34- The Road to Afabet The EPLF, Protracted Warfare, and the ...

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In 1956 Amharic was made the official language over the protests of the majority of the nation whichhad traditionally adopted Tigrinya or Arabic as their preferred languages. i That same year theAssembly was “Temporarily Suspended.” Although elections followed they were without directionor organization, leading to bitterly contested results. The nascent Labor Union movement that hadbeen growing in strength and organization was essentially driven from sight by a series of crushingblows dealt to it by the Federal military during protest strikes in 1958. ii This was followed in 1959by the leaders of the Assembly voting to replace their own penal code with that of Ethiopia after oneof their increasingly common visits to Addis Ababa, Selassie's capitol. By 1960 the main politicalsupports of a separate Eritrea had been dissolved, with most governmental and grassrootsorganizations having been reduced to irrelevancy or driven from the country. Even protests directedat the United Nations, which had created the rapidly crumbling federal system, were simply met withthe response that all protests would have to pass through the federal government first- in this case theEmperor himself. iii The final curtain fell in 1962, when the Assembly was at last “persuaded” to voteitself out of existence, a process aided by armed police and jets providing air cover. Eritrea wasofficially no more as of November 14 th , 1962. ivThe shooting war had already started in 1961 under the auspices of the absentee leadership ofthe ELM, which was quickly subsumed by the more radical and active ELF. Both began the policyof characterizing the conflict as a struggle against an African colonizer and therefore their war wasone of decolonization and liberation. However, despite these claims, little progress was madedomestically or internationally. Guerrilla strikes and assassinations were carried out, but theEthiopian military carried out a reign of terror that stifled most major operations. This was aided bythe massive military aid the Ethiopian forces received from the United States. From 1960 onAmerica's military aid to Haile Selassie's forces was staggering, with $10 million dollars a year ingrants and loans being offered and from 1964 on material and logistical support continued to arrive. vThis made the struggle all the harder on the Eritrean guerrillas and the Ethiopian strategy continuedto evolve to incorporate the massive advantages they accrued in armor, air superiority, and specialcounter-insurgency forces. The struggle became even grimmer for the ELF as the Ethiopian forcesslowly recognized the influence of the Algerian FLN on the ELF's strategic thinking, where theEritrean rebels had divided their front into five semi-autonomous zones under the control of localleaders. vi While in theory this gave a certain amount of tactical flexibility, it instead gave theEthiopian forces a chance to target the zones one by one while fractious central command meant thatlittle concerted aid was forthcoming. By 1970 the commanders of three of the zones protested thestructure and after a period of attempted negotiation and finally violence, split off to form theEritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF).2
This split of the armed forces would not be the last but was certainly the most important ofthe conflict. The literature since the independence of Eritrea has followed various paths to analyzethe reasons behind the divergent characters of the ELF and the EPLF, covering aspects of religions,ethnicity, class, even economic backgrounds of the various member groups, but perhaps the simplestexplanation is that of a rising tide of student recruits in the late 1960s brought with them newerradical ideas that had been absent in the earlier leadership of the ELF. These progressivephilosophies were brought to the fore as these students assumed leadership positions and participatedin overseas training courses in such revolutionary countries as Cuba and China. By 1970 the risingambitions of these younger aspiring leaders and the faltering grip of the older conservativeleadership simply could no longer coexist and the split occurred. The ELF remained a fiercelynationalist but loosely disciplined group of guerrillas and older intellectuals while the EPLF took amore rigorously revolutionary tack and began organizing a disciplined peasant base from which togrow its infrastructure. This revolutionary tack, inspired by the movements of Mao, Giap, andCastro, would lead the EPLF to greater success throughout the conflict and it would eventually bothoutlast its rival organization and achieve its ultimate goals.The first major step in the alteration of the conflict was the EPLF's efforts to restructureEritrean society to successfully wage a People's War. The successful Protracted Wars in China andVietnam both relied on the social transformation of their states to both enhance nationalconsciousness of the struggle and to create a logistical base that would support the war efforts of theliberation forces. To effect this social change, the EPLF created a transformative social program anda national ideal for the emergent Eritrean consciousness. By building off a base of five major massorganizations (for workers, peasants, women, students, and youth) which began to operate openly in1977 after years of clandestine organizing, the EPLF enunciated a completely transformativeprogram which would alter the very fabric of Eritrean society. This program’s stated goals wouldcompletely rebuild Eritrea in terms of agricultural production, industrial production, education,health care, and even gender relations.In terms of agricultural production and relations, the Eritrean general program for reformcalled for a socialized agricultural sector with control placed back in the hands of the producers. Intheory the program claimed its goals as including the nationalization of the lands expropriated by theEthiopians and their feudal collaborators and revising this into larger collective farms for the use ofthe masses. It also sought to introduce more modern farming methods, including the use ofmachinery and modern fertilizers to help increase the productivity of the peasant class. For the stillexisting pastoralists, veterinary and breeding aid would be provided as well as financial aid to helpthem become sedentary and successful animal breeders. Beyond all these (and several other small3
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34- The Road to Afabet The EPLF, Protracted Warfare, and the ...

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