Eritrea's history: the treaty line behind two wars

What lay north of the Mereb before Italy

At Buya, Eritrean and Italian scientists found a hominid fossil more than a million years old. The kingdom of Dʿmt held the plateau in the first millennium BC, with Qohaito and Matara among its towns. Aksum, a trading state centred in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia from about AD 100, sent its goods out through the port of Adulis, near modern Zula, and adopted Christianity under Ezana in the fourth century.

From the twelfth century the Zagwe and then the Solomonic kings of Ethiopia held the plateau to a degree that rose and fell. They called the central highlands mereb melash, the land beyond the Mereb River, and governed them as a northern frontier through an official titled the bahr negash, lord of the sea; Britannica describes the crown's hold there as never firm. Under Emperor Zara Yaqob the region became Medri Bahri, sea land, with its capital at Debarwa. The Portuguese traveller Francisco Álvares passed through in 1520 and described its frontier at the Mereb with the province of Tigray.

The coast answered to others. There were no towns on the plateau, and urban life was confined to the Red Sea shore. The Ottomans made Massawa the seat of their Habesh Eyalet by 1557 and kept a garrison there, with interruptions, for more than three centuries. Egypt took the port in 1865 and marched inland until, in 1875, an Egyptian force that reached the Mereb was destroyed by Ethiopian troops.

How Italy named a colony and fixed its edges

On 15 November 1869, the year the Suez Canal opened, a local chief sold land on the Bay of Assab to the missionary Giuseppe Sapeto, acting for the Rubattino Shipping Company, as a coaling station. The Italian state took the holding over in 1882, and in 1885 Italian troops landed at Massawa and worked inland toward the highlands while Ethiopian protests were ignored.

After the death of Emperor Yohannes IV in 1889 his successor, Menilek II, accepted Italian occupation of the region north of the Mereb in return for weapons he needed against his rivals. In the Treaty of Wichale of 2 May 1889 he recognised "Italian possessions in the Red Sea", and on 1 January 1890 Italy proclaimed the colony of Eritrea, named from the Greek for the Red Sea, the Erythraean Sea. When Menilek's army destroyed an Italian force at Adwa on 1 March 1896, he did not pursue it across the Mereb, and in the Treaty of Addis Ababa he recognised Italian rule over Eritrea in exchange for recognition of Ethiopia's sovereignty. Three further treaties between Italy and Ethiopia, of 1900, 1902 and 1908, set the boundary between colony and empire in its central, western and eastern sectors. Asmara, formerly a small hamlet, became the colonial capital in 1900.

The colony built towns where the plateau had none, and its railway reached Asmara in 1911. A sizeable share of the best farmland was reserved for Italian farmers, and the land shortage that followed pushed Eritreans into the towns, where an Eritrean working class formed. Britannica records that schooling for Eritreans stopped at primary level and that the colonial service employed them as labourers and soldiers; another account notes many in the police and public works. In 1936 the colony was merged into Italian East Africa as its industrial centre, and by 1939 it had about 2,198 factories and 75,000 Italian residents, 53,000 of them in Asmara. Most of central Asmara went up between 1935 and 1941, and UNESCO inscribed the city on the World Heritage List on 8 July 2017.

Why the British decade ended in federation

British forces defeated the Italian army at Keren in 1941 and ran Eritrea as a military administration while the Allies argued over it, and several Italian-built industries were dismantled and removed to Kenya as war reparations. Britain proposed a partition along religious lines, the Muslims to Sudan and the Christians to Ethiopia. Ethiopia, landlocked and wanting Eritrea's two seaports, claimed the whole territory as always its own.

Inside Eritrea a Unionist Party, founded in 1946 and in Britannica's words "financed and guided" from Addis Ababa, campaigned for union with the help of Ethiopian Orthodox clergy, and a Muslim League founded in 1947 campaigned for independence. In February 1950, after a Muslim League leader was shot dead, rioting in Asmara killed more than 62 people. How far the split was religious is argued. Britannica concludes that the division ran largely along sectarian lines, while Bereket Habte Selassie, a former attorney-general of Ethiopia, holds that the British exploited religious tensions and that most Eritreans, Christian and Muslim, wanted independence.

