On The Third Try, Asmara

A Visit To Eritrea's Capital And Ports At The Start of A Consequential War

Banco d’Italia, Massawa

In May of 1998 I found myself, not exactly by accident, in the Eritrean capital of Asmara as Eritrea's first war with Ethiopia broke out in a remote border area about 300 kilometers West-Southwest.

The Eritrean-Ethiopian war, a.k.a. the "Badme War" was one of the most senseless and bloody conflicts of the late 20th century, costing somewhere between 70,000 and 300,000 lives on both sides, in the worst trench-fighting since WWI.

The war built upon animosities dating back long before Eritrea's 1993 split from Ethiopia, and most directly, a failure to agree on the international border between the two. The Ethiopian province of Eritrea was an administrative creation of Italy. A recently-unified European state in the late 1800s, Italy joined the colonial scramble for Africa late, and found a beachhead at the Red Sea port of Assab, purchased from Ethiopia by Italian missionary Giuseppe Sapetto on behalf of the Rubattino Shipping Company in 1869. In 1890, Italy announced the creation of the much larger colony of Eritrea, whose name it took from the Greco-Roman term for Red Sea, "Erythrea."

From 1996, I was a graduate student based in Aden, Yemen, where I was doing research for a Ph.D. dissertation on port competition in the Red Sea.

The development of Aden's port into a regional—if not global—transshipment hub had been one of the grand hopes of Yemeni unification back in 1990, a mega-project that would bring prosperity to the masses and improve access for peoples who had been isolated from the rest of Arabia by remote location and harsh geography. There had been a grand precedent, as Aden had been one of the busiest ports in the world in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, a stopover and fueling hub on the way to the British Raj.

But this dream was already unravelling in the mid 1990s, with North-South Yemeni grudges persisting and Al Qaeda taking shots at the port. While there were still believers, graffiti across the city proclaimed the Free Zone "mintaqat al furra"—a profane play on "Mintaq al Hurra" (Free Zone).

My research idea was to create a model of how investment in port infrastructure affected the well being of people in cities well away from those ports—using the price of common and imported staple foods like sorghum, rice, and barley as a proxy. I was interested in how two factors affected this distribution: the quality of roads, and the formation of local and foreign trading monopolies. Better roads, I thought, might distribute the benefits of better port infrastructure more evenly.

In most Red Sea countries, ports were linked to capitals by a single—often two-lane—trunk road. I chose three models, all places with that capital-port configuration, in the process of expansion: Yemen, which had very poor infrastructure; Jordan, which had very good infrastructure; and Eritrea, which had infrastructure somewhere in between, though certainly closer to Yemen's level.

Having collected as much data as I could from Aden, my plan was to fly to the Eritrean capital of Asmara from the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, then drive to Massawa, Eritrea’s largest port and closest to the capital. Internet access was both weak and very slow at the time, and news of what was happening in Eritrea was not easily obtained. I had no idea I was about to fly into a war zone.

Red Sea Air Welcomes You

I purchased my ticket to Asmara on "Red Sea Air"—a Saudi-backed regional airline—and showed up at the Sanaa airport late one morning for a late afternoon flight. The airplane did not instill confidence; a hole in the leading edge of the left wing appeared to be shored up with burlap bags full of rice. The flight was delayed for two hours.

I was the only Westerner on the plane, which had a capacity of about 30 but which was mostly empty. As soon as we were airborne, we corkscrewed out of the terraced valley in which the capital sits at an altitude of more than 6000 feet and headed for what I thought would be a half-hour crossing of the Red Sea. Instead of flying straight north, I could tell we were headed south.

"Where are we going?" I asked one of the flight attendants, who was not Saudi, but Ethiopian or Eritrean.

"We're making a stop in Assab—to pick up a few passengers," she said.

Assab was the other major Eritrean port, in the southernmost piece of the country. That, I realized, would add at least an extra two hours—possibly much more—to the trip.

"I recommend you start drinking—a lot," she said, as she offered me one of several Eritrean beers.

While I was ready to numb the unease caused by the turbulent air above the Red Sea, the extra prompting was alarming.

"Why?"

"Landing will be bumpy. The winds at Assab are risky, and we cannot land. Three tries, then Asmara."

Buffeted by those winds, we came over a long line of acacia trees to land on a thinly paved runway—luckily on the first try. It looked like the most desolate of places. The passengers did not get off, and I saw no terminal through the windows—only a group of men and women in bright local clothes and a pair of emaciated camels. A handful of people boarded the plane, and we took off. I had half a mind to get off—as Assab was one of the places I had hoped to find useful data. But I knew no one, and I figured I might have a hard time getting myself out of a bind, should my presence not be welcome.

Asmara: An Art Deco Memorial

Asmara is one of the most gorgeous of African and Arabian capitals—a twin of sorts to Sanaa, formed from the same geological rift. Facing one another across the Red Sea, both cities sit on high, fertile, high-altitude plains carpeted green. For hundreds of years the mountainsides that surround Sana'a used to grow coffee—during the days when Yemen and Ethiopia were two earliest producers of high-quality coffee, exported through the Yemeni Red Sea port of Mokha. In the 1980s, much of the coffee was replaced by water-guzzling qat, a quasi-narcotic to which the populations of Somalia, Djibouti and Yemen are addicted in large numbers.

Eritrea at the time, like Aden, had been talked up as a development miracle in the making—the next “Ghana” -- praised for its entrepreneurial spirit, and fast early post-Independence growth. That hope didn't last long, bookmarked by the war that was just starting -- conditions that had been set several years earlier in the collapse of the USSR. What I didn't realize, was that I was walking straight into it.

