Ethiopia Threatens to Escalate War on Eritrea

Emboldened by a major battlefield triumph in what is now Africa’s biggest shooting war, Ethiopia on Sunday vowed to make things still hotter by seeking out and destroying the forces of its neighbor and enemy, Eritrea.

“As long as you’re going to have a neighbor like that who’s going to flex his muscles when he is in a bad mood, you’re in trouble,” Ethiopian government spokeswoman Selome Tadesse said.

At the same time, the specter of famine again looms over the East African region, which already has suffered two devastating episodes of mass starvation in recent history. The United Nations estimates that as many as 16 million people, half of them in Ethiopia, are threatened with starvation unless they receive emergency food and medical aid.

In seven days of fighting, Ethiopian troops backed by tanks, artillery and warplanes seized their most valuable prize yet last week, the town of Barentu, depriving the Eritreans of what had been their command post for the western section of the 600-mile-long front.

One newspaper here in the capital Sunday hailed the victorious “blitzkrieg” of Ethiopian Defense Forces through barren territory. But the capture of the strategic locale, at least 30 miles inside Eritrea, raised troubling questions about what Ethiopia’s true ultimate objective might be.

Evidently concerned that the Ethiopians might not halt before reaching the capital, Asmara, more than 100 miles east of Barentu, the State Department ordered its embassy in Eritrea to evacuate dependents and nonessential personnel.

“U.S. citizens are urged to depart the country while commercial transportation is available,” the department said in Washington. Last week, the United States and other members of the United Nations Security Council attempted to quench the escalating violence in the impoverished Horn of Africa by unanimously voting for a one-year arms embargo against the belligerents.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., has denounced the two-year conflict as “the most senseless war in the world.” Since hostilities broke out, an estimated 30,000 soldiers have been killed on both sides in battles that some military analysts said on occasion resembled the protracted trench warfare of World War I.

The on-again, off-again hostilities began in May 1998, when Eritrea dispatched tanks to enforce its claim to a disputed section of the frontier. But the warring countries’ differences also concern economic grievances, rivalries between their leaders and issues left unsettled since Eritrea, a former province of Ethiopia, seceded peacefully in 1993.

‘Waging a Two-Front War’

The link between the fighting and hunger, if any, is hotly debated. Holbrooke this month accused Ethiopian authorities of using trucks and aircraft not to get food to suffering civilians in the parched south of this country but to ferry ammunition, blood plasma and fuel to soldiers battling the Eritreans in the north.

“There is danger of famine, no question about it,” said Kristine Eidem, an official with the U.N. World Food Program, who flew to Addis Ababa to help coordinate international relief efforts for the 10 countries at risk.

Ethiopians, in officialdom and outside it, argue that though their country may be one of the poorest in the world--per capita income is a meager $110 a year--its territorial integrity must be defended.

“What alternative do we have except to wage the war and try at the same time to save the lives of people stricken by drought?” a 49-year-old official of the Ethiopian Chamber of Commerce said Sunday. “In fact, we are waging a two-front war.”

“It hasn’t rained for the last three years,” said Tadesse, the government spokeswoman. “Whether or not there was a war, it [the risk of famine] would have happened.”

To aid the hungry, a number of Ethiopia’s best-known musicians held a benefit concert Sunday that producer Yayehyirad Alamerew likened to the Live Aid concerts that generated millions of dollars in Western assistance to victims of the 1984-85 famine that killed as many as 1 million Ethiopians.

Attendance Sunday, though, was sparse, with only about 1,000 of Addis Ababa’s 3 million inhabitants gathered in the fierce sun that beat down in midafternoon on the downtown amphitheater by Meskel Square.

Hamelmal Abate, 34, a popular singer who returned from her home in Alexandria, Va., to take part in the benefit, complained that Ethiopian television gave the event scant publicity, and that the preferred venue, the Addis Ababa stadium, was being used for a soccer match.

The warble-voiced emigre was the only Ethiopian interviewed by an American journalist to speak out against the fighting, even in general terms.

“Personally, I don’t support war,” Abate said. “I feel sorry even when animals die. We [Ethiopians and Eritreans] are like brothers, and my heart goes out to people who have died.”

The Eritreans accuse the leaders in Addis Ababa of starting the latest round of fighting and say uncertainties about borders dating back to Italian colonial rule are being exploited as a pretext for invading their land. Eritrea’s president, Isaias Afwerki, has claimed that the fighting has cost 70,000 lives on both sides.

Ethiopian officials contend it is they who are the victims of a troublemaking neighbor that, since independence, has picked quarrels with Yemen, Djibouti and other countries in the region. Eritrea, they note, has an army of 300,000--a little less than 8% of the total population of about 4 million and, the Ethiopians say, four times as many soldiers as Ethiopia. The Ethiopians vigorously deny any intention of retaking possession of the former province.

“The main objective is that he [Afwerki] has to return our territory” along the disputed border, Tadesse said. “While we’re doing that, if we can weaken his army, good.”

Reports of Foreigners Taking Flight

News reports out of Asmara said trucks loaded with Eritrean soldiers rushed out of the capital for the front as foreigners gathered before dawn Sunday for a flight out of the country. Expatriates from Canada, Britain and Denmark had signed up to join the State Department-ordered evacuation.

Peace talks between Ethiopia and Eritrea broke down in Algiers on May 5. A round of shuttle diplomacy by Holbrooke between the two countries’ capitals this month also failed to prevent the Ethiopians’ latest offensive.

On Saturday, the Ethiopian government bombed and destroyed an antiaircraft battery near Mendefera, south of Asmara. A military training center at Sawa in western Eritrea also was reportedly bombed several times, and the government in Addis Ababa claimed Sunday night that the Eritreans had abandoned the position.

The Ethiopians also claimed that, after Eritrea’s “devastating defeat” at Barentu, Eritrean soldiers were fleeing en masse, some into neighboring Sudan.

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War in the Horn of Africa

Except for a brief occu-pation by Italy (1935-1941), Ethiopia is the only country in Africa never to be colonized. Eritrea was an Italian colony for about half a century, until it was captured by the British in 1941. Control eventually was handed to Ethiopia.

A province of Ethiopia since 1962, Eritrea fought its much larger neighbor for three decades before Eritrean rebels and Ethiopian militias defeated the Marxist regime in Addis Ababa in 1991. Eritrea seceded in 1993 to become independent.

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Ethiopia

Population: 64 milllion

Per capita income: $110

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Eritrea

Population: 4 million

Per capita income: $200