The sesame-growing region of Western Tigray/Welkait was the focus of a fierce struggle between Amhara and Tigrayan forces during the 2020–22 civil war. Amhara currently controls the contested territories, but the sesame sector has been left decentralized and fragmented.
Violent conflict on the Ethiopia–Sudan border, and internally in both countries, is having ‘redistributive’ and transformative effects. It is creating new power-holders, and new political and economic winners and losers. The examples presented so far in this research paper illustrate how important economic resources, or conflict goods, such as sesame can be used to fuel conflict when captured by certain groups – including national armed forces, but also rebel groups and economic elites linked to such groups. Ethiopian dynamics have been predominantly driven by internal contestations. However, the latter has still been consequential for Ethiopia’s cross-border relations with Sudan.
The boundaries between most of Ethiopia’s 12 national regional states are the subject of disputes. These disputes often degenerate into violent conflict. The most contentious dispute today is over territory spanning the Amhara and Tigray regional states. Since the civil war began in 2020, forces from Amhara have captured vast expanses of land in western and southern Tigray. Amhara claims that these territories – which include key sesame-producing areas – were seized from it by Tigray 30 years ago, after the ethnic coalition dominated by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) came to power. This earlier assimilation of territories into Tigray, which Amhara has sought to reverse, allegedly occurred without the consent of local people and has been a source of hostility between Amhara and Tigrayan nationalists since the early 1990s. However, since late 2020 the contested territories have been under Amhara control, although both sides continue to claim them.
Competition over the sesame sector and for control of land has reinforced ethnic and political fragmentation. Before the war, the sesame and wider agricultural sector in Western Tigray/Welkait had been dominated by Tigrayan business interests, through the TPLF’s business conglomerate, the Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigray (EFFORT), and its subsidiary, Hiwot Agricultural Mechanization PLC. The transportation and export of sesame were facilitated by Guna Trading and Trans Ethiopia, both also belonging to EFFORT.
Amhara forces’ annexation of the area in late 2020 resulted in contestation for the control of sesame production and export. As a result, the previously integrated sesame sector has become decentralized and fragmented, and the role of the formal Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX) mechanism has been severely diminished. The precise role of the Amhara state government in the sesame sector is unclear. There are suggestions that Nigat (a parastatal business previously called Tiret Corporation) has taken over the role previously played by Hiwot. Nigat owns 19 companies and controls much of the Amhara regional state’s economy, including agricultural assets. Following the change of government in 2018, Nigat was made the public property of the Amhara people, and legally accountable to the Amhara Regional Council.
The emerging intersection of Amhara nationalism with business and security interests has meant that profits from the sector have served to reinforce de facto Amhara control over the disputed Western Tigray/Welkait region. Thousands of displaced Tigrayan inhabitants have been replaced by ethnic Amharas (many of them from Gonder), who have been enticed to settle there by the Amhara state government’s offer of grants and land. The interim zonal administration and joint Amhara security forces have facilitated this process. This shift has further driven competition for control of the sesame sector – with such competition now involving local authorities, businesspeople, security officers, individual farmers, investors and smugglers, as well as non-state armed groups such as the Amhara nationalist Fano militia forces, Qemant insurgents, armed bandits and Eritrean forces. Private businesspeople with strong state connections and links to the Amhara military are also an important part of the sesame production and export chain.
Much of the sesame farmed in Welkait and Humera is now exported through channels outside of the formal Ethiopia Commodity Exchange mechanism, which has led to the sector becoming increasingly securitized and unregulated.
In 2021, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed inaugurated two major edible-oil refineries in Amhara regional state, including the Fibela Industrial Complex – Ethiopia’s largest edible-oil refinery. When fully operational, the refinery is projected to supply more than 60 per cent of the country’s edible-oil demand. The facility is owned by one of the wealthiest businesspeople in Ethiopia, Belayneh Kindie, whose Belayneh Kindie Group (BKG) is the country’s largest exporter of sesame seeds. In May, another oil refinery was established worth 5 billion birr (equivalent to c. $88 million at the current exchange rate). Having the capacity to process 1.3 million litres of edible oil daily, the plant is located in East Gojjam Zone and is owned by another prominent Amhara businessman. The factory, which has since stopped production, has also been implicated in providing support for the Amhara nationalist Fano militias which have been leading regional protests during the last three years.
Much of the sesame farmed in Welkait and Humera is now exported through channels outside of the formal ECX mechanism, which has led to the sector becoming increasingly securitized and unregulated. Political instability in Amhara state has further exacerbated this trend towards informal and/or contraband trade. The formal sector (including producers, buyers and exporters) is heavily controlled by delala (‘brokers’), who also regulate the sale of sesame outside formal channels via a complex transnational supply chain. The delala often lend money to local farmers if the farmers cannot afford to pay daily labourers or buy agricultural inputs. In this way, the brokers maintain an advantage in the market, as farmers caught up in such arrangements are then obliged to sell their crops to the brokers that have provided loans.
