A Four Power Inquiry Commission was established by the World War II Allies (Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States), but this commission failed to agree in its September 1948 report on a future course for Eritrea. Several countries had shown an interest in the area. Italy had asked for Eritrea to be returned as a colony or as a trusteeship, and this was supported at first by the Soviet Union, which anticipated a Communist victory in a coming Italian election. The Arab states saw Eritrea and its large Muslim population as an extension of the Arab world, so they sought the establishment of an independent state. Some Britons favored a division of the territory, creating one region with the Christian areas and the coast from Mitsiwa southward to go to Ethiopia, and creating an area to the northwest to go to Sudan. A UN commission arrived in Eritrea in February 1950 and eventually approved a plan involving some form of association with Ethiopia, and after that, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution affirming this plan, with the provision that Britain, the administering power, should facilitate the UN efforts and depart from the colony no later than September 15, 1952. To meet this deadlin

"Somalia--Emerging Third Front in the Ethiopia-Eritrea War?" Stratfor (April 7, 1999), http://www.stratfor.com.

Thirty years of civil war, compounded by drought, have uprooted whole villages, disrupted farmers and strained supply routes. At least 17 million people risk starvation, many of them refugees from embattled Sudan and Somalia. Hunger is only part of the problem. In a new report, Amnesty International documents the torture and repression carried out by the recently ousted Ethiopian regime. Years of turmoil have so interrupted education that a generation of children is illiterate (Lord 13).

There was growing opposition to the regime of Haile Selassie during the last fourteen years of his reign. There had been a coup attempt in 1960, after which the emperor sought to reclaim the loyalty of the opposition by stepping up reform. There was no coherent plan for reform, however, until 1966, and that plan tried to confront the traditional forces through the implementation of a modern tax system. The proposal required the registration of all land, and implicit in the proposal was the aim of destroying the power of the landed nobility. Since the latter controlled parliament, all progressive tax proposals were vigorously opposed. This led to revolt in other provinces and taxed the ability of the central government to cope with all the opposition developing (Ethiopia: A Country Study).

From the beginning of this federation, though, the emperor's representative undercut the territory's separate status under the federal system and in contraven