Eritrea: Brothers at Arms
Duration: 05'25"
Reporter-Producer: Martin Adler
Executive Producer: Ron McCullagh
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As the world focuses its attention on the crisis in Kosovo, the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea rages unabated. Insight News looks at a savage conflict believed to have claimed upwards of 40,000 lives since February, and looks set to claim many more.
There is another war going on aside from Kosovo, and this one the world isn't watching. A short distance from the scene of the Great Famine fifteen years ago, thousands are dying again. The scale of this new slaughter - over 2,000 kilometres of scrubland - must merit attention again.
This is not a war of airstrikes, precision bombings, and 'zero deaths', but one fought in trenches with indiscriminate slaughter. Survivors speak of human waves, mown down by machine-gun and shellfire. Survivors have appalling tales that remind one of the horrors of World War One - and in a conflict where being forcibly conscripted and thrown into the front-line is commonplace, it seems that the safest thing to be is a prisoner of war.
This report visits the front-line - where despite war's savagery it is clear that these two enemy nations were for a long time friends. An Eritrean major tells us how he knows his Ethiopian opposite number - how they were close comrades for most of the 1980's, struggling together to overthrow the dictator Mengistu. Now he feels betrayed by his former friend, and that there no longer is any bond between them - he says "my country is more important than the friendship I had with him."
The film also examines the ugly part that mass deportations have played in the conflict too - more than 52,000 people of Eritrean origin have been deported from Ethiopia since last May. One man describes how armed men came to his house in the middle of the night and took him away before he could even say goodbye to his family. Although married to an Ethiopian, and having lived in Ethiopia for forty years, hatred left him no place in a country that he would have called his own. Now we see him trying to rebuild his life as he can.
But on the streets of the Eritrean capital Asmara, crowds celebrating victories in which thousands have died show how hard-won independence has bred a fierce patriotism and spirit of defiance in this tiny country of only three million. They may not be divided along lines of race, creed, or language, they may share many ties of culture and friendship, but this brutal war between brother nations looks set to endure.
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