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"Scarred by decades of conflict and occupation, the craggy African nation of Eritrea has weathered the world's longest-running guerrilla war. The dogged determination that secured victory against Ethiopia, its giant neighbor, is woven into the national psyche, the product of a series of cynical foreign interventions. Fascist Italy wanted Eritrea as the springboard for a new, racially pure Roman empire, Britain sold off its industry for scrap, the United States needed a base for its state-of-the-art spy station, and the Soviet Union used it as a pawn in a proxy war." "Michael Wrong reveals the breathtaking abuses this tiny nation has suffered and tells the story of colonialism itself. Along the way, we meet a formidable African emperor, a pigheaded English suffragette, and a guerilla fighter who taught himself French cuisine in the bush."--Jacket.… (more)
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Wrong details the odyssey of Eritrea, the youngest country in Africa, and the subtitle of the book is depressingly accurate. Eritrea was basically invented by the Italians in the late 19th century so that they could have their own colonial empire, carved out of the northern bit of Ethiopia and the southern bit of Egypt. The country was subsequently ransacked by the British during WWII, illegally annexed by Ethiopia while the UN looked the other way (no surprise there), ignored by the entire Western world as it fought an ultimately successful 30-year-long guerilla war for independence (with first the U.S., then the Soviet Union, then Israel supplying Ethiopia with billions of dollars worth of military equipment and training), only to stumble back into war with Ethiopia after only six years of peace and prosperity as the poster-child for a possible African renaissance. The book was written in 2004 and I immediately looked up Eritrea's Wikipedia article to see what had happened in the last four years, only to find that, among other indictments, Eritrea is currently ranked dead last on Reporters Without Borders' Worldwide Press Freedom Index. Despite the horrible effect that the Eritrean government (ironically composed of some of the very freedom fighters who liberated the country in the first place) has had in the last 10 years, Wrong still holds out hope that the dogged pride and determination of the Eritreans will help the country bounce back. It was a nice note to end on, and the book itself is incredibly interesting and well-written, but the emotional effect of reading it can be summed-up by one of Wrong's own comments: "And you were left in a sulky gray fug of ambiguity, sure of only one thing: everyone had behaved badly, everyone was to blame."