Ethiopia and Eritrea cut ties — the Nobel peace was signed by two men, not two states

The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave Abiy Ahmed the 2019 Peace Prize “in particular” for ending the border conflict with Eritrea, and wrote that when he reached out his hand, Isaias Afwerki grasped it — a fair description of a peace that lived in two men's hands. Our Power block shows why that was the weakness rather than the merit: as we noted on 29 September, they are the only two of the 15 sitting leaders we grade who govern under no term limit at all, and our Scorecard puts Isaias's Eritrea, over 1993–2025, at the 4th percentile of African countries on rule of law and control of corruption — level with Burkina Faso's junta at the bottom of our sitting roster — and at P10 on rights. The 2002 boundary ruling whose acceptance the Committee called the premise of the breakthrough was never marked on the ground, so the 2018 declarations had no institution to outlast a quarrel: the two governments fought the Tigray war of 2020–22 on the same side, and drifted apart after the Pretoria Agreement was signed without Asmara. Each now accuses the other of arming its rebels — Addis Ababa says Eritrea backs the alliance fighting in Tigray, Afar and Amhara, Asmara says Ethiopia trains Eritrean armed opposition groups for regime change — and neither charge has been independently verified. We said on 26 September that growth did not buy the Pretoria peace; this week showed that the 2018 peace was never built, only held, and the real test is whether Abiy's first address to the new parliament after 5 October offers Mekelle and Asmara alike a way back to the table before the Nobel's seventh anniversary, on 11 October, falls with both his peace agreements broken.