ASMARA, Eritrea, Oct. 9 — The first thing you notice about Eritrea is that no one ever locks up a bike.
It is one of the poorest countries on the planet, situated in one of the world’s most reliably violent regions, the Horn of Africa, yet Eritrea is virtually crime-free.
Anytime, day or night, young couples stroll freely down the palm-lined avenues of Asmara, the capital. Old men in tweed jackets and vintage Ray-Bans park themselves at the 1930s chrome-trimmed Art Deco cafes and soak up the scene.
But beneath the peace, harmony and South Beach style that once made Eritrea the little gem of Africa, cracks are beginning to show. There are bread lines, milk lines and lines for rationed cooking gas. At night, dissidents meet on dark streets to chat secretly in parked cars.
Because of the rising prospects of war with Ethiopia, essentially Round 2 of a border conflict that has already killed 100,000 people, tens of thousands of Eritrean students have been conscripted into the army.
Relations with the West, especially the United States, have deteriorated to a historic low point, with the State Department threatening to designate Eritrea, a tiny country on the Red Sea that most Americans have never heard of, as a terrorist state for its support of Islamist rebels in Somalia.
As the country hits its most difficult point since winning its hard-fought independence 14 years ago, its people, once so famously united, are divided about what to do.
“We just have to keep making sacrifices,” said Letedngel Temelso, a mother of five and former guerrilla fighter who still has bits of shrapnel in her lungs. Sacrifice, she said, is part of the Eritrean national ethos.
But a man named George, who walks Asmara’s streets with a baseball cap pulled down low because he is part of an underground opposition cell, said that was ridiculous.
“We’ve been stoic long enough,” he said, adding that such criticism was not allowed and that if he gave his full name, he would be jailed. “We didn’t fight all these years for this.”
Eritreans are proud of their history, even their colonial history. The Italians ruled the country for 51 years. After World War II, when Italy lost its few colonies, the world was not sure what to do with Eritrea. The superpowers stood by when Ethiopia swallowed it whole in 1962, which started a 30-year guerrilla war that Eritreans call “the struggle.” Their heterogeneous society rallied together, with Christians and Muslims, Tigrinya and Tigre (two of the bigger tribes) and men and women fighting together on the front lines.
The Eritreans won the struggle in 1993 and Eritrea became an independent nation. At the time, the country was in ruins, with few natural resources. Its soil was pebbly and dry. But it possessed collective values forged in the trenches and stressing self-reliance that seemed so different from those of older African nations that were corrupt, debt-ridden and torn by ethnic rivalries.
“Eritrea showed enormous promise in the 1990s,” said Dan Connell, a journalism professor at Simmons College in Boston who covered the war in the 1970s and has been writing about the country ever since.
“But now you have a quiet population that is seething underneath,” he added, saying the government’s strict control of the economy and political culture were breeding resentment.
There is only one legal political party, the Marxist-inspired People’s Front for Democracy and Justice. The president, Isaias Afewerki, a former guerrilla leader with an intelligent, easygoing charm that belies a much steelier side, has been ruling since 1993.
When a group of prominent Eritreans spoke out in 2001, they were jailed and never heard from again.
And the news media are dominated by the state-run Eri-TV, which sends its reporters around in little blue vans with “Serving the Truth” painted on the sides.
Eritrean officials are unapologetic. “Whether there’s democracy or not, whether there’s freedom of expression or not, the ultimate judge will be the people of this country,” Mr. Isaias said.
He said his people supported him and understood that the problem with Ethiopia had “affected every aspect of our lives,” as he put it.
“Our political process overall has been held hostage because of this,” he said.
Eritrea, with a population of five million, and Ethiopia, population 77 million, went to war in 1998 over a seemingly insignificant border town called Badme. Thousands of soldiers were cut down in World War I-style trench warfare.
American diplomats helped broker a truce two years later but then backed off after Ethiopia ignored a United Nations-supported commission that said Badme belonged to Eritrea. The two sides have not made peace and recently accused each other of trying to start another war. Tens of thousands of troops are massed on each side, in case it breaks out.
Trade links have been severed. Massawa, Eritrea’s biggest port, used to be bustling with cargo headed to and from Ethiopia. Now it is a ghost town.
Eritrea is having trouble getting enough wheat and milk for its people, and in the past few months long ration lines have formed. Shoppers sometimes wait for hours for a single loaf of bread. The country’s few private industries are in trouble. In 1997, the Dahlak Share Company cranked out five million pairs of sandals, boots and snazzy leather dress shoes. Now, it produces one million.
“Most of our products used to go to Ethiopia,” said Tamirat Tewelde, the factory’s marketing manager.
Its most famous product is the Shida sandal, a black plastic shoe that became the symbol of the struggle because in the 1980s the rebels built a mobile Shida factory underground that survived countless bombings. Today, that same machine stamps out Shidas in leaky metal molds.
The Shidas sell for less than $3. But they still have a mystique. Asmara’s greatest war memorial is a pair of 20-foot-long sheet-metal Shidas.
Nowhere is Eritrea’s bunker mentality and underdog complex more evident than in Nakfa, a rocky little town north of Asmara. To get there, you pass hillsides terraced by 12-year-olds made to work during their summer vacations.
Nakfa was the headquarters of the struggle, and it was up there, in the thin mountain air, that Eritrea’s rebels were pounded relentlessly and nearly annihilated by the Ethiopians, who were armed first by the United States and then, after Ethiopia went Marxist, by the Soviet Union. Today, hundreds of miles of stone trenches snake along the ridgelines and disappear into the misty horizon.
It is partly because of this against-all-odds legacy that Eritrea has turned into a magnet for rebels from across Africa, including Islamist leaders from Somalia, who have been waging a guerrilla war against Somalia’s weak transitional government.
The Eritreans say they have given the Islamists political support only, but the United States and the United Nations accuse Eritrea of shipping them weapons. This is why the State Department is considering designating Eritrea a terrorist nation, which would put it in the same class as Iran, Cuba, Syria, Sudan and North Korea and mean severe sanctions.
But many Eritreans are not worried.
“We have our own country,” said Hassan Mohammed Nur, a former fighter who gave 16 years of his life and his left leg to the struggle. “After that, it doesn’t really matter.”
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