Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Tigray are sleepwalking into war
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The two-year war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region left thousands of people dead. (AFP/File Photo)
By Hafed Al-Ghwell
The Pretoria peace agreement that halted Ethiopia’s two-year war in its Tigray region is unraveling. Fighting has flared again as rival factions within the Tigray People’s Liberation Front turn on each other, raising fears that Ethiopia and its northernmost region are sliding back into conflict.
This comes barely two years after a ceasefire agreement purportedly ended the brutal 2020-2022 war. That conflict, which pitted the TPLF’s Tigray Defense Forces against Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s federal military (backed by Eritrea), killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions. The truce in November 2022 was intended to silence the guns, create an interim administration in Tigray, and initiate the disarmament of the TDF, and the withdrawal of Eritrean troops.
Yet key grievances remained, resulting in renewed tensions. Eritrea, which had intervened in the conflict in an attempt to crush its old TPLF enemies, was excluded from the Pretoria talks and reportedly maintained forces inside parts of Tigray despite the peace deal. The TPLF, meanwhile, never fully reconciled with Ethiopia’s political fold, sowing the seeds of future discord.
One of the immediate causes of the present meltdown in Tigray is a bitter power struggle within the leadership of the region. The TPLF has split into rival camps led by its longtime chairperson, Debretsion Gebremichael, and the federally appointed interim president, Getachew Reda.
This feud has now spilled over into open confrontation, with each side claiming to represent the true Tigrayan cause. The resulting divide has paralyzed governance and security in the region. The interim regional government — short on trust and beset by factional mutiny — is pleading for Prime Minister Abiy to intervene as armed loyalists on both sides jostle for control.
What was left of the Pretoria Agreement’s security framework is rapidly collapsing, with former comrades-in-arms now clashing, civilians again fleeing in fear, and Addis Ababa’s authority in the region becoming increasingly tenuous.
Neighboring Eritrea is watching these developments with growing alarm — and, naturally, some sense of opportunism. It remains deeply hostile to the TPLF, in any form, and seeks to prevent any resurgent Tigrayan power along its border.
Also at the heart of the Eritrean unease is Ethiopia’s revived push for access to the Red Sea coast. Abiy has repeatedly declared that regaining a seaport is an existential imperative for landlocked Ethiopia, which lost its coastline when Eritrea gained independence in 1993. Ethiopia currently pays about $1 billion a year to ship goods via Djibouti, and Abiy’s government has openly stated that Ethiopia has a sovereign right to sea access.
To Eritrea, such discourse sounds like a direct, certainly an implied, threat to its territory, and in particular to the port of Assab, which Ethiopia covets.
The bad blood runs deep. Eritrea and Ethiopia fought a border war from 1998 to 2000 and remained bitter rivals until Abiy’s rapprochement in 2018. Eritrea then aligned with Abiy against the TPLF during the Tigray war. But this “enemy-of-my-enemy” alliance soured quickly after Addis Ababa and the Tigrayan authorities made peace.
Should Ethiopia and Eritrea relapse into war, the consequences would reverberate across the region.
Hafed Al-Ghwell
Eritrea sees Ethiopia’s federal government and the TPLF’s interim administration converging, a scenario it has long feared. Some reports even suggest Eritrean leaders felt more threatened after the Pretoria deal because they believed it increased cooperation against Eritrean interests between the leadership in Tigray and Abiy’s government. With Abiy eyeing access to the Red Sea, and Tigray in turmoil, Eritrea might calculate that confrontation is looming.
Should Ethiopia and Eritrea relapse into war, the consequences would reverberate across an already fragile region. The ongoing civil war in Sudan would probably be the first arena of spillover; the Sudanese Armed Forces and its rival military faction, the Rapid Support Forces, each seek external support, and the conflict in Tigray has already aroused suspicions of meddling. The RSF at one point accused Tigrayan fighters of joining the fray on the side of the SAF. At the same time, Eritrea has reportedly been backing tribal militias in eastern Sudan to help contain the spread of the RSF near the border.
A full-on Ethiopia-Eritrea war could therefore entangle Sudan on several fronts: Ethiopia might lean on it for strategic access or support, while Eritrea could intensify its covert support for Sudanese factions for instance. Naturally, such proxy entanglements would demolish the fragile efforts to bring stability to Sudan, dimming hopes for peace in the short term.
Meanwhile, Somalia’s security woes would likely deepen. The country’s federal government relies heavily on regional support, including Ethiopian troops, to keep militants at bay. If Ethiopia becomes consumed by a war at home, its military deployments in Somalia could cease, providing insurgent group Al-Shabab with an opening.
Therefore, a wider conflict would be catastrophic at a time when cooperation against extremists and famine relief is crucial.
Even Egypt is possibly a part of the equation. Cairo has had reservations with Ethiopia over the waters of the Nile. Egypt has cultivated ties with Eritrea and Sudan as counterweights. This week, Eritrea’s foreign minister visited Egypt to coordinate their positions, with both governments pointedly asserting that Red Sea security should be led by coastal nations — implicitly sidelining Ethiopia.
Eritrea and Egypt share concerns about an ascendant Ethiopia, and a conflict could bring them into even closer alignment. Egypt might see an opportunity to press Ethiopia on the Nile issue if the country were bogged down with fighting on several fronts.
Tremors from any of these, and other, interconnected fault lines — the civil war in Sudan, South Sudan’s fragility, Somalia’s insurgency, Ethiopia’s rivalries with Eritrea and Egypt — would not stop at the borders of one country but would likely spread across the Red Sea corridor, potentially undermining security on African and Arabian shores.
With the Horn of Africa teetering on the brink, the window for preventive diplomacy is rapidly closing. The cost of inaction would be enormous. A renewed interstate war in the region could make other, existing flashpoints dramatically worse, and risk drawing in extra-regional powers.
Yet so far, external engagement has been dismal and inadequate, given the urgent need for high-level, proactive diplomatic interventions. A first step could be to press all sides to halt military build-ups and inflammatory rhetoric; essentially hitting the pause button on the march to war.
Above all, mediators need to be laser focused on internal reconciliation within Tigray. The feuding TPLF factions must be brought back to the negotiating table to prevent a political breakdown from sparking a full-blown civil war.
If the global community remains passive, Ethiopia and Tigray might well sleepwalk into a war that no one truly wants, in a region that has known enough bloodshed. With firm and farsighted diplomacy, however, another catastrophe can still be averted.
- Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow and executive director of the North Africa Initiative at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. X: @HafedAlGhwell
Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Ethiopian Tribune’s point of view
