Country
Eritrea
A statement that names Eritrea's forces directly and warns Ethiopia against its own most seductive instinct, war, nine months into a conflict that would kill roughly 600,000 people before it ended.
The Tigray war began in November 2020, when forces loyal to the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which had dominated Ethiopian politics for nearly three decades before Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's rise in 2018, attacked federal military bases in the country's north, prompting a counteroffensive by Ethiopian forces from the south and, controversially, by allied Eritrean forces from the north. By the time it ended two years later, the war had killed an estimated 600,000 people, among the deadliest conflicts of the twenty-first century, and displaced roughly five million.
Kenya's own engagement with the file, delivered through the A3+1 coalition with Niger, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Tunisia in August 2021, is one of the most extensive and directly argued statements anywhere in this archive. It names Eritrea's forces specifically and calls for their withdrawal, a notably direct position given Eritrea's status as a state rather than merely an armed group, and addresses the Tigrayan armed actors (the TPLF and the Tigray Defense Forces) by name, urging restraint on both sides of the conflict rather than framing it as a purely government-versus-rebel matter.
It closes with an extended argument, addressed directly to Ethiopians, that the country's own history of resisting colonialism holds the lessons of compromise and unity the crisis demanded, rather than a license for war's "seductive" clarity.
The path the statement called for, Ethiopian-owned mediation backed by the African Union's Peace and Security Architecture, with former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo as the AU's High Representative for the region, is largely the path the war eventually took: Obasanjo went on to broker the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement that ended the fighting, fifteen months after Kenya's statement had first welcomed his appointment to that role.
Independent Sources for This Introduction
Contemporary Reporting
Chronology
| 2020-11-03 | event | Tigray war begins Forces of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which had governed Ethiopia for nearly three decades before Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018 and had grown estranged from his federal government, attack the Ethiopian National Defence Force's Northern Command headquarters and other bases in Tigray. Federal forces counterattack from the south while Eritrean forces, allied with Addis Ababa, attack from the north. This is the opening of a war that would kill an estimated 600,000 people and displace roughly 5 million before it ended two years later. |
| 2021-08-26 | Statement | Tigray, Ethiopia: A3+1 Statement A3+1 joint statement (Kenya, Niger, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Tunisia), delivered by Amb. Martin Kimani, Permanent Representative of Kenya |
| 2022-11-02 | event | Pretoria Agreement ends the Tigray war The Ethiopian federal government and the TPLF sign a permanent cessation of hostilities in Pretoria, South Africa, under African Union mediation led by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, the same AU High Representative for the Horn of Africa whose appointment Kenya's 2021 statement had welcomed. The agreement ends two years of war, though Eritrean forces' continued presence in parts of Tigray remains a point of contention afterward. |