Ethiopia s decision this month to implement an earlier peace agreement with neighbouring Eritrea brokered by the African Union brings hope, despite the problems that loom ahead. The agreement signed by the two countries in Algiers in December 2000 was intended to bring an end to a conflict triggered by Eritrea, but the pact was never fully implemented. The two neighbours remained deadlocked in a conflict that has over time claimed more than 50,000 lives over a dispute concerning the border town of Badme. A boundaries delimitation commission had awarded the area to Eritrea in 2002, but Ethiopia refused to cede control. The presence of Ethiopian troops served to prolong the confrontation, as Eritrea mobilised its own forces under its autocratic leader, President Isaias Afwerki. The conflict gave the dictator a pretext to expand a large conscription programme, in the process enslaving thousands of young men and women and triggering a mass exodus to European countries. Desperate Eritrean migrants were among the hundreds who drowned off Italy s Lampedusa island in 2013. Ethiopia s decision to honour the terms of the peace accord is credited to its popular and young Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, who assumed office this April. The rapprochement is part of a string of democratic reforms he has unveiled including lifting the state of emergency, releasing thousands of political prisoners, and removing some Opposition parties from the list of terrorist groups. But there are already rumblings in the ruling Ethiopian People s Revolutionary Democratic Front, between the country s ethnic Oromo majority and the politically dominant Tigrayan minority. The choice of Mr. Ahmed, an Oromo, as Prime Minister was aimed at restoring stability in the light of growing unrest in the community for greater political representation. Unless managed tactfully, these internal tensions within the governing coalition could