The MacNeil/Lehrer Report

(Film showing Eritrean town being fired upon.)

JIM LEHRER: This is Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea? Never heard of it? Well, we all soon will, because a lot of people are about to die there.

Good evening. People are dying in three separate wars in Africa tonight, two of them in areas where the disputes are fairly well known, the third in a place most of us had barely heard of until yesterday.

They`re fighting in Zaire, the old Belgian Congo, over control of Shaba province, formerly called Katanga, an area rich in copper and in bloody disputes. There have been no authoritative casualty reports since rebel forces crossed over the border from Angola Sunday, but the dead are believed to already number in the hundreds.

In southern Africa black guerrillas in Rhodesia are still fighting troops of the new white-black transitional government. An estimated 9,000 people have died in that fighting over the last six years. An announcement yesterday said fifty civilians caught in a crossfire were added to the death list on Sunday.

The third place where people are shooting at each other is the Ethiopian province of Eritrea which, unlike Zaire and Rhodesia, has seldom been in the news before, despite the fact that its war has been going on for nearly seventeen years. The conflict is between Eritrean guerrillas, who want independence, and the government of Ethiopia, determined they won`t get it. Ethiopia reportedly has just launched a major offensive against the guerrillas; some 40,000 Ethiopian troops are supposed to be involved, supported by Russian and Cuban advisers, planes and other military equipment. It promises to be a long fight, a bloody fight, with only a bitter end regardless of who wins.

Tonight, with an extended film report from inside the Eritrean independence movement, a look at this little-known area and its war; and some geographical points for reference purposes first. Eritrea is the northern most province of Ethiopia, Ethiopia`s only link to the Red Sea, the strategically important Red Sea. The heaviest fighting so far has been around the city of Asmara, which, though held by the Ethiopians, has been completely encircled by the rebels for several months. The other crucial war zone is here at the port city of Massaua, and it is here that our film opens. BBC reporter Simon Dring spent five weeks with the Eritrean rebels earlier this spring.

SIMON DRING, Reporting: More than 6,000 Ethiopians are trapped in the city`s naval base and port area. Isolated by several hundred yards of open sands, it`s almost impossible to break out. But the guerrillas have failed to overrun them for exactly the same reason. A battle that has already left more than 4,000 dead and wounded has become a stalemate.

Do you like to watch them?

ERITREAN YOUNG MAN: We see them all the time. So what? We see them, and we don`t care until the final time that we`ll be ready to hit them. And we know we are going to hit them very hard.

DRING: And you think that a kalashnikov, a few grenades and your determination is enough to overcome the obstacles of Russian equipment, the tanks, the artillery...

YOUNG MAN: Yes. It`s the will of the man that fights such kind of forces, not really the sophistication of the weapons.

DRING: In Eritrea, the armor is for show. Russia`s support of Ethiopia has to date done little more than provide the guerrillas with some unexpected garnishing for their victory celebrations -- and there have been plenty of those over the past few months. These Soviet tanks, some with less than fifty miles on the clock, are now part of the Eritreans` first armored brigade. The guerrillas admit that they`re unlikely to use them in battle, but what better for morale, they add, than to be able to parade them under the noses of the enemy.

Extraordinary confidence, and an admission of defeat, but not perhaps without good reason. The EPLF now has more than 30,000 fighters under arms. But the threat is all too apparent. For three months now a Russian naval task force has been keeping the Ethiopians in Massaua alive and the guerrilla positions under regular bombardment. If it isn`t from the ships, it`s from the artillery and the planes.

Their casual behavior appears to bear no relation to the reality outside. But that, they say, is the only way to survive.

The city itself, however, has not. Ethiopia`s most important outlet to the sea is under siege and in ruins, the rows of concrete and wooden houses shattered by the fighting. But it`s in these buildings strung out across the city and around its edges that the EPLF hold their line, a warren of tunnels and trenches burrowed out of the damp sands of Massaua, within clear sight of the Ethiopians.

Railway sleepers provide a solid enough roof, but the preoccupation is not with the war. Four hours daily of grammar, maths, English and political education is compulsory. Their protection, a discipline that appears to maintain their morale under the most appalling conditions, is the leading of as normal a life as possible.

One hundred and fifteen kilometers inland, 7,000 feet up, the Eritrean capital, Asmara, like Massaua, has been under siege since the beginning of this year. The EPLF refused to allow us to film their positions, but they`re clearly dug in around the city in some strength. Despite the help of Soviet advisers and Cuban and South Yemeni troops, the Ethiopians were forced to retreat after nearly a week of heavy fighting. Still, the dead remain unburied. But the Eritreans are only too well aware of the response that their success will bring.

