Ethiopia Accuses Eritrea of an All-Out Invasion of Tigray
In a letter to the United Nations Security Council, Ethiopia’s foreign minister Gedion Timothewos calls Eritrean troop movements into Tigray a “blatant act of aggression that engages Ethiopia’s inherent right to self-defence”, and says forces advanced up to sixty kilometres. Eritrea says it faces “an unprovoked war of aggression”. Both accusations are now on the record.
Eritrea’s information minister Yemane Gebremeskel, who on Thursday would say only that he was “not in the business of refuting wild allegations”, has now gone further: the Ethiopian account is “duplicity in their most extreme forms”, and Addis Ababa is “openly working to bring about regime change in Eritrea”. The sixty-kilometre figure is one belligerent’s claim in a letter to the Security Council and should be read as that. What is independently reported is the air war: Ethiopian drone strikes hit Adigrat on Wednesday and Thursday, and the monitoring group Acled records multiple strikes on Eritrean troops and ammunition. A resident told a news agency there were “many, many drone strikes”. No casualty figures have been verified, and no international news organisation can currently report from Tigray, which is the single most important caveat on everything written about this war. Underneath the exchange of letters is a concrete object: Abiy Ahmed’s stated ambition for Ethiopian access to a Red Sea port, in a country that has been landlocked since Eritrean independence in 1993. He won the Nobel peace prize in 2019 for making peace with the government he is now accused of invading.