This week Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki said on national television that the US pushed hard to seal the Pretoria deal to prevent the military defeat of the Tigray. He added that thousands were killed in battle.

In the interview broadcast from Asmara, Afwerki sidestepped questions about losses in his own army, and the number of dead Eritrean soldiers.

The mountainous Tigray region in northern Ethiopia had endured a two-year conflict between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the central government in Addis Ababa, in which Eritrean troops participated on the side of the latter.

International human rights organisations have accused all parties -- Tigray forces as well as Eritrean and Ethiopian armies, and the Amhara militias supporting them -- of committing crimes against humanity.

The Ethiopians and Eritreans received the lion’s share of these accusations. The government in Addis Ababa imposed a blockade on Tigray, causing famine and cutting off communication between the region and the outside world. The government was also accused of systematic rape and killing on a large scale, as hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans (a population of seven million) died.

“Eritrea regards the Tigrayans as their archenemies. Their existence threatens the very existence of Asmara itself, Asmara believes,” said Ahmed Al-Sayed, a professor of African studies in Cairo. “The peace Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed struck with Afwerki was only meant to forge an alliance against the Tigray.”

The TPLF assumed control over the ruling Ethiopian revolutionary front for 28 years, up until Ahmed rose to power in 2018. Ahmed began to turn against the ruling Tigray through a campaign to fight corruption a few months after taking office.

“The Tigrayans understood this campaign as an attempt to divest them,” said Al-Sayed. “Hundreds of thousands of the general public of Tigray left Addis Ababa and went back to their mountainous region after their leaders had lost control of the army,” he noted, pointing out that the Tigrayans made up 38 per cent of the officers in the army and an even higher figure in the intelligence and security apparatuses.

Meanwhile, Ahmed met with the TPLF leaders in early February for the first time since the signing of the peace agreement in Pretoria, South Africa. Although the meeting did not come up with an announced roadmap to effect the peace measures, it “gave Ahmed momentum, showing him as a hero of war and peace”, noted Al-Sayed.

In any case, Ethiopia does not seem to be taking a peaceful path. The second most diverse and populous African country after Nigeria is busy with news of divisions within the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is the largest and oldest in sub-Saharan Africa. It was almost the only one present before the advent of the European colonialists who spread Christianity among Africans of traditional religions.

Almost 50 million people are loyal to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, despite the spread of Protestantism in the country among the young, including Prime Minister Ahmed. His father, however, is an Oromo Muslim and his mother is an Amhara Orthodox Christian.

The church division began when three Oromo priests announced the establishment of a synod for their region, claiming that the church leadership was practising “ethnic discrimination” against them, which the Orthodox Church vehemently denied.

This is the second division after the independence of Eritrea and its church from Ethiopia in 1991.

Today, the Tigray control the presidency of the church under Patriarch Matthias, who launched an attack on Ahmed’s government during the Ethiopian civil war, accusing it of committing “genocide” against the Tigray.

The church is now accusing the government once again of being behind this division, especially with Ahmed directing his ministers not to interfere in church affairs.

The mother church believes the government should be on its side, “or else the division may escalate to feed a new civil war,” according to sources close to the church.

There is already a conflict between Tigray and Amhara, the two nationalities that have dominated the church for centuries, and if the divisions serve their goal of establishing a new church, this will spell the disintegration of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which was the basis for the cohesion of a large part of the ethnically, nationally, and linguistically diverse population.

This division “could also exacerbate the situation in the Oromo region, Ethiopia’s largest region in terms of area and population, which includes the capital,” according to Al-Sayed.

Armed Oromo groups are already fighting a war against the central government.

Al-Sayed believes it is highly unlikely Ahmed’s government stands behind the division in the church, simply because this would fuel the Oromo against him even more. It would also encourage the Amhara, who defeated the Tigrayans, to remove Patriarch Matthias, and this would also fuel the flames of war with the Tigrayans, lead to further disintegration of the church, and the rapid fall of Ethiopia as a whole, he added.

However, Tigrayan media outlets broadcasting from outside Ethiopia are saying Protestant Ahmed will benefit from the disintegration of the church that has for long stood powerful.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 16 February, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly