Women hold the line in Africa's forgotten war
By Inigo Gilmore in Tsorona, Eritrea

ISSUE 1437 Sunday 2 May 1999


ERITREA'S female warriors are playing a crucial role
in one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent African
history.

In the past 10 months about 30,000 female Eritrean
soldiers, out of a mobilised force of 200,000, have
been sent to the front line, with trenches along the
old colonial-era border between the two countries,
where the Ethiopians are reported to have massed an
army of 300,000.

Since emerging as Africa's newest nation in 1993,
Eritrea has required all men and women aged 18 to 40
to do 18 months national service. Many of the women
fighters are veterans of the country's independence
war.

Although both sides possess modern weapons, the female
fighters who fought in a three-day battle in March at
Tsorona, 75 miles south of the Eritrean capital
Asmara, described scenes resembling a First World War
battlefield, with waves of Ethiopians walking into
relentless Eritrean machine-gun, mortar and tank fire.
Mikiely Bahlby, 25, a member of the elite Eritrean 525
commando unit, said: "The Ethiopians were being driven
forward like herds of cattle. First we threw hand
grenades and they were dying together in groups. Then
we opened fire with machine-guns and I found it easy
to kill them."

As she spoke, clutching a heavy Belgian BK
machine-gun, she glanced out beyond her trench to grim
scenes of carnage in the surrounding scrubland where
charred and fly-blown corpses of Ethiopian soldiers
lay strewn between burnt-out tanks.

The three-day encounter at Tsorona was dismissed by
the Ethiopian government as a skirmish; the Eritreans
say that an estimated 10,000 Ethiopians were killed,
57 of their tanks destroyed and another 20 captured.

In a repeat of tactics witnessed in the 1980s at the
height of the conflict between Ethiopia's former
Dergue military dictatorship and Eritrean
secessionists, dense formations of troops were pushed
forward into no-man's land with commanding officers
shooting those who refused to advance.


Another of Eritrea's female warriors, Sara
Ogbagergis-Dubarwa, 25, said she had been at the front
for almost a year. In the latest battle, she said, she
shot advancing Ethiopian soldiers with an AK-47
assault rifle as mortars and tank fire rained down
around her. "I've never experienced anything like it,"
she said. "They kept coming at us as though they were
thinking, 'We can overrun the trenches because they
are fewer than us'. We just kept on firing and I
killed many of them."

Tension between President Issaias Afewerki of Eritrea
and Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia's leader, who were
comrades-in-arms in the struggle against the Stalinist
Dergue regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam, has been
escalating since the two sides fell out over defining
their border last summer. As the tension has risen so
has the purchase of military hardware. The Ethiopians
have spent tens of millions of dollars buying T55
tanks from Bulgaria and SU-27 fighter bombers from
Russia, while Eritrea has bought an undisclosed number
of MiG-29 fighters.

The initial flashpoint for the latest outburst of
fighting was the Badme border area where, in
mid-February, Eritrea's defences buckled under an
Ethiopian ground assault backed by strikes from
bombers, fighter planes and helicopter gunships.

Despite Eritrea's eventual agreement to withdraw from
the disputed area - a key demand under a peace plan
drawn up by the Organisation of African Unity, which
is based in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa -
Ethiopia went on to attack Tsorona and launched air
strikes deep inside Eritrean territory. Eritreans fear
that the incursions indicate an Ethiopian desire to
re-impose control over them.

In the days after the battle for Badme - claimed as a
"victory" by Ethiopia even though it lost an estimated
10,000 to 15,000 soldiers against Eritrea's reported
losses of 2,000 to 3,000 - Ethiopian television
triumphantly broadcast pictures of dead and captured
Eritrean women fighters.

Miss Bahlby originally joined the Eritrean People's
Liberation Front in 1988, at the age of 14, and was
shot twice before being demobilised in 1994 after the
end of the 30-year secessionist war. Along with
thousands of other women, she volunteered to rejoin
the army after the Badme battle, and arrived in
Tsorona just days before the fighting there, having
left her family to run her general store. "Fighting is
like gambling - I can die, be captured or wounded just
like the men," she said. "The important thing is we
are protecting our country against invaders and I'm
not afraid to die."


Besides general soldiering, women serve as gunners on
tanks and as helicopter pilots. Some command men in
the field, the highest ranking female officer being a
colonel. They live with the men on the front line,
sharing everything from fighting to cooking.

For Sara Ogbagergis- Dubarwa, the challenge is to
demonstrate her bravery and ability as a soldier in
order to win respect from the men both at the front
and in her village near Asmara. Success in this, she
believes, will pave the way for a change in Eritrea's
traditional view of a woman's role. "We are showing by
our power that we can do the same things as men," she
said. "We can go back into society and society will
understand, 'Okay, women should not just do
housework'. In this way we will be able to participate
in every aspect of life."