Word: eritreans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While trying to cope with rebellion in Addis Ababa, Mengistu has had to deploy nearly half his 50,000-man army in a losing struggle against three different forces in Eritrea. The 20,000-man Eritrean Liberation Front (E.L.F.) controls much of the land near the Red Sea coast, while the 15,000-man Eritrean People's Liberation Front (E.P.L.F.) rampages through western Eritrea. Five thousand guerrillas of the Eritrean Liberation Front-Popular Liberation Forces (E.L.F.-P.L.F.) are fighting in the province's north central region. Variously supported by such Arab states as Syria, Sudan and Saudi Arabia...
...left of a U.S. presence that once had numbered some 4,000 advisers, diplomats, technicians and family members were 76 staffers and five Marine guards at the U.S. embassy and the Agency for International Development in Addis Ababa. The regime also closed down six foreign consulates in Asmara, the Eritrean provincial capital: those of Italy, France, Belgium, Britain and Sudan, as well as the U.S. Evidently Mengistu did not want nonsympathetic foreigners in a position to observe the latest phase of his drive against the rebels-an advance by thousands of civilian militiamen equipped with old-model rifles...
...million. Chief export: coffee. Religions: Christianity (Coptic) and Islam. A military government with increasingly Marxist orientation. The armed forces, numbering 50,000 men, have been equipped until recently by the U.S. The regime is embattled on several fronts. One is the northern province of Eritrea, where the Sudanese-supported Eritrean Liberation Front, after more than a decade of fighting, claims it controls two districts and has Ethiopian forces pinned down in other urban areas. Another is the Somali border, where Ethiopians and Somalis have quarreled. Meanwhile the French Territory of Afars and Issas, with its key port of Djibouti, which...
...from international arms merchants, who routinely sell to the highest bidder. A third major source is Eastern Europe, which acts as arms supplier to Soviet-backed parties in the Middle East. The recipients represent a who's who of revolutionary militant movements, starting with the P.L.O. and the Eritrean Liberation Front, dissident groups in the Gulf states, SWAPO and other smaller black African nationalist movements, and rebels in Pakistan's Baluchistan. The traffic reaches as far as Thailand and Burma. Its customers are not exclusively radical: some of the biggest and most lucrative orders have come from...
Under a searing African sun last July, Eritrean rebels burst into a U.S. naval radio station near Asmara, Ethiopia, and seized Steven Campbell, 27, a civilian technician, and another American, James Harrell, 41. The kidnapers' apparent motives: extort ransom from the U.S. and end American aid to Ethiopia. They dragged both men across 100 miles of desert in twelve days to a tent outpost. There the guerrillas held them virtually incommunicado on a diet of rice and canned vegetables...