Word: eritreans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mengistu has had more success against the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, the largest and strongest rebel force. More than 50,000 Ethiopian troops used tanks and dense air cover late last year to drive the Eritreans back to their stronghold in the war-ravaged town of Nakfa. The two sides are now stalemated. While the Ethiopians are wary of attacking Nakfa's warren of artillery-guarded trenches and barbed wire, the 25,000 guerrillas and their dependents must live an underground existence, though they have built an impressive infrastructure of schools, hospitals and farms...
...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...
Financial support for the rebels comes from some 500,000 Eritreans living overseas. The U.S. and other Western governments have not backed the E.P.L.F., in part because some of the group's leaders are Marxists. In addition, like many African countries, they are reluctant to support what some see as a secessionist movement. Says a U.S. 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...