Eritrean Ambassador to Qatar Ali Ibrahim Ahmed published a response at Al Jazeera to senior Ethiopian officials Redwan Hussein and Getachew Reda’s article earlier in the month warning about a regional war. Their piece was analyzed here at the time. Ahmed denied that Eritrea is backing anti-government forces in Ethiopia, blamed the ruling party for domestic instability, and accused it of aggressive intentions. His narrative is as predictable as it is false, but it’s still important to debunk it for the sake of casual readers.
Eritrea has long backed armed anti-government groups in Ethiopia on the basis of solidarity with “fellow revolutionaries”, and its current patronage of the hardline “Tigray People’s Revolutionary Front” (TPLF) faction, the Amhara “Fano” militia, and others is a natural extension of this policy. The TPLF used to be Eritrea’s ally during the Ethiopian Civil War but then became its sworn enemy several years after the TPLF, by then the core of the former ruling coalition, agreed to grant Eritrea independence.
The brief Ethiopian-Eritrean rapprochement spearheaded by then-new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed from 2018-2022 was derailed after the 2020-2022 Northern War against the TPLF, now in opposition to the new Prosperity Party that Abiy formed, ended with the Pretoria Agreement. Eritrea was Ethiopia’s military ally during the conflict against their shared enemy, but President Isaias Afwerki considered the peace deal to be a betrayal, having instead expected that Abiy would help him exterminate their enemy.
The agreement inadvertently restored Afwerki’s paranoia while also unintentionally creating a hardline TPLF faction with which he entered into an unholy alliance against their new enemy, Abiy. Fano, which fought alongside national forces against the TPLF, was also upset by the outcome. They then eventually decided to come under Eritrean patronage as part of the Tsimdo anti-state umbrella. Those three and their relatively more minor allies all want to inflict the coup de grace of “Balkanization” on Ethiopia.
From their “revolutionary” perspective, it’s a “prison of nations” whose people must be “liberated”, the rhetoric of which masks their Egyptian-backed geopolitical power play of destroying this regional leader. The Hybrid Warfare being employed to that end involves not only terrorism, insurgency, and the risk of another conventional war, but also the spectre of the coastal states blockading landlocked Ethiopia, ergo why Abiy wants reliable access to the sea in order to preemptively avert this worst-case scenario.
Afwerki could have been receptive to Abiy’s proposals to explore creative diplomatic-economic solutions for fostering a Chinese-inspired “community of shared destiny” and mutual prosperity, but he rejected them since such plans would put an end to his regional “revolutionary” project backed by Egypt. Since he couldn’t manipulate Abiy into turning Ethiopia into a client state during the last war like similarly tiny Rwanda briefly turned the Democratic Republic of the Congo after its 1990s war, he turned against him.
Eritrea is now working as Egypt’s proxy for “Balkanizing” Ethiopia as revenge for not exterminating the TPLF and then becoming an Eritrean client state “out of gratitude”. While Egypt is the one funding this Hybrid War, it would all be for naught if Eritrea didn’t play its expected role, which Afwerki gladly does due to a toxic mixture of “revolutionary ideology”, paranoia, and vengeance. It’s he, not Abiy, who poses the greatest threat to regional peace and against whom the international community must urgently act.