A UN commission that arrived in February 1950 divided, Pakistan and Guatemala proposing independence after a trusteeship and Burma, Norway and the Union of South Africa incorporation into Ethiopia. On 2 December 1950 the General Assembly adopted Resolution 390A(V), federating Eritrea with Ethiopia under the emperor. The imperial government took defence, foreign affairs, currency, foreign commerce and the ports, and Eritrea kept its police, its taxes and its own budget.

Elections on 25 and 26 March 1952 chose an assembly of 68, evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, in which the Unionists held the most seats and no majority. It adopted a UN-drafted constitution on 10 July 1952 that made Tigrinya and Arabic the official languages, the emperor ratified the act of federation on 11 September, and British authority ended on 15 September.

How Ethiopia took the federation apart

Britannica puts the failure down to an imperial government unwilling to keep the federal terms. Arabic was dropped from state education, Muslims were squeezed out of public employment and independence leaders were harassed until many fled abroad. In mid-1953 the chief executive closed the Muslim League newspaper Voice of Eritrea, although the constitution guaranteed a free press, and political parties were banned in 1955. That year the incoming chief executive, Asfaha Woldemikael, proposed replacing Tigrinya and Arabic with Amharic and abolishing the Eritrean flag; the attorney-general ruled the proposals unconstitutional, and the flag was taken down from public buildings anyway in 1958. Trade unions were banned the same year, and in 1959 the Eritrean Government was renamed the Eritrean Administration and Ethiopian law was imposed. Pleas for a referendum reached the American, British and Ethiopian governments in these years, and a confidential American memorandum put support for the Independence Party at around 75% of Eritreans.

On 14 November 1962 the Ethiopian parliament and the Eritrean Assembly voted unanimously to abolish Eritrea's federal status, and Eritrea became a province of the empire. Other accounts describe the same event as the emperor dissolving the Eritrean parliament unilaterally, and the UN University's case study records that Ethiopia abrogated the federal agreement and annexed Eritrea directly. Tigrinya was soon banned in schools and replaced by Amharic, and Britannica credits that ban with turning a generation of Christian students toward nationalism.

How the liberation fronts held out at Nakfa

The Eritrean Liberation Movement, founded in 1958 and known in Tigrinya as Mahber Showate, the Association of Seven, organised students, intellectuals and urban workers in secret; the imperial authorities had found and destroyed it by 1962. In 1960 Muslim exiles in Cairo led by Idris Mohammed Adam announced the Eritrean Liberation Front, and on 1 September 1961 Hamid Idris Awate and his companions fought Ethiopian army and police units at Adal, the action taken as the start of the war. By 1971 the emperor had declared martial law and sent roughly half the Ethiopian army to Eritrea.

Why the fronts split and fought each other

Christian students joined in numbers at the end of the 1960s, just as the fighters in the field were falling out with an ELF leadership that lived in Cairo. Breakaway groups merged in 1972 as the ELF-PLF, which under former students became the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, Marxist and secular; sources date the EPLF's founding variously to 1970, 1972 and August 1973. The two fronts fought each other from 1972 to 1974 and were pushed into reconciliation in 1975.

In 1974, the year the emperor was deposed, the Derg under the Eritrean-born General Aman Andom held a ceasefire in Eritrea between June and mid-November. Andom was killed on 24 November 1974 and the junta turned to force. A peasant army of 100,000 sent in 1975 was largely routed, and by 1977 the fronts held all of Eritrea except Asmara, Massawa, Assab and Barentu. Their alliance broke after 1980, and with help from the Tigray People's Liberation Front the EPLF drove the ELF out; its last large group crossed into Sudan in 1981.

