Eritrea Calls Getachew Reda a Liar “Busy Agitating for War” After His Bahir Dar Forum Remarks

Eritrea Calls Getachew Reda a Liar “Busy Agitating for War” After His Bahir Dar Forum Remarks

October 24, 2026

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Getachew Reda at a press conference in September 2023, when he was president of the Tigray Interim Administration. [file photo] [Voice of America Tigrigna, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

Eritrea’s Ministry of Information on Saturday accused Getachew Reda, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s adviser on East African affairs, of “putting forward false narratives and accusations” and being “busy agitating for war,” a day after he told a security forum in Bahir Dar that Eritrea keeps fomenting crisis in the region and, according to one account of the panel, set out what Asmara would have to do before any talks.

The attack came in a long Tigrigna article posted early on Saturday on the ministry’s website, Shabait, and on its X account under the title “ሓሳውን ቈርበትን እናሓደረ ይፈኵስ!” an Eritrean saying that means a liar, like a drying hide, gets lighter with every night that passes. Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel shared it about an hour later, writing that Getachew “ወግሐ-ጸብሐ ናይ ሓሶት ትረኻታትን ክስታትን እናፈብረኸ፡ ኣንጻር ኤርትራ ናይ ሓሶት ዘመተ ብምክያድ ንኲናት ኣብ ምጉስጓስ ተጸሚዱ ዘሎ” (“morning and evening fabricates false narratives and accusations, wages a campaign of lies against Eritrea and is busy agitating for war”) and calling him “a cheap man” who “changes like the seasons and the months.” The ministry said Getachew had swung “from one extreme to the opposite extreme” over the past three years, and to make its point it printed a list of insults it said he had once aimed at Abiy, without saying when or where he made them. In one, the prime minister is “a political dwarf, a dwarf in everything”; in another, Getachew says that sitting down to talk with a government led by Abiy, for any reason, would be “the shame of shames.” The article ended by saying that his “present masters” would use him for a while and then throw him away.

Getachew spoke on Friday at the Special Envoys’ Dialogue of the Tana High-Level Forum on Security in Africa, which Ethiopia is hosting in Bahir Dar, the capital of the Amhara region, from Oct. 23 to 25, on a panel with the UN Secretary-General’s envoys for the Horn of Africa and for Sudan and with the French and German envoys to the region. The Ethiopian News Agency reported that he singled out Eritrea for “recalcitrant behavior” and for continuing to “foment crisis,” said the government wants to settle conflicts through dialogue, pointing to the Pretoria agreement, and urged the international community to separate Ethiopia’s internal peace efforts from the need to confront outside forces fueling instability, including in Sudan and Somalia. Al Jazeera, in a video posted on Saturday, said he told reporters at the forum that Tigrayan forces and regional actors were blocking the Pretoria Agreement.

Kulu Media reported that Getachew laid out three conditions for talks with Asmara. Eritrea would have to publicly renounce support for armed groups fighting the Ethiopian Government, pull its troops out of what he called sovereign Ethiopian territory, and say it was willing to settle disputes by peaceful means. According to Kulu Media, he said Eritrean forces still hold places he named as Aiga and Dalera, said he doubted Isaias Afwerki’s government would accept the conditions, and questioned whether the TPLF was still organized enough to negotiate at all, saying many of its senior leaders were in Eritrea or hiding near the border. Zegabi has not seen the full video of the panel, and none of these claims could be checked independently.

A day earlier, at a defense college forum in Addis Ababa, Getachew said the Ethiopian army was five kilometers from the Eritrean border and that, if fighting broke out, “it takes a very short time to enter Asmara,” Ethiopia Insider reported.

Asmara has also answered the substance. In a separate statement posted by the Information Ministry on Saturday and signed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the date Oct. 21, Eritrea said its sovereignty is “absolute and inviolable” and that it “will not make concessions or hold talks over its sovereignty under any circumstances, through preconditions or violent intimidation.” It said the Eritrean Defence Forces “are within the internationally recognized borders of the State of Eritrea,” called the charge that Eritrea had invaded Ethiopia “fabricated,” and said Ethiopian claims of Eritrean troops on Ethiopian soil in fact point to land that the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission awarded to Eritrea on April 13, 2002. The statement blamed the crisis in the Horn of Africa on what it called the Prosperity regime and Ethiopia’s ruling Prosperity Party, and said international calls for “all parties” or “both countries” to calm things down wrongly put the two governments on the same level.

Getachew, a former president of the Tigray Interim Administration, posted on X early on Saturday that he was in Bahir Dar taking part in the forum. By 9:45 a.m. ET he had not replied to the Eritrean article, and Zegabi had not found a response from the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

On X, reaction split along familiar lines, and none of the claims could be checked. Getachew had said the TPLF received half a million dollars from Egypt, Afro Insight News reported, and Ambassador Estifanos (@AmbassadorEstif), Eritrea’s ambassador to Japan, wrote that Getachew had “claimed, before few days publicly, to have received USD 500,000 from sources in Egypt” and called it “an amazing confession indeed.” Okubay Berhe (@OkubayBerhe) wrote in English that Getachew “claims that the relationship between Tigray and Eritrea has collapsed. On the other hand, he accuses Eritrea of supporting the TPLF. These statements contradict each other.” Translations from Tigrigna are Zegabi’s. Zegabi has not verified the claims made in these posts.

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