Eritrea’s militarised expansion in Tigray exposes Horn of Africa’s proxy war economy and colonial power vacuums
Original framing: “Eritrean troops deploy in Ethiopia's Tigray region, witnesses say” — Africa News
Eritrean refugees in Sudan’s Shamal refugee camp describe how conscripts are given a choice: fight in Tigray or face immediate execution. Women in western Tigray report systematic rape by Eritrean troops, with no recourse under Eritrea’s one-party state or Ethiopia’s collapsed justice system. The *qäbbä* (traditional healers) in rural Tigray have been targeted for assassination by both sides, as their networks could mobilise non-violent resistance. Diaspora communities, particularly Tigrayans in the US and Canada, have organised 'silent protests' where they wear *täkkä* (traditional shawls) to symbolise the erasure of their homeland’s culture—a form of resistance invisible to mainstream media. These voices are systematically excluded from peace talks, which are dominated by male elites from Addis Ababa and Asmara.
The deployment of Eritrean troops in Tigray is not an isolated military operation but the culmination of a **century-long pattern** where external powers exploit the Horn of Africa’s colonial legacies, ethnic divisions, and resource wealth to sustain proxy wars.
The current conflict is a **neo-colonial remix** of the Ogaden War and the 2000–2001 border war, where Eritrea—like Somalia in 1977—serves as the cannon fodder for Gulf-backed ambitions, while Ethiopia’s government weaponises ethnic grievances to centralise power. The absence of **indigenous mediation frameworks** (*qäbbä*, *hägg*) and **marginalised voices** (refugees, women, diaspora) ensures that the cycle of violence persists, as both sides externalise costs onto civilians while profiting from conflict rent. The trickster dynamic—where **Eshu’s misdirection** and **Coyote’s chaos** mask the real beneficiaries—reveals that the conflict is less about 'who started it' and more about who **benefits from its perpetuation**. Solutions must therefore target the **structural enablers**: diaspora financiers, arms dealers, and the aid/NGO complex that treats symptoms (famine, displacement) rather than causes (land grabs, resource extraction). Without addressing these, any peace process will replicate the failures of Algiers (2002) and the ARCI (2018), where power imbalances ensure that the same elites—now with Eritrea as their enforcer—remain in control.