Eritrea | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

With an area of 121,300 square kilometers (46,800 square miles) and an estimated population of 4.5 million, Eritrea is a relatively small state located on the Red Sea. It is bounded on the north and west by Sudan, on the south by Ethiopia, and on the east by the Red Sea and Djibouti. Eritrea has close to 1,100 kilometers (670 miles) of coastline and it is located along one of the busiest oil transit sea routes in the world. Asmara, the capital city, is estimated to have a population of 500,000.

Eritrea was an Italian colony from 1885 to 1941, when Italy was forced to relinquish its East African colonies to Allied powers after World War II (1939–1945). Between 1941 and 1952 the British administered Eritrea as a United Nations (UN) Trust Territory, and in 1952 the UN federated Eritrea with Ethiopia. Ethiopia incorporated Eritrea in 1962.

Resistance to the union with Ethiopia started in the early 1960s. The Eritrean Liberation Front and, subsequently, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) conducted an armed struggle against the Ethiopian government that lasted thirty years.

In 1991, the Ethiopian People's Democratic Front ousted the repressive government of communist leader Mengistu Haile Mariam (b. 1937) and took control of the Ethiopian government. The EPLF soon captured Asmara and set up a transitional government. In a referendum on the independence of Eritrea held in 1993, over 98 percent of the Eritrean people supported independence.

Following this vote, a transitional government began to chart the course for establishing a constitutional government and a pluralistic political system. The EPLF leader Isaias Afewerki (b. 1946) was elected as the head of state. In 1994 the EPLF adopted the new name—the People's Front for Democracy and Justice—and transformed itself into the only political party in Eritrea. It set up an eighteen-member executive committee and a seventy-five-member central committee, with Afewerki as the president. In 1997 a Constituent Assembly adopted a constitution authorizing political pluralism and a presidential system that allows the president to serve a maximum of two five-year terms. The president was to appoint the prime minister and judges of the Supreme Court, subject to approval by the National Assembly.

The first post-independence election was scheduled for 1999, but it was later postponed following outbreak of hostilities between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Elections were once again postponed in December 2001. As of 2005, the constitution had not been implemented and the likelihood of pluralistic elections remains slim. President Afewerki, who is the chief of state, head of the government, and head of the State Council and the National Assembly, has assumed an increasingly authoritarian position, dismissing cabinet ministers and the chief justice of the Supreme Court and dissolving the electoral commission. In May 2001 a group of influential Eritreans, including some government officials, wrote a letter to President Afewerki accusing him of operating illegally. By late 2001, eleven

of the fifteen government officials who signed the letter had been arrested, and the independent press was suspended.

Hostilities between Ethiopia and Eritrea started soon after independence because of conflicting border claims. A war that broke out in 2000 claimed the lives of eighty thousand people and displaced thousands more. The conflict subsided after Ethiopia and Eritrea agreed to settle their border conflict based on the decisions of an independent boundary commission to be set up by the UN. The commission gave its rulings in 2002, but the border demarcation and peace process that were to follow the commission report had still not been implemented as of early 2005. Eritrea's citizens continued to live in a repressive state.

Ethiopia.

Clapham, Christopher. Transformation and Continuity in Revolutionary Ethiopia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

"Eritrea." In CIA World Factbook. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2005. <http://www.cia.gov/cia/publicat ions/factbook/geos/er.html>.

Gebre-Medhin, Jordan. Peasants and Nationalism in Eritrea. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1988.

Markakis, John. "The Nationalist Revolution in Eritrea." Journal of Modern African Studies 26, no. 1 (1988):51–70.

Negash, Tekeste. Eritrea and Ethiopia: The Federal Experience. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997.

Negash, Tekeste, and Kjelil Tronvoll. Brothers at War: Making Sense of the Eritrean and Ethiopian War. Oxford, UK: James Currey, 2000.

U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. "Eritrea." Country Reports on Human Rights Practices 2003. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 2004. <http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/ hrrpt/2003/27726.htm>.

Yohannes, Okbazghi. Eritrea: A Pawn in World Politics. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991.

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