[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 49 (Wednesday, March 26, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E580-E581]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              ERITREA: A FRIEND THAT DESERVES RECOGNITION

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. DAN BURTON

                               of indiana

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, March 26, 2003

  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, the small nation of Eritrea 
occupies a very strategic location on the coast of the Red Sea. This is 
an area that is and will continue to be very important to our country's 
security interests. Fortunately, Eritrea is a stable, reliable friend 
of the United States. Practically alone in its region and in its 
continent of Africa, Eritrea is developing a democratic, accountable, 
and responsible government.
  I have been privileged to know many of Eritrea's leaders, since the 
time that they were freedom fighters struggling against the communist 
Mengistu regime in Ethiopia. Over all these years, they have been 
consistent in advocating, and implementing decent values. I am 
especially gratified that Eritrea is one of the countries standing 
shoulder to shoulder with us now in the ``Coalition of the Willing''. I 
might add that they are one of only two countries in all of Africa to 
do so.
  I would like to insert into the Congressional Record an excerpt of an 
article written by Robert Kaplan, which appeared in the April issue of 
the Atlantic monthly and focuses on Eritrea. I commend this article to 
all my colleagues in Congress who want to know which countries of the 
world are deserving of the label ``U.S. ally'' and worthy of American 
support.

                                Eritrea

       On the Horn of Africa, just a forty-five-minute flight from 
     Yemen, across the Red Sea choke point of the Bab el Mandeb 
     (``The Gate of Lament''), is the newly independent, sleepily 
     calm, and remarkably stable state of Eritrea. While the West 
     promotes democracy, market liberalization, military 
     demobilization, and the muting of ethnic hatreds as necessary 
     to domestic tranquillity, Eritrea, at least for the moment, 
     provides a rejoinder to all that. The country has achieved a 
     degree of non-coercive social discipline and efficiency 
     enviable in the developing world and particularly in Africa--
     and it has done so by ignoring the West's advice on democracy 
     and development, by cultivating a sometimes obsessive and 
     narcissistic dislike of its neighbors, and by not 
     demobilizing its vast army, built up during a thirty-year 
     conflict with Ethiopia, unless there are jobs waiting for the 
     troops.
       Whereas Yemen's streets and shops are plastered with photos 
     of President Saleh (whose cult of personality is mild 
     compared with those of other Arab and African leaders), one 
     never sees such photos of the Eritrean President, Isaias 
     Afewerki, the veritable founder of this country. For decades 
     Afewerki led a low-intensity guerrilla movement that finally 
     wrested independence from Ethiopia in 1991. ``Photos of me 
     would create an air of mystery and distance from the 
     people,'' he told me in December. ``It's the lack of photos 
     that liberates you. I hate high walls and armed guards.'' 
     While other leaders in the region live inside forbidding 
     military compounds, Afewerki lives in a modest suburban-style 
     house and greets people in his secretary's office, which sits 
     at the end of an undistinguished corridor. He moves around 
     the capital in the passenger seat of a four-wheel-drive 
     vehicle, with only one escort car, stopping at red lights. 
     Western diplomats here say they have seen him disappear into 
     large crowds of Eritreans without any security detail at all. 
     ``It's easy to put a bullet in him, and he knows it,'' one 
     foreign diplomat said to me.
       Security, which consumes the Western diplomatic and aid 
     communities in Sana'a (and everywhere else in the Middle 
     East), is barely an issue in Asmara, Eritrea's capital. 
     Despite its tattered storefronts, Asmara not only is one of 
     the cleanest capital cities in Africa but also may be the 
     only capital south of the Sahara where one can leave the car 
     doors unlocked or prowl the back streets at all hours without 
     fear of being robbed, even though the police are barely in 
     evidence. American, Israeli, and other resident diplomats and 
     aid administrators in Eritrea move freely around the country 
     without guards or other escorts, as if they were at home.
       Desperately poor and drought-stricken, with almost three 
     quarters of its 3.5 million inhabitants illiterate, Eritrea 
     nonetheless has a surprisingly functional social order. Women 
     run shops, restaurants, and hotels; handicapped people have 
     shiny new crutches and wheelchairs; people drive slowly and 
     even attend driving school; scrap-metal junkyards are 
     restricted to the urban outskirts; receipts are given for 
     every transaction; there are few electricity blackouts from 
     sloppy maintenance or badly managed energy resources. Foreign 
     diplomats in Asmara praise the country's lack of corruption 
     and its effective implementation of aid projects. Whereas 
     rural health clinics in much of Africa have empty shelves and 
     unexplained shortages of supplies, clinic managers in Eritrea 
     keep ledgers documenting where all the medicine is going.
       An immense fish farm near the port of Massawa testifies to 
