Word: eritrea
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...that it is using Western food aid as part of its "pacification" program. Though Ethiopia says it has 211 famine-relief centers operating chiefly in its northern provinces, all in towns under government control, Mengistu's opponents maintain that little food is reaching most of the residents of Eritrea and Tigre. The main reason: the government refuses to distribute aid in "unsafe" regions, meaning those under guerrilla control. Those who visit government food centers must display identity cards showing that they belong to state-controlled peasant organizations or neighborhood associations. Says REST's Zeno: "It is only the very young...
...guerrilla organizations claim to be both willing and able to help in the relief effort. Operating out of underground bunkers in Eritrea, they organize occasional truck convoys to ferry supplies from Port Sudan on the Red Sea into their territory. What the insurgents lack, however, is access to adequate relief supplies and the means to transport them through a war zone. The Mengistu government has refused rebel offers of free passage for food aid intended to reach the hinterland's of the war-torn provinces...