Informal trade takes place across multiple borders – administrative, legal, social, community – and occurs despite ad hoc infrastructure and inconvenient border impediments (securitization, taxation, corruption, etc.). Smuggling is driven in part by the fact that official state policies on trade are often impractical and restrictive. It is also often a necessity due to the lack of alternative livelihood options, and this way of life has emerged as part of the accepted cultural fabric of borderland communities.
Subregional contestation
As well as stoking regional rivalry between Amhara and Tigray, attempts to control the sesame sector have generated tensions between subregional Amhara elites (from Gojjam and Gonder) and indigenous Welkaites. The latter have a mixed cultural background, reflecting their links to both Amhara and Tigray. Previously marginalized under TPLF rule, the Welkaites have since sought to reclaim land and influence by aligning themselves with powerful Amhara elites. But this hope has not been fully realized. From 2021 until early 2024, the local Welkait administration was reliant on financial assistance and in-kind support from the Amhara state authorities, rather than receiving regular funding from the federal budget, while Welkait officials have been strengthening their ties with members of the Amhara security and business elites, as well as with the Eritrean regime.
The area encompassing the annexed Western Tigray/Welkait region is currently administered as the ‘interim Welkait-T(s)egede-Setit-Humera zone’, led by a mix of the Amhara Prosperity Party (PP) and representatives of the Welkait Tegede Amhara Identity Restoration Committee. This local administration has sought to push the Welkait issue to centre stage in Amhara nationalism and national politics, and to promote Welkait leaders as protectors of Amhara identity. Some members of the administration have been implicated in ethnic cleansing and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans from the area during the civil war.
With little federal-level financial support, the interim Welkait administration views the sesame sector and agricultural land as crucial for revenue generation. In April 2021, the Amhara regional government issued a directive encouraging investment in the area to cultivate the ‘liberated’ land, and provided one-year leases to capable investors. The initiative was subsequently extended until the end of the 2022 harvest season. The idea was that successful investors would continue farming sesame and other crops in the coming years, and that mutually beneficial working relationships would thereby develop between investors, the local administration and the security apparatus.
The Amhara Bureau of Rural Land Administration and Use is nominally in charge of overseeing land lease agreements covering areas larger than 10 ha. But field research conducted for this paper suggests instead that the regional state government in Bahir Dar has allowed the interim Welkait administration to apportion land in the zone without interference. As a result, Welkait has effectively had carte blanche to lease land for agricultural investment, likely to the benefit of those with close personal and business ties to the administration’s leadership. Supporters and enablers of the local administration have been granted farmland, including land likely to have been seized from Tigrayans. The Welkait authorities have discretion to exclude smaller farmers or investors from these land lease transactions. Those affected are likely to include locals or farmers displaced from Al Fashaga due to Sudan’s annexation of the territory. This situation has the potential to cause further unrest and conflict in the interim Welkait-T(s)egede-Setit-Humera zone.
Land grabs in Western Tigray/Welkait
Given the shifts in control of the sesame sector, the expansion and control of fertile agricultural lands used for sesame production has become an issue of contention among local farmers in Western Tigray/Welkait. Field research for this paper indicates that parts of the lowland agricultural farms around Humera have been occupied (sometimes forcibly) by members of emerging Amhara economic elites. These actors often maintain connections with government officials at either the local, regional or federal level, as well as with members of the diaspora community, and are sometimes implicitly backed by Amhara militias. These new economic elites have taken over lands that used to be controlled by TPLF-affiliated companies, investors and politicians. The legality of such appropriations, especially since they have been driven by wartime displacement, is highly contested.
There are also cases of local Amhara farmers who possess legal documents confirming their land rights but who have nonetheless been forcibly evicted by powerful individuals. Since the existing interim Welkait administration lacks formally recognized government structures, these disenfranchised members of the local community are unable to seek justice through the courts, or appeal through any other government body. Since ‘liberation’ from TPLF rule, some local Amharas see themselves as victims of the current interim administration. Emerging patterns of land control and access to agricultural assets (including, but not only, in the sesame sector) often fail to take community interests into consideration. Some farmers are still being denied what they claim are their political and economic rights, despite the removal of the TPLF administration from the zone.
