CURRENT AFFAIRS
Ethiopia: the peace signed in South Africa that no one defended
26 September 2026 — Ethiopia (Tigray, Amhara, Afar)
On 2 November 2022, in Pretoria, South Africa, the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) signed, under African Union mediation, an agreement for a permanent cessation of hostilities, known ever since as the “Pretoria agreement”. It ended one of the bloodiest wars of the century: two years of fighting in the north of the country, whose toll remains disputed. The African Union mediator, former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, spoke in January 2023 of about 600,000 dead; a Ghent University study estimated up to 500,000, while some Ethiopian officials put the figure below 100,000. In recent days that agreement has collapsed, and the people paying the price are once again the same.
Facts
On 21 September 2026 seven armed groups, including the TPLF and forces active in Amhara and Afar, announced an alliance against the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. From 23 September an offensive was launched on several fronts; Tigrayan forces took control of three local airports, including Lalibela's. The federal army says it killed at least 272 TPLF fighters in Amhara: this is a partisan figure that no independent source has so far verified.
On 25 September the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, described a rising civilian toll. According to his office, on 22 September federal army airstrikes, some carried out with drones, hit five schools in Tigray, causing deaths and injuries; a mortar strike attributed to the army killed civilians in the town of Kobo, in Amhara (on 23 September according to the High Commissioner, on 24 September according to UN News: the sources differ on the date). The same office denounces the forced mass recruitment of civilians, children included, by the TPLF across Tigray, with reprisals against those who refuse and their families, and reports cases of arbitrary conscription by government forces as well.
The Secretary-General's spokesperson added that a drone hit a truck carrying food for displaced people in north-western Tigray, that phone and internet services are cut in the region, and that armed groups in Amhara have seized humanitarian vehicles. All this is happening where the IOM already counts some 750,000 internally displaced people left homeless by the previous war.
Why the agreement collapsed
The November 2022 agreement rested on a few precise commitments: the disarmament of Tigrayan fighters, the restoration of humanitarian aid, the return of the displaced and, later, a solution for the territories disputed between Tigray and Amhara. According to the analysis published by the International Crisis Group on 25 September, none of these knots was ever truly untied: disarmament was not completed, the contested lands remained under Amhara control, preventing many Tigrayans from returning, and outside diplomatic pressure to reach a compromise was insufficient.
Meanwhile the Tigrayan camp split. Between April and May 2026 the TPLF ousted the interim administration created by the agreement and reinstated Debretsion Gebremichael at the head of the region; his predecessor, Getachew Reda, now an adviser to Abiy, accuses the TPLF of starting the hostilities.
Then there is Eritrea. In the 2020-22 war its troops fought alongside the Ethiopian army and were accused of some of the worst atrocities of that conflict. Asmara never signed the Pretoria agreement. Today the Ethiopian government accuses it of financing the new alliance, and Eritrea denies it; according to Crisis Group's assessment, it has quietly moved closer to its former enemy. These are a partisan accusation and an analysis, not established facts, and we report them as such.
Legal reading
The frame of reference is international humanitarian law governing non-international armed conflicts. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol II, which Ethiopia has ratified, bind the federal army and every armed group in the same way: they prohibit attacks on civilians and on civilian objects such as schools, and require the passage of humanitarian aid to be allowed. The same Protocol prohibits recruiting children under fifteen; the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, also ratified by Ethiopia, raises to eighteen the limit for recruitment by armed groups.
The limit already pointed out on this site for the war in Amhara remains: Ethiopia has not ratified the Rome Statute, and the International Criminal Court can act only on a referral by the Security Council. Finally, the Pretoria agreement is not a treaty with a judge: it is a political commitment mediated by the African Union, whose survival depended on the will of the parties and on pressure from those who had promoted it.
Implications — symmetry test
The symmetry test takes no effort here, because the source itself applies it: the UN High Commissioner's office attributes violations to the federal army (the strikes on schools, the mortar on Kobo, arbitrary conscription) and to the TPLF (the forced recruitment of children). Neither side can present itself as the only victim, and neither of the political causes at stake, the unity of the state or the autonomy of Tigray, makes it lawful to strike a school or enlist a child.
This site's judgment is that the collapse of Pretoria shows the same problem we see elsewhere: an agreement without guarantors and a rule without anyone to enforce it hold only as long as they suit everyone. When Ethiopia slipped out of international attention, no one watched over disarmament, returns and the contested borders. The price of that distraction is being paid again today by the civilians of the north, the same ones as four years ago.
Related pieces: Ethiopia, the war no one is covering: a guide to understanding it
Sources: Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, statement by Volker Türk (25/9/2026) · Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, briefing of 25/9/2026 · UN News (25/9/2026; 2/11/2022) · International Crisis Group (25/9/2026) · Al Jazeera (24/9/2026) · IOM, data on displaced people in Tigray · The National (16/1/2023)