Ethnicity/race: Oromo 40%, Amhara and Tigrean 32%, Sidamo 9%,
Shankella 6%, Somali 6%, Afar 4%, Gurage 2%, other 1%
Religions: Islam 45%–50%, Ethiopian Orthodox 35%–40%,
animist 12%, other 3%–8%
Literacy
rate: 43% (2003 est.)
Economic
summary:GDP/PPP (2007 est.): $55.07 billion; per capita
$700. Real growth rate: 9.8%. Inflation: 15.9%.
Unemployment: n.a. Arable land: 10%. Agriculture:
cereals, pulses, coffee, oilseed, cotton, sugarcane, potatoes, qat,
cut flowers; hides, cattle, sheep, goats; fish. Labor force:
27.27 million (1999); agriculture and animal husbandry 80%, government
and services 12%, industry and construction 8% (1985).
Industries: food processing, beverages, textiles, leather,
chemicals, metals processing, cement. Natural resources: small
reserves of gold, platinum, copper, potash, natural gas, hydropower.
Exports: $1.2 billion f.o.b. (2007 est.): coffee, qat, gold,
leather products, live animals, oilseeds. Imports: $4.54
billion f.o.b. (2007 est.): food and live animals, petroleum and
petroleum products, chemicals, machinery, motor vehicles, cereals,
textiles. Major trading partners: Djibouti, Germany, Japan,
Saudi Arabia, U.S., UK, Italy, India, China (2006).
Communications: Telephones: main lines in
use: 725,000 (2006); mobile cellular: 866,700 (2006). Radio
broadcast stations: AM 8, FM 0, shortwave 1 (2001). Television
broadcast stations: 1 plus 24 repeaters (2002). Internet
hosts: 89 (2007). Internet users: 164,000 (2005).
Transportation: Railways: total: 699 km
(Ethiopian segment of the Addis Ababa-Djibouti railroad) (2006).
Highways: total: 36,469 km ; paved: 6,980 km; unpaved: 29,489
km (2004). Ports and harbors: Ethiopia is landlocked and has
used ports of Assab and Massawa in Eritrea and port of Djibouti.
Airports: 84 (2007).
International
disputes: Eritrea and Ethiopia agreed to abide by the 2002
Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission's (EEBC) delimitation decision,
but despite international intervention, mutual animosities,
accusations and armed posturing prevail, preventing demarcation;
Ethiopia refuses to withdraw to the delimited boundary until technical
errors made by the EEBC that ignored "human geography" are addressed,
including the award of Badme, the focus of the 1998-2000 war; Eritrea
insists that the EEBC decision be implemented immediately without
modifications; Ethiopia has only an administrative line and no
international border with the Oromo region of southern Somalia where
it maintains alliances with local clans in opposition to the
unrecognized Somali Interim Government in Mogadishu; "Somaliland"
secessionists provide port facilities and trade ties to landlocked
Ethiopia; the UNHCR expects most of the remaining 23,000 Somali
refugees in Ethiopia to be repatriated in 2005; efforts to demarcate
the porous boundary with Sudan have been delayed by civil war.
Ethiopian forces invaded southern Somalia and routed Islamist Courts
from Mogadishu in January 2007.
Ethiopia is in east-central Africa, bordered on the west by the Sudan,
the east by Somalia and Djibouti, the south by Kenya, and the northeast by
Eritrea. It has several high mountains, the highest of which is Ras Dashan
at 15,158 ft (4,620 m). The Blue Nile, or Abbai, rises in the northwest
and flows in a great semicircle before entering the Sudan. Its chief
reservoir, Lake Tana, lies in the northwest.
Government
Federal republic.
History
Archeologists have found the oldest known human ancestors in Ethiopia,
including Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba (c. 5.8–5.2 million years
old) and Australopithecus anamensis (c. 4.2 million years old).
Originally called Abyssinia, Ethiopia is sub-Saharan Africa's oldest
state, and its Solomonic dynasty claims descent from King Menelik I,
traditionally believed to have been the son of the queen of Sheba and King
Solomon. The current nation is a consolidation of smaller kingdoms that
owed feudal allegiance to the Ethiopian emperor.
