Reveling in Eritrea’s Independence
By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 30, 2006; B01
Dressed in a pistachio-colored chiffon dress, flanked by her husband and daughters as festive music jangled, Abeba Mebrahtu casually mentioned something her daughter Faven, 14, had never known.
It was about the war of independence that her people fought against Ethiopia for 30 years.
“I joined when I was 13,” Mebrahtu said.
Faven’s eyes popped open in disbelief. The eighth-grader from Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax County knew that her parents had fought in the “Armed Struggle,” as Eritreans call it. Like many Eritrean couples, they met as young fighters on the front. But she hadn’t known that her mother was a child when she went in.
“Well, I was young, and a lot of students were going there,” said Mebrahtu, 41, now a waitress. “And the Ethiopian government, they were killing youngsters, so because of that we decided to join.”
Faven smiled and said she was proud that her parents had been fighters. Another daughter, Nadia, 3, beat a spoon against the table, too young to know what they were talking about.
She’ll know soon enough.
Among people of Eritrean heritage — including 7,000 to 10,000 in the Washington area — the day of their home country’s independence, May 24, 1991, is remembered vividly– in part because it was not so long ago. Some recall people hugging in the streets of the capital, Asmara, elated by the end of a war that had killed 65,000 people and become part of the fabric of life. In Washington, jubilant Eritreans cruised in cars down 18th Street NW, unfurling flags and honking their horns.
On Sunday night, about 3,000 of them streamed into the Show Place Arena in Upper Marlboro to celebrate the 15th anniversary of independence. They feasted on zigni (spicy berbere beef), spongy injera bread and penne in tomato sauce (a holdover from the East African nation’s half-century as an Italian colony). Women ululated. A poet spoke of his hope for the country’s future. Some people wore costumes of the country’s nine major ethnic groups — including a man with his head swathed in loose scarves and a woman with a large gold nose ring — and many women wore gauzy white netsela shawls with colorful borders.
But the party was not all lightness. Video screens flashed footage of tanks exploding, of maimed children on stretchers, of soldiers marching over mountainous terrain in flimsy black sandals. The sandals, made from used tires, have become a symbol of the country’s self-reliance and are celebrated in a sculpture — a giant pair of them — in an Asmara plaza.
The emcee announced a moment of silence to honor those who had died. ” Awat ne hafash ,” she said, raising a fist, and the people in the audience did the same. The phrase, Eritrea’s war slogan, means, “Victory to the masses.”
The war began in the early 1960s, about a decade after the United Nations made Eritrea part of an Ethiopian federation. In the meantime, violations of Eritrean rights fueled opposition to Ethiopian rule. Eritrean rebels took to the hills and started fighting the Ethiopian army.
A few Eritreans came to the United States as students in the 1960s, but when Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie was overthrown by Marxist military officers in 1974, the Eritrean-Ethiopian war heated up and refugees began to come in higher numbers, seeking asylum.
Many settled in the District, Northern Virginia and Maryland, where they worked as doctors and entrepreneurs, cabdrivers and parking attendants. But they remained connected to home, sending money for the war effort and, in some cases, going back to join the struggle. Eritreans like to point out that although Ethiopia was supported at different times by the United States or the Soviet Union, the ragtag Eritreans had no outside help.
Life on the front developed a romance, memorialized in literature and poetry, of a multigenerational society hiding out in the mountains for decades, with its own schools and hospitals, and even artists and writers who recorded the events. The effort transcended ethnicity, socioeconomics and gender. Women made up 30 percent of the fighters (accordingly, 30 percent of seats in the Eritrean parliament are now reserved for women). In Eritrea, it is common to see people disabled or scarred by the fighting.
“Almost every Eritrean has someone who paid in the war,” said Elsa Hailemariam, chairperson of Eritrean American Community Inc. “If I didn’t have my brother who died there, it would be my aunt or my uncle or my sister. So we are all a family.”
Adhanom Tess, whose wildish halo of hair recalls the styles of the 1970s fighters, sipped a beer and watched the dancing. Tess, a cabdriver who lives in Arlington, spent 15 years fighting and now plays bass with the Eritrean pop group Salina, which performed later in the evening. His wife had gone to Eritrea to celebrate, bringing along their 15-month-old son, who is named after the country’s president, former rebel leader Isaias Afwerki.
“I’m going to teach him about my people,” said Tess, who wore a gold medallion with a portrait of the president. Etched on it was, “DON’T MESS WITH MY PEOPLE.”
The troubles are not quite over: Starting in 1998, Ethiopia and Eritrea battled for three years over a disputed border town. The fighting killed thousands more people. An international court decided the town belonged to Eritrea, and U.N. peacekeepers enforce a demilitarized zone between the two countries. And in recent years, some Eritreans have voiced concern over such domestic issues as Eritrea’s shuttering of the independent press and lengthy extensions of military service.
But on Sunday, the focus was not on those things. A woman brewed coffee in the traditional way, roasting the green beans over a fire. Dancers in tribal outfits and military garb handed Eritrean flags to children, a symbolic passing of the mantle to a new generation.
Outside, near the lot where cabs were parked beside luxury sedans, some members of the younger generation were blase. What war? joked a group of teenage boys who had come from Baltimore with their families.
But Semhar Abed, 18, a student at Arlington’s Yorktown High School who was wearing an Eritrea-shaped pendant around her neck, said she is proud of her heritage. She said her father, a veteran, had told her about “the 30 years and Haile Selassie’s reign on the Eritrean people, how they couldn’t be Eritreans because they’d get killed.”
Yeshu Woldemichael, 41, who for the past two decades has sold hot dogs from a stand at 18th and L streets NW, said her 16-year-old son goes to Eritrea every year.
“He loves it,” she said, remarking that Asmara is very safe. “He goes everywhere day and night, not worrying about anything. It makes me very happy; it’s worth it that we fought for our kids.”
Woldemichael fought from age 14 to 19 and met her husband on the front. She is glad the fighting is over, she said, but if a situation arose in which teenagers might again have to defend Eritrea, she would support it.
“I don’t mind even my son going there and going through what I went through,” she said. “It makes you tough. It teaches you about life.”
© 2006 The Washington Post Company