The Ethiopia-Eritrea Peace and Its Unravelling
The 1998-2000 Ethiopia-Eritrea war killed tens of thousands over a barren border district and ended in a boundary ruling that Ethiopia refused to implement. Two decades of 'no war, no peace' followed: closed borders, divided families, and in Eritrea an indefinite national service conscription justified by the standoff that became one of the world's largest producers of refugees per head. Abiy Ahmed became Ethiopia's prime minister in April 2018 and within weeks announced that Ethiopia would accept the boundary ruling in full. Flights, telephone lines and the border reopened; families separated for twenty years met at the frontier. He simultaneously released political prisoners, unbanned opposition movements and invited exiles home. The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded him the 2019 Peace Prize. The rapprochement had a second logic that became visible later. Both Abiy and Eritrea's President Isaias Afwerki had reason to weaken the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which had dominated Ethiopian politics for decades and had been Isaias's adversary in the war. When conflict broke out in Tigray in November 2020, Eritrean forces entered Ethiopian territory alongside the federal army, and the war that followed killed an estimated hundreds of thousands.
- Year: 2018 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
