Word: eritrean
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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...
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...
...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...
...magnitude, the Ethiopian evacuation is relatively orderly. Traveling on foot for as long as eight weeks from their homes in the drought- ridden northern provinces of Eritrea, Tigre and Welo, the refugees stop at makeshift rest camps provided by two of Ethiopia's major antigovernment guerrilla organizations, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (E.P.L.F.) and the Tigre People's Liberation Front (T.P.L.F.). The refugees move largely at night; otherwise, they might be attacked by Ethiopian air force planes. In one widely reported strafing run on a refugee column last month, Ethiopian jets killed 18 travelers and wounded 56 others. Says...
Those tactics appear to be part of a government strategy to force an end to Africa's longest-running war. For 23 years, Eritrean guerrillas have been battling governments in Addis Ababa. The prize is control of their 45,400-sq.- mi. homeland, a former Italian colony absorbed by Ethiopia in 1962 during the rule of the late Emperor Haile Selassie. In the mid-1970s, the insurgents were joined in the struggle by Tigrean guerrillas demanding greater autonomy for their 25,400-sq.-mi. province. The insurgencies have intensified in the years since the 1974 coup against Haile Selassie that...