00:00Laura Hammond is a professor of development studies at SOAS, part of the University of London.
00:05Welcome back, Professor Hammond. Thank you for joining us.
00:07And if you could just tell us what's driving this latest escalating tension between Ethiopia and Eritrea in recent days.
00:16Yes, Ethiopia and Eritrea have been brought into a kind of stalemate against each other in the preceding months,
00:26partly because the Eritrean government has been supporting the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front,
00:31which is the army of the northern region of Tigray.
00:35And for the most part so far, that support had been financial and logistic.
00:40But in the last week, when the federal forces of Ethiopia moved into Tigray region,
00:47the Eritreans thought and considered that to be too close for comfort and felt concerned that
00:54if they did not meet the Ethiopian federal army on its own territory, i.e. in Ethiopia,
00:59that there was a really strong danger of the fighting moving into Eritrea itself.
01:06We know that many of the TPLF leaders who have fled out of Tigray region seem to have moved north
01:13into Eritrea itself.
01:15So there's this sort of buffer zone now between the federal forces of Ethiopia and the Eritrean government, which is
01:22Tigray region.
01:22OK. And if you could set this in a bit more context for us, the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea
01:29goes back decades, doesn't it?
01:32It does, although there's been a sort of flip-flopping back and forth of different alliances.
01:37But between 1998 and 2000, Ethiopia and Eritrea fought an extremely bloody war in which over 100,000 people were
01:46killed.
01:47There was never a full resolution to that conflict, and their diplomatic relations remained completely frozen until 2018,
01:57when the new, then new Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, brokered a peace agreement with Eritrea,
02:06creating a brief moment of an alliance, actually, between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
02:10But that soon fell apart once the war, another civil war between the federal forces of Ethiopia and Tigray region,
02:20came to a final cessation of hostilities agreement in 2022.
02:25But that agreement was not ever negotiated with any involvement from Eritrea.
02:30So the alliance between the federal forces of Ethiopia and Eritrea started to fall apart,
02:36and Eritrea gradually moved itself closer to the TPLF alliance that we now see in action on the ground.
02:43And, Laura, what do you make of these latest accusations, then, that each side is preparing for war?
02:50I mean, are there fears that other countries could be drawn in?
02:54Where do you see this heading?
03:24Where do you see this heading?
03:24Particularly, we know that Eritrea is also receiving some support from the Sudanese government and from the Egyptian government,
03:34whereas the federal forces of Ethiopia are receiving support from the United Arab Emirates.
03:39So there is financial backing on both sides to continue this fighting going on.
03:44And unless there's a de-escalation quite soon, the danger of escalation really into a full-scale war between the
03:53two countries is...
03:54The likelihood is quite high.
03:57Really appreciate your expertise today.
03:59Thank you so much, Laura Hammond, Professor of Development Studies at SOAS.
