ABSTRACT
Eritrea, the youngest sub-Saharan African nation, became a sovereign state in 1993 after a thirty-year war for national liberation, which has become known as the longest liberation struggle in Africa. The Eritrean people resisted the Ethiopian occupation by peaceful means until 1 September 1961. On that day the revolutionary vanguard, under the direction of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), decided to begin the armed struggle, with martyr Hamed Idris Awate as its leader. They numbered twelve people, with only ten old Italian rifles. By 1965 the ELF had about 1,000 fighters in the field. In 1970 the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) emerged as an intellectual left-wing group that split from the ELF after large numbers of Christian highlanders had joined its ranks. By 1976 the ELF and EPLF had a combined force of 20,000 troops. They were making significant advances in controlling the rural and less populated regions of the country. The Christian-dominated EPLF and the mainly Muslim ELF struggled among themselves in a contested civil war (1972-74 and 1981), which ended after the EPLF had crushed its mother organization, the ELF, in 1981. The EPLF succeeded in liberating the country in 1991.1
Given the historical background of Eritrea, this chapter analyses diversity issues in the Eritrean armed forces in the context of two phases: during the liberation war (1961-93) and after independence (1993-2004). This is because the legacy of the Eritrean liberation struggle has considerably affected the current Eritrean armed forces. For each phase, diversity will be dealt with in terms of ethnicity and gender. In particular, the integration of women in the armed forces has drawn much attention as a cause célèbre within the war for independence. Besides ethnicity and gender, religion will be touched upon in this chapter as well, albeit more briefly. After each of the two descriptive analyses, a number of general conclusions will be drawn. The chapter will be rounded off with an afterword that briefly assesses the present state of civil-military relations in Eritrea.
