After 29 Years, Ethiopian Rebels Seem on Verge of Winning Civil War

Just south of this neat town built of rock and adobe are towers of sandstone boulders hundreds of feet high, where the people take cover during daylight in case of bombing raids.

“We cannot stay down there during the day,” said Mariam Teglest, 32, a soldier’s widow with three children. “It is much too dangerous when the planes fly.”

She was speaking of Soviet-built MIG fighter-bombers of the Ethiopian air force, which had strafed the town of about 20,000 people twice in a few months.

Afabet is one of a dozen or so major towns in Eritrea, Ethiopia’s northernmost province, where rebels have fought for independence since 1961. Rebel forces captured the town in February, early in their biggest offensive of the war.

The conflict began 29 years ago as a small uprising by scattered guerrilla bands and has grown into a toe-to-toe slugging match by armies of thousands of soldiers armed with heavy artillery, tanks and other modern weapons.

It is a war the Eritreans appear on the verge of winning, despite the Ethiopian military’s total dominance of the sky and its vast superiority in manpower. The government has a military force of about 320,000 men, largest in black Africa.

The Eritreans do not divulge the size of their army. The International Institute for Strategic Studies in London says 30,000, but some recent visitors to the region believe the true strength is double that or more.

In three decades, the war has touched almost every part of this barren, mountainous province the size of England.

Afabet is tucked into a desert valley that evokes the American Southwest. Here and elsewhere, people hide by day and work by night in caves or camouflaged stone buildings and under the spreading branches of the ubiquitous African thorn tree.

“We’ve created the world’s largest underground economy,” said Haile Menkerios, a Harvard-educated economist, grinning at his play on words. He is on the Central Committee of the rebel Eritrea People’s Liberation Front.

“We’ve learned not to expose ourselves,” he said, with a sweep of the arm that covered hills dotted with cave mouths and stone huts almost undiscernible from a few yards.

Eighty miles north of Afabet is Orota, the main rebel base camp. It sprawls through a deep, narrow valley cross-hatched by canyons and surrounded by rugged peaks so high that the sun reaches in for only a few hours a day.

Enemy planes fly into this maze at great peril.

Orota is a supply and military training base, site of a detention center for thousands of prisoners of war, a civilian and an army hospital, schools for children of soldiers, manufacturing plants and repair shops for trucks, tanks and other military vehicles.

The hospitals stretch for 3 miles down the main valley, to reduce the threat from bombing. Wards and operating theaters are hidden in tents under thorn trees, in caves and in nearly invisible buildings hewn from the same sandstone as the surrounding mountains.

“I think Frank Lloyd Wright would be proud of us,” said Menkerios, grinning again at his reference to the architect who believed buildings should harmonize with their natural surroundings.

A pharmaceutical factory, hidden in caves, makes everything from saline solutions to malaria pills and sanitary pads for women.

One in four rebel soldiers is a woman, many of them commanders in an army with no ranks or sex discrimination.

Everything in Orota is powered by electrical generators, most of which are cranked up only after sundown, when the vast camp stirs to life.

Primitive, Soviet-made field telephones captured from the Ethiopians connect the scattered complex.

Nearly everything is captured, scavenged, donated or handmade by a people used to getting by on next to nothing. This province on the Red Sea is one of the poorest in one of the world’s poorest nations.

Nothing is thrown away. Artillery shell casings filled with sand and welded together form the supporting pillars of a new school. Disposable hypodermic syringes become light switches. Old tractor and truck tires are turned into wash troughs.

The Eritreans claim that they do not have the support of foreign governments and that all their military hardware, from tanks to Kalashnikov assault rifles, has been captured from the Ethiopian army.

Officials and some diplomats in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, say the Eritreans have received arms and money from several Arab countries around the Red Sea that oppose the Soviet-supplied government of President Mengistu Haile Mariam. Eritrea’s population is split about 50-50 between Muslims and Christians.

A few reporters allowed behind rebel lines in recent months saw nothing but old and often battered Soviet-made military equipment.

Nothing in Orota except the crowded hospitals suggests the huge battles being waged around Asmara, the Eritrean capital, a 16-hour drive south over rutted trails even experienced drivers can lose in the dark.

On a roughly north-south line running nearly 100 miles between Asmara and the sea, the rebels are fighting more than a third of Ethiopia’s armed forces, mostly conscripted and poorly trained young men.

At the beginning of their February offensive, the rebels surrounded and cut off Asmara, including an estimated 1 million civilians and the government’s 120,000-man 2nd Revolutionary Army.

Three times since early April, the 2nd Army pushed eastward in an attempt to recapture its nearest outlet to safety, the Red Sea port of Massawa. Each time, an Eritrean force no more than half the size stopped it cold.

Reporters who visited Massawa in late April could hear the thunder of artillery and tank barrages day and night at the front 40 miles away. The fierce exchanges often made windows rattle.

The rebels claim that they killed, wounded or captured 30,000 Ethiopian soldiers when they took Massawa in a three-day battle in early February and have inflicted similar casualties along the Ghinda front.

Journalists who have seen the remains of Massawa, and have been guided near the front by the rebels and talked with deserters from Mengistu’s army, believe the numbers are not greatly exaggerated.

Whatever the number of dead and wounded on either side, the Ethiopian 2nd Army’s inability to break out of Asmara illustrates the rebels’ military prowess.

Most of Mengistu’s other forces are occupied far to the south in the neighboring provinces of Tigre, Wollo and Gonder with an uprising by the smaller Tigre People’s Liberation Front.

The Tigreans, known to coordinate military moves with the Eritreans, have spent 15 years fighting to overthrow Mengistu and establish a new national government.

Eritrean fighters and their leaders predict that the long war will end in a few months.

“Come back soon,” said Asmellash Abraha, who was detached from other duties to play host to three visiting journalists. “I’ll show you Asmara. I am anxious to see it myself. It’s been a long, long time since I was last there.”