ADDIS ABABA: Official rivals just weeks ago, the leaders of Ethiopia and Eritrea embraced warmly to the roar of a crowd of thousands Sunday at a concert celebrating the end of a long state of war.
A visibly moved Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, clasping his hands over his heart, addressed the crowd in Ethiopia’s official language, Amharic, on his first visit to the country in 22 years.
“Hate, discrimination and conspiracy is now over,” the 72-year-old Isaias said to cheers and people chanting his name. “Our focus from now on should be on developing and growing together. We are ready to move forward with you as one. No one can steal the love we have regained now. Now is the time to make up for the lost times.”
The Eritrean leader repeatedly praised the “able leadership” of Ethiopia’s reformist new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who in his own speech thanked Isaias for his “courageous gesture” in accepting the offer of peace.
The concert highlighted the end of hostilities between the arch-foes in East Africa, who fought a bloody border war from 1998 to 2000 that killed tens of thousands and left families separated. The antagonism ended last month when Abiy announced that Ethiopia was fully accepting a peace deal originally signed in 2000 and Eritrea swiftly responded.
“The reconciliation we are forging now is an example to people across Africa and beyond,” the 42-year-old Abiy said.
Jubilant Ethiopians, some of whom have compared the dramatic developments to the fall of the Berlin Wall, found themselves putting aside the World Cup final to watch live coverage of the concert.
Isaias arrived in Ethiopia on Saturday, reciprocating the Ethiopian leader’s trip to Eritrea last weekend that led to the restoration of diplomatic, telephone and transport ties. He was greeted by Abiy in a red-carpet welcome, with people dancing at the airport and thousands of residents of the capital, Addis Ababa, lining the streets to see Isaias’ motorcade.
Some chanted songs criticizing the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front, which used to be Ethiopian ruling coalition’s strongest political party and was hostile to Eritrea until Abiy came to power at the beginning of April and introduced a breathtaking series of political and economic reforms.
“Nothing can stop the ongoing reforms in Ethiopia,” Abiy told the crowd Sunday. “But we need to protect the democratic rights we are regaining now.”
The embrace of the peace deal, which hands key disputed border areas to Eritrea, was the boldest of the changes as Ethiopia moves away from years of anti-government protests that demanded wider freedoms in Africa’s second most populous country with more than 100 million people.
Now attention shifts to Eritrea, one of the world’s most reclusive nations, which has been ruled by Isaias since it gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993. The state of war with Ethiopia kept the country of 5 million in a constant state of military readiness with a system of compulsory conscription that sent thousands of people fleeing the country toward Europe and elsewhere.
Eritrea also has faced years of UN sanctions over alleged support to extremists, which the government has denied, and Abiy already has called for them to be lifted.
The sight of the Eritrean leader speaking Amharic to reach out to Ethiopians surprised even his longtime acquaintances. “I have known him for more than 40 yrs. Never heard him speak Amharic,” the Eritrean ambassador to Kenya and Tanzania, Beyene Russom, said on Twitter, describing the crowd’s shouts of joy.
The United States and others have praised the end of the state of war between the two countries as a welcome development for the strategic Horn of Africa region and beyond.
Ethiopia’s leader has been quick to promote economic development as a shared goal of the new friendship, giving Isaias a tour of an industrial park and pursuing deals for his landlocked nation to use Eritrea’s ports on the Red Sea along one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
The Eritrean leader’s visit to Ethiopia continues Monday as Isaias is expected to re-open his country’s embassy.
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Eritrean, Ethiopian leaders call new peace example to Africa
Eritrean, Ethiopian leaders call new peace example to Africa
- The concert highlighted the end of hostilities between the arch-foes in East Africa
- The antagonism ended last month when Ethiopia accepted a peace deal and Eritrea swiftly responded
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
