H o p e____T h i s___D o s e n 't___h a p p e n___i n____ S o malia
I n__ t h e___ l a s t__ w a r__ b e t w e e n___ E r e r t r e a___ a n d ___e t h i o p i a___ 125,000

E t h i o p i a n___ t r o o p s__ w e r e___ k i l l e d___ a n d ___19,000 __E r e t r e a n___ t r o o p s___ w e r e___ k i l l e d.__ I __t h i n k ___ E r i t r e a___ s h o u l d n t___ c o m e___ c u z____ i t____ w i l l___ m a k e___ i t__ a__m u c h___ b i g g e r_____ w a r ____t h a t____ w i l l____ h a v e____ a__ l o t___ o f___ p e o p l e__ d y i n g.
The Tigrayan-dominated regime that seized power in Ethiopia in 1991 at first agreed to the secession of Eritrea in 1993, which ended the world's longest-running civil war and met longstanding Eritrean aspirations for nationhood. Eritrean rebel forces had, in fact, cooperated with their Tigrayan counterparts during long years of struggle to overthrow the military regime of Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam. But Ethiopia's claim to Eritrea, which had previously constituted its entire coastline, would not be so rapidly resolved. It flared into battles along seemingly-insignificant stretches of desert border, fuelled by Tigrayan expansionism and a desire to recover strategic access to the Red Sea. Very quickly, the largest land war in Africa was underway, and it resurrected the pattern of former Ethiopian campaigns against Eritrean rebels during the 1970s and 1980s. Massed armies of undertrained Ethiopian conscripts were flung into the teeth of fortified Eritrean positions; the number of killed is probably in the low tens of thousands at the time of writing. In recent warfare, the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict is probably matched only by the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s as a World War One-style meat-grinder. In mid-1999, the distinguished war correspondent David Hirst described one of the bloodiest battles of the war:
Nearly two months after the battle of Tsorona, the bloodiest yet of this desert "border war," Ethiopian soldiers still lie unburied on the baking plain, just metres from Eritrean trenches. A fifth of Eritrean combatants are women. "I was born in Addis Ababa [the Ethiopian capital]," said Agib Haile, aged 21. "Ethiopians are my friends. It was horrible." The horror was less in what Eritreans themselves suffered than in what they inflicted on the enemy. The Ethiopian commanders' strategy was simple. Deploying tens of thousands of barely trained recruits along a 5km front, they drove them forward, wave upon wave, with the aim of blowing them up on minefields until they had cleared a path to the Eritrean front line for better trained infantry, mechanised forces and armour. ... It didn't work: the soldiers hardly raised their weapons, but linked hands in communal solace in the face of certain death from mines, the trenches, perfectly aimed artillery and their own officers, who shot them if they turned and ran. This was the horror of which Ms. Haile and her companions spoke, of mowing down the horde till their Kalashnikovs were too hot to hold.
Hirst adds that the present Ethiopian regime is "a thin democratic facade for a Tigrayan supremacy that was even more extreme than that of the Amharans" under the old Ethiopian military regime. "Tigrayans dominated the administration, security services, police and army. ... It was Oromo peasants who were selected as human minesweepers, and Tigrayan officers who shot them from the rear. Yet the TPLF [Tigrayan People's Liberation Front] showed hardly less contempt for its own people. Local Tigrayan villagers were pressed into that suicidal train, and many Tigrayan soldiers died in tanks." (Hirst, "Ethiopia strikes out for the sea," Guardian Weekly, May 30 1999.) Conscription policies thus overlapped with ethnicity, class, and other variables (notably age), the standard pattern the world over. The result in the Ethiopian/Eritrean conflict is mass killing that, if not gendercide strictly viewed, must still be seen as a profoundly gender-selective slaughter -- one of the worst of the post-World War II era, in fact. This is especially true in that, as with the Iran-Iraq conflict, the Ethiopian/Eritrean war has been confined so far to thinly-populated border areas, and has not swept up large numbers of civilians in the killing -- apart from the young men press-ganged as minesweepers and cannon fodder. (The Eritrean military is the only one in the world that conscripts women into active combat service, but casualties have been much lower on the Eritrean side, as Hirst's account of the Tsorona battle suggests.) (Update: In June 2000, after renewed fighting that saw a rearmed Ethiopia make major gains, the two belligerents agreed to a ceasefire. The border issue, however, remains unresolved.)
Ethiopia
Military branches:
Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF): Ground Forces, Air Force
note: Ethiopia is landlocked and has no navy; following the secession of Eritrea, Ethiopian naval facilities remained in Eritrean possession
Manpower available for military service:
males age 18-49: 14,568,277
Manpower fit for military service:
males age 18-49: 8,072,755
Military expenditures - dollar figure:
$595.9 million (2000 est.)
Military expenditures - percent of GDP:
4.4% (2000 est.)
Eritrea
Military branches:
Army, Navy, Air Force
Manpower available for military service:
males age 18-49: 893,361
Manpower fit for military service:
males age 18-49: 555,553
Military expenditures - dollar figure:
$520.1 million (2000 est.)
Military expenditures - percent of GDP:
30.7% (2000 est.)