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| Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, left, and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed disembark from an airplane upon arrival at Juba International Airport in South Sudan before meeting with South Sudan's president for tripartite talks on regional affairs on March 4. |
Addis Ababa, ETHIOPIA
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed
was announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, with the
committee that decides the awards singling out his efforts to achieve peace
with neighboring country Eritrea.
But notably, the prize was not
awarded to Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, Abiy’s partner in the talks.
Instead, Nobel Committee Chair
Berit Reiss-Andersen simply acknowledged that “peace does not arise from the
actions of one party alone” and said that they hope the “peace agreement will
help to bring about positive change for the entire populations of Ethiopia and
Eritrea.”
In some years, the Nobel Peace
Prize has been awarded to multiple parties for their work trying to end a conflict.
In 1994, for example, the prize was awarded to Israel’s Shimon Peres and Yitzhak
Rabin, as well as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
But the decision to award the 2019
Nobel Peace Prize only to Ethiopia’s Abiy was hardly surprising. Eritrea’s
Isaias leads one of the most repressive military dictatorships in the world;
his government has been compared to North Korea and accused of possible crimes against humanity.
And even though he reached an
agreement with Abiy in Eritrea’s capital last year to end the conflict between
the two nations, in practice the agreement remains largely unimplemented, and there
have been little visible benefits for Eritreans.
“I think there was a lot of hope in
Eritrea,” said Laetitia Bader, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “But very
quickly, Eritreans saw that things were not changing on the ground.”
Vanessa Tsehaye, an Eritrean
activist based in London, noted, “I’d say it has brought no positive
developments for the Eritrean people, because the lived reality is the same
more than a year after the peace deal.”
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The conflict between Eritrea and
Ethiopia stretches back decades. After European powers left occupied Eritrea in
1951, landlocked Ethiopia claimed the land of its coastal neighbor, eventually
resulting in a civil war that started in 1961 and lasted three decades.
In 1991, Eritrean forces helped
overthrow the communist-led government in Ethiopia, and two years later,
Eritreans voted for independence.
However, the two nations did not
reach an agreement on the border between them, and in 1998, small-scale border
incidents around the town of Badme grew into a full-fledged conflict. It’s
estimated that almost 100,000 people died, and after it ended, Ethiopian troops
had control of Badme and other disputed areas.
As part of a peace agreement
brokered in Algiers, in 2000, a commission cited colonial-era documents to rule
that the land around Badme was part of Eritrea. But Ethiopia did not agree to
the arbitrated border, and the two sides remained in a standoff.
Their relationship was dubbed “no
war, no peace,” which meant that diplomatic, trade and transport ties were
severed, and the countries remained on a war footing, clashing repeatedly and
supporting rival rebel groups.
Abiy, a former intelligence officer
who had taken part in the operations to drive Eritreans out of Badme, took
office as Ethiopia’s prime minister in April 2018 and almost immediately began
changes in the country, which had long been ruled by authoritarian governments.
On June 5, 2018, Abiy made a key
pledge to accept the peace agreement with Eritrea and withdraw Ethiopian troops
from occupied territory. Within weeks, Isaias responded by saying that both
nations yearned for peace.
Just a month after Abiy’s
announcement on July 8, the Ethiopian leader touched down at the airport in
Eritrea’s capital Asmara, where he was greeted by Isaias. The leaders embraced
and later announced they would reopen embassies, allow direct communications
and restore transport links.
“Love is greater than modern weapons
like tanks and missiles,” Abiy said. “Love can win hearts, and we have seen a
great deal of it today here in Asmara.”
Despite the signs of goodwill,
critics say not much has changed between the two nations. Among the Eritrean
diaspora, many voiced disapproval for the Nobel Peace Prize focusing on the
agreement with Eritrea when so little had changed in practice.
“I didn’t know one could win a
peace award without achieving peace!” Selam Kidane, a London-based
activist wrote on Twitter.
Border crossings between Ethiopia
and Eritrea were opened last year, but Eritrea soon closed the border again.
Analysts suspect that Eritrea, which has virtually complete control over its
citizens, is delaying because of fears about wider reform.
Isaias, a former freedom fighter,
has led the country since 1993, and his government has left no room for
opposition. In 2015, the United Nations released the results of a year-long
investigation into human rights in the country, finding “systematic, widespread
and gross human rights violations,” including extrajudicial killing, torture
and forced labor.
Bader said that there was little
evidence that there had been any positive change to some of the most
restrictive elements, such as the arbitrary arrest of people for perceived
political crimes, or the indefinite national service that sees many Eritreans
permanently conscripted to the military.
“The government has often argued
that it was the ‘no war, no peace’ situation with Ethiopia was what forced it
to conscript its whole population,” Bader said.
Jeffrey Smith, the director of
Vanguard Africa, said that he viewed the Nobel Prize as “encouraging Prime
Minister Ahmed and the new regime in Ethiopia as much if not more than it is
about the progress already made.”
But for activists such as Tsehaye,
the peace deal had helped legitimize Isaias, the leader of an isolated and
repressive nation of 5 million people on the world stage. The Eritrean leader
had traveled with Abiy to foreign nations, and the United Nations lifted
sanctions on Eritrea. - The Washington Post
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