The surprising triumph of “Africa’s Kim Jong Un”

In 1967, at the height of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, a group of young Eritrean students posed for a photo on the outskirts of Nanjing. The Eritreans, whose tiny country had been annexed by Ethiopia five years previously, were training to be guerrilla fighters in order to win it back. Looking at the photo, it’s not hard to guess which student would eventually emerge as a leader. Standing at the back, Issaias Afwerki towers over his comrades and their Chinese tutors, who loyally clutch copies of the Little Red Book. Arms crossed, he looks straight at the camera with a quizzical expression.

Since that photo was snapped, China has become a superpower. Nanjing is now overrun by shopping malls, and bold skyscrapers have replaced the modest homes discernible in the photo’s background.

In contrast, Eritrea seems stuck in a time-warp. Not only is it one of the world’s poorest countries, it is also a giant prison, from which legions of despairing youngsters try to flee every year. Pundits dismiss it as the “North Korea of Africa”.

You might expect that tall former student – the only president post-independence Eritrea has ever known – to have been consigned to the footnotes of history. But thanks to his cunning and ruthlessness, and to horrific civil wars that have rocked Eritrea’s giant neighbours, Ethiopia and Sudan, Issaias has emerged as an unlikely powerbroker in the Horn of Africa.

More prominent leaders are courting him. In May he was given a red-carpet reception in Beijing, with full military honours. In July he flew to Moscow for a tête-à-tête with Vladimir Putin. In February he was warmly welcomed to Kenya by President William Ruto, who persuaded him to rejoin a regional trade bloc which he had petulantly quit 15 years ago.

To the West – and anyone who cares about human rights – he remains a pariah and a source of trouble. At festivals staged this summer to mark 30 years of Eritrean independence, police forces in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Israel, Canada and the United States were taken aback by the violence of clashes between supporters and opponents of Issaias’s government. The confrontations resulted in dozens of police casualties.

What’s clear is that Issaias can no longer be ignored.

The 77-year-old Issaias ticks many of the classic “dictator” boxes: he has jailed former colleagues and journalists, neutralised possible military challengers, blocked the establishment of political parties, emasculated parliament and never held a national election.

Yet in other ways he doesn’t fit the mould. Priding himself on his “man of the people” image, he avoids ostentation. He may don suits for summits with Xi Jinping and Putin, but at home is more frequently seen in short-sleeved jackets and open-toed sandals. His wife is similarly low-key: she wore a zip-up tracksuit when she received the Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, at the family home. Despite his iron grip on power, his portrait isn’t plastered all over the country and his subordinates waste little time nurturing a personality cult. “Issaias isn’t interested in luxury brands, personal wealth or the trappings of office,” says Dan Connell, an Eritrea expert who has interviewed the president many times. “The only thing that interests him is power.”

Issaias was born in 1946 on the outskirts of Asmara. Located on a rugged plateau separating what used to be the landlocked kingdom of Abyssinia from the Red Sea, the town became the capital of Eritrea after Italy, which had seized a strip of coastal land in 1890, decided to move the administration of its first African colony to the cool of the highlands.

Over the next few decades, Italy’s most talented architects got to work, designing Modernist palazzi and Art Deco cinemas and laying out palm-lined avenues, piazzas and fountains. In 1935 Benito Mussolini used it as a springboard for his invasion of Abyssinia (the old name for Ethiopia).

By the time Issaias was born, Italy and Germany had lost the second world war and Eritrea was under the control of the British Army. The British regarded the colony as a ludicrous white elephant, and were keen to hand it over to the UN. Culturally, the former Italian colony was divided between Orthodox Christians who wanted to be part of Ethiopia, and a mostly Muslim movement agitating for independence. In 1952 the UN tried to please everyone by making Eritrea part of a federation with Ethiopia. Eritreans adopted a sky-blue flag in homage to the international body that had given them a degree of autonomy.

