By Dan Connell
ADI CAIEH, Eritrea — Each afternoon a cold wind howls over the lip of the plateau, some 2500 metres above sea level, sending clouds of thick brown dirt swirling through the empty streets, deserted except for swarms of small, scantily clad children. Their parents are in the surrounding countryside trying to salvage a harvest from their scorched grain fields. Otherwise there is little activity in this once bustling frontier outpost.
Adi Caieh is a dusty and desolate town left behind by political events in Asmara, the capital, and now dangling at the outer edge of Eritrea's deeply depressed postwar economy. Its current plight typifies the peacetime challenges the new Eritrean government faces after 30 years of war.
Eritrea's fight for independence from Ethiopia, which annexed the former Italian colony in 1962, ended last May with the capture of Eritrea's last remaining government-held cities by the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. Shortly afterward, Ethiopia's ruling military junta collapsed. The new Transitional Government of Ethiopia agreed to let the Eritreans hold a United Nations-supervised referendum to decide their future status in 1993.
However, the end of the fighting does not mean an end to the problems for the people of this war- and drought-ravaged Red Sea territory.
The Ethiopians left behind a devastated economy which the EPLF, now calling itself the Provisional Government of Eritrea, is trying to reconstruct. The Eritrean nationalists start with almost 90% of the population of 3.2 million on emergency food relief, an obsolete and badly damaged infrastructure, few resources on hand and almost no external assistance apart from emergency food aid.
Like much of Eritrea, the region around Adi Caieh is suffering from protracted drought. A late start and an early finish to the annual summer rains leaves much of the wheat and barley drying in the fields far short of maturity. The Eritrean Relief Association, the main agency for drought relief, is forecasting 70% crop failure, but this is only the start of the region's problems.
Under Ethiopian rule, Adi Caieh was an administrative centre for the province of Akele Guzai, an agricultural area with almost half a million inhabitants, most subsistence farmers who are so poor today that they lack seeds to plant for next season.
Employment in the town centred on the many government departments headquartered here. These are now all closed. EPLF administrators, agricultural specialists, doctors and other personnel are working for no pay, so they add little stimulus to the local economy.
Thousands of Ethiopian soldiers based here also fed money into the economy through scores of bars and restaurants. EPLF soldiers, however, are not paid, so their presence in place of the routed Ethiopian army also adds no cash to the local market. As a result, sed.
After EPLF fighters captured Adi Caieh in April 1990, they built a new road up the steep escarpment to supply their forces. The road also facilitated commerce with coastal traders who plied their small boats across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia, but the Gulf War brought a halt to this bustling trade as the international armada blockading Iraq also disrupted informal commerce throughout the region.
Then the EPLF capture of Asmara last May shifted the main trade routes to the formerly embattled centre of the country. This leaves Adi Caieh and many other rural areas almost entirely cut off from what little trade takes place between Eritrea and the outside world.
According to Luel Ghebre-ab, Adi Caieh's chief administrator and the first and only woman mayor of a large Eritrean municipality, the town needs rebuilding almost from the ground up. She charges that the Ethiopian military government did nothing for the town in its 15 years of rule but tax its residents to support the war while letting the community's infrastructure run down and decay.
The local water system, installed by Italian colonists in the 1930s, has never been repaired. It now leaks over a third of its water supply into the ground. Ethiopian soldiers stripped the forests around the town, leaving the area subject to devastating soil erosion and the people without firewood or construction materials for their houses, many of which were damaged by the war, according to Ghebre-ab. "Thirty years of war have taken everything to zero", she says.
Most of the EPLF army is now engaged in rehabilitation work, and the new government has announced a program of "national service" that requires all unemployed youth to take basic military training and to participate in public work projects for 12 to 18 months.
An EPLF agriculturalist said they are planting a million eucalyptus seedlings in Akele Guzai province this year.
They are also terracing many of the steeper hillsides to curb erosion. "We have to travel with what we have — we can't expect the new government to help at this time, and we can't sit idle and wait for something to come from heaven", Ghebre-ab said.