Ethiopia Claims New Gains in War

Troops from Ethiopia launched a major offensive on a new front Tuesday in their war with Eritrea, government officials said here, seizing mountain heights and outflanking the entrenched enemy in what may be the beginning of the endgame in Africa’s bloodiest conflict.

Ethiopian officials said they are willing to negotiate with their adversary in the 2-year-old war--which arose over a border disagreement--but will keep fighting to drive Eritrea to the negotiating table.

“The peace option and the war option are not mutually exclusive,” Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin told a news conference here.

The war, which the Clinton administration has denounced as senseless, has been unfolding against the sorrowful backdrop of a humanitarian emergency in the Horn of Africa, one of the world’s poorest regions. About 550,000 people in Eritrea reportedly have fled their homes since the conflict began, and 25,000 have crossed the border into Sudan.

International aid agencies have warned that 8 million people may be at risk of dying from starvation in Ethiopia, which has suffered years of drought.

European Union and African envoys have been shuttling between the belligerents’ capitals this week, trying to concoct a formula to end the bloodshed and suffering. Already, Ethiopia and Eritrea between them have lost an estimated 30,000 soldiers, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars of scant national resources.

Both countries said the latest battle broke out early Tuesday along a central section of the disputed border, including the area near Zalambessa, a market town occupied by the Eritreans in May 1998. Tens of thousands of soldiers from both sides face one another in rugged terrain, and Ethiopian government spokeswoman Selome Tadesse said the latest combat was “heavy, enormous.”

There were no independent reports reaching Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.

Mesfin said his country’s infantry had “shattered” the Eritreans’ lines, outflanked their trenches on the left and right and penetrated deep into Eritrean-held territory. Commanding heights in the craggy, arid region, where peaks reach 8,000 feet, were in Ethiopian hands, the foreign minister said.

“The Eritreans are losing. The Ethiopian defense forces are proceeding ahead, scoring glorious victories along that wide front line,” Mesfin said.

In Asmara, Eritrea’s capital about 60 miles northwest of Tuesday’s fighting, a senior official dismissed Ethiopian claims of triumph and said heavy fighting was continuing. For peace talks to begin, presidential spokesman Yemane Gebremeskel told reporters, Ethiopia must agree to a cease-fire--a condition previously rejected by leaders in Addis Ababa.

“We shall negotiate while we fight, and we shall fight while we negotiate,” Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said Monday.

Officials here claim that their soldiers have driven Eritrean troops from large areas of that country’s territory, but they deny any intention to occupy or reclaim anything beyond border zones that they say are rightfully part of Ethiopia.

Eritrea, once a province of Ethiopia that gave that landlocked nation a vital commercial outlet on the Red Sea, won independence in 1993 after a guerrilla campaign against then-dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. Ironically, the current leaders in Addis Ababa were the Eritreans’ allies in that protracted struggle.

Tuesday’s action appeared to be centered about 150 miles southeast of Barentu, scene of a major Ethiopian victory last week.

On Monday, one Western defense analyst in Addis Ababa had predicted that the Ethiopians would seek a knockout blow this week.

Already, the analyst said, the Ethiopians have between 80,000 and 100,000 soldiers inside Eritrea, whose troops are increasingly demoralized and battered. The Ethiopians’ goal, the analyst said, seems to be to force a resolution of the conflict within three weeks, before arrival of the yearly rains bogs down operations and gives the Eritreans a badly needed respite.

Last week, in a bid to end the fighting, the United Nations Security Council adopted a U.S.-authored resolution imposing a one-year arms embargo on Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Though largely symbolic, because the countries have had ample time to stockpile weapons and munitions, the gesture and the Clinton administration thinking behind it were denounced by Ethiopia. They were seen as a tacit reward for the Eritreans’ decision in May 1998 to send soldiers and tanks to occupy disputed sections of the frontier. Mesfin even likened the arms embargo to one of the most notorious failures of international diplomacy--the refusal of the League of Nations, the U.N.’s predecessor, to condemn Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia.

“Ethiopia was a sacrificial lamb, so to say, in the 1930s,” the foreign minister said. “Today again, those who count with the Security Council have found it appropriate to sacrifice Ethiopia for expediency.”