     Eritrea's ability to utilize foreign aid and know-how. The 
     1,500-acre complex channels salt water from the Red Sea, 
     purifies it, and then uses it to raise shrimp in scores of 
     circular cement tanks. The nutrient-rich excess of that 
     process is used for breeding tilapia, a freshwater fish. The 
     remaining waste water is pumped into asparagus and mangrove 
     fields and artificially created wetlands. Though the 
     operation was initially overseen by a firm from Phoenix, 
     Arizona, and for a time employed an Israeli consultant, the 
     consultant is now only rarely used. The Eritreans themselves 
     run the operation in every respect.
       Such initiative and communal discipline are the result of 
     an almost Maoist degree of mobilization and an almost 
     Albanian degree of xenophobia--but without the epic scale of 
     repression and ideological indoctrination that once 
     characterized China and Albania. The Eritrean xenophobia and 
     aptitude for organization are, as Eritreans never cease to 
     explain, products of culture and historical experience more 
     than they are of policy choices. Eritrea never had feudal 
     structures, sheikhs, or warlords. Villages were commonly 
     owned and were governed by councils, or baitos, of elders. 
     ``It was not a society deferential to individual authority,'' 
     I was told by Yemane Ghebre Meskel, the director of President 
     Afewerki's office, ``so we didn't need Marxist ideology to 
     achieve a high stage of communalism.'' Wolde-Ab Yisak, the 
     president of the University of Asmara, observed, ``Communal 
     self-reliance is our dogma, which in turn comes from the 
     knowledge that we Eritreans are different from our 
     neighbors.'' (On my flight out of Eritrea, I overheard a 
     teenage Eritrean girl from the diaspora lecturing her younger 
     siblings in American English about how ``the Ethiopians 
     murdered our people.'')
       A monument in downtown Asmara definitively symbolizes such 
     self-reliance, collectivity, and rudimentary survival. The 
     monument celebrates not an individual, or even a generic 
     guerrilla fighter, but a giant pair of sandals--shedas, in 
     the native Tigrinya language. Such sandals, worn by every 
     Eritrean fighter during the long struggle with Ethiopia, 
     were homemade from recycled tire rubber, and gave fighters 
     the ability to move quickly in the stony desert war zone. 
     The monument shows what mythic proportions the conflict 
     with Ethiopia has achieved in the minds of Eritreans; it 
     has come to supersede the power of religion itself, in a 
     society split evenly between Islam and Orthodox 
     Christianity. This is an impressive achievement on a 
     continent where Muslims and Christians are forming 
     increasingly antagonistic group identities.
       Eritrea's clarified sense of nationhood, rare in a world of 
     nation-states rent by tribalism and globalization, is in part 
     a legacy of Italian colonialism. ``We acknowledge that the 
     legacy of colonialism was not all negative,'' says Yemane 
     Ghebreab, the political-affairs officer of the People's Front 
     for Democracy and Justice--successor to the country's 
     guerrilla force, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. 
     Having conquered Eritrea in the late nineteenth century, the 
     Italians had by the late 1930s turned their new colony into 
     one of the most highly industrialized places in Africa, with 
     road and railway networks that united a people previously 
     divided by mountains and deserts. To drive from Asmara to 
     Massawa--a descent of more than 7,500 feet in only seventy 
     miles, down tangled vertebrae of coppery-green peaks, on a 
     road of never-ending switchbacks, bridges, and embankments, 
     built by Mussolini in the mid-1930s and kept in excellent 
     condition by Eritrean highway crews working seven days a 
     week--is to experience the historical energy of the 
     industrialized West transplanted successfully to an African 
     nation.
       Another benefit of Italian colonialism, according to Ghebre 
     Meskel, was town planning. Rather than concentrate everything 
     in Asmara, the Italians developed Massawa and similar towns 
     so as to prevent the overcentralization that now plagues 
     other developing countries. To stem migration into Asmara and 
     preserve this legacy, the Eritrean government has tried to 
     improve life in rural areas; thus Asmara is not surrounded by 
     shantytowns that might breed political extremism.
       Following the defeat of Fascist Italy in World War II, and 
     the dissolution of its East African empire, the new United 
     Nations voted to incorporate Eritrea into Ethiopia. The 
     Eritreans, unhappy with this decision, finally revolted in 
     1961. For thirteen years Eritrean guerrillas fought an 
     Ethiopia backed by the United States. In 1974, when 
     Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown, leading to 
     a Marxist regime headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam, Eritrean 
     guerrilla activity did not cease, and from then on the 
     Eritreans fought an Ethiopia backed by the Soviet Union. 
     Despite their ability to grind away at a Soviet-supplied war 
     machine, which featured MiG fighter jets in the air and 
     Soviet generals on the battlefield, the secretive and 
     independent-minded Eritreans received no aid under the Reagan 
     Doctrine (a U.S. program for arming Third World anti-
     communist insurgencies). Nevertheless, in 1991 Eritrean and 
     Tigrean guerrillas, fighting on separate fronts, defeated

