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.
An earlier phase of the offensive went better for the Ethiopians. In October government forces moved by air, sea and land to capture a stretch of the Red Sea coastal plain held since last year by the rebels. They dislodged the insurgents, who retreated into the hills. In the southwest, Ethiopian armored units recaptured two rebel-held towns, Tessenei and Barentu. Mengistu reportedly was jubilant over the advances. But the gains probably mean little: the recaptured areas were changing hands for the second time–and almost certainly not the last. “We cannot defend the plains against the armor and air power of the Ethiopians,” says an E.P.L.F. commander, “but we will return to those areas when the time is right.”
Unlike rebels fighting Soviet-supported regimes in Nicaragua, Kampuchea, Afghanistan and Angola, the Eritreans are fighting a conventional, set-piece war. Their estimated 24,000 fighters, backed by thousands of trained militiamen, control several hundred square miles of inhospitable mountainous terrain. Guerrilla units also move freely in rural areas behind Ethiopian lines, though government forces hold the major cities. “The Ethiopians concentrate their effort on crushing our main units and controlling the roads and towns,” says E.P.L.F. Politburo Member Sebhat Ephrem. “That strategy does not leave them enough troops to control the countryside.”
The incessant fighting has intensified the effects of the drought that led to widespread famine in the region. Heavy fall rains should have produced % healthy crops in Eritrea and neighboring Tigre province; in nearby Sudan, record crops are already being harvested. But in Eritrea and Tigre, so many farmers have been pushed off their land by the war that the Eritrean Relief Association, the rebel’s relief arm, estimates that Eritrea’s fall crop will reach only 25% of its potential. Says Selass Ghimay, 28, who fled her village because of the drought: “Even if there is food and seed, there will be no peace. I will not go back.”
Although the war is the rebels’ main preoccupation, their vaguely Marxist, 13-member ruling politburo promotes land reform and supports a health-care system in areas it controls. Through the ERA, the rebels operate 23 camps in Eritrea for 135,000 persons displaced by the war and famine. Trucks and camels transport grain and other supplies to another estimated 750,000 Eritreans, many of them behind Ethiopian lines. Western agencies give the relief operations high marks. “It’s really extremely efficient,” said Robert Cottingham, the director for Africa at Lutheran World Relief.
At the main rebel hospital in Orota, near the Eritrean-Sudanese border, stone buildings partially dug into mountainsides house operating rooms and recovery wards. Outside a surgical ward, litter-bound and heavily bandaged fighters wait silently in the cool evening air. Among the more advanced procedures performed by E.P.L.F. surgeons: microsurgery to repair burst eardrums and skin grafts for burn victims. “We are very rich in experience here,” says the hospital’s chief, Dr. Assefaw Tekeste. “There are not many combat surgeons who are well acquainted with removing both Soviet- and American-made bullets and shrapnel.”
Assefaw is an avid student of U.S. Army Medical Corps practices during the Viet Nam War. “The Americans had helicopters, of course, and we don’t,” he says. “But we still manage to get casualties from the field to surgery in twelve hours, compared with eight hours for the Americans in Viet Nam. And of the casualties who make it to a hospital, our mortality rate is 25 per 1,000, compared with 20 per 1,000 for the Americans.”
The constant air bombardment is probably the major cause of casualties. It also shapes practically every aspect of life behind E.P.L.F. lines. Unless skies are overcast, vehicles are not permitted to move during the day. Trucks or jeeps are hidden beneath nearly every acacia tree. Antiaircraft guns are on constant alert. Every rebel building is covered with vines and tree branches; * some permanent structures have 2-ft.-thick stone walls that can withstand barrages of shrapnel. Civilians are regularly lectured on how to wipe burning napalm jelly from their skin.
The refugee camps are more difficult to hide and defend. This fall the Ethiopians struck at nine camps, killing 66 civilians. At Solomuna camp, home to 7,000 Eritreans, including 500 children in an orphanage, Ethiopian MiGs dropped 20 bombs in one day last September. Nine people were killed, including six children, and 23 were wounded. Solomuna’s residents now rise before dawn and climb into narrow ravines, where they spend the day huddled under rock overhangs. The sound of a distant MiG one morning instantly silenced several hundred chattering children, as all peered skyward. Ghiday Haile, 33, sat under a rock ledge holding her four-year-old son. “Women who were friends of mine died in the attack,” she recalled. “I will never again spend the sunlight hours in that camp.”
But even the night can be perilous. Late one evening an Ethiopian plane, probably a Soviet-made An-12, unleashed a payload of bombs and flares near the camp, lighting up the sky for miles around. The brilliant display, which the Eritreans call the “Christmas tree,” fell harmlessly into the mountains. But ERA workers report that the night raids frighten refugees for miles around. “What the Ethiopians want,” says one, “is to scare our people into leaving these camps and force them to cross into Sudan or into government- controlled camps.”
Financial support for the rebels comes from some 500,000 Eritreans living overseas. The U.S. and other Western governments have not backed the E.P.L.F., in part because some of the group’s leaders are Marxists. In addition, like many African countries, they are reluctant to support what some see as a secessionist movement. Says a U.S. State Department official: “(Such) support establishes precedents that could prove explosive all around the continent.” Rebel leaders, however, have long insisted that the U.S. and the West have a responsibility to back Eritrean independence. They point out that in 1962 Haile Selassie asserted Addis Ababa’s control over Eritrea in violation of a 1950 U.N. resolution that called for Eritrean political autonomy. “We base our case on that U.N. resolution,” says Sebhat. “And we want the Americans and the West to act according to their promises at the U.N.” The prospect remains unlikely. But the rebels believe more strongly than ever that it is a key to ultimate victory.
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