Ethiopia: on the brink of a hellish civil war
Ethiopia’s fledgling civil war is only a few weeks old, said Giulia Paravicini on Reuters – but it is already exacting a heavy toll. Since government forces launched a fierce military offensive against the rulers of the rebellious northern region of Tigray in early November, hundreds of people have died and some 33,000 refugees have fled to neighbouring Sudan. The offensive followed months of escalating political tension between the federal government – led by Nobel Peace Prize-winner Abiy Ahmed – and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which had effectively ruled Ethiopia for 27 years before Abiy became prime minister in 2018. The UN has now warned of a “full-blown humanitarian crisis”; many question whether Abiy can hold his ethnically divided country together.
Tensions between the TPLF and the federal government are partly the result of the party’s failure to take up an invitation to join Abiy’s ruling coalition, said Brook Abdu in The Ethiopian Reporter (Addis Ababa). But in September, things came to a head when TPLF leaders defied Abiy’s ban on holding regional elections during the pandemic: the war of words erupted into full-blown conflict on 3 November. Civilians fleeing the fighting report air strikes; army tanks gathered around the regional capital Mekelle this week. Amnesty International says hundreds of non-Tigrayan civilians were stabbed or hacked to death with machetes in one recent incident in Tigray; witnesses blamed TPLF-aligned forces. The TPLF is a force to be reckoned with, said Al Jazeera (Doha). It led the successful effort to topple Ethiopia’s Marxist Derg regime in 1991, then dominated the nation’s military, bearing the brunt of the war with neighbouring Eritrea between 1998 and 2000. Now it risks reigniting that conflict, said the Addis Standard. TPLF rockets hit Eritrea’s capital two weeks ago – apparently in retaliation for siding with Abiy. The fear is that other nations in the fragile Horn of Africa may be dragged into the conflict.
There are also “ominous signs” that civil war could trigger a Yugoslavia-style break-up of Ethiopia along ethnic lines, said Florian Bieber in Foreign Policy (Washington). The country – which has a population of 110 million and has enjoyed stellar economic growth in recent years – is split into ten ethnically defined regions. But many long-held ethnic grievances remain dangerously unresolved, leading to fears that the violence in Tigray could provoke tit-for-tat killings elsewhere. Abiy’s critics blame the conflict on the PM’s penchant for centralising power in defiance of Ethiopia’s federalist constitution. But he could yet salvage his reputation as a peacemaker by bringing both sides to the negotiating table, said Farid Abdulhamid in the Daily Maverick (Johannesburg). Nothing at all will be solved by war.