Last modified: 2004-04-29 by zeljko heimer
Keywords: tigray | ethiopia | star |
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According to the Ethiopian Parliament site,
"the State of Tigray consists of 4 administrative zones, one special zone, 35 woredas and 74
towns." It is "located at the northern tip of the country. The region
shares common borders with Eritrea in the north, the State of Afar in the
east, the State of Amhara in the south, and the Republic of the Sudan in
the west." The capital city is Mekele and the "State of Tigray has an
estimated area of 80,000 square kilometers."
What this means is that the old province of Tigray grew with territory
formerly belonging to the province of Gonder to give birth to this state
(eventually with border arrangements with other administrative divisions).
Mekele was already the capital of the old province.
Jorge Candeias, 22 December 1999
The flag adopted is a slightly changed flag of the
Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPFL). Crampton in his 1990 book (cra90) already states
that "The Tigre Liberation Front is fighting a similar battle in the
Ethiopian province of Tigre [he refers here to the Eritrean People's
Liberation Front] and is one of the more successeful of several such
secessionist groups in Ethiopia."
The flag adopted for the state is red with a golden yellow triangle at the
hoist and a large star of the same colour centered (or sort of) in the
flymost 2/3rds of the flag, rotated to point at the fly.
I ran across a recipt from a trip I took to Ethiopia a year and a half ago.
Most of it is in Amharic and only English text on it reads: "Tigray National Regional Administration."
The amazing thing is that the symbol at the top is almost the same as the
symbol on the communist flag of 1987-1991.
The diffrence is that there is no star and it is split
horizontally in half. The upper half has the leaves, cog wheel, Axum obalisk
and spears. On the bottom half the leaves turn into a cog wheel and the
dividing line holds two ends of a scale, like a scale of justice.
So why is it that the Tigray administration is using a modified communist
symbol, espically considering that Tigray was the region most opposed to the
communist regime?
Robert Wilson, 2 February 2004