Issaias’s career as a revolutionary can be viewed in part as a rebellion against his parents’ generation. His father, who worked for the Ethiopian state tobacco firm, belonged to a party pushing for Eritrea to be fully merged with Ethiopia. His uncle Solomon Abreha, a stalwart nationalist, was governor of the northern Ethiopian province of Wollo: he would later be one of the 60 officials executed when a military junta seized power in Ethiopia in the 1980s.

Issaias’s mother was of Tigrayan descent, which he found embarrassing. Immigrants from Tigray, a poor Ethiopian region just south of Eritrea, tended to hold the lowliest jobs in Asmara: street-sweepers, maids and sex workers. Issaias’s family was solidly middle class, yet his grandmother – to whom he was close – made money distilling and selling mies (mead), a far from respectable occupation in the eyes of conservative highlands society. Childhood acquaintances remember that when Issaias and his friends were walking back from school, he would slip away and surreptitiously enter the family home by the back gate.

Outside his childhood world, a bigger drama was unfolding. Ethiopia was then ruled by an emperor, Haile Selassie, who was supposed to respect Eritrean autonomy under the terms of the UN federation agreement. Instead he slowly turned the smaller country into a vassal state, banning political parties and forcing schools to switch from Tigrinya, the language most Eritreans spoke, to Amharic, the language of imperial Ethiopia.

In 1962, when Issaias was 16, Ethiopia formally annexed Eritrea – a land grab that gave Haile Selassie long-desired access to the sea. Eritreans felt betrayed: the world had stood by as its people were turned into second-class citizens in a desperately poor African state.

Issaias went to university in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, to study engineering. Here he encountered snobbery towards Eritreans, which was particularly pronounced among members of Ethiopia’s Amhara ruling class. The experience left him with a life-long suspicion of the university-educated. It also fed his appetite for political activism. The campus was turbulent, with left-wing students – outraged by Ethiopia’s feudal conditions – calling for change.

Issias caught the revolutionary bug. After a year he abandoned his studies and headed to Sudan to join the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), an independence movement which was staging hit-and-run raids on the Ethiopian army and police. It was a route many Eritrean youngsters were taking, but when they joined they found the organisation was being pulled apart by differences between Muslim lowlanders and Christian highlanders. Frustrated, Issaias and two comrades talked about forming a secret splinter group. They got matching tattoos of the letter E, for Eritrea. A few years later, Issaias would have one of them executed – the other is assumed to be dead or rotting in one of his jails.

In 1967 a few ELF fighters were chosen to go to China and receive military and political training from Mao’s revolutionaries. Among them was Issaias.

At Nanjing Military College, recalls Mesfin Hagos, a fellow guerrilla, lectures ranged from the theoretical – “how to mobilise the people, how to form a vanguard party to lead the struggle, how to create a people’s army” – to the intensely practical. Recruits learned, among other things, “how to manufacture explosives using exclusively local materials, how to lay a landmine, how to blow up a bridge”.

There was time for some revolutionary tourism, too. Carefully monitored by their hosts, the Eritrean recruits were taken to see Mao’s birthplace, the site of his historic swim across the Yangzi river, and the Great Wall of China. “All of those who went to China were very marked by it,” says Mesfin. “We were very young, so it left a deep impression. It was not just how our Chinese tutors handled us, it was the expectations they had of us, what they thought we would go on to do.”

The experience left Issaias with a lifelong affinity for China, a taste for moutai, a local hooch, and a useful playbook for eliminating opponents. He is said to be an obsessive reader of books by and about Mao.

“I have a picture of him taken in an underground bunker…and behind him you can see a bookcase full of Chinese volumes and books published by Progress Press in Moscow,” says Dan Connell. “But it was Mao’s military writings that had the greatest impact.”

When he returned to Africa, Issaias found the ELF consumed by internal disputes: he later complained that the organisation was so focused on factions, clans and religion that its cadres “would never talk about Eritrea”.

