Overview of Eritrea’s Involvement
Eritrea’s relations with Sudan are driven by two strategic concerns:
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A long-range view that as a small, vulnerable state with extremely limited resources, Eritrea needs to keep its larger neighbors either in its thrall or Balkanized (in practice, if not in name) with the neighboring regime’s power to govern compromised and with Eritrea maintaining clear allies among the contending political forces there.
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In the short and medium-term, the best defense of its borders against hostile acts by neighboring states or by oppositional groups based in them is the construction of effective insurgent forces that challenge these regimes from within and that will, as a quid pro quo, assist in patrolling Eritrea’s borders—in effect acting as buffers. With regard to the first point, the approach of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) to Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s models the Asmara regime’s current behavior and should be carefully scrutinized. After the fall of Haile Selassie in 1974 (and for a year or so prior to that), the EPLF invested heavily in the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) as a vehicle for replacing the military junta led by Mengistu Haile Mariam with a political organization beholden to it and sharing its ideological and political roots in the student movement at Haile Selassie University in the 1960s, which also gave birth to the similarly named secret party, the Eritrean People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), which guided the EPLF throughout its existence (Connell, 2001; Connell, 2005).
Both this strategic outlook and the accompanying pattern of behavior toward allied movements (treated as subordinates, rather than partners) informed the approach of the EPLF’s successor, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), to Sudan throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Among the groups the Eritreans supported were: a small force to the left of the Sudanese Communist Party in the 1980s that had grown out of the trade union movement and later merged into the Sudan Alliance Forces;3 the SPLM/A starting in the early 1990s; the Free Officers Movement, which became the dominant trend in the SAF, in the mid-to-late 1990s; and the NDA as a whole from 1995 onward. At the same time, and especially as these successive investments proved ineffective as national alternatives, the EPLF/PFDJ, operating through the Eritrean state, stepped up its investment in regional forces in Darfur, the northeast and elsewhere, even as it took advantage of these armed forces to strengthen its own border defenses.
The Development of the Eastern Front
There are two main Beja tribes (of at least four) that provide the bulk of
the social base for the opposition in northeastern Sudan: the Hadendowa (termed
Hedareb within Eritrea) and the Beni Amr. The former, residing in the Red Sea
Hills and along the Sudanese coast from Suakin to the Eritrean border and in
the Sahel region of northern Eritrea, were close with the EPLF through much of
the Eritrean independence war. By contrast, the Beni Amr, straddling the
Eritrea-Sudan border in the Gash-Barka region in Eritrea and the
Kassala/Gedaref area in Sudan, were not only close to the ELF, they provided
much of its membership. These historical alliances continue to heavily
influence the politics of each group.
Though the Beja Congress was formally launched in 1958, its armed wing has been
repeatedly manipulated by the EPLF/ PFDJ since the mid-1990s (much as had been
the Ethiopian movements in an earlier era and as are religious and other social
and political constituencies in Eritrea today). One of the most dramatic
instances of tension over this came earlier in that decade when the Eritreans
intervened directly in the Beja Congress’s internal affairs after the latter
took a decision at odds with Eritrean strategy for them, triggering a bitter
backlash that ended up strengthening the jihadist opposition forces operating
out of Sudan—a miscalculation to which I will return in more detail
below.4
Despite the oft-touted mutual solidarity among the Eritrean and Sudanese
peoples, the EPLF had rocky relations with successive regimes in Khartoum
throughout its independence war, and neither side ever truly trusted the other.
Generalizations about Eritrean-Sudanese relations are risky—just as were those
between the EPLF and TPLF prior to the outbreak of the border war in 1998, even
as the two cultivated a myth of close relations that many outsiders bought into
and then cited as grounds for surprise when the two fell out.
