By Rosalind Russell
Asmara - Eritrea said on Tuesday that it had recaptured its western town of Tesseney from Ethiopian forces after a day-long battle which forced thousands more civilians from their homes, adding to the region's humanitarian crisis.
The Eritrean government said its forces had "totally routed" one Ethiopian army division and two brigades in heavy fighting in and around Tesseney on Monday.
UN officials said thousands of civilians were fleeing from western Eritrea into neighbouring Sudan every day and that the recent flight of hundreds of thousands of people across southern and western Eritrea was exacerbating severe food shortages.
Ethiopia reignited the two-year-old border war between the neighbours last month with a surprise offensive that thrust deep into western Eritrea.
Ethiopia said last week it had effectively won the war and would withdraw from western Eritrea but, while pulling out of the strategic town of Barentu, it continued to occupy a string of smaller towns close to the Sudanese border.
Retreating Ethiopian soldiers looted and vandalised Barentu, and Eritrea has accused the Ethiopian army of destroying homes and property across the fertile region.
"Ethiopia's sinister design is aimed at delaying and preventing the early return of the population so as to disrupt agricultural production during the critical months of June when the rains are due," the foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
The United Nations estimates that as many as 750 000 Eritreans - one-quarter of the country's population - have been displaced by the recent fighting, fuelling a new refugee crisis in a country already stricken by drought.
Even worse, most of the civilians are from Eritrea's western breadbasket region and are fleeing just when they should be planting crops for crucial grain harvests late in the year.
Those harvests are now expected to fail - yet hundreds of thousands of mouths must be fed in camps that have sprung up in central Eritrea and eastern Sudan.
"The nightmare scenario is that when the rains do come, the people will still be in the camps with no shelter and there will be more and more we cannot reach." said Trevor Rowe of the UN's World Food Programme.
"This is a potentially horrible humanitarian crisis which is burning slowly while most eyes are focused on the conflict."
About 55 000 Eritreans have fled into Sudan, and the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said at least 2 800 more crossed the border on Monday and Tuesday.
UNHCR spokesperson Paul Stromberg said the sound of shellfire from the battle of Tesseney was audible some 50km away in the Sudanese town of Kassala, where the agency has set up the temporary camps.
"Our staff on the ground say they could hear shelling through the morning," Stromberg said. "At least two of the civilians who crossed had been wounded in the fighting."
There was no word of progress at peace talks being held in Algiers under the mediation of the Organisation of African Unity.
Ethiopia says it will withdraw its troops from Eritrea only if they are replaced by an international peacekeeping force, while Eritrea says it will not accept a ceasefire until all Ethiopian troops have left its soil.
There was heavy fighting over the weekend near Eritrea's Red Sea port of Assab and UN officials warned that more people were now trying to escape from that area too.
"Throughout Eritrea, people are trying to find some provisional shelter, some shade in scorching heat which exceeds °40C on a daily basis in very dry weather," UNHCR spokesperson Kris Janowski said in Geneva. - Reuters