Issaias and like-minded comrades slipped away, setting up a group which eventually merged with other breakaway units to become the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). It was a Marxist movement that six of his siblings would eventually join. A bitter civil war would rage between ELF and EPLF until the former was pushed into Sudan. The EPLF emerged triumphant as the primary movement resisting Ethiopia.

The EPLF’s first secretary-general was Romodan Mohammed Nur, another Chinese-trained fighter, but Issaias was widely recognised as its real commander. “He was smart, hard-working, decisive in everything, and we needed that at the front,” recalls Mesfin.

“The Struggle”, as it was known, would last another two decades. By 1978 the various liberation fronts controlled 95% of Eritrean territory. But then Mengistu Haile Mariam, an army officer who had toppled Haile Selassie and made himself dictator of Ethiopia, shucked off the country’s ties to the United States and instead turned to the Soviet Union.

Moscow poured heavy weaponry into the Horn of Africa and the EPLF was forced to stage a “strategic withdrawal” – another concept Mao would have recognised – pulling back to a remote base in the Rora Mountains, where its members regrouped.

At its height, tens of thousands of people were involved in what was a shadow-state-in-waiting hidden amongst the euphorbia cactus and wild olive saplings. Those who visited the EPLF’s mountain hideaway were astonished to discover a sophisticated network of trenches, pharmaceutical laboratories, schools, guestrooms and even a hospital – much of it dug under the barren rock to escape constant bombardment by Ethiopian jets. Fighters emerged and went about their duties at night, sleeping during the dangerous daylight hours.

In theory this was a collective of like-minded comrades, dedicated to winning independence from Ethiopia and installing democracy. In reality, Issaias used textbook Maoist tactics to divide his opponents, establishing a secret vanguard party which made all key decisions, and encouraging “self-criticism” sessions as a way of suppressing dissent.

The EPLF was run like “a police state”, recalls Hebret Berhe, a former Eritrean ambassador who started out as one of the group’s female fighters. She found the transition from working as a clandestine activist in Asmara to a combatant in the field a shock. “If you showed signs of independent thought, you could be singled out for a self-criticism session in which you would be personally attacked in front of trainees – after that no one wanted to be seen with you.”

According to Hebret, Issaias was particularly suspicious of educated people in the movement, who might pose a challenge to his authority: they were labelled “petit bourgeois”.

Some EPLF members pushed back. In the 1970s he came after them, unleashing two purges in which people whose loyalty he doubted were denounced and punished. Mussie Tesfamikael, one of the original trio to tattoo an “E” on their shoulders, died in the clandestine executions that ensued.

In the 1980s Issaias launched the “three privileges” campaign, in which mid-ranking cadres were encouraged to heap shame on their superiors for drinking, womanising and exploiting their positions. “There were no trials, just public shaming, but that was the worst,” recalls Mesfin Hagos. “If you are humiliated in front of your own troops, how can you ever be a commander? And some of those attacked were his close friends.” There was an irony to these denunciations, as Issaias himself has a reputation as an aggressive drunk who often makes use of his fists.

For all the fear that he instilled, Issaias was also admired. Comrades remember a man who never sat still, either occupied with some practical task – cooking, building a shelter, repairing a trench wall – or studying. Perhaps making up for his interrupted education, he would return from trips carrying piles of books he’d urge the fighters to read, setting up study groups to discuss socialist theory, the roots of Zionism or international affairs.

Paulos Tesfagiorgis, who ran the Eritrean Relief Association, the EPLF’s humanitarian wing, noticed the same dogged determination when it came to mastering the languages Issaias needed to get his message out. “I saw someone who was moving very, very fast. When I first met him, his English was not very good, but when I started bringing journalists to him, I saw him beginning to use complex words to discuss humanitarian issues with non-governmental organisations and government officials.”

Issaias mastered Arabic with similar rapidity, according to Tesfagiorgis. “He decided he needed to know what was being said in the Arab world. The level of serious hard work involved was amazing. He was always working, working, working. His capacity for learning – whether the lessons are put to good or bad use – is extraordinary.”

