The Moment the Ghedli Lost Its Soul (Part II)

The Moment the Ghedli Lost Its Soul PART II
The erosion of voluntary participation did not occur in a vacuum. It unfolded against a backdrop of shifting battlefields, demographic upheavals, factional rivalries, and organizational panic. To understand how coercion became normalized—and how the tegadalai was transformed from a moral agent into an instrument—we must trace the pressures that reshaped the fronts in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I. The Tegadalai as a Moral Category
The early tegadalai was unlike any figure in Eritrean history. He was not a soldier because he was not paid. He was not an ascari, because he did not serve colonial power. He was not a shifta, because he did not extract food or shelter through force or was not inspired by personal vendettas or self-aggrandizement. His sustenance came through kwadere (ኳደረ), the traditional system of hospitality through which villagers provided for travelers, strangers, and royal messengers—and through contributions from Eritreans inside the country and in the diaspora.

The ghedli adapted this ancient ethic to modern struggle: civilians supported fighters not out of fear but out of solidarity. Urban clandestine networks and diaspora mass organizations reinforced this moral economy. The tegadalai resembled the shifta only in his voluntary entry into the field; his cause, however, was collective and emancipatory, not personal or vengeful. Eritrean history knows noble shiftas, but they were exceptions. The tegadalai was the norm.

Political theorists of revolution—from Frantz Fanon to Amílcar Cabral—argue that voluntary participation is the moral foundation of any liberation movement. The tegadalai embodied this principle: he was a moral subject before he was a military one. His sacrifice carried weight precisely because it was voluntary. Martyrdom meant something because it was freely given.
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II. The Rupture: When Coercion Entered the Struggle**
The decisive rupture came with the introduction of forced recruitment, commonly known as giffa. Once coercion entered the bloodstream of the struggle, the tegadalai—as a moral category—ceased to exist.

The fighter who emerged after 1977 was neither tegadalai nor shifta nor soldier, but something in between: a conscripted combatant who fought within a liberation movement without the voluntary moral agency that had once defined it. Some of the tegadelti had joined out of conviction; others were rounded up. The first casualty of this hybridization was moral agency either directly or indirectly through association.

Comparative revolutionary history shows similar ruptures:
In Zimbabwe, ZANLA’s forced recruitment in the late 1970s weakened its moral legitimacy.
In Ethiopia, the Derg’s mass conscription eroded the distinction between soldier and subject.
In Mozambique, FRELIMO’s early voluntarism gave way to coercive mobilization under wartime pressure.
Eritrea’s case fits this pattern: coercion corrodes the moral foundation of liberation.
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III. The Strategic Turn: War, Demography, and Organizational Panic**
Up to the mid-1970s, both the ELF and the EPLF still functioned as genuine popular fronts. Their fighters were citizens who had crossed the threshold of fear and chosen to bear witness to a national mission. The ghedli, at that stage, was sustained by voluntary commitment rather than organizational compulsion.

The ELF embodied this ethos. For nearly three quarters of its existence, it allowed its fighters annual leave in its liberated areas or across the border in Sudan. This practice was more than logistical accommodation; it was a profound expression of trust. It affirmed that a tegadalai was anchored not by coercion but by conviction—that he would return because he believed in the struggle, not because he was compelled to do so. It was the ultimate vote of confidence in the idea of a voluntary freedom fighter and in the moral grammar that defined the early ghedli.

Recently, I came across a story that captures this ethos with remarkable clarity. A friend who lived in Kassala told me about his neighbor, Adem Mohamed Hamid—affectionately known as Gendefil—a name spoken with quiet admiration in Eritrean history. For years, Gendefil would work in Sudan for three months to earn enough money to support his family, then be exiled in Kassala, and afterward return to Eritrea to lead his squad of fighters. Few stories illustrate the voluntary nature of the early struggle more vividly: a man who balanced the obligations of family with the obligations of liberation, moving between two worlds with unwavering commitment.

Gendefil is remembered for one of the most daring missions of the early armed struggle: the liberation of the military post at Haikota in 1963. After Mebrahtu Tseggai surveyed the area, Gendefil disguised himself as a madman and entered Haikota to assess the feasibility of the attack. His reconnaissance confirmed that victory was within reach—and the rest became part of the lore of Eritrea’s liberation history.

After independence, it was Gendefil who presented his old rifle to Isaias Afwerki—a symbolic gesture marking the close of one chapter of Eritrean history and the opening of another. His life, like that of so many early fighters, stands as a testament to a time when the ghedli was sustained by voluntary sacrifice, moral agency, and a deep sense of national mission. Gendefil died in the late 1990s in Kassala, but he was among the few of the pioneering generation who lived long enough to see the dream of an independent Eritrea fulfilled.

