East Africa: Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict kills hundreds and thousands flee to Sudan

11/11/2020 Ethiopia



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Addis Ababa – “This is a useless and preventable civil war that is likely to turn into a geopolitical nightmare.”

Ethiopia’s transition to a multi-party democracy has been in jeopardy for months, but the outbreak of conflict in the northern region of Tigray threatens a humanitarian disaster that could derail the whole process and sow instability in the Horn of Africa.

Mass casualties have been reported in different parts of Tigray, while thousands of Ethiopians have fled to neighboring Sudan since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered a military intervention last week against the region’s powerful ruling party, the People’s Liberation Front of Tigray (TPLF).

Kiros Woldemariam, a 54-year-old man from a city in south Tigray, told The New Humanitarian that he was traveling to a neighboring region when military planes began to hit the area, forcing him to take cover.

With phone and internet services cut off, Woldemariam said he had not been able to communicate with his wife and children, in another part of Tigray, for days. “I don’t know if they are alive because there is no communication,” he said.

Relief operations in Tigray, which is home to around 200,000 internally displaced persons and refugees from neighboring Eritrea, have been severely restricted, according to the UN aid coordinating body, OCHA.

The agency estimates that nine million people living in and around the region are at “high risk” from the conflict, although it remains difficult to establish a complete picture of humanitarian needs due to difficulties in gathering information and accessing the area. .

Tensions between the TPLF and the federal government have escalated since September, when Addis Ababa indefinitely postponed regional and national elections due to the coronavirus pandemic. TPLF officials opposed the decision and held their own elections.

An ethnic Tigrayana party, the TPLF was the dominant force in Ethiopian politics until Abiy took office in 2018. Since then, its members have lost positions within the central government and several officials have been arrested for corruption and rights abuses. humans.

On Monday, Abiy said the Tigray operations “would end soon.” But analysts fear an all-out civil war that could spark wider unrest within Ethiopia, where different regions are campaigning for more self-rule or threatening to separate altogether.

Neighboring states could also find themselves embroiled in the conflict, notably Sudan, which is undergoing its own tense political transition, and Eritrea, which lies across the border from Tigray and has a long-standing feud with the TPLF.

“This is a futile and avoidable civil war that is likely to become [a]… geopolitical nightmare in the Horn of Africa, which could lead to the disintegration of the Ethiopian state into multiple warring republics, “said Awol Allo, a law professor at Keele University in the UK and a vocal critic of Abiy.

Limited relief work

Since the fighting broke out nearly a week ago, hundreds of fighters from both sides are believed to have been killed in airstrikes and clashes, although details remain scant.

The government said it had captured villages in western Tigray, where most of the fighting has been concentrated, while its fighter jets have destroyed missiles and other heavy weapons belonging to regional security forces.

TPLF officers claim to have shot down an Ethiopian army fighter jet and seized control of the Northern Command, which is one of the country’s four regional military centers and has a large number of Tigrayan officers.

Khalid Alsir, a humanitarian official in eastern Sudan’s Kassala state, which borders Ethiopia, told TNH that 2,700 refugees had entered the country since Monday and thousands more were waiting to cross.

Alsir said that local authorities are transporting the refugees from border towns to camps and providing them with shelter, water and food. Some refugees had walked for four days to reach the border and shared “horrible stories,” he added.

The official called on international organizations to step up assistance. “Sudan’s capacity is very limited and the number of refugees is very large,” Alsir said. “[We] it will not be able to cover the influx of refugees in the coming days.

An OCHA situation report warned that the conflict could cause “massive displacement” in Tigray, a region where more than two million people already need humanitarian assistance. He claimed restrictions on air and road travel were significantly affecting humanitarian operations, while the UN refugee agency UNHCR said it was struggling to provide support to refugees in camps in the region.

Efforts to combat an invasion of desert locusts have also been reduced in Tigray, which is among the regions of the country most affected by the plague, just as new swarms are expected to arrive in the coming weeks.

Tensions rise

Six percent of Ethiopia’s population of more than 100 million lives in Tigray, but local officials have dominated the country politically since the TPLF led a guerrilla fight that defeated the country’s Marxist junta, known as Derg, in 1991.

In power, the TPFL introduced a new constitution that divided Ethiopia into nine ethnically based regions, each with its own security forces, parliaments, and the right to secede.

The constitution also gave rise to the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a coalition of ethnic parties that was controlled by the TPLF and ruled with an iron fist for nearly 30 years.

The removal of Tigray officials after Abiy, an Oromo ethnic group, came to power following massive protests against the EPRDF, fueled a feeling of ethnic discrimination among party members.

Then, last November, Abiy dissolved the EPRDF, creating a national “pan-Ethiopian” party, known as the Prosperity Party, which opposition groups saw as an attempt to centralize state power and deconstruct the federal system. The TPLF refused to join.

“The current war with the TPLF is not like any other fight,” explained Woldegiorgis G. Hiwot, an Addis Ababa-based political analyst. “It is also a battle between federalist and unionist forces, both trying to control modern Ethiopian politics.”

Tensions escalated when the Abiy government claimed that the TPLF, which is not uniformly supported by all Tigrayans, was funding rebel groups and instigating ethnic violence across the country as part of a plan to derail the transition.

And since the TPFL won the regional elections in September, both sides have described each other as illegitimate, while the Finance Ministry in Addis Ababa has frozen money for Mekelle, the capital of Tigray, a move that TPLF leaders saw as a “War declaration”.

Regional risks

Both sides of the conflict are heavily armed. The national army has redeployed troops to Tigray from across Ethiopia amid concerns about the loyalty of the Northern Command, which makes up a large proportion of the country’s total troop numbers.

Tigray regional forces and local militias are believed to number up to 250,000 among them, many of them seasoned veterans of past conflicts against the Derg and Eritrea.

Analysts fear that the sustained conflict could spread to other regions of Ethiopia, such as Amhara, which has long claimed territories in western Tigray, and whose regional forces and militias are supporting the federal government offensive.

If the Ethiopian government and military are weakened by the TPLF, opposition groups in other regions could be emboldened as well. The risk is particularly high in Abiy’s home region of Oromia, where separatist rebels are fighting for independence.

A full-scale civil war could draw Eritrea, whose president, Isaias Afwerki, has grown closer and closer to Addis Ababa since the two sides agreed on a historic rapprochement in 2018 that earned Abiy the Nobel Peace Prize.

Tensions between Asmara and the TPLF date back to 1998, when the Tigrayan party led Ethiopia to war with Eritrea over a disputed border area. Tens of thousands died in the violence.