In the end, it was the collapse of communism in Moscow that fatally weakened the Ethiopian regime. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, scaled back military support for its African client states in the late 1980s. The Eritreans seized the opportunity to capture town after town.

In May 1991, the EPLF routed the Ethiopian army and liberated Asmara. Its convoy of trucks, laden with young fighters, rolled down the palm-lined central avenue and were met by weeping, euphoric crowds. It was an extraordinary moment. Largely friendless, powered by little more than sheer grit, the EPLF had won independence for Eritrea, defeating one of Africa’s best-equipped armies.

Looking back, many EPLF veterans believed that Issaias had been preparing for this moment back when he launched the “three privileges campaign” which marginalised EPLF stalwarts. Remaining commanders who won posts in the post-independence government felt beleaguered and insecure.

The Eritreans hadn’t been the only ones fighting the Ethiopian government. In the mid-1970s students and peasants in the Tigray region set up a rebel group of their own called the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Its leader, a medical school dropout called Meles Zenawi, reached out to the EPLF, asking its more experienced fighters for help. The EPLF took a small number of Tigrayans for military training and sent a handful of their cadres to teach the TPLF basic guerrilla warfare tactics.

It proved a fruitful alliance. Four days after Asmara’s fall, a rebel coalition dominated by the TPLF captured Addis Ababa, bringing Mengistu’s Marxist regime to an end. The armoured column that drove into Addis included Soviet-made tanks driven by EPLF fighters, who had turned the capture of Ethiopian military hardware into an art form.

Mengistu’s defeat left Issaias feeling invincible: as he saw it, he was responsible for liberating not just Eritrea, but Ethiopia too. “In the early days of liberation, he used to speak about individual TPLF leaders as if they were under his command. He would try to guide them, lead them – he would talk on their behalf,” recalls Mesfin Hagos, who was appointed defence minister in Eritrea’s new administration.

At home, Issaias consolidated his position. The EPLF turned into the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), which quickly became Eritrea’s sole legal political party. It was a similar story with the economy, which gradually came to be dominated by the Red Sea Trading Corporation, a firm owned by the PFDJ.

Issaias was no more collegial as president than he had been as a rebel. Amanuel Eyasu, an Eritrean journalist, witnessed this several times at Asmara airport. Issaias’s ministers would gather to meet him after a trip abroad, but he would simply sweep past them, forcing them to quiz reporters to find out how it had gone. “Information is power for him,” says Amanuel, “so he gives them very little.”

For a brief period in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the world bought into Issaias’s vision of himself as a progressive leader. He built hospitals, planted millions of trees on Eritrea’s denuded slopes and saw that food aid was effectively distributed to a perennially malnourished population. Bill Clinton hailed him as one of the leaders of a much-hyped but short-lived “African Renaissance”.

But the relationship between the EPLF and the TPLF had always been prickly, in spite of their leaders’ common language and goals. During the Ethiopian famine of 1985, Issaias’s fighters shut down a key road used by starving Tigrayans to import food aid, a tactical decision the Ethiopians never forgot or forgave.

In 1998 Ethiopia and Eritrea went to war. The spark was a squabble over a tiny border village called Badme. The underlying cause was mounting economic rivalry and hotheaded leadership on both sides. Initial skirmishes escalated quickly, and Issaias’s bluntness didn’t help (his response to the deaths of 12 Ethiopian schoolchildren killed by a stray Eritrean bomb was, “This is war.”)

Confident of victory, Issaias failed to consult his generals on the ensuing military campaign, issuing instructions from his office, hundreds of kilometres from the front. Tens of thousands died. When the fighting ended in 2000, a big slice of Eritrean territory lay under Ethiopian control. And Issaias had no one to blame but himself.

