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By Douglas Okwatch
Nairobi, Kenya: The international community loves a signed piece of paper. In November 2022, when the African Union stood in Pretoria and announced a permanent cessation of hostilities in Ethiopia, global diplomats breathed a sigh of relief.
They chose to celebrate an event rather than interrogate a process. Today, that willful blindness has exacted a staggering price. The Pretoria Agreement is dead, exposing the hard truth that it was never a genuine peace deal—it was merely a long, heavily armed armistice that froze a catastrophic war while leaving its volatile structural fault lines completely untouched.
We are now witnessing the inevitable collapse of a fundamentally flawed diplomatic architecture. The fundamental sin of the Pretoria accord was its execution of selective diplomacy. It attempted to manufacture peace by locking out the very forces doing the heavy fighting on the ground: the Eritrean military and the Amhara militias.
You cannot resolve a complex, multi-factional civil war by pretending major belligerents do not exist. By excluding them, the brokers of the deal ensured that the highly sensitive, zero-sum territorial disputes over Western Tigray were left to fester.
What has followed is a masterclass in political decay and insurgent calculation. Inside Tigray, the political floor has completely given way. TPLF hardliners, frustrated by a total lack of confidence in Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s willingness to fulfill federal promises, executed an aggressive internal purge.
They ousted the cooperative regional interim administration and illegally reinstalled the 2020 pre-war regional assembly openly defying the National Electoral Board and abandoning the legal parameters of the truce.
Worse still, the TPLF’s recent tactical seizure of critical regional airports is a calculated double-play. Logistically, it cuts off the federal government’s aerial resupply lines. Politically, it holds a landlocked population hostage, shutting down commercial air travel and forcing millions of civilians to wait out a looming humanitarian disaster. The unmitigated displacement crisis has been cynically weaponized, transforming a desperate pool of jobless, stranded youth into a fresh source for forceful military conscription.
Yet, the fuel that turned this simmering tension back into an active inferno came directly from Washington. In a baffling policy shift enacted just before this latest escalation, the United States lifted arms procurement sanctions on both Ethiopia and Eritrea. In doing so, the international community effectively opened the floodgates for fresh heavy weaponry to pour directly into a region already on the brink of explosion.
In response, an extraordinary, deeply cynical “alliance of convenience” has emerged. Seven disparate rebel factions—including the TPLF, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), and the Amhara Fano Movement (AFM) have joined hands. Make no mistake: this is not a coalition bound by a shared ideological vision or a coherent plan for a post-Abiy administration.
These groups have spent decades prosecuting and killing one another. It is a purely transactional pact born of a shared resentment against the federal government, built entirely on an agreement not to fight each other while they focus on fracturing the center.
As Ethiopia slides back toward full-scale warfare, the institutional impotence of the African Union and IGAD has been laid bare. Headquartered in Addis Ababa, the AU has historically suffered from an acute political will deficit, bound by an unspoken rule among African heads of state to shield peer leaders from external accountability. It has proven, time and again, to be an organization with more bark than bite.
As Dr. Hassan Khannenje brilliantly summarised, the tragedy of the current fighting stems from the absence of a strong third-party enforcement mechanism. You simply cannot go to a gunfight armed with a machete.
If the international community wishes to stop an impending regional conflagration, it must abandon the failed Pretoria blueprint. First, the federal government must dismantle the rebel alliance’s leverage by bypassing the bloc and launching aggressive, separate bilateral negotiation tracks tailored to the distinct historical grievances of the OLA, the Fano, and the TPLF. Second, Eritrea’s proxy interventions must be neutralized by formalizing its stake in a broader regional diplomatic framework.
Most critically, future stability cannot rely on the empty promises of a signed document. It demands a powerful, neutral external guarantor armed with genuine economic carrots and real military sticks—including a physical, ground-level peacekeeping enforcement mechanism modeled after active missions in Somalia. Until regional and global powers are willing to enforce the peace they broker, any new agreement will merely be a countdown to a third war.
The writer is a Senior Journalist based in Nairobi
