Siye Abraha

Siye Abraha (also Seeye Abraha) was one of the leaders of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF), and afterwards served in the government of Ethiopia as Minister of Defence, under the new president Meles Zenawi as a member of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) which ran Ethiopia until elections entrenched the new government.

Beginning of the rebellion

In the 1970s, Siye Abraha was at Addis Ababa University, studying medicine. At that time Mengistu Haile Mariam was consolidating his power within the Derg, who had taken control of the government after they had ousted Haile Selassie. About that time Mengistu ordered the university students out into the countryside to work on the farms. This had a sound Marxist pedigree; Mao Zedong had just done it as part of his Cultural Revolution. Mengistu was, however, later to regret his own version of this when, seventeen years later, many returned – at the head of a column of tanks leading the victorious rebel army. As a student from the Tigray Province, where the rebellion started, Siye eventually joined the rebel army. Reflecting his education and pacifist beliefs, he became a medical orderly. However, his superiors soon realized that he was much more adept with his Kalishnikov rifle than he was with his medicine.

The Tigrayan rebel army

Siye wanted to join the fight.The army he had joined had no great resources at its command. Indeed, although they might initially have had some minor help from the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) the story was frequently told within the TPLF 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 supplied massive amounts of military aid to the Derg; including a complete air-force and literally thousands of tanks. It was for this reason that the TPLF briefly flirted with Albania, as it was the only other Marxist nation opposing MoscowFact|date=March 2007. The outcome was that, throughout the revolutionary war, they never received military aid from the outside world. This contrasted with most other successful revolutions; where, for example, the mujahidin 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 Siye Abraha’s tactics, though, they ended up with thousands of captured tanks under their control, so much so that the end of the war featured large-scale tank battles and its warehouses were full of more munitions than they could ever use. The one piece of new technology which did transform their warfare, though, was the CB – (citizens' band radio), which they used 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, in that discipline was self-imposed. The troops didn’t have uniforms, and foot drill was unheard of. Instead, the cadres of troops chose what to do themselves. If they ever needed to storm a position, knowing that some of course would die, they took a vote on the decision. One policy, perhaps better than any other, demonstrates how idiosyncratic yet successful, they were. It concerned the fate of any enemy troops captured in an action. These were given three choices:
# Join the rebels, which some did and died fighting for the TPLF cause.
# Leave the country, and go across the border to Sudan, which some also did.
# Go home! The third option, that most often chosen, was a very humane offer. The prisoners of war were given a month of political indoctrination, which was 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 Derg troops had their backs to the wall, 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!

The 1984 Famine

Mengistu used the infamous famine in Tigray – the home of the TPLF – as a military weapon. Even food aid was withheld by the Derg. Hence, even that paid for by the Band Aid appeals went to support the Derg armies and not those in need. In the process Mengistu quite deliberately killed a million civilians, where the even worse drought of ten years later only resulted in the deaths of 8,000.even their close ally the EPLF had forbidden the gallant warriors of tigrai a pass through Eritrea which could have been the easiest,Then To counter this, the rebels had to carve, by hand, roads through the Semien Mountains – 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.

Promotion

As the war progressed, Siye Abraha gradually rose in rank to become the general in charge of military planning at the beginning of the 1980s, and ultimately their war-time leader. He and his staff were by then 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 including the farmers who 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, Siye Abraha and Meles Zenawi – who handled all the diplomatic contacts and after the war became the president – had their Spartan bedrooms and a library. Siye Abraha also had his map room, with a large 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, Siye Abraha’s genius, which eventually made him one of the most successful generals of the last quarter of the 20th century, was in strategy. As just one example, five years before the end of the war he correctly predicted 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.

Battle of Tewodros

Western observers were surprised by the sudden collapse of the Derg army in this battle. In fact the planning for the "sudden" victory had started more than two years before the battle. The TPLF had 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. By then the warfare was almost traditional in its scale. Indeed, at the heart of the battle was a conventional tank battle involving many hundreds of tanks - split evenly between the two sides - and then one of the largest tank battles since World War II. The quarter of a million highly trained troops under Siye Abraha’s command were opposed by approaching a million Derg conscripts.Fact|date=February 2007 However, the outcome was inevitable. The TPLF lost only some ten thousand troops, where the Derg army was routed; and, although the numbers of these are in dispute, in that rout several hundred thousand of them perished. The TPLF’s armoured column rolled into Addis Ababa, meeting almost no resistance.

Life after Wartime

Siye Abraha’s brilliance did not end with that final victory. For he then stepped aside and let the better diplomat, Meles Zenawi who had been in touch with the leaders of the nations around the world throughout the war, take over as President. Between them they helped negotiate a generous peace settlement with the defeated Mengistu, who then fled to hide in Harare. Siye Abraha then withdrew to become Minister of Defence, with his reduced army of 100,000 troops acting as a guardians of the new peace.

The three members of the junta who then ran Ethiopia were Meles Zenawi, who was President, Tamirat Layne who was Prime-Minister and Siye Abraha who was Minister of Defence. Meles Zenawi clearly was the dominant figure in the post-war administration. He certainly was intellectually dominant. He was also unusually modest at the same time as being charismatic; giving him one of the most effective PR images of any world leader. During the war itself, however, he had been second-in-command to Siye Abraha, handling the various diplomatic contacts.