An international boundary commission later vindicated many of Eritrea’s territorial claims but the TPLF-dominated coalition in Addis ignored it. The international community, which saw giant Ethiopia – rather than little Eritrea – as the prime regional power, had agreed to act as guarantors but failed to insist on demarcation.

The Big Brother-Little Brother relationship between the EPLF and TPLF had been turned, unnervingly, on its head. The West’s apparent readiness to dismiss Issaias as an irritant while flocking to Addis to discuss aid and business opportunities with the clever, charming Meles cut deep, say contemporaries, lies at the root of Issaias’s implacability towards Tigray today.

“Issaias felt humiliated,” says Paulos Tesfagiorgis. “The TPLF were making jokes about him and he could not tolerate that. He felt utterly betrayed by the international community, [a sentiment] which of course tapped into Eritrea’s long history of betrayal.”

The disastrous outcome of the war prompted long-checked internal criticisms to bubble to the surface. Key ministers formed the “Group of 15”, which issued an open letter decrying Issaias’s failure to implement a proper multi-party constitution or hold elections. Over the hiss of the Gaggia coffee machines in Asmara’s cafés, former comrades openly described him as a “dictator”, and were happy to be quoted in the independent media. For a brief moment, change seemed imminent.

Issaias waited. In September 2001 terrorists flew planes into the twin towers in New York, and journalists and diplomats around the world were suddenly thinking about little else. Then Issaias made his move. In a series of dawn raids, his security forces arrested every member of the G-15 in Asmara at the time (bar one, who recanted). Returning from a health checkup in America, Mesfin Hagos, the defence minister, learned while in transit through Frankfurt airport that his passport had been revoked: he’d been rendered stateless. Unable to board the flight to Asmara, he went into exile in Germany.

None of the people arrested has been seen since. More than half are believed to have died in prison. Issaias’s ruthless handling of the men and women he’d fought alongside heralded a new phase of his rule. Soon afterwards he shut down independent media. Many churches – seen as magnets for dissent – were hounded underground, and NGOs were encouraged to leave. In an echo of Mao’s anti-intelligentsia campaigns, Asmara’s university was shut down and replaced with military-run technical colleges.

The most serious consequence of the border war was the introduction of open-ended military service. Eritreans of both sexes were obliged to abandon their studies and family farms to go and drill in Sawa, a bleak desert training camp. Having learnt to become soldiers, they were used as camouflage-clad labourers, digging wells in the baking heat and building roads on pitiful state allowances.

This system, which some have likened to slavery, is still in place. The forced labour can last for years – there is no time limit. Those who resist are arrested. Many have fled the country. Human Rights Watch puts the number of emigrants at a tenth of the entire population, but no one can be sure.

Having been trounced in a border war, Issaias pursued proxy wars farther afield. After Ethiopia sent troops into Somalia in 2006 to take on al-Shabaab, a jihadist group, Issaias entered the conflict on the jihadists’ side. This doomed Eritrea to nearly a decade of UN Security Council sanctions, including asset freezes and travel bans on the PFDJ, the Red Sea Trading Corporation and the armed forces.

The opprobrium rankled, but Issaias refused to engage in the diplomatic dances that might unlock foreign aid, and pulled out of regional co-ordination bodies because, his critics said, he couldn’t dominate them. He rarely agreed to meet visiting dignitaries or foreign ambassadors, unless they were Chinese. (The Chinese embassy in Asmara, according to a US cable, sent Issaias a meal once a month.)

With the doors of the presidential office closed, Western diplomats resorted to clumsy stereotypes when analysing this complex, deeply private head of state. In a cable from 2008, published on Wikileaks, the American ambassador was quoted describing Issaias as “unhinged”. But predictions that he would become irrelevant proved premature.

The beginning of the end of Issaias’s wilderness years came in 2012 with Meles’s relatively early death from blood cancer. Bereft of its brilliant leader, the increasingly unpopular TPLF began to lose its grip on Ethiopia’s ruling coalition, itself undermined by growing unrest among the Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups.

