Ethiopia and Sudan Are Trading Proxy Accusations While Millions Burn

Somewhere in Sudan this week, a family is sitting in the dark. The drone strike that hit an electricity substation in Al-Dabbah and another in Abu Hamad on Sunday did not only cut power. It cut the refrigeration for medicine, the pumps for water, and the lights in the hospital wards where surgeons were already working without enough of anything. Who launched those drones? Sudan's government and the rights group Emergency Lawyers say the Rapid Support Forces did. Who is protecting the RSF's supply lines? That is the question now sitting on the desk of every ministry in the Horn of Africa.

On Tuesday, Ethiopia ordered six Sudanese consulate staff out of the country within 48 hours and closed Sudan's consulate in the border town of Asosa. Addis Ababa has offered no public reason. Khartoum has accused Ethiopia of backing the RSF. Ethiopia accuses Sudan of arming Tigrayan rebels. Both sides deny everything. And while the two governments trade accusations in diplomatic cables and press statements, the people who will die are the ones who never get a seat at the table.

Let us be precise about the scale of what is burning. Since fighting between Sudan's army and the RSF erupted in 2023, tens of thousands of people have been killed. More than 14 million have been driven from their homes. The United Nations calls it one of the worst humanitarian crises on Earth. Fourteen million people is not a statistic. It is the population of a mid-sized African country, uprooted and scattered, sleeping in camps, in schools, under trees, on the roads to nowhere. Every one of them had a name, a farm or a shop, a child who wanted to go to school. Every one of them lost it.

Now the Horn is fracturing along new lines. Ethiopia expelled ten Eritrean diplomats and closed its embassy in Eritrea on October 1. Asmara responded by severing diplomatic ties altogether. Last month, Addis Ababa expelled an Egyptian diplomat. Relations with Cairo have been poisoned for years by Ethiopia's giant dam on the Blue Nile, which Egypt believes threatens its water. Sudan, Egypt and Eritrea are now all accused by Ethiopia of supporting the Tigrayan rebels who launched an offensive in September. Every one of them denies it. Every one of them is making the region more dangerous by the week.

We have seen this movie before. Proxy accusations are the cheapest weapon in African politics. They cost nothing to make and everything to disprove. A government that cannot control its own border, its own army, or its own security services can always point across the frontier and say, "They did it." And the neighbour, equally weak in the ways that matter, points back. In the end, the only real victims are the nurses in Asosa, the herders on the Sudan-Ethiopia border, and the children in Khartoum who wake up to find the power gone again.

Who benefits from this? Not the people of Sudan, who have watched their capital, their hospitals and their farmland destroyed. Not the people of Tigray, who lived through a catastrophic war only a few years ago and deserve a peace that is more than a pause between offensives. Not the Ethiopians whose government is spending diplomatic capital on expulsions instead of ceasefires. The beneficiaries are the armed men who profit from chaos: the warlords with gold, the commanders with weapons from abroad, and the foreign powers who see an unstable Horn as a market to be divided rather than a continent to be built.

Let us also be honest about the internal rot. Sudan's army has spent more than two years fighting the RSF, and the RSF has committed atrocities in Darfur and elsewhere that should haunt every African capital. Civilians have been massacred, raped, and starved, and the men who ordered it have not faced justice. The Sudanese military, for its part, has been accused of indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas. Neither side can claim the moral high ground. Neither side is protecting the people who are supposed to be their citizens. And Ethiopia, with its own unresolved conflicts and a history of ethnic violence in Tigray, Amhara and Oromia, has no business lecturing anyone about sovereignty while its own borders leak blood.

So what should happen? The answer is not another communiqué. It is institutions that work.

The African Union's Peace and Security Council, which Sudan has already petitioned, must stop issuing statements and start acting. It should send an independent fact-finding mission to verify the drone attacks on Al-Dabbah and Abu Hamad, and to trace where those drones were launched and who supplied them. Proxy wars survive on deniability. Remove the deniability, and you remove much of the fuel. IGAD, the regional bloc that includes Ethiopia and Sudan, must convene a ceasefire framework with binding monitoring, not just photo opportunities. The United Nations Security Council should stop treating Sudan as a footnote and require humanitarian corridors into besieged areas, with the names of anyone blocking aid placed on the record.

Look at what works. Botswana built one of Africa's most prosperous and stable democracies by protecting property rights, honouring its constitution, and keeping its institutions independent of the men in power. Mauritius has shown that a small island can attract investment and grow its middle class when the courts are impartial and corruption is punished. Senegal, after years of tension, completed a democratic transfer of power that proved its citizens were not hostages to a single family or a single army. These are not perfect nations. They are proof that the rule of law, transparent governance and accountable leaders produce peace and prosperity, and that the alternative of militias, mercenaries and proxy wars produces only graves.

Ethiopia and Sudan both need to hear this plainly. Expelling diplomats does not defend your borders. Accusing your neighbour does not protect your people. What protects your people is an army under civilian control, courts that answer to the constitution rather than to commanders, and a government that treats its citizens as partners in the nation rather than as collateral in a power struggle.

And what must we, as Africans, demand? We must demand that our governments stop using the people of Sudan and Tigray as props in their feuds. We must demand that the AU and IGAD produce results, not press releases. We must demand that every drone, every weapon and every shipment of arms into this region be traced and exposed. We must demand that the foreign governments and private companies pumping money and weapons into both sides face the same scrutiny we would demand of any African warlord. And we must demand that the RSF commanders, the Sudanese generals, and the Ethiopian and Eritrean officials responsible for these crimes answer for them in courts that do not bend to power.

The lights are still out in Al-Dabbah. The children in Abu Hamad are still waiting for medicine. The fourteen million displaced are still waiting for a home. How much longer will we accept diplomatic theatre while our brothers and sisters burn? Call your representatives. Ask your ministers what they are doing at the African Union. Demand that the Horn of Africa be governed by law, not by proxies. The people of Sudan did not start this war. They deserve to be the ones who end it.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA