This was reported by "The Reporter Ethiopia ”, specifying that Asmara refers in particular to the border city of Badem and other disputed territories on the northernmost tip of Ethiopia, areas that the president's government Isaiah Afwerki claims as Eritreans. “Eritrean troops are located within Eritrean sovereign territories without any presence in sovereign Ethiopian land,” reads a statement published on February 28 by the Eritrean embassy in the United Kingdom and Ireland, which states that the areas of the border have been under the control of Eritrean troops since the Tigray conflict, which lasted two years and ended in November 2022. These are, we further read, "sovereign Eritrean territories that the TPLF (the Tigray People's Liberation Front) has occupied illegally and with impunity for two decades."
The terms of the Pretoria peace agreement, which put an end to the Tigrayan conflict, provided for the withdrawal from northern Ethiopia of the forces allied with the federal government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed: among these the regional Amhara militias, known as Fano; and the Eritrean troops themselves, although neither one nor the other was explicitly mentioned in the text. It is from this absence of Eritrea from the negotiations for the peace agreement, signed in Pretoria on 2 November 2021, that the already precarious balance existing between Ethiopia and Eritrea after the 2018 reconciliation agreement has crumbled, bringing Eritrean troops to maintain their positions on the border and preventing the inhabitants of those areas from returning home after the end of the conflict. During the war, the Ethiopian government long denied that Eritrean forces were involved in the fighting, despite repeated international complaints about it. Officials of the provisional administration of Tigray and its president Getachew Reda they have long denounced to the Ethiopian federal government what they actually experience as an occupation of their territory by Eritrean forces, who never retreated across the border after the war.
Last February 28st, in her speech to the United Nations Human Rights Council, UN Deputy Secretary-General for Human Rights Ilze Brands Kehris stated that her office “has credible information that the Eritrean Defense Force (army) remains in Tigray and continues to commit cross-border violations, namely kidnapping, rape, looting of property, arbitrary arrest and other violations of physical integrity.” Furthermore, according to the Tigrinya administration, 52 percent of the land in the Ethiopian region is currently not cultivable due to the presence of the Eritrean and Amhara forces, exposing the area to a very high risk of famine. As highlighted to “Ethiopian Reporter” by the deputy head of the Tigray Regional Agriculture Office, Adolom Berhan Harifyo, the Ethiopian federal government has not fully implemented the Pretoria Agreement and most of the high-yielding areas in the region are were captured by Eritrean forces. The final effect is that out of a harvest forecast of around 15 million quintals of wheat in the middle of the current fiscal year it was only possible to obtain 5 million, or 33 percent of the total. In the Tigrinya region there are a total of 1,3 million hectares of arable land, of which 640 thousand have been cultivated. In all, 48 percent of the land in Tigray is cultivable.
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