The central government and rebels struck the deal Wednesday, almost to years since fighting erupted Nov. 4, 2020. The fighting has killed hundreds of thousands of people, uprooted millions from their homes and devastated one of Africa's biggest economies.
Redwan Hussein , representative of the Ethiopian government, and Getachew Reda , representative of the Tigray People's Liberation Front, sign a peace agreement between the two parties in Pretoria, South Africa, Wednesday.
But one major player in the conflict — the neighboring nation of Eritrea — wasn't involved in the negotiations, which raises questions about the lasting power of the truce.The outbreak of the war was followed by months of building tensions between the federal government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the Tigray People's Liberation Front , Tigray's ruling party.
Who fired the first shots is hotly disputed. Abiy's government blames the TPLF for attacking a federal army base in Tigray, while TPLF officials say they were preempting an invasion of their region by federal troops and allied ones from neighboring Eritrea.Ethiopian federal troops and their Eritrean allies captured Tigray's major towns and roads in the early days of the war, but they were pushed out of the region in June 2021 in the face of a guerrilla campaign from the TPLF.
All sides have committed human rights abuses, according to investigators. Eritrean troops in particular waged a campaign of killings and gang rape when they occupied Tigray between November 2020 and June 2021.starvation as a weapon Yet the conflict has mobilized vast numbers of troops, with the amount of combatants fighting on the eve of the peace deal estimated to be between 500,000 and 1 million combined."In terms of international comparison, this is currently the largest conflict in the world right now," says a Western diplomat, talking on background.
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