Forgotten World (108): Djibouti

Djibouti is a small (population 721,000) African country by the Gulf of Aden that is surrounded by Eritrea to the north, Ethiopia to the west and Somalia to the south. It was a French colony until 1977 and France still has thousands of troops stationed there.
The country has two main ethnic groups: the Issa of Somali origin and the Afar of Ethiopian origin. A civil war between these two groups in the early 1990s eventually led to a power-sharing settlement.
Djibouti’s location is the main economic asset of a country that is mostly barren. The capital, Djibouti city, handles Ethiopian imports and exports and its transport facilities are used by several landlocked African countries to fly in their goods for re-export.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 7:47 am and is filed under World current affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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