Appointment in Asmara

For decades, the "empire" of Ethiopia has really been nothing more than a collection of disparate feuding fiefdoms held together by the military power of deposed Emperor Haile Selassie and the aristocratic Amhara tribe of the Central Highlands. Last week, as fighting flared across the northern province of Eritrea, the old empire appeared to be on the verge of civil war and perhaps of actual disintegration.

The center of the battle was the palm-fringed city of Asmara, Eritrea's capital, which was rocked by mortar, bazooka and howitzer fire as rebel commandos attacked army and navy installations. One exchange caught a group of 30 Americans, including the local consul, in a social club; they gamely sang John Brown's Body and other traditional songs as tracer bullets arced overhead. A U.S. communications base was hit in another assault. Throughout the week, Ethiopian planes bombed and strafed guerrilla concentrations and mud-hut villages suspected of supporting the rebels. By week's end, according to some accounts, as many as 2,000 people had been killed.

The troubles in Eritrea date back to 1962, when Haile Selassie annexed the former Italian colony. Over the years, the rebel forces of the predominantly Moslem Eritrean Liberation Front gained control of the countryside, but have never made much headway against Ethiopian forces amassed at Asmara. Even after Haile Selassie was overthrown last September, the position of the guerrillas did not improve appreciably--partly because the front man for the new military government, General Aman Michael Andom, was himself an Eritrean and tried to solve the problem by granting greater autonomy to the province. Ever since Andom was killed last November by some of his own subordinates, however, the two sides in the Eritrean dispute have been headed for war.

The showdown came two weeks ago.

The Ethiopian government, which had been toying with the idea of negotiating with the rebels, bluntly announced that it had decided instead to crush them by force. The same day, Eritrean guerrillas --armed to the hilt by Libya, Algeria and other militant Arab powers--ambushed and burned seven fuel trucks 30 miles from the Eritrean port of Assab. Two days later, they destroyed an Ethiopian army column, then launched the heaviest assault on the provincial capital in the 13-year history of the revolt.

The unrest spread beyond Eritrea to Tigre province, just south of Asmara, where guerrillas blew up a bridge and halted a convoy of 50 army tanks bound for the relief of the city. In Addis Ababa, a few skirmishes took place between nervous soldiers and civilians. The government was said to be setting up three concentration camps in the capital in possible preparation for the internment of tens of thousands of Eritreans who live there. In case serious fighting breaks out in the city, the junta was reported to be moving Haile Selassie from the National Palace to a secret hideout in the country. The military rulers do not want the former Emperor to be killed, because they know that they would be blamed for his death, and they are still acutely sensitive to the reaction of other African leaders to his fate.

In its official statements, the Addis Ababa junta discounted the seriousness of the Eritrean revolt. But in Beirut, an Eritrean guerrilla leader vowed that if the Ethiopian government should try to step up the fighting, "the whole northeast of Africa shall burn."

Civil War. Grandiose as that boast may be, the rebel leader had a point. As the fighting in Asmara indicated, the guerrilla force may well be too large and too well armed to be defeated militarily. Moreover, Ethiopia today is ruled by an unstable, volatile military government riven with quarreling factions. If full-scale fighting continues in the north, the junta could easily find itself in the middle of a multisided civil war in which the chief casualty might turn out to be the ancient empire itself--and its military rulers.

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