1. The Liberation of Towns and the Shift to Positional Warfare
The fronts began liberating towns and cities—Karora, Nacfa, Teseney, and Aqordet—and the battlefield transformed from guerrilla warfare into positional warfare resembling the trench battles of the World Wars. The existing literature is often misleading about who liberated what and when, but the essential point remains: the fronts were entering a new military phase that eventually demanded more manpower than voluntary recruitment could supply. It was the ELF that started the liberation of towns and cities. It suffices to mention that Karora was liberated by the ELF in 1976. Of course, the ELF did not hold on to it for long, and it was retaken by the Derg, but the same is true for the EPLF. The EPLF liberated Karora in January of 1977, and a year later it was taken back by the Derg. Several towns, such as Hagaz and Omhajer, were already liberated by the ELF before Karora.

2. The Demographic Surge
Derg brutality drove tens of thousands of young Eritreans into the field, overwhelming the capacity of both fronts. The influx was sudden, massive, and politically unplanned; neither the ELF nor the PLF/EPLF possessed the organizational infrastructure to absorb it. Crucially, this surge was entirely voluntary. Between 1974 and 1977, Eritreans—especially the youth—joined the struggle out of conviction, fearlessness, a desire for revenge against the unprecedented killings and massacres their communities had endured, and a deepening sense of national urgency.

For many, joining the ghedli became the defining aspiration of Eritrean youth culture. It was the “cool” thing to do—the ultimate expression of courage, patriotism, and adulthood. In this early period, no forceful recruitment existed; the movement was still animated by moral agency, personal choice, and a collective sense of historical responsibility.

And those of us who were children dreamed of growing up quickly so we could join the ghedli and kill the “Amhara.” One of my favorite songs at the time was “ኣብ ሩባ ሩባ ጸግዒ ጎቦ፣ ኣምሓራይ ኣድጊ ተዝረኽቦ፣ ብሬነይ ጌረ ክዕምብቦ።” Fighting—and the desire to kill the “enemy”—became normalized, woven into the emotional fabric of childhood and the cultural imagination of the era.

The Derg did not grasp the danger of this deeply embedded cultural DNA, and in its miscalculation, it provoked a force it could neither contain nor comprehend. Once awakened, the war machine that had long been dormant surged into motion. The sheer scale of voluntary mobilization forced both fronts to rethink their military organization. What had once been small, ideologically cohesive guerrilla units now had to be reorganized into more formal structures: first battalions, then brigades, and eventually kifle serawit.
This transformation was driven not by coercion but by the unprecedented number of citizens choosing to fight. The human geography of the war had changed, and the fronts had to adapt to a movement expanding faster than their existing frameworks could absorb.

Within the ELF, the crisis exposed deep fissures. The military chief, Abdella Idris, resisted accepting large numbers of highland recruits even as late as 1976, and the newcomers were met with disparaging labels—Sewret BBC, Sewret Khamsa Wesebi’en—terms that revealed the cultural anxieties and regional suspicions simmering beneath the surface. The ELF’s hesitation was not merely logistical; it reflected an older political grammar struggling to accommodate a new demographic reality. The disparaging labels were not confined to the ELF; the EPLF had its own for those who joined when the liberation struggle reached its apex in 1975. They were called—ironically, and tellingly, in Arabic—heruya geriba.

The EPLF was more receptive, but even it—like the ELF—approached the influx with caution. The concern on both fronts centered on the growing number of underage youths arriving at their gates. The phrase “quintal belieka temeles—ኩንታል በሊዕካ ተመለስ” captured the spirit of the moment: an acknowledgment that the movement was receiving children whose bodies were not yet prepared for the physical burdens of war, even if their political consciousness had been forged prematurely by state terror. It was a dilemma born not of reluctance toward volunteers, but of the painful recognition that the struggle’s moral and military demands were colliding with the vulnerability of its youngest recruits.

3. Organizational Breakdown
The tragedy is that this transformation—from conviction to coercion—unfolded without any meaningful deliberation. Forced recruitment was never sanctioned by the ELF’s Revolutionary Council or its Congress; it emerged in the highlands, initiated at the kifle serawit level, allegedly by Woldedawit Temesgen. Its implementation was uneven and regionally selective. Most recruits came from Seraye, while Akeleguzay and Hamasien were largely spared. It is important to note that much of Hamasien and Akeleguzay—aside from a few wereeds—was considered EPLF territory. Outside Seraye, only Gash—particularly the Kunama—was subjected to giffa.

What began as an improvised response to alleged battlefield pressures soon hardened into practice, yet it never passed through the movement’s formal political organs. The erosion of voluntary participation did not begin with a single decree; it seeped gradually into the bloodstream of the struggle—first through necessity or misguided power struggle, then through habit, and finally through institutionalization.

One of the individuals I interviewed raised a critical question: if the ELF leadership had not authorized the policy, why did it allow some of the new recruits to be trained in Barka? The answer lies in the internal politics of the time. First, most of the recruits were not trained in Barka at all but by the kifle serawit in Seraye. Secondly, more consequentially, Abdella Idris was in cahoots with Woldedawit Temesgen. Their collaboration aimed to swell the number of fighters from Seraye and the Lowlands, a deliberate attempt to counter what Abdella Idris perceived as the growing ascendancy of the Hamasien Akeleguzay Semhar-Maria alignment under the “Hamasien-dominated EPLF.” In this sense, giffa was not merely a military improvisation; it became entangled in the factional arithmetic of regional representation and leadership rivalry.

