ADDIS ABABA: Ethiopia and Eritrea could be headed toward war, officials in a restive Ethiopian region at the center of the tensions have warned, risking another humanitarian disaster in the Horn of Africa.
Analysts said that direct clashes between two of Africa’s largest armies would signal the death blow for a historic rapprochement for which Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 and could draw in other regional powers.
It would also likely create another crisis in a region where aid cuts have complicated efforts to assist millions affected by internal conflicts in Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia.
“At any moment, war between Ethiopia and Eritrea could break out,” Gen. Tsadkan Gebretensae, a vice president in the interim administration in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, wrote in Africa-focused magazine the Africa Report on Monday.
A 2020-2022 civil war in Tigray between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, and Ethiopia’s central government killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Fears of a new conflict are linked to the TPLF’s split last year into a faction that now administers Tigray with the blessing of Ethiopia’s federal government and another that opposes it.
On Tuesday, the dissident faction, which Tsadkan accused of seeking an alliance with Eritrea, seized control of the northern town of Adigrat.
Getachew Reda, the head of Tigray’s interim administration, asked the government for support against the dissidents, who deny ties to Eritrea.
“There is clear antagonism between Ethiopia and Eritrea,” Getachew told a news conference on Monday.
“What concerns me is that the Tigray people may once again become victims of a war they don’t believe in.”
Ethiopia’s federal government has not commented on the tensions.
Eritrea’s information minister dismissed Tsadkan’s warnings as “war-mongering psychosis.”
However, according to UK-based Human Rights Concern-Eritrea, Eritrea ordered a nationwide military mobilization in mid-February.
Two diplomatic sources and two Tigrayan officials said Ethiopia deployed troops toward the Eritrean border this month.
Payton Knopf and Alexander Rondos, the former US and EU envoys to the region, say the prospects of a new war are real.
