Tigray war: Why peace talks may fail before they even begin {Africanews Debates}

As fighting intensifies in northern Ethiopia, analysts say the biggest obstacle to ending the conflict may be that the warring parties still see a military victory as possible.

Calls for peace are growing as fighting returns to Ethiopia’s Tigray region. The October edition of the Africanews Debates highlighted a central obstacle to ending the conflict.

Dr Jalale Getachew Birru, an East Africa regional expert at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), said the problem is not simply the absence of diplomatic initiatives. It is whether the conditions exist for the opposing sides to accept them.

Birru said the parties still appeared to believe they could achieve their objectives through military means, making an immediate breakthrough at the negotiating table difficult.

That assessment presents a challenge for regional mediators. If the warring parties believe continued fighting can improve their positions, calls for restraint alone may not be enough to bring them back to negotiations.

The problem with calling for peace

The November 2022 Pretoria agreement ended the previous war between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). However, the renewed fighting has exposed how fragile that settlement remains.

Birru argued that key political issues were left unresolved, and that the implementation of the agreement failed to address the underlying tensions between the sides.

Mulat Haregot, a representative of the Community of Tigrayans UK, highlighted the gap between the agreement’s commitments and the lives of people affected by the war. He pointed to the continued displacement of civilians and the failure to achieve the normalisation envisaged under the deal.

He argued that a settlement cannot be judged solely by whether the guns fall silent. The conditions that allow people to return home and rebuild their lives also matter.

That raises a difficult question for any new peace initiative: would another agreement change the incentives driving the conflict, or merely pause the fighting?