Ethiopia a Forgotten War Rages On

Once more, Eritrean rebels fight off a government offensive

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For the past 24 years, Ethiopia's northern province of Eritrea, with its strategic 620-mile coastline on the Red Sea, has been mired in a savage war between Eritrean nationalists, who are fighting to win their independence, and the Ethiopian government, which is bent on subduing what it calls the "Eritrean bandits." The U.S. backed the Ethiopian regime of the late Emperor Haile Selassie during the early years of the civil war. But U.S. ties with the country all but dissolved after 1977, when Ethiopia's leader, Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, allied his country with the Soviet Union.

Moscow is now Addis Ababa's principal ally in the Eritrean conflict. The Soviets have poured more than $3 billion in arms and 1,700 military advisers into famine-stricken Ethiopia, making Mengistu's 210,000-man army the largest and best-equipped in black Africa. Yet all that might has not blunted the will of the Eritrean rebels. The bloody, seesaw war, largely forgotten in the West and even in Africa, has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. TIME Reporter Edward W. Desmond recently traveled to Eritrea and filed this report:

Four miles to the east of Nacfa, a once prosperous farm town that is now a bombed-out ruin, rebel fighters carrying Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifles stand watch in trenches along a ridge. Across a narrow valley, in places just 60 yards away, Ethiopian troops are dug in. Some of their comrades, identifiable by their bright green uniforms, lie dead in no-man's-land. An exchange of automatic-weapons fire echoes through the valley. Moments later, two Soviet-built Ethiopian MiGs roar overhead in search of the rebels' camouflaged artillery and tank emplacements. Sipping tea in his command bunker, Afewerki Melke, a field commander of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, turns to his visitors and says, "Why we're here is simple. All we want is our land."

Last month the army launched the second phase of a fall offensive aimed at breaking through the E.P.L.F.'s 250-mile-long defensive line and capturing Nacfa. Ethiopian infantry, backed by Soviet-made T-54 and T-55 tanks, tried to blast its way onto the heights commanded by the rebels. One night Ethiopian fighter-bombers pounded rebel positions near Nacfa for five hours with bombs, rockets and napalm. Ethiopian infantrymen, backed by more than a dozen tanks, managed to overrun a rebel position. Before the Ethiopians could move on Nacfa, though, rebel reinforcements moved in from the flanks and drove the Ethiopians back in a long night of fighting.

That was only one of a dozen failed Ethiopian assaults during November. "It's a pity to see the way they waste men," observes a rebel fighter. Ethiopian casualties in the battle numbered 200 killed or wounded and four captured. The rebels refuse to discuss their losses. Says Afewerki: "When you attack, you lose men, and when you defend, you also lose men." The E.P.L.F. leadership is confident, as are Western intelligence analysts, that the sputtering government drive, like the seven other major offensives launched by Mengistu's army since 1977, will fail to crack rebel lines around Nacfa.

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