[[Page E581]]

     Mengistu, and Eritrean tanks rolled triumphantly into the 
     Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. In the minds of the 
     Eritreans, they had fought and won a three-decade struggle 
     against a state ten times as populous, with no help from 
     either of the superpowers or anyone else in the outside 
     world. They now feel that they owe nothing to anybody, and 
     they are filled with disdain for international opinion. (A 
     taxi driver berated me for the West's focus on the crimes of 
     the former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic; Mengistu, he 
     said, was responsible for at least twice as many deaths 
     through his collectivization programs, but now lives in 
     lavish exile in Zimbabwe.)
       In 1996, following a long series of town meetings, the 
     Eritreans drafted what one foreign diplomat has called ``an 
     impeccable constitution.'' But a second war with Ethiopia 
     erupted in 1998, and the constitution has never been 
     implemented. That war lasted until 2000; by some estimates it 
     left 19,000 Eritreans and 60,000 Ethiopians dead, after tanks 
     and fighter jets engaged in desert combat reminiscent of the 
     Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. A U.S.-brokered ceasefire 
     has resulted in the current demarcation of the disputed 
     border under UN auspices.
       Since this latest war the very stubbornness and social 
     discipline that continue to make Eritrea the most civil of 
     societies, in ways rarely considered by Western journalists 
     and policy elites, have also made it a pariah in Europe and 
     the United States--and for good reason. In 2001 national 
     elections were postponed indefinitely (though free and fair 
     elections at the village level were under way at the time of 
     my visit). Far more disturbing, though, is that Eritrea now 
     has the worst press repression in Africa. And in a widespread 
     government crackdown on political dissent, eleven high-
     ranking officials, nine journalists, several businessmen, and 
     two Eritreans working for the political and economic sections 
     of the U.S. embassy were arrested; they are still being held 
     without charges. Moreover, a campaign of national 
     mobilization requires young men and women to spend eighteen 
     months in the military or the civil service: a good idea in 
     principle, but they are often kept much longer, with no 
     guaranteed release date. That, together with the political 
     repression and the exceedingly slow pace of economic reform, 
     has induced young people to quietly leave the country. An 
     increasingly disaffected diaspora has refused to invest 
     substantial amounts in Eritrea until conditions have been 
     liberalized.
       ``We're not asking all that much,'' one foreign diplomat 
     told me. ``They don't even have to hold national elections. 
     If they would just implement a version of China's economic 
     reforms, this place could bloom overnight, like Singapore, 
     given its social control and small population.'' But several 
     diplomats admitted that the sense of patriotism is so strong 
     here, except among some of the urban elite in Asmara, that 
     they detect no widespread unhappiness with the regime. ``The 
     change would have to come at the top,'' one foreign resident 
     told me. ``It's not altogether impossible that we will wake 
     up tomorrow morning and learn that Isaias is no longer 
     around.'' Another outside expert told me that he has not 
     given up on the President, but if 2003 goes by without some 
     political and economic reforms, he will consign Afewerki to 
     the ranks of boorish African strongmen.
       My first interview with Afewerki was in 1986, in a cave in 
     northern Eritrea, during the war with Ethiopia. That meeting 
     had been scheduled for ten in the morning--and at ten exactly 
     he walked in and said, ``You have questions for me?'' He 
     hasn't changed. He was just as punctual when we met this 
     time, and he spoke in the same blunt and remote tone, with 
     the same shy asceticism. He spoke in intense, spare bursts of 
     cold analysis--in contrast to the gasbag homilies one hears 
     from many Arab and African politicians--for more than two 
     hours. Afewerki may be the most intellectually interesting 
     politician in the history of postcolonial Africa.
       ``All that we have achieved we did on our own,'' he said. 
     ``But we have not yet institutionalized social discipline, so 
     the possibility of chaos is still here. Remember, we have 
     nine language groups and two religions. No one in Africa has 
     succeeded in copying a Western political system, which took 
     the West hundreds of years to develop. Throughout Africa you 
     have either political or criminal violence. Therefore we will 
     have to manage the creation of political parties, so that 
     they don't become means of religious and ethnic division, 
     like in Ivory Coast or Nigeria.'' He went on to say that 
     China was on the right path--unlike Nigeria, with its 10,000 
     dead in communal riots since the return of democracy, in 
     1999. ``Don't morally equate the rights of Falun Gong with 
     those of hundreds of millions of Chinese who have seen their 
     lives dramatically improve,'' he told me.
       Yemen, Afewerki thinks, is ``a medievalist society and 
     tribal jungle going through the long transition to 
