The repeated, ground-shaking thump of Ethiopian bombs comes from more than 10 miles outside the city of Assab. But the residents of Eritrea's main port, on the Red Sea coast, take little comfort from the distance. One hit on the water system would wreck the city's only supply.

During a night attack on Tuesday, Jeep-loads of Eritreans rushed into the desert to find large bomb craters near Assab's underground reservoir. Still burning, the powerful incendiary bombs have so far missed the pump house.

There is an atmosphere of siege. With the port, the oil refinery and all overland trade at a standstill, Assab is the most isolated - and strategically important - target in the war in the Horn of Africa between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

"I can put on my radio and know what is going on in the rest of the world, but I have no idea what is happening in Eritrea," one resident said.

Until it was connected to a satellite link this week, Assab had been without telecommunications for eight months after Ethiopia cut off the telephones. "You can call it a state of emergency," said Abdulla Aden, a senior official from the governor's office.

An Eritrean family waiting for a flight out of Assab to the capital, Asmara.
Ethiopian bombing has given the port an atmosphere of siege - Amr Nabil/AFP

The isolation is heightened by the growing anxiety in Eritrea that the international community wants to appease Ethiopia, the Goliath of this war. Diplomats informally acknowledge this. "Ethiopia is a large, regionally important country, which we don't want to see fragment or weaken," one diplomat said.

This week the conflict took a new twist when Assab became the target of Ethiopia fighter jets and Antonov planes, which fly high over the front-line defence about 70km west of the city. The port remains untouched, heavily defended by anti-aircraft guns and tanks.

An Ethiopian helicopter shot down last Sunday lies near the trenches that weave along the desert ridge at the border. The pilot's charred body remains in the wreckage; the other crew members have been incinerated. They do not deserve burial, says Colonel Alem Seged, who strides behind the lines holding a pistol, binoculars and a leather briefcase. "They were trying to kill us, so why should we do that for them?"

The battle for Assab has changed the nature of the conflict. Ostensibly it began as a border skirmish, but the Eritreans are now convinced that land-locked Ethiopia wants to seize its main port. "First it was Badme, but now Ethiopia wants to annex the port," says Tesfu Tewolde, vice-chairman of Eritrean Shipping Lines. He says he is waiting for peace for business to start up again.

Assab, once a major transit station for cargo ships calling at the Red Sea ports in Yemen and Dubai, has been reduced to servicing only four ships a month. More than 90 per cent of its business was lost when Ethiopia boycotted the port over a currency and access issue last March, and started using neighbouring Djibouti instead.

About 20,000 Ethiopian workers left, bars closed, and the machinery at the dock stands idle. A once cosmopolitan trucking town has become a military city. Land cruisers camouflaged with tar and mud race the empty streets, and soldiers in fatigues fill the pavements. Hungry for custom, supermarkets depend on supplying the military with pasta, tinned fish, tomato paste and jam.

The city's remaining Ethiopians run some of the surviving businesses, but tension over the recent battles has made them fearful. The military seized about 10 Ethiopian businessmen after the bombing raids started this week. "They think some of us are informers," one Ethiopian man said.

It is a curious feature of this war that Ethiopians have generally been allowed to continue a normal life in Eritrea, while Ethiopia has deported 52,000 Eritreans. Most were driven to the border and made to walk with their few possessions across the no-man's land between the two countries. Idle cargo ships in Assab were turned into passenger vessels, shipping 1,500 at a time to ports in Masawa, further north.

It had landed the previous evening, along with five other Russian-built combat aircraft, rather elderly MiG 21s and MiG 23s, which were also dispersed around distant points of the airfield.

Even farther, hidden from prying eyes was the plane's crew. But away from the airstrip, in the bars and hotels of Mekele, the men can be found: Russians and Ukrainians, mainly, with a few Bulgarians, all working as technicians, advisers and instructors. It is an open secret that there are as many on the Eritrean side, where the 12 or so combat planes of the air force are understood to include five MiG 29s. Over the coming weeks, Russians could be shooting down Russians over the Horn of Africa.

