According to a diplomatic official at the German Embassy, "the aid which was meant for development projects in Ethiopia and Eritrea was diverted to Uganda because the German government decided Uganda was in better position to put the money to better use." Ethiopia and Eritrea are at war.

Sunday Vision learnt that the money is being put into water development specifically in Entebbe town. It will help upgrade the water system in the town.

Originally, aid from the German government to Uganda is usually 60 million marks of which 20 million is meant for technical development and 40 million for financial help, primary health care in Western Uganda and experts in Bank of Uganda.

THE BADME FRONT, Eritrea - The shooting always starts like clockwork: just after sunset and just before moonrise.

Ethiopian snipers hiding behind boulders 60 yards across a scrubby no-man's land loose a few sporadic shots at the Eritrean trenches, probing for men digging bunkers under the cover of dark.

Within seconds the Eritreans answer with a deafening barrage of AK-47 fire. The Ethiopians reply with the deep rattle of heavy machine guns. Then the Eritreans open up with anti-aircraft artillery -- they go "pok! pok! pok!" like giant popcorn poppers -- and fat, cherry red tracers sweep the pitch-black savanna, the low rounds ricocheting off rocks and corkscrewing crazily skyward like fireworks.

By the time Ethiopian mortar rounds begin falling, Eritrean Lt. Yohannes Haile, 32, knows he must get his men under cover. He scuttles by feel through his darkened trench, clapping his troops on the back and shoving them toward a bunker. For the next hour, his 30 grim men join thousands of others like them, sitting motionless in dusty holes pocking the stony, almost biblically desolate plains of Africa's Horn, hoping not to die in the world's most senseless, inscrutable war.

"My theory is this," Haile says wearily after the skirmish wanes under the silvery moonlight. "The Ethiopians want our coastline. We've found their dead with fishing hooks in their pockets."

Theories abound, but fishing hooks in the landlocked, camel-dotted plains of Badme is as good an explanation as any for the festering 17-month border conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia. The two impoverished one-time allies have slaughtered at least 40,000 of each others' troops in a largely ignored war of attrition that happens to be the largest ground conflict in the world.

It is a strange, forgotten clash that involves scores of miles of World War I-style trenches and sophisticated MiG-29s. It is bloodletting that defies international mediation; a fragile, often-violated cease-fire is getting shakier by the week.

And, perhaps a twist of fate, its combatants are adding their mortal remains to the oldest human bone yard of all. Ethiopian dead -- and Lt. Haile's dead -- are falling on the ancient plains where the first people no doubt hefted stones and brought them down on each others' heads.

Africa experts, exasperated by the seeming pointlessness of the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict, describe the war as two bald men fighting over a comb.

No gold or oil is at stake in the killing. Instead, it is an old-fashioned border dispute, a war over an imaginary line that snakes across scorched, acacia-stubbled plains and dry gulches hardly fit for cows and goats.

Sketchily drawn decades ago by Italian colonists, the 600-mile boundary is marked by minefields and trenchworks reminiscent of Verdun. It is one of the most heavily militarized frontiers on the globe, bristling with 500,000 troops.

When the war broke out in May 1998 with an obscure and minor gun battle in the village of Badme, both countries were still the closest of allies.

Eritrean President Issaias Afwerki and Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi had fought side by side to topple the dictatorship of Ethiopian strongman Mengistu Haile Miriam in 1991, a victory that earned tiny Eritrea its independence from Ethiopia two years later.

Both men, dubbed "new leaders of Africa" by President Clinton, once chatted by phone almost weekly. They are even distantly related.

"This thing really has people stumped," says a Western diplomat in Asmara, the sleepy Eritrean capital. "Some experts claim to have seen warning signals," he adds. "Eritrea angered Ethiopia when it declared economic independence and established its own currency. Ethiopia regretted losing its only access to the Red Sea when Eritrea broke away and gained sovereignty.

"But the real reasons are probably simpler. You've just got two proud countries competing to be top dog in the Horn of Africa."

Yemane Gebremeskel, chief of the president's office in Asmara, insists Eritrea wants peace. "We've asked the Ethiopians to send us their maps -- their version of where the border should be," Gebremeskel says. "We're willing to discuss this."

