Badmé, epicenter of the void between Ethiopia and Eritrea

Text by: Léonard Vincent Follow

9 min

The control of the town of Badmé, on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, was the trigger for the disastrous war that the two countries waged between 1998 and 2000. However, this small town has nothing of a geostrategic site.

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Badmé is first of all a straight road, in the middle of nowhere. A sun-drenched locality like any other, in the middle of a wide plain, "  with small low buildings and dusty cross streets  ," says American journalist Dan Connell, who has visited the locality several times , from first in the 1980s and for the last time in 2017. “  Shops, a few hotels for a night or two, children and old people sitting at the door of their house, a telecommunications mast on one side of the city, one police station on the other,  ”he still recalls. And in the middle, therefore, passes this stony artery crossing the plain, by which old buses rattle from the cityEthiopian from Shiraro. The road leads past the last house to a line of trenches and the Mereb River, marking the start of Eritrean territory, one kilometer away.

Badmé, that's not much. And the surrounding bush has only been a no-man's-land motionless since the end of the terrible war of 1998-2000. But his name is associated with a tragedy.

Two years of massacre

Because it is in these surroundings of pebbles and burning acacias that, on May 6 and 7, 1998, units of the Eritrean army and patrols of the Tigrayan militia and the Ethiopian police had some serious clashes. Certainly, similar incidents had already taken place in this isolated savannah, where the border had never been officially demarcated since the effective independence of Eritrea in 1993. But no one thinks, in 1998, that these incidents can degenerate.

Yet it is they who, against all odds, light the fuse, setting fire to the entire border area for two years, this stifling western landscape, this "  piece of mountain  " where, says the journalist Jean-Paul Mari who has Covered the conflict for Le Nouvel Observateur , it is "  difficult to see clearly, where the nationalities are diluted in the common life  ". Because they are intervening in a context where the two countries, or rather the two leaders - Meles Zenawi in Addis Ababa and Issayas Afewerki in Asmara - have been exasperating each other for months on a number of subjects: the currency, the trade, political alliances, the future of the Horn of Africa. And this personal and political enmity rekindles the fracture that passes through Badmé: that which marks, on the one hand, the territory never colonized by the Ethiopian emperors and, on the other, the former Italian colony of Eritrea, annexed after the Second World War by the negus Haile Selassie I.

This time, the rulers of Asmara choose the showdown. The order is therefore given to the Eritrean troops to cross the border. At dawn on May 12, according to the inquiry by the Complaints Commission of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, "  two brigades of regular soldiers of the Eritrean army, supported by tanks and artillery  ", first invade Badmé and its plateau. Then, they advance in the direction of several Ethiopian districts of Tigray and attack localities which were all, "  either in undisputed Ethiopian territory, or in territory administered peacefully by Ethiopia  ". The following days, the Migs take action: Asmara international airport is hit on one side, a school in Mekele is bombed on the other. The war becomes all-out, raging, horrific, on several fronts, all along the desert hills and canyons of this desolate border.

Two years of massacre in the trenches ensued, two years of televised carnage under artillery or aircraft fire, killing around 80,000 soldiers and civilians in the two neighboring countries. In the spring of 2000, the Eritrean army pushed back beyond the Mereb river, the Ethiopian soldiers seem to have the enemy capital within their reach. But the horror and the ruin of the war eventually push the two countries to the negotiating table, then to sign the peace, under the aegis of the Algerian FLN, a former mentor of the Ethiopian and Eritrean liberation fronts from which the two came. belligerent.

Badmé is officially Eritrean

And in concrete terms, pending the legal resolution of the matter, Badmé remains in Ethiopia for the time being. The Eritreans who lived there with the Tigrayans having disappeared, the locality is enlarged, modernized and repopulated by soldiers and their families, keeping the cemetery of the fighters of the carnage of 1998-2000. Tigrayan trade agents from Adigrat, Mekele or Axum settled there. A Tigrayan administrator is appointed to rule over this small trading knot, marking the western tip of the demarcation line on which the nightmare of what has been called " the cousins  ' war " unfolded  .

But soon, Badmé is attributed to Eritrea. At least this is the “  final and binding  ” opinion issued by the commission created in December 2000 by the Algiers peace agreement. After having examined all the texts, the historical testimonies, the evidence provided by the parties, the old maps and the local practices, its independent jurists themselves demarcate the border on April 13, 2002, in a long document, satellite coordinates to the support.

