A year after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed landed in Asmara on 8 July 2018 to streets lined with Eritreans waving Ethiopian flags, the peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea had reunited families and restored flights, but most of what the two governments promised on paper had yet to happen. Horn of Africa specialists writing at the anniversary described a relationship slipping back into uncertainty and suspicion.
Less than a week after that visit, President Isaias Afwerki was welcomed just as warmly in Addis Ababa. In September 2018 the two leaders signed a formal treaty in Jeddah, witnessed by King Salman of Saudi Arabia and UN Secretary-General António Guterres. It ended the state of war and committed both countries to joint special economic zones and to a high-level joint committee, with sub-committees, to oversee the deal. Martin Plaut, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London, wrote that there had been little visible progress on either. A planned potash mine straddling the border, seen as one of the economic drivers of the rapprochement, had dropped from view.
The most tangible change had been reversed. In the first months of peace, Ethiopians flew to Eritrea for tearful reunions, traders crossed the border to sell in Eritrean towns, and thousands of Eritreans travelled into Ethiopia by taxi, up to 500 a day by one count. A year on, the crossings were officially closed and no explanation had been given. Eritrean human rights campaigner Selam Kidane and Plaut, writing in African Arguments, said Asmara appeared to fear that opposition members long based in Ethiopia were coming back across. The main remaining sign of the deal, they wrote, was the daily Ethiopian Airlines flight, open only to well-off Eritreans over 50 with official permission to leave.
The border itself was unresolved. The commission set up under the Algiers agreement that ended the 1998–2000 war could only rule on strict legal and historical grounds, and the line it drew cut through settlements and separated villagers from their farmland. Changes needed the agreement of both countries, which was one of the jobs the joint committees agreed in Jeddah were supposed to take on. In Tigray, residents had blocked the Ethiopian army from moving heavy artillery away from the frontier, fearing renewed fighting. Isaias had called the Tigray People’s Liberation Front “vultures” with a “toxic and malignant” agenda.
Inside Eritrea, Kidane and Plaut wrote, the benefits of peace were mostly limited to everyday goods brought in by Ethiopian traders on unofficial routes. Indefinite national service remained in place, and the national assembly, disbanded in 2002, had not met to scrutinise or ratify the treaty. A diaspora campaign under the slogan “Enough!” had spread on social media and at large rallies abroad, with slogans against conscription appearing on walls at home. The authors said the government had answered by detaining members of unregistered churches and outspoken Orthodox clergy, and by closing 33 hospitals and clinics run by the Catholic Church.
Asmara had nonetheless gained a good deal abroad. Plaut noted that limited UN sanctions were lifted, Eritrea took a seat on the UN Human Rights Council and it assumed the chair of the Khartoum Process, the main forum for migration talks between African states and the European Union. Its foreign policy also diverged from Ethiopia’s in Sudan. While Abiy Ahmed mediated for the African Union, Isaias was welcomed in Khartoum by the military council’s deputy chairman, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, and his government asked the AU to “refrain from internationalising and exacerbating the situation in Sudan.” Plaut tied that stance to Eritrea’s close links with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which had used Eritrean ports and airfields in the Yemen war and were alarmed by the uprising in Sudan.
Ethiopia, meanwhile, was absorbed by ethnic conflicts that had displaced more than two million people and by the 22 June 2019 killings of the army chief of staff and Amhara regional leaders. “A sullen, tense cloud now hangs over relations between Asmara and Addis Ababa,” Kidane and Plaut concluded. Plaut warned that it was hard to know how relations would develop, given fears that Isaias had returned to his unpredictable ways.
Sources: Mail & Guardian (The Conversation, Martin Plaut), African Arguments (Selam Kidane and Martin Plaut)