He shrugs and sighs. "They have not replied."

Selome Taddesse, the government spokesman in Addis Ababa, says Ethiopia was also a peace-loving nation, but Eritrea had attacked first. "We have not supplied maps because the Eritreans know exactly what territory they have occupied by force," Taddesse says. "They are the aggressors, and they are playing games."

Neither Gebremeskel nor Taddesse knows how many square miles of territory are in dispute. They do know that over the centuries this remote region of the world often has been in dispute; it has a heritage of war as much as land.

- - -

Across this ancient land, scientists are gaining new insights into the origins of that violent heritage. Berhane Asfaw, a kind-faced man, insisted he is no expert on human aggression.

Instead, he was the director of the National Paleontology Laboratory in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's bustling, grimy capital, and an authority on the spectacular hominid fossils that litter the parched Afar region of Africa's Rift Valley, near the Eritrean border.

Most recently, Asfaw and his American colleagues have unearthed the remains of a 2.5 million-year-old pre-human they call Australopithecus garhi. Other finds may date back 5 million years. Fossils, he noted, can contain many clues about the behavior of humanity's most distant, apelike ancestors. But clear-cut evidence of human violence is not often among them.

Still, there is the remarkable case of the Bodo skull.

Locked in a gray vault in Asfaw's office -- a soldier with an AK-47 sat outside; all of Addis Ababa was under tight security to thwart "Eritrean infiltrators" -- the Bodo skull belonged to an archaic human who roamed the savannas of Ethiopia 600,000 years ago, when the area was much more lush.

Asfaw carefully pointed out small, dark slash marks on the skull's beetle brows and receding cheekbones.

"Notice," Asfaw said with a little smile, "that it has been scalped."

Ever since Cain smote Abel, people have hungered to understand the roots of human violence. Not far from Ethiopia's ancient war zone, to the south in Uganda, researchers are looking for answers in the behavior of another species closely linked to man.

"We know of only two species of primate who make periodic, violent excursions into the ranges of neighbors," said Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard University. "Humans and chimpanzees." Wrangham, co-author of "Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence," has studied chimpanzee behavior in the forests of East Africa for many years. What he and his colleagues have observed is an aggressiveness that is disturbingly human.

Male chimps form coalitions or "party gangs" that conduct violent raids into neighboring territory to seek and kill other chimpanzees. These raids are conducted with military precision, with the attackers moving stealthily and purposefully through the trees, carefully choosing victims to minimize their own casualties.

In essence, chimps -- humankind's closest animal kin -- conduct ambushes. They kill other males, females and infants.

Interestingly, Wrangham pointed out that bonobos, another chimplike primate closely related to humans, do not share this trait. Bonobos are not patriarchal; females seem to moderate male behavior. "What chimpanzees tell us about ourselves is that it pays to be aggressive," Wrangham said. "When the chips are down, when you're struggling for territory or the same resources, it pays to fight, especially if the risk to your own safety is minimal."

Wrangham remembered one chimpanzee raid last year in the Kibale forests of Uganda. "The band of six chimps we were observing attacked into neighboring territory and got a lone male," he said.

"They dragged him around spread-eagled and held him down. They bit him all over his front. They tore out his testicles. Then they tore out his throat."

- - -

Last March, about 120 miles east of the Badme front, at a place called Tsorona, the Ethiopians stormed Eritrean trenches with tanks and massed infantry and died in horrible numbers.

They marched in human waves, recalls Eritrean Col. Tewelde Desbele. He claims 15,000 enemy were killed in a three-day battle, a number that, even if exaggerated by 50 percent, equals all the dead in Kosovo.

He says some of the Ethiopian soldiers didn't even carry guns; they were human mine-clearers. "They came like herds of animals," Desbele says in disgust. "My men's trigger fingers got blistered on their hot rifles, just shooting them down, shooting and shooting."

