Soldiers Martyrs, and Exiles: Political Conflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora (review)

I worked with Trish Hepner from 1998 to 2000, when I was the ceremonial president of the Eritrean Studies Association and she was the indispensable secretary. I was impressed then by her intelligence and compassion, and my admiration for her has only been strengthened by this book. As the book jacket states, it "provides a moving and trenchant critique of political intolerance and violence."

This is a well-written account of how an initially small group of Eritrean men (and several remarkable women) in the EPLF–PFDJ (Eritrean People's Liberation Front/Peoples' Front for Democracy and Justice) came to dominate the Eritrean community at home and abroad. Hepner rightly points out that losers do not write history; nonetheless, this work leaves us with the hope that she might one day give us an account of the struggles of the ELM (the Eritrean Liberation Movement) and ELF (the Eritrean Liberation Front). In addition, her pioneering study of the growth and demise of the student-led Eritreans for Liberation in North America is especially balanced and thought provoking; Eritrean memories are long, and it is not surprising that accounts of the ideological and military struggles of the ELF and EPLF should still be at the forefront of the discourse of many of Hepner's interviewees. Indeed, such is the sensitivity on the issue of the brief civil war between Muslim and Christian communities in British-occupied Eritrea during the Second World War that Eritrea's foremost historian, Alemseged Tesfai, has expressed to me a great reluctance to continue his account of Eritrean history much beyond this date, for fear of offending the descendants of participants and rekindling conflict.

Hepner is less than analytic in her account of the U.S. position, which now is (as it was also in 1998) one of full support of Ethiopia. (An Eritrean friend of mine who was attending a press conference in Addis Ababa during the early stages of the war dozed off in the hot room and thought the Ethiopian foreign minister was giving the usual vindication of the Ethiopian action; he opened his eyes to see the U.S. ambassador at the podium.) Hepner's account of the war with Ethiopia from 1998 owes rather too much to accounts by Ethiophiles such as Tekeste Negash amd Kjetil Tronvoll. A counterbalance might be found in the books jointly written by Lyda Favali and myself: Blood, Land and Sex: Legal and Political Pluralism in Eritrea (Indiana University Press, 2004) and Sangue, Terra e Sesso (Giuffrè, 2007).

As far as I am aware, Hepner has not been in Eritrea since 2001. From my own visits since then, I am able to support much of her speculation about the way the PDFJ is digging itself into a hole. Indeed, I must admit that many of us veteran camp followers of the EPLF and PFDJ turned a blind eye to questionable practices in the field, using as our justification the truism that liberals do not win guerrilla wars.

I think it was Richard Leonard who, some years before liberation in 1991, expressed his serious misgivings about the creation of a centralized party and government. This followed a day-long meeting we had had with Issayas Afeworki in Afabet shortly after one of the most significant military victories of the struggle. Later, in liberated Asmara in 1991, Issayas told me that Eritreans did not have the necessary background to implement a fully functioning liberal democracy. In 1995, after surviving a couple of challenges to his leadership, he was more forthright, saying: we cannot as Africans afford to be fooled by the "big banner" headlines of multipartyism.

It is a pity that the book's glossary does not include the word midiskal (Tigrinya for "frozen"), which refers to the practice of freezing people in their positions, a practice increasingly frequent...