How the Derg's offensives failed at Nakfa

A Soviet airlift of arms in 1977 and Cuban support after the Ogaden War let the Ethiopian army retake most of Eritrea in 1978, and the EPLF withdrew to the mountains of the Sahel and dug in around Nakfa. Between 1978 and 1986 the Derg launched eight major offensives against the independence movement and none succeeded. The Red Star campaign of 1982 put more than 80,000 troops into the attack and used air power and toxic gas on a new scale, and the EPLF gave its fighters homemade gas masks. It failed to take Nakfa and was unofficially abandoned on 20 June 1982.

In 1988 the EPLF took Afabet, headquarters of the Ethiopian army in north-eastern Eritrea, and put about a third of that army out of action. It took Massawa in February 1990. In May 1991 the garrison in Asmara disintegrated, EPLF fighters entered the city on 24 May and the last battle was fought at Assab the next day.

Why Eritrea waited to vote on independence

The EPLF had won the territory and wanted a popular mandate beside the military one; it had first proposed a referendum in 1981. It formed a Provisional Government in May 1991, and at the conference of 1 to 5 July 1991 in Addis Ababa the new Ethiopian authorities, its wartime allies, recognised the Eritreans' right to a referendum.

Registration from October 1992 to March 1993 enrolled 1.1 million voters out of an estimated 1.5 to 1.75 million eligible, 860,000 of them inside Eritrea and the rest in Sudan, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Three groups registered to campaign for independence and none against. Some 6,000 polling officials ran 1,012 voting stations, watched by about 100 observers of the UN mission, UNOVER.

Eritreans voted from 23 to 25 April 1993, and 99.83% chose independence on a turnout of 98.2% of registered voters. The Eritrean authorities declared independence on 27 April, when provisional results were announced. On 21 May the EPLF's secretary-general, Isaias Afwerki, was made president of a transitional government, on 24 May he proclaimed Eritrea officially independent, and the United Nations admitted it on 28 May 1993.

The EPLF reorganised itself as a political party, the People's Front for Democracy and Justice. In October 1995 Proclamation 82 required every able-bodied man and woman to serve 18 months of national service, six of them in military training. A Constituent Assembly ratified a constitution on 23 May 1997 whose first article defines the national territory as "delineated by recognized boundaries", and the UN commission of inquiry on human rights in Eritrea called it in 2015 the "never-implemented Constitution of 1997".

What the Badme war settled about the border

Before 1993 the line with Ethiopia separated provinces of one state and mattered little. Independence made it an international frontier, and the two governments, which at first tacitly agreed to keep it where it was, could not agree on where that was. Both went back to the Italian treaties and read them differently.

Trade sharpened the quarrel. In the years after independence Eritrea sent more than 65% of its exports to Ethiopia, against 9% of Ethiopia's going the other way. When Eritrea introduced its own currency, the nakfa, in November 1997 and asked that it be treated as equal to the birr, Ethiopia insisted on hard currency and a trade war followed. In July 1997 more than 1,000 Ethiopian troops had occupied the border village of Bada, and that October Ethiopia published a map of Tigray that, in the Eritrean government's reading, took in large parts of Eritrean territory.

How the fighting at Badme spread

After armed incidents in which several Eritrean officials were killed near Badme, a large Eritrean mechanised force entered the Badme area on 6 May 1998. The accounts are opposed. Eritrea says the war began with an unprovoked Ethiopian attack on its positions, and Ethiopia says Eritrea invaded and occupied disputed areas. The Ethiopian parliament declared war on 13 May.

Each side mobilised close to 250,000 troops. In February 1999 Ethiopia's Operation Sunset retook Badme, at a cost independent observers put at 30,000 dead on both sides. A last Ethiopian offensive from 12 May 2000 crossed the Mareb and took Barentu, and by the end of that month Ethiopia held about a quarter of Eritrea's territory and 650,000 people had been displaced. The parties agreed to stop fighting on 18 June 2000, the UN Security Council set up a 25-kilometre security zone inside Eritrea on 31 July, and the Algiers Agreement was signed on 12 December 2000. Both states expelled the other's people: about 70,000 Ethiopians from Eritrea by Human Rights Watch's estimate, and 77,000 Eritreans and Ethiopians of Eritrean origin from Ethiopia.

