On a continent of conflicts that often make little sense to outsiders, the war that reignited last weekend on the Horn of Africa may make the least sense of them all.
The two nations here, Ethiopia and Eritrea, know full well that they are shambling into a confrontation nearly impossible for either of them to win. The United States has praised both nations for their bright leaders and promising economies. Yet people here talk with resignation of how the war will inevitably ruin much of what they have achieved.
Most of all, the war has an unusual potential for destruction. Ethiopia and Eritrea, once brother nations, have spent the last eight months since hostilities ceased buying as much weaponry -- planes, tanks, artillery -- as possible. In manpower alone, the war could become the biggest in Africa. Estimates of the number of soldiers along the border range from 120,000 to 400,000.
These troops are dug into trenches, hard to overtake. Each nation is run by former guerrilla leaders, and neither side is likely to back away now.
''We are accustomed to war,'' Hambissa Ensermu, a 19-year-old student at Addis Ababa University, said the other day. ''The only choice we have now is to fight.''Continue reading the main story
A Western diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, warned, ''We have got to accept the fact that this war is going to produce tens of thousands of dead if it goes ahead.''
Though there has been a lull in hostilities over the last several days, Eritrea already says it killed roughly 3,000 Ethiopian soldiers since fighting broke out Feb. 6. While Ethiopia ridicules that claim as wildly inflated, it says more than 7,000 Eritreans have been killed or wounded.
The numbers on both sides, even if exaggerated, nonetheless hint at the broad concern among outside nations of how bad things might get if the fighting, so far confined to two spots along the border, expands into full-scale conflict.
On Thursday, the State Department advised American citizens to leave both countries, citing worries that the fighting could spread to either capital, as it did last spring, when Ethiopia launched heavy attacks against Asmara.
Aside from the weaponry and number of soldiers, there is another element that may be driving the conflict to catastrophe, a quality one observer called the two nations' ''knack for stubbornness.''
The dispute is nominally about a rocky piece of land along the border, known as the Badme region, which is barely populated and holds no special significance, as one merchant in the main market here said.
''That area, I think, is desert,'' the merchant, Tilahun Wolde, 25, said. ''It's valueless.''
Nonetheless, he said he believed that Ethiopia should fight as long as necessary to reclaim it from the Eritreans, who have held it since May and feel just as strongly about it.
''It's territory, you know,'' he said. ''We'll die for our country.''
Leaders from around the world, including Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary General, have called for a halt to the fighting. This week, President Clinton spoke out for the second time recently, saying that ''a peaceful solution can and must be found without delay.''
His comments underscore that this, unlike most conflicts in Africa, is one in which America has definable interests. Each nation is a strong ally, and Eritrea sits astride the oil channels of the Red Sea.
Despite their dispute, the two nations have been regarded as being comparatively stable in a turbulent region. Their neighbor to the west, Sudan, is a haven for both terrorists and Islamic militants, American officials contend. Their neighbor to the east, Somalia, where 18 American lives were lost in 1993 in an effort to alleviate famine, remains fractured among competing clans.
More abstractly, the war would seem to sound death knells for the notion of an ''African renaissance,'' pushed with special vigor over the last few years by the United States and derided by many less optimistic outsiders. Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, and Isaias Afwerki, President of Eritrea, were among the ''new breed'' of African leaders hailed by the Clinton Administration.
The roots of their conflict are long and tangled. Mr. Meles, from the Ethiopian border province of Tigray, and Mr. Afwerki fought side by side for years in the war to overthrow the brutal regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam. They won in 1991, and two years later, Eritrea, which had been the northernmost province of Ethiopia only since 1962, separated peacefully.
But the divorce of the two nations, with strong historic and economic ties, did not come without tension. The most pronounced split came in 1997, when Eritrea introduced its own currency over Ethiopia's objections. Ethiopia responded by demanding that all trade with Eritrea be conducted in hard currency.
The two nations also never formally drew their 600-mile border. Last May, the bad feelings erupted when Eritrean troops occupied the Badme region, roughly 250 square miles. The Eritreans said that old colonial maps showed that it belonged to them, but the Ethiopians said it had always been theirs.
After brief but fierce battles, the two sides agreed to a cease-fire last June. Since then, they have worked toward both war and peace.
For war, each nation has bought hundreds of millions of dollars in military hardware, mostly from Russia and Ukraine, several diplomats said. Eritrea purchased half a dozen Russian MIG fighter jets, essentially doubling the size of its small air force.
For peace, the Organization of African Unity drafted a plan that called for Eritrea to withdraw its troops and for Ethiopian administration to be restored as international mediators decided where, in fact, the border lay. Ethiopia accepted the plan. But Eritrea has objected to a renewed Ethiopian administrative presence and has demanded instead that impartial monitors be placed in the area.
''We have said Eritrea is willing to leave the disputed areas,'' said Yemane Ghevreab, an aide to Mr. Afwerki. ''We are saying that the other side should also withdraw.''
Eritrea also has called for any peace plan to address what it calls the violations of the human rights of the 52,000 Eritreans deported from Ethiopia since the first round of hostilities. Ethiopia says that nearly 40,000 of its citizens have been ejected from Eritrea. Human rights officials say both claims are inflated.
Most foreign nations seem gingerly to blame Eritrea for not accepting the O.A.U. plan, the only peace proposal on the table.
And Ethiopia has been using that refusal by Eritrea as its first line of defense in the battle for public opinion.
''This is not only an O.A.U. exercise,'' Ethiopia's Foreign Minister, Seyoum Mesfin, said in an interview. ''It's the voice of the international community, which Ethiopia has accepted and Eritrea has not.''
There are currently no negotiations, and most people here believe that all-out war is inevitable. Mr. Mesfin said that Eritrea must be taught that ''acquiring territory by use of force is unacceptable to civilized nations.''
Mr. Ghevreab, of Eritrea, accused Ethiopia of resuming the hostilities Feb. 6, in what he called ''an adventurist, very reckless path.''
''It's sad,'' he said. ''We shouldn't have come to this.''
One Western defense official theorized that the fighting may in fact have begun by accident. The reason is that the battles have been confined to only two areas along the border, rather than along the entire front as might have been expected if either side was planning an all-out attack.
With so many troops in place along the border and clear boundaries yet to be marked between them, there was, and remains, ample room for miscalculation.