Eritrea

Eritrea, officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa bordered by Ethiopia, Sudan and Djibouti with an extensive Red Sea coastline including the Dahlak Archipelago, covering about 117,600 square kilometers with Asmara as its capital and largest city. The Kingdom of Aksum, centered in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia and established in the first or second century AD, was regarded as one of the great powers of its era and adopted Christianity around the mid-fourth century; the Zagwe and Solomonid dynasties later held fluctuating control over the plateau, and much of the coastal lowlands passed to the Khedivate of Egypt before Italy formed the colony of Italian Eritrea in 1889. Italian rule continued until 1942, when Eritrea came under British Military Administration, followed by a 1952 United Nations decision that federated Eritrea with Ethiopia for ten years before Ethiopia annulled the Eritrean parliament and annexed the territory in 1962, prompting the Eritrean Liberation Front's Eritrean War of Independence, which achieved de facto independence in 1991 and de jure independence after a 1993 referendum. Eritrea is a multi-ethnic country of nine recognized ethnic groups, predominantly Tigrinya and Tigre peoples, with Tigrinya, Arabic and English as working languages and Christianity and Islam the main faiths; it is a unitary one-party presidential republic and de facto totalitarian dictatorship in which Isaias Afwerki has served as president since 1993 with no elections ever held, and its human rights record is regarded as among the worst in the world.