Rebels in Ethiopia Work to Modernize Eritrea

OROTTA, Ethiopia— By day, this narrow valley carved into the steep mountains seems nearly deserted, the only movement herds of goats scrambling among the rocks. But as dusk falls and the danger of Ethiopian MIG bombers fades with the light, the valley springs to life.

Convoys of big Mercedes trucks pull out of hiding places under trees, ferrying food and supplies, their headlights catching camels lurching arrogantly in the brush. Men and women carrying flashlights and Kalashnikov rifles staff checkpoints neatly marked with stop signs showing an upraised palm.

In a hospital dug into the side of the mountain, rambling along in a corridor nearly three miles long, doctors in green surgical gowns are operating on wounded guerrillas and civilians. Workshops tucked into the ravines repair everything from electric generators to captured Soviet T-55 tanks, and tiny factories turn out plastic sandals, schoolbooks and spaghetti. War Began 27 Years Ago

This is the headquarters of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, one of the world's most remarkable guerrilla organizations, not only because of the duration of its struggle - 27 years - but also because of the extensive social and political network it has established in the region.

The rebels' war for independence, waged with little outside help, is based on their conviction that Eritrea, a former Italian colony that gives Ethiopia its only access to the Red Sea, was illegally made a part of the country after World War II and that linguistically, culturally and historically, Eritrea is separate.

Even as the fighting continues, the guerrillas, led by one-time campus Marxists, are also struggling to modernize a backward, traditionalist society. They are teaching an overwhelmingly illiterate people to read and write, building a primary health care system in a land ravaged by famine and disease, championing the rights of women who had been treated as chattel and introducing new technology.

In the last few months, the Eritreans have broken a nine-year-long stalemate of trench warfare, overrunning the main Ethiopian Army headquarters in the north and threatening the Soviet-backed regime of Lieut. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam. Despite the Eritrean gains - they control nearly three-quarters of the territory, although not the major cities - there is no end in sight to a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

No outside power supports the Eritreans, and other African nations oppose secession for fear that tribalism would splinter them too.

Starting from scratch, the Eritrean rebels have built an impressive, self-sufficient network of medical clinics, refugee relief centers, factories and schools.

A conversation with a rebel official inevitably begins with a statistics-packed review of the table of organization, and a list of accomplishments, usually coupled with the cheerful admission that they are only making a dent in an overwhelming problem. ''We make intravenous solutions, capsules, tablets, ointments, tinctures,'' said Sennay Kifleyesus, a pharmacist running a hidden plant here that produces the rebels' drugs and medicine. He went on with a list of ''four main types of antibiotics, vitamins, especially C and B-complex, anti-malaria pills - important because it's very common - aspirin, a basic list of 182 items.''

''We're not fully self-sufficient yet,'' he added apologetically, shining a flashlight on the rocky paths between his laboratories. ''Right now, we supply about 40 percent of our needs.'' In Shipping Containers, Modern Laboratories

Around a rock and behind a bush a door opens onto an interconnected series of cargo shipping containers, painted white, that are now laboratory rooms where workers in futuristic sterile coveralls and hoods check the drugs for purity. Elaborate machines mix compounds and spew out pills.

''Our medical department is in two sections, civilian and military,'' said Dr. Assefaw Tekeste, the director of civilian health services, showing a visitor through tents filled with quiet women and children who have lost legs to land mines.

''The central hospital here is at the top of the pyramid,'' he said. ''It has 400 inpatients at the moment. We have 6 regional hospitals in areas we control in the central highlands, 23 regional health centers, 32 health centers, 208 village clinics, which can serve 500 to 1,000 people.

''We have trained more than a thousand barefoot doctors,'' he added, referring to those trained in basic medical techniques.

The tour entered what appeared to be a stone hut that was actually a spotless operating theater, where a team of doctors, peering into a sophisticated magnifying device, were performing microsurgery on a man's eardrum, ruined by artillery fire.

Dr. Tekeste Fekadu, the military health director said, ''Behind the lines, we have a clinic at the battalion level, division hospital with mobile surgical units, regional hospitals and then the central hospital here, with a unit for prostheses.

''We have 35 certified doctors, 37 assistant doctors we have trained ourselves who can do simple operations, 150 nurses, 65 lab technicians and over 1,700 barefoot doctors. To compensate for the lack of helicopter evacuation, we carry the casualties out on our backs, but our mortality rate from stomach injuries compares favorably with the Americans in Vietnam. We have learned a lot.'' 'A Very Small Dent' In Vast Illiteracy

Andebrhan W. Giorgis, the Harvard-educated deputy chairman of the rebels' education department, who is trying to deal with a 90 percent illiteracy rate in the population of roughly 3.5 million, said: ''We have 165 schools, some 1,780 teachers and 27,000 students. We have devised a three-year program for adult education of reading, writing, arithmetic, elementary hygiene and some physical and social sciences.''