Sporting dreadlocks and a U.S.-made desert camouflage uniform, Desbele seems personally affronted by the Ethiopians' tactics: He helped train many of the Ethiopian officers. He has been a soldier for 22 years -- for most of the three decades, in fact, that Eritrea had waged a guerrilla war of secession against previous repressive Ethiopian regimes.

"Never in our dreams did we think we would be fighting them again," he says. He pauses at a dirt berm near his bunker from which protruded spent rifle rounds, old bandages, twisted bits of shrapnel and a pair of combat boots. He stares at the boots, which still have feet in them.

"Men have been fighting over this area for a long time," he says finally.

Ethiopian corpses litter Tsorona. They rot under the sun, and new grass grows through their bodies. Someone has propped an Ethiopian's decapitated head on a burned-out tank and put a twig in the head's mouth. Cooked human muscle looks exactly like the rusty steel bands in an old burned tire.

- - -

Tim White wasn't sure how long humans and near-humans have been fighting in the Horn of Africa or anywhere else for that matter.

One of the world's leading paleontologists, the University of California at Berkeley scientist was the first to identify the cut marks on the Bodo skull, but he thought they might merely be signs of a ritual mortuary practice. Or post-death cannibalism.

"Bones don't tell us the whole story," White cautioned.

Still, he noted that more and more evidence is surfacing that our ancestors, over an almost unimaginable span of time, mutilated each other with regularity. Neanderthal bones in Croatia show evidence of having been butchered. So do even older skeletons in Spain. White himself is re-examining at least four hominid skulls from the rich fossil beds of Ethiopia for the telltale gashes left by stone tools.

White's mentor and one of the deans of African archaeology, J. Desmond Clark, was less ambiguous.

"I think they were probably beastly," Clark said of the upright-walking hominids who branched from the ape lineage some 5 million or so years ago. "I mean I think they were rather like ourselves. We're dreadful, and I think we'll probably destroy ourselves unless we learn to sublimate it."

Clark, a courtly octogenarian, began sifting the alkali sands of Ethiopia and Eritrea for artifacts more than 50 years ago. He got his start in the British Army during World War II, between rounds of fighting with the Italians.

- - -

Tedros Mengsteab has no hatred in his heart.

Sitting in his front-line bunker at the Badme front, the Eritrean soldier whispers tensely between the mortar rounds that hurtle down through the night sky with a sound like ripping bed sheets.

An army medic and a young Omar Sharif look-alike, Mengsteab, 29, says he despises the war and not the Ethiopians. He is a shopkeeper from Asmara, one of the tens of thousands of civilians mobilized to man the front, and at night he dreams of neatly arranging orange bottles of Fanta on his store shelves.

He loves his shop. He loves Ethiopian pop singers, whom he listens to on a battered cassette recorder that he rewinds by hand to save battery power. In his spider hole behind the lines, he reads Danielle Steele books and other novels of love.

"I hate being a medic," he hisses. "I am a businessman, not a soldier. I don't want to see any more bodies."

While the Ethiopians lay down erratic mortar fire -- after months of static front lines, their rounds still explode short, hitting only the dead in no-man's land -- Mengsteab speaks earnestly of peace.

A mortar round explodes nearby, shaking the ground. He talks faster, of his hope in a stalled peace agreement brokered by the United States and the Organization of African Unity.

Another round slams in. It is deafening. The soldiers in the bunker hunch together. Some hold hands.

But Mengsteab can't stop talking. The United Nations will step in soon, he predicts. It will map the boundary. Everything, then, will go back to normal in two of the poorest countries in the world. He sounds almost happy. Then morning comes. And Mengsteab regains his composure.

"I now hear the Ethiopian supply trucks moving up to the front at night," he admits, peering bleary-eyed though a firing port in his trench. "They come with their lights out, guided by boys walking out front in the darkness."

A short dry season is returning to the African Horn in October, he says, making armor movements easier.

On a typical weekday morning at the Golden House Restaurant, the booths are jammed with men from the small African nation of Eritrea. Chattering softly in Tigrinya, they drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and discuss a pressing issue in their lives these days: the violent border war raging with their former friend and neighbor, Ethiopia.

