AFRICA’S FORGOTTEN WAR
“IN WHAT PROVED THE MOST INTENSE FIGHTING IN EAST AFRICA SINCE WWII, THE ETHIOPIANS SOUGHT TO DRIVE AWAY THE ENTRENCHED ERITREANS WITH SOVIET-VINTAGE TANKS AND ARTILLERY, BUT THESE EFFORTS WERE BLUNTED BY DETERMINED RESISTANCE”
The 1990s offered little respite for Africa, with bloodshed and disorder carving a destructive path from Freetown to Mogadishu. As the decade neared its end one of the continent’s youngest states was proving to be a difficult neighbour. Eritrea gained its independence in 1993 after 32 years of struggle against Ethiopia, which had itself almost collapsed following the overthrow of its Soviet-backed Marxist Derg regime in 1985 and the subsequent internal conflicts that followed.
When Eritrea’s tough freedom fighters, clad in their iconic leather sandals, seized the colonial city of Asmara in 1991, a new state was cobbled together under the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) and its taciturn strongman Isaias Afwerki. But as ideal as the country’s territory looked on the map – flanked by the Red Sea on one side and a tranquil land border with Sudan on the other – Eritrea was soon bickering with neighbouring countries over unclaimed land, first with Djibouti over their overlapping geography, next with Yemen because of uninhabited islands, and then with its former nemesis Ethiopia, as a new border couldn’t be drawn up between them.
The borders of Eritrea and Ethiopia did resemble a jagged scrawl on any map. Stretching almost 1,000 kilometres (621 miles) from end to end, it followed a colonial-era boundary that didn’t reflect the region’s demographics. During the 1970s the
