Last Feb. 28, in a statement issued by the Eritrean Embassy in London, the Asmara government officially confirmed the presence of its military units in several long-claimed border areas with Ethiopia in which it began to exercise direct control during the two-year conflict in the regional state of Tigray.
These border areas were attributed to Eritrea under the 2000 Algiers Accords, which ideally enshrined an end to the long-standing disputes between the two countries, although without ever being released by Ethiopian authorities until the election of Abiy Ahmed as prime minister in 2018, proposing a peace agreement with Eritrea and a commitment to unconditionally restore Asmara’s legitimacy over the disputed territories.
This process of peace and transition in the control of the disputed border areas, including the town of Badme, was, however, strongly hindered by the authorities in the regional state of Tigray, where the majority TPLF party – which had de facto ruled the country since the fall of Menghistu’s reign – had long been at odds with its former Eritrean allies.
The war that pitted the federal government against the Tigrinya government between 2020 and 2022, and which later involved the participation of other regional Ethiopian states and Eritrea itself, resulted in the de facto occupation of all of western Tigray by Amhara forces and the continued presence of Eritrean forces along the disputed border areas, although without ever expressly admitting their presence in both the conflict and the subsequent phase.
Instead, the declaration last Feb. 28 officially confirmed the presence of Eritrean military units along the southern borders, in what the Asmara government claims as sovereign territories assigned to Eritrea under the Algiers Accords, illegally occupied for a long time by Tigrinya authorities.
Tigrinya’s TPLF authorities, however, have accused Eritrea of a far larger presence on its territory, albeit undocumented, in violation of the 2022 Pretoria Accords by which the cessation of hostilities in the regional state was defined, making it responsible for human rights violations in the occupied areas.
Eritrea rejects the allegations of the Tigrayan TPLF, arguing that the presence of its units is limited to the border areas recognized under the Algiers Accords, which represent part of its sovereign territory, while denying its presence outside these areas, and rejecting the allegations related to human rights violations.
However, the evolution of the conflict in Tigray and its aftermath have also severely chilled relations between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia and Isaias Afwerki’s Eritrea, especially as a result of the violence perpetrated by Eritrean forces during the conflict, leading to a lull in the process of rapprochement between the two countries.
This has been at the expense of the establishment of a new official border demarcation process between the two countries, which Eritrea has nevertheless carried out on its own, announcing its completion in the middle of last April, in accordance with the terms of the Eritrean-Ethiopian Boundary Commission, in order to bring to a final end a dispute that has lasted more than two decades and over which a war was also fought between the two countries.
The Ethiopian government has never in fact officially responded to the demarcation carried out by Eritrea, while according to the Tigray authorities this initiative was conducted arbitrarily and extensively, occupying larger areas than those established in the Algiers Agreements and by the Commission. The Tigrayans, moreover, accuse Eritrea of supporting the initiatives of the Amhara militias occupying the whole of Western Tigray, claiming that ethnic cleansing has been carried out in that region in order to force Tigrayans to flee and thus exclude them from future votes that the federal government intends to organize to define the region’s future.
Managing the tensions that have arisen with the end of the conflict in Tigray, where the interests of both Eritrea and some militias in the regional state of Amhara have certainly emerged as strengthened, has thus forced the federal authorities to adopt a marked pragmatism to contain the numerous initiatives of individual regional actors and prevent the possible emergence of any form of new conflict. This is an arduous endeavor, which must now be measured as much by a renewed de facto tension with Eritrea, after the illusory appearance of a new phase of peace initiated in 2018, as by the increasingly complex and tense relations within the country between the authorities of the different federal states, and especially those of Amhara and Oromia states.
