The latest developments
The Ethiopian civil war is getting worse. The Tigrin rebels threaten to march on Addis Ababa. In addition, hundreds of thousands in the north of the country are affected by hunger.
Members of the Ethiopian Army gather at a government rally against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in the capital Addis Ababa.
The latest developments
- The USA terminated an important trade agreement with Ethiopia and the West African countries Mali and Guinea from January 1st. The reason for this are concerns about the unconstitutional changes of government in Mali and Guinea and about the violations of human rights in connection with the conflict in northern Ethiopia, said the trade representative Katherine Tai on Saturday (January 2nd). The countries had been clearly communicated what progress would have to be made in order to be included in the trade agreement again, it said. The so-called Agoa program guarantees many African countries duty-free access for thousands of goods in the American market. The preferential treatment for exports to the USA is particularly important for Ethiopia.
- Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) fighters withdraw to Tigray. The TPLF decided to withdraw its fighters from the neighboring regions of the Tigray region. A spokesman for the TPLF communicated this to the Reuters news agency on Monday (December 20th). By withdrawing, they hoped that the international community would do something about the situation in Tigray. “So they can no longer use the excuse that our fighters take Amhara and Afar,” said the spokesman. There is famine in the region.
- In the East African crisis state of Ethiopia, security forces from the Amhara region are said to be responsible for a wave of mass imprisonments, massacres and displacement. The human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report on Thursday, December 16, according to which these attacks took place in western Tigray state. Civilians fleeing the escalating violence would be attacked and killed. Eyewitnesses reported streets littered with corpses. Since the beginning of November, police officers and militias from the Amhara region known as “Fanos” have systematically rounded up civilians in the towns of Adebai, Humera and Rawyan and arrested adult and minor civilians aged 15 and over. Women and younger children as well as the sick and the elderly have been displaced.
- The UN has to stop deliveries of food to at least two villages in Ethiopia. The World Food Program (WFP) has stopped its distribution of essential food due to fighting and looting. As a UN spokesman announced on Wednesday (December 8th), the employees were intimidated, harassed and threatened with firearms. What began with petty theft has turned into the looting of large quantities of food. According to Dujarric, this is largely due to Tigray fighters and local residents. In addition, three delivery vans with food were confiscated by the Ethiopian army and used for their own purposes.
- Former British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has issued harsh words to warn against genocide in the Ethiopian region of Tigray. “A genocide is taking place in Tigray,” said the conservative politician on Tuesday (November 30th) in the British House of Commons with regard to the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Ethiopian part of the country. Hunt demanded that international aid should no longer pass through the hands of the Ethiopian government “until the genocide ends”. He also asked whether Ethiopia’s prime minister should be deprived of the Nobel Peace Prize in view of his role in the conflict. Ahmed received the 2019 award for the historic peace treaty with Eritrea. Eritrean soldiers later helped Ahmed fight the TPLF. However, according to the Nobel Institute, it is not possible to withdraw the award.
Refugees from the Tigray region in Ethiopia wait in front of the UN human rights organization’s center in Hamdayet in Sudan to be registered on November 14th.
After months of tensions between the Ethiopian government and the regional Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the government started a military operation against the rebel group and the ruling party of the Tigray region on November 4, 2020. The Ethiopian Air Force bombed various locations in the northern region. According to its own information, this was a response to an attack by the TPLF on Ethiopian troops. The offensive was declared over, but the fighting has continued since then; several actors are involved, including troops and militias from neighboring Eritrea, with which Ethiopia was long enemies, and militias from the state of Amhara, which borders on Tigray.
Since the beginning of August, the conflict has spread to the Afar and Amhara regions. At the end of October, the TPFL fighters were able to take several strategically important cities and push the national army further and further back. On November 2nd, the government declared a state of emergency across the country and called on the residents of Addis Ababa to defend their quarters against the rebels.
According to Amnesty International, the state of emergency allows the authorities to arrest people without an arrest warrant and detain them for up to six months without judicial review. An investigation by the United Nations also found that serious human rights violations had been committed in the conflict over Tigray. In the conflict there has also been mounting tension between the United Nations and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for months. A few weeks ago, seven UN employees were expelled in an unprecedented campaign. In October, reports of UN agency workers, especially drivers, being arrested increased. Secretary General António Guterres accused Ethiopia of violating international law.
Access to the conflict region is difficult for human rights organizations and journalists, but reports of crimes keep leaking out. Amnesty International and other organizations have documented massacres in which hundreds of civilians were killed. Eritrean forces are blamed for some of the most serious crimes. The UN counted over 500 rape victims, in fact there are likely to be many more.
Tigray faces a humanitarian catastrophe. Five million people (out of 6 million total) in Tigray depend on humanitarian aid, two million people have been displaced. In June 2021, the UN said that 350,000 people in Tigray were at risk of starvation.
An Ethiopian farmer with his 5-year-old son who he said was shot when Ethiopian soldiers and their Amhara allies entered his village in the Tigray region on March 12th.
The roots lie in the loss of power of the political elite in the northern region of Tigray, which had previously determined the fate of the country for almost three decades. In 1991 the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) led the overthrow of the communist military regime as a guerrilla force. After that, the party alliance Revolutionary Democratic Front of the Ethiopian Peoples (EPRDF), to which the regional revolutionary parties had come together, ruled. The TPLF had the leading role in this.
In 1995, the constitution made Ethiopia an “ethnic federal state”, in which the various ethnic groups were granted extensive rights of self-determination. Smaller minorities were not taken into account, however, and their aspirations for autonomy were suppressed. There were also tensions between the individual regions due to territorial claims and ethnic rivalries. To this day, the coexistence of the ethnic groups and the balancing of their interests hold the potential for conflict.
The TPLF’s increasing claim to omnipotence led to major protests from around 2015, in which hundreds were killed and thousands arrested. At the beginning of 2018, the then Prime Minister Hailemariam resigned. He was succeeded by Abiy Ahmed, the first Oromo to head government. The young politician, initially seen by many as a weak and loyal figure, soon turned out to be a reformer. He released tens of thousands of political prisoners, lifted a multi-party ban and initiated a peace agreement with Eritrea, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.
An Orthodox Christian refugee who fled the conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia reads prayers with his son in front of a church in the Hamdeyat Transition Center near the Sudanese-Ethiopian border in eastern Sudan, Tuesday, March 16, 2021.
The head of state Abiy Ahmed put national unity over regional self-determination. He wanted to replace the existing ethnic federalism with a regional federalism. Abiy replaced the previously existing collecting party from former regional rebel groups (EPRDF) with his Prosperity Party. The Tigray then left the party and went into opposition with the TPLF. They are bothered by their loss of power and their reconciliation with the archenemy Eritrea.
The postponement of the elections due to the emergency that Abiy had declared because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the barrel overflowed: The TPLF believes Abiy’s term of office expired last summer and that it is illegitimate to extend it. Despite the state of emergency, she recently held regional elections in Tigray, which representatives of the central government have described as unconstitutional. The parliamentary elections, postponed due to the corona pandemic, were held in June 2021.
In the worst case scenario, the multi-ethnic state with over 100 million people could collapse into war. Because of Ethiopia’s strategic importance, neighboring countries such as Sudan, South Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia are also affected, and they in turn are struggling with crises themselves.
Ethiopia is also of great economic importance for the Horn of Africa. The economy has grown very rapidly since the 1990s. The African Union has its headquarters in Ethiopia – for symbolic reasons, because the country has never been under colonial rule.