Eritrea trained and supported the forces of the NDA, including the Beja, from
outset. NDA constituent organizations had bases in western Eritrea around
Haikota, Tessenei and Sawa and received logistical support, training and arms
from Asmara until the late 1990s, when Asmara engineered a rapprochement with
Khartoum and moved the NDA’s camps across the border to a base at Belasid (once
a redoubt of the EPLF’s arch rival within the national movement, the Eritrean
Liberation Front), which I visited four times between 1999 and 2002. Once
there, they received regular supplies of food, fuel, ammunition and more from
across border, as well as political instruction and military training in or
near their new base. Throughout, Eritrea maintained strict control over the NDA
operation. To the best of my knowledge, no significant military action was
taken without Eritrean permission, with one notable exception, to which I will
return below.
Subsurface tensions in this alliance that mirror those between EPLF and TPLF
have long been evident in the ways each described the development of the
northeastern war front and their respective role in it. According to SPLM/A
leaders, the first informal contact between it and the Bejas took place in
Cairo in the early 1990s. The first official meeting between the SPLM/A and the
Beja Congress took place in Asmara in December 1994 (several months after the
congress in Asmara that marked the official launch of the SAF), with the SPLM
encouraging the Bejas to take up arms and join the fight to displace the NIF
regime in Khartoum while offering them aid to do so. In this narrative, SPLA
training for the Bejas started in 1995, and the first joint operation took
place in October 1996.5 For their part, the Eritreans saw the armed wing
of the Beja Congress as a product of their initiative and design from the
outset as a counter to Eritrean Islamic Jihad (EIJ) after a series of
high-profile raids into Eritrea from Sudan in 1993 and 1994, and they have
treated the Beja Congress as a surrogate ever since.
My first direct observation of the armed forces in the northeast came in 1996
when I traveled to the Eritrea-Sudan border with members of the SAF. (I also
interviewed defectors from the Sudanese armed forces and from Osama bin Laden’s
organization then.) I was told by SAF commanders that their forces, slim as
they were, had been deployed along the border to fill in security gaps for the
Eritreans as well as to position them to carry out ambushes and small-scale
raids (Connell, 1998A)
In 1997 and again in 1998, I traveled with SAF escorts to the rebel-held
village of Togan and its surroundings, stopping in small Beja settlements and
encountering a number of Beja Congress irregulars and forces of the SPLA.
During this period, I also traveled into SPLM/A areas in the south via both
Kenya and Uganda, flew into the Nuba mountains from Lokichokio with a rebel-run
relief group linked to SPLM/A and traveled into the northern Blue Nile area
from Ethiopia with SAF. In the process, I developed stronger ties with the
SPLM/A and grew increasingly skeptical of the strength and capacity of the SAF,
especially as I learned about the extent of internal squabbling between
military and civilian factions and among key personalities in the leadership
following a period of promising growth in 1996-97 and after I met SAF defectors
in Cairo and listened to their accounts of petty bickering, favoritism,
recrimination and disorganization. As a consequence, the next time I traveled
into NDA areas in the northeast, I made my arrangements through SPLM/A.
When I returned in 1999, as Eritrea was in the process of negotiating a
rapprochement with Sudan, the NDA camps had been relocated across border from
the Haikota/Sawa area to Belasid. By this time, the coalition included armed
forces from SPLM/A, Beja Congress, SAF, Mohammed Osman Mirghani’s Democratic
Unionist Party (DUP) and a small though largely inactive (and insignificant)
force from Sadiq al-Mahdi’s Umma Party, along with a host of smaller groups.
Among the latter, whose numbers rarely ran more than a few dozen each, were the
Sudan Federal Democratic Alliance (SFDA) from Darfur and the Sudan Communist
Party (SCP), most of whose members deployed to the NDA base were medical
personnel.
Meanwhile, the NDA, pushed by the Eritreans (whom the Sudanese characterized
simply as ‘the friends’), was attempting to unite the various military forces
under one command. SPLM had tried to achieve this on its own from the start,
characterizing its troops as part of a ‘New Sudan Brigade’ rather than a
northern branch of SPLA, and promoting the NSB as a home for all opposition
forces. The other groups resisted this, however, rightly perceiving it as a bid
for SPLM hegemony and fearing that the SPLM only intended to use the northeast
front as a lever against the regime to promote its interests in the south; they
were supported by the Eritreans, who also sought hegemony over the opposition
alliance, which they hoped to develop into a political alternative to the NIF
regime in Khartoum.
