Eritrea’s information minister on Tuesday rejected claims his country was working to reignite the 2020-2022 civil war in northern Ethiopia and had “engineered” the ethnic Amhara militia Fano amid diplomatic tensions between the two Horn of African countries.
In a lengthy post on X, Yemane Gebremeskel said the accusations by former Ethiopian president Mulatu Teshome in an Al Jazeera opinion article were “intended to conceal and rationalize a war-mongering agenda”.
He said the “myriad problems besetting the region stem and find their fulcrum in Ethiopia”.
“And the panacea does not lie in externalizing the conflict or scapegoating Eritrea,” the minister added.
Yemane described the former Ethiopian president’s accusations as ”audacious”, saying the government in Asmara had always acted in accordance with international law and has no interest in interfering in its neighbour’s internal matters.
“Eritrea has neither the interest nor the appetite to obstruct or tamper with a purely internal Ethiopian affair,” he said.
In the Al Jazeera article, published on February 17, Mulatu accused Eritrea of being “involved to differing degrees in almost every conflict” in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia.
“The ambitions of Isaias Afwerki, the first and only president of Eritrea since 1993, have seen his country get involved in many conflicts miles away from its borders, including those in the Great Lakes region,” the former leader added.
“It seems Isaias is not just drawn to conflict but he seeks it out and thrives in it, like a pyromaniac who can’t resist setting fires,” he added.
Mulatu also accused Eritrea of seeking to undermine a 2022 peace ageeement that ended a two-year war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region and of having “engineered a militia in Ethiopia’s Amhara state”, referring to Fano.
Sour relations
Eritrea’s president Isaias Afwerki and Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed signed a reconciliation agreement in 2018 and reopened their embassies after years of bad blood and a brutal border war between 1998 and 2000.
The agreement was celebrated internationally and led to Abiy being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.
Eritrean troops also supported Ethiopia’s army in the 2020-22 Tigray war against Tigrayan forces.
Relations between the two countries have, however, soured in more recent years over the deal that ended the Tigray conflict, landlocked Ethiopia’s quest for access to the sea and other issues.
Last year, state-run Ethiopian Airlines suspended flights to and from Asmara due to “difficult operating conditions” after Eritrea accused the carrier of “malicious trading practices”.
