 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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