Ethiopian Civil War and Eritrean War of Independence: A Visual History

The Eritrean War of Independence (1961-1991) began when Ethiopia's annexation of the federated former Italian colony sparked armed revolt; the Ethiopian Civil War (1974-1991) followed the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie by the Marxist military Derg under Mengistu Haile Mariam. The Derg's Red Terror killed tens of thousands; Soviet and Cuban aid repelled Somalia's Ogaden invasion in 1977-1978 but not the Eritrean People's Liberation Front and the Tigray People's Liberation Front. Famine in 1983-1985 killed up to a million. Rebel offensives destroyed the army in 1988-1991; the EPRDF entered Addis Ababa on 28 May 1991 and Eritrea became independent in 1993.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Ethiopian Civil War and Eritrean War of Independence. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Ethiopian army strength

Timeline of the Ethiopian Civil War and Eritrean War of Independence

1. 1961
   Eritrean revolt begins
2. 1974
   Haile Selassie deposed
3. 1977
   Mengistu supreme; Red Terror; Ogaden War
4. 1982
   Red Star campaign fails at Nakfa
5. 1984
   Famine
6. 1988
   Afabet
7. 1991
   Mengistu flees; EPRDF takes Addis Ababa; EPLF takes Asmara
8. 1993
   Eritrean independence

Eritrea and the fall of the emperor

The UN federated Eritrea with Ethiopia in 1952; Haile Selassie dissolved its parliament in 1962, and the Eritrean Liberation Front had already fired the first shots in 1961. Student protests, army mutinies and the Wollo famine of 1973 undermined the emperor; a committee of officers, the Derg, deposed him in September 1974 and murdered him the next year along with 60 officials. Mengistu emerged supreme in 1977, and his Red Terror against the civilian left killed perhaps 50,000.

Ogaden, Soviets and the Red Star

Somalia invaded the Ogaden in July 1977; the Soviets switched from Somalia to Ethiopia, airlifted arms and 15,000 Cuban troops, and the Somalis were routed by March 1978. The Derg then threw the largest army in sub-Saharan Africa at Eritrea, driving the EPLF back to the mountains of Sahel, and launched the 1982 Red Star campaign against the trenches of Nakfa, which failed. Forced villagisation and resettlement, and the drought of 1984, produced the famine that Live Aid answered while the government spent on its tenth anniversary.

Collapse

The EPLF destroyed an army corps at Afabet in March 1988 and took Massawa in 1990; the TPLF, allied in the EPRDF, took Tigray and pushed south. A coup attempt in 1989 was crushed. With Soviet aid ending, the army disintegrated; Mengistu flew to Zimbabwe on 21 May 1991 and the EPRDF took Addis Ababa a week later. Eritrea voted 99.8 percent for independence in a 1993 referendum. The two former allies fought a border war in 1998-2000, and Tigray was at war with the Ethiopian federal government in 2020-2022.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Italian Empire (1882 to 1947)
• Soviet Union (USSR) (1922 to 1991)
• British Empire (1583 to 1997)
• German colonial empire (1884 to 1919)

Wars of the same era and region

• Conquests of Menelik II (1878 to 1904)
• Cold War (1947 to 1991)
• Somali Civil War (1991 to present)
• Tigray War (2020 to 2022)
• First Sudanese Civil War (1955 to 1972)
• Second Sudanese Civil War (1983 to 2005)

8 surprising things about the Ethiopian Civil War and Eritrean War of Independence

1. Haile Selassie was smothered in his bed and buried under a latrine in the palace, according to testimony at Mengistu's trial in absentia.
2. The EPLF's trench lines at Nakfa held out for a decade and the town gave its name to Eritrea's currency.
3. The 1984 famine coincided with the Derg's spending of an estimated 200 million dollars on its tenth anniversary celebrations.
4. Live Aid in 1985 raised over 100 million pounds; some aid was diverted by both sides.
5. The EPLF ran hospitals, schools and factories underground in the Sahel mountains during the war.
6. Mengistu still lives in exile in Zimbabwe, sentenced to death in absentia for genocide.
7. Ethiopia lost its coastline with Eritrean independence and became the world's most populous landlocked country.
8. The TPLF's Meles Zenawi ruled Ethiopia from 1991 to 2012; his party's later fall led to the Tigray War.

Sources

• Ethiopian Civil War Wikipedia
• Eritrean War of Independence Wikipedia
• Ethiopia: The socialist military government Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Gebru Tareke, The Ethiopian Revolution: War in the Horn of Africa (2009) Yale University Press

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