What 'cessation' meant in Kokob Tsibah

What “cessation” meant in the towns the Eritreans still occupied

The Pretoria Agreement was signed on 2 November 2022. In the weeks and months that followed, Eritrean forces continued killing and raping Tigrayan civilians in the parts of Tigray they still occupied. The Amnesty International report documenting it would not appear until September 2023. By then, the international community’s attention had moved on.

Filed October 2023, after the Amnesty September report and the ICHREE final report

The day the Pretoria Agreement was signed — 2 November 2022 — Eritrean Defence Force units occupied positions in northern Tigray (the Erob and Gulomakeda districts on the Eritrean border, parts of Adwa, Adi Daero, Shire), in central Tigray (the Mariam Shewito and Kokob Tsibah districts, parts of the Tahtay Adiabo and Tahtay Koraro Woredas), and in western Tigray alongside Amhara regional forces (the Welkait, Tegede, and Humera areas, although the EDF role in Western Tigray was more limited than the Amhara role). EDF units would, by various international assessments, remain in some of these positions through 2023 and substantially into 2024. The agreement signed at Pretoria did not require their withdrawal. The federal-government commitment in Article 6 to use “all possible means” to ensure non-ENDF withdrawal was, as Article 13 of this chronicle has documented, an empty commitment.

What the EDF did during the months it occupied Tigrayan territory after Pretoria is the operational test of what the agreement’s “cessation of hostilities” actually meant. The Amnesty International report of 5 September 2023 — Ethiopia: Eritrean soldiers committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity after signing of agreement to end hostilities — is the principal documentary record of the test. Its findings, summarised below, establish that the cessation of hostilities did not apply to the EDF in operational terms, that Tigrayan civilians in the EDF-occupied zones continued to be killed and sexually violated through January 2023 and into the spring, and that the federal government’s commitment to ensure non-ENDF withdrawal was not fulfilled in any meaningful sense during the period covered by the Amnesty investigation. [Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: Eritrean soldiers committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity after signing of agreement to end hostilities – new report,” 5 September 2023, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/09/eritrean-soldiers-committed-war-crimes-and-possible-crimes-against-humanity-in-the-tigray-region-after-signing-of-agreement-to-end-hostilities/]

The Amnesty investigation was based on field interviews with 49 survivors and witnesses conducted in Tigray Region between January and June 2023 by Amnesty’s regional team and consulting researchers. The investigators visited Kokob Tsibah, Mariam Shewito, and several smaller towns in central Tigray. They interviewed survivors of EDF attacks, family members of victims, medical personnel who had treated survivors, and local administrators who had been operating in the affected zones during and after the EDF occupation. They examined photographic evidence, satellite imagery of EDF positions, and where available, autopsy and forensic records from clinical facilities. The findings establish a pattern of EDF conduct between November 2022 and January 2023 — and in some specific cases through early March 2023 — that meets the legal definitions of war crimes and, in Amnesty’s characterisation, “possibly crimes against humanity.”

The pattern of conduct documented by Amnesty includes the following.

Intentional killings of Tigrayan men in house-to-house searches. EDF units conducted searches of homes in the Kokob Tsibah and Mariam Shewito districts through November 2022, December 2022, and into January 2023. The searches were targeted at ethnic Tigrayan men of fighting age — defined, in operational practice, as men between approximately 15 and 60 years old. Men identified in the searches were either killed in their homes (shot or stabbed at close range) or removed to nearby locations and executed. Witnesses described, in interviews, multiple specific incidents in which family members had been killed in their presence, after EDF soldiers had entered the home and identified the male occupants. The targeting was based on ethnic identification (witnesses described EDF soldiers asking about the ethnic identity of household members) and on perceived military-age status (witnesses described EDF soldiers asking specifically for “the men of fighting age”).

Sexual violence against Tigrayan women and girls. Amnesty documented multiple specific cases of sexual violence committed by EDF soldiers against Tigrayan women and girls during the post-Pretoria occupation period. The cases included rape, gang rape, sexual slavery (cases in which women and girls were held in EDF positions for periods of days or weeks and subjected to repeated sexual violence), and the use of foreign objects in sexual violence (the pattern documented across the wartime Tigray sexual-violence campaign). The investigation documented cases of women and girls held by EDF units in Kokob Tsibah until 19 January 2023 — more than ten weeks after the Pretoria signing — at which point the women and girls were released or escaped during EDF positional movements. The youngest documented survivor was 12 years old; the oldest was 65.

