ETHIOPIA & PRESIDENTIAL ADVISOR
9037 My Favourite Character – for U3A Creative Writing Group

Source: http://futureobservatory.dyndns.org/9037.htm

My favourite character was, and still is, a real person. He is Seeye Abraha, or Seeye - as I have always thought of him - though in the Ethiopian tradition his (Coptic) christian name should be taken as Abraha. On the other hand, he shares some bigger than life features with the fictional heroes of adventure writers such as Earnest Hemingway. Of course he is ruggedly handsome, one of my female colleagues fell for him in a big way, and he is - to a degree – charismatic as all leaders have to be. But, unusually for someone whose deeds deserve to enter into history, he is self-effacing. You will certainly never have heard of him, and few others ever have. Yet, if the truth was known, he was one of the great figures of the last quarter of the 20th century.

I never found out anything about his earlier background, though it must have been somewhat privileged, for – when my account starts – he was at university studying medicine. It was the 1970s, and the communist dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, had not too long previously ousted Haile Selassie; the Ras Tefera still beloved of the Rastefarians. The momentous decision, which Mengistu then made, had a sound Marxist pedigree; Mao Tse Tung had just done it as part of his Cultural Revolution. It was to send the university students out into the country to work on the farms. Mengistu was, however, to regret this when, after seventeen years of revolutionary war, they returned – at the head of a column of tanks.

As a student from the Tigray province, where the rebellion started, Seeye eventually joined the rebel army. He described how, with mounting apprehension as to what his future might be, he took his last drink as a ‘free man’, in a bar in Asmara, before setting off to war. In view of his training, and his almost pacifist convictions, he became a medical orderly. Like everyone else in the rag-tag army, though, his only possessions were a blanket and the Kalashnikov rifle which was the common currency of the times. For almost a decade he was to sleep in ditches or under hedges, but almost never under a roof, with this trusty weapon at his side. Indeed, it was soon realized by his superiors that he was much more adept with the weapon than he ever was with his medicine. Thus, from the humblest of beginnings, began his military career.

The army he had joined had no great resources at its command. Indeed, the story is told of how, at the beginning, it had just two shotguns and five Lee Enfield rifles. Against it was ranged the military might of the Derg, the communist government, and that in turn was backed by the overwhelming might of the Soviet government. Paradoxically, the rebels too were Marxist – but this counted for nothing with the Soviets, who pumped in massive amounts of military aid; including a complete air-force and literally thousands of tanks. It was for this reason that the TPLF, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Force as they liked to be known, briefly flirted with Bulgaria – then a leper even amongst communist states – for the simple reason that it was the only other Marxist nation opposing Moscow!

The outcome was that, throughout the revolutionary war, they never received a single piece of military aid from the outside world. This contrasted with almost every other successful revolution; where, for example, the Taliban in Afghanistan were resourced by the US and the rebels in Southern Africa were supported by Cuba. As a result, every bit of the TPLF’s military equipment had to be captured from the Derg forces. Thanks to Seeye’s tactics, though, they were incredibly successful in this respect, and ended up with thousands of captured tanks under their control, so much so that the end of the war featured massive tank battles, and its warehouses were full of more munitions than they could ever use.

Even food aid was withheld from them by the Derg. All the food paid for by the Band Aid appeals went to support the Derg armies, since Mengistu was using the famine in Tigray – the home of the TPLF – as a military weapon. In the process he quite deliberately killed a million civilians, where the even worse drought of ten years later only resulted in the deaths of 8,000. As a result, the rebels had to carve, by hand, roads through the Simian highlands – which rise to 18,000 feet - for heavy lorries to bring in from Sudan what little aid they did receive. Even then the trucks could only run at night, where they were bombed by day.

The one piece of new technology which did transform their warfare, though, was CB – Citizen’s Band – radio; which they used, superbly well, to coordinate their attacks. Apart from that they had very little. They were famous for wearing plastic sandals, which were much cheaper than boots. Indeed, their symbol for the first anniversary after winning the war was a sandaled foot crushing a helmet!

They were an unusual army, though. Discipline was self-imposed. The troops didn’t even have uniforms, and foot drill was unheard of. More amazing still, for those many who think that obeying orders without question is a life and death necessity in an army, the cadres of troops chose what to do themselves. If they ever needed to storm a position, knowing that many would die, they took a vote on the decision; and then, without fail, stormed the position. They ended up, without it being imposed, as the best army in Africa, and one of the best in the world.

