Bells jingled and incense wafted through the Northeast Washington sanctuary as a couple in their 50s, formally dressed, knelt before their priest. With embarrassed but proud smiles, they renewed their wedding vows of a quarter-century ago and received the priest's blessing.

The repeating of vows this recent Sunday was symbolic of much more than an enduring marriage. The priest, Abba Tesfamariam Baraki, is from Ethiopia. The Arlington couple, Woldeab Teklezghi and his wife, Negisti, are refugees from Eritrea, which fought with and split off from Ethiopia in 1993 and has continued to battle its neighbor intermittently. The day before the church ceremony, the border erupted in new fighting.

Outside the church, Eritreans and Ethiopians might find themselves on opposite sides of heated political discussions and street demonstrations. Inside, however, they suspend their differences in order to share their faith.

"As a priest serving both nationalities, I am deeply saddened by the suffering in both countries," Baraki said during the service. "We are children of one God; we have a common culture; we are bound in blood. This is a fratricidal war."

Local Ethiopians and Eritreans, he said, "should not pour gasoline on the fire from outside. . . . Both sides must sit down and stop the madness."

The recurring clash between Ethiopia and Eritrea is only the latest in a dozen civil or regional wars that have contributed to an influx of foreign-born in the Washington area. In some cases, the conflicts have led to political tensions among immigrant groups. In others, they have created improbable friendships between onetime adversaries.

Many refugees from Southeast Asia are bitterly split into factions, depending on how ardently they oppose the current communist regimes in their homelands. Ideological conflict has even divided this area's Buddhist temples.

In contrast, thousands of Central Americans, from former leftist guerrillas to government soldiers, fled from bloody civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala and are now neighbors in such communities as Langley Park and Alexandria. For the most part, these immigrants successfully avoid discussing home-country politics or ideology.

In public, members of all these groups blend quietly into the region's immigrant communities, their partisan loyalties hidden from co-workers and neighbors. But after-hours and on weekends, many spend a lot of time on the phone discussing politics, patronize ethnic bars and restaurants whose owners share their views and scour foreign-language newspapers or tune in radio programs to learn the latest developments back home.

"Our sleepless nights and our long-distance phone bills are the best proof of how close we are to these issues," said Seyoum Berhe, 40, an Ethiopian immigrant who lives in Alexandria. "I try to be sensitive, but there are extremely few Eritreans I can talk to right now. They are our brothers, but they say nothing when our families are being killed back home. I can forgive, but I am not sure I can forget."

Actually, one of Berhe's oldest friends is an Eritrean named Abraham Mehretab Beyene, a District accountant whose birthplace was less than 40 miles from his. One recent evening, with their native region fighting and their villages divided by a volatile border, the two men met in Beyene's D.C. office to commiserate -- because they could not find an Ethiopian or Eritrean bar where both felt comfortable.

"We are still friends. I see no reason to hate an Ethiopian just because his government is fighting mine," said Beyene, who came to this country 20 years ago and is among an estimated 50,000 Ethiopians and Eritreans in the metropolitan area.

"Some people are driven by emotion, and there is so much propaganda that they get carried away," he said. "But for those of us who have been associated a long time, there's no problem."

At Baraki's church, Kidane Mehret Ge'ez Rite Catholic Church, relations between Ethiopian and Eritrean members are cordial but formal. After the priest's Sunday homily about the war, there were murmurs of dissent from certain pews. Later, many worshipers retreated behind their own borders, gathering in Eritrean homes or Ethiopian restaurants to discuss the latest clashes.

But they had come to church together, listened patiently as the lessons were read in both the Amharic and Tigrinya languages and congratulated the Teklezghi couple on their anniversary. For a few hours each week, Kidane Mehret is a place where people leave their divisive homeland politics behind.

"If there was a demonstration today, anything related to Eritrea, I'd be the first in line," said Sofia Tesfamariam, a parish council member from Reston who calls the conflict back home a "war of self-defense" for Eritreans. "But inside the church, we don't let our emotions get in the way. Here, we are all Catholics first, and we are all praying for peace."

