| By–Hermona Kuluberhan |
There’s a story my aunt tells of the first time she visited Eritrea. She was traveling along Mengedi Keren, the dangerous and winding road connecting Asmara to the Anseba region’s capital, wondering if this was how she’d meet her maker. The road is known to be treacherous – it’s a twisting, narrow strip with no guardrails and has been the site of many fatal accidents. With each bump leaving her more convinced that the next sharp turn would mark her end, she shut her eyes and began to pray under her breath. Joining her for the journey was her sister-in-law, a battle-hardened former resistance fighter who was left largely unimpressed (though somewhat amused) by my aunt’s reaction.
You are not a real Eritrean if you can’t stomach this.
My aunt, for her part, continued praying under her breath and resolved to never travel down this road ever again. Over twenty years later, she laughs whenever she recalls the experience because of the way it captures the cultural differences between Eritreans raised in the motherland and the children of those who had migrated southward before the country won its independence from Ethiopia.
I don’t know what she expected from me – yeh Addis Ababa lijoch nen! When they were fighting in the bush, we were drinking mango juice in Nazreth.
Those like my family who were raised in Ethiopia are nicknamed Amiche. It’s a play on the acronym for the Automotive Manufacturing Company of Ethiopia (AMCE), a company that used car parts imported from Italy to assemble vehicles in Addis Ababa. Like these cars, Amiches were assembled in Ethiopia by parents who hailed from the former Italian colony of Eritrea. It’s a hybrid identity characterized by strong and contradictory ties of belonging to two nations that have spent decades locked in violent conflict. While their cousins, aunts and uncles in Eritrea were fighting for independence from the Ethiopian state, Amiche Eritreans had more or less assimilated into the dominant society.
Still, they were Eritrean. When I ask my mother’s father how he made sense of the contradiction – living and working in a country that was violently occupying his people – he mentions the inscription on his old identification card.
Tewelde Eritrea, Zeginete Ethiopia.
Place of birth, Eritrea. Citizenship, Ethiopia.
However, in 1998, what was once a question of nationality versus citizenship was unequivocally settled when cracks in the wartime alliance between the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front culminated in a border war. Despite assurances that those loyal to the Ethiopian government would be permitted to stay, Eritreans were cast as the enemy within and subject to arbitrary detention. Though initially only targeting a few prominent members of the community, widespread deportations were conducted based on ethnicity and justified on the grounds of perceived disloyalty. While the Eritrean government also expelled Ethiopians in retaliation, unlike the Ethiopian government, Eritrea did not deport its own citizens.
Last May marked my first trip back to Ethiopia since 1998 as well as my first-time visiting Eritrea. In Asmara, I spent four days with my paternal grandfather who had worked as a foreman in charge of some of the largest construction projects in Addis Ababa. In Ethiopia, I met my mother’s younger brother who has spent nearly two decades living as a refugee in the country of his birth following the deportations.
Although often hearing people say, “You can’t be both, you are either Ethiopian or you are Eritrean,” I had never felt any internal contradiction claiming ties to both nations. My family were Eritreans from Ethiopia and for us, whatever division existed between these two identities existed only in the heads of other people.
However, the conversations I had with relatives during my time in Africa forced me to reconsider the imagined ties of belonging that bind me to Ethiopia – if a country deports you after you’ve built its roads and only allows you to live within its boundaries as a refugee after stripping you off your citizenship, that country has effectively severed all ties with you. Despite this painful history, Amiche Eritreans like my family still maintain strong ties to Ethiopia and for many in the diaspora, a visit to Ethiopia is still referred to as “going back home.” Yet to this day, the presence of Eritreans living in Ethiopia is still treated with a degree of suspicion.
A recent article from Canada’s Globe and Mail re-printed rumors from a commentary released by Alex de Waal, a Tufts University professor known to have ties with the TPLF, alleging that an Eritrean agent is embedded within Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s security detail. Analyst Rashid Abdi, also known for his sympathies for Ethiopia’s former ruling party, tweeted a thinly veiled warning to Ethiopians that “Eritreans are very enterprising…give them [two years] and they will take over Ethiopia.” Like de Waal’s commentary, Abdi’s tweet played on the same fears that justified the deportation of nearly 80,000 Eritreans during the Badme war – that they are a calculating and dishonest population who pose a threat to national security and therefore can never be trusted.
While this kind of paranoia is an expected feature of wartime politics, it has left me marveling at the way that citizens of an impoverished country, a sliver on the Red Sea coast that has only existed as an independent state for a little over three decades, are able to render otherwise logical individuals – journalists and academics alike – irrational. More plausible than what de Waal and Abdi allege is that Eritreans living in Ethiopia are doing their utmost to build better lives for themselves – today as they were back then.
On one hand, I have been reminded that whatever ties one may have to Ethiopia and whatever rapprochement may have occurred between the two governments, an Eritrean in Ethiopia – daughter of a mango juice drinking Amiche or otherwise – is still an Eritrean and not an Ethiopian. On the other hand, Amiche Eritreans in the diaspora have for decades deftly straddled the divide between these two nations. The 1998 deportations marked what was thought to be a permanent schism, not just between the two former allies but between the two countries. Yet the strength of the ties that bind us to both nations, contradictory as they may be, is proof that while the differences that separate the two may be real, our histories are too deeply intertwined to be easily severed.
