My Brother, My Enemy
The two men who liberated Ethiopia are locked in war. The author returned to the Horn of Africa to find out how disaster overtook it. TALK MAGAZINE

By Abraham Verghese

THIS IS THE IMAGE THAT LINGERS: It is August 1974, and I am in a bar in Addis Ababa and have had one too many beers. It is 10:45 in the evening, and only a fool would give himself just 15 minutes to get home before the 11 o'clock curfew. But my roommate - like me, an expatriate medical student in Ethiopia - is dallying with one of the barmaids.

It is a time of anarchy. Earlier this year, a student revolt voicing popular discontent with the aging, probably senile Emperor Haile Selassie led to mutinies by army garrisons.

A month from now, the emperor will be deposed. A military cabal is calling the shots. It has no interest in the democratic process the students agitated for. Each morning corpses - students, royalty, intellectuals - are dumped on the streets, to convey some inchoate message. The medical school has been shut down. Our routine is to visit the embassies in the mornings (looking for a visa out), play marathon rounds of Monopoly in the afternoons, and listen to BBC Radio in the evenings to find out what is going on. Later we venture out for a nightcap, which is what we're having now. Undoubtedly, by this time the jeeps with the mounted machine guns have emerged from their lairs and are patrolling the drizzly streets. I don't feel brave enough to gamble that a trigger-happy corporal's wristwatch shows the same time as mine. The mistress of the bar closes the front door, deciding the issue. It will be an all-nighter.

The patrons are all men. Several are wearing highly polished shoes that don't quite match their slacks and sport coats. Trouble. Such footwear means these men, whose voices are becoming increasingly raucous, are military folk in mufti, drunk with newfound power and surely packing revolvers.

Well after midnight, two patrons grapple at the bar. One brandishes a gun. Every- one dives for cover. In the tussle the gun falls. The disarmed combatant pulls out a grenade. His opponent flies out the door. The grenade man follows. We cautiously move to the windows. A figure, coattails flying, sprints away. Suddenly the coattails vanish in an explosion that rattles the windows. Minutes later the jeeps arrive, like hyenas that have picked up the scent of blood. The man who threw the grenade chats happily with the soldiers. A vague, crumpled mass is visible in the distance. I think: I cannot get out of this country soon enough.

I DID GET OUT THAT YEAR. My journey took me first to America, where I worked as a nursing home orderly, then to India to complete medical school, then back to America, where I now live. As for my medical schoolmates in Addis Ababa, several joined guerrilla movements that were trying to overthrow the military dictatorship - led by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam - that had seized power. Among them was Meles Zenawi, a brilliant student a year behind me. Busy as we were in the hospital, my class tended to look down on main-campus politics. But Meles's class was a left-leaning lot who readily joined strikes with the other students. Meles Zenawi is now the prime minister of Ethiopia.

For almost a decade after I Red, I had little desire to return. But then a longing to revisit the geography of my youth took root, and grew with every passing year. This year, I wrote to the Ethiopian embassy in Washington, asking permission to visit and to interview Meles (by custom, Ethiopians are generally referred to by their first names). What I didn't say was how Ethiopia had never left my consciousness, how it pervaded the anecdotes I told my teenage sons, how, when I saw the skepticism on their faces, the country began to seem like something I had hallucinated. Now, in my mid-forties, I felt a deep need to see Addis Ababa again.

The embassy gathered some of my published work and forwarded it to Addis Ababa with my letter. In just two days word came back: I was welcome to visit, and an inter- view with Meles had been scheduled. When I collected my visa in Washington, the press officer ventured that the rapid okay had probably come right from the top. The prime minister, he said, had lately been extremely selective about interviews with foreign journalists. It seemed that my connection to the story meant I could be trusted.

At the time of my visit, almost unnoticed, Ethiopia and the new nation of Eritrea were locked in a war that had culminated this past February in a horrific battle in Badme, an arid bit of borderland. It is probable that more soldiers died in four days there than have died during the entire Kosovo conflict. I found it impossible to fathom how, just when peace and stability had come to the Horn of Africa, such a conflict should erupt. I welcomed the chance to hear directly from the prime minister, the man who had been steering the country back from the 16-year rule of Colonel Mengistu, Africa's Stalin.