Hamitic peoples migrated to Ethiopia from Asia Minor in prehistoric
times. Semitic traders from Arabia penetrated the region in the 7th
century B.C. Its Red Sea ports were important
to the Roman and Byzantine Empires. Coptic Christianity was brought to the
region in A.D. 341, and a variant of it became
Ethiopia's state religion. Ancient Ethiopia reached its peak in the 5th
century, then was isolated by the rise of Islam and weakened by feudal
wars.
Modern Ethiopia emerged under Emperor Menelik II, who established its
independence by routing an Italian invasion in 1896. He expanded Ethiopia
by conquest. Disorders that followed Menelik's death brought his daughter
to the throne in 1917, with his cousin, Tafari Makonnen, as regent and
heir apparent. When the empress died in 1930, Tafari was crowned Emperor
Haile Selassie I.
Haile Selassie, called the “Lion of Judah,” outlawed slavery and tried
to centralize his scattered realm, in which 70 languages were spoken. In
1931, he created a constitution, revised in 1955, that called for a
parliament with an appointed senate, an elected chamber of deputies, and a
system of courts. But basic power remained with the emperor.
Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia on Oct. 3, 1935, forcing Haile Selassie
into exile in May 1936. Ethiopia was annexed to Eritrea, then an Italian
colony, and to Italian Somaliland, forming Italian East Africa. In 1941,
British troops routed the Italians, and Haile Selassie returned to Addis
Ababa. In 1952, Eritrea was incorporated into Ethiopia.
On Sept. 12, 1974, Haile Selassie was deposed, the constitution
suspended, and Ethiopia proclaimed a Socialist state under a collective
military dictatorship called the Provisional Military Administrative
Council (PMAC), also known as the Derg. U.S. aid stopped, and Cuban and
Soviet aid began. Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam became head of state in
1977. During this period Ethiopia fought against Eritrean secessionists as
well as Somali rebels, and the government fought against its own people in
a campaign called the “red terror.” Thousands of political opponents were
killed. Mengistu remained leader until 1991, when his greatest supporter,
the Soviet Union, dismantled itself.
A group called the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front
seized the capital in 1991, and in May a separatist guerrilla
organization, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, took control of the
province of Eritrea. The two groups agreed that Eritrea would have an
internationally supervised referendum on independence. This election took
place in April 1993 with almost unanimous support for Eritrean
independence. Ethiopia accepted and recognized Eritrea as an independent
state within a few days. Sixty-eight leaders of the former military
government were put on trial in April 1996 on charges that included
genocide and crimes against humanity.
Since Eritrea's independence, Eritrea and Ethiopia had disagreed about
the exact demarcation of their borders, and in May 1998 Eritrea initiated
border clashes that developed into a full-scale war that left more than
80,000 dead and further destroyed both countries' ailing economies. After
a costly and bloody two-year war, a formal peace agreement was signed in
Dec. 2000. The United Nations has provided more than 4,000 peacekeeping
forces to patrol the buffer zone between the two nations. An international
commission defined a new border between the two countries in April 2002.
Ethiopia disputed the new border, escalating tensions between the two
countries once again. In Dec. 2005, an international Court of Arbitration
ruled that Eritrea had violated international law in attacking Ethiopia in
the 1998 war.
In 2003, in an effort to solve its chronic shortage of food and to
lessen its dependence on international aid, Ethiopia began relocating 2
million farmers from their parched highland homes to areas with more
fertile soil in the western part of the country. The largest relocation
program in African history, however, has turned into a disaster. The
majority of those resettled are still unable to support themselves, and,
most alarmingly, much of the fertile regions where the farmers have been
resettled are rife with malaria.
In June 2006, an Islamist militia seized control of the capital of
neighboring Somalia and established control in much of that country's
south. Ethiopia, which has clashed in the past with Somalia's Islamists
and considers them a threat to regional security, began amassing troops on
Somalia's border, in support of Somalia's weak transitional government,
led by President Abdullah. In mid-December, Ethiopia launched air strikes
against the Islamists, and in a matter of days Ethiopian ground troops and
Somali soldiers regained of Mogadishu. A week later most of the Islamists
had been forced to flee the country. Ethiopia announced that its troops
would remain in Somalia until stability was assured and a functional
central government had been established. It was far from clear when that
would happen, however. Battles between the insurgents and Somali and
Ethiopian troops intensified in March, leaving 300 civilians dead in what
has been called the worst fighting in 15 years.
A group of separatist rebels from the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia
attacked a Chinese-run oilfield in April, killing 65 Ethiopian soldiers
and nine Chinese workers.
