Behind the Eritrea/Ethiopia War

By Dan Connell
Asmara, Eritrea

12 March 1999

More than a half million troops now face each other on a frontline that stretches over 900 kilometers along the two countries common border. Each side is fielding mechanized units, backed by heavy artillery and in the case of Ethiopia jet fighters and helicopter gunships. While Ethiopia has an edge in manpower and hardware, the Eritreans make up for this in the level of organization and discipline of their forces, the effective use of mobile and conventional tactics and the quality of their field leadership, most of whom gained their experience in Eritrea's 30-year fight for independence from Ethiopia, a grueling marathon that ended with Ethiopia's defeat in 1991.

Despite their withdrawal from a key disputed village and a subsequent Ethiopian declaration of victory--the Eritreans remain in a strong position to continue the war if current mediation efforts fail again. Another lull without resolving the conflict will only provide a breathing space for yet another escalation in what is already one of the largest-scale confrontations in modern African history.

For over a quarter century, the Horn of Africa served as one of the Cold War's most intense and destructive battlefields. The United States and the Soviet Union took turns pumping billions of dollars in arms into Ethiopia in a vain effort to help a succession of cruel dictators crush the war for independence of tiny but strategic Eritrea an Italian colony annexed by Ethiopia with U.S. backing in the early 1960s. What made the territory so important to both the U.S. and to landlocked Ethiopia was its Red Sea coast.

Tens of thousands perished in the fighting and hundreds of thousands more were displaced, as war combined with drought to create an epic human disaster. Right up to the end, the rival superpowers insisted to Eritrea that it should compromise and accept autonomy, as it could not win a protracted war without the support of one or the other of them. It is the legacy of these years the poverty, the social dislocation, the rival nationalist passions and a deep distrust of the international community born of repeated back-stabbing and broken promises that today fuels the current crisis and makes a peaceful solution so difficult to achieve.

Meanwhile, the conflict has reconfigured the balance of power throughout the region, disrupting both the alliance of "frontline states "Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda that supports Sudanese opposition groups, and contributing to the fragmentation of the wider group of African states that helped bring Laurent Kabila to power in the Congo (former Zaire). Sudanese government forces redeployed from posts in the strife-ridden south, where a partial cease-fire is in effect to permit famine relief operations have been engaged in a major offensive against opposition forces in the eastern Blue Nile region since mid-January. Reports from the field indicate a government build-up in the northeast as well, where a counterinsurgency campaign is said to be imminent.

Ethiopia broke the fragile truce with Eritrea on February 6 with a mechanized assault near the disputed village of Badme in southwestern Eritrea, after the last of a parade of would-be mediators UN special representative Mohamed Sahnoun failed (again) to break the impasse. The next day Ethiopian forces opened a second front to the east, along the Mereb River. A week later the Ethiopians shelled Eritrean positions for nine hours at Buri, far to the southeast near the border with Djibouti, but no ground assault ensued. One Ethiopian MI-24 helicopter gun-ship was reportedly shot down during the barrage. Sporadic exchanges of fire continued on several fronts until the Ethiopians mounted an unbroken series of human wave assaults along the Badme front, where skirmishes had broken out last May, sparking the crisis.

For the first two weeks, the Eritreans repulsed each assault with heavy losses on the Ethiopian side, according to journalists who traveled to all the battle areas. On a day-trip to the frontlines south of Tserona, where the second round of attacks took place, I found the Eritreans dug into heavily-fortified trenches that showed little damage from the Ethiopian assault. The ground behind the lines was pocked with shell holes that seemed to hit nothing of consequence. In front of the stone and dirt bunkers, the decomposing bodies of scores of slain Ethiopian solders littered the steep hillside that rose from the river dividing the two countries.

In the lead-up to the fighting, Ethiopia charged that Eritrean jets bombed the town of Adigrata claim soon discredited by international observers in an apparent bid to justify the abrogation of a U.S.-brokered moratorium on air strikes. This agreement was negotiated by President Bill Clinton in telephone calls to Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawe last June, after an exchange of bombing attacks, as the U.S. sought unsuccessfully to defuse the crisis while maintaining good relations with each side.

Strong U.S. pressure on Ethiopia which recently acquired a fleet of Russian SU-27 fighter-bombers appeared to prevent attacks on major urban centers, including the Eritrean capital, Asmara, which was hit last time. But diplomats warn that there are no guarantees against such action in the future, and most foreign nationals were evacuated from the jittery city. Eritrea, which purchased six new MiG-29 interceptors since the last round of fighting, kept its air force out of combat, using it to chase Ethiopian jets out of its air space.