     modernity.'' He accused it of advancing an ``Arab national-
     security strategy against Israel,'' a country he openly 
     supports. However, he accepted the international arbitration 
     that awarded the disputed Hanish Islands, in the Red Sea, to 
     Yemen. As for Ethiopia, he said it could fragment, because it 
     is controlled by minority Tigreans who have created a 
     Balkanized arrangement of ethnic groups (Amharas, Oromos, and 
     so on) rather than trying to forge an imperial melting pot, 
     in the way of Halle Selassie.
       Despite Afewerki's refreshing, undiplomatic brilliance, a 
     few hours with him can be troubling. His very austerity, 
     personal efficiency, and incorruptibility are mildly 
     reminiscent of Mengistu himself (who also suffered from a 
     seeming excess of pride), even though the latter was a mass 
     murderer and Afewerki could yet turn out to be among Africa's 
     most competent rulers. Civilization in the Home of Africa has 
     often bred sharp political minds that, with cold efficiency, 
     dealt with their intellectual enemies not through written 
     attacks but by imprisoning or killing them. And it is said 
     repeatedly in Asmara that the President has closed himself 
     off since arresting the very people who challenged him 
     intellectually.
       General Franks, on several visits here, and Secretary of 
     Defense Donald Rumsfeld, during a visit last December, have 
     held long talks with Afewerki. ``The meetings were superb,'' 
     Afewerki told me. ``I mean that they were frank, without 
     pretensions or flattery on either side. I share the strategic 
     view of the Americans in the region. French forces in 
     Djibouti have been a stabilizing factor, and U.S. troops will 
     add to that. You need outside powers to keep order here. It 
     sounds colonialist, but I am only being realistic.''
       When I pressed Afewerki about human-rights abuses, which 
     Rumsfeld had pointedly raised in their meeting two weeks 
     earlier, he said, ``If you just leave us alone, we will 
     handle these matters in a way that won't damage our bilateral 
     relationship and won't embarrass us or you.'' He indicated 
     that he would be more likely to satisfy U.S. demands on human 
     rights in the context of a growing military partnership, but 
     would not do so if merely hectored by the State Department.
       I worried that Afewerki, like many other realists, is 
     obsessed with everything that could go wrong in his country 
     rather than with what could go right. True realism requires a 
     dose of idealism and optimism, or else policy becomes 
     immobilized. And that might be Afewerki's problem. He seemed 
     more comfortable when I first met him, in a state of wartime 
     emergency, than he does now, in a state of peacetime 
     possibility. He analyzes brilliantly what he knows, but he 
     gives in to paranoia about what he doesn't know. He did not 
     seem to understand that U.S. foreign policy is often a 
     synthesis of what the State and Defense Departments are 
     comfortable with, and that therefore Foggy Bottom alone 
     cannot be blamed for Eritrea's image problems in the United 
     States.
       Nevertheless, Afewerki has essentially offered the United 
     States exactly what it wants: bases enabling its military to 
     strike at anyone in the region at any time, without 
     restrictions. Although the World Bank has questioned the 
     economic viability of a new airport at Massawa with a long 
     jet runway, Afewerki reportedly told Rumsfeld, ``The runway 
     can handle anything the U.S. Air Force wants to land on it.'' 
     Eritrea also boasts deepwater port facilities at Massawa and 
     Assab, both strategically placed near the mouth of the Red 
     Sea.
       Afewerki told me, ``The increasing social and economic 
     marginalization of Africa will be a fact of life for a very 
     long time to come.'' Ethiopia in particular, he said, will 
     weaken internally as the Oromos and others demand more power. 
     Its Tigrean Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, already lives 
     inside a vast security apparatus designed for his protection. 
     Meanwhile, across the Red Sea in Yemen, not only water but 
     oil, too, is running out even as the armed young population 
     swells, potentially threatening the political order of 
     significant parts of Arabia. And with fighting terrorism now 
     a permanent strategic priority of the United States, the 
     stability and discipline of Eritrea make it the perfect base 
     for projecting American power and helping Israel in an 
     increasingly unstable region. That, in turn, might foster the 
     Singaporean kind of development for which, according to some, 
     Eritrea appears suited.

  So there you have it: Yemen and Eritrea, two case studies in the war 
on terrorism. In Yemen the United States has to work with unsavory 
people in a tribalized society in order to prevent more-unsavory people 
from destabilizing it to the benefit of Osama bin Laden. In Eritrea the 
United States may have to use a bilateral military relationship to 
nudge the country's President toward prudent political and economic 
reform, so that Eritrea, too, won't be destabilized. Thus our military 
involvement with both nations will mean political involvement in their 
domestic affairs-and throughout the ages that has been the essence of 
imperialism.

                          ____________________