Eritrean Fighters Stand Firm Againsi Stalinist Barrage

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Second of three articles on the Eritrean war of liberation by David Whitfield It is sixty miles from Asmara to Keren, a journey of two hours by road.

For the armies of the Derg that journey lasted ten days of bitter fighting and heavy losses.

Their final march into the evacuated city of Keren itself brought them only cold comfort.

The Derg had reached its objective but, by taking back Keren, the Ethiopian dictators had not crushed the Eritrean liberation Break siege The Derg's first offensive of 1978 had been blocked in August. Mengistu, with his Soviet and Cuban advisors was then forced to launch a second offensive to break the siege of Asmara and to wrest control of Eritrea from the forces of the Eritrean Liberation Front and, above all, of the Eritrean Popular Liberation On November 18, this new offensive was launched on a scale even more massive than its predecessor.

Keren was the primary target of the assault, with armies advancing on three fronts.

Some 120,000 troops had been mobilised by the Derg for this stage of the campaign. Their attack was spearheaded by 250 Soviet tanks, largely piloted by Russians.

Soviet officers

Beyond the Soviet generals who led the campaign, the EPLF estimated that 250 high-ranking Soviet officers were also present.

The Eritrean Popular Liberation Army was dwarfed by the size of this threat, its arms were no match for the sophisticated equipment provided to the Ethiopians by their Stalinist allies.

Yet in the ten days of battle that followed, the Derg's army was driven back and harried again and again. In these encounters the EPLF estimated to have captured or (mostly) destroyed 90 tanks, at least 30 armoured cars and 180 military lorries.

The battle of Elaberet showed the scale of defeats which the Eritreans were able to inflict on the aggressor armies.

The Ethiopian forces were advancing on three fronts-one, on the southwest from Agordat which they had captured from the ELF, and two from Asmara to the south-east.

It was one • of these second two columns which the EPLF ambushed in the narrow valley at Elaberet. The result was a complete victory for the EPLF in what was probably the EPLF motif largest battle of the war so far.

Dozens of the Derg's tanks were destroyed, and several captured along with armoured cars and considerable quantities of both light and heavy artillery. The column was routed, but the immediate fate of Keren had already been sealed.

Tactical retreats

By this time the EPLF had assessed that it was necessary to make tactical retreats in the face of an overwhelming superiority of enemy forces. The evacuation of Keren was in fact already under way.

For six days lorries rolled north, taking with them all the military, medical and other necessary supplies from the city: The last of the 40,000 civilians were evacuated on the night of Eritrean freedom fighters November 27.

When the Ethiopian armies entered Keren the next day, they captured a ghost city.

The EPLF had made an orderly retreat, as it had done at the same time from the towns along the AsmaraMassawa road, and in the past from all the other towns which have fallen to the Derg's advance.

Major blow

The loss of Keren was a major blow to the liberation forces: Its capture in July 1977 had been the crowning point of the EPLF's major offensive. For the Derg, the recapture of this key strategic point was an essential step in their campaign to eliminate the struggles of the Eritrean people.

Yet the EPLF was not smashed in a forlorn attempt to defend Keren against siege by land and air.

Its forces withdrew in order, to re-form in the towns to the north and in their central base in Sahel.

The short-term military situation is obviously far from favourable to the EPLF, yet the prospects are not entirely black.

The towns of Nakfa and Afabet remain the hands of the EPLF, while in October they succeeded once again in liberating Digsa which had fallen in the summer offensive.

Their strategy now lies in a return to the guerrilla warfare which preceded the escalation of their struggles in the winter of 1976/77. But the EPLF returns to this method of struggle under new conditions.

Fighting Soviet Union As the battle for Keren raged in November, Isayas Afewerki, EPLF assistant general secretary, declared:

'The face of the war has changed. We are not fighting the Derg anymore. Now it is the Soviet Union"

The intervention of the Stalinist bureaucracies of the Soviet Union and Cuba has transformed the struggle in Eritrea.

It is with their assistance alone that the Derg has been able to drive the EPLF back into a base-area one-third of the size it controlled six months ago.

But the vicious treachery of the Stalinists has brought its own contradictions. The EPLF is equipped almost entirely with the weapons it has • captured from the Ethiopian armies.

Better armed Their successes in the last offensive mean that they are now far better armed than ever before.

Today the EPLF controls a force of some 90 tanks and armoured cars, all captured from the Derg. RoI ds Ra Iways TOI miles Kassalo Gedoref SUDAN Nokfo, Keren Tessenei a Adi Ugrio Hagor Adi Quala á Koie R Umm > Metemmo Dabat Gondor Lake •bebra labo In other words, the Eritrean Popular Liberation Army is in this respect one of the strongest armies in Africa by far-stronger even than the Ethiopian army had been before the Kremlin began its massive flood of supplies.

But this strength is of course inadequate to confront the mammoth invasion forces in open battle.

The Ethiopian military dictatorship has complete superiority in the air, and the EPLF lacks the defensive weapons to restrict this power.

The MIG jets are basically free to bomb the guerrilla bases and the refugee camps, to strafe the SAUDI ARABIA SAUDI RED ASEA •Adi T Aksum aa cululin 2 Adigrat Aduwo Edd, Makale DANKALI, Assab, Sokoto political crisis a degree nearer to flashpoint.

The fear of explosion in Addis Ababa must gnaw at the thoughts of the Soviet generals as they pace the ramparts of Keren or Asmara in frustration. Even in the palaces of the Kremlin, icy shivers of doubt and dread must seize the Soviet leaders when they consider how much has been invested in their Ethiopian ally.

Civil war

But the war in Eritrea is not simply a military war.

Like every revolutionary struggle, it is also a civil war that is fought out in every sphere of society.