I WAS BORN IN ETHIOPIA. My parents were schoolteachers, hired out of India in the 1950s to be part of the emperor's modernization program. Although I never held Ethiopian citizenship, I grew up in Addis Ababa, the misty, eucalyptus-covered capital. I came of age in that city, and thought it likely that I would live there all my life.

From childhood I had been aware of the turmoil in the north, where Eritreans were fighting for independence. Eritrea was once an Italian colony. When the British kicked Mussolini's forces out in 1941, it fell under British control before becoming an independent federation of Ethiopia in 1952. Ten years later Haile Selassie, coveting its ports, annexed Eritrea outright, triggering a guerrilla war that lasted for the next 30 years.

After I left Ethiopia in 1974, the military cabal intensified the campaign against the Eritrean guerrillas. At the same time, Tigray, a province just south of Eritrea, also began fighting for independence. Among Tigray's guerrilla troops was Meles Zenawi, who had abandoned medicine to enter the bush. He was a frontline soldier, 6ghting alongside the peasants, priests, and students who made up the Tigray People's Liberation Front. Over time he formed part of the core group of Marxist-Leninists who shaped the movement. Before long he was its leader.

In 199I a coalition of rebel organizations, including the Tigray guerrillas and the Eritreans, led by Issaias Afewerki, routed Mengistu in several epic battles. Eyewitnesses clearly remember the day when the longhaired guerrilla fighters, wearing khaki shorts and sandals, marched triumphantly into Addis Ababa.

I followed these developments in the newspapers with excitement and pride. Meles's guerrillas merged with other prodemocracy- groups and formed the new government of Ethiopia. Issaias and the Eritreans - who had lost more than 60,000 lives in their 30-year struggle - voted to become independent in 1993 with Ethiopia's blessing. President Clinton and others hailed Meles and Issaias - thoughtful men who had fought side by side to liberate their nations - as representatives of a new era in African leadership. I would never have predicted that the two countries would later find themselves at war.

The seeds of the conflict were in part economic. Many Ethiopians felt that Meles had made too many concessions, and Eritreans were infuriated when Ethiopia refused to accept its new currency in country-to- country commerce. The breaking point came in May 1998. After a border skirmish, the Eritrean army entrenched itself in Badme, where the border was in dispute. Ethiopia agreed to a peace plan supported by the United States, Rwanda, and the Organization for African Unity (OAU). But Eritrea refused to sign What ensued last February was a four-day rage. On one side were tens of thousands of troops from Eritrea, digging a labyrinth of trenches and emplacing gun positions and numerous mines. Arrayed against the Eritreans were an equal number of Ethiopian troops determined to retake Badme. In wave after wave the Ethiopian foot soldiers, backed by artillery and armor, threw themselves onto the Eritrean defenses. Finally they broke through at two points and mopped up all the forces in between. It was the kind of brutal ground war no modern Western society would countenance. Once the Ethiopian forces broke through, Eritrea agreed to the peace plan that was already on the table. At the time of my visit, Ethiopia was negotiating the fine points, but there was still tension. There have been several more major battles, though none has approached the bloodshed at Badme.

I LANDED IN, ADDIS Ababa late one evening last September. The phalanx of customs officials and the odd soldier with a rifle reawakened old anxieties. But the familiar scent of eucalyptus brought me to the edge of tears. The face of the customs lady, when I addressed her in Amharic, broke into a wonderful smile. I told her I had been born in the city and was returning after so long. In that case, she said, I was no foreigner. She welcomed me back and waved me through.

The road into the city, once mostly empty, was now a bustling thoroughfare. I tried to drink it all in, feeling a visceral sensation of having located some part of me that had been missing. I chastised myself for not having returned sooner.