The Russians have all been hired on private contracts with Russian companies, usually as part of a package including the supply of the planes, parts and maintenance - with no involvement by the Russian Government. The same would apply to the Ukrainians and Bulgarians. "It takes quite a while to train a pilot to fly something as sophisticated as a Sukhoi 27 or MiG 29.

There are probably one or two Ethiopian pilots who have reached that standard by now, with about the same number among the Eritreans - but you cannot afford to take risks with planes as valuable as that," a military analyst said.

Even the experts are not immune. Last month a Sukhoi 27 crash-landed at the main Ethiopian airbase at Debre Zeyit, 40 miles southeast of Addis Ababa. The embarrassed pilot was a Russian ex-air force colonel. Since the collapse of Soviet power, pilots and other military experts from the former Soviet Union are turning up in scores all over Africa, from Angola to Sudan to Sierra Leone.

Their scope for employment is assisted by the quantity of Soviet military hardware on the continent, dating from the time when Moscow was building up relations with new African states and national liberation movements and supplying military equipment at bargain-basement rates. With the cuts in Russia's armed forces, highly qualified military personnel found themselves without a job and have been eager to take up the opportunities that open up with every new African conflict.

At least 150 Ethiopian families, refugees from Eritrean bombardments across the frontline of a border war 10 km (six miles) away, have set up home high among the sandy rocks which face south across a plain fringed on the west by jagged peaks.

But the spectacular view is of little consequence. Far more important is the 30-metre (100-foot) rock face rising above them and providing protection from the shelling.

Over the last few weeks, nearly 17,000 people have left their border homes near the Tsorona war front after the Ethiopian and Eritrean armies reinforced the area and their and their villages became targets of sporadic artillery barrages.

Most civilians had left by last Monday when a full-scale ground and air battle broke out at the front and both sides claimed to have inflicted heavy troop casualties.

An overspill of women and children outside the caves shelter from the searing midday heat under canopies made from sticks and blankets. Every day, a group leaves to fetch water two km (just over a mile) away and lug it back up the steep hill.

Local officials said they are providing basic food supplies to all the displaced families scattered around 20 cave dwellings.

The area was spared fighting last May when Eritrea's occupation of contested border territories around Badme to the west sparked a six-week war between the Horn of Africa nations.

But this time around, the Tsorona front seems destined to become a key battle zone.

On the high ground on Ethiopia's side of the border, heavy artillery pieces are lined up for the next encounter.

Dozens of soldiers armed with AK-47 rifles man fortified observation points looking out to the buttes and valleys of the Eritrean-held territory below.

Eritrea has accused Ethiopia of massing 55,000 troops at the Tsorona front, while Ethiopia says its northern neighbour has reinforced its positions on the other side with the aim of attacking historic sites in the ancient towns of Axum and Adwa.

The new cave dwellers, all subsistence farmers, said they hoped to get back to their land in time to save the next harvest in August, but not before Ethiopian soldiers have beaten back Eritrean troops from the areas they occupy.

``We used to have Eritrean friends at the border. They came to our weddings, our christenings and our funerals and we went to theirs,'' said Ababa Gebre Selassie, an elderly woman with tight plaited hair,.

Intro: European Union officials are in Ethiopia today trying to find an end to the border war with Eritrea. As V-O-A's Scott Stearns reports, fighting has resumed after eight months of relative calm.

Text: Diplomats from Germany, Austria, and Finland are trying to help push an Organization of African Unity initiative to arbitrate the border dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea. They are in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa for talks with foreign ministry officials.

The government here says (Ethiopian) prime minister Meles Zenawi is not available to meet the European delegation. Ethiopia has accepted the O-A-U plan. Eritrea has yet to respond. Ethiopian government spokeswoman Selamai Todesa says, because Ethiopia already agrees with the O-A-U, there is no point in diplomats meeting here. She says it's more important for them to convince the Eritrean government to accept mediation.

The European delegation travels to the Eritrean capital of Asmara Saturday for talks with (Eritrean) president Isaias Afwerki. (signed)

NEB/SS/DWJ/PLM
19-Feb-99 3:50 AM EST (0850 UTC)
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Source: Voice of America