Badme is a place of no particular consequence in the highlands between Ethiopia and its much smaller kin, Eritrea, two nations of great promise on the Horn of Africa. But lying on the battlefields near this town are the corpses of perhaps 10,000 soldiers -- maybe less, maybe more -- who died over the last month because each nation claims Badme and the surrounding area as its own. (For comparison's sake, 3,200 people have died in Northern Ireland's sectarian conflict in the last 30 years, according to the U.S. State Department).

None of the Badme region has much value or historical or emotional resonance. It is merely undefined. And its outlines became so ambiguous in a way that tells the story of many conflicts in modern-day Africa: The colonists of a century ago, in this case Italy and Britain, buried a time bomb or two in the treaties that marked off their ambitions. African rulers of today have been unable, or unwilling, to defuse them.

In fairness, the treaties are wildly complicated and laughably imprecise, using tribes and river junctions and obscure mountains as reference points.

"It's mind-boggling," Professor Bahru Zewde said in his office at Addis Ababa University early this month. He is one of Ethiopia's leading historians, and he knows as much as anyone about the history of the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which were a single nation until Eritrea split off six years ago with Ethiopia's blessing. He has come to the conclusion, deliberatively and sincerely, that Badme belongs to Ethiopia.

On the other side, Eritrea says it has looked long and hard at the same evidence. Asked to make the Eritrean case for this article, a government spokesman pointed a reporter in the direction of a Harvard-trained lawyer and U.S. citizen born in Eritrea, Seyoum Haregot. He is a technical adviser to the United Nations in Asmara, the Eritrean capital, and he emphasized that he is only a civil servant who researched the issue not for the government but out of curiosity. "I am not ideological about it at all," he said. "But I believe the Eritreans are right."

What is fascinating is that both Bahru and Haregot differed barely at all in the evidence they presented. Each side seems to be looking at the same facts and drawing completely contrary conclusions. That has made the dispute especially hard to solve.

What follows, then, is a summary of the major treaties that marked off the boundary between Ethiopia and Eritrea and how those documents have been interpreted to justify the latest of Africa's bloody wars.

Of a dozen or so treaties signed near the turn of the century, three are important. The key signatories were Italy, which colonized Eritrea, and Ethiopia, which fought off the Italians' southward march and remained independent.

A 1908 treaty between the Ethiopians and Italians established the long eastern border as a line running parallel to the Red Sea. A 1900 treaty, also between Italy and Ethiopia, established the eastern part of the Ethiopia-Eritrea boundary along the Mereb River and two tributaries. To the west, a straight line was drawn between the town of Tomat, in present-day Sudan, northward to Todluc. And a treaty signed in 1902 -- the essence of the problem -- moved that straight line to the east. But the reference points were not the most precise. Those points became the junction, on the south, between the Setit and Maieteb Rivers and, on the north, between the Mereb and Mai Ambessa Rivers.

On some later maps, the 1902 line is moved even farther east, but in either case Ethiopia claims that the line, which is about 50 miles long, falls to the west of Badme. That is to say, Badme is Ethiopian.

"All the maps show this straight line, however capricious it might be," Bahru said. "There is no way the line could bend."

But the Eritreans say that even if the line does not bend, it can indeed move. Haregot pointed to two other sections of the treaty.

One provides that the Kunama tribe, a group of highland cattle drivers, be included in Eritrea. ("This is, as you say in America, baloney," grumbled Professor Mesfin Wolde-Mariam, a retired geographer and past head of the Ethiopian Human Rights Council, who is opposed to the war completely and furious with both sides. "People are not stones.")

The other provision says that Mount Ala Tacura is also included in Eritrea (The State Department claims it cannot even find this mountain).

The effect of those two additions, Haregot said, appears to move the line further east, putting Badme in Eritrea. "There is no confusion about the delineation," he said. "That can be determined by cartographers. There should not be a fight between the two countries."

But a U.S. official said that even Haregot's interpretation does not do justice to the issue's full complexity. As an example, he described the terrain around Badme: "It's desert right on the edge of the Ethiopian plateau, and when the rains come they come suddenly and they rush off the side of the mountains with tremendous force. When you have water moving with such force, the rivers move over 97 years. And so the lines move."

Certain that the treaties made the land theirs, Eritrean forces marched into the Badme region in May 1998. Fighting lasted a month. Then, after nine months of re-arming, fighting erupted again Feb. 6.

By Feb. 26, Ethiopia had pushed the Eritreans out of Badme and Eritrea agreed to a peace proposal drafted last year by the Organization of African Unity. Ethiopia, saying it had accepted the plan long ago and was not sure it trusted Eritrea, has not yet agreed to a truce.

If a cease-fire ever comes, the peace plan requires that experts go over the ground and finally define the border.

"They did not think of the borders," said Mesfin, of those who planned Eritrea's independence in 1993. "So, hurriedly, they were independent. Now we have no idea what on earth is happening. And mind you, these are the same people on both sides. They speak the same language, have the same culture. It's very depressing."