Ertirea Today
From Article at:
http://www.fieldingtravel.com/dp/dangerousplaces/eritrea/

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There's a new contestant for the inauspicious title of the world's most impoverished nation: Eritrea, an arid sliver of desert along the Red Sea, populated by Tigrinya-speaking peoples emerging from an ultimately successful 30-year independence struggle against Ethiopia.

Here a man cannot expect to live past his forty-fifth birthday and children are lucky to survive past the age of five. The GNP per capita, at US$120, is the second lowest in the world. More than 80 percent of Eritrea's inhabitants are subsistence farmers, and the economy is entirely dependent on foreign aid. Just another famine-stricken, war-torn, dirt poor republic in the bowels of the Sahara.

Eritrea started life as an Italian colony in the 19th century and came under British mandate in 1941. Addis Ababa took the reins in 1952, and the nearly two-generation-long struggle for independence started shortly thereafter.

Eritrea is famous for conducting one of the first wars of liberation fought in large part by women. Of the 100,000 freedom fighters who fought the Ethiopians, nearly a third were women. The Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), who shoved the Ethiopians out of the picture in 1991, accomplished what no other African liberation force had before it: It created the first African state on the dark continent carved out of another African state, not from a European colony.

In its mainly unheralded struggle for democracy--in which it is doing admirably well--the new nation waits for the world to realize its people are starving to death


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