When Abiy Ahmed, a former intelligence officer of mixed Oromo and Amhara descent, was eventually appointed prime minister, he made it his business to repair relations with Eritrea, while purging TPLF members from senior posts in the military and security establishment. Humiliated and facing prosecution, they retreated to Tigray, their home province.

In July 2018, a crowd gathered in the fierce sunshine at Addis Ababa airport to watch a plane land. Its touchdown heralded the end of a two-decade stand-off between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Cameramen scurried across the tarmac as the doors opened to capture the moment Issaias set foot on Ethiopian soil. A brass band struck up as the president strode down the red carpet; some people began to dance.

For Eritrean viewers, the fact that Issaias was visiting Ethiopia for the first time in 22 years wasn’t what kept them glued to their TV screens. What transfixed them was his smile. As the 6’3” Eritrean stooped to embrace Abiy Ahmed, more than 30 years his junior and seven inches shorter, Issaias seemed close to tears of joy. When a crowd greeted him with ululations later that day his face, normally set in a look of stern resolve beneath its impressive moustache, dissolved in a grin. When Abiy handed him the keys to Eritrea’s dust-blanketed embassy in Addis Ababa, the man sometimes described as “Africa’s Kim Jong Un” positively beamed.

“None of us had seen anything like it before,” says Hebret Berhe, his former ambassador. “His face was completely changed. Everyone was wondering what it meant.”

Subsequent events have cast that trip – and that smile –  in a new light. On the surface, reconciliation was the order of the day, with the visit paving the way for a series of peace deals between Eritrea and Ethiopia (Abiy would go on to receive the Nobel peace prize for his role). But analysts now wonder whether Issaias and Abiy actually struck a war pact, with the TPLF as the allotted victim. In a speech the same month, Issaias made clear that – in his view – it was “game over” for the loathed Woyane, as the TPLF are known in Eritrea.

In November 2020, after the TPLF insisted on staging an election Abiy had cancelled in the rest of the country, Ethiopia’s federal army and Tigrayan fighters went to war. Issaias sent Eritrean troops to help his new friend smash his old enemy.

For the first five months, Abiy covered up the Eritrean role in the fighting but eventually it became impossible to deny. Issaias, we now know, not only ordered his own forces across the border into Tigray – he also trained a contingent of Somali soldiers who followed them and allowed imported drones to be stationed in the Eritrean port of Assab.

The war claimed between 160,000 and 380,000 civilian lives, by one estimate. Every side committed atrocities, some ghoulishly recorded on smartphones and posted on social media. But it is striking just how many abuses have been attributed to Eritrean soldiers. Most of these troops – like Issaias – speak Tigrinya. Some have distant family in Tigray. Yet Eritrean troops stand accused of killing Tigrayan civilians sheltering in churches, using women as sex slaves, setting fire to crops, slaughtering livestock and pillaging businesses in what appears to have been a razed-earth operation intended to bring the entire province to its knees.

One harrowing account given to Human Rights Watch describes Eritrean soldiers – identifiable from their distinctive plastic sandals – going from house to house in a Tigrayan town and murdering civilians. In one house they shot two children and left the mother alive, locking the door behind them so that she was trapped with their dead bodies for a day and a half.

“These unhappy youngsters have spent years in Sawa being brainwashed, being told by their commanders that all their problems are the fault of the Woyane,” says Hebret. “So when they were encouraged by their commanders to take revenge, they did.”

Eventually a peace deal was brokered in November 2022, under which the TPLF was to lay down its weapons and Ethiopia was to let humanitarian aid flow into Tigray again. But the agreement was missing one important thing: it made no mention of Eritrean troops. That raises a major question over future deployments.

“Issaias has always seen negotiation and diplomacy as a sign of weakness,” says Connell, the expert on Eritrea. “It’s never been about give and take, with him. If you give, it’s a sign of weakness.”

