Peace Agreement Between Ethiopia And Tplf Pdf Download
Shanae Maerz
Furthermore, tensions are rising in Oromia. The Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups are each alleging killings committed by the other, while deadly attacks have been reported in recent weeks. The peace agreement has offered hope for the Tigray region, but the persistence of instability in Oromia underscores the myriad challenges Ethiopia faces on the road to peace. Recently, Abiy has increased military operations against the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), which was not a party to the agreement despite at least a nominal, one-time partnership with the Tigrayan forces.
Thus, while a peace agreement between Tigrayan forces and the Ethiopian government is a heartening step toward resolving the conflict in Northern Ethiopia, it has a long way to go to being a holistic blueprint for durable peace.
The international community, particularly the European Union and the United States, must support the cease-fire agreement by ensuring that there is a large economic upside to peace. The first step must be providing international political and financial support to ensure economic stabilization, followed by support for recovery.
Many Tigrayans seem to believe that Tigray got the short end of the stick in the recent peace agreement signed last month in Pretoria, South Africa. Similarly, some express disquiet that the agreement contains provisions for disarmament of the Tigray Defense Force (TDF), with no attempts to address the root causes of the war. The feeling in Tigray is that with the disbandment of the TDF, the agreement has prepared the ground for exactly what Ethiopia and Eritrea want: a contained, depopulated, and weak Tigray. Indeed, no just peace can be achieved in Tigray as long as the population believes it is under the occupation of military forces it considers alien.
The agreement states that the Ethiopian government gets to re-establish federal authority over Tigray. It will take full control of the territory along with key infrastructure facilities, such as airports and highways. Additional transitional measures foresee the establishment of an inclusive interim regional administration and federally supervised regional elections, which would, however, be subject to further dialog and negotiation between the parties.
Peace agreements are inherently a fragile affair, because they seek to reconcile hostile groups in a coordinated process that requires mutual trust and commitment. That being said, one key factor improving the prospects of the current agreement being a success are the relative military capabilities of the main adversaries. Before the conclusion of the agreement, the government side appeared to be in a favorable position, close to achieving a full military victory. The TPLF had retreated to Tigray and was barely able to resist the latest offensive from the Ethiopian government and its Eritrean ally. At the same time the devastating humanitarian situation in Tigray was putting further pressure on the TPLF to cease fighting. Accordingly, the terms of the agreement are strongly favorable to the government side. Research suggests that peace is easier to maintain if a conflict is resolved with one side having a clear military advantage as opposed to situations where the conflict parties possess roughly equal military strength.5 Beyond that, however, the current peace agreement includes two major pitfalls that may undermine its stability.
Although the AU monitoring mission lacks the mandate to provide strong external oversight, it may very well alleviate commitment problems and reduce information asymmetries by monitoring the situation on the ground closely and encouraging dialog between conflict parties if and when minor disagreements do occur. This all-important role in the peace process would, however, require sufficient staff and financial resources, provided to the AU by external actors such as the EU, the UN, and the US.
Additionally, external actors should use sticks and carrots towards the individual parties of the agreement to foster their commitment to the peace process. This would mean financial aid to help rebuild the regions most affected by the war but also economic sanctions toward the government of Eritrea and Ethiopia in the event that they fail to meet their commitments or undermine the peace process in any way.
If these efforts succeed, the current agreement may provide a promising pathway to peace and may pave the way for a more comprehensive agreement that addresses important issues such as accountability for war crimes and the political future of Tigray within the Ethiopian state. This would in turn also provide a positive impetus for the settlement of other conflicts in the Afar, Amhara, and Oromo regions of Ethiopia (see map).
Download (pdf): Bethke, Felix S. (2022): Prospects for Peace in Tigray. An assessment of the peace agreement between the Ethiopian government and the TPLF, PRIF Spotlight 12/2022, Frankfurt/M, DOI: 10.48809/prifspot2212.
The peace agreement had brought to an end to the two-year-long civil war that began after the TPLF attacked a federal army base in Mekelle on November 3, 2020. The war expanded to neighboring states in the subsequent year when the TPLF invaded Afar and Amhara.
He also ended the war with Eritrea, and followed up the 2018 peace-deal with a Tripartite Agreement for peace and cooperation between Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia in 2019. Threatened by the prospect of unity between the countries of the geopolitically crucial Horn of Africa, the Biden administration, which was waiting to take the White House in late 2020, instigated the TPLF to start this war in an attempt to unravel the progress made, maintains Hassan.
This attempt to paint the Ethiopian federal government as the aggressor appears to have halted after the peace agreement, which was signed only when the TPLF was said to be on the verge of a total military defeat. However, the US continues to train its guns on Eritrea, denying the widely reported withdrawal of its troops.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the G7 foreign ministers' meeting in the German city of Muenster, Borrell acknowledged that the agreement was "good news," but cautioned: "Making peace is much more difficult than making war."
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