The skirmish near Mount Adal in western Eritrea marked the start of Africa's longest armed conflict, pitting Eritrean separatists against successive Ethiopian governments. The war, fueled by Cold War arms shipments and shifting alliances, ended only in 1991 with the fall of Ethiopia's Marxist regime, leading to Eritrean independence in 1993 after a UN-supervised referendum.
Eritrea had been federated with Ethiopia under a UN resolution in 1952 after decades as an Italian, then British-administered, colonial territory. When Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie unilaterally dissolved the federation in 1962 and annexed Eritrea as a province, he confirmed the fears that had already driven Hamid Idris Awate and a small band of fighters to take up arms the year before.
Awate, a veteran of earlier anti-colonial banditry, gathered roughly a dozen men in the rugged terrain near Mount Adal and clashed with Ethiopian police, an engagement now commemorated as the war's opening battle. He died of illness within a year, but the movement he sparked splintered and reformed over three decades into the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, which eventually prevailed.
The war ground on through famine, Cold War proxy politics—Ethiopia backed first by the US, then the Soviet Union—and horrific sieges, killing an estimated hundreds of thousands. Eritrean fighters finally captured Asmara in May 1991, and a 1993 referendum saw 99.8 percent of Eritreans vote for independence, ending Africa's longest-running war and creating the continent's newest state at the time.
Key people: Hamid Idris Awate, Haile Selassie