Toward this goal, Abdella Idris and his coterie also embarked on mobilizing Muslim refugees in camps across Sudan, hoping to broaden their support base and augment their fighting force. But the initiative failed to produce the desired outcome. The political calculus remained centered on Seraye, and the attempt to draw on refugee populations only underscored the increasingly improvised—and increasingly desperate—nature of their strategy.

This dynamic also helps explain why Woldedawit Temesgen eventually joined the Rasae group of Abdella Idris after the ELF was forced to retreat into Sudan under the combined onslaught of the EPLF and its ally, the TPLF—the original Tsemdo long before the term acquired its current popularity. The political logic that had shaped the early implementation of giffa—regional balancing, factional maneuvering, and personal alliances—continued to shape alignments long after the battlefield had shifted.

The alliance between Woldedawit Temesgen and Abdella Idris soon reached a standoff. Abdella Idris was reluctant to allow Woldedawit to pursue his strategy of returning to the highlands and reasserting his turf. Abdella eventually realized that he could not afford another threat emerging from the highlands; he needed something he could claim as his own. The assassination of Woldedawit put the final nail in the coffin of this uneasy partnership.

In the end, ክልተ ጎራሓት ሓሙኽሽቲ ስንቆም—two slick willies will have ashes for their food supply. Alliances built on power calculus rather than principle consume themselves from within, leaving nothing but ashes for those who forged them.

More importantly, the decision to launch giffa, and its implementation by Woldedawit and his conspirators, created a crisis for the Revolutionary Council. The Council had no role in authorizing the operation and was left scrambling to determine who was behind it. In that moment, Giffa ceased to be merely a mobilization tactic; it became a fault line exposing the erosion of collective leadership and the rise of unilateral decision-making within the ELF.

The EPLF’s adoption of giffa in the early 1980s followed a familiar pattern: driven by “necessity” rather than institutional process. It is important to recall that the EPLF—together with its ally, the TPLF—had already pushed a well-organized Eritrean army off the field, thereby diminishing the capacity of a volunteer force inside Eritrea. The collapse of that army created a vacuum the EPLF could not fill through voluntary mobilization alone.

A respondent noted that a national call to optimize resources and unite against the “ቀዳማይ ጸላኢ—number one enemy” was issued as the Sixth Offensive loomed. A parallel appeal was directed at the Eritrean population under the slogan ሎሚ ዘይከተተ ብደው ከም ዝሞተ. The ELF and the Sabbe group were likewise invited under the banner “ኩሉ ኣንጻር ቀዳማይ ጸላኢ,” but it was allegedly clear to the EPLF leadership that they were not stepping up to the plate.

Faced with the prospect of simultaneous attacks—from the Derg and from the ELF, the EPLF concluded that it could not withstand pressure on both fronts. It deemed the elimination of the ELF a strategic necessity. In a bitter historical irony, the ELF, the organization that had launched the national armed struggle, was now perceived as the major liability to the cause, an existential threat whose removal was required for the survival of the revolution.

To the delight of the Derg, the EPLF and TPLF combined forces unleashed unprecedented onslaught on the ELF. True to Napoleon’s maxim, the Ethiopians practiced, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

After the war to rid Eritrea of the ELF and the Sixth Offensive, the EPLF suffered heavy casualties, and no volunteers came forward to replace the martyred tegadelti. The situation necessitated mandatory and coercive recruitment.

As with the ELF, there were no deliberations at the politburo or central committee level of the EPLF. Yet the decision was accepted as the correct one by the rank and file almost unanimously. Credible evidence suggests that the policy originated within the executive of the secret party, though not all members were aware of it or involved in the process. (With two exceptions, the individuals who composed the executive of the front and the executive of the secret party were the same.)

Unlike the ELF’s regionally selective approach, the EPLF sought to apply giffa across all regions of Eritrea; in practice, however, it was concentrated primarily in the Christian-dominated highlands. And Seraye—long the turf of the ELF—became the crown jewel of the policy. In some areas, Muslim communities resisted with swords and whatever weapons they had at their disposal. What is known with certainty is that the policy transformed what had once been a voluntary national mobilization into a system of compulsory recruitment—introduced without collective debate, institutional procedure, or ideological justification.

Political science teaches that when organizations bypass their own procedures during moments of crisis, they create precedents that later harden into authoritarian norms. Eritrea followed this script. Institutions are expected to have clearly defined provisions that authorize non standard measures during states of emergency, and the invocation of those measures must follow a protocol agreed upon a priori. When such protocols are ignored—or improvised under the banner of necessity—the exception becomes habit, and habit eventually becomes doctrine.

By the early 1980s, the ghedli stood at a crossroads. What had begun as a voluntary national covenant was now strained by demographic surges, battlefield pressures, and factional maneuvering. The introduction of giffa—improvised at first, institutionalized later—marked the beginning of a profound moral rupture. The stage was set for the emergence of a new type of fighter, one whose presence would redefine the struggle itself.

Part III will be published next Sunday.
To contact the author: [email protected]