Looting of civilian property and destruction of infrastructure. EDF units conducted systematic looting of households, businesses, agricultural infrastructure, and medical facilities through the period. The looting pattern was consistent with the documented EDF conduct from the war’s earlier phases — extraction of livestock, agricultural equipment, seed stocks, vehicles, household electronics, medicine, and any portable item of economic value — and continued to degrade the Tigrayan civilian population’s economic base in the affected zones.

The Amnesty conclusion, articulated explicitly in the report, was that the EDF conduct documented during the post-Pretoria period was “continuous with” the EDF conduct documented during the war’s open-conflict phase, that the conduct met the legal thresholds for war crimes, and that the systematic and widespread character of the conduct met the legal threshold for crimes against humanity.

The federal government’s response to the Amnesty report was to dispute its methodology and findings without committing to its own investigation. The federal Foreign Ministry, in a statement issued on 7 September 2023, characterised the Amnesty report as relying on “biased” sources and as “interfering” in Ethiopian internal affairs. The federal government’s commitment under the Pretoria Agreement to ensure non-ENDF withdrawal was not addressed in the response. The federal government did not deploy ENDF forces to compel EDF withdrawal. The federal government did not break diplomatic relations with Eritrea over the EDF conduct. The federal government did not refer the EDF conduct to any international accountability mechanism. The federal government did not, in any operational sense, act on its Pretoria commitment.

The Eritrean government’s response to the Amnesty report was to deny the findings without engagement. The Eritrean Ministry of Information characterised the report as “fabricated.” Eritrean officials did not appear at any international forum to address the substance. The EDF did not, in any documented case during the period covered, prosecute or discipline any of its own personnel for conduct alleged in the Amnesty investigation.

The Western Tigray pattern of conduct by Amhara regional forces and Fano militias against remaining Tigrayan residents continued through the same period. Human Rights Watch’s continuing documentation of the Western Tigray situation — which had begun in early 2021 and produced the April 2022 joint HRW/Amnesty report — extended through 2022, 2023, and into 2024. The HRW World Report 2024 (covering 2023 events) documented continued forced expulsions, arbitrary detentions, torture in detention, and extrajudicial executions of Tigrayan residents in Western Tigray through August 2023. The federal government’s commitment under the Pretoria Agreement to resolve the contested-territories question in line with Article 39 of the constitution did not, in operational terms, alter the Amhara administrative control of Western Tigray or the conditions under which Tigrayan residents were being held in detention or forced into displacement. [Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2024 - Ethiopia,” 2024, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/ethiopia]

What the Amnesty September 2023 report and the broader documentation of post-Pretoria conduct establish is that the Pretoria Agreement’s central operational claim — that the cessation of hostilities had taken effect — was true for the bilateral signatories’ formal armies (the ENDF and the TDF) and false for the non-signatory armed actors (the EDF, Amhara regional forces, Fano militias). The war between the federal government’s ENDF and the TDF stopped in November 2022. The war between the Eritrean Defence Force and the Tigrayan civilian population continued. The war between the Amhara regional forces and the Tigrayan civilian population continued. The cessation was, in the operational sense, partial.

The retrospective question is what the partial cessation meant for the Tigrayan civilian population whose suffering Pretoria had been intended to end.

The answer, on the documented evidence, is that the post-Pretoria period delivered substantial improvements in some dimensions of Tigrayan civilian life and continued atrocity-level violations in others. The siege architecture against Tigray was partially lifted: telecommunications, banking, electricity, fuel, and food supplies began returning to parts of Tigray from December 2022 onwards, and humanitarian aid flows expanded substantially through 2023. These improvements were real and meaningful; the famine pressures that had been accumulating through the second half of 2022 began to ease. The improvements did not reach the EDF-occupied zones or the Amhara-administered Western Tigray; in those areas, the patterns of violence and forced displacement continued. The aggregate effect was a fractured peace: the central Tigrayan urban areas — Mekelle, parts of Axum, Adwa, Adigrat — experienced significant improvement; the peripheral zones — the EDF-occupied northern districts, the Amhara-administered Western Tigray — experienced continued atrocity.

This pattern produced, by mid-2023, what some Tigrayan observers characterised as “the geography of forgetting.” The Tigrayan civilians most able to communicate with the outside world — those in the central urban areas with restored telecommunications — were the ones whose conditions had most improved. The Tigrayan civilians whose conditions had not improved — those in the EDF-occupied zones and in Western Tigray displacement — were the ones whose voices reached the international community least. The international press attention to Tigray, which had been intense through the war’s open-conflict phase, began to shift to other regional stories — Sudan after April 2023, the Amhara Fano insurgency from August 2023 — at a moment when the post-Pretoria atrocity pattern was still operative. The September 2023 Amnesty report and the October 2023 ICHREE final report were, in this sense, the last major international documentation of Tigrayan civilian suffering during the post-Pretoria period; subsequent international attention to Tigray would be substantially reduced.