From the Ethiopians` previous allies, American F-5s. From their new friends, Russian MiGs. This city of 250,000 people may be under siege, but it`s rapidly being built in to a formidable fortress. A Soviet airlift that involves twenty or more flights a day has been underway since last month -- new armor, food and fuel for a garrison that now numbers some 20,000 men. But the guerrillas still manage to infiltrate behind the Ethiopian lines.

How much are you able to operate inside Asmara itself?

ERITREAN MAN: For example, in the past months we were in need of a film projector here, for the cultural show. So we went into the cinema, the biggest one, and we just took it -- pillaged it.

DRING: In the middle of the night.

PLAN: In the daytime.

DRING: In the daytime?

MAN: Yeah, in the daytime.

DRING: No such deception is needed in the Sudan. North, across the mountains and deserts, the supply lines of the Eritrean People`s Liberation Front begin. Graham Greene would have it no other way. The colorful but somewhat conspiratorial atmosphere of this Red Sea port provides the perfect setting for a guerrilla operation. While largely dependent on its own resources, the EPLF is still forced to buy much of its basic food stocks, medicine and fuel from outside. Port Sudan is the headquarters of the Eritrean Relief Association. It handles no guns, just food, donated or bought with funds from Arab friends and trucked back across the deserts to Eritrea.

How much of your supplies actually pass through the Sudan?

YONAS DEBESSAI, Relief Coordinator: Supplies from each camp of the Eritrean Relief Association, actually most of it comes through the Sudan.

DRING: Are there any restrictions imposed upon you by the Sudanese, or do they just turn a blind eye to what you`re doing?

DEBESSAI: Actually, I wouldn`t say they turn a blind eye; they know what we are doing. This is a humanitarian activity, so they really help us.

DRING: It`s the Ho Chi Minh Trail of the Horn: Liberation Road, as the EPLF call it -- 1,600 kilometers of roughhewn track built by hand over a period of four years, an improvised road system that is the backbone of their entire operation. More than a thousand lorries, nearly all of them captured from the Ethiopians, keep the supplies coming. They move mostly at night or under the cover of cloud There is a constant threat of air raids, even in the more remote mountain areas. Scattered along its entire length is a network of repair shops, underground garages and camouflaged fuel dumps.

Like nearly everything else, the generator is captured. The garage might appear makeshift, but it is in fact extremely efficient. Their assorted collection of Fiats, Bedfords, Mercedes, American Mack trucks are regularly serviced. The spares are cannibalized or made on the spot. The mechanics work long hours, but are expected to fight as well.

Where did you get this machine from?

GARAGE WORKER: This machine? Yes, we took it from the liberated area of Massaua. In the nighttime we go there, and we put it in our lorry by manpower and we take it out side.

DRING: Just like that.

WORKER: Yes.

DRING: So whenever you want a modern machine lathe like this or any other equipment, you just mount an operation into one of the cities held by the Ethiopians and take it out.

WORKER: Yes.

DRING: It is perhaps the thoroughness of their organization that`s been the key to their success. Hidden in the valleys, buried deep in the more inaccessible areas of Eritrea, a complex system of interlocking underground base camps. Not just in support of the war, but as part of a behind-the- lines civilian administration.

The EPLF information department -- fighters rotated from the front man the duplicators. In February alone they produced four different political magazines, 500,000 bus tickets, forty editions of their school textbooks, and the first water and electricity bills. Not a mile or so away, a typing school, currently training ten new typists a week. And they have to learn to type in English and Arabic as well as their own language, Tigrinya. In part of the same camp, a carpentry shop. It has thirty skilled carpenters, many of them taught after they joined the Front. They repair and renovate rifles -- again, mostly captured. They also provide the hospitals with equipment, produce furniture, and with the help of the engineering department next door have started to manufacture artificial limbs.

Like everybody else in the support camps, they work from six to eleven in the morning and four to seven in the afternoon, and are expected to go through at least six months of military training first.

It`s during this period that the fighters receive what is considered to be the most essential part of their education. Be it Mao or Marx, the setting is African, a philosophy tailored to the needs of one of the poorest corners of the continent and the traditional demand for victory to the people.

Much colonial blood has been spilled in Eritrea.

It was the British, helped by Sudanese and Indian troops, who drove out the Italians during the Second World War, who stormed the dame Italian-built fort outside the city of Keren that the EPLF captured from the Ethiopians last year. For the Ethiopians it was the loss of the second largest city in Eritrea and the end of their effective administration in the province. Ironically, the site of another Italian defeat was also the scene of an Ethiopian one only a few months after Keren. One hundred years ago 500 Italians were killed around this hill. In December last year 1,500 Ethiopians died here.