After checking in at the Hilton, I repaired to a tiny bar in my old neighborhood. The mistress of the bar greeted me warmly. I had forgotten how magnificently courteous Ethiopians can be, how many bows, kisses on each cheek, and handshakes we had to go through before we could actually converse. We agreed that we both looked older, but undoubtedly were wiser. The bar was unchanged. There was still a framed picture of Haile Selassie, in a navy uniform, dwarfed by Britain's Princess Anne, who was wearing an evening gown. It was an almost comical photograph, which during the military era might have constituted a form of treason. But in that bar, amid the scent of incense and coffee and cigarettes, there existed a smoky reality that had somehow remained truer than the succession of men who had occupied the seat of power.

I explored the city obsessively over the next few days, visiting every house where I had lived. I made my taxi driver cruise the routes I had ridden on my motorcycle as a student. The population had grown considerably, from half a million to about four million. Meanwhile, the old expatriate business community - Armenians, Greeks, Italians, and Indians - had dwindled.

Meles Zenawi's government had abolished the state-controlled economy of the previous regime, under which no one had ever lost his job and the prices of staples had been kept artificially low and the value of the birr, Ethiopia's currency, artificially high. The opening of the economy had brought foreign investment and wealth to many middle-class people. But common folk seemed to be having a hard time. Inflation had eaten away at their buying power, and unemployment was rampant. There was muttered resentment among people from the Amhara and Oromo tribes - the majority in Addis Ababa - about the Tigrayans' holding most positions of power. Still, most Ethiopians seemed to believe that the war had been justified, given Eritrea's aggression.

MY INTERVIEW with the prime minister took place in his office, in a complex built by the dictator he had overthrown. After being searched twice, I was led to a large, paneled living room. Meles walked in, a short, fit man in his forties. "Welcome back," he said.

I knew that a special U.S. delegation was about to visit and that the war front was still active. But if Meles was under any time pressure, he did not show it. Occasionally he would rub his eyes, as if sleep had been at a premium for some time. Indeed, since coming to office, "in what spare time I had," he had taken a degree in business management. I asked if he regretted having given up medicine. "It was not easy to get into medical school in those days, and so to abandon the work that I had started was not easy. On the other hand, at that stage the hope that had been rekindled by the popular movement in 1974, which overthrew the imperial regime and opened up the political situation, was suddenly trampled upon by the military coup. And we thus soon came to the conclusion that we could only speak to them in the only language they understand - which is by carrying arms."


"You became a frontline fighter?"

He smiled. "In the early days we didn't ' have much division of labor.... As the movement evolved...I moved out of the frontline troops and into organization work."

I was intrigued by the tenacity it must have taken to fight from 1974 till 1991. "Was there a time when you despaired?" I asked.

He nodded. "There were difficult moments. And one is never sure that one will live to see the outcome of that struggle. It is not really critical who takes the baton in the final dash; it is the fact that this baton has crossed the line. And so far as crossing the line is concerned, there was never a time that I doubted. As to whether I would be among those who carry the baton in the final 100 yards, I had considerable doubts."

I hesitated to ask about Issaias Afewerki. Every Western press report made much of the fact that the two had been comrades in arms, and this was clearly a sensitive area. Nevertheless, I asked whether he thought that if he and Issaias were in a closed room together they would be able to reconcile their differences. "

There's a myth that has been created about the personal relationship between me and Issaias," he replied. "I would say that our personal relationship was not a relationship that led us to act together on personal issues. The political issues were what brought us together. And when the political issues set us apart, there was no independent personal relationship we could fall back on to retain a semblance of under- standing one might have had in the past."

I asked if he regretted lobbying for Eritrea's statehood, and thus ceding Assab, which had been Ethiopia's main connection to the sea. "Absolutely not," he replied. "I believe that the Eritrean people have, like any other people, certain inherent rights. It is not up to me to give or take their rights.... One can recognize or fail to recognize but one cannot take or give away these rights. It is not about territory, it is about people's rights. Land makes sense only because people are in it. You cannot separate land from people.

