At a Glance
The Making of a Liberation War General
Petros Solomon joined the EPLF at an age when most young men in most countries are completing their education and beginning their careers — at a moment when the choice to join a guerrilla liberation movement meant accepting years of hardship, the probability of imprisonment or death, and the permanent disruption of whatever conventional life might have been available. He was part of the generation that joined the EPLF in the 1970s, the decade in which the movement was establishing itself as the dominant force in the Eritrean liberation struggle, developing the organisational structures and the military doctrine that would eventually produce victory.
His rise through the EPLF's military command structure reflected exceptional ability — in a movement that faced existential military threats and could not afford to appoint commanders on the basis of political connection or social background rather than military competence, advancement meant demonstrating the specific qualities that effective guerrilla and conventional command required: tactical intelligence, physical courage, the ability to maintain the confidence of subordinates under conditions of extreme stress, the logistical and organisational capacity to sustain operations across extended campaigns in difficult terrain, and the political judgment to understand the relationship between military action and the broader liberation project. The EPLF's internal culture was meritocratic in its military appointments in a way that many organisations, liberation or otherwise, are not, and Petros Solomon's ascent to the movement's supreme military command was the result of demonstrating those qualities across years of progressive responsibility.
The Sahel years — the period from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s when the EPLF maintained its base areas in the harsh mountains of northern Eritrea after withdrawing from the lowlands under the pressure of Ethiopia's Soviet-backed offensive — were the years in which the movement built the conventional military capacity that its final campaigns would require. The EPLF's development of armoured units from captured Ethiopian tanks, its construction of artillery capable of engaging Ethiopian positions at extended range, its establishment of the engineering and logistical infrastructure that sustained operations in a remote and resource-scarce environment — all of this was achieved during the Sahel years, and the commanders who built these capabilities, including Petros Solomon, were doing something of genuine military achievement.
The Capture of Massawa: The Decisive Operation
The EPLF's capture of Massawa in February 1990 was the military operation most directly responsible for Ethiopia's inability to sustain its occupation of Eritrea, and it was the operation that most clearly demonstrated Petros Solomon's military command quality. Massawa was Eritrea's principal port — the facility through which the Ethiopian forces in Asmara received the majority of their supplies and reinforcements, and whose loss would reduce those forces to a position that could not be sustained indefinitely. It was also a strongly defended position, protected by Ethiopian naval forces, garrison troops, and the fortifications that years of Ethiopian military presence had established.
The EPLF's attack on Massawa combined land operations — the advance of EPLF ground forces through the approaches to the port — with the use of Eritrean naval forces that had been built from captured Ethiopian vessels and improvised Eritrean craft. The simultaneity of the land and naval operation, the coordination required to manage forces operating across different domains against a position with multiple defensive layers, and the speed of the final assault that overwhelmed the Ethiopian garrison before it could be reinforced — all of these reflected the operational intelligence of the command that directed it. The capture of Massawa was completed on 10 February 1990, and its strategic consequences were immediate and decisive: Ethiopian forces in Asmara were now dependent on air supply, which was both more expensive and more vulnerable, and the military balance had shifted fundamentally against continued Ethiopian occupation.
The final advance on Asmara in May 1991, which Petros Solomon commanded, completed the military process that the capture of Massawa had made inevitable. Ethiopian forces, demoralised by years of military reversal and the simultaneous collapse of the Derg government in Addis Ababa as the EPRDF forces advanced from the north, offered limited resistance as EPLF columns entered the capital. The liberation of Eritrea was achieved — thirty years after the armed struggle began, in a victory that had appeared impossible to outside observers for much of its duration. Petros Solomon was thirty-seven years old. He had commanded the armies that won his country's freedom.
