'RUSSIA'S VIETNAM' is an inexact and incorrect description. But on the emotional level it does sum up what is going on in Eritrea.
Led by Soviet generals and serviced by Cuban and Soviet advisers', the Ethiopian military regime launched most serious offensive against Eritrea on 18 November. Subsequent fighting has led to the recapture of all the major towns held nationalists since early 1977.
The result has been the uprooting of large sections of the population, the exacerbation of food shortages to famine proportions and the retreat of the nationalists into the countryside.
Perhaps as many as a third of the four million Eritreans refugees. By last July the numbers in Ethiopian-occupied Asmara shrunk from 250,000 to less than 100.000. 30.000 more were made homeless in the Ethiopian capture of Keren in November.
The civilian casualties in this latest offensive have been horrific. Eritrean Relief Association reports:
*In large areas crops burnt to ashes. About 160 villages have suffered heavy damage and 40 of them have been completely ruined. 5,000 civilians are reported seriously wounded or dead, and 8,000 others require medical attention.
Even worse is the nature of those casualties. People are not just killed and maimed; they maimed Napalm B, bombs and defoliant poisons. And all this in the name of socialism.
The plight of the forgotten on all sides. Being victims of the Soviet Union does not qualify them for Western aid. The British government has sent a measly £75,000 to the Red Cross-and Red Crescent.
LINKED It refuses to send to the Eritrean Relief Association, organisation operating in the war zones, because it is linked to the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front.
What aid there is never rear es those who need it. When the Eritr. ns LOOK Massawa they undistributed Cross supplies.
John Pilger, one of an honourable handful of journalists to take up the Eritreans' case, has reported human cost caused by the lack of medical supplies. Eritrea's 16 - yes SIAICCE virtually none of the most basic trained medical aids. For example, Eritrean doctor writes to Pilger on how amputations "The lucky ew anaesthetic. But for most there is only surgical spirit and a mouth gag. This is terrible for the younger boys.... but there is nothing we can do.
have nothing.
Almost all the refugees suffer from malaria and dysentery and one child in three has tuberculosis or trachoma or severe malnutrition or all three.
numerous and Vietnamese NLF.
past Ethiopia preliminary by bombardments followed by disciplined and EPLF transformation.
These claims are now had weeks.
Nevertheless
The MIG-19s, have been told Dan Connell of Reuters:
'We saw Ethiopians.
Cubans... _ saw them firing killed and cluster Asmara Eritreans is The two major Eritrean liberation have disciplined, effective guerilla forces - probably militarily superior to anything of their type since the Previously they have easily overrun their raggle-taggle opponents. In the attacked with massive but hastily levied peasant armies'. This time the Eritreans faced Bai and artillery swift, sophisticated used.
communiques repeatedly point to Soviet and Cuban officering as the explanation for this sudden are difficult to substantiate since they come only from the Eritrean political organisations and a tiny number of journalists who have visited the country in recent the evidence impressive. Many refugees report the the presence of Cuban troops operating the Ethiopian artillery and flying their 21s and 23s. One of them white HICH Most of them were The Ethiopian militia was in front, and the Massawa sioned officers. The EPLF also says Soviet warships have been bombarding the coastline and landing troops and supplies.
reports are not definitiv roof. But they offer strong evidenc of one of the most brutal crimes against socialism by its self-styled proponents.
Yet, even on the rare occasions it mentions Eritrea, the left has almost totally ignored the possibility that Cuban and Soviet troops have been POLITICAL The political evidence of Cuban and Soviet support for the Derg, the Ethiopian ruling military council, is there for all to see. Mengistu, the Derg leader, is the regular recipient of large arms supplies from the Soviet Union and treacly panegyrics in Granma, the Cuban party paper Much is made of the insistence of Cubans, particular, on 'political solution' to the problem of Eritrea. Even the way the question is posed is revealing.
Nations are not 'problems' which have solutions, political, military or otherwise. They are entities with the indivisible right to determine the territorial allegiance of their state.
/SOUTH Ethiopian soldier with poster reading 'Everything to the war front' at the time of the war with Somalia.
the need for unity.
But what unity is possible between ppressed peoples when one of ti lations is burning the flesh off th other with Napalm B or penetratin its guts with the deadly needles o anti-personnel cluster bombs?
Eritrea has every nationhood and self-determination It was federated to Ethiopia in 1952 by United Nations mandate — not the without even the UN's stamp legality, the regime then destroyed all Eritrean and deprived its people of the most basic rights, such as the use of their languages.
In those days particularly American, was Addis Ababa's major Cubans, no doubt to their present embarrassment, trained and suppor ted the Eritrean liberation movement.
When the upsurge came against the old regime in 1974 it was a general strike of the Eritrean workers which struck the first and most decisive blow against the monarchy Haile Selassie fell because of the most enormous workers and peasants, Eritrean and Ethiopian. Yet it was not the masses who seized power but a small clique of army officers.
Because of the chronic weakness of the state apparatus and the native claim to institutions flows backer considerations.
SHIFTED mobilisation when at will:
The latter phrase is in danger of becoming newspeak for genocide in Angola the Cubans are doubtless moved by some healthy considerations. But the root of the betrayal in Eritrea lies in their failure to understand that support for the Ethiopian revolution is not the same support for the Derg indeed the two are incompatible.
The reasons for such mistakes -the initial peculiarities of the Cubar revolution, the all-important role of a single crop in the Cuban economy, the absence of socialist democracy, and dependence on the Soviet Union -lie outside the scope of this article.
But effectively the Cubans fall into line with Soviet foreign policy, which far more cynical Strategy -demands that Moscow builds up its relations with African regimes, especially those as geographically key as Ethiopia. But relations with the imperialist world and the interests of the bureaucracy demand that socialist revolution be actively discouraged.
That is how such farces can occur as the switch around of alliances in 1977 Soviet-backed and US-backed Ethiopia swapped sides. If class affiliations are a matter of indifference, alliances can be shifted yesterday's "progressive and