Soviet tanks on both sides in Eritrean war

Press, 27 December 1985, Page 14

Soviet tanks on both sides in Eritrean war

By

John Murray Brown,

recently in Eritrea

Dr Assefaw Tekeste is head of the Eritrean Medical Association. He is also an expert on shrapnel, Soviet and American made. f ‘Our experience of war surgery is quite rich," he said, looking back over a 25-year-old guerrilla war against Ethiopia during which both superpowers have given assistance to the regimes in Addis Ababa. Dr Tekeste likes to point out such anomalies. Cuban troops, happy to fight alongside the Ethiopian Army • against the Somaiis in the Ogaden, now refuse to fight the Eritreans whom they helped train in the early seventies. It is far from being a normal guerrilla war. The recent Ethiopian offensive used mechanised divisions redeployed from neighbouring Tigray and the Ogaden, driving up the plain and overrunning the fertile Barka valley in the west. The capture of Mersa Teklai cut off the Eritreans from access to the sea. Karora on the border with Sudan has been the scene of daily artillery exchanges in recent weeks. Mr Sibhate Gebrahim, a senior member of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front’s (E.P.L.F.) 13man politburo, suggested it was the largest tank battle on the African continent since Rommel confronted the British Bth Army. The tanks on both sides are Rus-sian-made Ts4s and Tsss. The E.P.L.F. has long maintained it captures tanks when the Ethiopians cut and run. During this October offensive the towns of Barentu and Tesseney, taken by the Front in July, were retaken by the Ethiopians. The E.P.L.F. claims it made a “strategic withdrawal.” In the past, the Front has kept to the mountain base area. With no air defence against the Ethiopian Soviet-made MiG 21s and 235, the Frort concedes it is uhable to hold

on to the towns. The capture of Barentu was explained by Mr Sibhate, as an attempt to change the existing 'stalemate, in an area normally outside the E.P.L.F.’s political control. The Conama tribe of Barentu had given assistance to the Eritrean Liberation Front (E.L.F.), the guerrilla force defeated by the E.P.L.F. in a bloody internal conflict in the late seventies. The base area remains intact. Nakfa, for long discussed by military experts in Addis Ababa as the key strategic position, is still in rebel hands. The buildings have all been razed to the ground by months of Ethiopian bombing. But some semblance of normal life continues. Nakfa’s tiny market garden grows vegetables for the front line, where the incidence of scurvy has been rising.

An assault on the E.P.L.F. lines in early November followed five

days of sustained Ethiopian bombing, using napalm and cluster bombs. The lines were temporarily breached south of Nakfa before the E.P.L.F. regained control of the high ground. According to a Front spokesman at the lines, the Ethio--I>ians suffered heavy casualties, osing over 200 dead.

The base area of the Front looks impenetrable. Tanks coming up the Keren road have been easy targets for the guerrillas in the past.

Like a First World War scene set high in the mountains, the two armies face each other along a 400-mile front line, their position sometimes less than 60 yards apart. The daily volley of small arms fire is interspersed by loud hailers from both trenches broadcasting, propaganda.

Copyright—London Observer Service.