Word: eritrea
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Afabet. In the annals of the interminable civil war between Ethiopia and its . province of Eritrea, the name is a milestone. It was at that dusty town in northern Ethiopia that the Eritrean People's Liberation Front overran President Mengistu Haile Mariam's main northern garrison in March. The rebels claim to have killed or captured 18,000 soldiers in one of their greatest victories in 26 years of fighting. At about the same time, just south of Eritrea, insurgents in Tigre scored a series of military triumphs...
...weeks government troops have retaken the major towns of Tigre, but the battle-hardened Eritreans have fought them to a stalemate. Both sides have used the region's chronic hunger as a weapon, with the rebels attacking a relief convoy and Mengistu ordering most foreign-aid workers out of Eritrea and Tigre. Some food is still reaching the estimated 2 million to 3 million victims of northern Ethiopia's latest famine, but no one knows how many have died, casualties as much of politics as of malnutrition. Photographer Anthony Suau traveled through Afabet and the EPLF field bases, assembling...
...wars continue in Ethiopia: one against drought and famine, the other between government forces and well-armed insurgents. Long-suffering Ethiopians are the losers in both. In recent weeks rebels in the northern provinces of Eritrea and Tigre, where close to 3 million people are at risk of dying from starvation, have escalated their campaign against the government by ambushing food convoys, attacking grain-distribution centers, mining roads, firing on transport planes, and rocketing airfields. By last week the civil war had virtually halted the relief program in Tigre. Regional warehouses are mostly empty because roads are too dangerous...
...country. But much of this aid never reaches the hungry. Last week relief officials reported that 172 tons of food, given chiefly by Italy, were destroyed when rebels of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front attacked a 17-truck commercial convoy moving supplies to the stricken provinces of Eritrea and Tigre. The guerrillas say the vehicles were used to ferry ammunition to government troops, a charge adamantly denied by aid organizations and U.S. officials, who fear many people will die if relief supplies cannot be safely delivered to distribution centers...
Despite the criticisms of Mengistu's regime, some of his heavy-handed policies appear to have rationales behind them. It is true, of course, that rebellious Eritrea, governed as an Italian colony from 1890 until World War II, has a tribal makeup different from the rest of Ethiopia. Yet the country as a whole contains more than 80 distinct ethnic groups, and poverty-stricken Eritrea could hardly survive as an independent entity. It is also likely that Mengistu's motives for forcibly transporting 600,000 peasants from Eritrea and neighboring Tigre to the less populated southern part of the country...