But all war reparations not having been honored, the Tigrayans, then in power in Addis Ababa, did not budge, and neither did the Eritreans. The inhabitants of Badmé therefore continue to live their lives, in the shadow of the memories of the war and of the small cemetery celebrating their combatants. And the situation freezes for eighteen years, providing an excellent pretext for the two belligerents to continue to hate each other.

Upheavals in Ethiopia

But now in April 2018, political upheavals in Ethiopia bring to power a new Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, as well as a new generation of leaders. They oust the old Tigrayan guard from the revolutionary party that brought down dictator Mengistu in 1991 and humiliated Eritrea in 2000, now withdrawn into its province. Immediately, Abiy Ahmed sought to extinguish all fires that could threaten his project for the development and liberalization of Ethiopia: he extended his hand to the ominous and all-powerful President Issayas Afewerki to Eritrea.

He thinks he has finally got rid of his most dangerous political enemies, the leaders of the Tigray People's Liberation Front, "  whom he considers to be usurpers who have robbed him of victory against Mengistu  ", according to a former Eritrean diplomat who wished maintain anonymity. The reconciliation is therefore readily sealed, with a lot of red carpet and fanfare; the two men embrace, receive each other, exchange greetings of friendship - a grand parade soon to be celebrated by a Nobel Peace Prize that Abiy Ahmed says he shares with his Eritrean “brother”.

But on the ground, nothing changes. The few border posts open during the grace period for the reconciliation of the enemy brothers - in Humera in the west, in Zalambessa in the east - were unilaterally closed by the Eritreans, as of December 2018. “  The situation was becoming dangerous. for Issayas , explains Dan Connell. Eritreans returned from Ethiopia realizing the difference with the misery reigning in their own country. The climate was starting to become politically tense in Asmara.  Since then, the status quo and mistrust have reigned over Badmé, its immobile plateau and all the sectors still occupied and administered by Ethiopia, albeit legally Eritrean.

We don't talk about Badmé anymore

The leaders of the province of Tigray , excluded from power in Addis Ababa, surrounded by hostility from the other great nations of Ethiopia, the Amharas and the Oromos, have retreated to their capital, Mekele. The threat, for them, no longer comes only from the Eritrean side, but also from the Ethiopian capital, where Abiy Ahmed intends to put them in line. “  They are waiting,” says Dan Connell, who met the Tigrayan executive on his last trip to the region. I believe they would be ready to evacuate Badmé and the disputed territories, to move the villages and their cemeteries a little further. But only as part of a comprehensive peace agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which is not on the agenda today. "

In Asmara, after eighteen years of campaigning trumpeting that Eritrea was "  occupied by Ethiopia in general indifference  ", we hardly speak of Badmé any more. It is "  not a priority  ", explained the Eritrean president in a television interview in 2019, although his close adviser and Minister of Information, Yemane Ghebremeskel, recalled on July 10 on Twitter, and in Tigrinya , on the occasion of the second anniversary of the reconciliation agreement with Ethiopia, that “  Ethiopian troops were still present in sovereign territories  ” of Eritrea. And regret that “  commercial and economic ties  ” have not reached “  the desired extent and scale  ”.

But the Eritrean president knows that the key to resolving this issue lies not in Addis Ababa, but still in Mekele, where his Tigrayan rivals and enemies sit. "  Issayas Afewerki still despises the Tigrayans and their former claim to lead the immense Ethiopia as much as ever ," said this former Eritrean diplomat. So now that they're offside, he keeps them at bay and bides his time, since he's convinced he has a destiny and legitimacy beyond little Eritrea.  "According to him, the Eritrean president, whose family ties are precisely in the region of Tigray, is only interested in the" great game "of nations and the fragile balance between the Ethiopian peoples in which Abiy Ahmed is today. entangled. "  For him as for his advisers, the question of disputed villages has always been an accessory in the service of a greater confederal ambition  ," he laughs sadly.

But the political schemes have no concrete translation in this remote corner. The inhabitants of Badmé call themselves Ethiopians, without hesitation. "  I remember the war well ," said last year to RFI special envoy Léa-Lisa Westerhoff, an old lady installed in front of the television set in her small living room open to the street. We crawled to avoid the attacks, it was shooting ! After all that, if someone asks for this land, no one is going to give it to them. It is impossible !  "

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• Eritrea
• Ethiopia
• Abiy Ahmed
• Issayas Afewerki
• Disputed territories

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