Isaias Afwerki: Africa's Kim Jong Un?

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Video originally published on July 9, 2024.

This analysis examines Isaias Afwerki: Africa's Kim Jong Un? in historical and strategic context. It traces how the core developments unfolded, which institutions and actors shaped outcomes, and what those decisions changed on the ground. Rather than repeating headline-level claims, it focuses on concrete mechanisms, constraints, and tradeoffs that explain the trajectory of events. The discussion moves from Key Developments through Strategic Implications to Risk and Uncertainty, then evaluates wider consequences. The goal is to clarify not only what happened, but why these developments still matter for current planning, risk assessment, and policy decisions.

Key Takeaways

You know the story: a people or nation struggles under the bootheel of an occupying power.
Today, we turn our attention to one such example. We will be turning our gaze to the East African country of Eritrea, its recent history, and to the man who has converted this small, young country on the Red Sea coast.
What is known is that the country ranks worst in the world for press freedom, consistently low on economic freedom, and also as one of the worst countries in the world for freedom of religion, being ranked as a Country.
The Tigrinya are a mostly Christian ethnic group inhabiting the central highlands of the country and speaking their own language, which is also called Tigrinya.
In fact, Marxist-Leninist political ideologies, imbued with various ethnocentric flavours, were actually very much in vogue.

Key Developments

You know the story: a people or nation struggles under the bootheel of an occupying power. The nation languishes in subjugation until rising up in glory, through a wave of emancipation led by a figure or group willing to gloriously lay it all on the line for the cause. Commonly, the figures who played decisive roles in the drive for self-determination are later recognised as national heroes, great liberators, and model citizens who may be the subject of books, poems, films, and a long-term residence in the common memory and national narrative. Often, that person may continue their involvement in the destiny of the country as head of state and may continue to remain hallowed as such in that country long beyond their death, often with a distinct nickname or honorific title bequeathed to them. Think of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, or perhaps Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia. But what happens when that leader decides they rather like the feeling of power and all of its trappings, and resolutely refuses to hand it over when the people desire change, resulting in a dictatorial system and renewed oppression of the beleaguered population once anew? But what happens when that leader decides they rather like the feeling of power and all of its trappings, and resolutely refuses to hand it over when the people desire change, resulting in a dictatorial system and renewed oppression of the beleaguered population once anew? Today, we turn our attention to one such example. We will be turning our gaze to the East African country of Eritrea, its recent history, and to the man who has converted this small, young country on the Red Sea coast into a site of unimaginable repression and one of the biggest generators of outward migration in the world. Eritrea - a background Eritrea sits right at the juncture of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, alongside the strategically important Bab El-Mandeh strait, and between the states of Sudan, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. Its ruler is a man called Isaias Afwerki, who has sat as its President since May 1993, when Eritrea formally declared independence from Ethiopia. Formerly a guerilla leader and leader of Eritrean secessionists during much of its thirty-year War of Independence, Afwerki has remained in office throughout all the time since despite there not having been so much as a single election to support his mandate. The political and social context in Eritrea is - to some degree - shrouded in a great deal of mystery. What is known is that the country ranks worst in the world for press freedom, consistently low on economic freedom, and also as one of the worst countries in the world for freedom of religion, being ranked as a Country of Particular Concern in this regard by the U.S Department of State.

Strategic Implications

Today, we turn our attention to one such example. We will be turning our gaze to the East African country of Eritrea, its recent history, and to the man who has converted this small, young country on the Red Sea coast into a site of unimaginable repression and one of the biggest generators of outward migration in the world. Eritrea - a background Eritrea sits right at the juncture of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, alongside the strategically important Bab El-Mandeh strait, and between the states of Sudan, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. Its ruler is a man called Isaias Afwerki, who has sat as its President since May 1993, when Eritrea formally declared independence from Ethiopia. Formerly a guerilla leader and leader of Eritrean secessionists during much of its thirty-year War of Independence, Afwerki has remained in office throughout all the time since despite there not having been so much as a single election to support his mandate. The political and social context in Eritrea is - to some degree - shrouded in a great deal of mystery. What is also well-known is that streams of migrants originating from Eritrea flow northwards every year to escape bitter hardships and repression in the country. Its emigrant flow is large even when compared with other unstable countries in its environs such as Sudan and Somalia, and absolutely astronomical when considering its relatively small population size. But to understand how Eritrea came to be the country it is today, and how it came to fall under the grasp of the dictator who rules it, it is first necessary to understand its history, demography, and its relations with its political environment and the wider world. Eritrea - a background The first important thing to note about Eritrea is that it is incredibly diverse. In fact, the diversity of Eritrea is so great that it becomes really rather confusing. Around half of the population of Eritrea (including Isaias Afwerki himself) is thought to be ethnic Tigrinya, although their exact numbers and proportion of the population are difficult to determine, as we shall see later. The Tigrinya are a mostly Christian ethnic group inhabiting the central highlands of the country and speaking their own language, which is also called Tigrinya. As the name would suggest, the Tigrinya are closely related to the Tigrayan people of northern Ethiopia, sharing the same language and religious beliefs, but are nevertheless generally recognised as two similar yet distinct ethnic groups. Confusingly, both the Tigrinya and the Tigrayans are separate still from a third group, the Tigre people, who are another ethnic group native to Eritrea and thought to comprise around thirty per cent of its population. The Tigre people practice Islam and speak the Tigre language, although as the name would suggest, this language is related to Tigrinya, and both are members of Ethio-Semitic language family.

