Violence and the acknowledgement of tense past in the Horn: a note on the Ethio-Eritrean War (1998-2000)

• Main Author: Alessandro Triulzi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Instituto Universitário de Lisboa 2002-06-01
• Series: Cadernos de Estudos Africanos
• Subjects: inter-state conflict; Eritrea; Ethiopia; national identity
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/cea/1288

In this paper, the author attempts to describe how, during the two years of bloody conflict which confronted the newly-born State of Eritrea with its old «mother-country», Ethiopia, the two former allies and «brotherly» countries used war as an open way of acknowledging tense past between them and in the country at large. Between May 1998 and December 2000, when the peace accord was signed in Algiers, the two countries launched an extremely violent propaganda war which accompanied and sustained the fighting in the field. This «war of words» was aimed not only at defending the rights of each country over the disputed border areas, but at projecting as well the newly-found national identity and consolidating its internal perception. A public use of the past came to be enacted in an attempt to realign the historical identities of the countries and to adapt them to the new geo-political settings which came about with the demise of the previous Ethiopian regime in 1991.