Under pressure from both Abiy and the outside world, Issaias has reluctantly pulled some troops out of Tigray (though fewer than the Ethiopian government claims, according to experts). “Abiy is interested in a relationship with the West, while Issaias is not,” says Connell. “Abiy was incredibly naive, but he’s beginning to understand who he is dealing with now.”

Asmara today is a very strange place. The few visitors who make it there often feel they have strayed into a picturesque postcard from the past, where carefully preserved Fiat 500s still putter slowly past trotting donkey-carts. They can sip cappuccinos in the city’s famous zinc-top bars and pizzerias after taking part in the traditional evening passeggiata (stroll), a legacy of Italian colonialism. The Art Deco cinemas in this UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site still operate, even if the connection in the few internet cafés is so slow that would-be users often give up.

One reason why so much has been preserved is that starting a new business in Asmara is extraordinarily hard. The Red Sea Trading Corporation smothers private competitors, and now runs even the small corner shops where Eritreans use ration cards to buy basic goods. The economy, as Issaias admits, is “hand-to-mouth”. For foreign exchange, the government depends on its gold and potash mines, and on an income tax levied on Eritreans living abroad, who are denied passports or permission to visit their families back home unless they pay it.

As he approaches his 80s, Issaias can congratulate himself on having outlasted his rivals: Haile Selassie and Meles Zenawi are both dead. Mengistu is in exile. Yet while Issaias may still take pride in leading VIP visitors on walkabouts of Asmara, he fears for his own safety. An army lieutenant tried to shoot him in 2009, and a group of officers came close to initiating a coup in 2013. He swaps plates with subordinates when he eats out in restaurants, according to a leaked diplomatic cable. His tastes have changed little in all his time in power. When he relaxes, his preference is still for the kind of humble establishment his grandmother used to run – a roadside suwa beer shop – where he drinks alongside labourers, peasant farmers and street sweepers, his bodyguards nervously waiting outside.

There are no signs yet of Issaias slowing down or curbing his geopolitical ambitions. “He has no sense of proportion,” says Dawit Mesfin, a veteran opposition activist. “Ethiopia is a vast country, ten times bigger geographically than Eritrea, richer, more powerful, and with the support of the US. But Issaias has always thought he could control Ethiopia.”

Though Abiy is now forging a working relationship with the defeated TPLF, fighting erupted last month between his army and Amhara nationalist forces which regard Tigray’s western region as historically theirs. Loyalty has never been an Issaias forte, and analysts suspect Eritrean troops are co-operating with these militia fighters, Abiy’s former allies: the Abiy-Issaias bromance is fast frosting over.

Issaias also sees an opportunity in closer ties with Putin: Eritrea was the only African country to vote against UN resolutions condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Issaias’s reward was a visit from Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, during which the two men discussed using an Eritrean port and airport as strategic transit points.

The civil war in Sudan, Eritrea’s other giant neighbour, offers plenty of meddling opportunities for outsiders, particularly those indifferent to the dangers of escalation. The best-known are the mercenaries of Russia’s Wagner Group, who have deep commercial ties to one of the warlords fighting for control of the country: Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), the boss of a militia which carried out genocide in Darfur. But Issaias’s role in Sudan may turn out to be even more important. In the past he has been close to Hemedti. Yet this month he held closed-door talks with General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Hemedti’s sworn enemy.

Part of the reason Issaias might be tempted into fresh foreign adventures is that he needs to find something to keep busy the 250,000 troops who gained battlefield experience in Tigray. African regimes often struggle to reintegrate armies that have been encouraged to misbehave on foreign territory. There is virtually nothing for these youngsters to do back home in Eritrea. “That’s a very large force to be sitting kicking its heels in a very small country,” says Sarah Vaughan, a Horn of Africa expert. “It’s a ticking time bomb.” ■

Michela Wrong is the author of “I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation”

ILLUSTRATIONS: DEBORAH STEVENSON

images: GETTY