Fighting Rebels And Royalists

All last week in Ethiopia's northern province of Eritrea, warfare continued between government forces and rebel soldiers who belong to the Eritrean Liberation Front, a well-armed Moslem guerrilla organization which is dedicated to whining Eritrea's independence from Ethiopia. The situation was summed up by a Western diplomat in Addis Ababa: "The country could fall apart one night."

While the fighting went on in the outskirts of Asmara, the Eritrean capital, the rebels were reported to have blown up an important bridge at Keren, on the road to the Sudan to the west. In a drive to cut off the road from the port city of Assab on the Red Sea, the main source of Ethiopia's oil, the guerrillas warned truck drivers: "Put your nose out of town and you will be roasted alive!" Nonetheless, government troops tried to consolidate their hold on Asmara. Refugees, many leading donkeys or pushing wheelbarrows laden with pots and pans, straggled from the city past government tanks and machine-gun positions. At week's end the estimate of soldiers and civilians killed in the civil war had risen to 3,000. There were also reports from Khartoum that Ethiopia had accepted a three-point proposal for a cease-fire in Eritrea proposed by the Sudanese government.

As if the fighting in Eritrea were not crisis enough, the military government in Addis Ababa--whose front man is Brigadier General Teferi Benti--also had to contend with a series of royalist revolts that stemmed from its overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie last September.

General Negategegne, formerly on the side of the ruling military council, has defected and joined forces with Ras Mengesha Seyoum, the deposed governor of Tigre province, which adjoins Eritrea. Mengesha, a distant relative of Haile Selassie, has an armed band of more than 4,000 peasants. Near Menz, some 85 miles north of the capital, two other aristocratic revolutionaries, Merid and Mesfin Biru, recently wiped out a government battalion.

Considering the circumstances, the inexperienced military rulers in Addis Ababa were understandably jittery--as shown by their treatment last week of TIME Correspondent Eric Robins, who flew into Addis Ababa from Nairobi, tried to file a dispatch and was interrogated and inexplicably imprisoned by Ethiopian secret police.

Wall Scrawl. "The fetid 10 ft. by 10 ft. cell was windowless, barred and infested with cockroaches, fleas and mosquitoes," Robins later reported of his temporary residence. "A single yellowed bulb in the ceiling burned throughout the night as all the dogs in Christendom howled round us. On the cracked wall opposite the bed there had been scrawled in two-inch letters, MAN WILL DIE BUT THE CAUSE WILL LIVE.

"At morning exercise, a cockney occupant told me cheerfully, They don't often let their victim go too early, mate.' But at 10 o'clock I was taken before the chubby commandant, who blandly asked if I had had a good night. Then he told me that I would be put on the noon flight out of Addis Ababa. He also asked when I might be back in Ethiopia. I replied that I thought that it probably rested a good deal with him."

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