Eritrea's Three-Decade War for Independence From Ethiopia

Eritrea’s path into its independence war began not with colonial rule but with the way that rule was undone. After Italy’s defeat in the Second World War ended its colonial control of Eritrea, the United Nations in 1952 arranged a federation joining Eritrea, with its own parliament and a measure of self-government, to Ethiopia under Emperor Haile Selassie. That arrangement lasted a decade. In 1962, Haile Selassie unilaterally dissolved the federation and the Eritrean parliament, annexing the territory outright as an Ethiopian province and eliminating the autonomy the UN had guaranteed it.

Armed resistance had already begun before the formal annexation, when Hamid Idris Awate and a small band of fighters engaged Ethiopian police and army units on September 1, 1961, in what became known as the Battle of Adal, an action retroactively marked as the start of the war. The Eritrean Liberation Front carried the insurgency through the 1960s, but internal splits fractured the movement in the early 1970s, and in August 1973 several breakaway factions merged to form the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, which spent the rest of the decade fighting both Ethiopian forces and, at times, the rival ELF for control of the resistance itself.

The war’s character shifted again in 1974, when a Marxist military junta known as the Derg overthrew Haile Selassie inside Ethiopia and, with Soviet and Cuban backing, pursued the Eritrean insurgency with far greater firepower than the emperor’s government had. The EPLF weathered the Derg’s heaviest offensives from fortified positions around the town of Nakfa in the late 1970s and 1980s, and by the end of that decade had emerged as the dominant Eritrean force, steadily pushing Ethiopian forces back as the Derg’s own hold on power weakened under pressure from Ethiopian rebel movements fighting alongside the Eritreans. In February 1990, the EPLF captured the strategic port of Massawa in an offensive called Operation Fenkil, cutting off Ethiopian forces in Eritrea from resupply by sea. The end came in May 1991: as the Derg regime collapsed in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian garrison in Asmara disintegrated, with tens of thousands of soldiers surrendering or deserting, and EPLF fighters entered the Eritrean capital unopposed on May 24, 1991, thirty years after Hamid Idris Awate’s first shots.

Eritrea governed itself as a de facto independent state for two years before holding a UN-supervised referendum in April 1993 to formalize the separation; of more than 1.1 million votes cast, 99.83 percent favored independence. Eritrea declared independence on May 24, 1993, choosing the same calendar date as the fall of Asmara two years earlier. The war had killed an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 Eritreans, left a similar number permanently disabled, orphaned roughly 50,000 children, and driven close to half a million people, out of a population of about three million, into exile as refugees, a toll that continued to shape Eritrean society and its government’s militarized posture long after independence was won.