Another African war looms

An agreement two years ago halted a bloody conflict in Ethiopia but sowed the seeds of new ones

THE SOLDIER squints through his binoculars. “They can see us,” he warns, pointing to a silhouette of two figures on a hill in the distance. The men in his line of sight are soldiers from Eritrea. But the hill is in Tigray, a semi-autonomous region in northern Ethiopia. Eritrean troops control a significant chunk of Ethiopian territory on the border, in places reaching as far as 10km inside it. At night they creep even further south, spying on military positions and kidnapping civilians. “Let them not start a war and we shall not go to war,” says Tsadkan Gebretensae, the interim vice-president of Tigray and a veteran military commander. “But we are very much aware that things could get out of control.”

control.”

The tense situation around the hill, near the town of Fatsi, is a hangover from a war that has technically been over for two years. In late 2020 Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, launched what he promised would be a swift, clean military operation to oust Tigray’s ruling party, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). What followed instead was one of this century’s most horrific conflicts. To bring the recalcitrant region to heel, Mr Abiy enlisted tens of thousands of fighters from Amhara, a region next door. He also invited troops from Eritrea, which had been part of Ethiopia until seceding in 1993. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, by bombs, bullets or government-induced famine and disease. Many of the dead were civilians. More than 100,000 women are thought to have been raped.

A peace agreement signed by Ethiopia’s government and the TPLF on November 2nd 2022, stopped the fighting in Tigray. But it did not settle the conflicts between Tigray and the war’s two other main parties, Eritrea and the militias from Amhara. Two years on, that omission helps explain why Mr Abiy faces fresh insurgencies at home and a potential war with Eritrea. These new pressures threaten to further destabilise the Horn of Africawhich is riven by tensions between several states or would-be states and is facing fallout from a catastrophic civil war in Sudan.

The most dramatic consequence of the deal has been a quarrel between Mr Abiy and his erstwhile allies from Amhara, militias known as the Fano. During the course of the Tigray conflict the Amhara militias seized—and ethnically cleansed—large parts of western and southern Tigray. According to the peace deal, the status of these “contested areas” was to be resolved “in accordance with the constitution”. In reality “the can was simply kicked down the road,” admits an American diplomat involved in the negotiations. In 2023 the federal government moved to disarm the Fano, which raised fears among their supporters that they would lose control of the disputed territories they occupied.

Those fears sparked an open revolt, to which Mr Abiy’s government responded with indiscriminate brutality. Once again the Ethiopian army has murdered civilians, shelled hospitals and raped women. In Fogota, an Amhara town currently controlled by the Fano, a young man reports that federal forces arrived in his village in mid-October. When six of his neighbours tried to flee, the soldiers gunned them down. A teacher in the same town says that so many classrooms have been hit by government drone strikes that parents are afraid to send their children to school.

Much of the countryside in Amhara is now under the control of local Fano groups. “We believe we are months away from removing [the national government] from power,” says Asres Mare Damte, a Fano leader in Amhara’s Gojam district. Most analysts consider that improbable: Fano forces are decentralised, and so far have proven unable to capture and hold a single major city. But they can easily make Amhara ungovernable. Extortion, kidnapping and theft are already rampant.

Perhaps more worrying for the wider Horn of Africa is the breakdown in relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Soon after coming to power in 2018 Mr Abiy engineered a Nobel-prizewinning rapprochement with Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s ageing dictator, who fought a bloody war with Ethiopia in the late 1990s. Much of the fighting back then had been along Tigray’s border, leading to enmity between Eritreans and the TPLF. When war broke out again in Tigray in 2020, Mr Abiy and Mr Isaias joined forces to crush their common foe. Eritrean forces proceeded to commit some of the conflict’s worst atrocities.

But the formerly close allies are now bitter enemies. Mr Isaias, like the Fano, considered Mr Abiy’s 2022 agreement a terrible betrayal. He refused to withdraw his troops from Tigray. This month he struck a defence pact with Egypt and Somalia, Ethiopia’s most hostile regional adversaries.

Mr Abiy, for his part, has ratcheted up the tension with bellicose pronouncements about Ethiopia’s “natural right” to a port on the Red Sea. Eritrea has two of those, Assab and Massawa, to which Ethiopia lost access with the start of the border war in 1998. Many fear that Mr Abiy plans to take them back by force, despite the controversial agreement he recently struck for Ethiopia to establish a harbour on the coast of Somaliland (an unrecognised breakaway state of Somalia). Assuming both leaders remain in power, “they will definitely fight”, eventually, reckons a Tigrayan intelligence officer.

A war between Ethiopia and Eritrea would almost certainly involve Tigray, which is sandwiched between them. According to an adviser to the regional government, Mr Abiy has recently made overtures to the Tigrayans, his former enemies, about a possible military alliance against Eritrea. Tigrayan officials say they have no interest in yet another conflict on their soil. “We will not be involved in any military adventure, except to defend ourselves,” the adviser insists. But the Tigrayan leadership is divided, and although some of its members want to maintain ties with Ethiopia’s federal government, others are said to have approached Eritrea about joining forces to overthrow Mr Abiy. “In this region there is never resolution of conflict,” says Daniel Berhane, a prominent Tigrayan intellectual. “There are only realignments of forces.”

One flashpoint might be the disputed territories in western Tigray. For nearly four years hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans who were forced from their homes there have been stuck in limbo in other parts of the region. Many still live in makeshift camps where hunger and disease are rife. Mr Tsadkan, Tigray’s vice-president, says the displaced must return home, and that his government can brook “no compromise” on the matter. But there would be enormous resistance in Amhara if they tried.

The peace deal two years ago was supposed to ensure that Ethiopia’s warring parties could mend such rifts through further negotiations rather than violence. But no such talks have materialised. The agreement has failed to evolve into a proper peace deal, says the American diplomat. For now, it is no more than a ceasefire—and one that could easily collapse.