Re: [DEHAI] The death of Hamed Idris Awate
AFRICA WORLD PRESS (awprsp@castle.net) Mon, 08 Sep 1997 19:51:50 -0500 [source http://www.ephrem.org/dehai_archive/1997/sept/0108.html]
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Selam Dehai:
Here is what I found about the background of our national hero, Hamid Idris Awate, from Markakis' book, NATIONAL AND CLASS CONFLICT IN THE HORN OF AFRICA. I quote from Chapter 4, entitled "Anti-Colonial Nationalism" pp., 64, 65, 66 the relevant passages with a background. Most of the questions I raised last week seem to be answered here. Hope this will stimulate interest in the ongoing discussion. [Note: All typos mine.]
--Elias
--------------Excerpts from Markakis-------------------
"Ibrahim Sultan and his colleagues called a meeting of Muslim notables during the first week of December 1946 in Keren, where they set up a political organization named the Muslim League, but known as Rabita (from the Arabic term 'unite') among its followers. Ibrahim Sultan became secretary general and its effective leader. Religious symbolism was given prominence with the selection of the head of the Khatimiya sect in Eritrea, Sayyid Abubakar el-Morghani, as president. Despite appearances, however, the communal fronts were not solid. Most obvious was the breach in the Muslim side. Alienated by the emancipation of the serfs and the loss of influence entailed in the emergence of new political structures, many Muslim chiefs and traditional notables turned to the unionists, in the hope that Ethiopian rule would restore their former status.#20 On the other hand, leading Christian anti-unionists like Wolde Ab Wolde Mariam, Tessema Asberom and his son Abraham Tessema showed their solidarity with the basic aims of the Islamic League by attending the founding meeting in Keren." . . . . [Endnote #20: Among them were Osman Hidad, leader of the Habab, and some twenty other chiefs of the Bet Asghede. Also, the religious leader of Massawa, Sheikh el-Amin Abdulkadir, and the Diglal of the Beni Amer who was reported to 'have fallen out with his tribe because he adhered to the Ethiopian cause' (Beja District File, 57.B.2). In the western lowlands, 'a considerable proportion of the representatives of the aristocratic classes were in favor of union with Ethiopia, though some of them admitted that they left the Muslim League because it had promised their serfs more rights…' (FPC, Eritrea, 1948:120]
. . . " After the departure of the [Four Power] Commission [that visited Eritrea for three weeks in November 1948], the unionists launched a campaign of terror to cow the opposition. Wolde Ab Wolde Mariam survived two assassination attempts and other leading anti-unionists were assaulted. Christian shifta bands appeared on the plateau to attack Italian farmers and Muslim merchants, taking numerous lives and a heavy toll on property. Violence also erupted in the western lowlands. The years between 1946 and 1949 were blighted by drought. Famine stalked the Beja country, forcing the Hadendowa nomads to renew their incursions into Eritrea, which had ceased following the clan wars of the first half of the 1940s. The Beni Amer on the Eritrean side responded in character and a new round of violence ensued, with Hamid Idris Awate leading daring raids across the border and fending off Sudanese and Eritrean Police units sent against him. #21 . . . [Endnote #21: Hamid Idris Awate led a band of two to three dozen men belonging mainly to the Lebat, a serf section of the Beni Amer, and to the Baria [Nara], a downtrodden tribe living in the region of Barentu. Raided and enslaved by all their neighbors (their name is synonymous with 'slave' in the highlands, {and Markakis keeps using that offensive term throughout the book, which I will not}), the [Nara] were much reduced in number (about 15,000) and circumstances. The uprising of the serfs emboldened them to join the Beni Amer in raids against the Hadendowa and the Kunama. Hamid Idris Awate was himself a [Nara] who acquired a following among the Beni Amer. He was no ordinary bandit, but a man who had served in the Italian army for several years and had been sent for training to Italy. In July 1948, he killed a Sudanese police officer and two sergeants who were pursuing him. The British authorities in the Sudan and Eritrea now mounted a major combined operation against him. Idris [Awate] eluded his pursuers and continued his depredations until 1951, when he accepted amnesty and retired to his village, where he was made chief later."
-------------End of excerpt------------------
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