Risk and Uncertainty

What is known is that the country ranks worst in the world for press freedom, consistently low on economic freedom, and also as one of the worst countries in the world for freedom of religion, being ranked as a Country of Particular Concern in this regard by the U.S Department of State. What is also well-known is that streams of migrants originating from Eritrea flow northwards every year to escape bitter hardships and repression in the country. Its emigrant flow is large even when compared with other unstable countries in its environs such as Sudan and Somalia, and absolutely astronomical when considering its relatively small population size. But to understand how Eritrea came to be the country it is today, and how it came to fall under the grasp of the dictator who rules it, it is first necessary to understand its history, demography, and its relations with its political environment and the wider world. Eritrea - a background The first important thing to note about Eritrea is that it is incredibly diverse. In fact, the diversity of Eritrea is so great that it becomes really rather confusing. The remaining twenty per cent of Eritrea's population comprises a variety of other ethnic groups, none of which comprise individually more than four per cent of the population but each with their own customs and traditions, and most speaking their own language. Due to its status as the language of the largest single ethnic group, Tigrinya is the dominant language in Eritrea. However, the use of Arabic is common too, as well as English, and the population of Eritrea even includes some speakers of Italian, owing to the colonisation of the region by the Italians from the late nineteenth century until 1941. Now, with all that said, the exact proportions and statistics regarding the population of Eritrea are quite difficult to precise, since one of the many things that Isaias Afwerki has never allowed during his thirty years as President is an actual population census. Isaias Afwerki Turning now to the man who would turn independent Eritrea into his sort of personal plaything, Isaias Afwerki was born in the modern-day capital of Eritrea, Asmara, in 1946. At that time, Eritrea was in a kind of limbo, being administered temporarily by British forces since Italy had been stripped of its colonial possessions five years before. In 1952, it was decided by a UN resolution to federate Eritrea with the centuries-old Ethiopian Empire, a union which became known by the rather unimaginative title 'the Ethiopian-Eritrean Federation'. The Federation was a monarchy, under the dominion of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I, and was supposed to give Eritrea a high degree of autonomy and control over some of its own affairs. But this didn't really happen, and in 1962, Eritrea found itself forcibly annexed, being downgraded into a constituent province of Ethiopia by its Emperor.

Outlook

The Tigrinya are a mostly Christian ethnic group inhabiting the central highlands of the country and speaking their own language, which is also called Tigrinya. As the name would suggest, the Tigrinya are closely related to the Tigrayan people of northern Ethiopia, sharing the same language and religious beliefs, but are nevertheless generally recognised as two similar yet distinct ethnic groups. Confusingly, both the Tigrinya and the Tigrayans are separate still from a third group, the Tigre people, who are another ethnic group native to Eritrea and thought to comprise around thirty per cent of its population. The Tigre people practice Islam and speak the Tigre language, although as the name would suggest, this language is related to Tigrinya, and both are members of Ethio-Semitic language family. The remaining twenty per cent of Eritrea's population comprises a variety of other ethnic groups, none of which comprise individually more than four per cent of the population but each with their own customs and traditions, and most speaking their own language. This did not sit terribly well with many Eritreans, and a war of independence was launched by the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), a militant organisation with leftist leanings which had been founded in Cairo the previous year, and which operated largely out of Eritrea's neighbour Sudan. One of the many young idealists attracted to the ELF's cause was a twenty-year-old Afwerki, who arrived in Sudan in 1966 to join its ranks after abandoning his engineering degree at the University of Addis Ababa. Afwerki rose quickly in the ranks of the ELF, becoming a regional commander and later the founder of a splinter organisation, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), when it split from its parent organisation in 1970. The EPLF eventually became the dominant faction fighting for the independence of Eritrea, and would continue to exist until Eritrean independence, at which point it became the People's Front for Democracy and Justice, which remains the only legal political party in Eritrea to this day. You see, unlike the ELF, which incorporated elements of ethnonationalism and sectarianism into its structure, and frequently saw bouts of infighting between Muslims and Christians in its ranks, the EPLF was instead founded on Maoist principles and saw a lot of support not only from former members of its parent organisation, but also from the Eritrean public. With time, the two movements would go on to fight each other as well as the Ethiopian state, something that would cause the weaker ELF to eventually buckle and be defeated in 1981. The mantle of the fight for Eritrean sovereignty was therefore assumed by the EPLF alone, which it would continue in a sustained guerilla campaign against Ethiopia throughout the 1980s and up until 1991. Here, it is worth making a sidenote that the far-left leanings of the EPLF didn't make it anything particularly unusual or undesirable to the Eritrean public at the time.

The Making of a Leader: Isaias Afwerki's Rise to Power

In fact, Marxist-Leninist political ideologies, imbued with various ethnocentric flavours, were actually very much in vogue. In 1974, Emperor Selassie of Ethiopia was overthrown following a series of mass protests, and what arose to replace him was the Derg - officially the Provisional Military Administrative Council - which was a Marxist military dictatorship which would run Ethiopia (and by extension Eritrea) for the next thirteen years. The overthrow of Selassie also sparked the rise of a wide group of insurgent groups and ethnic militias who took up arms against the Derg in a conflict that would come to be known as the Ethiopian Civil War. In 1977, with the Civil War ongoing, the Derg was also plunged into war with its neighbour Somalia - a fellow Marxist totalitarian state under dictator Mohamed Siad Barre - and for this it received support from South Yemen, which at that time was independent and - you guessed it - also run by a Marxist government. The beginning of the Ethiopian Civil War no doubt played into the hands of the Eritrean separatists led by Afwerki, who had already been fighting the Ethiopian government for several years by the time the war began. Even so, the authoritarian government would not crack easily, and the civil war and Eritrean war would continue concurrently for a miserable sixteen years before the Marxist Ethiopian government was finally toppled in 1991, and only after communist support structures across the world had begun to collapse. The Hero of Eritrean Independence When the Ethiopian Civil War - and with it, the decades-long Eritrean War of Independence - did finally end, it did so with its intended objective secured: the official independence of Eritrea as a sovereign state, which was declared in 1993. This success came about through a combination of world events and good fortune for Afwerki. The collapse of communism in many parts of the world in the late 1980s was the chief catalyst behind the successful independence of Eritrea. In 1987, the Derg had given way to a civilian-led communist government for Ethiopia, the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (PDRE). The PDRE existed for four years until the collapsing communist system made continuing the Ethiopian Civil War almost impossible, due to drying up support by key backers such as the Soviet Union and Cuba. The PDRE withdrew from Eritrea in May 1991, and the same month, opposition forces entered Addis Ababa, resulting in the collapse of the government. Ethiopia's government quickly became a non-communist transitional government the same year, composed largely of longstanding opponents of the Derg, something which would bode well for the ambitions of Afwerki and the Eritrean separatists.

Eritrea's Turbulent Past: Historical Context for Afwerki's Rule

Many of the top positions in the new government were held by ethnic Tigrayans - which, as you will recall, are close ethnically to the Tigrinya of Eritrea. It was this government which decided to give Eritrea its independence, something formally recognised after a referendum in 1993. With that said, it wasn't just the dumb luck of having some pals in Addis Ababa that secured Eritrea's independence. It was likely also the result of the tenacious campaign waged by Afwerki, the EPLF and the ELF before it, which did warrant some recognition in wake of the collapse of the government and the end of the long civil war. After all, going toe-to-toe with Ethiopia in warfare has never been a mean feat. Ethiopia is seen as never having been successfully colonised despite its vast history, with the exception of a five-year occupation by Benito Mussolino's Italy around the time of the Second World War. Italy - a major European colonial power - had been soundly defeated by the Ethiopians when they had attempted to conquer what was then referred to as Abyssinia in the 1890s. Even Mussolini's later victory against stiff Ethiopian resistance only came through the use of advanced military equipment - heavy artillery and aerial bombers - which the Ethiopian forces could not match. The Italian campaign also featured the use of chemical weapons like mustard gas which had previously been prohibited by the Geneva Convention, alongside other war crimes. Even still, only a few decades later, a resurgent Ethiopia had managed to see off a surprise full-scale invasion by Somalia, when it sought to annex the eastern region known as the Ogaden - compromising around one-third of Ethiopia's territory - in 1977. Despite the Somalian Army's better equipment and support from local militias in the Ogaden, the Ethiopians had managed to rally and decisively defeat the Somalians - albeit with massive assistance from the Soviet Union and Cuba. The failed Ogaden campaign set off a crisis in Somalia, which eventually collapsed its government and led to an instability which continues to plague it to this day. Ethiopia even found time in this period to defeat the last remnants of the ELF, which was ultimately driven out of Eritrea into Sudan, where it dissolved in 1981. Now admittedly, for much of the latter part of the Eritrean War of Independence, and especially in the mid-1980s, the EPLF guerrillas were fighting a depleted and distracted Ethiopian state. The ongoing Civil War meant that - by the mid-1970s - Ethiopia was no longer fighting only the Eritreans, but was having to deal with rebel groups from the Oromo, Amhara, and Afar communities also, aside even from the full-scale invasion by Somalia in the Ogaden.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Jackson Reed

Jackson Reed creates and presents analysis focused on military doctrine, strategic competition, and conflict dynamics.

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