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Abiy Ahmed, Prime Minister of Ethiopia, image via Wikipedia
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1.833, November 29, 2020
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Ethiopia, an African favorite of the international community, is headed for civil war as the coronavirus pandemic tightens ethnic lines. The consequences of prolonged hostilities could reverberate in East Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
The struggle between the government of Ethiopian Ethiopian Prime Minister, Nobel Peace Prize winner Abiy Ahmed, and the Tigray nationalists in the north, could extend an evolutionary arc of crisis stretching from the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict in the Caucasus, the civil wars in Syria and Libya and the growing tension in the eastern Mediterranean in the strategic Horn of Africa.
It would also cast a long shadow on hopes that the two-year peace deal with neighboring Eritrea that earned Ahmed the Nobel Prize would allow Ethiopia to address its economic problems and ethnic divisions.
Finally, it would raise the specter of a new famine in a country that Ahmed was successfully positioning as a model for African economic development and growth.
The mounting tensions come as Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan failed to agree on a new negotiating approach to resolve their years-long dispute over a controversial dam Ethiopia is building on the Blue Nile River.
US President Donald Trump recently warned that downstream Egypt could end up “blowing up” the project, which Cairo has called an existential threat.
Fears of a prolonged violent confrontation increased after the government recently mobilized its armed forces, one of the most powerful and seasoned armies in the region, to quell an alleged uprising in Tigray that threatened to split one of its key stationed military units. throughout the strategic zone of the region. border with Eritrea.
Tension between Tigray and the government in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa has been mounting since Ahmed earlier this year diverted financial allocations aimed at combating a biblical-scale locust plague in the north to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.
The tension was compounded by Tigray’s rejection of a government request to postpone regional elections due to the pandemic and Ahmed’s declaration of a six-month state of emergency. The Tigrayans found that the measures dashed their hopes for a greater role in the central government.
The Tigrayans blame reports of earlier Ethiopian military activities along the border with Somalia suggesting that Ahmed was planning from the outset to downsize rather than further empower the country’s Tigrayan minority.
Although only five percent of the population, Tigrayans have been prominent in Ethiopia’s power structure since the 1991 disappearance of Mengistu Haile Mariam, who ruled the country with an iron fist. They claim, however, that Ahmed has fired several Tigray executives and marginalized businessmen in the past two years under the pretext of a crackdown on corruption.
Like Turkey’s Erdogan in the Caucasus, the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, Ahmed may be seeing a window of opportunity at a time when the US is focused on its presidential transition of suspense, leaving the African Command. Without clear direction from Washington on how to respond to the growing tension in the Horn of Africa.
The escalation of the conflict in Tigray could threaten efforts to solidify the peace process between Ethiopia and Eritrea; persuade Eritrean leader Isaias Afwerki, who has no love for Tigray, to use the dispute to strengthen his regional ambitions; and attracting external powers such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, which are vying for influence in the Horn.
The conflict further increases the spectrum of ethnic tension in other parts of Ethiopia, a federation of ethnically defined autonomous regions in the context of recent months of skirmishes and killings of ethnic Amhara people, violence against Tigrayans in Addis Ababa and clashes between Somalis and Afars in which dozens of people were reportedly injured and killed.
The military conflict in Tigray could also accelerate the flow of Eritrean migrants to Europe, where they already represent a significant portion of Africans seeking better prospects in the EU.
A balkanization of Ethiopia in a part of the world where the war-torn future of Yemen as a unified state is in doubt would eliminate the East African state as the hub with the Middle East and create fertile ground for the operations of militant groups. .
Given Tigray’s relatively strong security position, the conflict can be protracted and disastrous. [A war could] put serious pressure on an Ethiopian state already battered by multiple serious political challenges and could send shockwaves to the Horn of Africa region and beyond, ”warned William Davison, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group.
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This is an edited version of an article published by the Qatar Center for Regional and International Studies at Georgetown University.
Dr. James M. Dorsey, a Senior Associate not resident in the BESA Center, is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Nanyang Technological University of Singapore and co-director of the Institute for Fan Culture at the University of Würzburg.
