He
shrugged and gestured with his hand, the tiny white coffee
cup, half empty now, still held delicately between his
fingers. "Look, after the first fourteen years of the
struggle - and we started in 1961 from scratch with no
weapons at all - we were able to defeat Haile Selassie's
army that was supported by the United States and Israel.
"In
1977, the Soviet Union started massive military intervention
- not learning from the experience of the United States
in Eritrea. Of course by 1978 we were clearly on the defensive.
But we were able to frustrate one [Ethiopian] offensive
after another. And now we are again on the strategic offensive
ourselves.
"It
took us fourteen years to beat Haile Selassie's army.
We don't know how many years it will take us to defeat
[President Mengistu] supported by the Soviet Union, but
defeat is inevitable for the Ethiopians. We are already
winning. It is just a question of time."
STOP
PRESS: Eritrea finally won its independence in
1992. One day I hope to return to write about the changes
that have taken place since my visit in 1988/89. mf
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