Near the end of the month, Ethiopia mounted a series of human wave assaults at Badme, finally breaching the Eritrean defenses there and forcing them to pullback to higher ground. At this point Ethiopia declared a victory and Eritrea announced it would accept the terms of the US/OAU peace plan, which had called for a voluntary withdrawal from this area. However, it would be a mistake to think that Eritrea has suffered mire than a battlefield setback. Such a withdrawal is typical of the strategy the Eritreans used in their protracted independence war frequently shifting their forces to gain the advantage in future fighting rather than risk losses to hold particular positions.

Both sides have put their endurance in present form on the line, making it extremely difficult to back off. Ethiopia has invested over $400 million in new arms, while whipping its population into a frenzy, amidst pledges that Eritrea will be taught a humiliating lesson. For its part, Eritrea has mobilized most of its adult population to either join the fight or support it in the reara fight that nearly all Eritreans view as one of basic survival for their new nation.

Meanwhile, between rounds of fighting, Ethiopian authorities have waged a brutal ethnic cleansing operation, rounding up over 52,000 people of Eritrean descent, many of whom had been in Ethiopia all their lives, and dumping them on the border, further poisoning the atmosphere between the two former allies. This has poisoned the atmosphere and rendered a lasting settlement even more difficult. At the same time, public debates on Ethiopian media over the fact that Eritrea has two ports on the Red Sea, while Ethiopia has none, have fueled Eritrean suspicions that the border dispute is only a pretext for a grab at the port of Assab.

Obstacles to a Settlement

What triggered the crisis in the first place was a series of armed incidents in a disputed stretch of border near Badme, a peasant village that was under Eritrean administration in early 1985 when I visited it with Eritrean guerrilla forces. However, as with many small communities on the frontier, the villages ethnic make-up and its political administration shifted back and forth between the Eritreans and their allies from Ethiopias neighboring Tigray region, the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front. At the end of the war, Badme was under TPLF control, though Eritrea had it on all its official maps.

After a TPLF-led the coalition seized power in Ethiopia in 1991, the two new governments set up joint committees at the local level to iron out conflicting border claims. Meanwhile, under a policy dubbed "ethnic federalism," Ethiopias internal borders were redrawn on the basis of ethnic identity, and Tigray became an autonomous state-within-a-state, complicating the process of adjudication. It was only after Tigrayan authorities moved into previously undisputed villages in the mid-1990s and then issued a map in late 1997 showing them in Tigrayan territory that Eritreans realized they had a serious problem on their hands. Neither an exchange of letters between the two countries leaders, nor an official commission charged with resolving the fast-growing number of Tigrayan border claims, made any headway before fighting broke out in early May and the situation quickly spun out of control.

The incident that sparked the crisis came on May 6, when Tigrayan militiamen fired on an Eritrean patrol near Badme, killing four. When Eritrea moved regular armed forces into the village to restore order on May 12, Ethiopia raised the ante with a formal declaration of war. What came next, however in the frantic U.S.-led efforts to avert all-out war so thoroughly boxed the two quarreling sides into immovable positions that there has been no progress since then toward peace. U.S. efforts to strong-arm Eritrea into accepting the pact have only hardened opposition here.

The stumbling block enshrined in the original proposal hinged on Ethiopian insistence that Eritrea withdraw from Badme prior to formal negotiations. Eritrea refused to agree to a pullback without a neutral third party in place to ensure that Ethiopia did not act to "establish facts on the ground" and prejudice a settlement. The use of terms borrowed from the Israeli-Palestinian debacle indicated Eritreas lack of confidence in U.S. assurances that details would be satisfactorily worked out after a truce, if Ethiopia was permitted to reoccupy the disputed area first. It remains to be seen now whether their suspicions were well-founded or not.

What worries some observers is that in the event the peace talks failor if Ethiopia declines to honor the present truce--Eritrea will counterattack, carrying the war into Ethiopia. As they see this as a problem mainly with TPLF, rather than with all of Ethiopia continually denouncing the "TPLF regime "such a counterattack would likely be aimed at a target or targets in Tigray, with a view toward destabilizing the regime itself. And with no organized political opposition poised to challenge the Tigrayans for control of Ethiopia, this could lead to political chaos and even the fragmentation of the country.

With the sophisticated weapons and the sizes of the armies, not to mention the military expertise involved, this could escalate into a confrontation of a type and size never seen in Africa. Should Eritrea succeed in hurting or further humiliating the Tigrayans, which is likely despite the apparent odds, the possibility of desperate measures on their part also begins to loom among them the bombing of cities in EritreaAsmara, the ports of Massawa and Assab and other populated centers.

To end this conflict, the international community has to guarantee both sides that an interim arrangement will not pre-judge the final outcome. That means getting a third party involved on the ground right away to separate the two. The U.S. screwed up the initial mediation effort badly and needs to back off from appearing to be favor Ethiopia. Anything less than this will only reinforce Eritrean perceptions built up during a half century of experience with the chronic duplicity of American policy that Washington has long since ceased to function as an honest broker and has instead fallen back on its position as Ethiopias historic ally./ENDS