Tigray: four years after Pretoria, 750,000 displaced people still wait for their land

According to RFI, the Pretoria Peace Agreement, which ended the war in Tigray, was signed just four years ago. More than 750,000 people displaced by the conflict are still waiting to return home. Most were driven out of western Tigray, an area now administered by the neighbouring region of Amhara. Nearly 50,000 of them live in the Seba Kare camp, outside Mekelle, the regional capital. RFI has collected their testimonies, as the federal government has regained control of the region.

Useful note: today's editorial brief referred to drought in Saint-Malo. The dispatch, however, is about Tigray. We will not make one say what the other does not: nothing in this text concerns water or Brittany. What follows is therefore our reading, and it starts from the facts available.

What the dispatch does not say is under what material conditions these people live, or what exactly they are waiting for. We do not have the details of the testimonies. We know only the essentials: four years of official peace, and hundreds of thousands of people in limbo.

This raises a structural question, which we pose without pretending to answer it. Western Tigray is farmland, so the issue is land: who farms it, who administers it, and who is driven off it. A peace agreement signed between state apparatuses settles ceasefires. It does not, by magic, settle who lives on and who works which field. A change of administrator on paper is enough to turn farmers into camp residents.

Ecological Marxist thought speaks of a rupture in the bond between societies and the land they live from. Here the rupture is brutal, and it does not stem from some abstract mode of production: people are cut off from their soil by force, and then by inertia. Our hypothesis, to be tested: the longer peace takes to translate into a return, the more displacement becomes a fait accompli that no one has had to decide.

We should also be wary of narratives that pit peoples against one another. Logics of division, when they serve those in power, rarely benefit the farmers on either side of an administrative border. Who gains when Tigrayans and Amharas fight over the same land? The dispatch does not answer. The question deserves asking nonetheless, and by others than us.

In the meantime, 50,000 people at Seba Kare and more than 750,000 in total are counting the days. The Pretoria peace is four years old. For them, the return still has no date.