How Ethiopia and Eritrea made peace

By T.G. | ADDIS ABABA

THE cold war between Ethiopia and neighbouring Eritrea once seemed irresolvable. An uneasy stalemate had endured since 2000, when a UN-brokered peace agreement ended two years of trench warfare that claimed about 80,000 lives and displaced more than half a million. The deal was swiftly ignored by Ethiopia, which refused to cede the border town of Badme and other disputed territories. In subsequent years both sides massed thousands of troops on the frontier, while arming each other’s rebel groups. Occasionally tensions would boil over. Eritrea’s alleged support for Islamist rebels in neighbouring Somalia led to a UN arms embargo in 2009, prompted in large part by Ethiopia’s desire to push its northern rival, which had seceded in 1993, into diplomatic isolation. It was one of Africa’s most intractable conflicts. So why, on July 8th, did the two sides make peace?

The appointment in April of a new Ethiopian prime minister, 41-year-old Abiy Ahmed (pictured above, right), was vital. On taking office he called for peace, as did his two predecessors. But in early June he went further, by offering to implement the UN peace agreement, including its controversial ruling on the location of the border, without preconditions. The political and generational shift within the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) heralded by his rise had made such fresh thinking possible. Mr Abiy’s Oromo faction in the ethnic coalition lacks the baggage of the Tigrayan wing (the TPLF), which dominated Ethiopia’s government for the past quarter-century and has especially close (and bitter) ties with Eritrea’s ruling party, a former rebel movement once known as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). The two groups spent much of the 1970s and 1980s fighting alongside each other against Ethiopia’s then Marxist dictatorship, but relations were rarely amicable. “The Eritrean-Ethiopian war of 1998-2000 was in effect a conflict between the EPLF and TPLF over ideology and hegemony,” explains Kjetil Tronvoll of Bjorknes University College. As Mr Abiy sidelined the TPLF, so grew the chance of peace with Isaias Afwerki (pictured above, left), Eritrea’s first, and to date only, president.