Ethiopia peace talks started on Tigray, South Africa says

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Peace talks to end Ethiopia’s devastating Tigray conflict have begun in South Africa, a South African government spokesman said Tuesday. It is the highest-level effort yet to end two years of fighting that has killed perhaps hundreds of thousands of people.

The spokesman for South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Vincent Magwenya, said the African Union-led talks that started Tuesday are expected to continue until Sunday. Delegations from the Ethiopian government and Tigray authorities arrived in South Africa this week. There was no immediate comment from either side.

“Such talks are in line with South Africa’s foreign policy objectives of a secure and conflict-free continent,” Magwenya said.

Former Nigerian president and AU envoy Olesegun Obasanjo, former South African deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta are facilitating the talks with the encouragement of the United States, whose special envoy Mike Hammer picked up the Tigray delegation in a U.S. military aircraft on Sunday.

The peace talks — led by Ethiopia’s national security adviser Redwan Hussein and by Tigray forces spokesman Getachew Reda and Gen. Tsadkan Gebretensae — begin as Ethiopian and allied forces from Eritrea have taken over some urban areas in Tigray in the past few days.

The Tigray region of more than 5 million people is again cut off from the world by renewed fighting that began in late August following months of a lull in the conflict that allowed combatants — including two of the African continent’s largest militaries — to regroup.

All combatants have committed abuses, according to United Nations human rights investigators who recently singled out the Ethiopian government as using “starvation of civilians” as a weapon of war. Babies in Tigray are dying in their first month of life at four times the rate before the war cut off access to most medical care, according to a yet-unpublished study shared by its authors with The Associated Press this month.