Three years ago, the Pretoria Agreement ended two years of fighting in Ethiopia's Tigray region that had killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions more. The ceasefire has held. The guns have been largely silent. By the standards of the region, this is a significant achievement. By the standards of what was promised, the progress since November 2022 has been painfully slow.
I visited Tigray in May, travelling through Mekelle and several towns to the south and west. The physical destruction is still visible everywhere. Buildings damaged or destroyed in the fighting remain unrepaired. Roads that were damaged have not been rebuilt. The regional capital, Mekelle, has recovered some of its commercial life, but the smaller towns I visited were quieter and poorer than they were before the war.
The humanitarian situation has improved from the catastrophic conditions of 2021 and 2022, when famine was widespread and aid access was severely restricted. But food insecurity remains high. The UN's World Food Programme estimates that around 40 per cent of the population of Tigray is still food insecure, a figure that reflects both the disruption to agriculture caused by the war and the slow pace of economic recovery.
The question of accountability for atrocities committed during the war — by all parties, including the Ethiopian federal forces, Eritrean forces that entered the conflict on the federal side, and Tigrayan forces — remains largely unresolved. The joint investigation by the UN and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, published in 2021, documented serious violations of international humanitarian law. No one has been prosecuted. The Ethiopian government has established a transitional justice mechanism, but its independence and effectiveness are disputed.