Tribalism in Tigray
Yesterday representatives from the African Union held desperate eleventh-hour talks with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to dissuade him from the ‘final phase’ of his military campaign to crush the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The UN estimates the three-week old conflict, has driven at least 27,000 people across the border with Sudan and is displacing 4,000 more each day, mostly children. Ahmed says his army can attack the provincial capital, Mekele (population 500,000) and round up TPLF leaders “without harming innocent civilians, heritage sites, places of worship, development institutions and property.” But after several reported atrocities, which have claimed hundreds of lives, further bloodshed seems inevitable.
Ahmed, the winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize has resisted diplomacy and described it as ‘unwelcome and unlawful acts of interference.” On Thursday he warned that: “The last peaceful gate which had remained open for the TPLF clique to walk through has now been firmly closed as a result of TPLF’s contempt for the people of Ethiopia.” He says that only when the Ethiopian forces can reestablish the rule of law in the province will his government entertain the prospect of negotiations. Few analysts believe such control is possible. The TPLF’s estimated 250,000 fighters are heavily armed and battlehardened warriors. They played a leading role in the ouster of Ethiopia’s military dictatorship in 1991 and in the Ethiopian-Eritrean War which followed seven years later.
Ethiopia recently expelled an International Crisis Group (ICG) analyst and has cut Internet service and press access to Tigray. An ICG statement notes that Ethiopia “has also issued warning letters to the news agency Reuters’ Ethiopia correspondent and to the BBC and Deutsche Welle stations.” The absence of international observers is particularly worrying since the UN estimates that within Tigray up to 2 million people face food insecurity and are short of medical supplies and other basic necessities. Simultaneous refugee crises within the province and across the border with Sudan are deteriorating rapidly as the military conflict deepens. A UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesman has warned that refugees will begin to run out of food as early as next week.
Recent violence between Azerbaijan and Armenia has shown that tribal conflicts only need a few weeks to fully reignite. The speed at which they escalate and the ethnic passions reactivated by the resurgence of fighting can quickly destabilize entire regions. With al Shabaab in Somalia newly emboldened by America’s apparent withdrawal from the region, a fledgling democracy in Sudan, and South Sudan’s ramshackle peace deal visibly frail, a protracted conflict in Tigray could easily derail East Africa’s recent progress towards democracy.
Like every other tribal power struggle there are both short- and long-term reasons for the conflict. Ahmed’s government was widely perceived as undermining the TPLF’s political hold over Ethiopia since he took office in 2018. Nevertheless it is notable, and worrying, that it has only taken a month for a leader who has won international praise for establishing peace with a foreign rival to find himself embroiled in what seems to be an intractable and rapidly escalating showdown with his own citizens.