The influence of national politics
Amhara’s ability to retain control over Western Tigray/Welkait in the long term remains uncertain, due to shifting political alliances at the national level between Amhara, Tigrayan and Oromo elite groups. The Amhara regional leadership – its middle and low-level officials in particular – is increasingly suspicious of the federal government, with concerns driven by the sense that the implementation of a peace deal with Tigray – following the Pretoria Agreement – has been achieved at the expense of the Amhara region. The Amhara regional leadership has found itself in a difficult position in terms of ‘selling’ the idea of a peaceful resolution of the conflict to its constituents, given that the Pretoria Agreement calls for disputes over ‘contested areas’ to be resolved constitutionally. This has stoked Amhara fears that proposals for the establishment of a new interim administration will lead to the area’s return to Tigrayan control, raising the prospect of an influx of thousands of largely ethnic Tigrayan IDPs. Their arrival, in the eyes of Amhara’s leadership, would jeopardize Amhara’s consolidation of power in Western Tigray/Welkait, while depriving Amhara elites of access to critical economic resources such as sesame – the profits from which have partly been used to reinforce territorial claims and create new facts on the ground in Amhara’s favour.
This dynamic has contributed to mounting tensions and conflict between, on one side, the allied federal government and Amhara regional state government and, on the other, non-state Amhara Fano militia forces and Amhara nationalists. The Fano forces lack consolidated leadership and operate in a fragmented manner, but they were still able to take control of some zones and administrations in the region, leading to the imposition of a state of emergency on 4 August 2023 and the administration of the region via ‘command post’. Insecurity in cities such as Gonder has continued into 2024. However, Colonel Demeke Zewdu, the most prominent official in Welkait, has recently sought to distance his interim administration from the ongoing Fano insurgency elsewhere in the Amhara regional state, in part due to their reliance on federal forces and government support to continue controlling the zone. Moreover, some members of the Amhara elite believe that the issue of Western Tigray/Welkait has been holding the Amhara nationalist cause hostage, despite it being a rallying point for their cause since 2016. These developments threaten the sustainability of peace in northern Ethiopia, particularly if there were to be renewed hostilities between Amhara and Tigrayan forces over control of Western Tigray/Welkait.
Impacts on transnational relations with Sudan and Eritrea
The consolidation of control over Western Tigray/Welkait by nationalist Amhara elites has implications for Ethiopia’s cross-border relationships with Sudan and Eritrea. Some Amharas see the control of this land as partial consolation for having lost the fertile farmlands of Al Fashaga. As the war in Sudan deepens, so does the possible threat to the SAF’s authority in eastern Sudan. Such a scenario might elevate nationalist Amhara voices, who advocate that Ethiopia should retake Al Fashaga by force.
Despite Ethiopia’s stated neutral position in respect of the war in Sudan, escalation would be difficult for the Ethiopian federal government to control.
Depending on how the current instability in the Amhara region evolves, and how the unresolved future of Amhara-controlled Western Tigray/Welkait is addressed, this could lead to renewed cross-border tensions between actors in Ethiopia and Sudan. Certainly, such tensions would become more likely if the Ethiopian federal government moves forward with plans for a referendum on the status of contested areas, or with a plan to reshape the interim regional administration to make it more neutral ahead of a referendum.
Any renewal of raids by Amhara forces into Al Fashaga would inflame tensions between Ethiopia and Sudan. Despite Ethiopia’s stated neutral position in respect of the war in Sudan, escalation would be difficult for the Ethiopian federal government to control. And – although a distracted and stretched SAF would be unlikely to have the resources to retaliate – the SAF could seize on such incidents to further the arming and mobilization of civilians in eastern Sudan in an attempt to increase popular resistance on its behalf, including by Islamist brigades such as the Popular Defence Forces and Popular Security, as well as other armed movements.
Eritrea also remains an active and interested party in this tri-border region. Its strengthening of ties with local Amhara elites – the field research for this paper suggests that a trading route between Ethiopia and Eritrea now exists for the first time in over 25 years via Western Tigray/Welkait – has contributed to growing tensions between Eritrea and Ethiopia’s federal government. There are indications that shipments of sesame and other goods from Amhara-controlled Western Tigray/Welkait to Eritrea have been used as payment in kind for Eritrean forces’ protection, training and support of Amhara Fano militias. Dependence on Eritrean military support has enabled Eritrean traders to impose financial terms vastly in their favour. This mostly one-way cross-border smuggling remains outside the control of the Ethiopian federal government, and provides little benefit for local people in Western Tigray/Welkait – except for those engaged in smuggling.
Sudan, too, has been anxious about Ethiopia’s closeness with Eritrea, particularly given Eritrean involvement in eastern Sudan (including through local tribes spanning the borders, such as the Beni Amer, Beja and Rashaida groups) and the alliance between Eritrea and elements in Amhara. However, since the establishment by Sudan’s military regime of a de facto administrative capital in Port Sudan in the east of the country in August 2023, the SAF has sought to strengthen its alliances with Eritrea to counter such issues. These developments suggest that the future of Al Fashaga and the contested tri-border region between Ethiopia, Sudan and Eritrea remains uncertain. Equally uncertain is what these interlinked dynamics might mean for prospects for regional peace.
