Eritrean Liberation Frontpolitical organization, Eritrea

secessionist movement that successfully fought for the creation of an independent Eritrean nation out of the northernmost province of Ethiopia in 1993.

The historical region of Eritrea had joined Ethiopia as an autonomous unit in 1952. The Eritrean Liberation Movement was founded in 1958 and was succeeded by the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) in 1961. The ELF grew in membership when the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie abolished Eritrea’s autonomous status, annexing it as a province in 1962. In the 1960s and ’70s the ELF undertook a systematic campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Ethiopian government. A faction of the ELF broke away in 1970 to form the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. The EPLF managed to secure control of much of the Eritrean countryside and build effective administrations in the areas it controlled. Fighting that broke out between the EPLF, ELF, and other Eritrean rebel groups in 1981 prevented further military gains, but the EPLF subsequently emerged as the principal Eritrean guerrilla group.

As Soviet support of Ethiopia’s socialist government collapsed in the late 1980s, the EPLF formed an alliance with guerrilla groups in Tigray province and other parts of Ethiopia, and, when these groups overthrew the central government and captured the Ethiopian capital in May 1991, the EPLF formed a separate provisional government for Eritrea. After the holding of a United Nations-supervised referendum on independence there in April 1993, the EPLF declared the new nation of Eritrea the following month. In February 1994 the EPLF renamed itself the People’s Front for...

Eritrean independence leader and president of Eritrea from 1993.

When Afwerki was born in 1946 in Asmara, the city was under the United Nations-mandated control of the United Kingdom. Eritrea itself was federated to Ethiopia in 1952 and was forcibly annexed 10 years later. This annexation spurred the formation of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) in the Eritrean western lowlands. Afwerki studied engineering in Ethiopia at the University of Addis Ababa, but he left the university in 1966 to join the ELF. During Ethiopia’s own revolution in 1974, Afwerki led the highland-dominated Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). In 1987 he was elected secretary-general of the EPLF. After four years of military struggle by the EPLF and diplomatic efforts by Afwerki, Eritrea won its independence in May 1991.

In April 1993 Afwerki was elected president of Eritrea and chairman of the National Assembly, giving him control of both the executive and the legislative branches of government. In the years that followed, he gradually consolidated his power over virtually every aspect of Eritrean life, serving additionally as commander in chief of the army and as chairman of the country’s sole political party, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice, as the EPLF renamed itself in 1994. He canceled the 1997 presidential elections, and in 2001 he virtually closed the national press. That same year he had several prominent opposition leaders arrested and charged with treason. Critics of his regime accused him of using the long-standing border dispute with Ethiopia to avoid implementing Eritrea’s constitution, which had been ratified in 1997. In 2005 Afwerki banned helicopter flights by United Nations Peacekeeping Forces along the Eritrean-Ethiopian border, charging that the UN Security Council was not doing enough to resolve the dispute...