But he added, ''This is a very small dent.''

Playing with a kitten, he offered a visitor a glass of tea, an obligatory gesture here, serving from a thermos on the porch of the Zero School, the central boarding school operated by the rebel front.

The school, taking its name from the radio code for a nearby rebel headquarters, began in 1976 with 100 students. Today it is a complex of six schools, including one for fine arts, and has 4,600 students and 200 teachers.

Unlike the guerrillas of Afghanistan, who are fighting to maintain a traditional way of life in the face of that Soviet-backed regime's attempt to impose modernism, the Eritrean rebels are determined to create a new society. Nowhere is this more apparent than in their call for equality for women, traditionally confined to the kitchen and not allowed to speak in public. Now, wearing shorts and carrying Kalashnikovs, women make up nearly a third of the front-line guerrilla fighters.

In a part of the world where ties of tribe and religion define identity, the rebel front is trying to build this new society in a staggeringly diverse territory - about one-tenth of Ethiopia -that has nine languages and a people largely divided into Moslems of the lowlands and Christians of the highlands. Nationalism Traced To Italian Colonization

Ironically enough, the fierce sense of Eritrean nationalism, Eritreans themselves say, comes from having been colonized by Italy.

Italy founded its colony here in 1890, intending to use it as a springboard for further conquests in Africa. Small factories and, later, automobile repair garages were built, along with a network of roads hewn through the steep mountains. The local people worked as laborers and apprentices.

''Italy played a role in bringing people together and making them feel the same,'' said the Secretary General of the rebel front, Isseyas Aferworki, when asked about the roots of Eritrean nationalism.

After Italy's defeat in World War II and a brief period of British rule, the United Nations awarded Eritrea to Ethiopia and Emperor Haile Selassie in 1952. This was done largely at the insistence of the United States, which maintained a communications base near Asmara and wanted to keep the Red Sea ports of Massawa and Assab in the hands of its main ally in the area.

The United Nations plan called for a federation in which Eritrea would have an independent parliament, but within a decade the Emperor had annexed Eritrea. A military coup dethroned the Emperor in 1974, and three years later Ethiopia switched allegiance from Washington to Moscow. But Colonel Mengistu and his fellow officers, known as the Dergue or Committee, were no less determined to hang onto Eritrea.

The Emperor's moves had touched off mounting discontent, and the first shots of rebellion were fired in September 1961. The rebels, whose organization became known as the Eritrean Liberation Front, at first were mostly traditional and tribal leaders, with a strongly Moslem cast.

The rebellion was joined later by younger, more educated Eritreans, largely urban. Many were Christians, and a number were campus radicals at Haile Selassie University in Addis Ababa.

As the Eritreans fought the central Government, they also fought each other in an increasingly fierce civil war within the civil war, with the more modernist, leftist People's Liberation Front triumphing by 1981. Outside Support Is Said to Dry Up

In its initial stages, the Eritrean separatists received money from some Arab nations and military training from Cuba because they were opposing a Western-backed Government. Both these sources dried up when both the Government and the rebels turned left.

Recently, Colonel Mengistu has asserted that the rebels are backed by Arabs, which could raise the fears of Christian Ethiopians. The Eritreans deny this, saying most of their support comes from contributions by Eritrean expatriates.

Mr. Isseyas, the rebel leader, said: ''It's a misunderstanding when people try to talk about the E.P.L.F. as being a totally Marxist organization.''

In an interview at a base hidden in the mountaintops, the soft-spoken, lanky Mr. Isseyas looked puzzled for a moment when asked what the rebels' major accomplishment had been.

''We have been able to survive against all sorts of odds - that's the first thing,'' he said. ''We have learned to do things after a long process - a repetition of mistakes, confrontations, setbacks - but we have developed a proficiency in doing our jobs.'' 'We Have Come A Long Way'

In the darkening valleys below, the rebels were moving out, four-wheel-drive Toyotas bumping along the stream beds. Many stopped at roadblocks so men - and sometimes women - could give a traditional greeting of a hug and striking of shoulders.

Near the hospitals, men missing the lower parts of a leg exercised, walking with the aid of ski poles.

''We have come a long way,'' said Dr. Assefaw, the civilian health director, who has been in the field for 10 years. ''Today when I go to the front line, I will take a car and the necessary equipment. Before I would take a donkey. We never had houses like this; we slept under a tree.

''Our struggle has been a very isolated one. No superpower supports us. To the Soviets we are agents of imperialism. To the West we are Marxists. But there is some good about isolation. It steels us. We are self-sufficient.''

Map of Ethiopia indicating Eritera and Orotta (NYT) (pg. 1); photos of Eritrean guerrillas carrying equipment toward the front for a battle with Ethiopian troops (NYT/John Keller); an Eritrean guerrilla with a captured 40-round Soviet-made rocket launcher (NYT); an Eritrean sandal fctory dug into the side of a hill (NYT) (pg. 14)