No war exactly fills the heart with gladness but the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia which raged for most of the year must be one of the most depressing wars in a century overflowing with conflict. This is partly because of the countries’ recent history. Until 1991 Eritrea was ruled – and ruled brutally – by Ethiopia. Culturally distinct, the Eritreans waged one of the more heroic guerrilla wars of liberation against the immense

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Soviet-backed firepower of Colonel Mengistu’s Dergue regime. They built underground hospitals, were egalitarian in their goals and the part that women played in their struggle was internationally famous. They even had a highly sympathetic book written about them by Booker Prize-winning Australian author Thomas Kenneally (Beyond Asmara). Both here and over the hills in Tigray, where people were also fighting for their lives and rights, intrepid aid workers who ventured behind the lines would talk enthusiastically about what they might achieve if only they won freedom from Addis Ababa.

In 1991 a miracle happened – Eritrea and Tigray won the war. Mengistu fled the country, overwhelmed by a string of rebel victories and also by the collapse of Soviet support. In a scenario that would have seemed improbable had Kenneally included it in a work of fiction, the rebels not only drove back the Ethiopian Army but took the capital and formed a government.

True to their word, the Eritreans refused a role in the government of Ethiopia and instead held a referendum which led to independence in 1993. The new Ethiopian Government, meanwhile, was led by the Tigrayan Meles Zenawi who, to his own credit, allowed Eritrea to go its own way.

Yet in 1998, five years on, a petty border dispute erupted into full-scale war. This has not been a mere sabre-rattling skirmish. This has been war of the most terrible kind, fought in trenches and redolent both for that and for its appalling futility of the First World War. At least 50,000 Ethiopians and Eritreans have already been killed – more than the number of Americans killed over the decade-long conflict in Vietnam. The Ethiopian Army has used minority tribespeople in their thousands as minesweepers. A peace initiative by the Organization of African Unity in August led to a ceasefire but few observers are confident that the war will not imminently resume.

Perhaps the original guerrilla struggle and the politics behind it were talked up too much – people crave positive examples and are always looking for the archetypes of righteous David and dastardly Goliath. In both Ethiopia and Eritrea the governments have had trouble leaving behind the authoritarian certainties of the military ethos and thus have fallen back on least-common-denominator nationalism rather than democratization. And it was obviously too much to expect two players in the perpetually conflict-littered Horn of Africa to walk off blithely into a brand new dawn.

But this is still a bitter, bitter end – or, worse, a terrible beginning.