After the Silence: Ethiopia’s Tigray Peace Is Real, But Justice Remains a Ghost

The guns stopped. That is not nothing. In a war that killed more people than most conflicts of the past thirty years, in a war that involved mass atrocities, deliberate starvation, and sexual violence deployed as a systematic weapon, the fact that the guns stopped matters enormously to the people who lived through it.

The Pretoria Agreement, signed in November 2022, ended the formal hostilities between the Ethiopian federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. It was greeted with cautious relief by a humanitarian community that had watched helplessly as access to Tigray was restricted for months, leaving millions without food, medicine, or information.

But peace and justice are different things. And in Ethiopia today, they are moving at very different speeds.

Displaced populations in contested areas of western and southern Tigray have still not been able to return to their homes. The Eritrean military, which committed atrocities that human rights investigators have documented in detail, has never formally withdrawn or been held accountable. The African Union’s transitional justice mechanism exists on paper but has produced nothing that victims’ families would recognize as accountability.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for ending a previous conflict with Eritrea. He now governs a country where the scale of wartime atrocity demands a reckoning that his political coalition cannot afford to permit. The gap between those two realities is where Ethiopia’s future is being contested.