Hello everyone,
I know it’s been a while since I’ve written a deep dive. My apologies.
Recently, an old friend and journalism colleague emailed me in response to an edition of Proximities that covered Ethiopian troops entering the border town of Zalambessa after reports it had been captured by neighboring Eritrea.
“Hey Barry,” he wrote. “Was it not with you that I visited Zalambessa during our time together in Ethiopia? I remember going up to the border there and peering into Eritrean-controlled territory.”
For a moment, I thought it must be a dream because when I published the entry on Zalambessa, I had no memory of ever having been there, though I have strong recollections of being in other parts of northern Ethiopia close to the Eritrean border, which I’ve written about here before.
That deep dive was titled “Ethiopia-Eritrea: On the brink.” And I’ll be honest, I almost headlined this one exactly the same before I remembered that.
After my friend’s email, I looked at some photos of Zalambessa to jog my memory and fuzzy images from 20 years ago floated slowly into view.
The most salient thing, I guess, is that we were peering into Eritrea in 2007, just seven years after the end of a war the two fought from 1998 to 2000.
And even if Zalambessa is blurry to me, what the locals told me is not.
They remembered how ruinous that war, in which at least 80,000 people were killed, was. They remembered how after the dust settled, families who once lived on opposite sides of the border and crossed back and forth with ease were now permanently separated. And above all else, they didn’t want a repeat.
But we appear to have reached another dangerous moment, perhaps the most dangerous between Ethiopia and Eritrea since that last conflict ended.
This time, the implications are potentially huge but despite strong coverage from some dedicated journalists, it’s slipping under the international radar.
A Q&A below.
Bests,
Barry.
Give me some background. There was a war from 2020 to 2022, right?
Yes, there was, and you might remember that we covered it constantly in Proximities at the time. Ultimately, it became one of the most egregiously under-reported conflicts in modern history given the terrible toll it took.
That conflict was between Ethiopia’s central government in the capital Addis Ababa and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which at the time ran the regional government in the country’s northern Tigray region.
The animus was intense, because until current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2019, the TPLF had dominated the central government for almost 20 years. The two fell out shortly afterwards and war was unleashed.
Eritrea, please bear with me, intervened to support the Ethiopian government.
While estimating a death toll was difficult, not least because Addis Ababa effectively blockaded Tigray, research from Ghent University arrived at an average estimate of 518,000 civilian victims in Tigray, with the lowest estimate at 311,000 and the highest at 808,000. Those figures include people killed violently as well as those who died due to famine and the collapse of the healthcare system.
Though all sides were accused of committing war crimes, the documented atrocities carried out by Ethiopian and Eritrean government forces were widespread, calculated, methodical and even genocidal.
The Tigray war was by some distance the deadliest of the 21st century.
Yet many people in the West have never heard of it.
Now I’m confused. Which side is Eritrea on?
They’ve flipped. In 2020, Eritrea and the new government of Prime Minister Abiy were united by a common enemy in the TPLF. Abiy saw them as a fly in the ointment as he sought to cement power across one of the largest and most ethnically diverse nations on the planet and authoritarian Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki wanted revenge for the conflict of 1998 to 2000.