Now it`s the Ethiopians who are colonizing Eritrea, argues the EPLF. Certainly there is much eyewitness evidence to support guerrilla claims of the killings of large numbers of men, women and children in the ruined villages around Asmara. The sound of firing still haunts them. The Eritreans do have some claim to self-determination. They were annexed by Ethiopia in 1962. More than 600,000 Eritrean refugees can bear witness to the fighting that followed, to the late Haile Selassie`s attempts to subdue the bandits, as both he and the present regime in Addis Ababa call the EPLF.

Legally, though, the guerrillas are rebels; and as far as much of the outside world is concerned, they are a political embarrassment. It`s an embarrassment that has prevented most of the recognized aid organizations from doing anything about a problem that is becoming a massive strain on the guerrillas` meager resources. Many have been sent on the guerrilla convoys to camps in the Sudan, but the bulk of them remain. As more and more towns and villages have fallen under the control of the guerrillas, so the refugees are absorbed. Some have families and friends to go to, but with 90,000 made homeless since the beginning of the year, resettlement has become an almost impossible task. They set up home where and when they can, in deserted railway sidings and in the camps abandoned by the Ethiopian army. The EPLF provide them with flour and medical help. More than 1,500,000 people were treated last year alone in their four main hospitals and by their 500 barefoot doctors.

(Old man speaking.)

DRING: All our house, he says, all that we had was burnt during the fighting for Massaua, and now we are waiting for help and to start a new life.

Some kind of a normal life does in fact exist for a large majority of the three million people of Eritrea. Keren, with its population of 32,000, feels the pinch of war. But in the nine months since it was taken by the EPLF, it boasts more public services than the Ethiopians can offer in Asmara. Its markets are full, and although there are serious problems of unemployment, the EPLF has at least established an efficient administration. The buses arrive and leave on time, but always at sunset because of the air raids. The tickets from the information department are bought and checked, each passenger`s luggage handled with care.

The people of Keren have been organized into various associations. There are work parties, like these students returning from gathering wood. They`re the groups that are supposed to lay the democratic foundations for the Eritrea of the future. It`s entirely voluntary, but perhaps those on the outside feel a certain amount of social draft.

But it`s amongst the middle-class businessmen of places like Keren that the EPLF has had the hardest job explaining the reasons for its existence and its dreams of the future. There is price control and limited nationalization, and certainly no room in their program for profiteering.

But no matter how hard the EPLF strive for normality, the war, it seems, is impossible to escape. The children of Decamere, encouraged, as elsewhere, to learn practical skills, must always be reminded of the realities of life behind the guerrilla lines. They have to build their own air raid shelters.

The Ethiopians, it appears, will never accept anything less than victory in Eritrea, even though more than 6,000 Ethiopian regular soldiers are now prisoners of the EPLF. The problem for the EPLF is that the Ethiopians refuse to recognize that the prisoners even exist, although the International Red Cross has already been provided with their names, addresses and I.D. cards. The government in Addis Ababa has bluntly refused to discuss the matter, and it appears politically impossible for the Red Cross to act independently. They are fed, clothed and given medical treatment by the guerrillas, but all that`s come from the Red Cross so far has been 10,000 bars of chocolate, and even that was sent surreptitiously.

But high in the hills near Asmara, that`s one problem that wasn`t being discussed last month at the meeting of the EPLF`s political bureau and central committee, the men who over the last sixteen years have emerged as a driving force behind the Front: Alamin Mohammed Said, responsible for the Front`s foreign missions; Haile Mariam, in charge of education; Mohammed Romedan Nur, the Front`s general secretary.

ALI SAYED, EPLF Politburo: Now we know that, according to our intelligency, we know the plan of each offense after they have changed the situation in the Ogaden front, that they are planning to have or to concentrate on the northern front. But it`s true, it may have certain effect in the situation, but this does not mean that it could change the whole situation against our just cause.

DRING: Well, does that mean that as an army you`re prepared and ready to face the full force of an Ethiopian offensive, with its Russian tanks, planes, artillery -- perhaps even Cuban combat troops? Are you prepared to face that?

SAVED: Yes, we are prepared, and we are well prepared and ready to face such an offensive.

DRING: And you think you could contain it?

SAVED: Yeah, sure.

LEHRER: Again, that film was done by the BBC and shown originally on its "Panorama" program. The reporter was Simon Dring. Now for some update perspective from an American Congressman with a lot of knowledge about and interest in what`s happening in Eritrea and Ethiopia. He`s Congressman Paul Tsongas, Democrat of Massachusetts. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia at one time, and more recently visited Ethiopia as part of a Congressional fact-finding mission to the Horn of Africa. Congressman, you and your colleague on that trip, Congressman Don Bonker, said in January in the opening sentence of your report, "Nowhere in Africa is there more potential for major instability and violence than in the Horn." And Eritrea was clearly one of the problems you had in mind, was it not?