Press access was restricted throughout and no death toll has been independently verified.

What the commission in The Hague decided

The Algiers Agreement created the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission, five members under Sir Elihu Lauterpacht with two appointed by each party, sitting in The Hague with the Permanent Court of Arbitration as registry. Its mandate was to delimit and demarcate the border from the treaties of 1900, 1902 and 1908 and international law. In Article 4(1) the parties reaffirmed the principle, adopted by the OAU at Cairo in 1964, of respecting borders as they stood at independence.

The commission's unanimous decision of 13 April 2002 applied each treaty as modified, where relevant, by the parties' later conduct on the ground, gave some territory to each side and placed Badme in Eritrea. Both parties announced full acceptance. Martin Pratt writes that once Badme's side of the line was clear, "satisfaction gave way to triumphalism within Eritrea and dismay within Ethiopia", because for many people in both countries the hamlet's fate had become the measure of whether the loss of life had been justified.

Ethiopia then called parts of the decision into question and refused to leave territory the commission had recognised as Eritrean. Eritrea's position was that talks could start only once Ethiopian troops had handed back all of it. The commission marked part of the eastern sector between March and August 2003 and could go no further, and on 30 November 2007 it declared binding a set of pillar locations fixed by image processing and terrain modelling. The UN peacekeeping mission, short of fuel after Eritrean restrictions, began withdrawing in February 2008 and ended that July.

How the unmarked border shaped national service

What the stalemate did inside Eritrea

From 1998 national service became open-ended, with everyone under 50 enlisted for an indefinite period and release left to commanders. The government gave Ethiopia's continued hostility and its occupation of Eritrean territory as the reason, and Britannica records that the unresolved border war was used to justify the conscription. Tanja Müller of the University of Manchester's Global Development Institute argues that the 1998 war was "to an important degree literally a border war", because territorial integrity is a key foundation of Eritrean nationalism. Other commentaries read it as a war over economics, rival nationalisms or animosity between Eritrea and Tigray.

In 2001 fifteen senior officials of the People's Front for Democracy and Justice, the G-15, published an open letter calling the president's actions "illegal and unconstitutional". In September 2001 the government closed all privately owned print media and arrested 11 of the group, who were held without trial. The National Assembly last met in January 2002, and parliamentary and presidential elections were postponed indefinitely. In December 2009 the UN Security Council imposed an arms embargo and other sanctions on Eritrea, on the grounds that it supported armed groups in Somalia and had not withdrawn its troops after fighting with Djibouti in June 2008. In June 2015 the UN commission of inquiry, working from 550 interviews with witnesses outside the country, reported violations that might amount to crimes against humanity and described national service as an institution where "slavery-like practices are routine". The government rejected that report and a second in 2016.

What the peace with Ethiopia opened and closed

On 5 June 2018 Ethiopia's new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, said Ethiopia would implement the Algiers Agreement and the 2002 ruling, and on 9 July 2018 he and Isaias Afwerki declared an end to the state of war that had lasted 20 years. Land crossings opened from September 2018, and the Security Council lifted its sanctions in November 2018. Müller, in Mekelle that October, found Eritreans crossing to seek visas to join relatives abroad and others buying cement, which the Eritrean government controls at home. The crossings closed again from April 2019. Müller noted that year that no land had changed hands, and national service carried on as before.

From November 2020 to November 2022 Eritrean troops fought beside the Ethiopian government in the war against the Tigray People's Liberation Front, and Eritrea confirmed its part in April 2021. Its forces stayed in parts of Tigray after the Pretoria agreement of November 2022. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index's 2026 report, covering the period to January 2025, found the border with Ethiopia still undemarcated, Eritrean troops occupying borderland areas and the crossings shut. In December 2025 Eritrea withdrew from the Intergovernmental Authority on Development.