The road into Sudan is full again. Hundreds of Ethiopians from the northern region of Tigray crossed the border over the weekend, fleeing fighting that broke out Saturday near the village of Shererina, in western Tigray, a few kilometers (a few miles) from the Sudanese frontier. The wounded came too, carried to a health center at the border and then moved to al-Hashaba, 15 kilometers (9 miles) inside Sudan, where thousands of people displaced by the last Tigray war are still living. Four years after a peace deal ended that war, the same people are doing the same thing at the same border.
The fighting was not a skirmish. It involved heavy artillery, mechanized units and drones, and it ran from Saturday morning into Sunday. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the rebel movement that fought the federal government to a standstill in the 2020-2022 war, said the federal army launched a large-scale infantry offensive against its positions. The federal side gave no official response; the army’s spokesman did not answer questions. But a federal minister, Abraham Belay, confirmed the clashes on social media and accused what he called the TPLF clique of starting them, warning of worse consequences if the fighting continued and calling for dialogue. Both sides have spent months accusing each other of wanting a new war. On Saturday, one of them got it.
The peace that was never finished
The last war ended in November 2022 with an African Union-brokered deal that was supposed to be the end of it. At least six hundred thousand people died in that war, by the African Union’s count, and the agreement was meant to make sure it could not happen again. It did not work. The peace deal was never fully implemented. The TPLF pushed out the interim administration created under the agreement and regained control of Tigray. Western Tigray, the area where the fighting broke out, was never settled at all: it is disputed between Tigray and the neighboring Amhara region, which administers it, and both sides have troops in the area. For months, federal and Tigrayan forces have been massed along the border, glaring at each other. Analysts describe Saturday’s clash as the most serious confrontation in northern Ethiopia since the war ended, and the fear, according to the BBC’s reporting, is of a return to civil war.
This is not a new war yet. It is the old war that never ended, resuming at the exact place where it was interrupted. The TPLF’s leader told a rally recently that his movement was not alone as it was in the past, that it had allies now, and that other forces opposed to the government were emerging. The government, for its part, has accused the TPLF of forcing young people into military recruitment and of seeking outside support. The mediators have been busy: the US ambassador and the African Union’s envoy for the Horn of Africa have both traveled to Tigray in recent weeks. Neither came back with a breakthrough.
A border that no longer separates two wars
What makes this clash different from the last one is what is happening on the other side of the frontier. Sudan is in its third year of a civil war of its own, between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, and the border region has become a knot of overlapping conflicts. The fighters who fled Tigray during the last war have been living in camps like al-Hashaba, where the wounded were taken this weekend, and some of them, organized under a unit known as Army 70, later fought alongside the Sudanese army against the RSF. Addis Ababa accuses Khartoum of financing TPLF-linked mercenaries; Khartoum accuses Addis Ababa of allowing drone strikes to be launched from its territory in coordination with the United Arab Emirates, which Sudan’s army considers the RSF’s main backer. Each side of each war accuses the other side of the other war. The two conflicts now share people, weapons, territory and grievances, and the border between them has effectively disappeared.
The witness accounts from the weekend are the same accounts that came out of the region in 2020. People in the Sudanese town of Wad al-Hulaywah, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the frontier, heard three powerful explosions Saturday morning and heavy gunfire still going at half past four in the afternoon. Residents of a nearby village fled across the Setit River. In Hamdayet, the border town, the explosions went on all day and people saw aircraft moving southwest. The accounts could not be independently verified, and the death toll is unclear. What is clear is the direction of travel: the same direction as last time, out of Tigray and into Sudan.
Ethiopia’s federal minister said it would be better to reach out for peace before destruction. The TPLF says the government broke the peace agreement first. What the people crossing the Setit River know is that neither side’s accusation changes the fact that they are walking, again, into a country at war. The last war was supposed to be the last one. The peace that was supposed to guarantee that was never finished, and the unfinished peace is now doing what unfinished peaces do: it is coming apart at the seam.
Source
- AllAfrica / RFI: Hundreds flee Ethiopia to war-torn Sudan following new fighting in Tigray
- BBC News: Ethiopia-Tigray: Hundreds flee fighting in northern Ethiopia as fears rise of return to civil war
- Arab News / AFP: Ethiopia army, Tigray rebels clash
- Ethiopia Observer: Heavy fighting erupts near Sudan border as army and TPLF exchange fire