In many respects, indeed, the initial government of Ethiopia - made up solely from the rebels from Tigray, was unlike any other. The relationship between them was not just as colleagues but was more like that of family members. Thus, they had been fighting in the field together for 17 years and their relationships were strong as any between family members. This extended family – governing Ethiopia immediately after the end of the civil war - ran to no more than 100, and probably was as few as 50 in number.

The junta’s first major move, in 1993, was to negotiate the secession of Eritrea, the first ever such move in Africa. In gaining international acceptance for this they were helped by the British Foreign Office (FCO), which was unusually influential in these early years of the new government.

The junta also masterminded, again influenced by the FCO, the new government’s move from Marxism to social democracy; albeit this was on the pragmatic basis that this was more likely to put bread in the mouths of the near-starving peasants. With the new President they then introduced genuinely democratic elections - with landslide victories - which made them the favourites of many Western governments.

Negotiations with the World Bank

As a poor nation, Ethiopia needed a first tranche of one billion dollars, to be followed by a second one of a similar amount, to start its reconstruction programme. The World Bank was going to fund this, but as always the IMF was also involved. At that time, giving in to the IMF demands had effectively ruined a number of countries by demanding what it called a 'structural adjustment' package. In other countries this included significant changes to the various government institutions, especially the financial institutions. As Ethiopia didn't have these, there was no real problem in this direction. The major remaining problem, which had been disruptive elsewhere, was that the IMF invariably insisted on the devaluation of the currency -- and that was indeed the main demand in the case of Ethiopia. Fortunately it was in terms of the official exchange rate. In fact, the official exchange rate was meaningless, since most of currency came in and out illegally and was rated at about half the level on the official exchange. Even so, demanding a spirit of conciliation from the IMF, the Ethiopian government negotiated that fuel imports – the one part of the economy which would be affected by devaluation - be subsidized, so that the devaluation did not have any undue impact on the country. The IMF gladly accepted what they saw as a small price to pay. The IMF thereafter quoted this as being one of their most successful negotiations ever. The devaluation had almost no impact on the price index, which rose by just 6 percent over the next year; and the economy took off.

Until the war with Eritrea, when he was called back from retirement to fight, Siye ’s peace-time army only fought one major battle. This was against the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), who tried to restart the civil war. This new war lasted just three weeks.

The war with the OLF

Since its foundation in 1973, the OLF has waged a continuous low-level armed struggle for the independence of Oromia from Ethiopia (though it would later change its objective to solely self-determination, and has in recent times pushed for self-determination but within the federal union of Ethiopia), except for a short period following the overthrow of the Mengistu regime in 1991 when the OLF collaborated with the EPRDF in the Transitional Government. Since the OLF’s founding, its struggle has been weakened by the heterogeneity and differentiation within the Oromo people, by the Front’s own lack of unity and clarity regarding ultimate objectives, and by its much more limited strategic vision and organization compared to its main competitor, the TPLF.

Though the OLF wasn't a major participant in the Ethiopian civil war, it expected to take over the post-war government; since it thought it represented the largest ethnic group, the Oromo, who accounted for about 33% of the population. The TPLF, however, had created other ethnic-based groups (including the OPDO for Oromos, putatively representing the interests of each ethnicity) for the major ethnicities of Ethiopia to form the multi-Ethnic EPRDF. Matters eventually came to a head when the OLF demanded that they take over the government. They had no mandate for this, but they saw it as being theirs as of right. When this was denied them, they then took their representatives out of the government and brought their troops out of the camps. When they had moved back into Ethiopia, after the war had ended, they managed to gather together a number of troops. Most of these were in fact mercenaries, made up of the defeated Derg troops.Fact|date=February 2007 These, something like 40,000 in total against the government's 50,000, were housed in camps around the country At this point those troops were moved, by the OLF, out into the country to restart the civil war.

The western ambassadors in the country recognized that the OLF had no grounds for dispute inside government and certainly not for taking their troops out to fight military battles. However, they were clear that their own governments would have a very different attitude and would want to interfere. In an almost unique decision these ambassadors - as a group – did not tell their governments what was going on but only asked the Ethiopian government to ensure that the effective suppression of the OLF military force happened as discreetly as possible! They would allow the government to round up the OLF and end the new war. However, this had to happen as quickly as possible and news of this hadn't to leak out onto the front pages of the newspapers in the west. One memorable quote during these negotiations was "...for god's sake don't send in helicopter gunships!" The equivalent response from the Ethiopian government when, three weeks later, the OLF forces had been comprehensively defeated was: "We didn't use helicopter gunships. We didn't even use heavy weapons or armoured vehicles. All we did was go out into the jungle with our Kalashnikovs. They (the OLF) had been in the jungle for 17 days. We had been there for 17 years. Guess who won!" The ambassadors’ home governments never realized what had happened in Ethiopia, even though it had been one of biggest battles of the decade. There were something like 100,000 troops fighting in the jungle, yet nobody in the west heard about it.Fact|date=February 2007

In practice, most of the rebel troops had been rounded up by farmers, who were behind the new government.Fact|date=February 2007 The most significant difference, though, had been made by the fact that the government had decided to pay out the pensions of the ex-Derg forces. As a large proportion of OLF fighters were recruited from the Derg forces, these deserted in their thousands - to collect their pension. Even though more than 100,000 troops were involved, only a few hundred of the OLF fighters, and none of the government troops, had been killed.Fact|date=February 2007

References

* [http://futureobservatory.dyndns.org/2300.htm D. Mercer, "A Dance Through the Fires of Time" (Booksurge, 2006)]