Ertirea Today
From Article at:
http://www.fieldingtravel.com/dp/dangerousplaces/eritrea/
There's a new contestant for the inauspicious title of the
world's most impoverished nation: Eritrea, an arid sliver
of desert along the Red Sea, populated by
Tigrinya-speaking peoples emerging from an ultimately
successful 30-year independence struggle against
Ethiopia.
Here a man cannot expect to live past his forty-fifth
birthday and children are lucky to survive past the age of
five. The GNP per capita, at US$120, is the second
lowest in the world. More than 80 percent of Eritrea's
inhabitants are subsistence farmers, and the economy is
entirely dependent on foreign aid. Just another
famine-stricken, war-torn, dirt poor republic in the bowels
of the Sahara.
Eritrea started life as an Italian colony in the 19th century
and came under British mandate in 1941. Addis Ababa
took the reins in 1952, and the nearly
two-generation-long struggle for independence started
shortly thereafter.
Eritrea is famous for conducting one of the first wars of
liberation fought in large part by women. Of the 100,000
freedom fighters who fought the Ethiopians, nearly a
third were women. The Eritrean People's Liberation
Front (EPLF), who shoved the Ethiopians out of the
picture in 1991, accomplished what no other African
liberation force had before it: It created the first African
state on the dark continent carved out of another African
state, not from a European colony.
In its mainly unheralded struggle for democracy--in which
it is doing admirably well--the new nation waits for the
world to realize its people are starving to death