Why Ethiopian leader won Nobel Peace Prize but Eritrean counterpart ignored
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali was announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, with the committee that decides the awards singling out his efforts to achieve peace with neighbouring country Eritrea.
But notably, the prize was not awarded to Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, Abiy’s partner in the talks.
Instead, Nobel Committee chairman Berit Reiss-Andersen simply acknowledged that “peace does not arise from the actions of one party alone” and said that they hope the “peace agreement will help to bring about positive change for the entire populations of Ethiopia and Eritrea”.
In some years, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to multiple parties for their work trying to end a conflict. In 1994, for example, the prize was awarded to Israel’s Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, as well as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
But the decision to only award the 2019 prize to Ethiopia’s Abiy was hardly surprising. Eritrea’s Isaias leads one of the most repressive military dictatorships in the world; his government has been compared to North Korea and accused of possible crimes against humanity.
And though he has reached an agreement with Abiy to end the conflict between the two nations, in practice the agreement remains largely unimplemented, and there have been little visible benefits for Eritreans.
“I think there was a lot of hope in Eritrea,” said Laetitia Bader, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “But very quickly, Eritreans saw that things were not changing on the ground.”
“I’d say it has brought no positive developments for the Eritrean people, because the lived reality is the same more than a year after the peace deal,” said Vanessa Tsehaye, an Eritrean activist based in London.
The conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia stretches back decades. After European powers left occupied Eritrea in 1951, landlocked Ethiopia claimed the land of its coastal neighbour eventually resulting in a civil war that lasted three decades.