The armed clashes along the border between Sudan and Ethiopia are the latest turning point in a history of decades of rivalry between the two countries, although it is rare for the two armies to fight each other directly over the territory.
The immediate problem is a disputed area known as al-Fashaga, where the northwest of the Amhara region in Ethiopia meets the breadbasket of the state of Gedaref in Sudan.
Although the approximate border between the two countries is well known – travelers like to say that Ethiopia begins when the Sudanese plains give way to the first mountains – the exact border is rarely demarcated on the ground.
Colonial era treaties
The borders in the Horn of Africa are fiercely contested. Ethiopia waged war with Somalia in 1977 over the disputed Ogaden region.
In 1998, he fought against Eritrea for a small contested piece of land called Badme.
About 80,000 soldiers died in that war, which caused profound bitterness between countries, especially as Ethiopia refused to withdraw from the city of Badme, although the International Court of Justice granted most of the territory to Eritrea.
It was reoccupied by Eritrean troops during the fighting in Tigray in November 2020.
After the 1998 war, Ethiopia and Sudan revived long-dormant conversations to define the exact location of their 744 km (462 miles) border.
The most difficult area to resolve was Fashaga. According to the colonial era treaties of 1902 and 1907, the international border runs eastward.
This means that the land belongs to Sudan – but the Ethiopians settled in the area and were cultivating there and paying their taxes to the Ethiopian authorities.
‘Business condemned as secret business’
Negotiations between the two governments reached an agreement in 2008. Ethiopia has recognized the legal border, but Sudan has allowed Ethiopians to continue to live there undisturbed.
It was a classic case of ‘flexible frontier’ managed in a way that did not allow the location of a ‘rigid frontier’ to disturb people’s livelihoods in the frontier zone; there has been coexistence for decades until now, when a definitive sovereign line was demanded by Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian delegation for the negotiations that led to the 2008 compromise was chaired by a senior official from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), Abay Tsehaye.
After the TPLF was removed from power in Ethiopia in 2018, Amhara leaders condemned the deal as a secret bargain and said they were not properly consulted.
Each side has its own story of what triggered the confrontation at Fashaga. What happened next is not in question: the Sudanese army repelled the Ethiopians and forced the villagers to evacuate.
At a regional summit in Djibouti on December 20, Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok raised the issue with his Ethiopian counterpart, Abiy Ahmed.
They agreed to negotiate, but each has different preconditions. Ethiopia wants Sudanese to compensate burnt communities; Sudan wants a return to the status quo ante.
While the delegates were talking, there was a second confrontation, which the Sudanese attributed to Ethiopian troops.
As with most border disputes, each side has a different analysis of history, the law and how to interpret centuries-old treaties. But it is also a symptom of two major problems – each unlocked by Abiy’s policy changes.
Territorial claims in Tigray
The Ethiopians who inhabit Fashaga are of the Amhara ethnicity – a constituency that Abiy increasingly hitched in his political wagon after losing significant support in his Oromo ethnic group, the largest in Ethiopia. Amharas are the second largest group in Ethiopia and its historical rulers.
Encouraged by the victories of the federal army in the conflict against the TPLF in the past two months, the Amhara are making territorial claims in Tigray.
After the TPLF stepped back, pursued by the regional Amhara militia, they raised their flags and put up road signs that said “Welcome to Amhara”. This occurred on land claimed by the state of Amhara, but allocated to Tigray in the 1990s, when the TPLF was in power in Ethiopia.
The Fashaga conflict follows the same pattern of claiming sovereignty – except that it is not over Ethiopia’s internal borders, but the border with a neighboring state.
The failure to resolve it peacefully is the indirect result of another reversal of Abiy’s policy: Ethiopia’s external relations. For 60 years, Ethiopia’s strategic objective was to contain Egypt, but a year ago Abiy reached out for friendship.
Both countries consider the Nile River to be an existential issue.
Egypt sees the dams upstream as a threat to its part in the waters of the Nile, established in colonial-era treaties. Ethiopia sees the river as an essential source of hydropower, necessary for its economic development.
The dispute reached a culmination over the construction of the huge Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Gerd).
Explore the Nile with 360 video
Alastair Leithead and his team traveled in 2018 from the source of the Blue Nile to the sea – through Ethiopia and Sudan to Egypt.
The foundation of hydro-diplomacy in the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs used to be a web of alliances between other upstream African countries.
The aim was to reach a comprehensive agreement by several countries on the sharing of Nile waters. In this forum, Egypt was outnumbered.
Sudan was at the African camp. It was defined that it would gain from Gerd, which would control the floods, increase irrigation and provide cheaper electricity.
Egypt wanted direct bilateral negotiations aimed at preserving its colonial-era right to most waters of the Nile.
In October 2019, Abiy flew to the Russia-Africa summit in Sochi. On the sidelines, he met with Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi.
In a single meeting, with no Foreign Ministry official present, Abiy overthrew the Ethiopian Nile waters strategy.
He agreed with Sisi’s proposal that the US Treasury should mediate the dispute over Gerd. The United States leaned towards Egypt.
If the young Ethiopian leader, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending tensions with Eritrea, thought he could also secure a deal with Egypt, he was wrong. The opposite happened: the 44-year-old cornered himself.
Sudan was the third country invited to negotiate in Washington DC. Vulnerable to US pressure because it desperately needed the US to lift the financial sanctions imposed when a “sponsor of terrorism state” was designated in 1993, Sudan agreed with the Egyptian position.
More about the mega dam:
Ethiopian public opinion turned against American proposals and Abiy was forced to reject them, after which the US suspended some aid to Ethiopia. US President Donald Trump has warned that Egypt could “blow up” the dam, and Ethiopia has declared a no-fly zone in the region where the dam is located.
‘Mutual destabilization pattern’
The Nobel Prize winner cannot allow more disputes with Egypt, amid the conflict in Tigray and the clashes in Fashaga. The latter raises the ghosts of a long history of rivalry between Ethiopia and Sudan.
In the 1980s, communist Ethiopia armed Sudanese rebels, while Sudan helped ethnic-nationalist armed groups, including the TPLF. In the 1990s, Sudan supported militant Islamic groups, while Ethiopia supported the Sudanese opposition.
With armed clashes and unrest in many parts of Ethiopia, and Sudan’s recent peace deal with rebels in Darfur and the Nuba Mountains still incomplete, each country could quickly return to this old pattern of mutual destabilization.
Relations between Sudan and Ethiopia peaked when Abiy flew to Khartoum in June 2019 to encourage pro-democracy protesters and Sudanese generals to reach an agreement on civilian government after the fall of longtime ruler Omar al-Bashir.
It was a characteristic Abiy initiative – high profile and totally individual – and needed formalization through the regional Igad body and the diplomatic work of others, including the African Union, Arab countries, the United States and the United Kingdom to obtain results.
Sudanese Prime Minister Hamdok tried to return the favor by offering assistance in resolving the Ethiopian conflict in Tigray. He was rejected, most recently at the December 20 summit, at which Abiy insisted that the Ethiopian government would handle its internal affairs on its own.
While Tigray refugees continue to flood Sudan, bringing with them stories of atrocities and famine, the Ethiopian prime minister may find it more difficult to reject mediation.
It also runs the risk of triggering a new round of cross-border antagonism between Ethiopia and Sudan, deepening the crisis in the region.
Alex De Waal is the executive director of the Foundation for World Peace at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the United States.