Issue No. 258

The Second Anniversary of Pretoria

Sunday, 3 November, marked four years since the Tigray war erupted and two years from the signing of the Pretoria agreement between the Ethiopian federal government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF). The destruction during the two-year war wrought upon Tigray by Ethiopian troops, Amhara militia, and an invading Eritrean army remains unconscionable and has left indelible scars on the northern region. While we will never know the precise number of those killed, wounded, starved, or sexually assaulted, the best estimates by Ghent University and others place those dead at between 300,000 and 600,000, while over 120,000 Tigrayan women and girls were sexually assaulted or raped during the conflict.

The Pretoria agreement may have 'silenced the guns' and restored some limited services, but Tigray remains in a state of frozen conflict. Life in Mekelle has returned somewhat to normal, but over 750,000 people remain displaced across the region, swathes of the constitutional lands are under occupation by Amhara militias and Eritrean forces, and substantial infrastructure reconstruction has yet to begin in earnest. Indeed, the past year has seen little concerted progress made on major elements of Pretoria, particularly the restoration of Tigrayan control over western and northern Tigray and the subsequent support for internally displaced persons (IDPs) to return to their homes. On the anniversary of the war, the TPLF attributed the failure to implement Pretoria to the "reluctance" of Addis, "internal divisions" within the party and Tigray Interim Administration (TIA), and insufficient international support. 

Thankfully, the immense humanitarian crisis that was consuming Tigray has eased somewhat from the beginning of the year, but many remain dependent on humanitarian aid. During the war, the systematic destruction and looting of farming equipment and livestock and the government's denial of international humanitarian assistance to Tigray induced an all-but-certain famine in the region. The end of the war was meant to resume assistance to Tigray, but the uncovering of years-long widespread aid theft by the government in 2023 saw USAID and the World Food Programme support suspended-- and triggered another major humanitarian crisis. The international humanitarian response during and after the war remains deeply shameful. And without returning the hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians to the occupied fertile lands of Western Tigray and sufficient economic support, the humanitarian situation will remain dire. 

Meanwhile, justice for the millions impacted by the war remains non-existent. The UN's International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) mandate expired in October 2023 under pressure from Addis, despite its members urging for its continuation amid reports of the Eritrean military enslaving women in Tigray. Its 'replacement,' the federal government's transitional justice model and national dialogue commission, have been widely shunned and contain no capacity for extraditing and prosecuting foreign nationals, i.e. Eritrean soldiers, for their human rights violations. The shuttering of the ICHREE, despite it not having completed its work, has created a dangerous precedent of impunity. It is little surprise that today, there are widespread reports of the Ethiopian army and Fano militias committing extrajudicial executions and other atrocities in Amhara.

Though clearly most intense in Tigray, the reverberations from the war go far beyond the region. It both helped form and shatter the destructive alliance between Bahir Dar, Asmara, and Addis and helped inflame the Fano movement into the major insurgency it is today. It accelerated the militarisation and state contraction of Ethiopia's federal government, while severely damaging the officer class and capacity of the Ethiopian National Defence Force. And the failure to fully implement the Pretoria agreement has had a desultory impact on the possibilities of peace in both Amhara and Oromia. With the already flawed Pretoria agreement still far from enforced, Addis is not trusted as a partner to secure peace, which is partly why the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) rejected a Pretoria-style agreement in Tanzania in 2023 and called for a more comprehensive political settlement that the federal government refused. Similarly, the US and the African Union, the guarantors of Pretoria, have been largely missing in action since the end of the war and have not brought significant pressure to bear to implement the accord. Beyond Ethiopia, the war further allowed the return of Eritrea, a pariah for much of the 21st century, to the forefront of the Horn's politics. Asmara remains an extreme, destabilising force as it arms Fano as well as militias in eastern Sudan drawn from the Baja and Bani Amer communities. 

The past 12 months have also seen a deterioration within the internal politics of Tigray, with a schism within and between the TIA and TPLF erupting into plain view in August. It has politically paralysed the region, with both sides jostling for control of Tigray's future and, crucially, over the security architecture that has remained neutral to date. Some tentative signs of negotiations are now ongoing, facilitated by civil society and religious leaders, but the two competing nodules of power in a Marxist party have left it highly dysfunctional. And with Tigray divided, the pressure to implement all aspects of Pretoria has also subsided as Addis continues its contrary plan to conduct a referendum in Western Tigray to decide its future.

It is hard to fully comprehend the nature and consequences of the genocidal violence on Tigray just two years after the guns quietened, but it will undoubtedly remain a stain on the collective conscience of Ethiopia and the international community that comprehensively and repeatedly failed to prevent a litany of atrocities. Since the war ended, the political, economic, and humanitarian support for Tigray has been far, far below what the deeply traumatised population requires. The Pretoria agreement should be the absolute bare minimum, but even that has been left wanting with attention trained on Ukraine, Gaza, and, within the region, Sudan. The future of Tigray remains deeply uncertain, and with tensions rising between Ethiopia and the latest tripartite alliance of Egypt, Eritrea, and Somalia, it could yet be inadvertently plunged back into armed conflict. The guns may have been silenced, but it is past time that peace in Tigray and beyond is secured and supported. 

By The Ethiopian Cable Team