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When I first encountered Eritrea in 1976, I was deeply impressed with the movement heading up the former Italian colony’s 30-year war for independence from Ethiopia. During those years, most foreign visitors to Eritrea were. Eritrea: On a Slow Fuse Eritrea’s diverse society—half Christian, half Muslim, from nine distinct linguistic and cultural groups—has long rendered it vulnerable to centrifugal political forces, while its strategic location at the southern end of the Red Sea has made it the target of regional and global powers, …. Today, as Eritrea struggles to establish itself as a viable state, these fault lines threaten to reassert themselves, opening the country to increased ethnic and religious extremism that could spill over Eritrea’s borders, even as it draws inspiration and resources from the hostile states that ring it. Eritrea Eritrea showed considerable promise upon winning its de facto independence in May 1991 after a 30-year war against successive U.S.- and Soviet-backed Ethiopian governments that had laid claim to the former Italian colony. Eritrea formalized its status as Africa’s newest nation in a near unanimous vote for sovereignty (99.8 percent) in a United Nations-monitored referendum in which 98.5 percent of the 1,125,000 registered voters participated.1 Stop
the slaughter in Sudan One day last year more than 400 armed members of the janjaweed militia attacked the western Sudanese village of Donki Dereisa. They killed 150 civilians, including six young children, aged 3 to 14, who were captured during the assault and burned alive later that day, … Afterward, government sources denied any involvement and downplayed the incident — a response pattern that typifies the ongoing crisis in the embattled Sudanese province of Darfur. Redeeming the failed promise of democracy in Eritrea The struggle for freedom and democracy waged by the people of Eritrea has been a long and complicated one…. And it now suffers corrosion from within through a power grab that seeks to reverse the nation’s otherwise impressive strides toward openness, inclusion and equality. Eritrea Eritrea’s strategic location at the southern end of the Red Sea has long made it the target of regional and global powers,… A colony of Italy for the first half of the twentieth century, it was linked to Ethiopia after World War II in a United Nations-sponsored federation promoted by the U.S. American relations with Eritrea have been viewed through the prism of how they affected Ethiopia ever since. More/… Women, Gender And Public Office: Sub-Saharan Africa; East Africa; Eritrea Women played a central role in Eritrea’s thirty-year war for independence from Ethiopia, which annexed the former Italian colony in the 1960s, but their post-independence participation in public life presents a mixed record. See also: Eritrea/Ethiopia War Looms as Washington Watches & Waits, Foreign Policy in Focus (Jan. 21, 2004) Peace
in Sudan: Prospect or Pipe Dream?, Enough! A Critique of Eritrea's Post-Liberation Politics, allAfrica.com (Nov. 6, 2003)
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