Killing field barricaded with corpses

BUT FOR the colour snapshots of girlfriends, the human litter covering the ground around Eritrea's trenches must be identical to that which surrounded soldiers in the battle of the Somme: hats, buttons, belts, bullets and boots.

Here, in the world's biggest war, 14 months old now and stretching along a 600-mile front, the living crawl surreptitiously below ground, in two-metre trenches. The dead lie on the surface - decomposing Ethiopians from a human wave, apparently sacrificed to Eritrean landmines by their superiors.

Combining First World War tactics, Korean war weaponry and Napoleonic field-hospital care, this war began with a skirmish over a border violation and is now spreading across the Horn of Africa to encompass Somalia and northern Kenya. At least 50,000 soldiers have died, and some 400,000 Ethiopians and Eritreans are mobilised.

This week, at the end of the Organisation of African Unity's summit in Algiers, Eritrea said it was ready to accept a "framework agreement" for a ceasefire. But at the same time, in a letter to the Algerian President, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who chaired a meeting on the issue, Eritrea demanded reparations.

This new stipulation - of compensation for Eritreans deported from Ethiopia since the war started - is characteristic of the negotiating process in this conflict. Neither side trusts the other, each accuses the other of invading first and both want to retain the moral high ground.

Before anything can be achieved, a ceasefire is needed. The rainy season, which has just begun, may bring a lull in the fighting, but only if both sides consider that they have sufficiently consolidated their positions.

As they wait for the weather or the diplomats to do their work, troops on both sides are on full alert at Tsorona, as they are on the four other fronts in the trench war.

From the Eritrean side, the view over the ridge of the trench - towards Ethiopian positions 400 metres to the south - is of a singed scrubland plain of burnt thorn trees and tanks, trucks and personnel carriers.

This is the minefield the Ethiopians walked into and hundreds of bodies have lain here since March, frozen in writhing positions. The stench is permanent. Eritrea said 57 tanks were destroyed in a 60-hour battle and 10,000 Ethiopians killed, wounded or captured. Ethiopia matched the figures and claimed the battle as a victory.

Nineteen-year-old Letebrehane Teclezeghi, one of about 40,000 women fighting for Eritrea, said: "The fighting did not stop for three days. They attacked first by sending a human wave over the landmines, then came the tanks and vehicles.

"It was intense. The mines were blowing up, the anti-tank missiles and fighter planes were overhead," said Ms Teclezeghi.

"We were firing and throwing grenades as fast as we could. We did not eat or drink any water for three days.

"We just fired everything we had. We retreated from this place for a few days but on the third day we launched a counter attack."

The Eritreans, using a bulldozer, have created a bank of earth and bodies that runs behind their trench, leaving heads, hands and feet protruding. Other Ethiopian corpses have just been left to the elements. The powerful sun has peeled their skin from their skulls. To the war-possessed Eritreans, the corpses seem to serve as ghoulish trophies - devils defeated in their midst.

"The Ethiopians cannot attack again because, if they do, they must walk over the bodies of their dead comrades," said Ms Teclezeghi, on watch duty with her AK47 in the thin shade of a thorn tree.

Neither side will state its motivation for allowing a border skirmish at Badme in May last year to deteriorate into full-scale war.

Eritrea became Africa's newest independent nation in 1993 after a 30-year war against Ethiopia to win back the colonial borders drawn for it by Italy at the beginning of the century.

But the sacrosanct 1908 frontier has left Ethiopia with no ports and with the indignity of watching a minor economic miracle unfold in Eritrea - a nation of just 3.5 million people, run with military efficiency by 53-year-old President Issaias Afewerki.

It has a powerful and wealthy diaspora - for every Eritrean at home there are said to be four abroad - and, this year, the exiles are expected to send home about $400m (pounds 260m) for the war effort.

The money will go a long way: the list price of a MiG-29 fighter plane - of which Eritrea bought six earlier this year - is $20m, but the aircraft are said to be available for as little as $5m.

There are strong rumours that Eritrea is receiving support from Libya and possibly also Egypt, which is ever keen to see Ethiopia distracted from plans to exploit the Nile.

Eritrea is also able to draw on support and to foment anger among rebel groups in Ethiopian border zones with Somalia and northern Kenya. Thus, clashes in the last few weeks involving Ethiopian troops and the Oromo Liberation Front and Ogaden National Liberation Front have been seen as a sign that new fronts are opening up in the war.

Ethiopia, which has a population of about 60 million, is governed by a minority Tigrayan government - comrades in arms of the Eritreans who overthrew Mengistu Haile Mariam's dictatorship in 1991.

But the Tigrayans running the huge multi-ethnic Ethiopian state feel a need to assert themselves in the face of tensions that threaten the very fabric of their historic and proud nation.

The Tigrayans number only 4 million, against 18 million Amharans - the henchmen of Mengistu - and 20 million Oromos, always oppressed, spread over several countries, and harbouring their own ambitions for an Eritrea mark II.

Pride, strategy and nationalism seem to be the determining factors in this trench war where neither side seems fazed by extremes of brutality. The First World War gave Europe poets and pacifists but no such individualism has inveigled itself into these trenches.

The world is still busy with Kosovo - in April three plane loads of Red Cross blankets, destined for the displaced in this war, were flown from Kenya to the Balkans. Besides, the only non-African peace effort - by the United States last year - merely had the effect of stopping fighting in the rainy season, during which both sides went shopping for arms.