Not long ago, Ethiopians and Eritreans gathered together at the restaurant, located in the heart of Uptown, where many refugees are resettled. When the war between the impoverished countries flared again in May 1998, it touched Chicago, straining the relationships between the immigrant groups that share heritage and culture.

Now the Ethiopians tend to meet with other Ethiopians at a Dunkin' Donuts a few blocks away or at another Uptown restaurant. Like the Eritreans, they emotionally debate the war that has killed more than 40,000.

"We do say hello to each other, but there is a certain distance now between us," said college student Fanuel Gabriel, who, like many Eritreans, grew up in Ethiopia with people he considered brothers. "It's not like it used to be. We are apart now, and we used to be friends. It's mostly because of the war," Gabriel said.

For centuries, Ethiopians and Eritreans coexisted in an area of the world considered the cradle of humanity along the Red Sea. After a 30-year struggle, Eritrea officially gained its independence in 1993. Border issues lingered, and in 1998 Ethiopia declared war after Eritrean soldiers wrested away land that both sides claimed. On the surface, the fighting was over territory, but the conflict was fueled by long-simmering tensions over trade, independence and living together as equals.

A world away in Chicago, over omelets and turkey club sandwiches at the diner, the Eritreans discuss the reasons behind the war. Many are still bewildered that it is happening at all because there are so many other problems, including famine.

"The two countries need each other," said Tekle Gabriel, Fanuel's brother and owner of Mama Desta's Red Sea Restaurant, which serves Ethiopian and Eritrean food.

"Eritrea is a small country with much cultural and historical connection with Ethiopia. What we really need is peace in the region. In theory, what is happening in Ethiopia is the Balkanization of the area." Chicago is home for approximately 4,000 Ethiopians and 500 Eritreans who live primarily in Uptown, Edgewater, Rogers Park and Albany Park. Most arrived during the 1980s, when Ethiopia was in political and economic turmoil, a famine was ravaging the area and the song "We are the World" from the Live Aid concert was urging people to feed the hungry.

In 1985, the Ethiopian Community Association of Chicago was formed to help the first generation of displaced Ethiopians pull together and cope with their culture shock. It has evolved into a resettlement organization that works primarily with non-Ethiopian clients.

Though many Ethiopians arrived fully intending to return, the war is dashing their hopes. Many now doubt they will ever go back.

"(The war) seems like a wake-up call," said Yusef Adem, program coordinator for the Ethiopian Community Association, who arrived as a political refugee in 1985. "We've been postponing things, planning to go back, but we haven't been able to. And the clock is running. I was thinking of going back, and here I am 20 years later. Now people are getting into home buying and owning businesses. Now there is more integration and more networking."

As two of the newer African immigrant groups in the United States, Ethiopians and Eritreans are still grappling with language barriers and trying to maintain their African culture and identity. In 1974, Ethiopia had one of the smallest proportions of its citizens living abroad of any country in the world. About five years later, it had one of the highest, according to University of Chicago sociologist Donald Levine.

"One thing we're working on is the different expectations parents have here and in (Ethiopia)," said Erku Yimer, executive director of the Ethiopian Community Association. "Child rearing is very, very different here than in Ethiopia, where neighbors help and children are not confined to the house." Both sides desperately seek information about what is happening back home. Eritreans and Ethiopians call their embassies in Washington and try to reach family members in Africa, though the Ethiopian government dismantled satellite dishes and deported more than 60,000 Eritreans residing in Ethiopia. They mainly depend on the Internet. Every day at Golden House, Eritreans pass around printouts of articles from the Web.

"Eritreans have become extremely unified, both abroad and here," said Tekle Gabriel. "We are only 3 million people and not supported by any other countries. Our country depends on our people." And though relationships are not like they used to be, the Ethiopians and Eritreans are unified in their hope for peace.

"We're not going to affect the war (from Chicago), but at least we can make a call for peace," said Gabriel. Ahmed Berhe, one of the few Ethiopians who will venture inside Golden House, agreed.

"We are the same people. We have the same language, the same culture and the same attitude," said Berhe, 39.

But Berhe admits things have changed. "There is a gap now," he said. "They have to support their government, and we have to support ours."