The political effect of the partial cessation was to produce a Tigrayan political environment in which the TPLF leadership in Mekelle — which had signed the agreement and which was producing modest improvements in central-urban conditions — could be characterised by post-war Tigrayan opposition voices as having traded the suffering of the peripheral Tigrayan population for the survival of the political organisation. The internal critique of Getachew Reda’s role at Pretoria, which would intensify through 2023 and 2024 and contribute to the TPLF factional split of early 2025, was rooted partly in this assessment. The Debretsion-aligned faction that would eventually take political control of the TPLF would, by 2025, characterise the Pretoria Agreement as a deal that had bought TPLF survival at the cost of Tigrayan civilian protection in the areas where it was most needed.

The federal government’s accountability gap in the post-Pretoria period was, by the time of the Amnesty September 2023 report, established beyond dispute. The federal government’s failure to act on EDF withdrawal, on Amhara administrative conduct in Western Tigray, on the contested-territories resolution, and on transitional justice cumulated into the structural failure of the agreement’s enforcement architecture. The Joint Monitoring, Verification and Compliance Mechanism established under the Pretoria Agreement, which had been the only operational instrument for addressing violations, operated with limited resources, limited mandate, and limited public reporting. Its findings, where they were communicated, were not consequential for the conduct of the non-signatory armed actors whose conduct was producing the violations.

The ICHREE final report of 14 September 2023 — issued one week after the Amnesty Kokob Tsibah report and providing the broader human-rights documentation of the post-war period — characterised the cumulative pattern of post-Pretoria violations as evidence that “the risk of further atrocity crimes” remained operative in Ethiopia. The Commission’s warning was directed not only at Tigray but at the broader Ethiopian conflict landscape: Amhara (where the Fano insurgency was producing federal atrocities in mid-2023), Oromia (where the OLA insurgency continued), and Afar (where Tigrayan-Afar tensions remained operative). The Commission’s recommendation was that its mandate be renewed for an additional year to continue documentation of post-Pretoria conduct. The recommendation was not adopted; the mandate ended on 13 October 2023; the international community’s structural capacity to document Ethiopian atrocity conduct ended with it.

The retrospective assessment of the post-Pretoria period — written from the vantage point of June 2026 — is the following.

The Pretoria Agreement ended a particular war between particular signatories. It did not end the broader war that the same period of armed conflict had been one element of. The Eritrean military’s conduct in Tigray continued through 2023 and substantially into 2024. The Amhara regional government’s administrative conduct in Western Tigray continued through the same period. The federal government’s failure to compel either to withdraw or to cease atrocity conduct produced — by mid-2024 — the conditions under which the broader regional conflict architecture would re-form along new lines. The Tigrayan political relationship with Eritrea, which would shift from hostility to tsimdo engagement through 2024 and 2025, was a function of the post-Pretoria operational reality: the Eritrean Defence Force had continued to operate in Tigray after the Pretoria Agreement, the federal government had not stopped them, and the TPLF leadership had eventually concluded that the political relationship with Asmara — whether hostile, neutral, or accommodating — was a question the federal government had effectively delegated to Mekelle.

By mid-2026, the question of the Eritrean role in Tigray has come full circle. In November 2020, Eritrean forces entered Tigray as the federal government’s military partner against the TPLF. Through the war’s open-conflict phase, Eritrean forces conducted documented mass atrocities against Tigrayan civilians. After Pretoria, Eritrean forces continued the atrocity pattern in the zones they still occupied. Through 2024 and 2025, the TPLF and the Eritrean government progressively established a working political relationship — tsimdo — that has, by 2026, produced a Tigrayan-Eritrean axis aligned against the federal government in Addis. The same Eritrean army that committed the Axum and Kokob Tsibah atrocities is now, in 2026, the political and military partner of the Tigrayan political leadership whose population it killed.

The transformation is, in the strictest sense, the consequence of the Pretoria Agreement’s failure to address the Eritrean question in November 2022. The federal government’s calculation at Pretoria — that the Eritrean role could be managed bilaterally without inclusion in the agreement — produced a structural condition in which Tigray and Eritrea had to manage their bilateral relationship without federal involvement. The relationship they have constructed, by 2026, is hostile to the federal government that produced the conditions of its emergence.

