February 22, 1999 – Ethiopian-Eritrean War: Ethiopian forces launch a major offensive into Eritrea
On February 22, 1999, the Ethiopian Army, supported by air,armored, and artillery units, launched a major offensive in the easternfront. Five days later, the Ethiopianshad broken through and captured the Badme area, and had advanced 10 kilometersinto Eritrea. The Eritrean government then announced thatit was ready to accept the OAU peace plan, but Ethiopia, which earlier had alsoagreed to the proposal, now demanded that Eritrea withdraw all its forces fromEthiopian territory before the plan could be implemented.
Ethiopia, Eritrean, and nearby countries.(Taken from Ethiopian-Eritrean War – Wars of the 20th Century – Volume 4)
Background In themidst of Eritrea’sindependence war, in 1974, Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed in a militarycoup and a council of army officers called “Derg” came to power. The Derg regime experienced great politicalupheavals initially arising from internal power struggles, as well as theEritrean insurgency and other ethnic-based armed rebellions; in 1977-78, theDerg also was involved in a war with neighboring Somalia (the Ogaden War, separatearticle).
By the early 1990s, the Ethiopian People’s RevolutionaryDemocratic Front (EPRDF), a coalition of Ethiopian rebel groups, had formed amilitary alliance with the EPLF and separately accelerated their insurgenciesagainst the Derg regime. In May 1991, theEPRDF toppled the Derg regime, while the EPLF seized control of Eritrea bydefeating and expelling Ethiopian government forces. Both the EPRDF and EPLF then gained power in Ethiopia and Eritrea, respectively, with theserebel movements transitioning into political parties. Under a UN-facilitated process and with theEthiopian government’s approval, Eritreaofficially seceded from Ethiopiaand, following a referendum where nearly 100% of Eritreans voted forindependence, achieved statehood as a fully sovereign state.
Because of their war-time military alliance, the governmentsof Ethiopia and Eritrea maintained a close relationship and signed an Agreementof Friendship of Cooperation that envisioned a comprehensive package ofmutually beneficial political, economic, and social joint endeavors; subsequenttreaties were made in the hope of integrating the two countries in a broadrange of other fields.
Both states nominally were democracies but with strongauthoritarian leaders, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia and President Isaias Afwerki in Eritrea. Stateand political structures differed, however, with Ethiopiaestablishing an ethnic-based multi-party federal parliamentary system and Eritrea settingup a staunchly nationalistic, one-party unitary system. Eritreaalso maintained a strong militaristic culture, acquired from its longindependence struggle, for which in the years after gaining independence, itcame into conflict with its neighbors, i.e. Yemen,Djibouti, and Sudan.
Ethiopian-Eritrean relations soon also deteriorated as a resultof political differences, as well as the personal rivalry between the twocountries’ leaders. Furthermore, duringtheir revolutionary struggles, the Eritrean and Ethiopian rebel groupssometimes came into direct conflict over projecting power and controllingterritory, which was overcome only by their mutual need to defeat a commonenemy. In the post-war period, thisacrimonious historical past now took on greater significance. Relations turned for the worse when inNovember 1997, Eritreaintroduced its own currency, the “nakfa” (which replaced the Ethiopian birr),in order to steer its own independent local and foreign economic and tradepolicies. During the post-war period,trade between Ethiopia and Eritrea was significant, and Eritrea gave special privileges to the nowlandlocked Ethiopia to usethe port of Assab for Ethiopian maritime trade. But with Eritreaintroducing its own currency, Ethiopiabanned the use of the nakfa in all but the smallest transactions, causing tradebetween the two states to plummet. Trucks carrying goods soon were backed up at the border crossings andthe two sides now saw the need to delineate the as yet unmarked border tocontrol cross-border trade.
Meanwhile, disputes in the frontier region in and around thetown of Badmehad experienced a steady increase. Asearly as 1992, Eritrean regional officials complained that Ethiopian armedbands descended on Eritrean villages, and expelled Eritrean residents anddestroyed their homes. In July 1994,regional Ethiopian and Eritrean representatives met to discuss the matter, butharassments, expulsions, and arrests of Eritreans continued to be reported in1994-1996. Then in April 1994, theEritrean government became aware that Ethiopia had carried out a numberof demarcations along the Badme area, prompting an exchange of letters by PrimeMinister Zenawi and President Afwerki. In November 1994, a joint panel was set up by the two sides to try andresolve the matter; however, this effort made no substantial progress. In the midst of the Badme affair, anothercrisis broke out in July-August 1997 where Ethiopian troops entered anotherundemarcated frontier area in pursuit of the insurgent group ARDUF (AfarRevolutionary Democratic Unity Front or Afar Revolutionary Democratic UnionFront); then when Ethiopia set up a local administration in the area, Eritreaprotested, leading to firefights between Ethiopian and Eritrean forces.
Another source of friction between the two countries wasgenerated when, starting in 1993, the regional administration in TigrayProvince (in northern Ethiopia) published “administrative and fiscal” maps ofTigray that included the Badme area and a number of Eritrean villages that laybeyond the 1902 colonial-era and de facto “border” line. Since the 1950s, Tigray had administered thisarea and had established settlements there. In turn, Eritreadeclared that the area had been encroached as it formed part of the EritreanGash-Barka region.
Badme, a 160-square mile area that became the trigger forthe coming war, was located in the wider Badme plains, the latter forming asection of the vast semi-desert lowlands adjoining the Ethiopian mountains andstretching west to the Sudan. During the early 20th century when theEthiopian-Italian border treaties were made, Badme was virtually uninhabited,save for the local endemic Kunama tribal people. The 1902 treaty, which became the de factoborder between the Ethiopian Empire and Italian Eritrea in the western andcentral regions, stipulated that the border, heading from west to east, ranstarting from Khor Um Hagger in the Sudanese border, followed the Tekezze(Setit) River to its confluence with the Maieteb River, at which point it ran astraight line north to where the Mareb River converges with the Ambessa River(Figure 32). Thereafter, the borderfollowed a general eastward direction along the Mareb, through the smaller Melessa River,and finally along the Muna River. In turn, the 1908 treaty specified that theborder along the eastern regions would follow the outlines of the Red Sea coastline from a distance of 60 kilometersinland. These treaties have since beenupheld by successive Ethiopian governments, whose maps have followed thetreaties’ delineations to form a border that is otherwise unmarked on theground.
