Since the fighting began last year, Eritrea has struggled to match the numbers of troops Ethiopia has deployed along its 1,000 km (620-mile) frontier. Eritrea has a population of about four million while Ethiopia has 60 million.

Eritrea has a regular army of 35,000 and has mobilised more than 20,000 veterans of the long guerrilla struggle which eventually brought its independence from Ethiopia after a referendum in 1993.

There are also thought to be tens of thousands of conscripts on the front line.

National service, obligatory for all men and women between 18 and 40, forces conscripts to do development work, harvest crops or go to the front line.

The roundup began last week in the capital Asmara with police checking identity papers of all young males.

Witnesses said they saw several trucks leaving the city filled with those caught.

"Every few months they check for draft-dodgers and those (soldiers) who were on vacation and stayed," presidential adviser Yermane Gebremeskel told Reuters on Monday. "It's not a big number."

But the streets of the capital have been almost deserted at night since the checks began, and bars and nightclubs empty.

Some Eritreans, who did not want to be identified, complained of detention of between one hour and two days if they failed to produce their identity card or did not have any corroborating ID.

Recruitment for the 11th round of national service, which consists of six months military training followed by a year's work, is due to begin in the next few weeks.

Aidid, who had allowed Oromo Liberation Front rebels to launch cross-border raids into Ethiopia from territories under his control, gave the order following an agreement he signed with the Ethiopian government in October, Professor Issa Mohamed Siad, a close Aidid associate, told a news conference on Sunday.

OLF fighters have already been disarmed, have agreed to leave by Dec. 6, and their office in the capital Mogadishu has been closed, Issa said.

A close ally of Eritrea, which is fighting a 19-month border war with Ethiopia, Aidid had allowed the OLF entry early this year when Eritrea sent him shipments of weapons.

The move had prompted Ethiopia to invade parts of western Somalia along its border. Ethiopia captured several strategic towns from Aidid and his allies, including Baidoa in the central Bay region, 155 miles northwest of Mogadishu.

Ethiopia today welcomed the development.

``This kind of measure is a positive contribution to the peace and security of the region and we are closely following it up,'' said government spokesman Haile-Kiros Gessesse in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

Under the agreement, which was brokered by Libya and Egypt, Ethiopia has promised to withdraw its forces from Somalia, Issa said.

Libyan and Egyptian diplomats were present at Sunday's press conference, and Issa said the two countries would serve as observers to ensure the sides comply with the terms of the agreement.

The two sides have also agreed to form a joint committee to supervise demilitarization of the border region, and to cooperate in fighting the Islamic fundamentalist Al-Itihad Al Islamia fighters operating inside both countries.

Al Itihad wants to unite eastern Ethiopia's Ogaden region, which is populated by ethnic Somalis, with Somalia to establish an independent Islamic state, while the Oromos want greater autonomy from Ethiopia, whose government, they claim, has neglected their ethnic group.

In the past eight years, a dozen peace proposals have come to naught, scuttled by one warlord or another since political rivals ousted President Mohammed Siad Barre in 1991 and turned Somalia into warring fiefdoms.

Ahead of Friday's summit of the regional Inter-governmental Authority on Development, or IGAD, the Somali leaders have coalesced into two blocs: those for and those against a peace plan put forth by Djibouti President Ismael Omar Guelleh.

African regional governments and Arab League states, along with the United States and the European Union, have endorsed the plan.

The U.N. Security Council praised Guelleh's call for warlords to bow to democracy and said it was "ready to help bring about the restoration of a national government."

Eritrea won't be there

Other IGAD members are Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, Sudan and Uganda. Abdullahi Yussuf Ahmed, the self-styled president of Puntland in northeastern Somalia, and warlord Mohamed Saeed Hirsi, known as Morgan, met recently in Nairobi with Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi to promote the Guelleh initiative.

Not to be upstaged, warlords Hussein Aidid and Hassan Osman Ali Atto, whose fiefdoms include the southern half of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, also traveled to Nairobi to debunk the proposal. Moi is scheduled to attend the summit.

"You now have light at the end of the tunnel," said Ismael Warsame, an official in Puntland, one of two self-declared autonomous regions boasting some tranquility and semblance of law and order. The other is the self-styled Somaliland Republic in the northeast.

"Aidid and Atto are losing their grip," Warsame said. "Civil society is now participating in the decision-making process."

Guelleh's initiative comes as support for the warlords is waning in Somalia. They cannot pay fighters or buy weapons. Aidid reportedly is facing difficulty maintaining his leadership.

Seizing the momentum, Mogadishu businessmen have begun funding Islamic courts whose private militia police the capital.

Low profile

Gunmen plundered enormous amounts of relief food during the 1992 famine to buy weapons. Two years later, 18 U.S. Rangers sent to hunt down Aidid's father and chief warlord, Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid, were killed and their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, an image that continues to haunt U.S. policy-makers.

Observers are skeptical about the chances of the Ethiopian-backed initiative at a time when the Ethiopia-Eritrea war has spilled over into Somalia. Eritrea has armed Aidid, and Ethiopia is backing his rivals. Morgan, Yussuf and others cite dangers from Islamic courts they claim are funded by Muslim fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden, who is wanted by the United States in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

But Morgan and Yussuf are both hopeful that, with enough outside support, Somalia can achieve peace.

Tesfaye Habeso of the Ministry of Transport and Communications said a South African firm was undertaking a feasibility study of the line and construction was expected to be completed within three years. He said construction was in accordance with a bilateral agreement between Ethiopia and South Africa, but he gave no details of how it would be financed.

Since a border war broke out between landlocked Ethiopia and its Red Sea neighbour Eritrea last year, Ethiopia has diverted nearly all of its shipping traffic to Djibouti, which previously handled just a third of its shipped goods.

His haunting story of an African American woman's time travel back to the days of slave trading was rejected by Hollywood, which said it did not know how to market it. But Gerima did. He simply let the movie speak for itself.

He and his wife, Shirikiana Aina, rented a theatre in Washington to screen the film and raise some money. Word of mouth about the powerful picture was so great that it remained at that location for 11 weeks, then travelled to 32 other U.S. cities, was shown in London for more than four months and was screened throughout Europe and Africa.

By independent film standards ``Sankofa,'' which cost about $1 million to make, was a blockbuster. Now Gerima is back, hoping his latest picture, ``Adwa: An African Victory,'' will speak as loudly and to as many audiences.

``Adwa'' debuted in the United States on Nov. 20 at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington. Using oral history, song, poetry -- in the Amharic language with subtitles -- and period prints to enhance footage shot in Ethiopia, Gerima creates a mellifluous chant recounting an 1896 Ethiopian victory over Italian troops that inspired the Pan-African and nationalist movements, and later the American civil rights movement.

His method is not unlike that of an Ethiopian warrior who, returning from battle, sings the report of his fight to the emperor. ``He can't talk about his deeds per se. He raps it,'' Gerima said of the warrior tradition. ``In a poetic form all his own, he composed his deeds and chanted that in front of a king when the war was finally over.''

IN 'ADWA' GERIMA AGAIN RECLAIMS PAST

In ``Sankofa,'' an Akan word that means ``we must go back and reclaim the past so we can move forward,'' Gerima showed audiences the horror of the slave past. In ``Adwa'' he describes a distant triumph when an African nation, largely armed with spears and knives, defeated a well-equipped and organised Italian military bent on colonisation.

The ``Adwa'' story is one Gerima, born in Gondor, Ethiopia, in 1946, learned from his father.

``I didn't pay attention to it much, I was too busy studying European and American history, and Adwa got banished into the back of my reality,'' said Gerima, who studied at the University of California at Los Angeles and is now a professor of film at Howard University in Washington.

But in 1996, on its 100th anniversary, Gerima decided to make a movie about the battle, which he remembered, ironically, after reading about it in writings by African Americans.

With the help of a grant from German television and money from his own Negodgwad Productions and Mypheduh Films distribution company, he went to Ethiopia to find the elders who could tell him the story that lived in their memory but had been lost to the history books.

``I call it 'Sankofating' back to 'Adwa.' I'm utilizing that means of expression in my own field of cinema by bringing about things that I have lost or bringing about things that are on the back of the shelf,'' he said.

ADWA LIVES IN MEMORY

The battle of Adwa began on March 1, 1896, with more than 50,000 Ethiopian men and women on donkeys and mules facing nearly 20,000 well-armed Italian troops on horseback.

One press account at the time said that by nightfall the Italian army ``no longer existed.'' News of the outcome of the battle at Adwa was transmitted worldwide. There were other resistance movements in Africa but no victory on the continent before Adwa had culminated in independence.

``It was a major disaster for people who felt that Europeans were civilised and that they would triumph all over the world,'' Gerima said, adding that after a brief flurry of press reports news of the battle was suppressed.

``They didn't want most of the colonies to really know this information and it got lost in the process.''

Gerima set out to find it. Not in the history books, which, when they mentioned Adwa at all, gave a European interpretation of the story. And not on historic maps, which had been drawn by Italians. Gerima went to the towns and villages, along the route from Addis Ababa to Adwa that Ethiopian Emperor Menelik took before the battle, to speak with anyone who remembered.

``Anybody could do the film,'' he said. ``I felt I should do it how it was remembered, from the song to the chant to the literal remembrance. What I felt for Adwa, to make the mountains and roads speak, I needed to stop wherever I could and look for old people.''

The film begins with the question, ``Why didn't you come earlier if you wanted to learn history?''

Gerima said that was the question an old man posed when he asked about Adwa. ``He told me he was too old, I should have come earlier,'' Gerima said. Luckily, the filmmaker did find other elders who were not too old to recount the story.

He collected 20 hours of interviews for the 90-minute film -- from elders whose fathers and mothers fought at Adwa to children who still sang the proud songs of an African people who retained their independence while their neighbours succumbed to European armies.

``What we were finding was different folkloric forms of remembrance. It's amazing how precisely it's transmitted with a melody,'' said Gerima, whose film leaves a viewer with that very impression of a song.

Now, back in the United States after debuting ``Adwa'' at the Venice Film Festival, he is left to knock on doors and rent theatres in the hope its sweet strains will reach his audience. ``With a documentary it will be an uphill battle,'' he admitted.

Gerima could try to interest Hollywood again but he said he is not willing to compromise the stories he is committed to doing. ``It's not easy, what I do. It takes me years. But this weekend in Los Angeles I sat down with a (filmmaker) friend who said they cannot do the story they want to do. The stories are always compromised,'' he said.

``In some ways black filmmakers have a great deal of anxiety,'' he added. ``I would have had a heart attack.''