With a referendum on the secession of the southern part of Sudan scheduled for January 9th, the time seems right for a trip into the archives (specifically, the leader pages in the print edition of April 24th 1993), to reexamine what our thoughts were in advance of Eritrea's vote for independence, and on the merits of secession in Africa in general:
Africa should welcome Eritrea, not resist it
WITH referendums enjoying something of a vogue, the one taking place in a remote corner of Africa this weekend may not grab many headlines. Between April 23rd and 25th the inhabitants of Eritrea, a little wedge of territory beside the Red Sea, will vote on whether to secede from Ethiopia. The place is small, but the symbolic value of its vote is not. When Eritreans say Yes to independence, as they surely will, they will deliver to Africa the first country born through secession since decolonisation. Many fear that if Eritrea splits off the entire African jigsaw will break up.
In a continent where frontiers and people are famously ill matched, such a prospect is not altogether fanciful. Hence the principle so often cited: African borders may be random lines drawn on colonists' maps, but any attempt to alter them will only lead to more instability and fighting. Africans have bitter memories of secessionist wars; Nigeria's Biafra, the Congo's Katanga. They need only cast their eyes northwards to Bosnia to see where the post-cold-war version can lead.
But Africans should relax. Eritrea's claim to independence is unusually strong. And even where others have as good a case, that need not spell disaster for the continent.
A chip, but not off the old block
The fear that Eritrea will start a trend is, not surprisingly, strongest in Ethiopia. There is the worry that, once Eritrea has cut loose, other groups in other parts of the ethnically mixed country will want to do the same. They may, but their case will not be as strong as the Eritreans'.
Eritrea's claim to be special starts with its history. In colonial days, Eritrea was never a part of Ethiopia. Whereas the Ethiopians drove the Italians off their soil and escaped colonial rule (a brief spell under Mussolini excepted), Eritrea was in the first half of this century an outpost of the Italian empire. Not until 1952 was Eritrea handed over by the British, who had been running it for the previous 11 years, to Ethiopia; their reasons for doing so lay largely in their feelings of guilt about the way Europe had allowed Mussolini to gobble up Ethiopia in the 1930s. Besides spaghetti and cappuccino, Italy bequeathed to Eritreans a sense of national identity which has only been strengthened by their forced cohabitation with Ethiopia. Eritrea's independence will not draw new borders, but return the country to its shape of 40 years ago.
Furthermore, the Eritreans fought almost every year of annexation by Ethiopia. Their victory over the Ethiopian army in May 1991, which ended a 30-year war, led to the liberation of their country. Since then the Eritrean People's Liberation Front has been running the place as a de facto independent state. Eritreans are not breaking away so much as making their separation formal. Above all, since the end of the war, Eritreans have gone about their bid for secession in an orderly, peaceful way. They have waited two years before holding a referendum, to allow their war-battered country to recover. And they are on good terms with the government in Addis Ababa.
In time, other parts of African states may well press their claims more forcefully. Few will have as strong a case as Eritrea. The world should be especially wary of those areas that, being blessed with mineral or other wealth, simply want to bolt with the loot. But some may deserve support. British Somaliland, for example, the northern bit of (former Italian) Somalia, has a similar historical case. Southern Sudan's long war with its north might support a divorce on the ground of irreconcilable differences. Some boundaries have, in fact, been changed in the past: western Togo, once British Togoland, is now in Ghana; British South Cameroon is now part of ex-French Cameroon, whereas British North Cameroon is part of Nigeria.
Not every would-be secessionist should be encouraged to follow Eritrea. But it is time for Africans to bury a taboo.
