[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.
____________________