(Abyssinia map, Before the Italian arrived in Assab)
Ethiopia’s experimentation with federalism began in the 1950s when Emperor Haile Selassie decided to expand the Ethiopian empire when the future of Eritrea came up for discussion at the United Nations. Eritrea had been an Italian colony for 50 years but had gained some degree of self-identity under the British caretakers after the defeat of the Italians in 1941.The Muslim more than half of the population supported the idea of an independent Eritrean state proposed by Arab countries while the Christian half tended to support unification with Ethiopia. The emperor intervened on the claim that Eritrea had after all historically been part of the empire. The UN also chose the option of forming a federation linking Ethiopia and Eritrea, “under which the Ethiopian government was given control of foreign affairs, defense, finance, commerce, and ports while Eritrea was allowed its own elected government and assembly to deal with local affairs.”
(Meredith 2011, 209) Emperor Selassie, nevertheless, always saw the federation as only a step towards unification, and by 1959 he had discarded the Eritrean flag and imposed Ethiopian law. Eritrea’s two main languages, Arabic, and Tigrinya were replaced by Amharic, and finally, “in 1962 the Eritrean Assembly was persuaded to vote for the dissolution of the federation and its own existence for annexation by Ethiopia” (Meredith 2011, 209). The formal federal arrangement had lasted only ten years.
The annexation would, nevertheless, from then on face a great deal of resistance and revolts in the name of the Eritrean insurgency. Well-equipped militarily and ideologically, the insurgency gained prominence for declaiming against what it regarded as the imperialist oppression of Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie. In 1974, the Emperor was overthrown by a radical military group under Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam.
(And Eritrea was finally liberated by the Eritrean women, that's right, by the women.)