I think one policy, perhaps better than any other, demonstrates how idiosyncratic yet successful, they were. It concerned the fate of any troops captured in an action. These were given three choices:
1. Join the rebels, which some did and died fighting for the TPLF cause.
2. Leave the country, and go across the border to Sudan, which some also did.
   At this point most of my listeners expect to hear a third choice which says “or die”. The actual offer was, though, very different:
3. Go home!

It was a very humane offer, which most of them took up. They were given a month of political indoctrination, which wasn’t brainwashing but simply an extended explanation of what the TPLF planned to do for the country, and then they were repatriated to their homes in Derg controlled territory.

It was, however, not just ethically admirable but very effective militarily, for the Derg immediately drafted them back into its army. This meant that in every battle, when the chips were down for the Derg troops, there was always somebody to say “Shall we surrender and go home?” Vast numbers of such troops surrendered in this way, bringing their invaluable equipment with them!

As the war progressed, Seeye gradually was promoted, until – as the 1980s dawned – he became the general in charge of military planning; and ultimately their war-time leader. This meant he no longer had to sleep in a ditch. Instead he and his staff were housed in bunkers dug into a 2,000 foot high cliff face in the north of the country. There, underground, they were safe from the air-force who – during daytime - bombed anything that moved; even the farmers had to harvest their crops at night. At night, though, the pilots could not fly, so the cliff face - lit up by the thousands of fluorescent lights from inside the man-made caves – reportedly looked just like Manhattan.

Inside their own cave, Seeye and Meles – who handled all the diplomatic contacts and after the war became the president – had their Spartan bedrooms and a library; for both of them never gave up the learning they had started together at university. Seeye also had his map room, with a vast table spread with the maps of Ethiopia, on which he planned their campaigns. The one which was still there at the end of the war still showed the vast, sweeping movements of their armies as they converged on Addis Abeba.

Above all, Seeye’s genius, which eventually made him the most successful general in the last quarter of the 20th century, was in strategy. Five years before the end of the war he even predicted, correctly, in exactly what month his army would roll into Addis. His greatest victory though, the one which should have been on the front pages around the world, but never was, was the final battle of Teodras.

I well remember the British Ambassador saying to Seeye how they had all been surprised by the sudden collapse of the Derg army in this battle. I remember even more clearly the explanation for his ignorance: “MI6 wouldn’t pay for us to send spies behind your lines…you know, businessmen or academics.” At the time I was just such an academic! Seeye patiently explained to him that the planning for that ‘sudden’ victory had started more than two years before the battle. They had then spent those two years building the supply lines they would need, and the intelligence sources that would support their efforts. This timescale was much longer than for almost any other battle in history, with the possible exception of D-Day.

The battle, when it came, was indeed on a monumental scale; especially when it was supposedly conducted by a rabble of a guerrilla force. In fact, by then the warfare was almost traditional in its scale. Indeed, at the heart of the battle was a conventional tank battle involving something like ten thousand tanks, split evenly between the two sides; possibly the largest tank battle since World War II. The quarter of a million highly trained troops under Seeye’s command were opposed by approaching a million Derg conscripts. However, the outcome was inevitable. The TPLF lost only ten thousand troops, where the Derg army was routed; and in that rout something like half a million of them perished.

Thus it was that the TPLF’s armoured column rolled into Addis Abeba, meeting almost no resistance. I well remember that, when at last the Western papers realized what was happening, they graphically described seeing a burnt out tank on the approach to the city. In fact, the tank was outside the palace, scarcely 300 yards from the Hilton Hotel where the journalists stayed put and patronized the bar, listening to the stories anyone offered them. This was why they, and we, knew so little about the war, and the exploits of Seeye were never acknowledged.

His genius did not end with that final victory. He stepped aside and let the more diplomatic Meles, who had been in touch with the leaders of the nations around the world throughout the war, take over as President. He even helped negotiate a generous peace settlement with the defeated Mengistu, who then fled to hide in Harare. He finally withdrew to become Minister of Defence, with his reduced army of 100,000 troops acting as a guardians of the new peace. Until the war with Eritrea, which he was called back from retirement to fight, his army only fought one major battle. This was against the US backed OLF, which tried to restart the civil war. This new war lasted just three weeks, after all he still had the best army in Africa and the OLF only had mercenaries.

Paradoxically, before the war between the countries, he had also negotiated the secession of Eritrea, the first ever such move in Africa. He had also masterminded the new government’s move from Marxism to social democracy, albeit on the pragmatic basis that this was more likely to put bread in the mouths of the near-starving peasants, and – with the new President – introduced genuinely democratic elections; which at last made them, or at least Meles, for Seeye still managed to hide in the shadows, the darlings of Western governments.