Ethiopia Launches Large-Scale Offensive Against Eritrea

The Ethiopian government has today launched a large-scale attack against Eritrea on the Mereb-Setit front. The attack started at 6:00 a.m. this morning.

Ethiopia's impending offensive has been in the offing for days now:
* In early January, the Addis Abeba regime declared the ongoing OAU peace process as "good as dead."
* Soon after, it declared northern Ethiopia a "no fly zone" to all commercial aircraft.
* Ethiopia further opened a new front in mid-January in the Tsorona area (central Eritrea) by deploying around 55,000 troops.
* Earlier this week, Ethiopia's Prime Minister formally announced to the press that the attack could start "any time."
* Yesterday, the Ethiopian regime fabricated a story accusing Eritrea of bombing AdiGrat. This was designed to give it a pretext to break the US brokered moratorium on air strikes in preparation for the large-scale war that it intended to unleash. (The utter fallacy of this fabrication was corroborated by, among others, the US Government and news agencies. Reuters has established through direct calls to residents in AdiGrat that there was no bombing of any kind and that the town was quiet and peaceful.)

Ethiopia has unleashed the large-scale offensive today amid ongoing endeavors by the OAU, the UN and other concerned parties to seek a peaceful resolution to the border dispute. The TPLF regime in Addis Abeba has been consistently rejecting calls for a cessation of hostilities and threatening to launch the war "any time" which it has done today.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Asmara, 6 February 1999