The Kokob Tsibah survivors interviewed by Amnesty in early 2023 are, in this sense, the silent witnesses to a political transformation whose logic their suffering created. The federal government’s failure to protect them in the post-Pretoria period produced the operational conditions under which the Tigrayan political leadership concluded that the federal government could not be relied on as a security partner. The Eritrean government, having committed atrocities against the same population, became — through the absence of any operational alternative — the negotiating partner of the political leadership of that population. The structural result has been a Horn of Africa security architecture that, by 2026, makes the renewal of armed conflict more probable than less.

The peace that was signed at Pretoria in November 2022 was, in the documented experience of the Tigrayan civilians who lived through the months that followed, a peace that did not apply to them.

The Pretoria Agreement is, in this sense, the central failed instrument of post-war Ethiopian politics. Its formal success — the cessation of bilateral hostilities — was real and worth celebrating in November 2022. Its operational failures — the continued atrocity conduct by non-signatory forces, the unresolved contested territories, the absence of transitional-justice accountability — were also real and worth taking seriously in November 2022. The international community’s choice, in the period from November 2022 through October 2023, was to centre the formal success and discount the operational failures. The choice was understandable in its own terms. The cost of the choice was paid by the Tigrayan civilians of Kokob Tsibah, of Mariam Shewito, of the Erob and Gulomakeda districts, of the Western Tigray displacement camps, and of the broader Tigrayan periphery — the populations whose suffering after Pretoria did not, in the international press of 2023, command the attention their suffering before Pretoria had received.

By mid-2026, the cost has been visible across the broader regional architecture. The cost will, by the time of any future settlement, also be paid by populations not yet identified. The Pretoria Agreement’s structural failures have produced a Horn of Africa in which the next form of conflict is operationally inevitable. The form that conflict takes — whether between the federal government and Eritrea, between the federal government and Tigray, between Tigray and Amhara, or between configurations of these actors not yet visible — will be determined by political calculations made by men in Addis, Mekelle, and Asmara who are operating today in the architecture the post-Pretoria failure of enforcement produced.

The Tigrayan civilians whose suffering the agreement was supposed to end are, in mid-2026, neither protected nor avenged. They are the operative datum on which the next phase of the regional war is being calculated.

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Sources for Article 14

1. Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: Eritrean soldiers committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity after signing of agreement to end hostilities – new report,” 5 September 2023 — https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/09/eritrean-soldiers-committed-war-crimes-and-possible-crimes-against-humanity-in-the-tigray-region-after-signing-of-agreement-to-end-hostilities/
2. OHCHR / Human Rights Council A/HRC/54/55 (ICHREE final report), 14 September 2023 — https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/chreetiopia/A_HRC_54_55_AUV.pdf
3. OHCHR, “International community must ensure accountability and protection for civilians caught in Ethiopia conflict, UN commission says in final report,” 13 October 2023 — https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/international-community-must-ensure-accountability-and-protection-civilians
4. Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2024 - Ethiopia,” 2024 — https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/ethiopia
5. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, “‘We Will Erase You from This Land’: Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing in Ethiopia’s Western Tigray Zone,” 6 April 2022 — https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/04/06/we-will-erase-you-land/crimes-against-humanity-and-ethnic-cleansing-ethiopias
6. International Crisis Group, “Turning the Pretoria Deal into Lasting Peace in Ethiopia,” 23 November 2022 — https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/ethiopia/turning-pretoria-deal-lasting-peace-ethiopia
7. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, “The Pretoria Agreement for Tigray: One Year After,” 1 November 2023 — https://hoa.boell.org/en/2023/11/01/pretoria-agreement-tigray-one-year-after
8. Africa at LSE, “Isaias Afwerki’s gamble in Ethiopia,” 24 March 2022 — https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2022/03/24/isaias-afwerkis-gamble-in-ethiopia-tigray-is-endangering-eritrean-sovereignty/
9. Ethiopia Insight, “Strategic Reversals: Abiy’s Miscalculation and the Tigray–Eritrea Realignment,” 20 August 2025 — https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2025/08/20/strategic-reversals-abiys-miscalculation-and-the-tigray-eritrea-realignment/
10. ISS Africa, “A year after the Pretoria agreement, hard work remains for Ethiopia,” 2 November 2023 — https://issafrica.org/iss-today/a-year-after-the-pretoria-agreement-hard-work-remains-for-ethiopia

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End of expanded article for Dispatch 14. One article, approximately 2,700 words.