Isaias Afwerki
Isaias Afwerki won a thirty-year war of independence and has governed the country he made without an election, a constitution in force or a private newspaper since. He left engineering studies in 1966 to join the Eritrean independence movement against Ethiopia, and built the Eritrean People's Liberation Front into an army that ran schools, hospitals and workshops underground in the northern hills while it fought. It beat a Soviet-equipped Ethiopian army in the field in 1991, and independence followed a referendum in 1993 that carried on ninety-nine per cent. Eritrea was expected to do well: disciplined, literate by regional standards, and with a functioning administration inherited from the movement. What followed instead was a border war with Ethiopia from 1998 over the town of Badme, which killed perhaps a hundred thousand people for territory a boundary commission then awarded to Eritrea and Ethiopia refused to hand over. The no-war-no-peace that followed became the justification for everything. National service was made indefinite - conscription without end, in the army or in state construction - and it is the reason Eritreans have been among the largest groups crossing the Mediterranean for a decade. The constitution ratified in 1997 was never implemented, the private press was closed in 2001 and its editors have not been seen since. In 2018 a new Ethiopian prime minister accepted the border ruling and the two states made peace, which won that prime minister a Nobel Prize. Two years later Eritrean troops entered Tigray alongside Ethiopian forces in a war marked by massacres, and the opening did not survive.
- Lived: 1946 CE – ?
- Nationality: Eritrean
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
