The untold stories of militiamen from Gojjam, Ethiopia: voices of distress and desperation from the Ogaden and Eritrean fronts, 1977–1991

ABSTRACT Using untapped archival documents from the Däbrä Marqos provincial archives in Gojjam, and the archives of the Ministry of National Defence (MOND) in Addis Ababa, this study attempts to investigate the untold stories of militiamen drafted into the Ethiopian army in 1977 on the eve of Somalia's invasion of Ethiopia and in the wake of the fall of many towns in Eritrea in the hands of insurgents. These men played a critical role in reversing these threats (temporarily in the case of Eritrea, on a much longer-term basis in that of Somalia), and their impact on the region's history was massive. The archival evidence gathered from the former Gojjam province sheds new light on their personal lives, and the dislocation for those left behind, which is often missing from the larger histories of the Därg's wars. Those stories have been substantiated by interviewing ex-militiamen. Many of the stories revealed in the archives are quite disturbing – broken marriages, emotional distress, separated families and the like. This study, thus, attempts to show the importance of ‘history from below’ in the construction of narratives of the Ethiopian revolutionary wars.