Post-Independence: From General to Minister to Prisoner
The post-independence trajectory of Petros Solomon illustrates, in microcosm, the broader story of the EPLF's military generation in the years after liberation. His move from the Defence Ministry to the Marine Resources Ministry — from the most senior security portfolio to a secondary economic one — was itself suggestive of the political dynamics at play in the post-independence government, in which Isaias Afwerki's consolidation of personal authority required the gradual marginalisation of figures whose independent standing within the liberation movement gave them a potential base for political influence. A former supreme military commander who was universally recognised as the general who won the war was precisely the kind of figure whose continued prominence in the government was, from Isaias's perspective, a source of risk.
The 1998–2000 border war with Ethiopia — which Petros Solomon as a former senior military figure would have had strong views about, and whose conduct under Isaias's personal direction generated the tensions that produced the G-15 letter — accelerated the marginalisation of the military commanders who questioned presidential strategy. The dismissal of General Ogbe Abraha and other officers who had expressed reservations about Isaias's military decisions during the border war was a direct warning to the military establishment that dissent from the president's direction would not be tolerated. For Petros Solomon, this warning created a clear choice: remain silent about what he believed were the government's failures, or sign the letter that he and his G-15 co-signatories had drafted.
He signed the letter. He was arrested on 18 September 2001. He has been held in incommunicado detention without charge or trial ever since. The general who commanded the armies that liberated Eritrea from thirty years of Ethiopian occupation has now spent more than twenty years imprisoned by the Eritrean government — a prisoner of the state whose existence his military victories made possible. The historical irony is total, and it is not irony at all but tragedy: the deliberate imprisonment of the liberation's greatest military commander by the liberation's political leader, an act of profound institutional and personal betrayal that is one of the most complete expressions of post-liberation authoritarian regression in the history of African independence.
Aster Yohannes: The Wife Who Returned
The arrest of Aster Yohannes at Asmara airport on 29 November 2003 is one of the most devastating individual acts in the history of the Eritrean government's treatment of its citizens and its liberation veterans. Aster Yohannes — herself a qualified lawyer and one of Eritrea's most educated women, who had been studying in the United States on a scholarship — returned to Eritrea knowing, or at least suspecting, what had happened to her husband and to the other G-15 prisoners. She returned anyway: because she was a citizen of a country she believed in, because she had children there, because the alternative was permanent exile from the country whose liberation she and her husband had spent their lives working for. She was arrested as she stepped off the plane.
Her arrest was not based on any G-15 involvement — she had not signed the letter, had not been part of the political dissent that had led to her husband's imprisonment. She was arrested, as far as can be determined from outside, simply because she was Petros Solomon's wife — a hostage taken by the Eritrean state from its most celebrated military commander, an act of collective punishment that violated every principle of individual rights and due process that the liberation movement had claimed to be fighting to establish. Reports received through unofficial channels in the years following her arrest have suggested that Aster Yohannes may have died in custody. The Eritrean government has provided no official information about her condition.
Legacy: The General, the Prisoner, and What Both Demand
Petros Solomon's legacy has two dimensions that cannot be separated and must not be allowed to eclipse each other. The first is his military achievement: he commanded the EPLF's armed forces in the campaigns that liberated Eritrea, and the liberation of Eritrea — whatever has happened since — was a genuine historical achievement that the Eritrean people voted for overwhelmingly and that mattered enormously to the millions of Eritreans who had lived under occupation. That achievement is real, and Petros Solomon's role in it is among the most significant of any individual in the liberation war's history.
The second dimension is his status as a prisoner of the state he helped create — a man who exercised his democratic right to call for the implementation of his country's own constitution and who has been imprisoned for more than two decades as a consequence. That imprisonment is real, and it constitutes one of the most direct and most personal expressions of the Eritrean government's betrayal of the liberation struggle's stated values. The general who won the war has been in prison longer than the war's final decisive campaigns lasted. That fact demands to be stated clearly, remembered persistently, and used as a standard against which the Eritrean government's claims to legitimacy are measured.
Petros Solomon and the other G-15 prisoners deserve the same international attention and the same sustained advocacy that political prisoners in other contexts have received. That they have not received it — that the world has allowed liberation war veterans to be imprisoned without charge for more than two decades in conditions that may have killed some of them — is itself a failure that history should record alongside the Eritrean government's.