The two-year war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region left hundreds of thousands of people dead, more than one million still displaced and cost more than $20 billion in damage, until a peace deal in November 2022 ended the bloodshed.
The war erupted in November 2020 when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sent the army to overthrow the leaders of the northern Tigray region, accusing their forces of attacking federal military bases.
For all the devastation, the war changed little, with the Tigrayan leaders left in place and an uneasy truce holding.
– Has the peace deal worked? –
On November 2, 2022, Ethiopia’s federal government and Tigray’s leaders agreed to a ceasefire at talks in Pretoria, South Africa.
The guns were silenced, but the deal was too “vague” to address the complexity of the conflict, says Jonah Wedekind, a specialist at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute in Germany.
The peace talks did not include combatants who fought alongside federal forces, notably militias from the neighbouring Amhara region and the Eritrean army.
“Foreign forces” were supposed to withdraw under the agreement but that has not occurred, with Eritrean forces still in near-full control of a Tigray district called Irob.
Mehdi Labzae, an Ethiopia specialist at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, said the continued presence of Eritrean forces “threatens the peace and the populations that live under their occupation”.
It has also been very difficult to demobilise the Tigray Defence Forces, as required under the agreement, due to the lack of trust between them and the federal army, said Wedekind.
What is the humanitarian situation?
At least 600,000 people were killed in the war, according to an estimate by the African Union’s Horn of Africa envoy, Olusegun Obasanjo.
Federal authorities blocked aid to the region of six million people and suspended vital services such as banking, telecommunications and air links.
The UN’s humanitarian agency OCHA says more than one million people have still not been able to return home despite the end of the war — “a ticking bomb” for the local authorities, warned Wedekind.
The situation has improved through 2024, Labzae said, but added: “Aid is not arriving in sufficient quantities, particularly in the many displaced persons sites in western Tigray.”
Large amounts of infrastructure, including hospitals, were destroyed, with rebuilding costs estimated at $20 billion.
With Ethiopian coffers already under deep strain, reconstruction is expected to be slow.
– A Tigrayan split? –
For nearly three decades, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) effectively ruled the whole of Ethiopia, until it was marginalised by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed when he came to power in 2018.
The 2022 peace deal established an interim administration in Tigray, with familiar figures, including TPLF stalwart Getachew Reda, in charge.
But in recent months, tensions have emerged between Getachew and Debretsion Gebremichael, the TPLF’s leader.
“This crisis is different from the previous ones, since it’s difficult to identify any ideological clash. One has the impression they are fighting mainly over personal issues,” said Labzae.
So far, the Tigray Defence Forces have kept a neutral position on the disagreement.
“But if the two factions of the TPLF start to fight for power, the situation could become violent,” added Bizuneh Getachew, an expert at Queen’s University Belfast.
