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President Cyril Ramaphosa and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. (Meeting with Tlape GCIS)
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is expected to meet with the envoys, but may not allow them to meet his opponents.
Three special peace envoys appointed by the president of the African Union, Cyril Ramaphosa, are expected to meet with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in Addis Ababa this week to discuss how to end the country’s three-week civil war. But there are fears that Abiy, who has insisted that foreigners should not meddle in Ethiopia’s internal affairs, will not allow them to meet their Tigray enemies in the conflict.
South Africa has helped suspend UN Security Council action on the conflict, to give the emissaries of Ramaphosa the opportunity to find “an African solution to an African problem,” as one South African diplomat put it.
But Pretoria is concerned that the three former African presidents – South Africa’s Kgalema Motlanthe, Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Mozambique’s Joaquim Chissano – may receive “the Mnangagwa treatment” from Abiy.
This refers to the fact that Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa met with three other envoys sent by Ramaphosa to Harare in August and refused to allow them to meet with the Zimbabwean opposition to address the growing crisis in that country.
That refusal appears to have effectively ended South Africa’s efforts to halt Zimbabwe’s downward spiral.
Will the same happen in Addis Ababa? Official sources said Ramaphosa’s special envoys would travel to Ethiopia on Thursday or Friday this week, where they would meet Abiy, and then meet with the leaders of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) whose forces have been fighting against. the Ethiopian army ever since. November 4th.
Senior South African officials insist that even if Abiy tries to prevent the envoys from meeting their Tigrayan enemies, Motlanthe, Johnson Sirleaf and Chissano they would insist.
“They are, after all, former heads of state. They are not easy prey, ”said an official.
But it will take considerable effort to persuade Abiy to allow them to meet with the TPLF. When Ramaphosa announced the appointment of the special envoys, he said their mission was to help “mediate between the parties to [the] conflict … involve all parties to the conflict with a view to ending hostilities ”.
The Ethiopian government responded by agreeing to meet with the envoys, but dismissed any suggestion that they were mediating between the Ethiopian fighters as “fake news.”
It is clear that Abiy sees the meeting with the envoys simply as an opportunity to explain to them why it is necessary to defeat his TPLF enemies in battle.
A Pretoria official said that if the peacekeeping mission of the three envoys failed, South Africa would ask the UN Security Council to address the issue. South Africa, which is serving its final weeks as a member of the UN Security Council, had originally proposed that the council address the war.
“But then President Ramaphosa appointed the three special envoys and it was felt that it would be more appropriate to find an African solution to an African problem,” the official said.
As a result, a special meeting of the Security Council that had been scheduled for Tuesday this week was canceled at the last minute. The AFP news agency reported from New York that South Africa, Niger, Tunisia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines had withdrawn their request for the closed-door discussion because Ramaphosa’s special envoys had not yet traveled to Ethiopia.
“It is necessary to give more time to the regional efforts being made in this regard,” an African diplomat told AFP.
Meanwhile, a group of Tigrayan expatriates in South Africa marched on Wednesday to the headquarters of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco) in Pretoria to petition the South African government.
A Dirco official said the Tigrayans had welcomed the appointment of special envoys by Ramaphosa, had asked the UN Security Council to get involved and had demanded that Abiy be indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide.
Abiy launched the military campaign against the TPLF on November 4, accusing it of attacking federal military forces stationed in Tigray, Ethiopia’s northernmost federal state.
Hundreds of people are reported to have died, many of them civilians, and thousands have fled Tigray to neighboring Sudan. But a communications blackout has made it difficult to establish exactly what is happening on the ground. DM
