The African Union (AU), through its Peace and Security Council (PSC), is casting its lot with efforts to mediate between Ethiopia and Eritrea, whose tensions have been escalating amid a complex web of competing positions and interests, with direct war remaining a real possibility. It is emerging as a significant mediator with strong potential to forge a consensus or a mechanism for de-escalation, having succeeded in mediating between the rebel group the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Ethiopian government in the conflict of 2020 to 2022, the result being the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (CoHA), commonly referred to as Pretoria. The current impasse also involves the same actors and, in a sense, exposes the limits of the African Union in securing lasting peace once agreements have been signed. The current approach has been described by the AU’s Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, Bankole Adeoye, as aimed at reviving the 2000 Algiers Agreement, alongside Pretoria.

The current dynamics evolved, on the one hand, through the unravelling of the Pretoria Peace Agreement. Signed in November 2022, it had committed the TPLF to disarmament and the establishment of a properly constituted government for the Tigray region, following a period under an Interim Regional Administration. However, its requirements were never properly implemented and the fragile peace unravelled gradually, an outcome for which the AU and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) have been criticised, specifically for their lack of oversight in the implementation process. Before outright fighting broke out on 23 September this year between the TPLF and its rebel allies against the government, the AU had tried to mediate between a TPLF increasingly captured by hardliners who opposed the peace, and Addis Ababa. That effort failed to produce a resolution, as the TPLF accused the AU envoy, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, of bias before resorting to arms against the Ethiopian government forces, culminating in a landscape now defined by tension between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

At the same time, having fought against the TPLF in the conflict, the Eritrean regime saw its relationship with Addis Ababa deteriorate. From the outset, its war aims diverged from Ethiopia’s. Whereas Addis Ababa sought to contain the TPLF’s threat to the Ethiopian state, Asmara saw its interest in crushing the TPLF in its entirety, an outcome that Pretoria had effectively foreclosed.

Pretoria, although it succeeded in silencing the guns, indirectly produced a new reality in the region. It split the TPLF between its hardliners, who aligned with the regime in Asmara and other elements in tension with Addis Ababa, and its pragmatists, who saw peace as the path and aligned with the federal government. The peace also meant the unravelling of the 2018 rapprochement between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which deteriorated gradually until it reached the present state of hostilities.

What makes the African Union’s effort to resolve this complex mix of instability and tension so challenging are the limits of its toolkit and the shortcomings of the CoHA and, equally, of the much earlier Algiers Agreement, signed between Ethiopia and Eritrea to end a costly war more than a quarter of a century ago, ostensibly over border issues (but also driven by a much more complex set issues).

To begin with, the current landscape has moved radically away from the dynamics the two deals were meant to address. The arrangement of actors in the Tigray conflict has been replaced by one in which the antagonism lies between the Ethiopian federal government and a TPLF-led rebel alliance, comprising six other armed groups elsewhere in Ethiopia, which are themselves heavily influenced and backed by Eritrea, in pursuit of its own proxy strategy, which has also drawn in the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in neighbouring Sudan and, behind them, Egypt.

In addition, the reality in Tigray and in Ethiopia more broadly, that is, the balance of power between the TPLF, alongside its allied rebels in Ethiopia’s neighbouring regions, and the Ethiopian federal forces, has changed radically. Having repelled the offensive launched by the alliance in late September, the federal government, alongside the Tigray Peace Force (TPF), an offshoot of the former TPLF armed wing now opposed to it, has established firm control over Tigray and installed a caretaker government.

This all places the revival of the Pretoria agreement largely out of reach, as the outbreak of hostilities has overtaken past arrangements, and the African Union, in seeking to establish lasting peace in Tigray, may need to come to terms with the position of the federal government and its current capacity to maintain control over Tigray and govern it, as well as the TPLF’s diminished control and growing illegitimacy, as it has retreated to the Tigrayan countryside to mount irregular warfare against the government while continuing to sustain significant losses. The AU will need to navigate the current security landscape in Tigray to achieve the peace it wants to see, and will most likely need to move beyond the CoHA to do so.

More challenging still is that, Tigray included, all the dynamics of the region continue to feed the Ethiopia-Eritrea tensions, each riddled with complexity in its own right. Equally problematic is the nature of the Algiers Agreement, through which the Union is expected to help resolve the impasse.

Algiers was the deal that ended a war between Ethiopia and Eritrea fought between 1998 and 2000, signed under the principal mediation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the AU’s predecessor organisation. Similar to Pretoria, its chief utility lay in silencing the guns, but it later became problematic and fell short of establishing genuine peace between the two. It was in 2018, on the initiative of Addis Ababa, that the cold peace that followed Algiers, lasting 18 years, was brought to an end.

For Ethiopia, the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission, set up under Algiers to settle the question of the border between it and Eritrea, reached a problematic ruling. Although Addis Ababa had committed to abide by the ruling, deemed “final and binding”, it came to regard it as “totally illegal, unjust and irresponsible” and declared it null and void. The Commission, in reality, had relied solely on colonial-era treaties from a century earlier to reach its decision, and had failed to take into consideration the political and social realities on the ground, let alone the complex history between Ethiopia and Eritrea that occurred after those treaties, such as the period when Eritrea was reunited with Ethiopia for nearly four decades.

The applicability of Algiers to solving today’s impasse extends beyond the problematic terms of the deal itself and is shaped by complex dynamics that differ sharply from those of the late 1990s.

First, Ethiopia has been pressing strong demands for access to the Red Sea, which it lost when Eritrea seceded, de facto in 1991 and formally in 1993. Addis Ababa now sees the arrangements of 1991 and 1993, when Eritrea officially became a state, as “unjust” and “illegal”, citing the fact that Eritrea’s secession was sanctioned by a transitional government that paid little regard to Ethiopia’s sea access interests. Ethiopia likely sees a lasting peace settlement with Eritrea as one that includes securing access to the Red Sea through ports such as Assab, over which Ethiopia cites historical ties to press its claim.

The antagonism, moreover, extends beyond Ethiopia and Eritrea, and beyond the Ethiopian rebels that Asmara is making use of, to involve external actors, primarily the SAF and Cairo’s own rivalry with Ethiopia and its machinations in the Horn of Africa. The SAF, given its relationship with Asmara and with the Ethiopian rebels, particularly the TPLF, and its antagonism towards Ethiopia, is a significant actor, considering the long border that Sudan shares with Ethiopia and Eritrea, much of which the SAF controls and which has served as terrain for Asmara and its proxies to exploit. Cairo, which has been cultivating its ties with Asmara with vigour alongside its support for the SAF, is also an important element animating the tensions.

Whether the African Union can take on the challenge of bringing about a resolution to this impasse will be a matter to be tested in the coming months. It is a challenge in itself to manage peace in so conflict-prone a neighbourhood as the Horn of Africa, and the AU, regularly criticised for its limited ability to deliver lasting and comprehensive peace arrangements for the continent’s insecurity, will carry the weight of both. Both Algiers and Pretoria were net successes in that they stopped the fighting on the ground, yet this time their revival, or a similar deal, will succeed only if it goes beyond halting the fighting, which will take comprehensive and innovative approaches to prevent war and to secure lasting peace.

By Mahder Nesibu, Researcher, Horn Review