Sometimes, animosity can linger for years among immigrants from countries whose wars ended long ago. In 1990, an outspoken columnist for a Vietnamese language magazine published in Northern Virginia and his wife were killed outside their Falls Church home in what many Vietnamese refugees believed at the time was a politically motivated slaying. The writer, Triet Le, often wrote about the volatile issue of whether to accommodate or oppose the communist regime that had taken over in Vietnam.

Today, some Laotians still want revenge against the communists who took over their homeland in 1978; others feel it is time to move on. This area's estimated 5,000 Laotians are divided on whether to support or boycott the Embassy of Laos, whose communist officials repeatedly have extended olive branches.

The rift has poisoned Laotian social events, cultural projects and even worship. People who attend embassy functions or visit Laos have received hate mail. A weekend program in Falls Church to teach the Lao language and culture to immigrants' children was initially criticized as being "pro-embassy," and some Laotians have boycotted the Buddhist temple in Manassas.

Tensions burst into public view in December when a group of refugees, many of them former detainees in Laotian prisons or re-education camps, protested outside the Northwest Washington embassy, shouting insults at about 250 guests as they entered.

"They were yelling and cursing at everyone who walked in. That is not right," said Khamouane Phonseya, 42, an auto mechanic from Herndon who escaped from Laos in 1979. "I didn't break the law; I just went to a party. . . . Some people say that makes me pro-communist, but I am not."

Laos "is my homeland," he explained. "Before, we had a war, but now it's different. We should try to talk about the future."

To many, Phonseya's argument might seem fair and practical. To Sorasack Chounramany, it sounds like treason.

"When we were in the refugee camps, people swore they would never have relations with the Lao government. Now they have forgotten their oath," said Chounramany, 57, who spent seven years in a Laotian prison camp, chained in his dark cell and fed mostly rotten rice.

A gaunt, tight-lipped man who lives in Woodbridge, he has no use for those who attend embassy parties. "The embassy is nice to them, and they never say anything bad about Laos," he said. "But if they go to the embassy, we cannot be polite to them. We are still at war with the enemy."

Chounramany, a housing maintenance worker in Fairfax County, is a member of the United League for Democracy in Laos, whose goal is to keep alive memories of what the communists did in Laos and to work toward restoring democracy there.

An equally bloody conflict raged in El Salvador from 1980 to 1992, leaving more than 75,000 people dead. Yet relations among Salvadoran immigrants in the Washington area, who number in the tens of thousands, are generally smooth. The community includes leftist exiles, peasant refugees, conservative middle-class immigrants and a scattering of former government soldiers and police.

Increasingly, Salvadorans of all political stripes have found common ground as immigrants. Former leftist activists worked with conservative Salvadoran Embassy officials last year to press the U.S. government to grant permanent legal residency to Central American refugees. Others have joined forces in nonprofit groups that raise funds for improvement projects in their native towns.

Francisco Pacheco, for example, spent 20 years as a guerrilla fighter and organizer. He was shot and badly wounded during the war, then beaten and harassed later by rightist vigilante groups. But in Los Angeles, where he immigrated in 1994, and in Langley Park, where he moved two years ago, the 41-year-old house painter has built friendly relations with many Salvadorans, including ex-soldiers.

One immigrant from his village, a sublieutenant and ardent anti-communist, welcomed Pacheco when he arrived in Washington. And a man he met on a painting crew confided that he had taken part in a notorious Salvadoran army massacre in 1980. The next day, after Pacheco disclosed that he had been a guerrilla, the two went on painting and talking until the job was done.

"Here in America, it is a different reality," Pacheco said. "There are no political causes, only the common cause to survive, to become legal. We find there are not such great differences between us after all."

With national elections coming up in El Salvador next month, ideological loyalties are surfacing in Salvadoran communities, but there have been no ugly scenes. Earlier this month, when campaign caravans passed through the "barrios" in Mount Pleasant and Alexandria to promote a leftist presidential candidate, most people watched, waved and moved on.

"No one gives these things any importance. It's a theme of the past," said Santo Vega, a conservative businessman in Alexandria who co-founded a committee to aid his hometown, Chirilagua. "We have people of all backgrounds on our committee. We have built a soccer stadium, a cemetery and a recreation area. As we say in El Salvador, it's 'borron y cuenta nueva' -- erase the board and start over."