Rep. PAUL TSONGAS: That`s right. It was the obvious issue after the Ogaden.

LEHRER: Look, we just heard the Eritrean view of their situation; you talked to the Ethiopians. Why do they feel so strongly that Eritrea belongs to them?`

TSONGAS: Interestingly, during the film the distinction between Ethiopia and Eritrea was made very clearly. To the Ethiopian mind in Addis Ababa and the rest of Ethiopia, Eritrea is perceived as a province, like Shawa Province or Des& Province. The people speak Tigrinya, but there are Ethiopians who speak Gallinya or Gurage, that kind of thing, so it`s not perceived as that different. They see them as brothers, they will never let them go ...

LEHRER: Much like a state of the Union in the United States?

TSONGAS: A good analogy.

LEHRER: The rebel leaders, as we just heard, seem determined to fight, apparently to the last man, if necessary. Are the Ethiopians equally as determined?

TSONGAS: I think you`d have to draw a distinction between perhaps the average Ethiopian who would like to see, I feel, a kind of negotiated settlement, maybe a federation, as they had at one point; and Colonel Mengistu, who`s the head of Ethiopia, who I think has a mindset that dictates a violent approach towards the problems, and I think he`s going in there and he`s going to go in there and try to put them down.

LEHRER: Well, what is the likely outcome of this determination, of the will, of both sides? An awful lot of people are going to be killed?

TSONGAS: I don`t see the way out. If Mengistu insists on putting them down and bringing them back into Ethiopian camp, if the Eritreans believe in independence, which I think they do, it`s going to be an attrition bordering on genocide. It`s going to be a chapter in our history in this year and next year which will be very sad.

LEHRER: Thousands of people are going to die, then, on both sides

TSONGAS: At least.

LEHRER: Is a negotiated settlement really just not in the cards any more?

TSONGAS: Back in 1974 General Aman was the head of the Ethiopian government, who was from Eritrea. He tried to negotiate. He was overthrown by the dergue, the junta, and at that point when it killed him they went into Asmara with the military and killed a lot of people. I think at that juncture negotiations were out of the question, and it`s going to be settled by violence.

LEHRER: Now, you and Congressman Bonker just today, in fact, drafted a letter to the Ethiopian government pleading with them to negotiate. Where does that letter stand -- what do you hope to accomplish with that?

TSONGAS: I guess it`s out of frustration; what do you do in this particular case? There really aren`t that many options. And what we`d hoped to do is get a number of members of Congress to sign the letter to show Mengistu that the world is really looking at what happens in Eritrea. And what good it will do I don`t know.

LEHRER: Well, so far the State Department has issued statements lamenting what is happening there and what is likely to happen. Is there anything else that the U.S. really can do besides lament it?

TSONGAS: Realistically, no. When the United States made the error of not helping Ethiopia vis-a-vis the Somali aggression, we pretty much canceled ourselves out of Ethiopia; we don`t even have an ambassador there. We are in no position to have any influence on policy. Perhaps all we can do is help the Sudanese in terms of their problems and call attention to what`s happening in Eritrea. But in terms of any viability, we just don`t have it.

LEHRER: So far the wire reports say that there is no concrete evidence that those 17,000 Cuban troops that are in Ethiopia are actually involved in this fighting in Eritrea.Is there really any way for them to avoid it, down the line?

TSONGAS: I think Castro would be in a very difficult position putting his troops against what is essentially another Marxist government. It`s an internal problem. There are non-aligned countries, like Algeria, Iraq,

Syria, that are putting pressure on Fidel Castro not to do this. So he`s really caught in the squeeze; and he wants to be friendly with the Ethiopians, the obvious Soviet interest that`s involved. But he`s not going to come out of this looking good to the third world.

LEHRER: Particularly because the Eritreans see themselves as an independence movement, and here again he would be backing the other side.

TSONGAS: That`s right. People switch sides on this very often.

LEHRER: Congressman, this is a very tragic story, there`s no question about that, and there`s really nothing -- regardless of who`s right and who`s wrong, the fact is, thousands of people are about to die, and there`s really nothing that can be done about it, is that what you`re saying?

TSONGAS: What can be done is small things. You`re not going to have any kind of international intervention, clearly, because it`s within the borders of Ethiopia. There`s no way the Soviets are going to back down; I think it`s going to be tragic.

LEHRER: All right. Congressman, thank you.

TSONGAS: Thank you.

LEHRER: We`ll be back tomorrow night. I`m Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.