I took a cab from the airport to the city center and the old colonial-era Hamasien Hotel, an architectural wonder kept, like much else in Asmara at this time, in pristine condition. Asmara has been called a monument to Art Deco for very good reason—the Italian architecture and chrome exteriors have been assiduously preserved. The Italians left a mixed legacy in the Horn—perpetrating war crimes on one hand, while also creating this remarkable architectural heritage.

From the outside, the bright white exterior of Hamasien, with its distinctive dome, looked like a cathedral, reflecting light on a hillside covered with wheat. On the inside, large electric fans whirred and ruffled the long hair of affluent children lounging on leather couches in the lobby. In my room, I watched a bit of The Shawshank Redemption on Eritrean TV—which I remember thinking was oddly appropriate—before realizing I had lost my passport. This would be a problem.

The Reality of War

I had to wait until the next day before I could confirm the US embassy was open.

"What on earth are you doing here -- did you not know there was a war going on?" the young consular officer asked me.

"Perhaps you should go back to Yemen—or better yet, the States." I would think back to this moment a decade later when I became a diplomat, and had similar conversations with reckless Americans in countries off the beaten path.

Ethiopian jets would strike Asmara airport a few weeks later.

I stayed two weeks, determined to get the data for my thesis. Without those throughput numbers, my research was going nowhere. I moved to the decidedly less swank Imperio Hotel—another perfect Art Deco specimen. Sitting in a cafe outside, I was approached by a young man of about 18, ten years younger than I was, who asked if I spoke English and if he could practice with me. I bought him a Coke, and we chatted for a bit.

Eritrea already had the trappings of a police state. People chose their words carefully—even when they were learning a new language. Now that it was clear a major war might be coming, the practiced calm and formality of people on the streets was striking.

The kid and I met for each of the next couple of days. He told me of his desire to see the world, and his fears about what was coming.

"I am starting military service next week," he said—even then, Eritrea had universal military service starting at 18. "I'm afraid I will be sent to the border," he added quietly. The differences in our positions felt weighty. I was a foreigner who could leave when he wanted but was choosing to stay—at least for a few weeks. He wanted to leave, apparently badly—but there was nowhere he could go.

The Descent to Massawa

There wasn't much of value to me in Asmara; for shipping data I would need to travel to Massawa—70-miles on a road that doubled upon itself downward like ribbon candy. As we lost altitude and got closer to the sea, the air grew heavier and humid.

The car passed former Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie's somewhat diminutive Red Sea palace, riddled with bullets, and the impressive remains of the Banco di Roma, which looked as if it was mid-melt. Selassie had been overthrown, held under house arrest, and assumed to have been assassinated by the Marxist-Leninist Derg in 1974. Ethiopia plunged into a period of darkness, which included internal wars against rebel groups in Eritrea. Believing the Derg distracted, Somalia’s President Siad Barre made the mistake of attempting to take back the ethnically Somali Ogaden region in the late 70s, only to see Ethiopia backed by the Soviets, and Somalia thrown into disorder that continues to this day.

Along the road I recognized the elegant lines of a vintage Alfa Romeo lying belly-up, twisted and rusted—the car had obviously careened off one of the sharp turns, too far down to be retrieved without significant effort. I wondered if anyone had made it out alive.

I managed to get some of what I was looking for in the dilapidated Massawa port offices—cargo throughput data that would prove crucial for my research on how port investments affected inland food prices. Then I returned to Asmara for my flight home.

I heard no more from the kid I had tutored in English phrases.

Six months later, when both countries had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on weapons and the Badme War started in force, I wondered what happened to him. I'd given him my email—Eritrea was one of a few countries with a start on internet access—but I never heard from him again.

***

My passport replaced, I headed to the airport for one of the last scheduled flights to Sanaa. I looked at the white Yemenia 727 on the tarmac under a floodlight, long used to these hops across the Red Sea. I had ordered a thin crust Margherita pizza an hour before departure, and, optimistically expecting a short flight, took it through the X-ray machine—a small comfort for my host back in Sanaa. Once again, the flight took a detour to avoid hostile airspace, which added an hour to the flight, and turned the pizza decidedly cold.

A week later, the Ethiopians bombed the Asmara airport.

This was one of the opening salvos in the modern Red Sea port wars. The 1998 conflict definitively severed both Assab and Massawa from Ethiopian use, and shortly after, the Al Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole at Aden frustrated the ambitions of that port. The great beneficiary would soon be the port of Djibouti, nestled between Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Yemen on the other side of the Bab el-Mandeb straits.

What I had witnessed firsthand was not just a tragic war, but a fundamental reshaping of Red Sea politics and commerce that continues to influence the region today. Many — like the young man who wanted to practice his English—and the 500,000 like him who were sent to the front—paid the price for this transformation with their lives and futures.

The Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission, established under the Algiers Agreement by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, would eventually issue a binding verdict awarding Badme to Eritrea. It would take nearly a decade before the Ethiopian government recognized this award, and the conflict officially ended—in time for the outbreak of an even bloodier conflict within the boundaries of Ethiopia, known as the "Tigray War".

The Middle East-Told Slant offers a non-partisan, practitioner's perspective on Middle East politics, conflict, and culture. Written by a former US diplomat with 25+ years of regional experience, author of Benghazi: A New History (Hachette, 2022) and the forthcoming A Modern History of the Red Sea. Each week, I share analysis on current events, historical context, and cultural insights from the region, drawing on my experience in government, business, and academia across the Middle East.

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