When Fenqil, the 2015 anthology published by Hidri Publishers, appeared in print, it offered not just a collection of wartime stories, but a living archive of courage. Its pages pulse with heroism, sacrifice, and the quiet dignity of those who gave everything for Eritrea’s liberation. Among its most stirring accounts is the tale of Tank-795 — and of the fighter known simply as Magula (Gebrehiwet Kesete), whose story captures the soul of an entire generation.
Before the 1990 Battle of Massawa — Operation Fenqil — Magula and his comrades underwent grueling training for the decisive assault to liberate the port city. In those final days, Magula approached his company leader, Yemane Fesehatsion (Qufrlah), with a rare and human request: permission to see his young son one last time.
It was an uncharacteristic appeal. Fighters of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front had long accepted that personal affection must yield to the demands of the revolution. Their devotion to the cause was itself an expression of love — not only for family, but for humanity’s right to live free. Yet Magula, sensing a shadow over his fate, yearned to embrace his son once more before the storm.
Yemane hesitated, reminding him of the impending offensive. But the plea would not fade. Moved by empathy, Yemane referred the request up the chain of command. The mechanized division leadership, recognizing both Magula’s devotion and his humanity, granted him ten days’ leave. Magula made the journey, saw his child, and returned — ready, as always, to give his life to the cause.
February 10, 1990. Sigalet Qetan, the causeway leading to Massawa, became the crucible of Eritrea’s modern history. Flanked by advancing infantry, Tank-795 — Magula’s tank — was among the first to cross the narrow strip under a storm of machine-gun fire and anti-tank missiles.
Shells fell before, behind, and beside the tank. Fighter jets screamed overhead. Infantrymen collapsed in its wake. Yet Tank- 795 pressed on, its cannon and anti-aircraft guns roaring defiance. The crew fired relentlessly at entrenched enemy positions, even as the sky rained steel.
Then came the fatal strike. An anti-tank missile slammed into the vehicle, engulfing it in flame. The crew leapt from the inferno, seized their rifles, and continued fighting alongside the infantry until all were martyred.
Their valor — Magula’s among them — was not a lone act. It was emblematic of thousands who transformed impossible odds into triumph. Their message to history was unmistakable: Eritrea’s independence was not received as a gift; it was wrested from empire through blood, endurance, and genius.
The story of Tank-795 represents only a fraction of the unrecorded heroism that defined Eritrea’s thirty-year struggle. Behind every operation — Nakfa, Afabet, Massawa, Dekemhare — lay a mosaic of selflessness: young men and women who carried the weight of a people’s dream on their shoulders.
Their enemy was not only the colonial army of Ethiopia, but the array of world powers that supplied it. Their victory, therefore, was not merely military. It was moral, spiritual, and civilizational — the triumph of truth over betrayal, and of a people’s will over global indifference.
Since 1991, however, remnants of the defeated colonial army, political elites, and their admirers have tried to rewrite history. They claim — astonishingly — that Eritrea’s independence was granted by the Ethiopian government, not earned through sacrifice. Such distortion springs from ignorance and arrogance alike.
Many ordinary Ethiopians, insulated from the realities of the war, were never told of the decades of destruction unleashed upon Eritrea. For them, history begins in 1991, not 1961. As Charles Péguy once observed, “Short of genius, a rich man cannot imagine poverty.” Likewise, those who never tasted oppression cannot imagine what liberation costs.
This cultivated ignorance is reinforced by Ethiopia’s intellectual and media establishment, whose chronic denial of Eritrean agency reflects not misunderstanding but deliberate erasure. For them, to admit that the Dergue was defeated — not collapsed naturally — would puncture the myth of Ethiopian invincibility. Pride thus becomes a prison, ensuring that the lessons of defeat are never learned.
Modern communication research reminds us that representation and media are inseparable: whoever controls the narrative controls reality. Ethiopian media — both old state broadcasters and the new digital echo chambers — continue to amplify the illusion that Eritrea’s independence was a political bargain rather than a battlefield reckoning.
Such propaganda may cloud the airwaves, but it cannot alter the record. The historical ledger is clear: Eritrea prevailed through unmatched discipline, sacrifice, and strategic brilliance. In 1991 it stood free; in 1993, under UN supervision, 99.81 percent of Eritreans reaffirmed that freedom in a referendum that remains one of the most decisive votes in modern history.
Disinformation is thunder without rain. It rumbles, then fades. The deafening noise that seeks to drown Eritrea’s truth will, like all storms, pass with the dawn. What remains is the light — the record of a people who refused to surrender.
True peace and stability in the Horn of Africa can emerge only from respect: respect for sovereignty, for territorial integrity, and for the sacrifices that forged them. No nation can build harmony by denying its neighbor’s right to exist, to dream, and to flourish in its own space beneath the sun.
Ethiopian elites would do well to remember: words, however inflated, cannot rewrite maps traced in blood. To persist in expansionist fantasy is to walk barefoot on the shards of history. The wiser path lies in humility, restraint, and truth.
From Massawa’s burning causeways to the highlands of Nakfa, the promise remains unbroken: Eritreans will never bargain away the land or the sea bought with their children’s lives. Every grain of Red Sea sand, every inch of soil, was consecrated by tens of thousands of Magulas whose courage shattered the foundations of two successive empires, Haile Selassie’s and the Dergue’s, both sustained by global powers.
Their memory is not an artifact of the past. It is the foundation of Eritrea’s present and the compass of its future.