By T.G. | ADDIS ABABA

ERITREA has had some unhappy claims to fame over the years. Its war of liberation from neighbouring Ethiopia, which began in the 1960s and only ended in 1991, was one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts. Then, as a newly independent country, it fought a war with Ethiopia between 1998 and 2000, one of the bloodiest in the continent’s history, which only formally ended on July 8th of this year. Eritrea was Africa’s largest single source of refugees to Europe from 2014 to 2016. Over the past decade so many people have left that Eritrea has been called the world’s fastest-emptying nation. It has been likened to Cuba and the former East Germany. But in recent years no title has proven more durable (or more controversial) than that of “Africa’s North Korea”.