Ethiopia

The Tigray war began in November 2020, when forces loyal to the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which had dominated Ethiopian politics for nearly three decades before Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's rise in 2018, attacked federal military bases in the country's north, prompting a counteroffensive by Ethiopian forces from the south and, controversially, by allied Eritrean forces from the north. By the time it ended two years later, the war had killed an estimated 600,000 people, among the deadliest conflicts of the twenty-first century, and displaced roughly five million.

Kenya's own engagement with the file began publicly in July 2021, when Kimani, acting as the A3's coordinator for that period, delivered a joint media stakeout on behalf of the A3+1 (Kenya, Niger, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Tunisia) — a relatively rare step for the Council's African members, who more often speak through individual statements than joint press appearances. The stakeout condemned sexual violence and civilian killings in Tigray, welcomed Ethiopia's unilateral ceasefire, and set out a sequence — ceasefire, humanitarian access, dialogue, reconciliation, accountability — that the group's more extensive written statement would elaborate the following month.

The formal A3+1 statement that followed in August 2021 is one of the most extensive and directly argued statements anywhere in this archive. It names Eritrea's forces specifically and calls for their withdrawal, a notably direct position given Eritrea's status as a state rather than merely an armed group, and addresses the Tigrayan armed actors (the TPLF and the Tigray Defense Forces) by name, urging restraint on both sides of the conflict rather than framing it as a purely government-versus-rebel matter.

It closes with an extended argument, addressed directly to Ethiopians, that the country's own history of resisting colonialism holds the lessons of compromise and unity the crisis demanded, rather than a license for war's "seductive" clarity.

The path the statement called for, Ethiopian-owned mediation backed by the African Union's Peace and Security Architecture, with former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo as the AU's High Representative for the region, is largely the path the war eventually took: Obasanjo went on to broker the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement that ended the fighting, fifteen months after Kenya's statement had first welcomed his appointment to that role.