Ethiopia Civil War: The Incredible Journey to Liberation 1993

Ethiopia Civil War

Besides these three uprisings, Ethiopia was also involved in the Ogaden War with Somalia from 1977 to 1978. In 1941, British troops freed Eritrea and Ethiopia from Italian rule. That same year, Haile Selassie came back from exile to take back his throne in Addis Ababa. 

The UN decided in September 1952 that Eritrea and Ethiopia should be federations. By 1958, it was clear that Haile Selassie wanted to merge Eritrea into Ethiopia, which led Eritreans who were against the merger to create the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). Eritrea’s thirty-year war of freedom began with the first shots fired in September 1961.

In the 1960s, opposition to the central government came and went, and it was not always even. As the decade came to a close, there was a split in the leadership of ELF. This led to the formation of a more extreme group known as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). In the 1970s, both movements worked together, but over time, their differences became clearer. They fought bloodily with each other from 1979 to 1981, and in 1981, the EPLF took over as the main Eritrean freedom movement, leaving the ELF behind.

At the same time, there was a revolution in Addis Ababa that made Ethiopia a Marxist state. The 1973 Sahel drought significantly impacted Ethiopia, and the government’s poor management of drought relief measures expedited Haile Selassie’s downfall. In 1974, he had to give up power, and a military Dergue took his place. Haile Mengistu Mariam became its leader, and he quickly asked the USSR for military help. In 1975, Moscow switched its support from Somalia to Ethiopia. By that year, between 15,000 and 25,000 ELF fighters had taken over most of Eritrea. 

In 1977, the most important year in the conflict, Ethiopian troops were only in four towns in Eritrea. However, differences between the ELF and EPLF quickly turned into war, just as it looked like Eritrea might win. In the meantime, in July 1977, Somali troops crossed into Ethiopia. By November, they were laying siege to the town of Harar, but they ran out of weapons. 

Cuba, which had been backing Eritrea’s war of secession, switched its support to the Ethiopian government and sent 16,000 troops to fight the Somalis in the Ogaden War. At the same time, the USSR delivered arms worth about $1 billion to the Mengistu government. So, by March 1978, the Somalis had to leave, and Mengistu could focus on the war in Eritrea. 

The Mengistu government would finally fall apart because of a second nationalist uprising by Tigre province’s people. Tigre had been part of the Ethiopian Empire for a long time and had a lot of freedom within it. Yohannis IV, a Tigray native, ruled from 1871 to 1889. Tigrayans rose up against Haile Selassie several times while he was in power. The Tigre People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) emerged following his overthrow in 1974.

At the end of the 1970s, when the war against Eritrea was at its peak, the TPLF became important in terms of military power. If the TPLF and EPLF had worked together in the 1980s, they would have been formidable opponents for the Mengistu government. By the early 1980s, the Tigrayan revolt had spread widely, and the TPLF was killing a lot of Ethiopian soldiers while the EPLF and TPLF worked together to plan their attacks. 

In 1988, the government only had control over Makele, which was the Tigre area’s capital. The TPLF, on the other hand, had 20,000 battle-hardened troops under its command. There had been a third, more irregular and limited uprising among the Oromo peoples in the south, who make up 40% of the population. They were less organized and spread out than either the Eritreans or the Tigrayans, though. 

They rose up from 1963 to 1970 under Wako Gutu’s direction and used the name OLF to show their protest. They didn’t want to break away from the central government; instead, they wanted better care from it. The first revolt ended when Gutu took a job with the government in 1970. After Haile Selassie’s fall, there was a second Oromo uprising, but it needed help from Somalia and died out after Somalia lost in 1978. 

The TPLF and the Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement joined forces at the start of 1989 to form the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). The EPRDF and the EPLF led the last major operation of the war. In the first few months of 1991, the EPRDF and EPLF swept aside everything that stood in their way. In May, the Mengistu government fell. Mengistu ran away from Addis Ababa to Zimbabwe, and the EPRDF forces moved into the city. Ethiopia named Meles Zenawi, the leader of the EPRDF, and the leader of Tigray as temporary presidents.

The EPLF formed a separate government in Asmara, and its leader, Issaias Afewerke, created a temporary government for Eritrea. It was clear that the EPLF did not want to be part of the interim government in Addis Ababa. It said that it saw Eritrea’s future as different from Ethiopia’s. The EPRDF decided that the EPLF should hold a vote on independence from Ethiopia. The UN watched the vote in April 1993. 98% of people who were eligible to vote did so, and 99.8% of those who did voted in favor of freedom. 

Eritrea officially became its own country on May 24, 1993, and the rest of the world accepted it as such. The country’s first president was Issaias Afewerke. The new state named Asmara its capital, home to 3.5 million people. The EPRDF claimed to be in charge of all of Ethiopia in 1991 and 1992. They wrote a new constitution and now have about 100 political groups.

Elections for a constituent assembly took place in 1994. The EPRDF and its friends won. Votes for a new federal parliamentary assembly in May 1995 led to the formation of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. This was the first step in the process.

Also Read: Haile Selassie I reigned as Emperor of Ethiopia from 1892 until his death in 1975.