Word: eritrea
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...rages today on the politically volatile Horn of Africa. On one side is the army of Ethiopia's despotic military rulers, who are struggling to hold together the empire of the late Haile Selassie, whom they deposed in 1974. On the other are the 4 million people of Eritrea, Ethiopia's northern province. But also involved in the drama are the Soviet Union, Cuba, most of the Arab states, and the U.S.-and at stake is who will eventually control the strategic oil routes of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean...
...onetime Italian colony that was captured by the British in 1941, Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia, under a United Nations decision, in 1952 and a decade later was formally annexed by Selassie-an action that the Eritreans still regard as outright colonialism. Their outrage sparked a tiny guerrilla uprising that eventually became a full-scale war, perhaps the largest war now being fought anywhere in the world. In the process, reports TIME Correspondent Dean Brelis after touring the savanna and highland battlefront, the Eritreans have built an extraordinarily effective fighting machine of at least 25,000 men equipped with artillery...
...Ethiopians fear that the loss of Eritrea could become the first important step in the disintegration of their country. They have been training 200,000 peasant militiamen to make a sort of human-wave assault on Eritrea, reinforcing the 25,000 hard-pressed regular troops on duty in the province. But the Eritreans are far more highly motivated. "We didn't see any reason to fight and die here," explained one of the 500 Ethiopians who surrendered during their recent losing battle for the city of Tessenei. "The Eritreans wanted a victory, and they got it. We want...
Other Fronts. The Eritrean rebels are not the only ones who oppose Mengistu's rule. Just south of Eritrea, 1,500 guerrillas of the Tigre People's Liberation Front (T.P.L.F.) control about one-third of Tigre province. In the western provinces of Goijam and Gondar, 2,000 men of the right-wing Ethiopian Democratic Union (E.D.U.) are fighting for a non-Marxist civilian government and deny charges that they plan to restore a monarchy under Haile Selassie's sole surviving son, Crown Prince Asfa Wossen, 60, who is now in London. About 1,000 shiftas-armed nomads...
...Africa. Too many gestures of friendship to Mengistu are bound to alienate Somalia, which Russia also supplies and which is being wooed out of the Russian orbit by promises of economic aid from Saudi Arabia. Apparently unbothered by such strategic complications, Mengistu is planning an all-out assault on Eritrea, led by a people's militia of 200,000 peasants equipped with cast-off American arms and trained-if that is the word -by a small cadre of Cuban advisers. They hope to whip enough "volunteers" into fighting trim to begin marching north in June before the onset...