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Addis Ababa (AFP)
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said on Wednesday that he had ordered a military response to a deadly attack by the ruling party of the restless Tigray region on a camp that housed federal troops, in an escalation of a long-running dispute.
The Tigray Popular Liberation Front (TPLF) “has attacked a military camp” in the region and “tried to loot” military assets, Abiy said in a post on Facebook and Twitter.
The attack caused “many martyrs, injuries and material damage,” Abiy said later in a five-minute speech on state television, without giving details.
“Our defense forces … have been ordered to fulfill their mission to save the country. The end point of the red line has been crossed. Force is being used as the last measure to save the people and the country,” he said. the Posting on Facebook and Twitter.
It was not immediately clear what form the federal military response might take, although analysts and diplomats have been warning for weeks that the confrontation between the federal government and the TPLF could escalate into violence.
Internet monitoring group Netblocks reported that the Internet appeared to have been cut off in Tigray at 1 am local time (2200 GMT).
Abiy said on state television that “treacherous forces” had turned against the military in the regional capital, Mekele, and the city of Dansha in western Tigray.
The assault on Dansha was “repelled” by security forces in the Amhara region, which borders Tigray to the south, he added.
A separate statement from the Abiy office accused the TPLF of dressing its soldiers in uniforms similar to those of the neighboring Eritrean army to “implicate the Eritrean government in false accusations of aggression against the people of Tigray.”
The various government statements could not be immediately corroborated.
-A widening gap-
The TPLF dominated politics in Africa’s second most populous country for almost three decades before Abiy came to power in 2018 thanks to anti-government protests.
Under Abiy, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize last year, Tigray leaders have complained of being unfairly targeted in corruption trials, removed from the highest positions and generally scapegoats for the country’s troubles. .
Ethiopia was due to hold national elections in August, but the country’s electoral body ruled in March that all voting should be postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Lawmakers then voted to extend the officials’ terms, which would have expired in early October, but Tigrayan leaders rejected this and went ahead with regional elections in September that the Abiy government deemed illegal.
Now each side views the other as illegitimate, and federal lawmakers have ruled that the Abiy government should cut off contact and funding for the Tigray leadership.
In recent days, tensions have also increased over who controls federal military assets in Tigray.
The region is home to a large portion of federal military personnel and equipment, a legacy of Ethiopia’s brutal 1998-2000 border war with Eritrea, its northern neighbor.
The International Crisis Group, citing former Tigrayan officers, said in a report last week that Tigray “comprises more than half of the total personnel and mechanized divisions of the armed forces.”
Last week, Tigray blocked an Abiy-appointed general from assuming a new post, saying that Abiy no longer had the authority to make such moves.
-‘Playing with fire’-
Tigrayan officials have said in recent days that they would not start a military conflict.
“We will never be the first to shoot or the first to blink,” Getachew Reda, a senior member of the TPLF, told AFP last week.
On Tuesday night, hours before Abiy’s announcement, Wondimu Asamnew, another senior Tigray official, told AFP that the federal government was stockpiling troops on the southern border of Tigray, a claim that could not be independently verified. .
“I think that when it comes to military mobilization, it is not child’s play. It can trigger an all-out war … what they are doing is playing with fire,” Wondimu said.
“One small spark can ignite the entire region. So I think we are on alert and I can assure you that we are capable of defending ourselves.”
© 2020 AFP
