ETHIOPIA: Appointment in AsmaraMonday, Feb. 17, 1975

For decades, the "empire" of Ethiopia has really been nothing more than a

collection of disparate feuding fiefdoms held together by the military power of

deposed Emperor Haile Selassie and the aristocratic Amhara tribe of the

Central Highlands. Last week, as fighting flared across the northern province

of Eritrea, the old empire appeared to be on the verge of civil war and perhaps

of actual disintegration.

The center of the battle was the palm-fringed city of Asmara, Eritrea's capital,

which was rocked by mortar, bazooka and howitzer fire as rebel commandos

attacked army and navy installations. One exchange caught a group of 30

Americans, including the local consul, in a social club; they gamely sang John

Brown's Body and other traditional songs as tracer bullets arced overhead. A

U.S. communications base was hit in another assault. Throughout the week,

Ethiopian planes bombed and strafed guerrilla concentrations and mud-hut

villages suspected of supporting the rebels. By week's end, according to some

accounts, as many as 2,000 people had been killed.

The troubles in Eritrea date back to 1962, when Haile Selassie annexed the

former Italian colony. Over the years, the rebel forces of the predominantly

Moslem Eritrean Liberation Front gained control of the countryside, but have

never made much headway against Ethiopian forces amassed at Asmara. Even

after Haile Selassie was overthrown last September, the position of the

guerrillas did not improve appreciably—partly because the front man for the

new military government, General Aman Michael Andom, was himself an

Eritrean and tried to solve the problem by granting greater autonomy to the

province. Ever since Andom was killed last November by some of his own

subordinates, however, the two sides in the Eritrean dispute have been headed

for war.

The showdown came two weeks ago.

The Ethiopian government, which had been toying with the idea of negotiating

with the rebels, bluntly announced that it had decided instead to crush them by

force. The same day, Eritrean guerrillas —armed to the hilt by Libya, Algeria

and other militant Arab powers—ambushed and burned seven fuel trucks 30

miles from the Eritrean port of Assab. Two days later, they destroyed an

Ethiopian army column, then launched the heaviest assault on the provincial

capital in the 13-year history of the revolt.

The unrest spread beyond Eritrea to Tigre province, just south of Asmara,

where guerrillas blew up a bridge and halted a convoy of 50 army tanks bound

for the relief of the city. In Addis Ababa, a few skirmishes took place between

nervous soldiers and civilians. The government was said to be setting up three

concentration camps in the capital in possible preparation for the internment of

tens of thousands of Eritreans who live there. In case serious fighting breaks

out in the city, the junta was reported to be moving Haile Selassie from the

National Palace to a secret hideout in the country. The military rulers do not

want the former Emperor to be killed, because they know that they would be

blamed for his death, and they are still acutely sensitive to the reaction of other

African leaders to his fate.

In its official statements, the Addis Ababa junta discounted the seriousness of

the Eritrean revolt. But in Beirut, an Eritrean guerrilla leader vowed that if the

Ethiopian government should try to step up the fighting, "the whole northeast

of Africa shall burn."

Civil War. Grandiose as that boast may be, the rebel leader had a point. As the

fighting in Asmara indicated, the guerrilla force may well be too large and too

well armed to be defeated militarily. Moreover, Ethiopia today is ruled by an

unstable, volatile military government riven with quarreling factions. If full-

scale fighting continues in the north, the junta could easily find itself in the

middle of a multisided civil war in which the chief casualty might turn out to be

the ancient empire itself—and its military rulers.