By Gabriel Pogrund (Eritrea)<\/p>\n
MASSAWA, ERITREA\u00a0\u2212\u00a0Massawa is a broken city.
\nHalf of its once busy port is rubble and the surviving buildings struggle to stand up. Iron rods and barbed wire prod out of their crumbling Ottoman facades, as if to warn visitors \u201ccome no further.\u201d But few visit anyway.<\/p>\n
On this street, like many, people still sleep on fold up field hospital beds. Gabriel Pogrund
\nThe streets are empty, the 44 degrees Celsius heat too oppressive for anyone to come out. It is silent, save for the caw of crows and the soft purr of a caf\u00e9\u2019s electricity generator. Even the Red Sea doesn\u2019t make a sound.
\nThis is Africa\u2019s secret Aleppo, and like that infamous Syrian city, it was devastated by the indiscriminate weapon which most of the world\u2019s countries have had the good sense to ban: cluster bombs.
\n– Skip
\nToday, few outside of Eritrea remember the massacre at Massawa, where 50,000 people still live, but in this abandoned port, the bombed-out Ottoman buildings and their residents bear witness to what happened with such clarity, it is difficult to forget.
\nThe bombardment in 1990 was a last-ditch attempt by Ethiopia to demoralize the Eritrean guerrilla movement, which had liberated Massawa and stood on the cusp of winning independence after one of the longest-running guerilla wars in history.
\nWarplanes circulated around the bay for days, relentlessly bombing civilian areas. Napalm instantly incinerated buildings \u2013 and their inhabitants \u2013 at temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius. Cluster bombs landed and sent lethal \u2018sub-explosives\u2019 propelling in random directions, killing children and blowing off their parents\u2019 limbs.
\n\u201cMengistu [Haile Mariam] has decided to burn us like wood,\u201d a resident\u00a0said of Ethiopia\u2019s Marxist dictator at the time. Massawa was indeed some bonfire: Unpublished pictures from the massacre show a confused child whose back has been turned into raw flesh, a survivor whose face has been burnt off, and bodies lying face-down on the blood-stained streets.
\nWho armed the murderous Ethiopian warlord Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu, now convicted of killing half a million of his own citizens during his regime\u2019s death throes?<\/p>\n
Mural of an Eritrean resistance fighter, themed with the country’s colors, facing the Red Sea. Gabriel Pogrund
\nIt wasn\u2019t Washington. It wasn\u2019t the Kremlin. As memos, foreign press reports and the person who brokered the deal have since revealed, it was the Israeli Knesset.
\nIsrael would not confirm the allegations levelled against it at the time. Ruth Yaron, its spokesperson in Washington, told an LA Times reporter in 1990: \u201cWe don\u2019t sell cluster bombs to Ethiopia, and we don\u2019t give them either.\u201d Probed on whether Israel had sent them in the past, she replied, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be able to answer that.\u201d This was little surprise, as Israel had historically declined to say whether it was sending arms and military advisors to Ethiopia.
\nBut a confidential Congressional document leaked to Washington\u2019s Jewish press, as well as foreign reports by newspapers and human rights organizations provided details about the alleged events. And the historical literature written since \u2013 including the memoirs of Herman Cohen \u2013 has examined them in depth.<\/p>\n
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