The Ethiopia-Eritrea Peace and Its Unravelling
Ethiopia and Eritrea ended twenty years of frozen war in July 2018, and the man who did it won a Nobel Prize the following year. The war of 1998 to 2000 had killed perhaps 80,000 people over a border dispute centred on the town of Badme, in trench fighting between two of the poorest countries in the world. An independent boundary commission awarded Badme to Eritrea in 2002, and Ethiopia refused to implement the ruling, leaving a state of neither war nor peace: closed borders, no telephone links, families divided, and an Eritrean national service that became indefinite conscription and drove a large share of the country's young people abroad. Abiy Ahmed became Ethiopian prime minister in April 2018 after three years of Oromo protest had forced a change, and announced within weeks that Ethiopia would accept the boundary ruling in full. Isaias Afwerki sent a delegation, the two leaders met in Asmara in July, and telephone lines were reconnected the same day — people dialled numbers they had not used in twenty years and found them ringing. Flights resumed, embassies opened and the border was opened at several points. The Nobel Peace Prize followed in 2019. The border closed again within a year without explanation, the ruling was never demarcated on the ground, and Eritrean troops entered Ethiopia in 2020 to fight alongside Abiy's forces in Tigray, in a war that killed several hundred thousand people. The prize is the awkward part of the record. It was awarded in October 2019 substantially for this agreement, and within thirteen months the laureate was prosecuting a war in which the other signatory's army was accused of massacres and mass rape.
- Year: 2018 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
