Abiy Is Marching Ethiopia Toward a War With Eritrea

Nobody in Ethiopia or Eritrea needs a lecture on what war costs. Between 1998 and 2000, the two countries fought a border war that killed tens of thousands of soldiers, most of them young men who never saw the towns they died over. Then came the 2020 to 2022 Tigray war, which killed hundreds of thousands of people through combat, starvation, and disease, and displaced millions more. Now the border towns are changing hands again, and the question that should keep every African leader awake is simple: are we about to watch the same tragedy repeat itself?

According to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, Ethiopia has taken control of Zalambessa, a border town, and fears are growing that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed will push his army into Eritrea. Martin Plaut, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, has been tracking the escalation. We should listen closely to the experts who have watched this region for decades, because the warning signs are not subtle.

Consider where this crisis came from. In 2018, Abiy and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki signed a peace declaration that ended a twenty-year freeze in which neither side could open a border crossing. Abiy received the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. The world applauded. Then the peace turned into a partnership of convenience. In November 2020, Ethiopian federal forces, backed by Eritrean troops, launched a campaign against Tigray's ruling party. Eritrean soldiers were accused of killings, sexual violence, and looting across Tigray. Joint investigations by Ethiopia's own rights commission and the UN human rights office documented atrocities by all sides, including Eritrean forces. The peace that won a Nobel was built on the bodies of Tigrayan civilians.

The Pretoria Agreement of November 2022 ended the fighting between Ethiopia and the Tigrayan authorities. Eritrea was not a signatory. Its army was never required to withdraw, its officers were never held to account, and its leader never had to explain himself to the Tigrayan families whose relatives disappeared into Eritrean custody. That was the original sin of Pretoria. You cannot end a war by leaving one of its main actors outside the room and then expect the peace to hold.

Now Ethiopia's leadership has returned to its old obsession: the Red Sea. Ethiopia is one of the most populous landlocked countries on Earth, with more than 120 million people. It depends on Djibouti for the bulk of its trade. Abiy has spoken openly about needing sea access, and his January 2024 memorandum with the breakaway region of Somaliland, which offered a path to the coast in exchange for recognition, triggered a diplomatic storm across the Horn. Eritrea, which lost Assab when it became independent in 1993, has watched those ambitions with deep suspicion. Isaias answered by signing a tripartite pact with Egypt and Somalia in early 2024, a clear signal that Asmara is building its own alliances against Addis Ababa.

Here is what we must say plainly. Sea access is a legitimate economic goal. Landlocked nations deserve reliable, affordable routes to global markets. But you do not secure a port by marching an army toward another sovereign state's border. You secure it through treaties, commercial agreements, infrastructure investment, and regional trade law. Ethiopia has every right to negotiate better terms with Djibouti and its neighbors. It has no right to annex territory with tanks.

And let us not pretend this is only an Ethiopian and Eritrean story. The Horn of Africa has become a theatre of the new scramble for Africa. Turkey supplied armed drones that were used in the Tigray war, and Ankara has spent years building its influence across the region through arms sales and infrastructure deals. The UAE has reportedly maintained a military presence at Assab, and has invested heavily in ports and logistics along the Red Sea coast. Egypt, locked in its dispute with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, has leaned on Eritrea and Somalia. Each of these actors speaks the language of partnership. Each is also competing for leverage over the most strategic waterway on the continent. When foreign capitals treat African borders as chessboards, African civilians are the pawns who get sacrificed.

Ask yourself who benefits from this escalation. It is not the Ethiopian farmer whose harvest rots because fuel is scarce. It is not the Eritrean conscript who has been held in indefinite national service for years, sometimes for decades, with no end date and no legal recourse. It is not the displaced Tigrayan mother who still waits for her children's remains to be identified. It is the generals, the ruling elites, and the foreign suppliers who profit from every tank and every drone sold into the region. War is the cheapest way for a leader to avoid being held accountable at home.

That brings us to the uncomfortable truth that both governments would rather we forget. Eritrea has not held national elections since independence in 1993, and its constitution, ratified in 1997, has never been implemented. Political prisoners have been held without trial for years. Ethiopia, for its part, held its 2021 elections while large parts of the country were under siege, with Tigray excluded from voting, and it has struggled with a wave of violence in Amhara and Oromia. A government that will not allow its own citizens a fair vote has no moral authority to lead them into war, and neither does a government that jails its critics and forces its youth into servitude.

So what must happen? First, the African Union must stop treating the Pretoria Agreement as a finished document and start enforcing it. That means a clear, public demand that all foreign forces withdraw from Ethiopian and Eritrean territory, and an independent investigation into atrocities committed during the Tigray war, Eritrean involvement included. Impunity is the oxygen of the next massacre. Second, IGAD and the AU should convene a binding Red Sea access dialogue that includes Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somaliland's neighbors, with commercial rather than military terms. Ethiopia's need for a port can be met through transparent concession agreements, multimodal corridors, and shared infrastructure financed under open competition, not through a border offensive.

We also have success stories that prove a better way exists. Botswana has built one of the most stable democracies in Africa on a foundation of rule of law, fiscal discipline, and respect for property rights, and it has used diamonds to fund schools and clinics rather than militias. Mauritius has grown from a sugar island into a financial and services hub by protecting contracts and opening its markets. Senegal showed in 2024 that a peaceful, constitutional transfer of power is still possible when citizens and courts refuse to let leaders rewrite the rules. These are the models we should be demanding from every government in the Horn, Ethiopia and Eritrea included.

To the leaders in Addis Ababa and Asmara, we say this. Your people are not your bargaining chips. Open your prisons. Hold free elections. Put your constitutions into practice. Sign agreements that bind your soldiers, not just your press officers. If you want the sea, earn it at the negotiating table, not with a column of tanks.

To the rest of us, the Ethiopians, Eritreans, Kenyans, Nigerians, South Africans, and every African who has ever watched a neighbor's village burn on the evening news, we say this: silence is complicity. Write to your parliamentarians. Demand that your governments press the AU and IGAD for a public enforcement of Pretoria. Support the journalists and rights defenders who document what the generals want hidden. And refuse to accept a future in which a Nobel laureate and a dictator can trade a border town like a card game, while the people who pay the price are never asked.

We have buried enough of our children in wars that our leaders chose. Let this be the moment we stop them from starting another.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24