Through this period, there were three distinct efforts to bring these disparate
units under a single command structure—first, in 1997, as the United Military
Command, then in 1998 as a Joint Military Command and finally in 1999 as what
they called a Unified Military Brigade. None were successful. However, a number
of effective joint operations were carried out, mainly involving forces of the
SPLA, SAF and Beja Congress with some participation by former government
officers and men then with the DUP.6
Eritrea’s strategy was to build the NDA coalition while limiting the power of
the SPLM/A whose armed forces completely dominated the alliance, holding onto
the two major sect-based parties—the DUP and the Umma—as long as possible
before they defected back to Khartoum (though containing their influence), and
all-the-while working to strengthen the smaller forces and enhance cooperation
among them so that they could play a more prominent role in the NDA and later a
new regime.7
In addition to providing military training and substantial logistical support
(including food, fuel, uniforms, vehicle maintenance and equipment), Asmara
dispatched PFDJ organizational affairs head Abdella Jabr to carry out political
instruction. His brief had long been to work with and nurture opposition
movements across Sudan; he had traveled frequently to Chad in the 1990s toward
this end; and he knew the players well. In July 1999, he conducted a seminar
for 100 cadres drawn from NDA units, including 50 from the SPLA, as the NDA set
up what it called a Political Military Office, calling its cadres PMOs.
Eritrea’s intention here was to build a political movement within the military
coalition in an effort to replicate the EPLF experience during its war for
independence.
One incident during this time deserves special attention, not only for what it
demonstrates about Eritrea’s method of handling its relations with the NDA,
particularly the Bejas, but for the light it sheds on Eritrea’s own continuing
problems with Islamist opposition centered around the EIJ. In 1999, Ahmed
Bitai, the brother of a prominent Beja religious figure—Sheikh Sulieman—broke
with the Beja Congress over internal differences and announced that he was
taking his following to join NSB.8
The Eritrean response was decisive and swift: In August in a scene with eerie
echoes of Badme a year earlier, they sent a large armed force supported by
armor and infantry into the NDA base to demand that Bitai be turned over to
them. The ensuing confrontation lasted three days, after which a humiliated NDA
(SPLA included) acceded to Eritrean demands. Bitai was reportedly held for six
months before being turned over to the Beja Congress and eventually released.
At this point, the angry Beja leader defected to Khartoum from which vantage
point he orchestrated further divisions among the Sudanese Beja and opened
avenues through Beja areas for Eritrean jihadists to infiltrate across the
border, heightening the security threat to government and party installations
throughout northern and coastal Eritrea.
On a March 2000 visit to the NDA base at Belasid, just prior to the last round
of the Eritrea-Ethiopia border war, I heard more such stories of Eritrean
interference in Sudanese opposition affairs. SPLM leaders in particular
nurtured resentment over Asmara’s attempts to foist SAF commander Abdel Aziz
Khalid upon them as a potential alliance leader in the mold of Isaias. It was
widely known that Isaias had for nearly 15 years been the nominal second in
command of the EPLF behind his lowland Muslim ally Ramadan Mohammed Nur, even
as he ran the secret party (the EPRP) that controlled the liberation front, and
that this model was being played out in the NDA by elevating Mohamed Osman
Mirghani as the front man for that alliance, though he exercised little actual
power.
Eritrea initially put its full support into building the SAF, believing its
members could spark a mutiny within the Sudanese armed forces as well as a
popular uprising in Khartoum and contest for state power in Khartoum. As the
SAF began to splinter from within and lose both membership and capacity, the
Eritreans—as they had done in Ethiopia—then began to shift their focus to
ethnic and regional forces, particularly in Darfur and the northeast.
Later that year, after its devastating losses in the third round of war with
Ethiopia and newly eager to protect its western flank, Eritrea launched a
diplomatic initiative that brought Isaias and his foreign minister, the late
Ali Said Abdella, to Khartoum in October to thaw relations between the two
countries. However, in a move that prefigured JEM operations in Darfur and the
northeast in mid-2006, SPLA commander Pagan Amum led a surprise attack of his
own on Kassala in November 2000 without seeking prior approval from ‘the
friends,’ as was the standard operating procedure.9
Cmdr. Amum later told me that the SPLM feared the Eritreans were losing faith
in the NDA and might sell them out for a tactical advantage. For this reason,
he said, the NDA needed to demonstrate its strength with a dramatic move that
would, as a byproduct, help undercut the Sudan-Eritrea rapprochement. Before he
acted, he secured John Garang’s personal okay, as well as Mirghani’s approval.
In the event, a 2,000-strong joint SPLA/DUP/Beja force captured the government
garrison at Kassala and held it for nearly 48 hours, after which Khartoum’s
relations with Asmara soured. Government forces then heavily bombed NDA areas
and came down hard on the Bejas in the urban areas, causing many young Beja men
left to flee and join the opposition.
At about this time, in a 180-degree reversal that portended a loss of
confidence in the NDA among its own members, moves got underway to fold the
flagging SAF into the SPLM. They were initiated by SAF’s head of political
affairs Taisier Ali, a former activist at the University of Khartoum whose role
in promoting dialogue between Khartoum and the SPLM/A in the 1980s won him
enduring respect and trust among southerners, otherwise in extremely short
supply toward northern political figures. And this time, the moves were not
opposed by Eritrea, which saw in this a possibility to expand its own influence
within SPLM in the future via SAF members in its debt.
I went back to Belasid for the last time in May-June 2002. SAF was then still
negotiating its move into SPLM/A. The northeastern war front had been generally
quiet for almost two years, since NDA forces retook the strategic town
with its important religious shrine at Hamesh Koreb. The main issue
overshadowing the situation then was the continuing Eritrea-Ethiopia
confrontation, one side-effect of which was Eritrea’s insistence on a tacit
truce with Sudan on this front so as not to open itself to further subversion
from this direction.
However, Eritrea and the SPLA continued to work to develop the Bejas as an
effective fighting force, even though SPLA leaders bemoaned the fact that the
Bejas lacked both military experience and a military orientation toward
self-organization and discipline. With low level fighting reported in Darfur,
SPLA commander Peter Wal from Upper Nile told me that ‘the ground is prepared
for rebellion’ there.10 Meanwhile, there appeared to be stepped up
activity by the EIJ in the border area and within Eritrea, suggesting that
stability was eroding across the region despite the near absence of military
initiatives from the NDA there.
The extent to which these issues were interconnected had been underlined in
1999 when the NDA captured two members of EIJ in the uniform of the Sudanese
government and turned them over to ‘the friends,’ I was told. In fact, many
jihadists had been integrated directly into GOS forces for the defense of
Kassala in 2001-2002, following the NDA raid on that city the year before.
Meanwhile, EIJ operatives were said to be infiltrating Eritrea with returning
refugees and operating freely around Guluj, Barentu, and Agordat, occasionally
burning crops, planting mines, setting ambushes, and shooting at military
vehicles, and Sheikh Sulieman’s brother Ahmed Bitai was said to be in Kassala
working with EIJ, paying $1,000 for each land mine set within
Eritrea.11
But this was not the only regional confrontation engaging Eritrea’s attention.
As I transited the border crossing at Hadish Maaskar on this last trip to the
NDA base, I passed several small camps within Eritrea where Oromos, Amharas,
and Beni Shangul were undergoing military training, an indication that
Eritreaís commitment to fostering insurgency within Ethiopia had not lessened,
whatever the situation in northeast Sudan.