And when [the Eritrean] people decided that they wanted to separate, we said, 'Have it your way. Good luck. And let's work together.' Even if I had known this [war] was coming, there would be no way I would have done anything different."

Meles was at pains to make sure I understood the roots of the current conflict: "The problem here is really the problem of Eritrea trying to find a place in the sun that is commensurate with its potential and its limitations. This has resulted in their attacking Yemen, occupying an island, and finally losing when the matter went to international arbitration.... There is the genuine desire for self-determination being transformed into a virulent nationalism that is rocking the boat. The crisis that we have now is manifested in the form of a border dispute and aggression by Eritrea."

The economic crisis, he felt, had led to frustration on Eritrea's part and to the notion that the country could blackmail Ethiopia by attacking some border area. "They had some reason to think they might pull it off. They know we inherited an army of half a million, which we immediately demobilized. We were almost exclusively focused on economic growth and development, and we...felt it would be wise to spend every cent we had on economic growth and not on a big army.... I don't believe the Eritrean people have this innate desire to provoke everyone around them and cause chaos and war. I believe they are tired of war and have the simple desire to have a peaceful life...like everyone else. I think the sickness is in the leadership, not in the population. "

I brought up the battle at Badme, curious as to how he saw it. "In terms of scale, I think it was com- parable to the battles of World War II. The losses were quite heavy, and the amount of armor involved I think was comparable if not higher than the biggest battles in North Africa.... It should have been beyond the means of these two countries. But both sides inherited lots of hardware. And the issues involved are so involved with sovereignty that people are prepared to put up with a lot of hardship."

After Badme the Eritreans quickly agreed to the same peace proposal Ethiopia had agreed to earlier. But now Ethiopia seemed to be hesitating. Why?

"When Eritrea rejected the peace proposal initially, the international community was surprisingly silent. They began to tell us, 'These guys...are an extreme lot, stubborn. So why don't you give them additional concessions? ' We said, 'What concessions? Concessions from our sovereignty? That has never been done by any government in Ethiopia in 3,000 years.'... That is the only thing of great value that we have inherited from our past, our unflinching determination to keep our...country independent even if we are dying of hunger.

"As soon as we kicked them out of the key area in Badme, the Eritreans said, 'Okay...we accept the peace package. But the OAU requires us to move out from the territory that you pushed us out of militarily - the rest of the territory that we occupied we don't have to move out from.' In other words, they were saying that the OAU package meant that their forced rout in Badme would be sanctioned in the form of a peace package and nothing more! So we decided we will assign a team of lawyers to find any loopholes...and we will not sign till all these loopholes are cleared."

Toward the end, I asked him about his own heroes. His tone became almost sad. "I learned the most from the peasants who fought with me, many of whom died along the way. I had the misfortune, for example, to ask for volunteers to clear a minefield so that others could pass. And I knew personally some of those individuals who volunteered. I try to measure up to them. I try to remember them when I make a decision. I try to make sure their trust in me and in the movement was well worth it. That the battle that they paid for is still moving forward."

TO BE WITH MELES was inspiring. To witness one man's faith in an ideal is to have hope for the nation as a whole. And yet, I suspect I would find his counterpart in Eritrea just as charismatic - and his arguments possibly as convincing. But if the two men are truly visionary, they must resolve the present conflict. Once again, these leaders need to defy the conventional wisdom that says that out of stubbornness such a conflict in Africa will go on and on.

I went back to Ethiopia filled with a strange longing. I wanted, I think, to feel a sense of vindication, a justification for the memories I had clung to. But as much as the country seduced me on this visit, it also eluded me. My journey brought me back full circle to the place I had prayed to escape from; it gave me hope and yet left me disturbed; it reminded me, despite the welcome, that I had been forced to make my home elsewhere. It showed me, as they say, that you can't step into the same river twice.

I have changed. The country has changed. Whatever I thought I had, whatever I tried to take away, was as ephemeral as the mist that slipped down the slopes of the Entoto mountains, shrouding the city of Addis Ababa by nightfall and burning away by day.

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